I pay the cabdriver with a decent tip as I slide Chrissy out. I make more woozy noises as the cabdriver gratefully flees.
I carry her less than half a block to my SUV and then I manage to get her into the back without attracting attention.
Chapter 3
Her
I COME TO, ACHING, cranky. Groggy. And something else. I’m sitting upright, bolt upright. And I can’t move. I’m in a stiff, hard, straight-backed chair with a high back and very flat arms. My arms are bound to the chair with plastic cable ties. Cold metal balls are on the ends of the wooden arms, under my hands. My legs and feet are free, but my arms are bound so securely that I can hardly move at all.
There’s rust and sawdust in the musty air.
My head is still fuzzy. I have a dull, throbbing ache behind my eyes. My mouth is dry, my throat is sore and my chest aches.
What happened?
I’m trying to remember… The man… I remember the man.
I’m under a powerful spotlight, surrounded by complete darkness. I’m so dazzled that I can’t tell the size of the room. I can’t see anything. Nothing outside the light.
“Hello?” I speak mainly to hear the echo. To get a sense of the space.
I try to rock the chair. No good. It’s fastened securely to the floor.
“Hey!” I shout, “Get me out of here!” My voice is scratchy and weak.
“And I need some water!” My dry throat makes me cough.
The first thing I think of is my phone. Even before my bag. I’m annoyed with myself. Typical of my generation, I guess. I’m really wishing I’d read the PM that I got in the morning.
I hammer my heels on the floor. My shoes have gone, the floor feels like wood. Smooth and polished. Not cold enough for stone or tile. Not cement. No floor covering here.
I’m hungry. I didn’t eat in my shift at the restaurant. It was a tough one, too. Non-stop. Then… What? Drinking, in Bar-Dash-Bar. Down near the DJ. Sienna and Jolie were there. What happened to them?
We were leaving, going to… no, wait. I left and…
A sound behind me. Someone is in the room. Quiet movements. I try to look, but I can’t turn. I can’t see beyond the spotlight anyway.
I call out, “Who’s there?” No answer. I try shaking the chair, backward and forward.
No good.
“I need some water,” I state, firmly. “Please.” Try to establish some control, Chrissy. Authority. If you can. Is that what they say in the movies? It makes sense, surely.
The movements behind me have stopped. I feel the heat of a body. And weight, pressing on the back of the chair. I try to turn to look round. No good. The struggle makes me feel panicky.
I catch a dark, musky scent from the body behind me. With a smoky tang of testosterone. The chair moves as two hands hold the top of the back, about level with the top of my head. I have the sense that there must be a big and very tall man behind me.
Taking a breath to calm my thoughts, I say, ”So,” as breezily and lightly as I possibly can, “Are we having fun yet?”
No response.
“Please, I really would like some water. I’m quite dehydrated.”
The man scent is powerful. Almost overwhelming. In an instant, I know who it is. I remember him. Of course. He was in Sidewalk Jam in Henrietta’s section. An older guy, but obscenely hot. Eyes that said he’d take whatever he wanted. Kill you as soon as look at you, and he didn’t care about a thing. A voice than made my pants gooey. It fits. He saved me from that car.
Then he drugged me and kidnapped me. What the fuck?
Now I’m thinking about the PM that I got this morning. I probably should have opened it and read it on the bus after all.
Chapter 4
him
DAZZLED IN THE CENTER of the white cone of light, she can’t see outside it. She can’t see, for instance, the mirror a couple of feet in front of her. From behind her chair, I see her face, washed almost flat in the glare of the lamp, but still innocent, fresh with her peach plump skin. Lovely in a way that startles me. My life depends on extracting information from this young woman, but all of my instincts are only to protect her. To care for her. To enfold her.
Okay, most of my instincts. My other instincts are to fuck her senseless, to drive my seed deep into the core of the. To make her mine completely and to carry her away. I need her. But I’m not going to act on that. I’m not even going to let myself think about it. Otherwise this could get even more complicated.
That scent of straw and summer fruit from her hair mingles with a distinct perfume of her own. It fills my head and intoxicates me.
Just being in the room with her as a subject is challenging my professionalism in a way that I’m completely unprepared for. In the mirror I see her luscious pair of full, red lips, her two fabulous breasts, two thighs that I want to pull apart and dive in between immediately. In her beautiful eyes, her innocent openness makes my body sing and buzz with the need to protect her.
