Now wearing a badge that identified him as an agent, Dan pushed his way to the front of the stage where Lawton had ensconced himself, directing his agents and answering questions.
“Anything?” Dan asked tightly.
The Assistant Director shook his head. “Not yet. Once they got on the main road, their tire tracks vanished. And no one saw their car while they were here. At least, no one who will admit to it. Our agents on the main roads saw nothing but in-state vehicles driving by for the last hour, which suggests they rented something locally. We have all the airports in a three-state area on high alert, but if they keep a low profile and stay on back roads, we won’t be able to track her for another eleven hours.”
Dan held the urge to scream under tight control. The birth control implants in all the women’s arms held a small tracking device. In the event that she was removed from The Farm, the device would begin signaling her location twelve hours later. A signal that turned on immediately might be detected by the woman’s buyer, who would be on guard for just such an occurrence. The Agency hoped he would relax once she arrived at his house. After twelve hours, the signal was activated and they could pinpoint her location. The five women who had been sold since Dan took over had all been located, and they were being rescued right now. Dan prayed they were all right.
~ ~ ~
Once more, just like the night she’d been kidnapped, she was vaguely aware of movement, of travel, and of a splitting headache. When she finally came awake and was allowed to stay that way, she found herself in a metal cage that looked—and smelled—like one that had previously held canine occupants. The thick wires were about an inch apart on all sides. For dogs there would have been some kind of thick pad on top of the wires to prevent paws from falling through to the floor an inch below. For Laura, though, there was nothing but the harsh and open metal grate. Over the whole cage lay some kind of cover, blocking her view of anything except the floor underneath.
The loud vibrations confirmed her fear that she had been deposited in the luggage compartment of an airplane, currently in flight.
Every movement brought a wave of nausea and a pounding of her head, so she restrained her urge to scream for someone’s attention. The reflected brightness from the floor told her that the sun was shining through a window somewhere. It was warm in the cage, so she curled up on the metal grating with her head pillowed on her arm and tried to concentrate on not throwing up.
No one came to offer her a drink, or food, despite the gnawing of her stomach and her parched lips. Eventually she had to pee. Then she did try to attract attention by yelling but the noise of the plane made her efforts fruitless. No one came in to check on her. With a sob, she let go and watched as the urine fell to the floor below and ran in a stream towards the back of the plane.
The sun had disappeared and the compartment had grown dark and cold when at last she felt the plane begin its descent. She lay in the cage in a fog of misery and pain. Her butt ached under the bandage, and since she couldn’t lay on that side, she’d spent the whole flight on her other side, the arm that had been cut open pressed hard into the grating with no relief.
The plane touched down and immediately began to decelerate. The unsecured cage slid forward a few feet and slammed into the bulkhead. Her head, which had been resting against the forward bars, hit the solid surface as well, and she cried out in pain. Vaguely she wondered how many times today her head had been knocked about and how much damage had been done. She slumped in the cage, defeated, trying not to think of how far from home she must be right now. She had little hope that Dan would be able to find her.
The plane had scarcely rolled to a stop when she heard the door being flung open.
“Oh, shit, did you take a piss in here?” She recognized Ahmed’s voice. “It stinks!” She didn’t say anything, figuring there was nothing she could add to the conversation that would help her cause. The cage shuddered and began to roll. Suddenly, it tipped and she was flung to one side as it was rolled down an incline. She watched as pavement appeared under the cage bottom and the cage righted itself. Now she was rolling over the tarmac. She heard voices in another language. Though she’d known in her head she was no longer in the United States, it now sank into her just how far from home she must be. She couldn’t tell what language it was, though it sounded like Sergei’s.
The cage tipped up, and she was rolled into a vehicle. As the doors shut, she heard DeLeo’s voice outside.
“Fuck! Goddammit! I knew something was wrong! That’s why I went in early. They got every one of them?”
A voice mumbled something in reply.
“You covered our tracks the usual way, right?”
More unintelligible response and a question.
“We go home,” she heard DeLeo say. “We lay low, and in a month or so we reach out to a friend we know we can trust, to get a feel of the situation. We’re safe here—there’s no extradition treaty and all the authorities are well paid to keep their noses out of our business.”
Another question.
“Hmph. She doesn’t begin to make up for what he did to me, but she’s a start. She’ll be paying for his deception for the rest of her life.”
Laura’s blood ran cold.
~ ~ ~
The rocking of the vehicle led her to doze off, her exhausted body unable to stay awake. At some point the van stopped, the doors were thrown open, and the cage once more rolled off. This time she was prepared and braced herself. She rolled over rough dirt and then was hoisted up the stairs by three men, all muttering what had to be curses in that strange language. Then she was inside. She rolled down a hall, through several doors, and finally slammed to a stop, once more thrown against the bars.
She’d finally had enough. “Goddammit!” she yelled. “Stop throwing me around like a fucking sack of flour!”
The cover was whipped off the cage and she blinked against the sudden brightness. She stared up into the faces of three large men who glared back at her. One of them leaned over and unlocked a small door at the narrow end of the cage. He threw it open and gestured for her to crawl out. The cage was placed so that as she exited it, she’d be crawling through a doorway into a small room. Something made her afraid that if she entered that room she’d never come out of it. She shrank against the bars at the other end, refusing to move.
