by Matt Hilton
22
I woke on Billie’s bed with no recollection of how I’d got there. Last I recalled was bedding down on the settee where I’d dozed last night before trouble came to the farm. At some point Rink, and possibly Noah or Adam, must have got me to my feet and steered me to the bedroom where I’d less chance of being disturbed while they went about their business in the living room. Either the drugs had affected me more than I thought or I’d been semi-delirious from my injuries. It didn’t matter which, only that I woke feeling better than I had since the blazing gun battle in the forest. As I shifted there was some mild pain in my wounds, but not enough to keep me on my back much longer. Something else was more apparent than the hurt: I could smell Billie’s perfume wafting off the throw and pillows as I adjusted my position. It was an intimate aroma and I was uncomfortable having invaded her private space without invitation.
I sat on the edge of the bed.
A faint qualm moved through my body; a gentle shivering I hoped wasn’t the beginnings of a fever. But my flesh was cool and dry to the touch, and the shiver was simply down to the evening chill in the room. I was still wearing my jeans, but was bare-chested save for the bandages. My ripped and soiled Homer Simpson T-shirt had been consigned to the trashcan. I had a spare shirt in my bag, but it had been dumped back in the forest, or taken by those who’d left me for dead. I trusted that Rink had brought fresh clothing with him, and hoped he had something less gaudy than his usual attire. Muted conversation drifted from below, two voices, one of them Rink’s Arkansas drawl. He’d have set one of the other guys on sentry duty. I took it there’d been no trouble while I slept. That thought made me wonder what time it was. The light beyond the drapes was fading and I’d already subliminally deduced it was evening due to the chill in the air. An alarm clock sat on a bedside cabinet, but apparently there’d been a power cut at some point because the LEDs flashed and said it was 2:17 a.m. I glanced around looking for a more reliable wind-up clock, but my gaze caught on something else. On the opposite wall was one of Billie’s paintings. I recognised the style from her works of art displayed at her boutique in Hill End. I also recognised the landscape depicted in the painting as being the southern shore of Baker’s Hole and the hills beyond. An indistinct figure in red stood beneath the trees at the lakeside. The dash of vibrant colour among the other muted shades held my gaze, and my thoughts, for a long time.
Rink came in the room, and I realised I’d been lost so far in thought that I hadn’t heard him ascend the stairs. If he meant to be silent he would have been, but not under those circumstances. ‘What you doing sitting there like a toad on a lump of driftwood?’ he asked. ‘I heard you up and about minutes ago.’
‘Just gathering myself.’ I indicated my state of semi-undress. ‘Do you have anything I can put on?’
‘Hell, you expect me to give you the shirt off my back?’ He was joking, but that was his way.
‘No thanks,’ I quipped in return. ‘I’d rather keep with the Tarzan look than be seen in that monstrosity.’
He shook his head in remorse. ‘I finally have the opportunity to get you into a splash of colour and all I’ve spare is a grey undershirt.’
‘Suits me fine.’
‘It’s in the bathroom waiting for you, with some spare socks and underwear. Thought you might want to shower before you present yourself to your adoring public.’ He chuckled. ‘Don’t know what you did but those guys have a serious case of hero worship for you. I had to remind them that actually you got your ass kicked, so they should be lavishing all their adoration on someone else more deserving.’ He slapped his own chest for emphasis.
‘Arsehole,’ I called him.
He grinned, flashing his pearly white teeth. ‘It’s nice to have the old Joe Hunter back. Now come on. Hit the shower and we’ll see you downstairs. Grub’s cooking, mate.’ His last was a poor impression of my Brit accent, sounding more like John Lennon, but meant as a piss take.
‘Did you get hold of Harvey?’
‘He’s on the case, buddy. Now come on, get up, lameass.’
I chuckled at his final command.
‘What?’ he demanded.
‘When I was back in the woods, almost dead, I dreamed about you.’
‘Jeez, I don’t wanna hear,’ he said.
‘Don’t flatter yourself. It’s just you used those same words then: “Get up, lameass.”’
