I so don’t.
But he lay on his back as she’d asked. He had the placid look of a man having the best dream of his life. She straddled him, pushed up her skirt, but left her panties on. He reached for them.
“Wait. I want to play a little.”
She rubbed herself against him. She was still sore from the polish bottle, and each time she touched him through her panties a wave of pain ran through her. But she didn’t stop.
He grunted with pleasure, reached up for her. She pushed his arms down.
Time.
“Close your eyes.”
“What?”
“Close them.”
“Be good, okay.” He closed his eyes.
She rubbed her hips against him, Keep the rhythm, keep him entertained. She pulled the bottle and lighter from the bag, shifted the bottle to her left hand, held the lighter in her right. Keep moving, keep moving.
He groaned happily.
She flicked off the bottle cap and it skittered down.
Now, now, if he sees he’ll kill you—
He opened his eyes.
Grunted in surprise.
She felt his orgasm begin beneath her—
As he began to sit up she dumped the liquid in the bottle onto his face and flicked the lighter and
The flame at the tip of the lighter caught the acetone and—
Up it went.
Onto Rodrigo’s face. And his eyes.
The flame danced. And his eyes burned.
He screamed, high, frightened. He clapped his hands to his face, slapping at the flame, but too late. In sitting up he had made himself a perfect target. His eyes were black in their sockets, retinas gone, the eyelids burned, only bloody pulp left. For a moment he sat back against the wall.
The horror of what she’d done stunned her. She didn’t move.
His scream deepened into rage. He sat up, knocking her backward, and swiped blindly for her.
She dodged, turned, stood. Before her the door, the hallway, freedom. She ran.
He swept his legs sideways. They tangled hers. She went down, landed hard on her left elbow. A flash of pain shot up her arm into her shoulder. He grabbed her ankle, pulled her in. She kicked at him but he was so strong.
She found the nail in her waistband. It nearly slipped through her fingers but she held it tight.
He reeled her in, clamping his hands to her calf knee thigh. His fingernails tore her skin. She jabbed at his legs with the nail, but he didn’t notice.
He put an arm around her waist and squeezed. She tried to scream but only gurgled. If he could reach her throat he could choke her out even blind.
Live or die.
His erection had withered, his cock lay flaccid, semen dripping—
And she knew what she had to do.
She made a fist around the nail. As his fingers touched her shoulders, reached for her throat, she jammed it through his soft sac and into the meat inside—
He screamed.
She flattened her palm, drove the nail deep into his testicle.
His scream rose and he let go of her to reach for the nail.
She scrambled away on hands and knees.
Stood, ran out. He crawled for her, blind, groaning, blundering for the door. She slammed it shut and leaned against it. She heard him stand as she snapped the deadbolt into place.
The door shook as he ran against it, fierce, helpless.
The lock held. He stopped. He slumped against the door, sobbing now.
“Por favor, por favor, please, it hurts, it hurts—”
Coke-adrenalized rage rose in her, at herself for hurting him, what she’d done, at him for giving her no choice, his poisoned semen sticky on her legs.
“How do you like it, Rodrigo? How do you like it, how do you like it—” She heard a car in the distance, the engine rumbling, revving.
She was wasting time, she needed to run.
She ran.
31
Near Zaragoza, Spain
This time both phones had the same message, from a Spanish number.
Row 26, last cabin.
“I’ll go,” Rebecca said.
She walked down the aisle. The automatic door at the back of the car hissed and opened, and she was gone.
This ride was his very last chance to tell her the truth, Brian realized.
Whatever was hidden back there, a note, a phone, a picture with directions scribbled on the back, he could help her find it. Maybe he’d find a way to tell her, too.
As he was considering the possibility, his phone buzzed. A blocked number.
He looked around. No one within three rows. He sagged against the window, cupped hand over mouth. “Yes?”
Irlov. Brian was surprised the Russian would risk calling him on this phone, but Irlov probably figured Brian knew enough not to answer if the NSA were up on it or if Rebecca were close enough to hear.
