Pimpernel

by Sheralyn Pratt

  “That is not possible,” Mr. Ramsey replied, although he sounded less confident this time. “You’re bluffing.”

  Jack started for the door, still ignoring the armed men who seemed quite uncertain as to what they were supposed to do. He paused as he passed Mr. Ramsey, sizing the man up. “All your life you wanted to play in the big leagues. You’ve been the big fish in a small pond who desperately believed he wanted to swim with the sharks.” Jack patted the man on the shoulder and put more than an ounce of pity in his eyes. “A word to the wise? In the big leagues, when you threaten to destroy a man, make sure he can’t destroy you first.”

  Jack walked between the two guards, both still training their guns on him but not looking at all confident about it as Jack made his way to the door. When he was a step away from moving out of sight, he turned to face Claire’s father one last time.

  “There is a demand written on the back of that card. Fulfill it, or I will collect 50% of your assets and send all eight of your illegitimate children paternity tests identifying you as their father and them as your heirs. The decision is yours, sir.”

  A vein at the side of Everett Ramsey’s forehead started pulsing and his mouth was opening to yell some sort of command when Jack raised a cheerful finger as if just remembering something.

  “Oh, and I nearly forgot,” he said, pointing to the desk. “I left your guards’ guns in the top-left drawer. One can never be too careful, you know.”

  Then Jack disappeared.

  Chapter 39

  The clock in the top-right corner of Margot’s giant wall screen read 1:57 p.m. the next time an over-muscled guard led Claire up the elevator and into Margot’s office—Margot’s empty office. Claire stopped, sending a questioning look to her guard.

  “Ms. Harbour has a meeting for the next thirty minutes,” the bodyguard said, answering her silent question. “She wanted me to bring you up here and give you that time with the computer to see what you can figure out.”

  Huh? Claire looked from the screen to the desk and then back to the bodyguard. “I thought Margot was going to tell me what she thought I should know.”

  “Things are moving fast,” he said, gesturing toward the desk. “Ms. Harbour doesn’t have time to sit down and give you a highlight reel, but apparently you’re super smart.” He dropped his hand, giving a little head nod to the computer. “Information unrelated to your case is inaccessible, but the rest is unlocked, and you have thirty minutes to look up whatever you can find, in whatever order most interests you.”

  Claire walked up to the desk, noting the touchpad on the left side. “Do I get a tutorial on how to use this thing?”

  The bodyguard shook his head. “This is a meritocracy, Ms. Ramsey. You’ve seen Ms. Harbour use this enough to be able to figure out the basics. You have thirty minutes until she returns and I take you back down to your safe room.”

  He again gestured to the desk before stepping back against the wall. Apparently, Claire was going to have an audience while she poked around. Not surprising.

  Claire walked up to the desk, her mind rewinding back to when she first saw Margot in this exact spot. She hadn’t consciously taken note of Margot’s gestures when she’d controlled the computer before, but her mind had still mapped and cataloged them.

  A quick tap with one finger brought the screen to life. Three fingers together worked like a mouse. Lifting the two outside fingers and leaving the middle touching was the select feature, and raising the middle finger and leaving the outside touching worked to resize objects, depending on which way Claire moved her fingers. She could also fast-forward or rewind when she moved fingers clockwise or counterclockwise.

  Within two minutes, Claire felt confident navigating the computer, which just left the question of figuring out what she wanted to look up. There were literally thousands of live cameras along with some archived footage. That made Claire think about Jack and how her mother had allegedly sent men to kidnap “Daniel” the night before.

  Curious, she brought up the archives, noting they were labeled by location then date and time. The camera labeled DALR showed a thumbnail of her home apartment, and for a moment, Claire was stunned.

  Margot had a camera in the apartment? She’d been watching all this time?

  As quickly as the indignance came, it left. Of course Margot had been recording everything. Duh. They’d had her under surveillance for a month now. Of course they had cameras inside the apartment. When Claire selected the folder, she saw that 237 clips had been saved across the past four weeks. The most recent was 2:43 that morning. Margot had said the bust at the second location had happened around 4:30, so the timeline made sense.

  Claire cued the clip up. Five seconds later, two men dragged “Daniel” into the living room, clearly trying to inject him with something. A sedative? Whatever it was, Jack was resisting in true Daniel fashion—using hand slaps, effeminate squeaks, and wet noodle collapses to evade capture in the dark. The resulting fight somehow looked worthy of a Three Stooges skit, and it wasn’t until Claire saw Jack hold something up for the camera before sliding his hand between two couch cushions that she realized she was watching an actual strategy at play.

  Claire stopped the video, using two fingers to rewind to the part where Jack held the item up. She couldn’t tell what it was, so she zoomed in until the object pixelated and filled the height of the entire wall. It wasn’t a knife, although it kind of looked like a knife handle. The night vision on the camera wasn’t giving her the best visual on the whatever it was.

  Annoyed that she couldn’t figure out what Jack had stowed in the couch cushions, Claire let the video play on, smiling a little when Jack pretended to be thrown across the room before doing a ragdoll fall into the man who hadn’t gotten his hands on him yet. It was like watching a declawed cat attack a tree. Jack was fierce and fast, but the other man didn’t even flinch at the blows.

