A mini-fridge in the corner caught his eye.
When was the last time he’d had anything to drink?
There wasn’t a lot of time to get out of the building. “Where am I?”
His hostage replied, “This is the Secretary’s office.”
“What building?”
The stranger squinted through piercing blue eyes, surprise creeping in at his attacker’s obvious confusion. “The Pentagon.”
“The Pentagon!” Ben’s eyes flashed anger. “What the hell am I doing at the Pentagon?”
His prisoner shrugged as though the question had nothing to do with him. “I have no idea.”
Ben looked around the room, searching for a way out. He wore an expression of mulish obstinacy. His focus was shifting fractionally in and out, his brows rising and falling a little, the shape of his mouth always changing, as if he was constantly thinking. As if there was a computer behind his eyes, running at full speed.
“I need to get out of here!”
“That might be difficult,” his hostage pointed out pragmatically. “We’re near the center of the Pentagon. Already, there must be a dozen soldiers swarming toward this office. The building’s going to be on lockdown. No one’s getting in or out.”
Ben smiled sardonically. “Then we’d better move quickly. Because if I die, you die.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, what?”
“Let’s both try and get out of here alive.”
“That sounds good to me,” Ben replied.
Ben held his breath, still trying to determine his next move.
“You want to tell me what’s going on?” the hostage asked, his voice calm, almost insouciant.
It was the man with the Glock pressed against his face, asking as if he had all the time in the world to sort this out — he was just curious.
Ben knew the guy was just trying to defuse the situation, but he chose to take it as an actual question.
Maybe somebody would care.
“I came in to donate blood for a buddy who had been in a motorcycle accident, and now I’m a terrorist, apparently. They needed to do some ‘tests’ and all of a sudden I’m knocked out and shipped to the Pentagon. I asked for a lawyer, and they laughed at me and told me terrorists don’t have rights.”
Ben snapped his eyes back onto his hostage. The pawn he’d just captured was staring at him, looking him up and down. Finally, his gaze fastened onto Ben’s eyes.
It felt like an intrusion. Ben gritted his teeth. “Don’t get any ideas about being a hero.”
“Okay.”
“I have fast reflexes. Always have. And I have the gun. So just don’t.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t actually want to have to kill anyone. I’m sorry I dragged you into this, and I promise to do my best to make sure we both make it out of this unhurt. I’m not a terrorist. I was born less than five miles from here, and I’ve lived here my entire life. But if you try to screw me over, I’ll kill you without a second thought.”
“Okay.”
A loud, dull WHACK of a battering ram reverberated through the reinforced door.
Ben screamed, “Do that again I’ll shoot your friend in the goddamned head.”
His captive remained silent.
Ben said, “You best believe I mean it.”
The man shrugged. “I believe you.”
The banging stopped.
He and the hostage turned toward each other again. Ben took a moment to look the guy over a little more thoroughly. He had brown, wavy hair in a short haircut that made the guy come across as a slightly modernized Christopher Reeve. Handsome, blue eyes, wry grin. He seemed almost unnaturally calm.
Ben’s mind was racing, trying to think of the next thing. The next step. The phone started ringing, and he was tempted to rip the cord out and toss it. Just what he didn’t need but had to expect.
“I need to get out of here,” he said, trying to focus himself despite the noise.
His hostage said, “Okay.”
“Okay, what?” Ben asked. It seemed like that was the only answer the guy would give unless he was asked a direct question.
“Okay…you have the gun, and you have it pointed at my chest.” The man still spoke calmly. His speech was at a normal speed or maybe a little slower, just to be clear. His face hadn’t turned red with a raised blood pressure, and he didn’t look like he was even breathing faster.
Damn, the man could fake being calm.
The hostage said, “I was about to go on vacation, and now my life is in your hands.”
“Nothing but bad luck,” Ben said.
The stranger flashed him a wry, one-sided smile.
“I’m sorry you were at the wrong place at the wrong time,” Ben added. “Twenty-four hours ago, a friend of mine was in a serious motorcycle accident.”
“You mentioned that.”
“Yeah. The docs said that the hospital’s supply of his blood type was dangerously low. They thought they had enough, but then they gave me that puppy-dog look, you know, and I thought, hell, why not? I told him I would do anything I could to help. I expected to get dumped in a recliner with a magazine for ten minutes, then handed a glass of OJ and a donut.”
“Sure.”
“No. They took a sample of blood, walked off with it, and ten minutes later they were back for another sample of blood. That was not the total amount they needed, either. Just for ‘tests.’ I ask what’s going on, and they tell me they’re running a special test on my blood to make sure it won’t harm the person who receives it. Okay, I’ve never had that happen before, but fine — hospitals are always coming up with new ways to make life more difficult, right?”
The hostage nodded.
“This goes on for a while. More samples, more tests. Finally, I tell them that I’m done with it. I’m on my way out the door, ready or not. And not only do they try to stop me from going, but this cute blonde doc who’s been smiling and flirting with me the whole time sticks something in my shoulder to knock me out. Nobody will answer my questions, but they’re not talking about me being a terrorist, either.”
“Go on.”
“Then I wake up in another room, my wrists strapped to the arms of a chair while they take more blood samples. As if the first set of docs hadn’t taken enough. Fifteen minutes after I wake up, the big agent out in the hall tells me that I’m a terrorist, I have no rights, and by the way, my parents were terrorists, too, and my entire life is a lie constructed by my foster parents.”
Meanwhile, something in the back of Ben’s head had finally processed the situation. He was in the Pentagon, which was across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. proper. The entire area was a mishmash of nose-to-tail traffic. Trying to boost a car, or even a tank wasn’t going to get him very far before he was bogged down. And the Potomac wasn’t the kind of river on which you could just wave down a water taxi.
The answer to escaping was going to have to involve getting into the air. The Pentagon didn’t have a runway — he knew that much — they flew in and out on helicopters.
But a helicopter wasn’t going to take him as far as he needed to go.
If they were going to treat him like a terrorist, then he needed to get out of the country — fast. He had a passport at home, but that was the last place that he dared go at the moment. He’d have to hijack a plane up to Canada probably. And his best bet on that was to leverage his hostage into a helicopter ride from the Pentagon to Ronald Reagan Airport and to take a small jet or a plane straight north to Canada.
How angry would the Canadians be at him? Probably pretty angry. And they’d probably extradite him as soon as look at him. But it would be one more barrier between him and being thrown away forever in some hellhole prison.