by Scott Blade
And that was where she was. She was sure. Even with blurred vision and devastatingly disoriented, she knew where she was because she was lying in a spacious claw bathtub. It was unmistakable.
She knew that they would not move her from the hotel. One of the reasons why she had checked into it was because it was a popular destination. Lots of witnesses.
That was the only way that she would meet with them. What she did not understand was how they found her. Her contact was a lot more resourceful than she had thought.
The woman in the bathtub was tall, five foot ten, and thin, which made her good for the spy craft because she was supposed to play the part of a model, living in New York, rubbing elbows with political leaders and people in the know.
She had been good at this assignment. Another reason why she doubted that it was her own government that ambushed her in her room.
The bad thing about being tall was that she was gangly, which made moving around in the tub very difficult. They had used zip ties to restrain her hands behind her and tie her ankles together.
Then there was the headache, which felt more like a migraine. Her head pounded.
Every time that she fought, or squirmed, or shifted around, trying to escape her wrist or leg fetters, a sharp pain discharged through her head. It felt like fire. She did not remember her attackers hitting her over the head. Why would they, when they had drugs to put her out?
The headache was probable a side effect of the sedative.
Her abductors had left the light on in the bathroom. She stared up at it. Saw only the bright whiteness and fuzzy details of the ceiling.
She closed her eyes and tried to remember what had happened.
The first thing she remembered was checking into the hotel. Plenty of witnesses saw her. The hotel had been busy. A good sign. However, it also meant that she was forgettable among the crowd of tourists coming into New York.
She remembered going up in the elevator.
The woman in the tub paused, tried to remember before the elevator.
There were small crowds of people in the lobby and a line at the check-in counter, but there was one guy, in particular, she remembered sitting in the lobby. He was alone.
She remembered that he was plain, American, that was obvious, and had a demeanor of former military about him, only it was bred out. That was the first thing about him that stuck out to her. He looked not just former military, but like he had tried to lose the look.
He had brown hair and a beard, trim. He wore a sweater, sleeves shoved up, with sleeve tattoos. That was one of the signs that made her think he was former military. Not a guarantee, but a sign in the right direction.
The other thing that really stood out to her was that she walked by him, and pretended to be lost. Like she was headed for the elevator, only she went the wrong way.
She walked past him, stopped in the entrance to the restaurant, and looked around like she was searching. Then she asked one of the restaurant workers to point out the elevators. She even spoke in her accent, which she had found American men loved.
The employee pointed out the elevators, saying she had passed them.
She thanked him, turned and walked back.
Both times that she passed the guy sitting in the chair, not once did he ever look at her. Not a glance. Not a quick peek. Nothing. And that was not normal.
He never made any attempt to look at her backside, which never happened. Not in the tight dress that she was wearing.
She knew something was up with him.
She never should have gotten on that elevator.
She remembered opening the door to her hotel room. Then she remembered a gigantic, gloved hand swiping over her head and around her mouth and a muscular arm squeezing around her neck from behind.
One guy jumped her from behind and the second stormed into the room after both of them. Within a few seconds he had injected something into her arm. And then she was out like a light.
THE WOMAN IN THE BATHTUB opened her eyes and stared through the haziness and the mental fog at the ceiling and bright lights again.
How she got here did not matter anymore. How she was going to get free was all that mattered.
She focused on nothing else.
She remembered that one of them, the second guy to enter her room, she figured, had injected her twice with the same sedative. The second time had been when she was constrained in the bathtub. It had been around midnight, she figured, but wasn’t sure.
She pushed off the tub with her butt, and strained to see over the lip. Her sense of balance was off. Her brow barely cleared the lip.
There was a vanity counter, with a sink, crystal faucet, expensive-looking wallpaper and tiles and a toilet.
She stared in the direction of the door. She could see the basic outline and shade of off-white. The details of the hinges and the knob were still fuzzy.
It was shut.
A mistake, she thought. The proper thing to do would have been to leave it open so they could at least hear her in case she made noise, or be able to peek in without any trouble to make sure that she was still sedated.
Leaving the door closed left her with freedom of movement. At least it would if she were able to move.
The muscles in her lower back hurt and felt weak. There was a stinging sensation in her legs. A side effect of whatever drug they were sticking her with. She let go and slipped back down into the tub. Her skin squeaked against the interior.
She lay back, panting for a long second. It took a lot out of her just to make that little bit of movement.
She tried to relax, letting her lungs fill, expand and inhale. Then she let out each deep breath, slow and relaxed. Taking in one slow breath at a time, and then repeating the process.
How the hell was she supposed to get out of this?
She had to figure it out and there wasn’t much time left. She had to get free before the guy came back in to inject her again.
