“Her name is Katie James.”
“I’ve heard of her.”
“Journalist.”
“Right, that’s right. He’s got her? You’re sure?”
“Too sure.”
“And what does he want?”
“Me.” He hesitated, licked his lips. “And you.”
“The package?”
“I told him I didn’t know where you were.”
“But that wasn’t good enough, was it?”
“What do you think?”
“So where and when?”
“Reggie, don’t even go there.”
“I’m already there, Shaw.”
“I’m not going to let you do this.”
“Are you kidding? This is the best thing that could’ve happened.”
“What?” he said in a shocked voice.
“I don’t mean for your friend. I’m very sorry about that,” she added quickly. “But we were never going to find Kuchin. And now the guy is inviting us to come to him. This is our opportunity. Our shot.”
“It’s hardly an invitation, Reggie. He’s going to kill us.”
“No, he’s going to try and kill us,” she corrected. “And we’re going to do the same to him.”
“Well, given the circumstances, I think the odds lie with him.”
“It’s still our only chance.”
“Do you understand that if you come with me you’re most likely going to be murdered in some sadistic, painful way? Do you get that loud and clear?” He pointed to the door. “Just walk out and keep going.”
Instead Reggie sat down next to him. “I guess I could say something cute or flippant to show that I’m not scared, even though I am, but I think I’ll try the truth.”
This got Shaw’s attention. He stared over at her.
“Part of me never wants to see Kuchin again, Shaw, never again. I see the man in my head all the time. I wake up with him in my brain. I see him over my shoulder. I came one instant from dying that night. I saw his eyes. There was nothing there. I might as well have been a gnat. He didn’t give a shit. There’s no way for a normal, sane person to match something like that.”
“And you still want to go?”
“I can’t live while that guy is still breathing. That’s the bottom line. I want him as badly as anything I’ve ever wanted in my life. I will kill him with my own hands, if I have to. He’ll have to kill me, because I will never stop going for him.”
“The guy is the monster.”
“No, he’s a monster. He’s not the first, and he’s not the last. And he has to be dealt with.”
“Why the hell do you do this?”
She stood. “Just tell me when it’s time to go. I’ll be ready.”
The two hours came and on the dot the phone rang. Shaw was correct in his thinking. Kuchin asked to speak to Reggie.
“Hello, little Janie,” he said after she had confirmed she was on the line. “Our last meeting was cut short. I look forward to visiting with you again.”
Reggie said nothing else and simply handed the phone back to Shaw.
Arrangements were made. They would leave the following day. They were to say nothing to anyone. “She will be dead long before you reach her if you disobey,” Kuchin had warned.
“But if you plan to kill her anyway?” Shaw had countered.
“I give you my word that if you follow my instructions to the letter, I will release the woman unharmed.”
“Your word?” Shaw had said incredulously.
“As a former officer of the KGB.”
“That really does nothing for me.”
“On my mother’s grave, then. I swear it. I have no fight against your friend. My issue is with you and the woman.”
“Where and when?”
“That depends on where you are currently.”
“In your own backyard. Montreal.”
Shaw thought he could hear a small gasp from the other man and it gave him some pleasure at having startled him.
“Then that simplifies matters,” said Kuchin. He explained the details.
When he was done Shaw clicked off and looked at Reggie. “You still game for this?”
“Even more so now. His arrogance pisses me off. He takes it as a foregone conclusion that we’re just sheep blithely going to the slaughter.”
Well, aren’t we? thought Shaw.
CHAPTER
91
THE NEXT AFTERNOON Reggie and Shaw met at a café down the street from the hotel where they were staying. Shaw checked his watch.
“One hour,” he said. “The address we’re supposed to meet at is a five-minute cab ride from here.”
“Good, then we can catch up, Paddy.”
Shaw jerked around when he heard the voice.
Whit was standing there next to the table, with Dominic behind him.
“What the hell are you two doing here?”
“I’ll take that as an invitation to sit down,” said Whit, who did. Dominic sat across from him, resting his arm cast on the table.
Shaw looked at Reggie. “You arranged this?”
“I called and told them what was up. They were the ones who insisted on flying over.”
“Slept all the way,” said Whit as he stretched out his back. “Nice and rested for our little trip.”
