“Of course you know why they are dead! DON’T YOU?” The man continued to scream at her. All she could do was shake her head and hope he would leave her alone.
“All of these men, my people, and most importantly, him!” The man pointed to a picture that was larger than all the rest on the back wall. The picture showed a man sprawled out on the sand, clearly dead, dressed in the same sort of attire that the man screaming at her was wearing. “He is dead, and I know you know why. You know!”
Once again, Natalie shook her head. Emphatically.
“You say no, but I know. The reason all of my people on these walls are dead is because of your man. Your man who took you to the races. There were pictures of the two of you in magazines, on television. And I think he would like to see what I have got here with me. Don’t you?” This time the anger was gone. His voice was cold, his eyes were black, and she imagined his heart just might be as well.
Before Natalie could answer, he had hold of her chin again. This time, instead of showing her the walls, he tilted her upward until she was looking straight into the yellow light bulb that hung from the middle of the ceiling. Her face was a mess: tears running down her bright-red cheeks, her eyes wild with fright, and her mouth gagged and covered with duct tape. It seemed this was exactly what the man wanted to see. She figured this out when he pulled out his phone, forced her to open her eyes, and then took a picture. He admired the phone’s screen for a moment, and then his goatee-covered chin helped his mouth form a crooked-toothed smile.
“Yes. I think Xander King will very much like to see what I have here.”
He dropped her chin, put away his phone, and let out a maniacal laugh.
And just like that, all four of the men were gone.
And so too was the light.
5
Shades of Grey
Xander told his faithful pilot, Bob, to settle in because it might be a while; then he said good-bye, turned on his phone, and pulled up the Uber app. Xander didn’t want record of him getting a rental car. Not that Sam wouldn’t be able to find him anyway if she really wanted to. He had disabled the tracking device on the plane, and he had shut off his phone until he landed, but that would only minimally delay Sam in finding him. She was the best, and that was the reason they were such an amazing team. Regardless, he thought it might be a safer bet. Plus, he just really didn’t feel like driving. He waited for the car to pull up before he walked out of the airport. Better to wait inside than get drenched by the driving rain. It was coming down in sheets. They say Paris is magical in the rain. They also used to say cigarettes weren’t bad for you.
It was a particularly cool summer day as well. Even for Paris. Low sixties. The rain would make it feel more like upper forties. He spotted the Uber car, opened the airport terminal door, opened his umbrella, and made his way to it. His feet sloshed through the standing water on the blacktop, and the raindrops crashed into his umbrella like kamikaze pilots into Pearl Harbor. The sky was the sort of gray that would be enough to depress a man on his happiest day. Xander thought he could remember what a happy day was. But he wasn’t sure. He thought the Kentucky Derby was a happy day––the day that King’s Ransom had taken it to those other Thoroughbreds. But he also had to kill a man that day. Then that night, nine more when they broke in and stole Natalie’s innocent view of him. He had thought he had let her go in time after that. He thought letting her go would save her from more trouble. But here he was in Paris, once again trying to save her from one of his messes.
He opened the door to the Mercedes sedan Uber car, closed his umbrella, and managed to get in with at least a couple of dry spots left on his black hoodie.
“I’m Joe. How are you today, Mr. King?” the Uber driver said with a smile. He had a French accent, but his appearance suggested his parents may have been Arab.
“Fine. The Hotel Le Bristol, please,” Xander answered bluntly. He was in no mood to chat.
“Le Bristol, huh? I’m sure you heard what happened there, no?”
This is why Xander was in no mood to talk. “No,” he lied, “but it sounds like you’re about to tell me.”
“You haven’t heard? Well, have you heard of Natalie Rockwell?” Joe pulled away from the airport and started driving toward the hotel.
“Sounds familiar.”
Hearing Natalie’s name was like a knife in the heart.
“Yeah, she’s that hot actress. Biggest star in Hollywood. Don’t you watch the movies, Mr. King?”
“Is there an end to this story, Joe?”