There was no way of knowing the exact time in her head, not from waking up in a closed bathroom in a tub, but she figured that it was around midnight. The guy had injected her with a sedative twice. She woke up groggy, which meant that she had slept a long time.
If they were using the same sedative, same amount each time, then she probably woke up each time at the same hour. Maybe not dead on the minute, but close enough.
The woman in the tub concentrated. She did not need to be calm, not in the Zen sense of the word. What she needed was her adrenaline to kick in.
Every day, every week, there are countless stories of woman who look like her, being kidnapped, abducted by stranger men. These women almost always ended up on the local news stations a couple of weeks after disappearing. Usually, their bodies were discovered, tortured, raped, and almost always, dead.
Luckily, she was no ordinary woman. She had been trained. And she had been trained for this very situation.
She thought back to her training. The thought of suicide came to mind first. This was not her training, but she had learned that it had been the training of her predecessors from sixty years earlier.
The long list of women who came before her had been given cyanide capsules, embedded in one of their back molars. This was the “way out” that they were trained to take.
Nowadays, this was not the answer for most of the women in her line of work. The institution where she came from no longer cared if an agent was captured and tortured.
They did not care because their agents were not told anything. Secrets were typically kept away from agents like her.
Why should they care if she was captured?
If they found out that she had been taken, they would simply delete her records and disavow her status. She would be swept under the rug and forgotten.
And that was under the worst circumstances. Being captured in the United States, by an American agency, was a cakewalk for her. Her government knew that she would simply be returned to them anyway.
No harm. No foul.
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However, none of this was a comfort to her. For one thing, it meant that her government did not give a rat’s ass if she lived or died. And for another, she was not sure who the hell these guys were.
The only thing she did know was that it was not typical for American agents to tie a woman up and dump her in a tub.
Her American counterparts were notorious for being more humane. Again, she doubted that these were American spies.
She closed her eyes tight, felt the adrenaline surge through her as much as it was going to, and popped her eyes open. She rocked up and then back on her butt and repeated it three more times until she could tuck in her knees and swing her hands up and underneath her. They brushed up her thighs, and under the backs of her knees. Then she pulled them past her feet and the zip ties around her ankles, until they were out in front of her.
Pain rushed through her shoulders from the fastness of it all.
She fell back and took a couple more deep breaths.
Then she rocked again as she had before, only this time it was to get on her feet. She finally managed to stand up, reaching forward and grabbing the nozzle to the shower for balance.
She looked toward the door. She heard voices on the other side, distant, but in the hotel suite somewhere.
No one came, but she knew that soon the one would come check on her with the needle in hand.
She waited another couple of long moments because she wanted to let her balance return for the next part.
After she felt confident that she could stand without falling over, she reached her bound wrists straight up in the air, above her head, stretching them all the way out. Next, like a wild stallion’s kick, she jerked them down as fast and as hard as she could.
One of the lessons that she was taught in her training.
The force and the speed of her action broke the zip tie apart and her hands were free.
IT TOOK SEVERAL more breaths before the woman in the bathtub was ready to make another move after getting free from the hand restraints.
When she finally had her balance, she sat on the edge of the tub and draped her legs out and over the edge. She sat there for another minute, hoping that her vision would get better, but it did not.
The little trick of getting out of zip ties only worked on hands. Human legs are not attached correctly for this to work. There was a method to do it, using the same properties of physics, same sort of movements, where the prisoner lies on her back and pulls her feet all the way back to her face, and then kicks straight up with both feet and jerks back at the end of it. But this method required tremendous strength and flexibility.
She had the flexibility part—that came from yoga twice a week—but the remains of the sedative coursing through her veins killed the chances of having the right amount of strength.
Besides, she was running out of time.
She stood up, slowly. Blood rushed to her head and she felt it. But she pressed on. Half-hopping, half-scooting, she made her way to the bathroom door.
She had not seen the suite, nor had she ever stayed in The Plaza before, but she had been trained well. Before she even checked in, she had memorized the layout of the Terrace Suite.
She was on the ninth floor. There was a balcony and a window overlooking an interior courtyard.
She closed her eyes and tried to picture the room next to the bathroom. It was a bedroom. There should be a king-sized bed on the other side of the door.
There was a table with a lamp and an armchair. The next room after that was a living room, furnished with television and a mini-fridge and hotel furniture.
Hopefully, the kidnappers would be in the living room. She knew that there were at least two guys. Maybe more.
She was not going to get a better chance to make an escape.
She looked around the bathroom, one final time. She had hoped that there might be a sharp object in there to cut through the zip ties on ankles, but she had no such luck.
No scissors left behind by the previous occupants. Nothing in the trash.
