Blindside (Michael Bennett 12)

That was a little disconcerting.

Now my main hope was that Fiore could get help here immediately.

Henry came down the stairs from the catwalk with Natalie right behind him. He walked quickly across the floor, shouting for men to starting sterilizing the place. He paused briefly to look down at the injured man with the teardrop tattoo. Then he spoke in Estonian to the remaining shooter, the other man who had crept up next to me when I first stepped into the room.

The man shrugged, then shot his injured comrade in the face. Aside from a surprised gurgle just before the shot, there wasn’t time for the injured man to react. Now he lay flat on the floor, blood leaking from the hole between his eyes. The blue teardrop was still visible.

Henry casually looked my way and said, “No witnesses, no links to me. You see? I really am smarter than any cop.”

Christoph and Ollie pushed me forward as we all rushed out of the building. They shoved me into the back of a surprisingly c

lean Volkswagen Passat. It had a remnant odor of pot but was otherwise immaculate.

Ollie turned around in the passenger seat and pointed a Smith & Wesson revolver at me. “Lie down on the floor and don’t sit up again. If you do, I’ll have to shoot you.”

“If I don’t, does that mean you’ll just shoot me later?”

“Is that something you want to test right now?”

He was eloquent in his own way.

CHAPTER 73

THE RIDE IN the back of the Dutch killers’ Volkswagen had been short, probably less than ten minutes. I’d had a hard time calculating the speed with my face on the floor of the car. I believed Ollie when he said he’d shoot me. After years as a cop, you get a good sense for someone who’s full of shit. Ollie was not, even if his looks said otherwise. Stuck on the floor, with an utter lack of knowledge of Tallinn, Estonia, I was up shit creek. I had no idea where I was or why they had taken me instead of killing me on the spot. Perhaps I’d been spared just because Natalie would’ve been a witness to Henry ordering it. I might never know.

I had gotten a quick glimpse of the street and the fairly nice stand-alone office building I was rushed into after they stopped the car and hauled me out. Then they’d shoved me down a flight of stairs to some kind of basement with an empty loading dock area at the back. The building had to be perched on a hill, then, the dock at the far end lower than the main entrance. I’d been lucky to stay upright on the hard, concrete steps with steel strips embedded along the edges. At the bottom of the stairs, they’d crammed me into a small room with stained cinder-block walls sweating tiny beads of water. It wasn’t that humid, but basements did weird things all over the world. Dead bug carcasses littered the bare concrete floor with a drain in the center of the room.

It was dark and smelled of urine. Not the image I had of a cybercriminal’s hideout at all. Not even a decent super-villain lair. This sucked.

I had tried to pick up some intel on the ride over, but the men had spoken to each other only in Dutch. I worried about Bill Fiore and his wounds. I hoped he was getting treatment right now. That would mean he’d also alerted the local police to my kidnapping. I wasn’t a hopeless case yet.

Now I found myself in a room where the only light was a line along the bottom of the door, from a bulb at the base of the stairs next to it. I sat on a hard, wooden chair, like I was waiting to see the principal at a Catholic school. My hands were still secured by the cord handcuffs. And just like in a holding cell of a police station, there was a bolt in the wall with a ring on the end big enough to tie a rope through. That rope was attached to my handcuffs and kept me in place. I wasn’t impressed with Estonia’s restraint technology. I felt like I was in the Alabama of the Baltics. But I was secure. I had already tried to break free and only had sore wrists to show for it. Maybe I should watch my New Yorker’s natural tendency to make fun of Alabama.

Several times I heard people on the stairs who then walked past my room and toward the loading dock. After about thirty minutes, someone came down the stairs and stopped, then turned toward my room. Finally I was going to have some human contact.

Whoever it was, they hesitated outside the door. After another minute, a head popped into my room, allowing in some dim light. It was Natalie Lunden.

She didn’t say anything. I think she was shocked by the sight of an American police officer held prisoner in her boyfriend’s office building.

I managed to say, “Where are we?”

She didn’t answer. Natalie stepped into the small room and kicked away dead bugs near her feet.

“Are they going to torture me?”

She shook her head and said, “Henry doesn’t do that kind of thing.”

“Tell that to the guy Henry had shot in the head.”

I could tell by the look on Natalie’s face she had already been thinking about that. She looked like she might be ill. That’s just what this little shithole of a room needed: vomit.

Natalie said, “Henry acted rashly. He wasn’t thinking. He’s been under a lot of stress.” Everyone wanted to make excuses for criminals. Sometimes they were just assholes to the core.

“You’re kidding yourself. You’re not some wide-eyed country girl, for Chrissakes. You went to MIT. Can’t you see Henry is bad news?”

Natalie thought about it for a moment, then said, “I know what you think. But I’m here by choice. I wasn’t lying when I told you I bought my own ticket. It wasn’t my mom’s choice or my dad’s. I did it.”

“But why? For that little twerp with a Napoleon complex? How many steroids does he take to look like that? He looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tom Cruise had a baby.”