When he turned towards the women, he found them both looking at him with eyes glazed with terror, but then his eyes lowered and took in the sensuousness of their naked forms, only to rise once more and gaze at the manacles that held them to the bed.
They were naked and helpless before him, just as his wife had once been, and now, just as then, he was holding a knife in his hand.
A desire came over him at that moment that he thought long buried, and he could feel his predatory heart speed up at the sight of the helpless prey before him.
The men on the floor were dead and he and the women were in a hotel room on a floor where not another soul stirred.
His palms grew moist even as his grip tightened on the knife and he stepped towards the women with eyes as cold as the grave.
CHAPTER 4
O’Grady slammed a fist against the metal door in frustration.
He had made it to the bottom floor only to find that all doors leading out of the stairwell were locked. However, this door should have allowed him to exit the building in case of an emergency, such as a fire, but a magnetic device welded it to the doorframe and prevented it from opening.
The door did have a square of wire-reinforced glass, and he pressed his face against it and could just make out his small boat bobbing gently in the canal. A crescendo of screams came from the direction of the club, and O’Grady wondered just what the hell was happening in there, while knowing that he could do nothing to stop it.
If he couldn’t go for help, than he would return to Virginia’s side and protect her as well as he was able. He started up the stairs, and then increased his pace, as once again screams echoed all around him.
***
Belenko held the severed fingers before George Wessel’s face, as the older man sat on the floor cradling his wounded right hand against his chest, causing the ruffled, white shirt beneath his jacket to turn crimson.
“Tell me what I want to know, or must I take all of your fingers?”
Wessel answered through teeth gritted against waves of pain.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”
“A stubborn man, but that stubbornness will fade once I begin slicing into your daughter.”
Belenko tossed the fingers aside and took out a walkie-talkie. When his calls went unanswered, he summoned over some of his men, and then sent them on missions to discover what became of his missing troops, including his nephew, who should have joined them by now.
The men nodded their understanding and went off to carry out their orders.
“It seems we have more time, Wessel, but I grow tired of fingers. Remove your shoes.”
***
The foreign words squawking out of the walkie-talkie had shaken him from his trance and he turned from the women and looked down at the unit strapped to the belt of the man he had stabbed.
He dropped the knife and lifted the gun from the floor, before searching the dead men for spare ammunition, but all they carried were extra shells for the shotguns. The shells were 12 gauge double-ought buckshot, and between their choice of ammo and the fact that the barrels on their shotguns were all sawed down, he knew that the men were not choosy about who lived or died. Any blast from these weapons would have a wide dispersal range, while the multiple projectiles would insure a hit.
“Mister?”
It was Skye Quinlan who spoke, and she and her sister were watching him through eyes wide with fear.
“Mister, can you please unlock these handcuffs?”
“Don’t you have the key?” Cassie asked her sister.
“No, I left it on the table by mistake.”
“Skye!”
“I know, but there’s no harm, right mister, you’ll unlock us... right?”
He searched the table and found the key beneath one of the foil-wrapped condoms, then leaned over and freed the women.
“Get dressed.”
“Who are those men?” Cassie asked, as she reached for a robe.
“I think they’re terrorists, do you have another room to go to?”
“No, we only got this room so that... we wanted to be with you.”
“I’m flattered, but don’t leave this room until you see police cars in front of the building. It’s not safe to roam about.”
Cassie pointed at the bodies.
“You want us to stay here, with those?”
“I’ll move them.”
He wrapped the stabbed man inside a blanket and lifted him up, to carry him into the bathroom, where he dumped him in the shower stall. When he had finished with the second man, he held up the gun.
“Do either of you know how to shoot?”
“A little,” Cassie said. “We used to date a cop.”
“All right, use it if you’re threatened.”
He exited the room without another word and the girls watched as he pulled the broken door shut.
Skye shivered and held herself as she stared down at the blood on the carpet.
“We should have had him put the bodies in the closet instead of the bathroom.”
“Why?”
“Because now I have to pee,”
***
Outside in the hallway, he leaned against the wall and took deep breaths, as the emotions he felt at the sight of the bound girls replayed themselves repeatedly in his mind.
He shook his head, got off the wall and headed for a nearby staircase. Jessica was in danger and there was no time to analyze the evil temptation that had nearly possessed him in that room.
He entered the stairwell and heard the sound of the door’s opening echo off the walls, along with another sound, the sound of running feet. The owner of the feet appeared an instant later on a lower landing and raised his arms in the air when he spotted the shotguns.
“I’m not armed.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Jude O’Grady, a, a guest.”
“What’s going on down there?”
“I don’t know, but I think it might have something to do with my boss, George Wessel.”
“How did you escape?”
“I didn’t. I was upstairs with Wessel’s daughter when the men came.”
“Upstairs? Have you seen my wife, Jessica White?”
