Adrenaline

by Jeff Abbott

  She lay curled in the dark, holding her stomach, trembling. The room was not cold but still she shivered. She stared at him, not drawing away, just lying there, waiting to see what he would do.

  “It is an important day,” he said. He did not climb atop her, pushing her legs apart and easing down the sweatpants she wore for his pleasure. He did not yell at her about why everything in her Old Life was bad, and disgusting and criminal, and an affront against human dignity, and how they fought against injustice. He did not play her videos showing the burned people, the shot families, the results of her father’s commerce. The rest of the gang loved his speeches; they leaned against the door and listened to him preach to the girl. He had read a book on how the Symbionese Liberation Army had brainwashed Patty Hearst, and it held many useful and fascinating tips for reshaping a woman into a pawn. So far his approach had borne fruit: after a few hundred hours of careful torture the young woman was quiet and pliant now, a textbook victim of intimidation and fear. Suffering was a condition that forged strength, and Edward needed her to be strong. “What do you want to tell me?”

  She glanced at the door.

  “They’re not out there,” he said. “It’s only you and me.” He smiled; it would let her know that it was okay to smile. “So you can use the toothbrush today, and the toilet. And then we will take a walk.”

  “A walk?”

  “Yes. I have a job for you, one that is very important.”

  Edward helped her to her feet and steered her into the small bathroom. She stank of sweat; she would need a shower before she could venture into public. It was important she not be noticed or remembered. He opened the door and told her to clean herself. She nodded, not looking at him.

  He went downstairs and into his bedroom, where he had bought new clothes for her: modest slacks, a plain blue scarf she could pull over her mouth when needed to help mask her face, a gray pullover. She would be practically invisible. He came out and glanced in the kitchen. Demi stood at the sink, frowning.

  “What’s the matter?” he said.

  Demi said, “Piet went upstairs. He said you are handling the woman wrong. That you don’t know how to break her entirely. That he will do it.”

  Edward turned and ran up the stairs. He tried the bathroom door. Locked. He kicked it in and he could see Piet, bending her over the lavatory, starting to inch his pants down. He held an antique short Japanese sword in his hand, a wakizashi, teasing its sharp edge along the woman’s back as though her spine was a whetstone. She shivered in silence. Screaming for help was long past her abilities.

  Edward pulled his gun from the back of his pants and put it at the base of Piet’s neck. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “That’s my science project.”

  “She needs to be properly broken,” Piet said. “And it’s not fair you get all the fun.”

  Edward’s hand trembled. “Pull your pants up and go downstairs. She has a job to do today. Critical. You would traumatize her now?”

  “If you break her right, nothing’ll traumatize her, and that’s the point. She feels nothing then.” Then he said, looking at Edward in the mirror, “What job is she doing?”

  “A job for which she is uniquely qualified.” Edward fought down the urge to splatter Piet’s inconsequential brains across the faded paint of the bathroom wall. He wiggled fingers in Piet’s face. “Touch her again and her skin is the last thing you will feel.”

  “Why don’t you want to share Little Miss Succulent here?”

  Edward didn’t like the glint in Piet’s eyes. Piet was useful, but only to a point. However, he could make trouble and it was important there be no trouble, not now. Not when he was so close. So he said, “Because I don’t have to.”

  Piet took the small sword away from the woman’s spine and walked out of the bathroom, Edward holding the gun at his side. Piet turned and smiled back at the young woman who looked away from him, covering her nakedness. Edward closed the door behind Piet.

  The woman started to shudder, and Edward put a protective arm around her shoulders. “Did he? Did he?” He didn’t finish the question.

  She shook her head. He inspected her back; a scratch, but the wakizashi sword that was Piet’s pride had not made a serious mark.

  “It’s because you’re so important to me that he wants you,” Edward said.

  “You’re not here all the time.” She spoke very softly.

  “I’m everywhere. All the time,” he said, his voice cold. “I’m even in here.” He tapped her forehead. “Now clean yourself.”

