The Ultimatum--An International Spy Thriller

by Karen Robards

  “This is a hospital?” Bianca asked. The woman shrugged.

  If Bianca sounded uncertain, it was because the room didn’t actually look like a hospital. It looked like...a bunker. The walls were gray poured concrete. The floor was gray poured concrete. The ceiling was gray poured concrete. Fluorescent lights recessed into the ceiling beneath black metal grids provided indifferent lighting. Two small rectangular windows were set high in the wall to her right. The light that filtered in through them was thin, gray and cold-looking. A work light on a six-foot-tall tripod was positioned near the bed for the obvious purpose of providing additional lighting as needed. It was currently turned off. The wall to her left seemed to be covered in photos of some sort. She couldn’t get a good enough look at them to determine their subject. Besides a freestanding IV unit—was she hooked up to it? A glance confirmed that she was—and the mobile cart holding supplies, there was no medical equipment.

  Plus she seemed to be in four-point restraints. The arm that blood had just been drawn from was secured by a three-inch-wide white webbing strap that circled her wrist like a cuff and was fastened to the bed by another strap that seemed to pass all the way around the mattress and beneath it to encompass the frame. The thin blue blanket that covered her to her armpits had been folded back on that side to allow blood to be drawn, so she could actually see the cuff. Two silver buckles on the outside of her wrist where it would be impossible for even the most flexible fingers to reach it cinched the cuff closed. She tried moving her other arm and then her legs for confirmation that they were similarly restrained.

  They were. She was strapped to the bed.

  Bianca was starting to get a bad feeling.

  “Why am I in restraints?” Her voice was sharper. She still was not quite hitting on all mental cylinders, and the thought of being tethered to a bed gave her the willies.

  “I’m really not authorized to answer questions.”

  The sharp snick of metal on metal had Bianca shooting a glance in the direction from which it came. Moving her head so quickly it hurt, she winced at the pain but resisted the urge to close her eyes. All at once it felt very important that she gather as much information as possible.

  The sound came from a heavy-looking metal door set into a corner of the wall opposite the windows. She watched as it opened. Beyond it she caught a glimpse of a hallway, more poured concrete but a narrower space than the large room she was in and with more light. A man stepped through the doorway and into the room, commanding her full attention. He closed the door behind him, locking it with a key and the same sharp metallic sound that had preceded his entrance. He then dropped the key into the breast pocket of his shirt. As he turned into the room, she saw that he was sixty-ish, of average height and weight, maybe a little on the beefy side. He was wearing a white dress shirt and tan trousers along with a shoulder holster complete with a—she squinted—Beretta 96 tucked inside.

  Okay, Toto, we’re definitely not in Kansas anymore.

  “How’s she doing?” The man addressed the question to the woman.

  “Once the sedation wears off, she’ll be fine.”

  Sedation? Bianca’s spidey-sense, already quivering, went into overdrive. The IV dripping into her arm suddenly seemed beyond sinister.

  “Good. Let me know those results when you have them.”

  The woman nodded and moved toward the door, bearing the vials of blood and the used syringe away with her in a handheld plastic caddy. Bianca watched her open the door. She first had to unlock it with a key that hung with a bunch of others from a ring at her waist.

  The woman left. The clink of the key in the lock—Bianca knew what the sound was now—told her that she had locked the door behind her.

  This just kept getting better and better.

  The man loomed above her, looking down into her face. “Hello, young lady.”

  “Who are you?” Bianca asked. Most of the mental fog that had afflicted her when she’d first woken up had been swept away by her growing alarm. She was aware enough now to be careful. She made her voice breathy, weak. The details of the situation might be murky, but the big picture was becoming increasingly clear. Short version was, she was in trouble. Faking helplessness was a classic defensive move. Practically the only one available to her at the moment.

  “My name’s John Kemp.”

  “Are you a doctor?”

  He shook his head: no.

  Kemp had a pair of iron-gray eyes that were bright with intelligence beneath drooping lids. His hair was gray, too, cut short and thinning on top. His features were irregular but not unattractive. His jaw was square and a little jowly. Deep lines bracketed his mouth, formed a web around his eyes. The interest with which he looked her over—Bianca found it unnerving.

  She found him unnerving.

  Let’s see how hard it’s going to be to get out of here.

  “I can’t move my arms and legs.” She shifted restlessly, as if she were in discomfort. “Why are they tied down?”

  “It’s standard procedure while you’re under sedation, I believe.”

  “Can you unfasten my arms?” Bianca asked. “Please?”

  “Not now. That—” he nodded at the IV “—is a saline solution, to flush the sedative you were given from your body. Once that’s done, we can talk about it.”

  “Why was I given a sedative?”

  He said, “We thought it was best, to give you time to recover from the car crash. And to make the flight easier on you.”

  Oh, wow. She really didn’t like the sound of that.

  “Flight?” The quaver in her voice was easier to fake than it should have been. Something about the man made her skin crawl.

  “The one from San Francisco to Heiligenblut.” At what must have been the look on her face, Kemp added kindly, “Austria.”

