He circled her, admiring her. She stood before him now in only her underwear, felt a sudden hot flush of shame as his eyes tracked across her body. She could feel his gaze like it was his hands on her, though she knew she would feel his actual hands soon enough, and that they would be worse.
She tried to think about her family. Her sister. Her dog. Instead, she thought only about Dorina and the others, sold to similar psychopaths, to suffer and die the way she would. She felt suddenly responsible, suddenly helpless, and she wanted to cry. She would never leave this room, she realized, not alive.
The Dragon rubbed the front of his slacks lewdly as he pulled her to the bed, to the nightstand and the pile of cocaine. “Go ahead,” he told her. “You’ll love it. I promise.”
She looked at him, then the pile of white powder. Wondered what she was supposed to do with it. The Dragon gestured to the pile, waiting, his hand insinuating circles at the small of her back.
She approached the cocaine cautiously. A few lines had been drawn, and a straw lay beside them. She gathered she was supposed to ingest them through her nose.
She didn’t get the chance, though. The man stiffened beside her. Searched his pockets and came out with a vibrating phone. He looked at the number. “Shit,” he said. “My apologies, little one.” He smiled again. “We’ll continue our fun in a minute.”
126
LLOYD’S PHONE BEGAN TO RING. Volovoi stared at it. The number was blocked, but he knew who was calling. Knew it was the Dragon.
He turned to the thug who stood guarding the girls. “Get them back downstairs,” he said. “Hide them.”
The thug obeyed. Corralled the girls and marched them out of sight, downstairs to a storage area where they’d be secure. Meanwhile, the phone was still ringing. Volovoi dropped it to the floor and stepped on it, ground it beneath his feet until the ringing stopped and the phone was nothing but shards of plastic and glass.
It wouldn’t matter, he knew. It was a temporary fix. The Dragon would figure out what had happened soon enough.
Volovoi glanced down at Lloyd’s body. The client was still dead. He put his pistol away and pulled out his own cell phone, dialed a number as he walked to the front of the warehouse.
“It’s Andrei,” he said when his sister picked up. “Take the girls and get out of the city. Leave now, and tell no one that you’re going. I’ll contact you when it’s safe to return.”
His sister made to argue. Volovoi cut her off. “Leave, Ileana, for the sake of the children. Leave tonight.”
Ileana didn’t answer for a beat. Volovoi opened his mouth again, ready to plead with her. His sister cut him off. “We’ll go,” she said, her voice flat. “Whatever problems you have caused for yourself, Andrei, solve them.”
“I am solving them,” he told her, and ended the call. Looked around the empty warehouse, the buyer’s body by the door. Before he could do anything else, his phone began to buzz again. It was not Ileana. It was the Dragon.
Volovoi answered the call as calmly as he could. “This is Andrei.”
“What are you doing?” The Dragon’s voice was slurred, like his thoughts were too fast for his tongue. “Is everything okay?”
“Everything is okay,” Volovoi told him. “Everything is fine.”
“I just had a phone call from Lloyd,” the Dragon said. “He hung up before I could answer. And he’s not answering his phone anymore. What is happening over there, Andrei? Is everything okay? What are you doing?”
He’s high, Volovoi realized. He’s drunk or he’s high and he’s playing with that little girl of his.
“Everything is fine,” Volovoi said again. “Mr. Lloyd is just testing out a couple of our products. No doubt he simply called you by mistake.”
The Dragon said nothing. Volovoi could hear him breathing.
“The sale is proceeding smoothly,” Volovoi continued, after a beat. “I am quite sure Mr. Lloyd appreciates the quality of our product. He is ready and willing to buy.”
Another long silence. “Good,” the Dragon said finally. “Very good, Andrei. I told you, these men will make us rich.”
Volovoi looked again at Lloyd’s body. “You told me,” he said. “You did.”
“Call me when you are finished,” the Dragon said. “We’ll celebrate together, Andrei. Maybe I’ll save you a piece of my little toy.”