“Who is this?”
Irlov ignored the feint. “How’s your lovely wife? Tragedies can bring families closer.”
The Russian’s cleverness never ended. Sure enough, Rebecca had been nicer to him, even after the stupid joke he’d made about betting the money. Brian wasn’t sure her feelings would outlast the kidnapping, but this wasn’t the time to argue.
“This can’t be a tragedy, Feodor. It needs a happy ending.”
“You have the two million?”
Irlov not even pretending anymore he wasn’t in charge.
“We do.”
“Then I’m sure everything will be fine.”
“Promise.”
“Promise?” Irlov made the word sound absurd.
Brian heard the door behind him open. He looked up, wondering if Rebecca could have come back so fast. No. Just the conductor.
“If you don’t set her free, Becks will be useless to you. She’ll quit the bureau, spend her life trying to find her.”
“Best to follow instructions, then. No heroes.”
And Irlov was gone. Once again, he hadn’t promised the kidnappers would free Kira. But Brian had to assume he wouldn’t have called otherwise.
Maybe after Kira came back Brian could tell Rebecca, suggest they team up for revenge?
Funny story, Becks, the real reason our daughter got kidnapped—
Yeah, maybe not.
* * *
The train sped on. Zaragoza was no longer just a faint blur. The outlines of shopping centers and apartment complexes glowed in the night. The air coming through the train’s vents was cool and stale. Brian felt like an astronaut returning to Earth, no idea what he’d see when he touched down.
The first Zaragoza announcement came, in Spanish and then English. Fifteen minutes. Where was Becks?
There.
She slid in beside him. Held up a phone, an old-school Nokia.
“Sorry, took me a while, it was under the seat by the window. This was taped to the back.”
She held up a battered Toyota key.
“Wonder if it’s the same Camry?” Brian flashed a nightmare vision: Kira’s body in the trunk.
“Guess we’ll find out. As for the phone, we can see if there’s video of who left it. But I doubt we’ll find anything. That cabin is practically empty. They probably planted it before the train left Barcelona.” She was talking fast, amped.
“The phone’s locked?”
“No. I already checked for messages, the phone book, everything. Clean. I looked up the number, it’s a thirty-four country code, Spanish. I texted Jake the number.” Jake Broadnik, her NSA friend, who was waiting at his desk to run numbers for them. Typical Becks, she even pulled strings at his agency.
“I doubt it’ll mean much, but anything’s possible.”
His last chance to come clean with her.
He knew he wouldn’t.
* * *
The train ran alongside a highway now. They would pull in soon enough. Maybe he’d been wrong about Zaragoza.
The phone in Rebecca’s hands buzzed.
<
br /> A text. The number not blocked. Are you there
Rebecca thumbed an answer. Yes
You have car key
Yes
Zaragoza Police on platform
Yes
Get off Send them away Wait there
Yes
Leave phones on the train
Rebecca shook her head. “No,” she said. As if the phone could hear. “I’m gonna try a question.”
She thumbed in: What is the key for?
No response.
With her phone Rebecca took a picture of the phone number attached to the incoming messages. She texted the picture to Broadnik, along with a single word: Trace.
She shook her head. “I don’t get why they’re giving us their number. They have to know the NSA is going to be up on it in a hurry.”
“Unless they want us to know. Maybe their way of leading us to Kira.”
She nodded. “Maybe. But also they’re making mistakes with their English. They’re sloppy all of a sudden. I don’t like them being sloppy. This is the trickiest part of a kidnapping, handing back a hostage and getting the money without getting caught. Makes me wonder if that’s what they’re planning to do at all.”
She was right.
Her phone and the Kira phone buzzed at the same time. She handed hers to Brian. A 410 number, the NSA trunk line.
“Jake.”
“Brian. Okay, we got that phone. Tower’s about fifty kilometers northwest of Zaragoza, rural area so it’s a wide coverage zone, maybe thirty-five square KM.”