Dragging myself back to the manual, the routine, I lean down so my voice is close to her ear. As I speak, soft and low, I run the back of my middle finger, trickling down the back of her neck.
Quietly, I say, “So,” she jolts and shudders. “Why you, Chrissy?”
Through the metal balls under her hands, I could give her a couple of sharp jabs. Jolts of crackling electricity.
I could wheel in the gently clattering trolley of tools and leave them just on the edge of her sight. The shiny clamps, spring clips, drills, scalpels, hammers. Staplers.
I don’t have time for any subtlety to work on her. The fact that somebody else tried to eliminate her before I even got to her raises the stakes and makes everything a lot more urgent.
“Why you?” I ask her again.
Still staring forward, shaking now, she says, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” She struggles. Uselessly. “What the fuck? Who are you?” There’s a catch in her voice in the last part.
I moved to other ear “Why, Chrissy? Why you?”
Shouts now. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about. I don’t know who you are, where I am, or what the fuck is going on.” Her voice raises, “What the fuck is going on?”
The scent of her hair is heightened by her rising temperature. A delicious whiff of cream and strawberries in hay
This one time, I don’t enjoy making the subject feel fear. I have a strong urge to protect her, as strong as the urge is to extract what I need from her.
I’m struck by a powerful sense that everything is turning out of control. I don’t like that.
I don’t have much time and I need to make the most use of what I have got.
“You are going to tell me.”
“Tell me what?” Her voice is tense, shaking.
“You might not even know what it is yet. It could take you some time to realize. But you will tell me.”
“I don’t know what you want!”
“Always remember, Chrissy, it doesn’t have to be like this. You can stop it. Whenever you want. Just tell me; Why you?”
This kind of interview, you never give the subject a straightforward question. They have to work out what you want. It’s part of the breakdown protocol. The subject comes up with the questions as well as the answers. She would be a perfect subject, I know she would.
I don’t have time to wait, though.
As I step out to the office, to leave the girl to worry, she calls after me, “Tell me what you want to know.”
This basement storage unit, divided up as an interrogation room with the big lamp, walled off from a small office, it’s been convenient for me in DC. I may have had this place too long, though. It could be getting near time to vacate.
Now I’ll work the computers. See if I can pick up some threads or clues to where the real target has taken himself off to. How he managed to get this beautiful piece of disinformation slung into my communication lines. I would love a sense of what the fuck has gone on back in St. Peter
sburg with the mission controllers.
I feel as though the ground is moving. None of this makes any sense. And I hate the feeling of not being in control.
She’s shouting for water as I quietly move back to the other room. The sedative will have left her dehydrated. Not harmful, but quite uncomfortable. I pour cold water into a plastic cup to take out when I return. Letting her feel discomfort is helpful in the beginning of the interrogation process, and she should feel gratitude when I take the water to her. Angry and grudging, but grateful.
Still, I notice, I want to take it out to her now. Make her feel better. How odd. My reactions are distinctly unusual. I need to be very careful with this one.
In DC, we’re well resourced. We have a division called ‘Hospitality,’ for accommodation and transport. We have a ‘Library Services’ section for intelligence and communications. ‘The Pipeline’ is what we call the finance department, and that is where my target should be.
What we call the ‘Kitchen and Cookware’ arm provides weapons and equipment. I have my own tools. I shouldn’t need to trouble them.
The other department we call ‘Sport.’ That’s people like me.
I send a private message to whoever is on duty at Library Services. Two direct questions, and three requests.
As I wait for a response, I call the number for Hospitality. I know that I’ll need accommodation. A Russian girl with perfect American diction picks up the phone. “All-Star Guest Services, good evening. How may I help you?”
“I need a location for conference, tonight and probably the rest of the week.” She will know that means I need a safe house with facilities for interrogation and detention.
“How many delegates?”
“One. And one guest.”
“Very good. Text me an order reference, I’ll get details back to you in 10 minutes.”
“Thank you.”
A coding app on my phone generates the order reference and I send it to her.
An automated response comes back immediately and tells me that my reservation will be confirmed shortly.