Volovoi felt his stomach turn. “I will call you as soon as I’m finished,” he said.
He killed the connection. Looked around the empty warehouse again, at Lloyd’s body in a pool of blood by the door. He thought about his sister and his nieces. About how angry the Dragon would be when he found out the buyer was dead.
You must act quickly, Volovoi told himself. For your nieces’ safety, you must strike first, before the Dragon realizes what has happened.
Volovoi pocketed his cell phone. Pulled out his pistol and loaded a fresh magazine. Then he walked to the door, stepped over Lloyd’s body, and hurried out into the driving rain and the darkness.
127
NOBODY AT T-MOBILE was willing to play ball at first. But they hadn’t met Carla Windermere.
“Takes a couple of days, usually,” the guy told Windermere. She’d mowed through a succession of customer service reps to get to him, and she was about ready to call up the company president himself. “Best we could do is, I dunno, say tomorrow by noonish?”
“You have an hour,” she told him. “Then I call my friends at Homeland Security and put your name on a no-fly list, understand? Get to work.”
“Jesus,” the guy said. “I think I’m supposed to ask for a warrant for this.”
“Go ahead,” she told him. “You want to ride Amtrak for the rest of your days? Get it done.”
She ended the call. Met Stevens’s eyes, gave him the hint of a smile. “Let’s see if that works.”
128
PAVEL DEMETRIOU put down his cell phone. Stared across the bedroom at the little girl who stood, hugging herself and shivering, by the bed. She was a delectable specimen, a perfect little plaything, but right now, the Dragon hardly noticed her. He was thinking about Andrei Volovoi. About Lloyd.
Volovoi had sounded different on the phone. He had not sounded confident, or composed. He sounded stressed, worried, urgent. He’d sounded like he was lying.
Lloyd had called. Lloyd had hung up the phone before Demetriou could answer. Demetriou had tried to call back. The phone had rung at first. Nobody had answered. Demetriou had tried again. This time, the line went straight to voicemail.
And Volovoi had sounded shaken. Maybe it was paranoia, the Dragon thought. Maybe it was the cocaine and the girl, making him crazy. Or maybe his instincts were right, and Volovoi was hiding something. Maybe the sale wasn’t going as smooth as Volovoi had claimed.
The girl was watching him. The Dragon smiled at her. Gestured to the cocaine. “Help yourself, little one,” he told her. “I’ll be with you shortly.”
Then he made another phone call. Tomas, this time, Volovoi’s thug. He’d driven the girls to Manhattan. He was in the warehouse with Volovoi. He wouldn’t dare lie to the Dragon.
Tomas answered on the second ring. “Hello?” he said. He sounded wary.
“What is going on?” the Dragon asked him. “Are you at the warehouse with Andrei Volovoi?”
“I am at the warehouse,” he said. “Volovoi just left. Did you try his cell phone?”
“Never mind,” the Dragon said. “Where did he go? Is the buyer with him?”
“He didn’t say where he was going,” Tomas said. “And the buyer . . .” He cleared his throat. “The buyer is, uh, dead. Volovoi shot him.”
The Dragon exhaled, long and slow. “Why did Volovoi shoot the buyer, Tomas?”
“There was an argument,” Tomas said. “I believe the sale fell apart. The buyer started to leave, and Volovoi shot him.”
The Dragon put down the phone and crossed the bedroom to his closet, dragged out a duffel bag and unzipped it. Inside was a pile of guns. He pulled out a machine pistol, a semiautomatic TEC-9.
“Nothing to worry about, little one,” he told the girl, relishing the way her eyes widened. “I won’t let a minor inconvenience get in the way of our fun.”
129
STEVENS CALLED NANCY while he and Windermere waited to hear back from T-Mobile. He’d talked to his wife earlier, asked her to take the kids to the FBI building in Brooklyn Center, and now he wanted to check in again, make sure they’d made it to safety. Couldn’t explain why, really; maybe it was that he’d already been shot once on this case, or maybe he just wanted to make sure his own family was all right, one more time. This case had been a dangerous game. High stress. And Stevens was pretty sure the toughest part was yet to come.