“Big.”
“Yeah. I’m sending the map with the tower location to this phone. The number moves, I’ll let you know. I’ll send the map to your phone and Rob Wilkerson and the Spanish Special Ops guy and the Mossos too.”
“Thanks, Jake.” He hung up. “What’d the text say?”
She showed him: No questions no Kira
“Jake says they have the mobile already,” Brian said. “Northwest of Zaragoza. He’s letting everyone know.”
“Everyone except the cops here, the ones we need,” Rebecca said. “Barraza will call them but it’s an extra minute, two, five. Try to pretend this jurisdictional stuff doesn’t matter and then this happens. Guys like Fernandes—”
She broke off.
Both their phones buzzed again, the map from Jake.
“It looks like there’s a big highway that runs from Zaragoza northwest to Pamplona in that coverage area,” Rebecca said. “Good place to keep her, rural but easy to get away.”
“You think she’s up there?”
Rebecca hesitated. “It’s possible.”
“Then we should go up there.”
“I’m not being cute, but where? Probably they’re moving her right now. They going north or south? North, they can go to France, San Sebastián, Bilbao, wherever. South, Madrid. Nobody’s putting up roadblocks. It’s eleven at night, what are we looking for? A car with a sign that says, KIDNAPPED AMERICAN GIRL INSIDE THIS TRUNK? We don’t know what kind of vehicle they might be using—”
“A Toyota.”
“Bri, the only thing we know is that it’s not a Toyota.” She held up the key. “Why give us this? Here, take the key to our getaway car, we’ll just walk.”
She was right. And cutting and dismissive. Couldn’t help herself. Even here. Even now.
“So we just sit with our thumbs in our asses, wait for this guy to give us orders?”
She exhaled heavily. “You think I like this? But if we get up there and they text us again and tell us the car’s parked around the station and we need to be there in five minutes and we tell them we can’t, who knows what they’ll do? Waiting is our only real option.”
Maybe the most infuriating thing about arguing with Becks, she was usually right.
“I’ll kill him,” Brian said. “If we don’t get her back I’ll kill him. Hunt him down and kill him myself.”
“You’ll have to beat me to it.”
She didn’t know he was talking about Irlov.
32
Northwest of Zaragoza
Kira skidded down the stairs, bare feet slipping on the slick wood steps. She couldn’t turn her head. She felt Rodrigo behind her, his fingers grasping, the reek of his burnt flesh filling her nose.
Halfway down she heard low Spanish voices in the living room. Waiting. Her heart beat so fast it seemed about to explode. They were waiting for her. Then the voices turned to a jingle, happy women singing—
A commercial.
She reached the bottom step, grabbed the handrail to stay upright. Breathe. Panic wouldn’t save her. She looked up the stairs. Which were empty. Of course. Rodrigo wasn’t a shape-shifter from Tony’s first-person shooters. She’d locked him away and he wouldn’t be getting out. She heard him now, pounding the door, as if sheer fury could free him.
But she’d learned for herself, the deadbolt didn’t care about the desperation of the person it held.
She put a hand to her cheek, felt her own ragged breath. Made her heartbeat slow. She listened for dogs barking, horns honking. Nothing. The car in the distance had turned around. Or turned off. Or maybe she hadn’t heard it at all, maybe it had been part of her freak-out.
She feared what might be waiting outside. But the house was a trap disguised as safety.
She made a deal with herself. She would look for a pistol. Quickly. If Jacques and Lilly weren’t close, she had a little time. And if they were, a gun was her only chance. A gun or a phone. Rodrigo had probably had his stuffed in his jeans, she realized now. Maybe he had already blindly thumbed in his password and called Jacques to come for him.
A few seconds. A minute. No more. She ran to the kitchen, putting aside the nightmare thought of Jacques and Lilly sipping sangria, Come, Kira, have a drink, join us, we never liked that guy anyway, he’s just the muscle—
No Jacques. No Lilly. Kira found herself alone in a barely furnished room: a toaster, a mini fridge. A card table with three folding chairs and two empty wine glasses, the world’s most boring still life. No phone. A closed laptop sat on the counter. She wanted to take it, but it would only slow her.