‘And they were as pertinent then as they are now. Do as you’re told.’
Rink went back downstairs while I eased up from the bed. There was some creaking and groaning and not all of it from the mattress. Testing my footing, I found I could stand still without my brain doing loop-the-loops. I concentrated my vision, again zoning in on the figure in red in the painting. I guessed what it represented to Billie. The undefined, almost spectral figure was her daughter, Nicola. I just wondered what the girl was pointing at between her feet. Probably nothing, I decided, and headed for the shower.
23
Billie had lost all sense of time or place. It didn’t help that she’d slept on and off on a number of occasions, with no real idea how long for: each nap could have been hours or indeed only a few seconds. The first she suspected had been much longer because it was an unnatural slumber, induced by a drug administered to her by one of her captors. As she’d been dragged from Joe Hunter’s side she’d fought her captors, clawing at the face of one of the rough men. He’d slapped her across the mouth with the back of his hand. Perhaps he thought his disdainful smack would be enough, as if she was the browbeaten wife of a violent husband, but he didn’t know Billie Womack. She’d smacked him back, and the full weight of her arm had been behind her clenched fist. The man had sworn savagely, covering his bleeding mouth while his friends laughed at his downfall. When next he struck her it was with his open palm and the force of his slap almost took her off her feet. She was positive he would have kicked her if one of the others hadn’t intervened.
‘She’s no good to us if she can’t speak,’ a bespectacled man with a poorly set broken nose snapped. ‘Hit her again and I’ll do the same to you.’
Her attacker was immediately cowed, but he glared at her, his eyes furnace-bright. ‘She’s a fucking wild animal. Needs putting in her place or she’ll cause more trouble.’
‘Try to hurt me again and I’ll show you how much trouble, you bastard,’ Billie snarled.
The man who’d come to her rescue hadn’t done so through pity. He grabbed her by her hair, twisting it savagely, and forced her to her knees. ‘Hey, Danny, bring me that syringe.’
Another man approached, who looked like a younger version of the one holding her. His face was less beat up, and he didn’t require glasses to squint down at her. From his pocket he took out a small leather case, enjoying the fear he induced in her as he took his own goddamn time about unzipping it. When a hypodermic syringe was handed over the first man was more perfunctory about his actions.
‘Get that away from me,’ Billie shrieked and reared away from the needle.
Her captor yanked back her head, exposing her throat where the collar of her sweatshirt gaped above the bulletproof vest. ‘Hold still,’ he growled and jabbed the needle into the muscles of her upper shoulder. Whatever kind of drug was administered remained a mystery to her, but its effect was absolute. Within seconds she drifted into a cold darkness where she had no sense of herself, never mind what was going on around her. Cognisance returned in swift snatches, though clouds of dirty cotton wool muffled these moments. She was aware of movement, of the buzzing of voices, the thrum of engines, but nothing made much sense. She thought that perhaps more of the knock-out drug had been administered to keep her docile while she was transported to her prison.
‘Prison’ was a misnomer. It wasn’t a barred cell, dungeon or even fortified room she had finally woken in, but some sort of office cubicle. It was barely fifteen by fifteen feet in size, with blank walls, inexpensive maroon floor covering and a suspended ceiling. She had been positioned s
o that her back was to the single door. She’d given up craning her neck to check it out. The pale grey walls around her were discoloured where framed pictures or notices had hung for years. Watermarks on the ceiling extended down the walls. On the thin carpet she could see where a desk had once stood, and there were track marks where some lazy person had wheeled their chair back and forward rather than take the trouble to stand and walk the few feet. She wondered if she was sitting in the same chair that had left the ghosts of its former movements.