Still nothing back from Library Services. I had a couple of leads to follow from Pipeline. What’s going on with Library Services, I wonder?
The text message comes into my phone telling me that my reservation is complete. I look at my email for the details. The message arrives as I’m searching. A nice-looking townhouse in Georgetown. Convenient, well located, and near a perfectly good restaurant. Couldn’t be better.
I don’t think I’m going to get anything out of Chrissy by twisting her ears, spearing soft and tender parts of her flesh, or by drilling through her fingernails. I don’t have time for any of the psych games so I think I may have to rely on a straightforward interrogation. I’ll take her to the safe house, work it out from there.
As quietly as I can, I open the door and step back in. Her sensitive musician’s ear picks it up immediately.
“There was a car,” she twists in the chair, trying to see me behind her. As soon as I come back into the room, the chair begins to shake. “A car came at me on the sidewalk. I remember. What was that about?”
“What indeed, Chrissy. Why you?”
“I know your voice.”
That gives me a small shock. But of course, she has a highly tuned ear. Chrissy plays the cello. Brilliantly well, in fact. She has a beautiful, poetic tone and a heartbreakingly lyrical technique. I enjoyed listening to recordings of her playing as a soloist in concert.
Her eyes narrow as she says, “You were the last customer in Henrietta’s section tonight. You had a black coffee and you left me a very small tip. Which was really Henrietta’s, by the way. I think she gave you better service than you paid for. So that makes you a skinflint, as well as a fucking kidnapper. And,” she shakes the chair again, “I have a horrible suspicion that you’re a torturer, too.”
I have to say, she’s handling it surprisingly well.
“Why you, Chrissy?”
“There’s a movie where somebody does that. Keeps on asking the same question. The same question and the person they’re asking doesn’t understand. Is that what you torturers do? Is that the torture gag this year?”
I move close beside her chair.
“I’m an interrogator, Chrissy. The choice of methods is up to you, more than to me. I have to get the information.” I look in her lovely eyes. My heart hammers and my breath catches. But I leave a beat and go on, “It’s up to you what I have to do to get it. Do you see?”
“Why not tell just me what you want?”
A tiny ‘PING’ from the office is an alert. I want to ignore it. Let it wait. But now is not the time to be lax with procedure.
I know from the sound, it’s an intruder alert. Distant. I return to the office, and I see it on the laptop screen. ‘ALERT: STORAGE RENTAL’ and some codes. Someone accessed the file. Looking for the location, maybe? Could be something innocent. The storage company making an audit.
It could be a coincidence that it happens at this moment. It’s never wise to discount coincidence. It’s never wise to count on it, either. Time to go.
I’m glad I made arrangements with Hospitality Services.
Chapter 5
Her
THIS TIME, HE MAKES more noise coming back. Either he put his shoes back on, or he was walking really quietly before. I don’t know, though. I was pretty confused. My eyes are still adjusting to the light, but only a bit. This bright spot lamp is giving me a headache. I can make out the size of the room, or at least vaguely. What I can see in front of me. Right in front of me, is a mirror. What’s that about?
He comes near. Snips the cable ties holding my right arm and hands me a plastic cup with water in it.
I drink, taking it in short, regular sips. I think that’s what you’re supposed to do. He stands by the chair. He’s huge. And hot. In all senses. An exotic male scent mingles with the raw, dark tang of testosterone.
“Don’t you say thank you?”
His baritone voice is smooth. It drips with seductive power.
“Thank you for what, the water, or the quality of the overall kidnap hostage experience?”
“We have to leave. Go somewhere else.”
“’We’? What, are we a team, now? Torture and torturee—”
“So.” He cuts me off. “Will you come quietly?”
Inside I’m seething. I refuse to give him the advantage of letting him know my feelings. I try to keep them from showing on my face.
“Or what,” I ask him, raising my chin. “Or you’ll knock me out again, big Russian?”
I don’t know that I am keeping my feelings hidden very successfully.
He looks down at me with a trace of amusement. “Would it surprise you to know that I’m also armed?”
“Would it surprise you to know that I’m not easily impressed, big Russian?”
“For a girl so many people are trying to kill, you’re pretty—what is it you Americans say? Sassy, is that right? You’re pretty sassy, yes?”
Dimitri Driven Page 2
