Nadia felt around her and found a counter and a sink. She must be in the kitchen area. She found drawers and pulled them open, searching for a weapon or even a flashlight, but all she found were food crumbs and dust.
She turned and felt around behind her. A table and—thank you, God!—a candle, maybe three inches long, in some sort of glass holder. She ran her fingers across the tabletop and knocked something to the floor. Bending she patted around and came up with a plastic cylinder. A lighter.
Her initial joy quickly faded when she realized that light would reveal what they'd locked her up with. But as she listened to the hissing, whining, thrashing thing at the other end of the trailer she knew she had no choice. Not knowing was worse.
She flicked the wheel and held the flame before her. It revealed nothing, but all noise except for the hissing breaths ceased.
Was it afraid? Afraid of fire?
The silence was almost worse than the noise. She didn't know how much butane she had left, so she lit the candle. Then, holding it at arm's length before her, she edged toward the far end of the trailer, moving inches at a time.
And slowly on the right she began to make out a shape… and it was human-shaped rather than animal, stretched out on some sort of bed… and as she moved closer she saw that it was a man and he was bound hand and foot, spread-eagle on the bed… and she saw a mouth sealed with silver duct tape, and above the tape wide blue eyes glistening in the light… She knew those eyes and the sandy hair falling over the forehead.
"Doug!"
The candle slipped from her fingers but she caught it again, barely noticing the splash of hot wax across her wrist as she leaped to his side. She was sobbing as she peeled the tape from his mouth.
"Oh, Nadj, I'm so sorry!" he half gasped, half sobbed. "I had no idea!"
She kissed him. "Doug, what happened? Why are we here?"
"I don't know," he said as she began to work on the knot on his right wrist. "I never got to see whoever snatched me."
"They stole your laptop and smashed your computer."
"Then it's got to be GEM."
"I think you're right."
Admitting that was a spike through her heart.
"I should have left their goddamn computer alone. But why you?"
Nadia had loosened the binding enough by then for him to wriggle his hand free. As he went to work on his left wrist and she tackled his right foot, Nadia told Doug about Loki-Berzerk and her suspicions.
When he was free he gathered her into his arms and she sobbed with relief and terror against his chest. His face was stubbled, his clothes wrinkled and smelly, but he was Doug and he was alive and holding her.
"I had no idea what they were planning when the little guy was talking to me," he said.
"The one who imitated your voice? He… he was uncanny."
"He came in with this big dog-faced guy and started talking to me, asking me if I needed anything and did I know why I'd been brought here. He didn't give me any answers, just kept asking questions. Now I know he was studying my voice."
Nadia studied his face in the flickering light. "Did they… have they hurt you?"
"Not a bit. They bring me food—plenty of it—and water." He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. 'There's even a bathroom. Except for tying me up an hour ago, they've treated me pretty decently."
Nadia looked around, not seeing much. "And there's no way out?"
"None. Believe me, I've tried."
She stared at the candle flame. "What if we started a fire?"
"Thought of it, but who's going to send a fire alarm? These folks could probably put it out before anyone noticed, and even if fire trucks did show up, we'd probably be dead from the smoke before they got us out.
"OK," Nadia said. "No fire. Let's stay alive."
"That's what's got me. If what we know is so dangerous, why didn't they simply kill us?"
"If they haven't yet, they probably don't intend to. I can't think of any other reason to keep us safe and dry and well fed, can you?"
He shook his head.
Heartened by the simple logic of her reasoning, Nadia wrapped her arms around Doug and clung to him.
11
Milos Dragovic sat in the rear of his Bentley in sullen silence. The car glided uptown on Park Avenue, a black cocoon of steel-girded stillness amid the midtown cacophony. Pera, his driver, didn't speak—didn't dare. No music and certainly no news. Milos had heard enough news for the day.
Vuk and Ivo dead… he still could not believe it. How was such a thing possible?
He had seen it on the midday news—the burnt-out, bullet-riddled husk of his car, the two bagged bodies being wheeled away on stretchers, and still he could not accept it. And even less the story that it was a lone assailant.
Witnesses said they had seen one man fleeing in a stolen taxi, but Milos knew this could not be the work of a single man. The news was calling the incident drug-related. It was not. These were the same people who had attacked him in the Hamptons. Now they'd moved to the city. This had been an ambush, a well-planned execution carried out with the precision of a military operation.
And that disturbed him the most. To ambush Vuk and Ivo like that, someone had to know they were coming. But Milos himself hadn't known where they were going until moments before he had sent them. This left only two possibilities: either his office was bugged or he had an informer in his organization.
The realization had chilled Milos's rage. If it was an informer, who? He looked at the back of his driver's head. Pera, perhaps? No, anyone but him. Pera had been with him since the gunrunning days. Pera would never.
A bug then? He sighed. Either was possible. After all, Milos had his own sources within rival organizations, even within the NYPD. None of them seemed worth a damn at the moment. His rivals were laughing at him and playing copies of the TV tape nonstop in their bars, but no one, either publicly or privately, was taking credit.
The police were worthless, searching for this so-called lone assailant. They had no good description other than medium height, average build, and brown hair, although some witnesses were disputing the hair color. They couldn't agree on his facial features either except that he'd been scorched by the flames from the burning car—Milos's car.
The police said he'd hijacked a taxi. That taxi was found abandoned in Queens where he'd apparently hijacked a Mercedes. NYPD later learned that while an all-points had been out on the Mercedes, the man they sought was lying unconscious in a North Shore hospital. The local police had considered him nothing more than a drunk driver. By the time they realized that they held a suspect in a far more serious crime, the man had vanished.
Milos wanted to scream: Not one man! He was a decoy, a set up to make it look like one man could take out two of mine! It's all a plot, a conspiracy to ruin me!
But he would be shouting at the deaf. The only ones listening were on the other end of the bugs in his offices, maybe even here in his personal car.
The thought made him hunger for fresh air.
"Pull over," he told Pera.
He got out at the corner of East Eighty-fifth. He saw Pera looking nervously about. He was spooked. Vuk and Ivo this morning… who would be next?
"Wait here," he said, and began to walk east.
He had decided to take the matter into his own hands. If he could not trust his men, his phones, his offices, his cars, that left him with one resource: himself. He would track down his tormentors and personally dispose of them. It was the only means left to him to salvage his honor.
But he possessed only one hard fact about his enemy: the first call from the so-called East Hampton Environmental Protection Committee had come from a phone on the corner of East Eighty-seventh Street and Third Avenue. That was it. The rest—the man in the car in the security video, for instance—was all speculation.