“Are you alright, Sam?” she asked sincerely.
Sam knew Nina would pry until he came clean — and she could tell when he was bluffing or playing down the urgency of his toils. Exhaling lengthily, he confessed. “I’m just worried about my equipment… not working.”
Nina wore a stone face, not daring to comment on Sam’s equipment being alright in her opinion, but she was dying to jest. Without reading into her amusement at the pun, he carried on, “Long story short, my equipment was left in my abandoned car in Barking the other night.”
“Aye?” she nodded, waiting for the rest.
“And let’s just say I left it after a heated disagreement with a bunch of immigrants living there,” he continued. Sam lifted his perfectly intact DSLR and examined it, rotating the thing to all angles of scrutiny. “Yet, none of my cameras suffered for it. Nothing seems to be damaged, broken, or stolen, Nina. How fucking weird is that?”
Nina shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t know there was stuff in your boot?”
“They knew,” he insisted a little loudly before Nina even finished her sentence. “They knew. They took time to slash my tires and fuck up my upholstery and smash all the windows, Nina. You mean to tell me they would not have bothered with the boot?”
He leered at the dark-eyed beauty as she mulled it over in her mind. Nina looked at Sam in conclusion, the tip of her tongue playing inside the wall of her cheek. “I get what you mean. Why would they not tamper or destroy your belongings? Best be grateful and let it go, maybe? Why? What else do you think could be wrong with the gear, Sam? There it is, in your hands. No problem, right?”
“I just don’t trust it.” He sighed. “Besides, I have to transfer the footage to my MotionCap program to edit it all into a proper report. No need to fret over a lucky break, right?”
“I agree. After I’ve had my Irish Coffee, I’ll leave you to your work,” she said. “After all, I only came by to make sure you weren’t dead.” Nina smiled and winked, forcing Sam to return the gesture.
“Many thanks, Dr. Gould,” he smirked, whipping out the whisky and two dusty glasses for the promised drink. A puff of hard breath made for a cheap eradication of dust from the glasses and he set them down on the counter, feeling quite a measure lighter after discussing the matter of the video equipment with Nina. She could see that the hyperactive Sam was rushing to get to the footage like a teenager charging a cell phone after a night of rock concert selfies.
“You know,” she said, leaning against him, “I would be happy to finish making these if you are in a hurry to start working over there.”
Sam’s face swung towards her, looking decidedly cheered. “You wouldn’t mind?”
Nina smiled and shook her head. “Nah, go on. I’ll bring the drinks.”
Sam grabbed her hard and thrust her body against his. He planted a solid kiss on her thick, soft lips and let go so suddenly that it sent her reeling. Not a moment later, he had disappeared into the dark hallway and she could hear the sound of clanking equipment and jacks sliding into line-in ports.
Vaguely, as Nina carefully poured the cream over the back of a teaspoon to form the frothy crown on the black coffee, she could hear sound coming from the computer. It sounded like an address, a speech, by some important man about some important issue. Assuming Sam had engaged in an interview with one of the significant representatives of his assignment, Nina walked in with the two glasses of delectable Irish Coffee.
“I hope I got the sugar part right, since…,” she stopped talking instantly as she watched Sam’s face glaring at the screen, frozen in horror.
7
Cutting the Wrong Bait
“Sam?” Nina pressed carefully, her eyes momentarily regarding the dark-haired young man on the screen, looking nothing like some important bigwig she imagined. Softly she trod past Sam’s static frame and set his drink down on the desk without a word. Instead of throwing questions, the curious Nina elected to listen.
On the screen she saw a plainly dressed man in his thirties with hair much like Sam’s, unkempt and curly at the ends of its wild cut. But what disturbed Nina about his face was the lingering smirk that constantly threatened to emerge on his face while his black, hateful eyes pierced the camera. She disliked him immediately, but kept the fact to herself. After all, she had previously misjudged an Ethiopian military man by his look and conduct, and barely managed to remove her foot from her mouth when he turned out to prove her horribly wrong.
The man on the screen had a deep voice, his accent British, mostly, yet certain inflections on some words revealed a distinctly French flavor. The combination baffled the historian, since it was rather out of place on the image of what struck her as a Taliban rat. Sipping the strong punch of the coffee she had prepared, Nina listened to his strange monologue — not resembling at all an interview with Sam Cleave.
“…and you are quite pressed for time, Mr. Cleave. We know who you are. We know where to find you. I need not dwell on idle threats in any attempt to frighten you into cooperating, but we must impress upon you the gravity of our demand. Because I am a reasonable man, and we take into account that you were unaware during your intervention of the incident, we have decided to give you twenty-four hours to deliver the woman.”
Nina scowled heavily as her heart jumped. “What woman?”
“Shh!” Sam snapped at her, keeping his eyes firmly on the man as he concluded his message.
“I implore you to comply, Mr. Cleave. Do not force our hand. We have some footage of our own and it could be dispatched to the authorities with a raise of my right hand,” the man warned, his face still sickeningly confident as his voice remained even, dripping with cool authority. Nina held her breath and her pounding heart troubled her sense of comfort. In the shadows of the dark flat, her uncertain eyes rapidly dashed from the screen to Sam’s face with every stinging reprimand, but the journalist showed no signs of agitation, only focus.
“I urge you to deliver the woman and pretend that none of this ever happened, and we shall show the same courtesy. I am sure that we all wish for this entire matter — and its related…,” he hesitated, murmuring with his eyes to the floor for the first time, finding the right words, “misinformation, its associated misdemeanors, to be kept out of the limelight, eh?”
“Jesus,” Sam whispered, his hands forming a spire over his nose as he contemplated the man’s request.
“Do be assured, Mr. Cleave, that we have no desire to kill you, only to get back our… privacy,” he informed Sam, directly contradicting what Sam thought his message conveyed. “Keep to our appeal, and you will never hear from us again. I give you my word.”
“S-Sam?” Nina stuttered, hoping not to get hushed so rudely again.
From under his hands, he spoke. “Aye?”
“Who is that? And who is the woman he is talking about?” she asked, taking great care not to sound snoopy or pushy. “Anything I can help with?”
Sam just shook his head, “No.”
On the footage, the man held up a map of London, simply saying, “By Thursday, midnight, Mr. Cleave, bring her to All Hallows by the Tower. Our agents are everywhere, out of sight. Any deviation from our demand will result in an instant distribution of our footage. I trust that we have an agreement, Mr. Cleave.”
With a rough displacement of frame, accompanied by a crackling din that startled both Sam and Nina, the recording was terminated, leaving the remnants of Sam’s own footage of the riots to play out. Now, all that juicy bullshit seemed so insignificant to Sam, the petty coverage of a local riot about wages and service delivery against a small municipality. Burying his hands in his hair, he didn’t even care about the mammoth task of editing before his almost expired deadline anymore.