Fire in the Wind

by Alexandra Sellers

  The man she had kicked was cursing steadily and painfully. Slowly he got up off the ground. It was Turquoise Mask.

  "Rope," suggested the man who held her, and Turquoise Mask moved to the back of the van, opened the doors, and, the soft stream of his curses mingling oddly with the scraping noises in the night air, rummaged for a few moments, then stepped back with a small bundle of binder twine in his hand.

  It looked wispy, like angel hair, but its roughness cut her skin, and Turquoise Mask tied her wrists tightly and cruelly in the darkness, so that the twine bit into her flesh.

  Every new assault took her terror one notch higher. Being tied filled her with such a panic-stricken dread she felt as though she were hanging on to reason by a tiny thread.

  The dark man placed her in the passenger seat, his hand still clamped on her mouth, the open door blocked with his body; and in the faint light coming from the house she saw that other man held a square of coarse dirty fabric. Her eyes widened in horror, and she moaned a plea and shook her head.

  The dark hawk face, which she saw again for the first time since that moment in her father's room—it seemed an hour ago, though it could have been only minutes—looked consideringly at her for a moment.

  "Sorry," he said, as though he meant it. "Even if you gave me your word not to scream, you are too much of a fighter to keep it."

  She moaned again behind his palm, her eyes pleading and promising. A white smile lighted the shadowed planes of his strong, bronzed face; strangely, it was a smile of admiration.

  "Not even for your solemn oath," he said, his eyes glinting at her. "Even if you meant to keep your word, you would not do so. That is the way of fighters. Now, if you breathe deeply and slowly and calm your panic, this will not be so bad."

  She was briefly thrown into confusion by his kindness. It was a ploy calculated to put her off her guard, she realized. It was not going to work. Shulamith took the deep calming breath, but stared stonily at the man while he tied the gag into her open mouth. He spoke a few quiet words to Turquoise Mask then, closed and locked the door, and turned back up the steps and into the house. With the shock of sudden memory, Shulamith thought of the other three men. Were they still in the house or were they waiting somewhere out of sight? Were they silent in the back of the van? She repressed a shudder. She wished she hadn't remembered them.

  After a moment he returned, flicking off lights as he came and locking the door. She saw his moonshadow. He had an animal grace that gave her a curious pleasure, a leanness of hip that was strangely compelling. Shulamith watched the man, whose face had a grave nobility in the moonlight, until he moved out of sight of her window. She heard his low voice in conversation with his still-masked accomplice. In the darkness she groped frantically for the door lock. She heard the click and prepared herself.

  "You will ride in the back of the van," the dark man said as the door opened, while Turquoise Mask climbed up into the driver's seat beside her. She smelled his sweat, the acrid smell of fear. She wondered if they smelled her fear.

  Wordlessly she slid off her seat, felt the cold pavement under her already chilled feet, and waited as the sliding door opened for her. She stumbled inside, banged her toe painfully on a metal strut, then felt carpet under her feet. The hawk-eyed man did not sit in the passenger seat but followed her into the back of the van.

  "I am not going to hurt you," he said, and she could sense that they were alone. "Please sit down."

  He guided her down so that she was sitting with her back against the side of the van behind the driver, then dropped lightly beside her. She discovered she was sitting on her hair, and it pulled her head. With the gag forcing her mouth open, too, her body felt twisted and uncomfortable. But she would not complain to him, or ask again for relief.

  "Go," he said, and the driver pulled off his balaclava, started the van's engine and let out the clutch.

  Smith lost track of direction, but they were certainly going down and not up. All she saw of the passing landscape were the treetops or street lamps, and after a very few minutes she gave up the attempt to judge the turns.

  Her companion was watching her in the flickering light, and Smith caught his gaze and looked away. Wriggling, she lifted her bound hands to her neck and pulled her hair from under her. He reached and lifted a lock of it from where it fell over her arm.

  "Your hair is very long," he said, in a tone of wondering admiration she was used to. Not many women could sit on their own hair these days; it often aroused comment. She stared fixedly into the darkness, ignoring him as though she hadn't heard.

  "Her hair was the color of foxes," the man recited softly to himself, "or of fire." She wondered what he was quoting; she didn't remember ever hearing it before. But of course she would not ask.

  The intent look in the man's hooded eyes, which were in light and shadow, light and shadow as the van rhythmically progressed past street lamps, made her think of an animal or a bird of prey. She shivered, half in fear, half with cold in the light cotton nightdress that was all she was wearing. Her mouth ached. The gag was choking, claustrophobic, and smelled of engine oil. Behind it, there was a bitter taste in her mouth. But that was fear.

  She raised her bound hands to try to ease the cloth, though she had already learned it would not loosen. The dark man lifted a hand to forestall her.

  "Close your eyes," he said, "and breathe slowly and deeply."

  As she obeyed, Smith wondered distantly how many kidnap victims he had calmed with just these words. She was amazed that someone she feared so deeply could simultaneously exert a calming influence on her. Like a lamb going to the slaughter, she thought, and a small self-deprecatory snort escaped her.