  He went downstairs. Piet sat alone in the kitchen. People always seemed to clear a room when Piet entered. It was time to get leverage over Piet so he made no further trouble.

  “Your initiative inspires me,” Edward said. “Come along on the job. Since you’re curious.”

  “Where are you going?” Piet sounded a bit nervous; Edward smiled.

  “Centraal Station.” It was Amsterdam’s main train hub, on the north side of the city.

  “Are you letting her go?” Piet asked. Demi, a thin Dutch blonde, stepped back into the kitchen, arms crossed.

  “Don’t be silly; she doesn’t want to leave me. You will walk with us. Demi, you too. Go get the handheld camera. We have footage to shoot.”

  Piet looked uncomfortable.

  “I want you there. Because I trust you. And if you are there, I think she will do whatever I say.” Piet would be a spur to her to do what must be done. And Piet would then be in his power.

  The woman came downstairs, slowly. She glanced about, uncertain, her hands trembling. She had not been left alone outside of the closet since being brought to the house three weeks ago. But she had made no trouble now, Edward thought, and he flicked a smile at Piet. The Hearst approach worked: break, tear down, and give her the barest bit of hope to rebuild.

  She glanced once at Piet and her mouth trembled. “Are you making me leave?” she asked Edward.

  “Of course not, Yasmin. You belong to us now, and we to you.”

  “Yes,” she said, her voice small. She’d fought back hard the first two days. That memory of defiance in her face seemed distant now.

  “Today is about your father.” Edward made a click in his throat. “He is dead to you. Do you remember, Yasmin?”

  “Yes,” she said after a long silence. “He’s dead to me.”

  “He’s a bad man, Yasmin. Your old world was very bad, isn’t that right? We’ve saved you from that evil.” He lingered on the last word. Evil wasn’t a word you got to use in every conversation. “But we are the ones who do good.”

  “He’s a bad man. He needs to pay for what he’s done.” More strength in her voice. “He’s bad. Like you said. Very bad.”

  Edward shot Piet and Demi a scowl of triumph. Then he gave Yasmin a smile. “You are nothing to him, and you are everything to us. Yes? This is true. This is your home now. We are your family. Forever.”

  She didn’t speak.

  “We are going for a walk, Yasmin, outside the house. You’ll be good, won’t you, Yasmin? Or I’ll have to put you back into the closet, for a week or a month or maybe a year. I’ll have to visit you there for a long time, play with you and my little knife. Maybe Piet would visit you, too.” He ran a finger along her jawline. She stared past his shoulder at Piet.

  Then she nodded. She rubbed her arm and he could see the needle marks from the drugs he’d given her.

  “You don’t need to be afraid,” he said. “I’ll be with you every step of the way. We’re going to use your expertise. You should be proud, us taking the bad you made and using it for good.”

  She nodded again.

  “We’re going where there are a lot of people, Yasmin,” Edward said. “All very bad people.”

  “Very bad people,” she repeated.

  “We’re going to the train station,” Edward said, and he held out his hand with a smile. With Piet and Demi watching, he put her hand in his. He could feel their gaze on him, like an audience in a darkened t
heater. And then he started to crush her fingers.

  A slow moan escaped her mouth.

  “I didn’t say you could make a noise,” Edward said, squeezing harder.

  She went silent. He continued to increase the pressure. “Now you may speak.”

  “When do we leave?” Yasmin gasped. But the best part was she didn’t try and pull her fingers away. She was broken.

  Behind him, Piet laughed.

  He released the pressure and interlocked her fingers with his.

  “In a few moments. If you do as I tell you, you don’t have to go back into the closet. You can stay outside. All day. And tonight you could sleep in a bed, Yasmin. With me. Like man and wife.”

  Her mouth moved like words might spill in a flood, but she was silent.

  Edward put his lips close to her ear. “Will you do what I tell you, Yasmin?” But he already knew the answer.

