“Not yet,” Orlando said.
“Can I at least hurt him?”
“Be my guest.”
The smaller man smirked. “You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed—” He screamed as a bullet from Ananke’s gun tore through his knee.
“Jesus!” Rachett said.
Orlando locked eyes with him. “Where is she?”
“She’s downstairs!”
“She’s here?” Orlando asked, surprised.
“Yeah. In the playroom.”
“Playroom?”
“It’s-it’s in the basement.”
“Show us.”
While Daeng tied a tourniquet around the shorter man’s leg, Orlando used a portion of the sedative on the man they hadn’t shot. There was no need to waste any on the injured man, as he’d already passed out.
Rachett led Orlando, Daeng, and Ananke to a service elevator behind the stage.
As they traveled down, Orlando said, “How many more men?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
She tapped her gun against his back. “Try again.”
“I’m not sure. At least two, and maybe as many as four.”
When the elevator stopped, the doors opened onto a fairly large room that contained a few pallets of building materials but was otherwise empty.
“Which way?” Orlando asked.
“To the left. There’s a hall. She’s in the last room.”
“The playroom.”
He hesitated and then nodded.
“Are the men with her?”
“How should I know?”
Putting him in front, Orlando held on to his belt loop, her gun still pressed against his back.
As they neared the end of the hallway, a man stepped out of the second-to-last room. “Hey, I was—”
The moment he realized they weren’t his colleagues, he dived back inside.
“Mine,” Ananke said, passing Orlando.
She went low into the room, firing, and returned less than fifteen seconds later.
“Three,” she said. “They won’t bother us.”
The last door had a pictogram on it, depicting a pair of feminine eyes and a seductive smile.
“This is it?” Orlando asked.
“Yes,” Rachett replied.
“Open it.”
The man did as ordered.
Using him as a shield, Orlando scanned the space as they moved in. The playroom was a sexual dungeon, with all manner of contraptions scattered throughout the room, and designed to have multiple guests at the same time. She suddenly realized what kind of movies was shown in the theater upstairs and almost shivered at the thought. Rachett’s private sex club, where he no doubt played the welcoming host while using his guests’ sexual predilections to further his business interests.
Helen was tied to a chair with a bag over her head. No one else was present.
Orlando’s client was only semiconscious when Orlando pulled the bag off her head.
“Hey, wake up.” Orlando gently tapped Helen’s cheeks.
A blink.
“Helen, it’s Orlando.”
Helen slowly turned to her. “Orlando? What…what are you doing…here?”
“Getting you out.” Orlando cut the bindings loose. “Do you think you can stand?”
“Um, I think so.”
Orlando helped her to her feet and held on to her as Helen took a few tentative steps, gaining more confidence with each one.
“Where are we?” Helen asked.
“Los Angeles.”
“How long?”
“You were taken two nights ago.”
As they passed Rachett and Ananke, the man glared at Orlando. “I won’t forget any of this, especially you. I’d watch your back from now on.”
“Daeng,” Orlando called.
Her friend stuck his head into the room.
“Can you take Helen for a moment?” she asked.
Once Daeng had collected the director and escorted her out of the playroom, Orlando stepped over to Rachett.
“I’m afraid you misunderstand your situation. Your life is over. That woman is not some low-level bureaucrat you can crush. She has resources available to her that you can only dream about. You might be thinking that you have friends in some pretty high places that can keep her down, but you’d be wrong. She will pay you back for your part in this. And when she does, you’re going to wish my friend here had killed you already, because at least then you might have had a nice funeral.”
With Ananke’s help, Orlando used the last of the sedative on Rachett, tied him to the chair Helen had been in, pulled the bag over his head, and left.
Having nearly been thwarted in Chicago and then finding the homing beacon on the girl had put Orbits on edge. Before leaving the building in Chicago, his intention had been to hire a plane to take them to Topeka, Kansas — the closest airport to the girl’s GPS coordinates. But as he was reminded after his flight from Spokane, planes could easily be tracked. Now that they’d lost their tail, staying on the road felt like the better option. Besides, Topeka was only eight hours away by car, which meant they could get there not long after midnight.
After tossing the girl’s shoes out the window, he’d stayed in the front passenger seat, staring at the road. It took a while, but around an hour southwest of Chicago, he finally started to relax, his mood helped by the auction heating up. For a while, Donnie called him with updates every five minutes or so, but as the bids began coming in faster and faster, Orbits decided to keep him on the line.
At one point there had been seven participants, but when the price continued to soar, two had fallen by the wayside. Those who remained were playing a feverish game of who would be last on top.
“New bid,” Donnie said, his voice coming through Orbits’s headset. “Fifteen million seven hundred and fifty thousand. That’s a three-million-dollar jump.”
“Who made it?”
“C.”
To participate in the auction, bidders had had to deposit five million in special accounts Donnie had set up. Once this occurred, they were assigned a letter to “maintain anonymity.” In reality, Donnie had collected the information on where each deposit had been transferred from, and already had automated bots working to uncover identities.
Bidder C had entered the auction when the price was sitting at five million. C had made a few incremental bids since then, but this was by far his or her largest jump.
If all stayed to pattern, bidder E would up the ante next, and then the remaining three — A, F, and G — would fight it out over who followed.
The delay seemed unusually long, and Orbits began to think that 15.75 million was going to be the final price. Not that he would complain.
“New bid,” Donnie said. “Sixteen even. Bidder A.”
A? Had they just lost another bidder?
“New bid. Sixteen one. G.” Donnie barely had time to take a breath before saying, “New bid. Seventeen. E.”
Apparently E was still in.
“Damn, Donnie,” Orbits said. “We’re going to hit twenty yet!”
Quinn and Nate could hear only half of the conversation, but it was enough to confirm that those in the ambulance were indeed the ones conducting the auction. Not only that, it sounded like the person in charge was in the vehicle.
Quinn looked at his watch. They’d been on the road for an hour and a half. Not for the first time he wondered where the ambulance was going. They weren’t randomly heading southwest, he was sure of that. If they’d just been trying to get lost, they would have stuck to the city.
No, they had a destination in mind. He wished one of them would say where it was.
“Address confirmed. Texting it to you now.”
“Thank you,” The Wolf said, and hung up.
CHAPTER 33