“You aren’t going,” snapped Shaw.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s not expecting four, only two. And he said if I didn’t follow his instructions to the letter Katie is dead.”
“We thought about that,” said Reggie. “So when we go to meet if they say no, Whit and Dominic will back off.”
“Back off? More likely they’ll be killed.”
“My life,” said Whit cavalierly. “I can do what I want with it.”
Dominic simply nodded in agreement.
“But if you’re really concerned,” said Reggie, “then call Kuchin back and ask his permission. You just have to hit last number received.”
Shaw pulled the phone out of his pocket and stared at it for a moment before looking up at Whit. “You do realize if he approves this you probably won’t be coming back alive?”
Whit glanced at his friend. “You okay with that, Dom?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t.”
“There’s your answer,” said Whit.
Shaw made the call. The answer was a little surprising. Kuchin seemed happy to add two more to his list.
“I welcome you all,” he said before Shaw clicked off, shaking his head.
“Everything good?” asked Reggie.
“Oh yeah, now we got four funerals instead of two. Break out the champagne.”
They rode in a cab to the rendezvous spot. It was a warehouse, which didn’t surprise Shaw.
“It’s usually a damn warehouse,” he said to Reggie.
The door was unlocked. They went inside. There was no one there, just a tan GMC Yukon XL with the keys on the front seat and a set of directions under the visor.
That did surprise Shaw, at least until he thought about it.
“If we were going to set up an ambush they just took that opportunity away. But this leaves us in control, so I’m not getting it fully.”
They drove out of Montreal heading northeast. Two hours later, following the directions, they turned off onto a one-lane road in an area covered with forest and not a sign of human life anywhere. Two hundred yards down this strip of gravel the truck suddenly cut off. Shaw tried to restart it but the engine never even turned over.
“We’ve got a half tank of gas,” Reggie said, pointing to the gauge on the dash. “Everything else looks normal.”
“It’s a new truck too,” said Whit from the backseat.
Shaw looked up at the button above the rearview mirror. “It’s also got an OnStar system.”
“So?” said Reggie.
“So they can take remote control of the car in case of an emergency or you lock yourself out. Or cut off the engine in case it�
��s been stolen. If someone overrode that system or piggybacked on it, they can pull the power to the engine and there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I think you’re right,” said Reggie as she looked out the window at the two trucks pulling up to their vehicle, one in front and one behind.
Six men climbed out with SIGs, Glocks, and MP5s pointed at them.
Twenty minutes later they were standing naked in a circle inside a small concrete-block building. They had been searched first by hand and then via a scanner, and then hosed down with a jet stream of water. After that the men repeatedly dragged hard metal combs through their hair and across their arms and legs, leaving long red marks on their limbs. They had also cut off Dominic’s cast and thrown it away. They’d given him a sling in replacement.
After they dried off they were given clean clothes to wear consisting of bright yellow jumpsuits, underwear, and sneakers with white socks.
“What the hell was that all about?” fumed Whit as he pulled on his shoes. “They almost drowned us.”
Reggie was dressing behind a door propped open for privacy, though everyone had already seen the others naked.
Shaw buttoned up his jumpsuit; it was several inches too short for him in the arms and legs. The sneakers were tight on his long feet. “Surveillance devices. These days they have trackers built into fake hair follicles, fake skin patches. They scanned and searched us for the obvious and did the hose-comb treatment for the sophisticated stuff.”
Whit smelled his skin. “There was something else mixed in that water. Probably causes cancer,” he said irritably.
“You should hope to live that long,” replied Shaw.
Reggie joined them after zipping up her jumpsuit. “Well, I can see you’re still Mr. Optimistic.”
“I’m just being realistic.”
“Why do you think the yellow jumpsuits?” asked Dominic.
“If I had to guess,” said Shaw, “the harder it will be to lose us.”
“Lose us?” exclaimed Whit. “How the hell could they possibly lose us?”
“I guess that depends on us, doesn’t it?” said Reggie.
CHAPTER
92
MORE HOURS passed, and then with hands cuffed, feet shackled, mouths taped, and hoods over their heads they were stuffed in an SUV with blacked-out windows and driven for a long time. Shaw had been counting off the seconds in his head. And while they were not on major highways, at least that he could tell, their speed had been pretty consistent and at least sixty miles an hour from the sound of the engine and the whine of the wind outside the truck.