Dishes and glasses were stacked beside the sink. Might as well be graffiti, Jacques was here. By his obsessive neatness shall ye know him. A space for a microwave over the countertop, but no microwave. A space for a full-size refrigerator, but no fridge. The house was incomplete, unfinished.
The air was nearly as hot here as in the closet. No air-conditioning. The smell of gasoline from the garage tickled her nose. She didn’t mind. Better than Rodrigo’s burned skin.
She pulled open the cabinets. No pistols. But a knife block with a half dozen black-handled knives. She grabbed the second-biggest steak knife and ran.
Into the garage. No cars. No vans. The gas smell was stronger here, stronger than it had been two days ago. A different life. A different girl.
She saw why now. One of the tanks was uncapped. She stepped toward it, thinking of setting fire to the house. Burning Rodrigo alive while he was locked in a closet.
Maybe a different girl but not that one.
Not yet.
Even in here his screams penetrated, faint, desperate.
She turned away from the gasoline. By the garage door, a motorcycle and a bicycle, a mountain bike, nice fat wheels. She didn’t know how to ride a motorcycle. The bike it would be. She didn’t want to hold the knife while she rode, but she couldn’t bear leaving it.
She tugged at the door handle. It stuck. She pulled harder. Harder.
Up it went, rattling its rails. The night air swept into the garage, a steady warm breeze. Free.
She hopped on the bike, felt the seat dig into her. She didn’t have shoes, but the pedals were flat, rubber. She stepped on them—
The handlebars twisted and she fell. Dropped the knife. It bounced off the concrete floor, nearly sliced open her face.
A Kryptonite lock ran through the bicycle’s front wheel and around the frame. She’d missed it.
<
br /> Maybe they’d taped the key to the wall or something. She looked. Nope.
She screamed in frustration. No bike.
She picked up the knife, ran into the night…
Found herself at the end of a cul-de-sac. What? The road and neighborhood looked weirdly American, suburban. She didn’t see how they could have held her here, all these people, why there hadn’t been any noise—
But who cared, the neighbors could call the police. She sprinted for the next house—
And put her left foot in a hole. Her ankle gave, twisted sideways. Her bad ankle, the one she’d hurt playing soccer. She screamed as she landed awkwardly on the pavement. Which wasn’t pavement at all. But dirt.
Her ankle. It hurt. Why hadn’t she found her shoes, why hadn’t she looked for them? Why hadn’t she looked at the ground instead of running blindly like a four-year-old?
She picked up the knife, stood carefully, leaned on her right leg. Slowly she eased her weight to her left. It was wobbly, loose, but it held. Sprained. Badly. But not broken. She could hobble. For a while.
She limped toward the neighboring house, wondering why her scream hadn’t brought anyone outside.
Then raised her head to the sky, brilliant with stars. A country sky.
The houses, dark. The yards, dirt. The driveways, empty.
How many more clues do you want?
A real estate development gone bad. She thought that only happened back home, that movie The Big Short, Margot Robbie in the tub, rose skin and perfect, Christian Bale in a suit, weird and fat.
A ghost neighborhood. For a ghost girl.
The dirt street ran up a low hill, houses on either side. Kira saw no electric glow, no evidence of anyone within shouting distance. She shouted anyway. “Help!”
“HELP HELP HELP!”
Her voice fell into the night. No answer. Not even a cat meowing or a dog barking. This place was empty.
Okay, move.
She limped up the street, keeping the weight off her left leg as best she could, dragging the foot behind her. She looked for a stick, a metal rod, anything to use as a cane. Nothing. She wanted to run but made herself go easy. She had no idea how far she needed to go. If she pushed too hard she might tear ligaments in the ankle and wind up crawling.
The Power Couple Page 30