“Oh, yes. Sorry. Well, seems as though she was kidnapped. They took her right out of her room in the middle of the night. Can you imagine how scared she must be?”
Xander didn’t answer. All he had been imagining for the last eight hours was how scared she must be. He turned his attention outside the window. The rain danced on the roof of the car and the gray filled in all around him. Outside and in. Joe got the hint that Mr. King didn’t want to talk and went on driving. Xander checked his phone: thirty-two new messages and missed calls. He felt bad for not reaching out to Sam and Sarah, but he felt horrible for not answering Kyle. He opened the texts from him and the last one read:
Look, X, I don’t care where you are or what you’re doing, but at least let me know you’re okay.
Xander tapped on the typing slot of his phone’s keyboard:
I am fine. Tell Sam to stop looking for me. I’ll call you when it’s all over.
After pushing send, Xander powered down his phone, closed his eyes, and sank down into the gray leather backseat. He knew that Kyle would tell Sam. And he knew both of them would ignore his request. They were probably on their way to Paris at that very moment. Tracking the GPS in his phone. He could run, but there was no way he could hide from Sam. Xander tried to relax, then slowly drifted off to sleep.
* * *
“Xander just messaged me,” Kyle announced to his fellow passengers on the plane. Sam, Sarah, and Zhanna bolted upright in their seats. “Says he’s fine, Sam, stop looking for me, and he’ll call when it’s all over.”
“Well, let’s just turn this plane around then,” Sam said sarcastically.
Sarah stood from her seat.
“What? We can’t just leave him alone!”
Sarah clearly misunderstood Sam’s sarcasm.
Kyle smiled, “She’s being sarcastic, Sarah. We’re not turning around.”
“Oh.” Sarah returned to her seat.
“Sam, were you able to get ahold of Jack?” Kyle asked.
“I left a voice mail and a text message telling him what was going on, but I haven’t heard from him.”
“Damn it. I was hoping we could get someone there before we landed. Xander will just jump right in. He won’t even worry about whether or not he has the numbers to make something happen.”
Zhanna leaned back in her seat. “I thought Xander didn’t need numbers.”
Sam took a drink of her gin. “He doesn’t. But it makes us feel better if we are there.” She gave Kyle a wink.
Sarah said, “So do we know anything yet? Mary said there is absolutely nothing on the wire.”
“Marv said he wasn’t going to stop hunting the networks until he found something,” Sam answered. “But he hasn’t reached out to me yet.”
Kyle put away his phone.
“Well, we’ll be there in a couple hours. Hopefully he finds something by then.”
The three women said in unison, “Hopefully.”
Just then Sam’s phone chimed. Everyone looked to her.
“It’s Marv again. Xander just called for an Uber, in Paris. Says he’ll keep tabs.” She looked up from her phone to the rest of them. “At least we are on the right track.”
* * *
The Mercedes hit some sort of pothole, and the rattle of the car woke Xander from his sleep. He never fell asleep in a car; he knew his body must be exhausted. His stomach and leg were still sore from the mostly healed gunshot wounds he’d taken during the pas
t month. But at least his shoulder wasn’t bothering him. He sat up just as the car was coming to a stop in a parallel parking space on a side street that Xander didn’t recognize. However, he knew the area he was supposed to be in, and they were nowhere near the hotel.
“Where the hell are we, Joe?”
“End of the line.”
Joe turned to point a gun straight at Xander’s chest. However, Joe’s boss must not have fully briefed him on the man he had in his backseat. Xander had detected the motion of Joe’s shoulder suggesting he was about to bring his arm upward. Computing for Xander was the fact that Joe had driven him to a strange neighborhood, pulled the car to a stop, and hadn’t yet begun to explain why they were there. The last mistake, one that all potential killers out there should always keep in mind, is the fact that you should NEVER say something before you turn to shoot someone––especially someone like Xander.