  Austria. Holy freaking disaster. Bianca had a hideous feeling that she knew exactly who this guy was—the client. Aka the threatening criminal kidnapper, the unknown player in the game, the not-Durand entity bent on hunting her father down, the rich, powerful and dangerous enemy she’d suspected was lurking in the wings.

  A jolt of adrenaline chased away the last vestiges of her disorientation. Her pulse quickened and her muscles tightened in readiness for...something. All of which she took care to conceal.

  “Austria.” She looked at him blankly, as if she’d never heard of the place.

  “Yes. We staged the accident with your car, then brought you all the way to Austria because we want to ask you some questions about Mason Thayer. He goes by any number of other names, but I’m confident you know who I’m talking about.”

  He’d staged the accident? Of course. If his people had been in the ambulance, they could have scooped her right up without raising any eyebrows at all. If she’d had any time to consider what had happened, she would have seen it.

  Little bubbles of panic started to percolate through her system at the thought of how well connected and powerful Kemp must be to have been able to pull something like that off. But she refused to panic; she never panicked, and she wasn’t about to start now. She reached for the icy calm that always came over her in dire situations and, thankfully, felt it settling around her like a blanket. It was imperative that she keep her head in the game. She wasn’t sure how much he knew, but he obviously was aware that she’d been babysitting the prototype if nothing else. He knew she had a connection to Mason Thayer. Denying it would be foolish, but there were other ways to get around answering.

  “I don’t understand—Austria? I was in California. You staged the wreck...?” She let her eyes go slightly unfocused and then allowed her eyelids to droop. Snapping them open again as if she were trying her best to stay awake, she added in a faint, fretful voice, “This isn’t making any sense. I...I can’t think. My head hurts so badly. Oh.” That last was a moan, uttered
as she closed her eyes.

  He leaned over her. Inwardly she recoiled. But all he did was punch a button on the intercom.

  “Yes, sir?” The female voice that answered almost certainly belonged to the woman who’d drawn her blood.

  “How much longer until this damned stuff is totally out of her system?”

  “With the saline running? Probably not more than another fifteen minutes.”

  “Do you have any results for me yet?”

  “Not yet, sir.”

  “Let me know the moment you do.”

  His hand dropped away from the intercom as he straightened to look down at her. Bianca’s lids were cracked open the teeniest bit, not enough so that he could tell, just enough to keep tabs on him, to see the way he was looking at her. No way could she make herself close her eyes all the way and go totally blind in his presence. Having him so close made every nerve she possessed jangle. It was as if her body could sense danger like an electrical charge. Under the current circumstances, though, there was absolutely nothing she could do about it.

  A tremor of dread ran through her. She didn’t fear often, and she didn’t fear much. But somehow, in the scant few minutes he’d been in the room, this man had managed to touch a well of horror buried deep inside her that she’d never even suspected was there.

  She drew in a soft, untroubled breath, as if she were falling asleep.

  “I’ll be back in fifteen minutes,” he said.

  To her enormous relief, he turned and left the room, locking the door behind him.

  All righty, then. Get on with it.

  She didn’t even have to think about what course of action to take. Lying there strapped to a bed and waiting to see what fate or Kemp had in store for her was a nonstarter.

  Whatever it took, she was getting out of there. Figuring out what to do when she was away from this place could wait until she was away from this place. The thought that Marin and Margery might be being held somewhere inside this same building gave her pause, but not for long. She had no idea of the size of the structure, the number of people inside, how many were armed, how fortified it was. She had no idea if Marin and Margery were even there. It was like the airplane guidelines for using oxygen: she had to save herself first, then work on saving them.

  Her body was tense, bristling with alarm, with the need to act. She forced herself to remain motionless except for her eyes, which she slowly opened. First things first: scan the room for signs of remote surveillance.

  There didn’t seem to be any cameras. Given the stark nature of her surroundings, the only place to hide one would be in the overhead lights or the intercom, and she could find no sign of a camera in either place. Craning her neck, she assessed the photos on the wall. They seemed to be head-and-shoulder shots of people, with photos of infants paired with those of adults. The photos were numbered, but what interested her was that they were flat and seemed to be affixed to the wall with tape. There was no place among them to hide a camera.

  The next thing she needed to do was get out of the restraints.

  Not as easy as one might suppose. She wasn’t wearing her watch; she’d had it on at the time of the accident, so she could only speculate that either she’d lost it or it had been taken from her. The relevant thing about no watch was, she had no way to judge the time.

  Her best estimate was, one minute had already elapsed of her fifteen. And it was always possible that Kemp would return early.

  She hadn’t worn one of her garter belts when she’d left the hotel to go on surveillance detail, so she had no tools with her. Not that she would have been able to access them, anyway, tethered as she was, so she supposed it really didn’t matter for this particular task.

  Being careful not to make any kind of move that might cause the restraints around her wrists and ankles to tighten, she looked down at her left wrist. It was circled by a shackle of white canvas webbing of the type used in straitjackets. To test it, she wiggled her fingers, jiggled her wrist around.