She was seated in a standard office chair, brown faux leather over a fake chrome and plastic frame, atop four castor wheels. Her forearms were secured to the armrests with plastic lock-ties that dug into her flesh; her fingertips were numb and she feared that the blood flow to her extremities had been cut off. Her ankles were similarly secured to the pedestal, elevating her heels so that only her toes rested on the floor. Her bulletproof vest had been removed at some point during her transportation to the room, as had her makeshift booties and pumps, and she sat now in only her sweats, with a thick nylon strap round her ribs secured at the back of the seat by Velcro fasteners. She wasn’t totally restricted, and if she wished could probably wheel the chair around the room, but where would she go? She’d also considered tilting forward and getting her feet flat on the ground, but all she’d achieve then was carrying the chair on her back like the shell of some mutant turtle. Then what, try to open the door handle with her teeth? That’d be pointless seeing as she’d heard a key turned in the lock each time her captors came and went from the room.
There were only three options for release. One was that she somehow got loose from her bonds and armed herself with a piece of the broken chair, then fought her way clear next time her door was opened. She didn’t fancy her odds with that idea. Once they’d extracted whatever information they were after, her captors could have a change of heart and allow her freedom. But she doubted that would happen: she’d seen their faces and knew what that meant. Lastly, someone could come to her rescue. Except the only person who knew that she’d been taken was lying dead in the forest. She thought of Joe Hunter and how he’d promised to protect her. Ultimately it had been a false promise, just like the ones her husband had always given her. Broken promises, she thought abstractedly, always ended up with dead men in Billie Womack’s life.
Other people might grow despondent in the circumstances, but Billie wasn’t the type to give in so easily. When she’d lost a child and found the fortitude to carry on, it would take more than abduction by a group of violent thugs to stop her in her tracks. There had to be another way out of her quandary, she just didn’t know what it was yet. Trying to escape the room was probably not a good idea. Not when she had no clue where it was situated, or what kind of building surrounded it or how many people stood ready to stop her. Frankly she’d no clue either as to where she was in the country. While drugged she could have been driven for miles, and she also had some dim recollection of being inside the helicopter. She had been flown somewhere, and without knowing the direction, flight time or anything else she couldn’t begin to guess. The blank walls of her prison gave no hint; there wasn’t even a scrap of paper lying in view with some handy information printed on it. And when her captors had entered the room to check on her, they had refused to answer any of her questions. She was confident she was still in the US, but that was about it. Better that she wait and scheme. Sooner or later her captors would return and take her elsewhere in order to do whatever it was they planned for her. She’d been left in this room for no other reason than she was out of their hair and less of a problem for them. Those holding her were hired guns, simple as, and not really the ones who wished to press her for the whereabouts of Richard. She guessed that someone more important was coming to interrogate her, and her incarceration would end only when they arrived. When it was over with, she chose to think that her freedom would be under her own terms and not at the end of a gun barrel.
24
It was approximately eighteen hours after Billie’s abduction before Agent Cooper returned my call. He made a poor attempt at apologising for his tardiness, stating that he hadn’t recognised the number on his cell phone.
‘That’s because mine was taken along with everything else,’ I said. Rink had loaned me his phone, and the space to speak in private. I’d walked out on to the porch, leaving him and the others inside. ‘This is a friend’s cell, store the number.’
‘Wait up a minute, I’m not in a good place to speak.’ In the background there was chatter, the noise of a busy workspace. Cooper muffled his cell, but I could hear him speaking quickly with someone else, before he came back on. There followed the swift rat-a-tat of his footsteps on hard flooring, and his breath had quickened. ‘I’m just finding somewhere more private.’
‘How about Hill End?’ I suggested.
‘I’m in Seattle,’ he reminded me.
‘So meet me halfway.’ I was still at Billie’s farm, but we’d planned on moving soon. Not because we feared an attack, but because while we were at the house we were no closer to finding Billie. I needed to get moving or I’d implode.
‘I can’t, Hunter. I’ve ongoing investigations here in the city. I told you this was an off-the-books job, I can’t just up and leave my post whenever I please.’ His voice was at a hush; he obviously hadn’t found a private place to speak yet.
‘If Richard had showed up you’d be burning rubber to get here,’ I said. ‘Doesn’t an abducted woman merit the same response?’
‘What the hell?’
