Chapter Eight

THE FIRST THING SHE WAS AWARE OF WAS DARKNESS.

Total darkness.

Not the darkness of her bedroom. The thick, cold, suffocating darkness of the grave.

She tried to scream, but no sound came out. Something had been stuffed into her mouth, a bitter-tasting cloth. She couldn't breathe.

Where am I?

Panic began coiling its way around her heart like a snake. Was she dreaming? She sat up. Her head cracked painfully against something solid and metal.

A coffin? No! Oh God, please, no!

Daddy!

Again she screamed. Again the cloth choked her, stifling the sound in her throat. Slowly, consciously, she began to inhale through her nose.

Keep calm. You're alive. Don't panic.

Air filled her lungs. Relax.

Bedtime stories about her great-great-grandfather Jamie McGregor came flooding into her mind. Jamie had been brave and cunning and resourceful. He'd battled sharks and land mines, escaped shipwrecks and fought off assassins. No situation had been too hopeless for him to figure a way out of it.

She tried to think logically.

What happened? How did I get here?

It was no good. She couldn't remember. Mrs. Grainger had put her to bed, and then...and then...darkness. The fear returned like a great crashing wave.

Help me!

Lexi shivered. She realized suddenly that she was freezing cold. She was still wearing the thin cotton nightie she'd gone to bed in. Beneath her back the hard metal floor felt like sheet ice.

Bump.

What was that?

The floor was moving. It vibrated steadily, then every twenty seconds or so, it threw her body upward, like a tossed pancake. Suddenly it dawned on her: A car. I'm in the trunk of a car. I've been kidnapped, and they're taking me somewhere. To their hideout.

If it hadn't been happening to her, it would probably have been exciting. Kidnapping was one of Lexi's favorite games. But this was no game. This was real.

"Get out."

The man wore a mask. Not a ski mask, like bank robbers wore in the movies. A rubber Halloween mask. It made him look like a corpse.

Too consumed with fear and cold to move, Lexi froze. Her eyes widened with terror.

Another voice. "Don't just stand there, man, pick her up. Get her inside before someone shows up."

The corpse reached into the trunk and grabbed hold of Lexi's arms. On instinct, she fought him, kicking and scratching like a wildcat.

"Fuck!" The corpse clutched at his forearm. Her sharp nail had drawn blood. "Little bitch!"

Pulling back his arm, he punched her in the face so hard she blacked out.

Time passed.

She was in a room with no windows. A low-wattage lightbulb burned constantly. Days and nights became one. At first, the pain in her face where the corpse had punched her was unbearable. But gradually it began to subside.

There was a bed in one corner, an old-fashioned porcelain chamber pot and a battered cardboard box containing a few desultory books and toys. The walls were bare, the floor smooth, green linoleum. It felt more like an office than a room in a house. The toys and books were all designed for much younger children.

My kidnappers don't know much about kids.

Fear gave way to boredom. There was nothing to do, nothing to break the monotony of the endless, lonely hours. At regular intervals, a masked man would enter, empty and replace the chamber pot and bring Lexi some food. Her captors never spoke to her, or answered when she spoke to them, but occasionally she heard their dim, muffled voices through the walls.

There were three of them. A leader with a deep voice and a strange, foreign accent, and two others - the corpse and a third man who wore a variety of animal masks, sometimes a pig, sometimes a dog or a snake. It was the third man, animal man, who really frightened her.

He was standing over her bed. He had the pig mask on.

"Make a sound and I'll kill you."

No you won't. If you were going to kill me, you'd have done it by now. You need me alive.

Lexi opened her mouth to scream but it was too late. A huge, hot hand clamped over her mouth. He was on the bed, pushing her down. The weight of him squeezed the breath from her body. One hand still covered her mouth, but Lexi could feel the other clawing beneath her nightgown. NO! A sharp pain between her legs brought tears to her eyes. She tried to move, to struggle, but it was hopeless. She was pinned like a leaf beneath a boulder.

He made strange noises. Deep, guttural groans Lexi had never heard before. The hair on her scalp began to rise with terror. Then suddenly the weight lifted.

Voices.

"What are you doing in there, man?"

It was the leader.

"She ain't due another meal for three hours."

Lexi couldn't see the pig's face, but she could tell he was afraid.

He hissed at her. "One word and I will slit your throat. Understand?"

She nodded.

Agent Andrew Edwards looked at the stack of black-and-white photographs on the table in front of him. It was as thick as a phone book.

"Is this all of them?"

"Yes, sir. That's every warehouse, hangar and industrial facility within a fifteen-mile radius of where the car was dumped."

It was eleven days, four hours and sixteen minutes since Peter Templeton had reported his daughter missing. Agent Edwards had played the tape of Peter's desperate 911 call so many times he could recite it by heart. Nine times out of ten with these child disappearances, the parents ended up being involved. What could you say? It was a sick world. But in this case, Agent Edwards believed the father. Not only did Peter Templeton's distress seem genuine, but the ransom note left under the child's pillow bore all the hallmarks of an organized criminal operation: no fingerprints, typed on the most common Lexmark printer paper, succinct, untraceable.

The Blackwell family had two weeks to transfer $10 million to a numbered account in the Caymans. If they involved the police at any point, the girl would be killed immediately.

Agent Edwards was a Scot by birth but a New Yorker by temperament. He had pale skin, watery amber eyes and hair that couldn't quite make up its mind whether to be blond or red. He loved the Yankees, hated the street gangs and drug dealers that plagued the city and described his yearly vacation to the Jersey Shore as "traveling."

He sighed heavily.

"There must be three hundred facilities here."

"Four hundred twenty."

"Got any good news for me, Agent Jones?"

"As a matter of fact, sir, I do. These" - Agent Edwards's colleague handed his boss a much-thinner manila folder - "are the derelict or deserted premises."

"How many?"

"Only eighteen of 'em." Agent Jones smiled. "I can set up surveillance this afternoon, if you want."

"No. Not yet."

"But, sir, we have less than sixty hours. The deadline - "

"You think I don't know what the damn deadline is?"

Agent Edwards was pissed. What kind of idiots was the Bureau hiring these days? The last thing he wanted was to have every warehouse in New Jersey crawling with feds. If these guys got spooked, they'd kill the kid on the spot.

The Blackwell family had taken a huge risk involving the authorities at all. With their money and connections, they could easily have made the payment quietly and been done with it. Or hired their own private hit men to get these guys.

But they hadn't. They'd come to Agent Edwards with a case that would either make or break his career. Screwing up was not an option.

Finding the kidnappers' car had been a coup. Agent Edwards had matched the DNA on hairs found in the trunk to hairs from Lexi's bedroom pillow. Two voice-distorted phone calls to Peter Templeton's office were probably made from inside a large, industrial structure. The FBI's tech team had analyzed the echo, if you could believe that shit.

But it wasn't enough. Agent Edwards didn't want eighteen targets. He wanted one.

"Send a chopper up. Not too low. It needs to sound like routine air traffic."

"Yes, sir. What are they looking for, exactly?"

Agent Edwards looked at his junior witheringly.

"The Emerald City of Oz. Jesus! Tire tracks, shit-for-brains. They're looking for fucking tire tracks."

He never wanted to get involved.

Tags: Sidney Sheldon Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net