It had been over an hour since they’d taken Ryan, and in that time, she had heard nothing but the drumbeat of her own heart pounding in her ears. Her mind conjured awful things that could be going on, and the imagined images triggered panic. The kind of panic that clouds your thinking and makes you do stupid things.
She wanted to scream, to call out to him. The warnings from the guards made the difference. They demanded silence. Hadn’t she already brought enough harm to her family?
What could they be doing to him?
She took a huge breath and tried to settle herself. The panicky thoughts were counterproductive. She was powerless to affect the outcome of this nightmare. What would happen would happen.
If she told herself that often enough, maybe it would bring solace.
For now, all it brought was more fear.
They had her son.
After easily ninety minutes of isolation, she heard movement of the lock again. This time, when the door crashed open, she had been anticipating it, and was able not to yell out in fear. The team of gunmen streamed in as before, guns at the ready, all of them trained on her. As four of them stopped six feet away, the fifth one-the man with the threatening eyes-approached another two steps, stopping only when he was face-to-face with Christyne.
“Where is Ryan?” she asked.
“Put your hands behind your back and turn to face the wall.”
“Please,” she begged. “Is he okay?”
“If you make me hurt you, I will,” the gunman said.
Christyne turned and faced the wall, crossing her wrists behind her back as she had seen Ryan do. The plastic loop closed over her wrists tightly enough to restrain her arms, but not tightly enough to hurt. Yet. A moment later, a hood was placed over her head, but to her surprise, it had a mesh front that allowed her to see. Not well, but enough.
“Walk to the door,” the gunman commanded.
The line of gunmen parted to allow her to pass, and as she did, they curled in around her to follow. The air approaching the door was easily twenty degrees cooler than the air inside the cell. She nearly asked where they were going, but then decided not to. They would tell her what they wanted her to know when they wanted her to know it.
Ryan was kneeling on the floor immediately outside the room, facing her, surrounded by at least a dozen of the black-clad gunmen, all of whose faces were covered by masks. Ryan’s hood had been removed. She could see the desperation in his eyes. His left eye and cheek were swollen and purple. The healthy eye showed an emotion she didn’t quite recognize from him. It was as if something inside him had been rewired.
Once she’d been allowed to see, the gunmen slipped the hood back over Ryan’s face.
Behind her, the man who’d been doing all the talking said, “It’s time now to atone for your sins.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Back in Fisherman’s Cove, Jonathan sat at his desk, with the fickle yet adoring JoeDog sleeping flatulently at his feet.
No matter how much he tried to avoid the soul-stealing administrivia that came with running a company, investigative findings had to be reviewed and approved, checks needed to be signed, and the occasional mega-client needed to be stroked. Most of the truly painful boredom was shared by his lead investigator, Gail Bonneville, and his office manager and technology guru, Venice Alexander. (It’s pronounced Ven-EE-chay, by the way, and she was known to lose patience with people who blew it more than once.) Even with layers of middle management in place, though, the boss was still the boss, and only so much could be delegated.
On the far wall, Fox News was running with coverage of the jihadist attacks that threatened to “paralyze America.” Some outfit that called itself the Army of Allah had released a video of a mother and her half-naked teenage son cowering at the feet of black-clad gunmen. The mother recited a prepared text-a rant about godless heathens and the inevitability of Islam’s rule, blah, blah, blah. While they spoke, an Arab translation crawled along the bottom of the screen.
The Army of Allah took responsibility for both the mall and bridge shooting incidents, plus the school bombing this morning. They promised that more violence was on the way. The shootings would continue, in fact, until the United States withdrew from virtually every geopolitical stance it had taken in the last seven decades.
Jonathan knew that the hostages were destined to die, if in fact they hadn’t already been killed. In his experience, impossible demands translated to a simple desire to kill. They were photo ops, really, designed to create iconic images of violence that would raise the stakes on terror, and the Army of Allah was doing a hell of a job so far. For the Wilson Bridge Massacre-that seemed to be the sensational moniker with the most legs-that image was the photograph of two ravaged and bloody child seats side by side in the back of a family sedan.
Between the various tableaus of carnage, the talking-head shows ran a loop of experts who seemed united in the belief that Islamist sleeper cells had been activated, and that their existence was evidence that our decade-plus of war had failed to protect us.
One day, Jonathan thought, he’d like to become a talking head so he could go on television and tell all those assholes to shut up.
In fact, he made them do exactly that with the mute button. He had paperwork to do, after all.
His intercom beeped. “Digger, I’m sorry to bother you, but there’s something in the lobby you need to attend to.” It was Venice Alexander.
“What brand of something?” he asked. Not that it mattered. He’d help polish the furniture if it would rescue him from this tedium.
“A visitor. An Army colonel named Rollins.” She spelled it. “He says it’s an urgent matter.”
Spelling the name was hardly necessary. There were few people drawing breath whom he loathed more than Roleplay Rollins. “What does he want?”
“He won’t say.” She softened her voice. “But he seems very agitated.”
Jonathan thought about telling him to pound sand and disappear, but his curiosity was piqued. “Bring him back to the office, please.”
“Into the cave?” Venice gasped. It was the corporate term for their highly secure executive suites, and no one from outside the company was ever invited back here. Precious few from inside the company were ever invited back here.
“Escort him every step and make sure that Rick searches him for weapons. Be sure he finds the one on his ankle.”
Three minutes later, Venice knocked on the door and opened it without waiting. At five-four, with chocolate-brown skin and a flawless complexion, Venice Alexander looked nothing like the computer genius she was. Her face showed utter confusion as she ushered in a graying man in jeans and a polo shirt, whose hair hung nearly to his shoulders, and whose beard made him look like a street panhandler. To those who knew what to look for, he looked exactly like the Delta Force operator that he was.
“Hello, Roleplay,” Jonathan said, leaning his butt against the front of his massive desk. Part of the reason for bringing the son of a bitch back here was to let him see just how little his Machiavellian games had affected Jonathan in the long term. JoeDog’s tail stopped wagging when she heard the tone in her master’s voice.
The visitor shuffled his feet. He clearly knew he was not welcome, and would rather be anywhere else in the world. “Not many call me that anymore,” he said.
“Not many people know your true nature anymore,” Jonathan countered. Rollins’s real first name was Stanley, but in the Unit, everybody got a nickname. The colonel preferred Iceman, and that stuck for a while until he advanced through the ranks and started to put his own career in front of the men he commanded. That was when Jonathan hit on the alliterative Roleplay Rollins, and it stuck like Krazy Glue.
“Are you going to invite me to sit down?” the colonel asked.
“Only if you promise to leave soon.”
Venice got squirmy. “I’m going to leave you two alone.”
Jonathan stepped forward, beckoning her closer. “No, no, no. I want you here. When you’re dealing with Roleplay, witnesses are never a bad thing.”