‘Billie,’ I emphasised. ‘She was taken.’
‘How the hell did that happen?’ He was strident, and it didn’t seem to matter if he was overheard now or not.
‘Those guys you warned us might be coming? They came.’
‘Hold on.’ There followed a muffled rattle and thump, then Cooper’s voice was clearer. He’d hidden inside an office, or broom closet or whatever. ‘OK, I can talk now. Start at the beginning and tell me what happened.’
‘I haven’t all day,’ I said. ‘So here’s the important stuff: a group of well-armed and equipped men chased us into the woods. They shot me and took Billie. What’s more important is how I’m going to get her back.’
‘They shot you?’
‘I’m good.’
Cooper swore under his breath. Then something dawned on him. ‘You didn’t kill any of them?’
‘Only in self-defence.’
‘Oh, Jesus . . .’
‘Listen up. I tried the softly-softly approach. They almost killed me and they snatched Billie. Your way didn’t work.’ I waited a beat. ‘Or maybe it did.’
Cooper’s silence lasted. Finally he said, ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘Sure you do.’
He pretended to think again. ‘Do you want to enlighten me, Hunter? I’m not happy with the way this conversation is heading.’
‘You set us up, Cooper. Plain and simple.’
‘Set you up? What the hell are you talking about?’
‘This is all some elaborate game you’re playing, and all you’re interested in is winning. The big prize is getting your hands on Richard Womack and you don’t care what you have to do as long as you get him.’
‘How’d you come up with that absurd idea?’
I snorted in disdain. ‘You might think I’m just dumb muscle to be manipulated. I’m not. You set all this up, Cooper. You brought me in to watch over Billie, to win her trust. But there was more to it than that: I’m expendable. If I happened to die in the line of duty, it’d be no big deal. In fact, if I were killed while trying to protect her, Billie would buy into the lie even more. She’d see my death as a huge sacrifice on her behalf, and being the one who’d sent me, her trust in you would strengthen. How’s that for starters?’
Cooper laughed. ‘Do you know how paranoid you sound?’
‘Paranoia keeps me alive,’ I replied sharply. ‘What about the bulletproof vests?’
‘What about them
?’ Even as his words came out I heard them falter and slow, as he understood where I was heading.
‘See, it troubled me how quickly those goons caught up with us. We’d escaped the farm and ended up in the wilderness, but those guys knew exactly where we were. I almost bought into the idea that we might’ve been tracked because of an anti-theft beacon in my rental car, but it was too long a shot. So I got to thinking: what else could have led them to us? I knew it wasn’t our cell phones because of the crappy reception, so it had to be something else. I’ve just cut an electronic bug out of the vest you supplied me. I bet that there was an identical one in Billie’s vest too.’
‘And?’ Cooper said. ‘That means I set you up? Jesus, it’s standard practice to insert GPS tracking technology into antiballistic vests these days. Most close protection outfits use them. If the unimaginable happens and the client is abducted then their protection team can find them again. Hell, Hunter, I thought you’d have known that.’
‘Like I said, I’m not dumb muscle. What’s troubling me is how those assholes from Procrylon knew about the trackers, and how they were able to follow them. Are you suggesting they just randomly hit on the correct transmission? Bull shit.’
‘It’s not an impossible scenario,’ Cooper said. ‘Maybe they had the technology to sweep for signals and locked on to them. I’m betting there weren’t many other transponders working out there in the wilderness.’
‘Bollocks. It wasn’t random chance. They were coming to snatch a woman from her bed, not take down a fucking terrorist cell. They learned about the GPS trackers after failing to find Billie at the farm, and came back prepared to hunt her down with the correct equipment. How would they even know she was bugged to start with unless someone told them about the vests?’
Cooper was silent again. When he came back on he’d mostly forgiven me for accusing him of being a treacherous bastard. ‘I told you I was worried about a mole in the ATF. If you’re right and you were tracked because of the beacons in your vests, someone in my agency must have given out the serial numbers. That’s a worrying thought.’
