She picked up the hotel telephone and made a quick call to the front desk. As she waited, she looked once again at the map, and noticed for the first time that one of the edges was slightly frayed. She raised an eyebrow as she took a closer took, but then someone answered the phone.
“Reception.”
“This is Room 76 calling,” she said quietly. “I wonder if you could please give me the address of a reliable bank. I need to put something in a safety deposit box.”
“You are quite welcome to use the safe in your room. They are perfectly substantial for most valuables.”
“This isn’t most valuables,” she said sharply. She had read about a steep rise in the number of professional and opportunist burglaries in Berlin apartments and hotel rooms. This wasn’t the time to test the accuracy of that particular journalism.
“I see, please wait.”
She looked at the ceiling and took a deep breath. Why was she doing this? Maybe it was time to leave it all behind. Just walk away and settle down, maybe with a guy like Joe Hawke — or then again…
“Madam?”
“Yes, go ahead.”
“Forgive the delay, but not all banks in Berlin allow access to a safety deposit box unless you are an account holder. The nearest bank is a Deutsche Bank which is on the same street as this hotel, or you could try the Berliner Bank a little further along. I believe they might be able to assist you.”
“Thank you.” She hung up, and looked at her cell phone, sitting innocuously on the hotel desk beside the window. She could just call him, she thought.
Hi Joe, it’s Lexi — back from the dead.
No, not right now. She had business to attend to.
She pursed her lips and pulled another cigarette out of the packet. She hated German cigarettes but they were all the local store had left. She stared at the little warning on the packet as she struck the match and held the tiny flame under the tip of the cigarette, igniting the tobacco shreds — Rauchen kann tödlich sein — smoking can be deadly. So can a lot of things, she thought, as she blew out the match and stepped back out to the balcony.
So can a lot of things.
Including me.
When she’d finished smoking, she put the map in her bag and slid her gun inside her jacket. Cigarettes in the pocket, and the door clicked shut behind her as she moved along the silent corridor toward the elevators.
CHAPTER THREE
Nightingale opened her eyes, but saw only darkness. Where am I? She breathed faster as she struggled to make sense of her new world. The man who had dragged her from the wardrobe had put a black sack over her head, and gagged her with what felt like a long piece of rough cloth.
The mere thought of him made her feel sick with fear.
She remembered him now. The feel of his heavy hands as he grabbed her head and shoulder and wrenched her from her hiding place. The smell of him as he hauled her into the light — cheap vodka and coffee. The sound of his foreign curses as he stumbled over her wheelchair and kicked it across the room in a fit of incandescent, animal rage.
The CIA was a long time ago, but she’d focused and recalled her training. Stay calm, assess the situation, don’t aggravate the hostage taker. More than that, she tried to stay positive and thought about her rescue… but no one knew where she was apart from the one person she trusted more than anyone else, and his name was Joe Hawke. Had he got her message?
Her terrified mind went over that night yet again. The second her CCTV cameras were shut off she had known something was wrong, and immediately grabbed her cell phone. A second later she heard her door being kicked down. Without thinking about what to do, she tipped herself up in her wheel chair and crashed to the ground.
Then, she had heard the man in the hall, searching for her.
She dragged herself across the floor, dragging the weight of her dead legs behind her with all her might, knowing she could have only seconds to live. She crawled into the wardrobe in her bedroom and texted Hawke. “Someone’s in my apartment. I’m hiding in my wardrobe. They’re trying to kill me. Help.”
And then she saw the man boot his way into her bedroom, kicking the door away like it was balsa wood. She watched him through the slits in the Venetian door of her wardrobe as he stalked into the small room. His tight, lean chest heaved up and down as he breathed in fast. He was alert and pumped with adrenalin.
Then he saw the hiding place.
She knew what she had to do. She flicked her phone to camera mode and began taking pictures through the slits. The man drew a long kitchen knife — one of hers — and she thought it was all over. She attached the image to the text and sent it to Hawke.
The man wrenched the door open and slapped the camera from her hand before dragging her out into the room by her hair. She screamed and tried to fight back but it was useless. Then she saw him pull back his right arm and make a fist. It reminded her of a coiled spring.
He punched her, and her world ended.
Now she winced at the pain from the punch, but at least she was alive. How long she had been unconscious for was a mystery, but it was possible she had been drugged. She thought she could hear someone moving around in the room and then she heard a second man enter. They spoke in rapid Russian for a few seconds and then someone spoke to her in heavily accented English.
“Tell me about Joe Hawke,” the voice said.
She recognized the accent as southern Russian. “I…where am I?”
A hard slap across her face came from out of nowhere and nearly knocked her out of the chair. She gasped for air and tried to stop the dizziness which was now making her head spin. There followed a few seconds of ominous silence and her mind buzzed with thoughts of why this was happening to her, and what she could do to protect herself.
The man sighed. “I ask the questions. I want to know about Joe Hawke, the British Special Forces man. Tell me about him, or you get another slap.”
In her new world of darkness, the panic began to rise like waves on an icy black sea. She tried to calm herself, but she had been out of the field for so long that dealing with situations like this wasn’t easy — and she knew she could never run from this nightmare. In the background, she heard more men speaking in rapid Russian, but her lack of training in the language reduced it to incomprehensible noise. How many were now in the room with her — watching her, listening to her panicked breathing?
“I don’t really know Joe Hawke, he was…”
Another slap, this time from the other direction, and much harder. This one knocked her from the chair and she crashed onto the ground. It felt like cold concrete. For a few short moments she thought she was going to throw up in the sack, but she fought hard to control the nausea and bring her hyperventilation once again under some kind of control.
“We’re not going to start with lies,” the voice said. It was harder this time, but lower — almost a hoarse whisper. “We know you have a long history with the Englishman. Tell us about that history.”
Without any warning, she felt two huge hands grab her by the shoulders and haul her back onto the chair. There was a lot of power in that grip, she considered. It was easy to imagine them squeezing her tighter and shattering her shoulder bones. Then she heard some kind of duct tape being pulled from a roll. Seconds later someone was taping her wrists and ankles to the chair. “This way, I don’t have to pick you up when I hit you next time. Now, tell me about Joe Hawke.”
Nightingale’s mind raced with so many emotions — fear, panic, rage — concern for Hawke — terror for herself. She had no idea where she was in the world, no idea who the men in the room were, or what they wanted with Hawke. She knew she had to play for time at the very least, so she had to tell them what they wanted to hear. She also knew she had to tell them the truth because she had no idea what they already knew. All of this, she considered, could be a test to gauge her reliability.