Xander trapped Joe’s gun hand before the gun made it around to him. Then he used the side of Joe’s front seat as a lever, pulled the gun hand with frightening strength, and snapped Joe’s arm in half at the elbow. The crack from the bone breaking sounded like the snap of a hundred broken celery sticks. Speaking of unsettling sounds, Joe had a real set of pipes on him, and unfortunately, the split second before Xander snapped his neck, he managed to scream loud enough to make Xander’s ears ring. Joe’s body slumped forward so quickly after Xander twisted his neck like a bottle cap that he fell against the car horn.
The little shit had ratted Xander out, from the afterlife.
Xander yanked Joe’s body off the horn, took his cell phone from the console, and grabbed his nine-millimeter pistol from the floor where his now broken, wrong way-dogleg arm had dropped it. The obvious next move would simply be to take Joe’s car and drive to the hotel. But Xander knew that wherever they were at the moment, Joe had driven there because his pals were going to be there waiting. He looked upward at the brick building just outside the back window. On the third floor of the building, he saw the tip of a rifle aimed in the direction of his car from an open window.
Rookies.
Xander pulled his hood up over his head. Directly in front of the car was a door leading into the building where the gunman was perched. Probably locked. Could this really be the place they were holding Natalie? He didn’t think so, but maybe he could get some information from someone inside. Joe’s cell phone began to ring. Joe—The Creative One—had the number stored in his contacts simply as BOSS. Really?
Xander answered the call.
“You have five seconds to tell me you’re going to hand Natalie over to me, unharmed, or I come find you and kill you. Don’t blow it. You ready? Five . . .”
There was a pause, nothing but silence on the other end. Xander ended the count early.
“Time’s up. One of your men in this building is going to tell me where you are, and when they do, you’ll be a dead man shortly thereafter.”
Xander ended the call before the “BOSS” had a chance to respond. He knew the voice would be disguised, and offer no information. Not letting him speak was a risky play, but Xander was betting on the fact that whoever this was, they wanted to put on a show. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of killing King’s Ransom, and they wouldn’t be wasting time kidnapping Natalie. The only reason for these theatrics was to make Xander suffer. And the only way Xander would suffer further was to make him watch Natalie die. Whoever this was didn’t just want to stab Xander in the heart; they wanted to stab it, twist it, and break it, all at the same time. This had revenge written all over it. This was evident when Joe’s phone chirped, displaying that an MMS picture message was waiting from the “BOSS.”
Xander wasn’t afraid of a lot of things, but he was scared to death to open that message. He stared at the lock screen for a moment, working up the stomach to open it. When he finally did, the caption read:
You should learn to be a little nicer, Mr. King. Otherwise, maybe I won’t be so nice to her.
Then he saw the picture.
Two things happened when he saw the fear in Natalie’s tear-drenched eyes and the duct tape over her mouth: 1) His heart broke completely in two; and 2) Everything that he had ever learned as a Navy SEAL and during the years he had been hunting his parents’ killer all came together in an adrenaline-fueled focus. His tired muscles suddenly felt like a metal coating; his bones suddenly felt like steel. He typed the words See you soon into a text message and pressed send.
Xander put the phone in his pocket, made sure Joe’s pistol had a chambered round, and funneled his fury into a virtual hand grenade that was about to blow whatever was inside that brick building into a thousand bloody pieces.
6
Don’t Blink
Xander opened the door of the Mercedes. The rain continued to fall in sheets; the sound as it hit the ground reminded him of a waterfall. The door across the sidewalk was a metal double door. This must be the backdoor entrance. Xander didn’t want to imagine what might be waiting on the other side. He knew it would only throw him off. He wanted the ability to go on pure instinct. His thought was that a fast entrance would at least catch someone by surprise. That was all he would need.