  It was loose enough so that she could move her wrist up and down inside it.

  She really hated doing what she was about to do.

  Gritting her teeth, she slammed her left hand hard against the metal bed rail and dislocated her thumb. The popping sound alone had once been enough to make her feel faint. Her father had made her practice doing it enough when she was young so that it no longer did.

  But God, it still hurt.

  “One day being able to do this may save your life,” her father had told her when she’d cried and vomited the first time he had deliberately dislocated her thumb and shown her what it allowed her to do. She’d been ten years old.

  He’d forced her to practice until she could dislocate her thumb herself without feeling sick and without tears.

  Always on her left hand, which preserved the structural integrity and strength of her right hand and made the gruesome task that much easier to do, because the joint became more elastic with each repetition.

  Today just might be that day her father had been talking about, Bianca reflected. Sweat beaded her forehead and her pulse rate shot through the roof, but she was able to worm her left hand out of the restraint.

  Popping her thumb back into place hurt almost more than forcing it out.

  But once it was done, the pain subsided to a dull ache and she was able to unstrap her right hand and then her ankles.

  Ha! She was free. She slid off the bed.

  For a moment after her bare feet touched down on the cold concrete, her legs wobbled. Her head swam. And ached. Her left hand hurt. She leaned against the bed for support, lifted a hand to check out her head.

  As she had suspected, she had a bump just above her left temple. It was tender to the touch.

  Get over yourself. Get it together.

  Taking a deep breath, she did.

  First, she turned off the drip on the IV. Then she lifted the tape on her arm and pulled the small needle from her vein. After she got back in bed, she would tape the dislodged needle to her arm. When the time came to move, she couldn’t afford to be tethered to an IV unit.

  Next she took care to refasten the restraints so that they were loose enough to allow her to get her hands and feet in and out of them with ease. Then she sabotaged the buckles so that they couldn’t be undone and refastened. The last thing she wanted to have happen was for her to be lying there pretending to be strapped to the bed and have Kemp or someone decide to tighten the restraints and make her pretense a reality.

  A glance up at the windows had already told her that she probably wasn’t getting out of them, not in the amount of time she had to work with. They were too small, the glass was thick and they were barred from the outside.

  Just to make sure, she climbed up to stand on the bed and looked at the closest one more carefully. Her breath caught when she realized that what she was looking at was bulletproof glass. She wasn’t breaking out through that, and no one was breaking in.

  The view outside the window made her stomach twist. A gray day, cold-looking, light, blowing snow. A mountain vista. Jagged blue peaks wreathed in clouds falling away into the distance. Austria—the thought blew her mind. She seemed to be on the second floor of a building that was perched on the side of a mountain. It was situated just below the tallest of the peaks but above the drifting blanket of clouds. The ground sloped away from the side of the building she was looking out from. Snow covered everything—the ground, the few evergreens she could see, the bump of what she thought might be a low wall or fence. It piled in tall drifts around an outbuilding. As she watched, a snowmobile came into view, swooping around a corner of the building, then rocketing away down the slope. The man driving it wore a black ski suit with a gray stocking cap pulled down low over his ears. An assault rifle—she was too far away to tell which one—hung across his back.

 
The door was a better bet.

  It was locked. She was almost one hundred percent sure.

  Moving like the fog on little cat feet, she jumped down from the bed, rushed to the door and carefully tried the knob, just in case.

  Yeah, no such luck. It was locked, with a formidable, military-grade double dead bolt. With a little time and a tool or two, she could defeat it.

  She had neither time nor tool.

  Ticktock, she reminded herself and looked swiftly around the room for anything that she could turn to her advantage.

  Her best bet was to get back in bed, pretending to be groggy and weak and helplessly strapped down, then at the first opportunity jump up and overpower whoever was in the room with her.

  The plan had a few weak points. First, Kemp was armed. If she struck fast enough, and with enough ferocity, though, she was confident she could neutralize and take possession of the weapon before he could use it on her. Second, she was assuming only one person would be in the room with her, probably Kemp, possibly the woman. Even Kemp and the woman together should be doable. But what if there were more, a couple of guards, maybe, or—well, who knew?

  Another weak point was, where did she go after she got out of the room? She had no idea of the layout of the building, how far outside civilization the building was located, etc.

  For both of those, the only solution she could come up with was Wing it.

  A third weak point was that she would be launching her attack from the bed, where she would be lying flat on her back. And no matter how quickly she moved, it would take her a few seconds to get out of the restraints.

  When attacking a physically larger, armed opponent, the element of surprise was crucial.

  First things first: what she needed was a distraction that would give her time to launch an attack.

  In what was basically a concrete box with a bed, a medical supply cart that—she went through it quickly—contained nothing more than gauze pads, Band-Aids, surgical tape, a slender Bic pen and a plastic bottle of isopropyl alcohol, an IV unit, a work light and dozens of paper photos taped to a wall, there weren’t a lot of options. The pen was a possible weapon. So was the alcohol, providing she wanted to throw it in someone’s eyes. The IV tubing or the cords on the IV unit or the light could possibly be used as a garrote—