“You’re Dr. White’s husband? Well don’t worry, when I left her with Virginia they were both fine, and Craig Morgan went to join them.”
“What were you doing downstairs?”
“Looking for a way out, to go for help, but I couldn’t even get out of the building, and these hallway doors only open from the other side.”
“Take me to my wife.”
O’Grady walked past him. “Follow me.”
When they reached the top floor, they found that the door was also locked. The metal door was far too tough to kick open, and so they had to find another way to breach it.
“Why don’t you shoot the lock?”
“Maybe, as a last resort, but it would be risking a dangerous ricochet from the pellets, for now, I’ll try to disable the lock.”
He removed the thick knife he’d taken from the man he killed and worked the blade between the door and the frame.
“That knife looks bloody,” O’Grady said.
“There are three less terrorists.”
“You killed three terrorists?”
“Yes.”
“Damn!”
He managed to unlock the door and they pushed it open and headed for the suite where O’Grady had last seen Jessica. But as they walked past an elevator, it chimed, and an instant later, he and O’Grady found themselves outnumbered four-to-one.
CHAPTER 5
Craig Morgan’s hit man, Blake, glanced nervously at the hard cases guarding him and the other guests.
He had seen Craig flee into the stairwell, but when he went to follow, he found the way blocked by a man with a shotgun.
Blake had his own gun, one given to him by Craig to carry out the hit on Wessel, but the way things were going, Wessel was dead in any event.
/> Most of the guests were freaked out by what was going on, but Blake was taking a professional interest in the matter. The bearded man with the wire cutters had clipped off two of Wessel’s fingers without flinching and was obviously the man in charge.
Whatever information Wessel was withholding would soon spill forth, of that, Blake was certain, and he also knew that when that time came, that he and the others would be at the men’s mercy. The moment Wessel gave in, Blake would make his move and shoot his way to freedom.
***
The men on the elevator shrank back in fear as he raised both shotguns to fire.
“Hey! Don’t shoot buddy, none of us are armed.”
He stared at the men. There were eight of them and they all looked to be middle-aged.
He lowered the weapons.
“Who are you men?”
The one who had spoken to him before spoke again. His suit was of better quality than the clothes of his companions, and he sported a diamond-studded watch.
“I’m Caine Perkins. I own Perkins Lumber in Harborton, and these are some of my employees. We have a poker game here every second Sunday. We know that some big shot rented the whole place, but the management let us hold the game anyway since they didn’t need the room, but now I wish like hell that we had cancelled it.”
“You know what’s going on, that terrorists have taken over the hotel?”
Perkins gestured to his left at a round man wearing glasses.
“Marty here was headed down to buy a newspaper just as the guys with the guns arrived. He came back and told us what was happening.”
“Why didn’t you stay in your room?”
“We didn’t want to be there in case they did a room to room search.”
“They won’t do that. It would take too long and gain them nothing.”
“Well, as long as we’re out, we’ll stay with you, at least you’re armed.”
A blast sounded back by the stairwell door, followed by a cry of pain, and two men in fatigues exited the stairwell with shotguns, one of which was bleeding from the arm, a wound doubtless caused by ricocheting pellets used to blast the lock on the door.
He urged O’Grady forward.
“Take me to where you left my wife.”
O’Grady began running, and he followed, as behind them a blast came from one of the guns. Caine Perkins and another man screamed and fell to the carpet with wounded legs, as the men with them raised their hands in surrender.
The two gunmen approached them with shotguns at the ready, but once they assessed that they were unarmed, they ignored them and went after Jessica’s husband.
***
When they reached the bridal suite, they found the door sitting wide open.
“Jessica!”
No answer, as the sound of running feet grew closer behind them.
He pointed at the room, bidding O’Grady to enter, and then pressed himself hard against the opposite wall with his left arm extended and a shotgun in each hand.
The footsteps slowed as they approached the corner and, ever so slowly, a face peaked around it.
When one blue eye was showing, he pulled the trigger on the shotgun and watched as the metal pellets obliterated the visible section of the man’s face and sent him tumbling to the floor in agony.
Firing the powerful weapon with his arm extended left his shoulder numb, and he found that for a moment it was all he could do to hold onto the gun, however, his right arm was unaffected, and as the other man reached out to drag his fallen comrade to safety, he fired once more and struck both men with the blast.
The second man yelped and pulled back a hand, stinging and bloody, while the man with the wounded face at last grew still, and died.
A long string of what he took to be curses flowed in a foreign tongue, and then he heard the sound of retreating footfalls. When he reached the corner, he dropped low and gazed around it, and saw that not only had the other man retreated, but that Perkins and his men had also departed.
O’Grady rejoined him.
“Are you alright?”
“Yes, was anyone in the room?”
“No, but your wife left a message for you. It’s written on the bathroom mirror in lipstick.”
“Grab that shotgun and follow me.”