One of the men said something in a harsh tone then grabbed the bars of the small cage, lifting the back end up and spilling her towards the open end. She tried to hold on but the other men pried her fingers loose from the bars and she found herself dumped out onto the floor just inside the door of the small cell. The cage was pulled away and before she could uncurl herself and move, she was shoved further into the room, and the door was slammed. She was alone.
She looked around her accommodations. The cell was concrete, about eight feet long and six feet wide. It held a platform with some kind of pallet on it. There was a corner that dipped down with a drain in the floor, and a faucet that stuck out over it. A tiny barred window, well above her reach, gave her nothing more than a glimpse of blue sky. The door was heavy and metal with a small peephole. And that was it.
She forced herself to stand up, to get the blood moving in her cramped limbs. She tried to see out of the peephole but it was one way only. She turned on the faucet and to her relief cool clear water gushed out. She scooped up handfuls and drank greedily, then used more to scrub her hands and face of the stickiness she didn’t really want to think about too much. She’d been very close to Marco when his brains were blown out.
She sat down on the pallet and cried out with pain, falling to her side. Despair rolled over her again. She tried to keep it at bay, to start thinking of a plan, but finally she let it in, and let herself cry.
~ ~ ~
Dan rubbed his hands over his scruffy face. It had been years since he’d let himself go unshaven for even a day. He hadn’t slept in way too many hours, his eyes were bloodshot, and his hands shook from the nonstop coffee he
’d been consuming.
All five women he’d had to sell over the last few months had been rescued, thank God. They were all in decent health. Dan could scarcely believe it, and he hoped that eventually his conscience would let him off the hook about his actions.
Claire would be fine, though Josh was still touch-and-go. The bullet had ricocheted around his abdomen, doing horrible damage to his liver and spleen. Dan had kept in touch with his condition but hadn’t been to see him yet. He’d been up all night with the task force, debriefing, following the rescue of the other women, and following any thin lead they could come up with on the location of DeLeo. A large part of him was biding time until the locator was activated, sometime about 4am if their estimate was right.
As the clock swept past 4:10, the base unit sprang to life. Dan leaped upon it, then frowned in confusion. It couldn’t be right. It said she was only fifteen miles away. With a nod to the men who had declared themselves his team, he leaped into a car and three vehicles drove out of the almost-empty compound.
The tree-shrouded roads wound around and doubled back on each other as they descended the mountain. The darkness was beginning to give way to the dawn but in the close woods there was still little light, and this was the time of morning that deer ambled across the road. As desperate as Dan was to race down the dark roads, he knew it was foolishness and even death to do so without care.
As the signal got closer and closer, Dan felt his heart sink. He knew where they were headed. The sparkling river that ran placid and wide through town became deep and wild a mile downstream, right where they were headed. As the blinking signal showed the locater off the road, the cars skidded to a stop on the bridge. Dan could hear the angry hiss and swoosh of the swirling waters below. He threw the car door open before it had come to a complete stop. Though he knew in his rational mind he wouldn’t see anything, he nevertheless ran to the railing and looked down. The barely brightening sky hadn’t lit the waters enough to force it to give up any secrets, and Dan slapped his hand on the rail in frustration. The damp railing gave off a funny smell, and as if in a dream Dan looked down and saw a reddish-brown smear on his hands that smelled like copper pennies.
“Laura,” he whispered in agony. His men were beside him instantly, shining huge spotlights down to the dark waters. There was nothing. Dan knew from his kayaking days that there was a ‘keeper’ in the water just around the bend that caught anything that drifted into it. He motioned to his men and they scrambled down the muddy embankment, making their cautious way along the side of the river through the underbrush. Dan could hear the keeper before he saw it—a roar that was louder than the roar of the river behind him. As he came around the bend, the keeper came into view in the growing light. The roiling circle of water, trapped by the rocks on either side, was full of debris that had drifted down the river—branches, occasional larger logs—and today, something else. Something that protruded straight up and looked exactly like a foot.
Dan knew he was making a stupid move, but he climbed out onto a rock then jumped to another, until he was a few feet from the rushing circle of water. He waited until the mass of timber floated nearer again then reached out to grab what he’d seen. It was a foot. A bare foot. The current ripped it away from him, but he’d seen enough. It was broad, and the glimpse of trousers on the leg above it were the same muddy yellow that Marco had always worn.
“What did you finally do, you fuck?” Dan’s whisper was lost to the wind. There was some relief that the blood on the railing could have been Marco’s. It wasn’t necessarily Laura’s. But he couldn’t escape the fact that the locator signal was telling him she was right here.
He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned. Murphy, the techie of the team who had all the gear, thrust the receiver in front of him and shined the flashlight down on it.
“Signal’s actually ten feet over there,” he said, pointing down the riverbank. Dan grabbed the flashlight and the gadget from his hand and leaped back to the shoreline. He fixed his eyes on the small white dot on the screen as he pushed his way through the tangled growth.