  It was hard for her to judge time as they drove; the wild emotions that she had experienced did not seem to be measurable in any recognizable time frame. The van needed new shock absorbers, but if she swayed with its motion she found a kind of rhythm.

  She gave in to her own sense of helplessness, not fighting the gag or the rope any longer, but somehow adjusting to them, allowing them to become part of her. She discovered that the bonds were not impossible to bear and gave herself over to examining her captor.

  He was at least part native Canadian, she realized. That was a little like saying someone was part European, but Smith was not familiar even with the various West Coast bands. The bone structure of his face was strong and sharply planed, and his eyes, with a faint but exotic slant, were hooded. He reminded her of a painting of some nameless Mongol invader she had seen somewhere, and Smith wondered suddenly whether his long-distant ancestors had come across the Bering Strait from the Steppes.

  She laughed a little, deep in her throat, and the man looked at her. / was just wondering if you were distantly related to Genghis Khan, she told him silently, because if so, you're a chip off the old block.

  Slightly more civilized, of course. No looting and burning, just carrying off the women... for ransom. She hoped that was all.

  And of course they hadn't meant to carry off the woman in this case, they had meant to kidnap her father. They had taken her as a last resort, unwilling to let their plan fail entirely. It would have been too much of a risk to kidnap a man who was prone to heart attack.

  They wouldn't have known that before, of course. No one had known that Cord St. John had a bad heart until a few weeks ago, when he'd had his first attack. Smith remembered her shock and disbelief on the day her father's executive secretary had phoned her at a client's office in Brussels to tell her that her father was in the cardiac ward of the Royal Columbia Hospital. Cordwainer St. John was young, still in his early fifties. He was a strong, healthy-looking man with hair graying attractively at the temples—a solidly built handsome man who exuded power. He was not a man who could be felled by the most determined business rival, and no one would have thought that his health was going to give him trouble for another twenty-five years. Certainly not his daughter.

  For sixteen years, her father had been the most e
nergetic, hardest working person she knew. For sixteen years he had been devoted to work—devoted to building his company and to making money.

  Sixteen years ago, at the age of thirty-six, late for such an abrupt career change, Cord St. John had bought up a small "gypo" operation, which he had immediately renamed St. John Logging. If at first the name had seemed more impressive than the company, it had not remained so for long. Cordwainer St. John had been tough and ruthless in what was already a pretty ruthless industry. Three years later he was making enough profit from his logging operation to buy up a medium-sized sawmill. He had modernized it overnight with a computer sawing system that had made two-thirds of the workers redundant and paid for itself in less than a year. After St. John Lumber had followed St. John Pulp and Paper, St. John Trucking and many others. Together, these companies were now known as St. John Forest Products. Within the trade it was nicknamed "St. John's Wood," though not with affection.

  "Oh, is there a St. John's Wood in British Columbia?" a visiting English businessman had asked once, thinking of the area of London known by that name, and had caused a table of lumbermen to burst into laughter. "You've got it wrong," one of them told him. "What you mean is, is there a British Columbia in St. John's Wood?"

  After the small warning heart attack, Cord St. John had been told in plain, almost brutal terms that he must slow down. A long holiday and then a four-day, instead of seven-day work week, his doctor advised, not without sarcasm.

  "Paris!" Smith had said immediately. "You haven't been to Paris for years." In fact, it was sixteen years since Cord St. John had seen Paris. "Visit Paris daddy. Or take a long cruise. I could go with you."

  He had let her plan. But as soon as he'd regained his strength, he had gone back to work, six or seven days a week; ten, sometimes twelve hours a day....She had begged, had reasoned, had argued, but her father had gone on working, like a man driven, or a man courting death.

  Smith's gaze focused again on the darkly intelligent face of her abductor, the would-be abductor of her father. When Cord St. John had made it legally impossible, a few years ago, for his company or his daughter to pay any ransom if he was kidnapped, the fact had been well publicized. Naturally, since it was meant to act as a deterrent to any potential kidnappers. All executives of St. John Forest Products had been informed that in the case of their kidnapping, too, no ransom would be paid. Out of curiosity once Smith had asked her father if that ban extended to her. She was not exactly an executive yet. But her father hadn't answered her.

  Well, no doubt she would find out soon enough. Smith closed her eyes against a brief spasm of pain. If her father had been kidnapped tonight in accordance with this dark man's plans, she would have moved heaven and earth to circumvent that ruling and pay the ransom. If there was only the smallest chance of his coming back alive. No matter how angry it would have made him.

  She opened her eyes and eyed her abductor speculatively. Would her father pay him money for the promise of her life? He looked like a man who usually got what he wanted, but then so did her father. And her father would not want to pay a ransom demand. Of that she was suddenly certain. A mirthless laugh rose in her throat then, and if she could have spoken she would have told her dark abductor, you miscalculated when you took me in place of my father. My father wouldn 't pay a counterfeit nickel to have me returned alive. My father couldn't care less if I was alive or dead.

  Chapter 2

  In the graying darkness of early dawn a full moon hung distant and cool above the ocean in the western sky. In the east, behind the city and the mountains, the pink and golden clouds catching the first of the sun's rays seemed almost to be part of another sky, another world. A sky in which night and day were perfectly balanced, each with its own territory, Smith thought, and wondered dryly if there was significance in the fact that she had her back to the sun and was walking into night.