When the vehicle finally pulled to a stop he had a rough gauge. Nine hours. In which direction he wasn’t certain, though he didn’t think it likely it had been back west toward Montreal or south to the United States. Security between the U.S. and Canada wasn’t that tight, but four hooded and trussed-up figures in an SUV would have raised at least modest curiosity along the way. If not, there was no hope ever of border security.
That left the direction they’d gone in as north or east. Nine hours due east in Canada at sixty miles an hour would also have taken them through Maine in the United States, in order to reach New Brunswick or farther along to Nova Scotia. And when the Yukon had cut off, the largest city they had been near was Quebec. From there to Halifax in Nova Scotia was far longer than the approximate distance they’d driven. For those reasons Shaw concluded they’d been heading more north than east, skirting the border with America but not crossing it. They had been allowed one bathroom break along the side of the road, and then they were off again.
Later, the vehicle’s doors opened and they were forced to lie facedown partially on top of each other in the back cargo area. For one terrible moment Shaw thought this was it. Execution time. From the quick breathing of his companions, he deduced they were thinking the same thing.
Instead, a heavy tarp was thrown over them and a voice said, “Not a sound or your friend is dead.”
Truck doors closed and the vehicle drove on. Then it stopped. Doors popped open again. There was talk. The doors closed again and the vehicle pulled forward haltingly, and then stopped. Whatever they were on now, it was not solid ground, Shaw could tell. The truck was moving though the engine was off. Only it was moving slightly up and down and side to side. Or at least whatever it was on was doing that.
A few minutes passed and Shaw heard more noises, including the clanging of a bell and feet moving fast. There was a lurch and the sensation of something sliding away, like a train leaving a station platform. The first real jolt he felt answered the question.
We’re on a boat. Probably a car ferry.
The water was rough, the ride uncomfortable, particularly lying facedown while wedged in the back of a truck. Shaw could hear Reggie moaning next to him and he thought she might become sick again, as she had on the ferry crossing from Amsterdam. And then it was over. They drove for more hours and then the truck stopped again. They were pulled from the back and made to march, still hooded and shackled, in single file. They were maneuvered roughly into seats in a confined space. Shaw actually hit his head on the top of whatever they were inside. When the engine engaged, the sound of the prop wash started, and the stomach lurch occurred when the vertical lift happened, he knew they were on a chopper.
Shaw continued to count the seconds even as he tried to calibrate their speed. When they began their descent at least eighteen thousand seconds, or five hours, had elapsed. If they’d been traveling in excess of two hundred knots north or east they would have covered over a thousand kilometers. That put New Brunswick or even Nova Scotia in play, though much farther than a thousand kilometers east and they would’ve been in the Atlantic. But Shaw didn’t think they had traveled directly east, because of the ferry.
While in the truck coming from Montreal and then Quebec they had been on the southern tip of the strip of water that cut through that part of Canada and that employed ferry service to cross it. He knew that because he had been on one of those ferries. No one would bother to take a boat north only to chopper back across that slice of water to head south or east. If New Brunswick or Nova Scotia was the destination, they would’ve gotten on the chopper on the southern side and not used the ferry at all. One would use the ferry if one were going due north, toward Hudson Bay or even the Arctic Circle, or to the east to Newfoundland and Labrador.
When the chopper set down and they climbed out, Shaw knew they were not in the Arctic Circle; they hadn’t flown long enough or stopped for refueling. He didn’t know what sort of chopper they were on but figured for most models five hours of flight with that many people on board bumped right up against the limits of the fuel load. And it was too warm. If he had to guess, they were more east than north. When the chopper engine quieted down and he heard the ocean slamming against the shore he concluded they were on the coast of either Newfoundland or Labrador, which still covered a lot of territory. And how knowing all this helped their current situation he didn’t quite have a handle on yet.
The hoods and mouth tape were finally removed and they all looked around, their eyes adjusting to the new light levels. They had left Montreal in the late afternoon and now dusk was giving over to dark. An entire day had passed and then some, Shaw calculated. His grumbling stomach confirmed this.
They were driven in a truck on a route away from the ocean.
“Any idea where we are?” Reggie whispered to Shaw.
“Shut up!” said the man riding next to the driver.
Ten minutes later lights came into view.
The house was built from sturdy logs with a covered front porch and a
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