At full burst Xander propelled himself out of the Mercedes, and at full speed he put a shoulder to the left side of the double door, which gave way with ease as he tumbled inside. He heard the blast of a rifle from outside. The man in the window wasn’t ready for Xander to come out at such a torrid pace. When Xander hit the door, he rolled, skidded to his knees, and came to a halt behind a computer desk inside a cubicle. The quick look at the open warehouse facility revealed row after row of the same type of cubicle. Some sort of pop-up office space. He didn’t notice anyone at the cubicles, but his millisecond view could never have scoured the entire floor. There were no sounds of typing, talking, or any other typical office activity, so Xander assumed it was empty. As he listened for any movement, he unzipped his soaking-wet hoodie and tied it around his waist. Restricted movement could get him killed. The formfitting black under-tank he was wearing might not keep off the chill, but it would allow him full range of motion. And as he heard the bing of an elevator at the other end of the hundred-yard room, he knew he was going to need every bit of that range of motion.
“Xander?” a female voice echoed through the large open room.
Was that a Russian accent?
“Xander, I know you are in here. There is nowhere for you to go.”
It was definitely Russian. Russian? Did this have something to do with him killing Vitalii Dragov? Could this be someone who worked for his father? The only Russian Xander knew was Zhanna. And she was on his side.
It was then that it hit him, like a two-by-four to the groin. The hand grenade he had thrown out the window of his G6 in Moscow as they were jetting down the runway must not have hit the Jeep as squarely as they all thought it had. Melania had survived. And now what? His assistant-turned-traitor, wanted revenge? For what? He had done nothing to her. Why did she want so much for Xander to suffer?
“Come on, Xander, there is no play here. You are trapped.”
Xander crouched behind the cubicle, his gun at the ready.
“Trapped? Come now, Melanie—or Melania—whatever the fuck your name is. I thought you knew me better than that. Frankly, I’m a little hurt.”
“I do know you, Xander. That is why I have positioned snipers in the buildings surrounding this one. There is nowhere you can go.”
“Snipers? Thanks for the heads-up, stupid.” Mister Mature.
“It is you that is stupid, Xander. You come here alone.”
“Actually, I was headed to my hotel. Guess my driver got lost. Uber isn’t perfect, you know. Don’t you worry, though, I’ll leave a bad review.”
As Xander was biding time with banter, he raised his head slightly to peer over the cubicle. At the far end of the room, he saw a few heads moving along the tops of the rows of cubicles. They were fanning out in all directions. There were n
o lights on in the room, but the rows of windows all along the walls let in plenty of gray light. Outside, the rain continued pouring.
“Cut the shit. If you want to see Natalie alive, and I know you do, you will come out now and I will take you to her.”
“Sounds intriguing, but I’m going to have to decline. Do you want to tell me where she is now, or do you want to wait until I have Joe’s gun in your mouth to give me the information? Your call.”
“Xander, Xander, Xander. You have yet to learn that you are not superhero.”
“Yeah? Give me five minutes, then I’ll let you decide what I am. Oh, and Melanie?”
“What, Xander?”
“Don’t blink.”
7
The New World Power
Construction sounds of hammers striking nails, socket wrenches cranking, and welding torches spitting fire echoed throughout the intimate ballroom-style dining room. The dining tables and chairs that normally filled the space had been removed, and now the dining area was left completely open. Windows on both sides of the room covered most of the walls, allowing the gray light of the rainy Paris day to illuminate the contraption that was currently being constructed on the far wall of the room, which covered the entire back of the room; with only one door on the left side, the rest was normally bare. However, some sort of medieval device rested in the middle of that wall. It was large, metal, full of gears and cranks, and had what looked to be two identical and extremely large pinpoint spears facing each other on the left and right sides of it. They were like gigantic needles made of steel, and they were pointed at each other. An open space in the middle of them revealed straps, more like leather restraints, attached to the wall. Men were hovered around the contraption, working diligently to ensure that everything was in place.
The door on the left side of the wall opened, and three men walked inside. The supervisor of the project immediately diverted his attention from the workers to the men who had walked through the door. Two of the men, both Caucasian were dressed in button-down shirts and dress pants and carried oversized briefcases in their hands. The man the supervisor addressed, however, was in stark contrast to them. He was Middle Eastern, dressed in what looked like a black cotton robe. He was fairly tall with a solid muscular frame, and he wore a turban on the top of his head. His caramel-colored face and dark eyes looked over the construction as he stroked his goatee, admiring their work.
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