  “Yes,” she said quietly. “I’ll do what you ask.” For a moment he saw the strong woman she had been, before her ordeal in the hellish closet, and then that sense of steel vanished as she glanced at Piet and Demi. Now she showed the others that she was a broken, desperate shell, trying to survive to the next hour. Just as he’d planned. Fear. He’d seen it in the faces of the men he’d killed in Hungary, in Sam Capra’s blind panic as he tried to find his wife in the smoke and noise of Holborn.

  Fear worked.

  He released her hand. “Everything changes for you today, Yasmin. Today, you’re the most important person in the house.”

  Edward smiled. This was going to be so much better than London.

  17

  ON SATURDAY I HAD a day off from Ollie’s. I had been careful to spend my days off at home, sitting quietly, watching TV or reading books that sharpened my mind. My only outings were an occasional jog or a trip to the library.

  A typical trip to the library meant browsing for an hour, killing time in the stacks, checking out books that would not raise red flags (no nonfiction, no books on the Company; I usually picked thick historical novels). I would log onto the web and do a search on Lucy’s name; I felt sure Howell monitored the library’s Internet connection, since it was my only avenue to the web. Lucy’s name never resulted in any news. I would visit her abandoned personal page on Facebook and I lingered over the few pictures of her: our first Christmas in London, her walking on a beach during a long weekend in Majorca, us having coffee in Kensington Park during a glorious summer morning. I have no photos of her; nothing left from our apartment in London. The Company had taken and kept it all, for evidence.

  In some of the pictures she smiled, in others she wore the intense competitive frown I’d seen in her. I stared at the old photos, looking for any trace, any sign, that she could turn traitor. As if it could be read in a face. She had not put up any photos since she became pregnant; most of her Facebook friends were from her college days at Arizona, and their wall postings remained unanswered.

  So, no surprise to my watchers when, on Saturday at noon, I stopped by Ollie’s for a minute and then went to the library. I dropped my checked-out, unread novels into the return chute. I smiled at the librarian behind the desk, who ignored me as she spoke into a phone. I moved along the shelves for five minutes, determining the relative positions of the staff and the visitors. I took off the cover of the alarm system sensor—it was close to the door—and with a pair of scissors I snipped the wire that connected the back exit door to the alarm. I replaced the cover. No one looked at me; story time was going on in the children’s section, a hearty reading of Where the Wild Things Are.

  Then I took the deepest breath of my life and eased open the door. The alarm didn’t blare. I walked straight out into the cool sunlight. I waited for a bullet to pound the pavement in front of me, or to cut into my kneecap. I waited to be hurt and fall and for a man to hustle me into a car at gunpoint and call on Howell to say I’d been a bad boy, asking me to explain the dead body in the neighboring apartment.

  Silence. The bars were widening, just a bit.

  I walked to a nearby car I’d noticed parked on a side street, same place every week, in front of a strip shopping center. The model was one that was easy to boost, and it had no GPS system to track it remotely. I hot-wired it and was gone in less than the proverbial sixty seconds. No sign of pursuit in the mirror; any watchers used to my routine were probably keeping their eyes on the front door or considered themselves clever by monitoring the Internet searches.

  I drove north, making a stop at a Wal-Mart for the rest of my disguise, then I drove on and found a truck stop about thirty miles south of Albany. I parked the car in the far corner, went inside for coffee. Many ate here because it was cheaper to eat a couple of hours out of New York than in the city. I drank three cups of excellent coffee in unhurried progression, watching the truckers come and go. Mostly they sat and listened to the news: a bombing at a train station in Amsterdam that had killed five, a dive in stocks yesterday, an indictment against a congressman for bribery.

  In the hush of the commercials I listened to them chat, in their varying levels of sociability; I wanted a talker. Talkers don’t ask as many questions. They like to discuss themselves, not you. You are just there to drink in the wisdom. Often they talked about their cargos, a conversational opener the same way one might ask about the weather. Forty-five minutes after I came in, a trucker, silver-haired and with a slight Southern accent, sat next to me and wolfed down a hamburger and fries, half-drowned in ketchup. When his plate was clear, he mentioned to the uninterested trucker next to him that he was hauling flannel and buttons to be shipped overseas for fashioning into shirts.