  Then it happened again. Jack’s hand came up, displaying something before he twisted around and dropped it to the side of the couch. That was when the two men descended on him and finally got the needle in. Claire’s heart raced as Jack’s body slowly went lax and he crumbled into the arms of the man who’d played tree trunk to his kitty cat. The second man said something as he pocketed his syringe, making Claire realize she’d been watching the whole thing on mute.

  How did she get sound?

  That thought took a back seat to seeing Jack flung over the shoulder of the tree truck guy before the other man went and opened the door to see if the coast was clear. He must have said something to signal the other guy because the both started out. Just before they took their last step out, Jack’s hand came up, giving the camera a thumbs up.

  He wasn’t knocked out. He was acting.

  Claire paused the video, zooming in on the thumbs up and staring, her mind trying to wrap around who this guy was and why he was doing what he was doing. Why let himself be taken? And why had he put on such an elaborate fight to escape if he had no actual intent of getting away?

  She rewound the footage until she reached the second time Jack had held something up to the camera. Again, the image was dark, but this time the lighter couch was in the background, giving her a better idea of the shape. A long rectangle just a bit taller than his palm. The shape looked familiar, but Claire couldn’t quite place it. She turned to her nameless guard.

  “Do you know what he’s holding up?”

  The man didn’t blink. “I’m not supposed to help you, ma’am.”

  “With the system,” Claire said. “But can you tell me what a shape is? I know I’ve seen it before.”

  The beautiful blond man stood there for a second before pulling back the right side of his jacket, revealing a holstered gun. He pulled the gun out, ejected the magazine, and held it out her direction. Then, without a word, he re-inserted the magazine and holstered his weapon.

  Claire’s jaw dropped before she looked back to the screen in shock. A gun magazine? How had Jack gotten his hands
on those, and why?

  She rewound the video, starting with Jack’s self-imposed ragdoll throw and trying to figure out if the video had a slo-mo option as she watched the clip again and again, trying to see when the magazine appeared. It wasn’t until the fifth time on slo-mo that her eyes saw how the kitten punches drew the other man’s hands up and kept them there while one hand popped back and forth underneath the man’s jacket…until the last time, when it came out holding the magazine.

  Claire let the rest of the clip play out while she processed what had just happened.

  Jack had pretended to be completely inept in a fight in order to distract both men long enough to remove the magazines from their guns. And based on the fact that he had signaled he wasn’t unconscious before they left, he had swapped out the syringe, too.

  For several moments, and maybe up to a minute, Claire simply stared at the screen. Compared to the two men sent to snatch him up, Jack was a bit on the small size. Five-foot-eight and maybe 165 pounds. These other guys were inches taller and a whole lot of muscle. Jack had used their confidence to his advantage and left the room on his own terms. He’d made it look seamless…easy.

  She didn’t realize her heart was pounding until she felt the heel of her hand press into it. I’ve kissed this guy, she thought out of nowhere. He might be the most fascinating person she’d ever met in her life, and she’d kissed him.

  Take that, plummeting satellite!

  She’d had her regrets about the kiss off and on throughout the day, alternating between panic and red-faced remembering. But at the moment, the memory of her artless kiss and his much more artful follow-up was lodged firmly in the Best Idea Ever category. It was a bit superficial to believe her current lightheadedness was an actual feeling of love. She barely knew the man behind the many masks he wore. But what she had just seen had put her in the throes of a pretty decent crush.

  He lied to you, a little voice whispered, but the heat in her chest rose up and burned that thought right out of her brain. She literally didn’t care anymore. She’d been committing felonies and he’d been doing his job to catch her. A girl could only be mad about that for so long.

  The two men carrying Jack away on the screen had been out of the apartment more than a minute before Claire realized there was more to the tape. The timer showed there were still seventeen minutes left. She fast-forwarded for fifteen minutes later when two police officers let themselves in and turned on the lights. Claire still had no audio, but she could tell they were talking to someone on the phone. One went for the cushions and the other for the side of the couch.

  Now that the lights were on, Claire could easily see what the magazines were. She saw the officers count the bullets, then pocket the magazines.

  She turned to her guard again. “Why would they do that? Count the bullets?”

  The man hesitated, then seemed to decide that it didn’t matter if he answered or not. “To see if the two men have a bullet chambered in their guns, or if the guns will be empty when they cross paths in about an hour.”

  Fascinating. Claire was about to ask if Jack’s team worked with police often, but decided not to press her luck. Especially when she glanced at the clock and saw it was already 2:17 p.m. Time flew when you were watching other people be amazing.

  Claire returned to the main video folder, looking for something else that had happened while she was down in her safe room. Her thoughts landed on Jack’s most recent disguise as a British gentleman. As Daniel, Jack had seemed so harmless but in that pinstripe suit he’d been the model of sophistication and elegance.

  Where had Jack gone dressed like that?