Even if the previous tenant had left a pair of scissors or a nail file behind, the Plaza’s housekeeping department was on the ball. They would have picked it up.
She reached out, grabbed the doorknob and, gently, turned it. She peeked out.
No one was there.
She opened the door a little farther. Nobody on the bed. No one sat on the chair.
She still heard voices. Then she squinted and looked into the next room.
The voices that she heard were not her kidnappers. The television was on.
She could not make out the screen, but she could see the colors and hear the actors on TV talking.
It was a late-night talk show, she figured. Sounds of an audience laughing and a host telling jokes filled the room. It was turned up fairly loud, not enough to bother the neighbors, but enough to fill the suite.
At first, she thought that was a mistake because it could potentially draw unwanted attention. On the other hand, it might have been because they were using a small crew to guard her and needed the noise to stay alert.
She could not see who was watching the TV. The sofa was out of her line of sight.
She ignored them and turned to the bed. She hopped over to it and used one hand to steady herself and hopped as quietly as she could. She plopped down on the bed, partially because she’d lost the strength in her legs to sit down slowly.
She looked over at the open doorway. No one came.
She turned back to the bed and looked at the nightstand next to it.
On the nightstand, next to a thin gold-trimmed lamp, was exactly what she was looking for. She did not find the number one thing on her list of items that she could really use right now. Nor, was it the number two item. Number one would have been a loaded gun and number two would have been a knife to both cut through her zip tie and use as a weapon.
Instead, she had to settle for number three, which was a telephone.
A small, digital clock sat next to it on the table.
She was close enough to see the time, blurry or not. She watched as three of the four displayed numbers changed over to the time. They went from eleven fifty-nine to midnight.
Her government trainers had taught her numbers to remember. One of them had been a local New York number to use in case of emergency, which this was, but the problem was that she could not call her contacts.
She was on a mission that was not sanctioned by her government. In fact, they would see her as a traitor for it. She was on her own.
The only thing that she could think to do was to call the local police. At least they would come for her. She could figure out how to get away from them later.
Chances were that her kidnappers did not plan to let her live. At least the police would not kill her.
The number for police in America was a short, three-digit number. That was one of the great things about Americans. They were good at streamlining things like that.
She scooped up the phone and put it to her ear. She dialed nine-one-one on the number pad and the phone rang.
CHAPTER 19
THE PLAZA HOTEL was an old hotel. They had old phone lines and old landline telephones in the rooms. Not rotary phones. They had push buttons, but they were old. The phones were polished and kept clean. They looked like the original, out-of-the-box condition that they were in the day they were all purchased.
Somewhere, inside the Plaza Hotel, some years ago, it was determined that the phones would be maintained and kept for as long as they worked. It was a way of keeping a classy, uniform, antiquity look, which worked well with the motifs and the look of the hotel.
Back years and years ago, it was determined in the hotel industry that having a nine-eleven room was bad when most hotels have both an internal and external phone line system.
A person needs help, they dial nine-one-one and instead of getting the police, they get the person staying in room nine-eleven.
To dial out, one must first dial nin
e—a universally known quantity.
What The Plaza did, instead of changing the room numbers and telephones, was they posted on a card on the base of the phone that instructed the guests needing emergency services, to dial nine-nine-one-one. A quick extra number, no big deal.
When this woman needing the police dialed nine-one-one, she got the room instead of the police.
JACK WIDOW WAS SOUND sleep when suddenly, his phone rang.
Widow opened his eyes abruptly, like he was way back in SEAL training and the instructors had just barged in, ringing dinner bells and sounding bullhorns in his ear.
He was facing away from the telephone, sleeping on his side.
He flipped over and grabbed the phone, nearly knocking over the lamp.
“What!” he said.
A pause. No one spoke. He heard breathing.
“Hello?” he said.
A low, sultry voice with a foreign accent said, “Help,” in a whisper.
“Hello? Who is this?”
“Can you help me?”
“Who is this?”
“Are you police?”
Widow sat up and looked at the clock, saw the late hour, and asked, “Who the hell is this?”
“I need help.”
“Where are you?”
“Are you police?”
“No. You dialed my room number,” Widow said. He looked down at the base of the phone, read the note about emergency calls.
“You gotta dial nine-nine-one-one. Not nine-one-one.”
He realized that was very stupid.
They should change his room number, he thought. He guessed even The Plaza was too cheap to change all the room numbers just to get rid of nine-eleven. He supposed they could have simply made a nine-twelve A or something.
“Help me,” the woman’s voice whispered.
Widow used his free hand and slapped it to his forehead, not hard, and rubbed his forehead.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“I’m in the hotel.”
“What room are you in?”
She paused a long beat.
Her accent, he thought, sounded Russian or maybe Ukrainian.
“I cannot remember.”