  No one noticed the casually strolling couple that made their way along the dock past the schooners, catamarans, sloops and launches berthed on the edge of English Bay. Perhaps there was no one to notice, at this hour. In the long walk from the van she hadn't seen anyone, had heard nothing except the gentle slap-slap of water against the hull; the intermittent comforting squeak of wood against a protective rubber tire; the familiar, ever present, overhead cry of gulls.

  Anyone who saw the two would have had to look very closely to catch anything amiss, in any case. A barefoot woman in a long cotton skirt might be thought a little foolhardy at this hour, but would cause nothing more serious than a raised eyebrow. Especially as she was wrapped up so warmly in her boyfriend's thick jersey. From a distance no one would see that her arms were not in the sleeves of the sweater, nor that the casually loving arm her boyfriend had flung around her was in fact a grip of steel. Nor would they notice, except at very close quarters against the backlighting of the sunrise, that the woman's magnificent, tangled red hair disguised a gag that was going to drive her insane if it was not soon removed.

  Nevertheless, Smith prayed as fervently as she had ever done in her life that someone—preferably large and burly, but anyone would do—would step out of one of the moored boats as they passed and hear the choked moan that was the only cry she could make behind the gag.

  No one came. Not a soul breathed; not one human noise fell on her ears. She was surrounded by examples of God's most incredible handiwork—ocean, mountain, moonset and sunrise—and yet her prayers could not conjure up one insignificant human being in a city of a million!

  Perhaps behind them. Perhaps someone had been slow to respond to the inexplicable urge to begin the day early, had come too late to his afterdeck and was now gazing incuriously after the two figures moving along the wooden dock between the rows of boats. Smith did not turn her head to see: she was too filled with despair even to hope.

  She felt sick—sick with pain and fright and useless anger at herself. Why had she pulled off the man's mask? From now until doomsday she would be able to identify him, and he knew it. Even if her father or the company paid a ransom for her, how could he let her go? The few kidnap victims who did survive never saw their captors' faces, she knew that. It was only common sense. Kidnappers got the money whether the victim lived or died.

  Would no one really come? There was not one light in any of the boats around her—hadn't anyone slept aboard last night?

  Smith let out a strangled moan that threatened to become a sob, and her dark companion bent his head with concern. Whether it was concern that she might be weeping or concern lest she be trying to make a cry for help she couldn't tell, but she calmed instantly under the searching gaze and willed her stinging eyes to dry. He might kill her, but he would not make her cry. She was damned if he would see her cry!

  She couldn't know whether he meant to drown her immediately off the end of the dock or whether he would take her on a boat. If he was going to drown her she hoped he would take the gag off so that she could beg him to knock her unconscious first. Smith closed her eyes. The thought of drowning terrified her: fighting for air while something pulled you down and down....

  When she was a child her nightmares of death were always of quicksand and drowning. She had never seen quicksand so far as she knew, but she had been haunted by it ever since she had read of it in a cowboy comic book. The day the Cisco Kid had been thrown into quicksand had been a bad day for Shulamith. The whole idea of it had terrified her nine-year-old mind. With horrifying immediacy she had envisioned the foul smell, the slime, the horrid sucking noises as the innocent-looking sand pulled you slowly under until you choked. One day at breakfast, watching her father read what she was sure must be less mail than usual, she had asked him what a person should do if she fell into quicksand.

  That was in the early days, in the first year after they had moved to Vancouver. Shulamith hadn't yet fully absorbed the enormous, terrible change that had taken place in her father: he was the man who for eight years had been her protector, her utter security, someone whose love was unquestionable.
Sometimes she did not remember, or would not, that now he had no time for her....

  No doubt she had been hoping he would say there was no such thing as quicksand, or that it only existed in the state of Nevada (so far away!), and she need never go there. Or he might have said that if she fell into quicksand he would be there to pull her out, and the nightmare would have lost its power.

  Her father had not had time or patience for her question that morning, however. Shulamith did not remember now what he had said, but afterward she had read up on how to save yourself if you fell into quicksand, because that day she had known she was on her own. Her father would not be there to save her if she fell into quicksand. She could never count on her father again.

  She had also read about how to save yourself from drowning, she remembered. The first rule had been to learn to swim. Shulamith could swim now; she swam like a dolphin, but she doubted if that would save her if she was thrown into deep water bound and gagged.

  "Here we are," the deeply resonant voice said in her ear, and when she opened her eyes she was looking not into the blue depths at the end of the dock, but at a large white sailboat of sleek, powerful lines whose name, navy on white, was Outcast II.

  Were it not for the gag, Smith would have laughed aloud. The sudden relief was overwhelming. If he was going to put her aboard this, he must intend at least to keep her alive. In this he could sail around the islands indefinitely until the ransom money was paid, without fear of discovery. Smith's heart soared.

  And then sank. Where on earth did her captor get a boat like this? Where did anyone who was kidnapping someone for ransom get such a boat? She looked at her captor in a new and frightening confusion. She didn't understand anything at all.