  “Why they can’t stitch together shirts here is beyond me,” the talker said. “We got sewing machines.”

  “Yeah,” the other trucker said, “Japanese sewing machines.” He shrugged at the shrinking world. He got up and left.

  The talker ordered a cup of coffee.

  After it had been poured and the first curl of steam was rising from it and he’d taken an ample sip, I asked, “Are you heading to the port, sir?”

  He gauged me with a look. “Yeah.”

  “I’m trying to get there. My car broke down here. My brother’s working on a ship sailing out of New Jersey and he got me a job.”

  “Usually it’s not American boys working those ships.”

  “I know. He’s a supervisor. He got me the job.” I tucked my teeth over my lip, all small-town sheepish. “I’m a little desperate. Ship’s coming in and leaving tomorrow and I’m stuck here, drinking coffee. I kept asking for rides earlier and I think I asked wrong. Everyone said no.” I let a shade of heartbreak show on my face.

  “That’s tough.” He looked at the empty, ketchup-smeared plate like it was a painting.

  “I know, sir. I wouldn’t ever ask but I need the job bad. If I can get to any Port terminal I can get a ride to my brother’s ship.”

  “I’m not supposed to take on riders. You understand.”

  “Sure, of course. But this wouldn’t be out of your way.” Then I went for the knife. “Like you said, wish they’d make shirts here. I’d have a job where I could stay on dry land. I got to take what I can get.” I had been careful to count out sparse change for the coffee in front of the waitress. I wanted to look like I was what I said I was the moment I walked into the truck stop. You have to play the role to the hilt. The waitress, listening since the crowd had slowed, put a bit more coffee in my cup without me asking.

  The trucker set down his coffee cup. Thinking it over. Most people are decent and are inclined to help. “Well…”

  “I could chip in some gas money.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Sam. Sam Capra.” I had no fake ID; there was no point in lying. I did have a driver’s license and he asked to see it. I showed it to him.

  “Capra like the film director?”

  I laughed like I’d never heard the question before. “Sadly no relation. How much royalties could I get off It’s a Wonderful Life?”


  “That’s a good movie,” he said, like I had confirmed a connection to the most famous Capra. “Says you live in New York: why are you up here?”

  “I was looking to get a job in Albany. Didn’t get it.” Could I be more hard luck?

  He studied the license some more, like it was a long book. He handed it back to me then downed the rest of his coffee.

  “Then it’s a wonderful life, Sam Capra, you got a ride,” the trucker said, and he laughed at his own joke. So did I.

  18

  I WAS NOW PART OF THE FLUX into the Port of New York and New Jersey, the river of goods going out into the wider world. I just wanted to be swept along by the current and hope I didn’t jam up in an eddy or a byway.

  The denim delivery truck paperworked its way into one of the port’s terminals on Newark Bay, past the checkpoints and the inspection sheds, all at a steady clip. I thanked the trucker, slipped him his bribe (which we called gas money), and stepped out of the cab.

  Ports are busy. People are intent on their work. From my Wal-Mart stop I was dressed in jeans and a denim shirt and work boots and a Yankees baseball cap. I carried not a knapsack but two duffel bags on which I’d marked FACILITIES along the side with a Sharpie pen. I could have come from a ship; I could have come from an office inside the port complex. I hoped I was invisible.

  I watched containers being hauled off the docks and craned into the bowels of the ships and, when the holds were full, stacked along the flat decks. The loadings were as graceful as a dance. The trucks inched forward, were relieved of their burdens, then turned around and joined another line to be loaded again with goods from Europe and Africa or from American ports to the south: Charleston, Miami, New Orleans, Houston.

  I walked past a line of cargo ships. There was an entry gate, with a guard. The line of fencing curved away as I walked out past a loading area and within a few hundred feet the guard shack lay out of sight.

  I climbed the fence fast, dropped over the other side. No one yelled.