“It’s me,” he said when Nancy picked up her phone.
“It’s you,” she said. “Where are you?”
“New Jersey. FBI office in Newark.” He stared out the window at the night beyond. “Just had a big storm here.”
“Oh yeah?” Nancy paused. “It’s been sunny here. Hot. You know.”
“Yeah,” Stevens said.
Another pause. “What’s up, Kirk? You calling to chat about the weather, or what?”
“Just wanted to say hi,” he said. “See how you guys are doing. Check in, that kind of thing.”
“Bull,” Nancy said. “Why are you really calling?”
Stevens caught his reflection in the glass, had to smile. It was a foolish man who tried to put one over on his wife. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay, you got me. This case is coming down to the wire, Nancy.”
“You’re getting close?”
“I think tonight’s the night,” he said. “I just wanted to hear your voice before it all goes down, in case—”
“Shut up,” she said. “Don’t even, Kirk. Go take these guys down and come home tomorrow. This FBI imprisonment thing is getting old.”
“It’s for your own good, though,” he said.
“Yeah, well, it sucks,” Nancy said. “You want to say hi to the kids?”
He talked to his son, asked about baseball, asked about Triceratops (“He ate nine and a half muffins from the FBI kitchen, Dad”), and then JJ put Andrea on the phone.
“Hey, Dad.”
“Hey, kiddo,” he said. “How’re you doing?”
A beat. A sigh. “I’m good.”
“How’s your day?”
“It’s okay,” she said. “Boring. How long do we have to stay here?”
“Just until I finish this case,” he said. “Another day or two, maybe. I just want to make sure the guys we’re chasing don’t try anything crazy, you know?”
She sighed again. “I guess.”
He stared out the window and felt like he was trying to hog-tie an eel, the way the conversation was going. “How’s your day?”
“I said already. Boring. Mom won’t even let me—” She stopped herself. “Not like it’s much different from real life, anyway. Now that you guys chased Calvin away.”
Stevens let his breath out. “We’ll talk about Calvin when I get home, Andrea.”
“Whatever,” she said. “Here’s Mom.”
“Wait,” he said. “Andrea—”
But she was already gone. A beat of silence, muffled voices, and then Nancy came back. “Sorry about that,” she said. “She’s been a terror lately.”
“I’ll be home soon,” he told her. “I’ll set her straight.”
“You’d better,” Nancy said. “I’m about out of ideas. Solve this thing and get your ass back here, mister. I’m lonely.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Stevens laughed. “I’ll talk to you later.”
He ended the call. Saw Windermere pacing the hallway. She stopped when she noticed him. “Everything cool?”
“Mostly,” he said. “They’re safe, anyway. Andrea’s still mad about the whole boyfriend thing. I think she hates me.”
Windermere cast a wry smile at him. “Maybe,” she said. “Probably she has a beef with a life sentence of parental-enforced celibacy.”
“Don’t you start,” he said. “She’s too young to date. She’s sure as hell too young to be fooling around in the living room.”
“Better than the backseat.”
“Carla.” He looked at her. She nodded an apology, and he sank back in his seat. “Anyway. Sorry. You talk to Mathers lately?”
Windermere’s eyes were impassive. “Nah,” she said, and started pacing again. “It’s not like I need to screw that situation up any more than it already is.”
130
THE T-MOBILE GUY called back exactly one hour later. “Manhattan,” he told Windermere. “Upper East Side. I can narrow it to an eight-block radius, but that’s the best I can do.”
“Do better,” Windermere told the guy. Then she turned to Stevens. “The Big Apple, partner. We have an eight-block radius to work with.”
LePlavy looked up from his computer. “You guys go,” he said. “I’ll call the Manhattan field office, get some feet on the ground over there.”