  Claire checked the archives, noting that if he’d gone somewhere with cameras, Margot hadn’t seen fit to save the footage. If she wanted to find where Jack went, she’d have to dig, which might be a bit easier if she didn’t have literally thousands of cameras to pick from. Margot was dialed into every traffic camera and even casino cameras. That couldn’t be legal, and yet there it all was.

  “There must be a search feature,” she muttered, looking at all the icons and programs. At 2:24, she found the feature, which required images or exact dimensions to perform a search. She closed her eyes, recalling her mental map of Jack’s disguise. He’d raised himself up to five-eleven, but that wouldn’t help and her specifications for the pinstripe suit left her with an overabundance of search results. With three minutes left on the clock, she running out of time.

  Claire remembered the watch, but there were no relevant hits since the watch probably didn’t show when Jack’s arms were at his sides. She closed her eyes, working her way the rest of the way down her mental map of him until she got to the shoes—the shoes that made him three inches taller. They’d been black Oxfords, bar-laced with blue laces that playfully matched his tie. Hopefully, that detail and the thickness of the sole and the heel would make the shoes stand out.

  Claire created the search parameters and applied them to the traffic cameras with less than two minutes to go before 2:30.

  Maybe she would be lucky and Margot would be late getting back.

  Claire prayed as much as results started populating. She recognized The Four Seasons in one of the thumbnails, since that was her father’s hotel of choice when he traveled, but the results were still populating when the office door burst open.

  “Get out of my seat,” Margot said as she strode in.

  “Wait,” Claire said, eyes on the screen. “I’m almost there.”

  “Out,” Margot said firmly, giving a nod to the bodyguard standing behind Claire. An instant later his hand was on her shoulder.

  “Let’s go, Ms. Ramsey.”

  But she was so close! One by one, the thumbnails zoomed in on the shoes she had specified, and Claire saw that Jack had changed out of his suit at some point. She would never learn more than that, though, because the bodyguard raised her out of the chair.

  “Jack will be here in about four hours,” Margot said, taking a seat and looking at the screen. “We’ll need you to play poker like you did last Sunday. Jack will come to get you while you’re playing and then it will be your job to run. When you stop running, all you need to do is be silent until I signal that the coast is clear.”

  What the what?

  Was Claire supposed to understand what all that meant? The bodyguard was physically pulling her toward the elevator as she tried to get Margot’s attention.

  “Wait,” she called out. “I feel like I need more information than that.”

  “So you can obsess about it and imagine a thousand ways to fail in the meantime?” Margot said, sounding bored. “I don’t think so. If there’s one thing watching you for a month taught me, it’s that you’re at you best when you respond in the moment. You know what you need to know. Play poker. Run. Hide in silence until I tell you to move. Then follow where Jack leads. That’s all you need to do, and Jack will do all the work. It all starts in four hours.”

  Margot disappeared out of sight as the bodyguard pulled Claire down the short hall that led to the private elevator. With a sigh of frustration, Claire resigned herself to the fact that she wouldn’t be getting any more answers for at least another four hours.

  Chapter 40

  Watching Claire play poker was a bit surreal, especially since Jack knew she wasn’t cheating. She was playing the game as it was meant to be played, and after only thirty minutes she was already attracting spectators.

  “We have incoming,” Margot said in his earpiece. “These are our guys.”

  Jack pushed the oversized Elvis sunglasses higher up the bridge of his nose. Between the glasses and the Elvis wig, Jack didn’t really need any other disguise. He was unrecognizable to both physical and digital eyes.

  Without missing a beat, he pushed through the crowd and headed for Claire’s table. She seemed to sense him coming and sent him a panicked look.

  “Now,” he whispered, slipping his hand into hers.

  “But I have $945 in the —”

 
“Forget about it,” he said, looking around to try to get his eyes on the men. “We’re moving now.”

  “Incoming on your left,” Margot said in his ear. “About twenty yards out.”

  Jack saw them. Two men in suits. Close and getting closer fast. “Now,” he hissed.

  Claire slid off her chair and fell in step next to him without another word. He led the way, carving the way through the crowd with his own body before using their joined hands to pull her through in his wake.

  Tourists. Everywhere. Jack reminded himself that tonight they were a good thing—or it would be on the tail end of all this. Right now they were pretty much in the way.

  “Sprint,” Margot urged. “They’re closing in.”

  He moved fast and Claire surprised him by keeping pace.

  “We’re taking the next right,” he coached her. “We’re going into an employee locker room. That’s where we’re going to let these guys catch up with us. We want them to corner us there, so don’t be afraid when they do, okay?”

  “Why do we want to get cornered?”

  “Because that’s how we get away.”

  Jack could see the confusion on her face—as if she was wondering if the two of them had different definitions of the word cornered—but she didn’t fight him. “Okay. How?”

  He turned the final corner to the hallway leading to the locker room he’d prepped for them. “I’ll do everything. I just need you to stay silent,” he said as they made the final sprint. “There will be a flash of light and smoke. Don’t scream. Just hold your breath when you see the flash. Smoke will follow and I’ll move you.”

  “Seriously?” she gasped as they reached the locker room door. “You couldn’t have told me all this before?”

  He held up a security card that beeped them in. “This kind of thing works better when you don’t overthink it.”