“Oh crap, look at his face.”
“Better him than us,”
“Amen to that,” O’Grady said.
He reloaded the shotguns as he walked towards the bathroom. Once inside, he read the message his wife had written, and he smiled at the memories it evoked.
“What’s she mean by, ‘Hiding in our private spot?’”
“When we were in college we had a spot on the roof of her apartment building where we used to go to talk. We named it ‘Our private spot,’”
“Ah, so they’re on the roof, clever, it’s the last place I would have looked.”
They found the stairwell that led to the roof and he opened the door that accessed it with one of the shotguns leading the way, but saw no one.
“Jessica?”
She came out from behind a massive air-conditioning unit with Virginia following, and as he rushed over to her, Virginia passed him and flew into O’Grady’s arms.
“Are you alright? You feel cold.”
Jessica grinned. “It’s chilly up here, but we’re good, and I see you got my message.”
O’Grady looked around.
“Where’s Morgan? I sent him to stay with you.”
Virginia pointed over to a section of the roof that was lower than the one they stood on.
“There are metal rungs embedded in the bricks that can be used to climb down. Craig said that there was another stairwell over there. He left when we heard the gunfire come from downstairs.”
O’Grady grew red with anger.
“He just left you here?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you follow?”
“Virginia stayed with me,” Jessica told him. “In my condition, I couldn’t make the climb down. I didn’t want to risk falling and injuring my babies.”
“So Morgan just left you two here alone?”
“Yes.”
“Coward!”
He looked around and sighed.
“You can’t stay up here forever, so I’ll settle you into a room downstairs and O’Grady here can stay and guard you.”
O’Grady took Virginia’s hand.
“You can count on me. I’m not leaving Virginia’s side until this nightmare is over, but what will you be doing?”
His intense eyes stared into O’Grady’s.
“I’ll be ending the nightmare.”
CHAPTER 6
While it may be better to light a candle than curse the darkness, Craig Morgan cursed it anyway.
He was in a narrow stairwell used by the maintenance personnel and the switch that turned on the power to the lights was at the very bottom of the stairs.
Leaving Virginia to fend for herself probably ended things between them, but Craig had no doubt that it was better to be a live coward than a dead hero.
Goddamn terrorists, they’ve ruined everything,
Craig had another problem as well—Blake. He had hired the hit man with a small payment up-front and the promise of more to come. Craig had counted on getting the money to pay him from the fat envelopes of cash that relatives and business associates of Wessel’s would hand Virginia, but with the wedding cancelled, he would never see that money.
Craig felt along the cinder block walls and cheered as he rounded the last corner and saw a line of light at what he knew must be the bottom of a door.
When he finally reached it, he gripped the round knob and cursed once more as he discovered that the door was locked tight.
Then, the door flew open and a man wearing blue coveralls confronted him. A patch on the left breast pocket identified him as Harold.
“Hell mister, what are you doing in there?”
“Don’t you know? Terrorists have taken
over the building.”
“Terrorists?”
“Yes, now tell me, is there a way out of here that leads to the outside?”
“There sure is, this is the sub-basement, but there’s a flight of stairs that lead up to the first floor.”
“Great.”
“I also got a phone in the maintenance office that we can use to call the police.”
“It won’t work. They disabled all the phones.”
“Shit, well, follow me and we’ll get the hell out of here.”
Craig followed Harold past machinery so loud that it made it hard to think, and then up a long flight of metal stairs. When Harold opened the door, Craig saw another door marked, exit, at the end of a corridor and pushed past Harold to get to it.
He had taken only five steps into the corridor when a voice shouted commands in a foreign tongue and Craig froze as a man came from the right pointing a shotgun at him, as behind him, he heard Harold close and lock the door.
***
After jimmying the lock open, he settled Jessica and Virginia into a suite on the sixth floor and was telling her goodbye as she relaxed against a pillow on the bed, with one of the shotguns at her side.
“Despite the wedding dress she’s wearing, I don’t think your cousin is getting married today.”
“No, and did you notice the way she greeted O’Grady?”
“So, he was the reason for her cold feet, hmm?”
“Yes, and Craig running out on her sealed his fate. She’ll never marry him now.”
He said nothing more and she studied him carefully.
“Something’s wrong, isn’t it? I mean something else.”
“It can wait until this is over.”
“No, tell me now, I don’t want you leaving here to go fight with something weighing you down. Let’s talk about it.”
He told her. He recounted getting the key card, of entering the room while being pursued, and of finding Skye and Cassie handcuffed naked to the bed, and after recounting the fight that occurred, he disclosed to her his reaction and feelings upon being alone with two helpless, naked women.
The last part of his tale was spoken in little more than a whisper.
Jessica reached out and took his hand.
“Those feelings frightened you, didn’t they?”
The TAKEN! Series - Books 9-12 (Taken! Box Set Book 3) Page 19