The receiver told him she was right under his feet. Frantically he looked around. He dropped into the ankle-deep water and shined his flashlight into the depths just beyond where he stood. But there was no Laura here. He looked up in confusion. Suddenly, his eye was caught by something in a shallow pool that reflected against the black rocks. He waded over to it and when he picked it up, his whole world came crashing down.
It was Laura’s locator. DeLeo had cut it out of her arm.
Chapter 29
Laura had expected the worst to happen, whatever that was, and braced herself mentally. What she didn’t expect to happen was…nothing. Since she’d been dumped out of the cage, she’d seen no one; she hadn’t even heard a whisper of noise from the hall. She’d gotten no food, either, since the bits of breakfast the day before.
She slept a lot, she paced the small cell, and she sang to herself. She even resorted to banging on the cell door and yelling, just to see a human face. Nothing.
She was dozing when the rattle of the door unlocking jerked her awake. Instead of the large guards, however, a small, pretty, Asian woman came through the door, her arms loaded down. The door slammed behind her.
Laura stared at her. “Who are you?” she asked softly. The young woman answered in a language Laura didn’t recognize. She had glossy black hair that fell like a waterfall down her back, almost to her waist, and she wore a short white dress that hid little of her figure.
“Do you speak English?” Laura tried again. The woman ignored her and came over to dump her bundle on the pallet. She picked up a small bottle and a square of cloth and handed them to Laura. Laura opened the bottle and sniffed—it was some kind of soap. The woman pantomimed washing her body and hair.
“Food.” Laura shook her head. “I need food.”
The woman looked confused. Laura pretended to put something into her mouth and chew. The woman shrugged and shook her head.
“I’m not going to wash until I have something to eat.”
The woman said something that sounded pleading and held the soap and rag out again. Laura shook her head once more. The woman looked up to the ceiling and said something. Immediately the door opened again and this time two large men came through. Laura shrank back. One of them towered over her.
“You refused a polite request to wash yourself?”
“I’m hungry! I want food first!”
He nodded to the other guy, and they grabbed her. She kicked and screamed as they dragged her over to the faucet and pinned her down on her back with her head hanging over the dip in the floor. The little woman clicked her tongue and spoke to her quietly as she began to run the water over Laura’s hair. Laura stopped struggling when she realized that the woman just intended to wash her hair. She took her time, humming softly, scrubbing Laura’s scalp in a way that in another time and place might have the effect of relaxing Laura. Once her hair was rinsed, the woman produced a towel and the men let her sit up while she got most of the water out. This time when the woman handed her the cloth, Laura took it. It was clear that the men were not going anywhere, so she turned her back and washed and rinsed. The woman pulled out a comb and gently untangled the mess of knots it had become. Finally, there was a toothbrush and toothpaste. Laura accepted them eagerly.
The woman came up behind her and touched the dressing on her butt. Laura craned her neck. She could tell that it had become dislodged during her struggle and it was hurting a lot right now. The woman gently pushed her over to the pallet once more and had her lay down. The old dressing came off easily. Laura glanced up at the woman to see a confused look on her face, but she shook her head and reapplied a clean piece of gauze, taping it down with surprising thoroughness. Then to Laura’s great surprise, she produced a replica of the same short white dress she was wearing. Laura donned the garment, which barely covered her bottom, and once done, the men spun her around and fastened her hands behind her
back. With one of them holding her elbow and the other marching behind, she was steered out of the cell and down the hall.
She tried to memorize where she was going, but there were several sets of stairs and many halls. The surroundings made clear this was the home of an obscenely wealthy person. At last, they paused before an ornate wooden door, and one of the men knocked. A voice called out something in that other language. They entered a large office with expansive windows that overlooked a manicured lawn. A large mahogany desk was the focal point, and behind it sat DeLeo.
“Welcome, my dear! It is delightful to see you again as my guest. I am looking forward to continuing your training and getting to know you in a much more intimate way. I know that you will understand that since your lover–” he spat out the word “–betrayed me and brought down my entire organization I must repay him by making sure he never sees you again.”
She didn’t reply, knowing he was goading her. He waited for a moment before continuing.
“I hope your accommodations have been comfortable. Is there anything you require?” He stood and walked over to a small table near his desk that she hadn’t noticed. He lifted a lid from a tray and the smell of roasted chicken drifted over to her. She was so hungry she was nauseous.
“I would like something to eat.” She had no illusions that this meal was for her, but she would have accepted a slice of bread right then.
“Of course! Where are my manners? You must be starving.” He stabbed a piece of chicken with a fork and lifted it to his mouth. “Mmm.” He nodded to one of the guards. “Tell the cook that she has outdone herself today.”
He turned back to Laura. “You are welcome to share my meal with me. There’s just one small thing you must do first.”
Here it comes, she thought. She wondered if he would rape her in her cunt or her ass. Or perhaps the guards were going to force her to her knees, fisting her hair to keep her still as DeLeo thrust his cock down her well-trained throat. She steeled herself, remembering how much she had already been through, and survived.
A Captive of Fear and Desire Page 19