Windermere held up the phone. “Keep bugging T-Mobile while you’re at it,” she told LePlavy. “See if they can’t narrow down the phone’s location any better.”
“And make sure the NYPD has a picture of Catalina,” Stevens said. “Every cop in Manhattan, get them looking for her.”
LePlavy straightened. “On it.”
Windermere was already at the door. “Find the car, partner. We’re moving.”
131
IT WASN’T WORKING. Whatever the Dragon was trying to do, it wasn’t working.
He’d stopped trying to force the cocaine on her after the phone calls. For a moment, Catalina dared to believe he’d forgotten about her. He’d stared at her with vacant eyes, barely saw her, put down his phone and dug out a bag from his closet. Inside the bag were guns, lots of them. He pulled out a mean-looking machine pistol and showed it to her.
“I hope you’re ready for a party,” he said. “I suspect we might have an uninvited guest tonight.”
Who? Catalina thought. The Dragon’s phone calls had been in English. She hadn’t understood them. Staring at the machine pistol, though, she felt a little stirring of hope. Whoever was coming was an enemy of the Dragon. And that made him a friend of hers.
She’d hoped that this new development would make the Dragon forget about her, about the awful things he was planning to do to her. How could he want to hurt her when someone was coming for him?
But apparently the maniac was unconcerned. He put the machine pistol on a dresser, far away from the bed, a million miles from her reach. Then he crossed the room to her. He moved fast, his jaw set. He wasn’t smiling anymore. Whatever he wanted to do now, he wasn’t happy about it.
She watched as he dove into the cocaine on the nightstand. Watched him come up again, swearing, blinking, his wiry beard coated in the white powder. He looked around the room, licked his lips. Shoved her down onto the bed and was on top of her before she knew what he was doing.
He was heavy above her. He crushed her into the bedsheets, pawed at her body. She could feel the handle of the knife digging into her hip and she squirmed beneath him, wriggled away from his hot breath, his tongue.
“Come on, little one,” he told her, raspy. “We might as well play together while we still have time.”
She reached for the knife as he began to kiss her neck. Closed her fingers over the handle and tugged. The knife didn’t move. It was stuck in its scabbard. The Dragon sat
up and slapped her.
“Hands off,” he said. “Don’t get frisky, do you hear me? This is my show.”
The slap hurt. Her face stung. Her ears rang and her thoughts swam. Catalina watched the Dragon remove the knife. He held it up so she could see it, the glint of the light on the blade. It was long and curved and awful, and she struggled and shied away. The Dragon sneered at her.
“Behave yourself,” he said. “Behave yourself and this will all be easy.”
He put the knife on the nightstand, beside the cocaine. Inhaled another mountain of the drug and came back to the bed, fumbling with his belt, the zipper on his pants. He was growing frustrated. He wasn’t looking at her.
“Come on,” he said. “Fucking bitch, come on.”
Catalina eyed the knife on the nightstand. It was close. It wasn’t close enough. She wouldn’t reach the nightstand unless she stretched, and even then, her fingers would barely graze the cocaine. She would have to lunge for the knife, and the man was faster, and stronger. She reached anyway, scrabbled with her fingers, squirmed on the bed.
The Dragon swore again. He slapped her again. Curled his lip as she screamed. He was touching himself now, she saw. It wasn’t working.
“Too much cocaine,” he said. “Fucking bitch. Fucking Volovoi. Fuck.”
Catalina felt her head swimming again. Couldn’t focus. The wine probably, and the man above her. The knife lay inches from her grasp. She shifted on the bed as the man struggled and swore. Strained with her fingers and tried to will the weapon closer.
132
VOLOVOI PULLED THE BMW to a stop outside the Dragon’s apartment building. Around him, traffic swarmed Park Avenue. Cars and taxis and buses. Police cars. Lots of them, but no sirens, not yet.
The Stolen Ones Page 25
