Dark of Night (58 page)

When he let the water drip from his hair and face, and he opened his eyes, there were still only four of them. And he wished that they hadn't taken his cell phone out of his pocket, so that he could call Decker and say,
You know how I'm always bitching about all you SEALs and former SEALs? Well, I apologize. Because you and Sam and Tom and Cosmo could absolutely make yourselves useful. You could kick down the door of this crappily built house in a heartbeat, and get me the hell out of here.

He'd seen and heard only four men, holding him here. The same four men. Which didn't mean there weren't more outside.

Although, he'd spent quite some time listening to the sound of footfalls overhead, to the water running through the pipes, to the toilet flushes—and he would've bet the bank that these four were it.

And the one in charge—the older, paunchy man—was losing the confidence of the others. Dave had made note, right away, of the fact that the guy with the glasses was positively spooked.

It was just a matter of time before he made some excuse—gotta pick up a pizza or run to the drugstore—and vanished into the night.

Or day. It was hard to tell down here exactly what time it was.

But regardless of the movement of the earth and the position of the sun and the stars in the sky, whenever the whole gang joined Dave here in the basement, it was time for only one thing.

A little game called
No Way, No How.
His opponents, sadly, still believed it was called
Everyone Has a Limit—Let's Find Dave's.
They'd yet to comprehend that his was death.

It always started the same way. With a little friendly conversation. With an invitation to sit like a person in a chair.

Well, not quite like a person, since his hands were cuffed behind his back, and it was getting harder and harder—as he became more and more ill—to do much of anything besides lie on the floor.

So as Paunchy watched, Glasses, ugly guy, and the sadistic dreamboat manhandled him up, wrenching his elbows so that his cuffed hands went behind the back of the chair, so that his arms held him there, in place. Humiliating and painful, but effective.

“How are you doing, Dave? Are you ready to talk to us?”

“I'm doing just great, thanks, but my throat's a little sore so I should probably save my voice. How are you?”

“We're doing much better now that we have Sophia.”

Words to make his blood pressure rise. But he knew if they had her, they would show, not tell. “Sophia. Sophia. I don't think I know a Sophia. But I do know a
lot
of Navy SEALs, and they are going to track you down and kill you. In the middle of the night. You know, you can go high-tech, you can go guards—” He aimed his words at the guy with glasses, because he knew the threat was freaking him out.

“Shall we bring Sophia down here?”

“—but it doesn't matter, because they're like phantoms. They'll get into your bedroom and you won't even wake up. Well, not until your throat's slit and you're—”

This was where he usually got slapped, hard enough to rattle his fever-riddled brain, and sure enough, he wasn't disappointed.

But he kept going, “—bleeding out.”

“Just fucking kill him!” Glasses was losing it.

“You're going to give us what we want to know, sooner or later, Dave. So just tell me, where's James Nash?”

Silence also worked, since Dave's goal was to run Glasses off, not get another knife in the gut. Because the stab wound he already had was plenty bad enough, thanks.

“This all ends, Dave, right here, right now. All you have to do is tell me where he is.”

“Is that supposed to be a philosophical question? Because everyone knows that James Nash is dead. I don't believe in hell, and even if I'm wrong, he was a good man, so I'm sure he wouldn't go there, so … I'm going to go with … he's in an urn on his girlfriend's fireplace mantel.”

That got him a punch from Sadistic McDreamy, right where his bandage was—assuming his bandage had stayed on through the last round of waterboarding. It was impossible to check with his hands cuffed they way they were, even when he was left alone down here.

This time the pain from the blow didn't just make his eyes water, it made the world dance and spark and sputter and fade and …

Sophia was there—right at the edge of his vision.

“Shh. Be quiet,” she said, smiling in that way that she had that always telegraphed her secret plan to get him naked, ASAP. He didn't have the heart to tell her that her plan was never much of a secret due to that smile. She held out her hand. “Come on.”

“I can't,” he said. “I'm a little tied up at the moment. Bah-dump bump.”

“No,” she said. “Come on. Come
on,
Dave. But, shh! Be quiet.”

He reached for her hand, but she shimmered and vanished, and he realized he was back on the floor, alone in the basement. He was soaking wet and shivering from the cold—they must've waterboarded him again, but he remembered none of it.

Which kind of defeated the purpose. He was supposed to fear it, and talk to keep them from doing it again.

Dawn was leaking in a strip of window that was too small for him to squeeze through, even without his hands and feet bound, without him being tethered to a workbench that was built into the wall and extremely solid. And he knew it was the sunlight that had caught his eye and made him imagine Sophia.

And yet her voice whispered in his ear.
Come on. Come on, Dave. …

And he realized they'd cuffed his hands in front of him to lay him back on that bench, and they'd failed to switch the cuffs around after they were done—no doubt assuming he was too weak, too ill, too broken to be much of a threat.

They'd still tethered him, tying a rope from his feet to that workbench they used, along with copious amounts of water, to persuade him to talk.

With his hands in front he could untie that rope, but his feet were locked together with plastic bands that he'd need a knife to cut through.

He couldn't get his eyes to focus quite right, and his hands were numb, his fingers thick and useless. Still, he was alive. He was breathing. And he wanted, more than anything on earth, to see Sophia again.

He wanted to meet little Marianne.

So he grit his teeth and he set to work.

Sophia's phone rang in the parking lot.

She'd set it on silent, but it was in her pocket so she felt it vibrate. She pulled it out and—

Decker nearly tripped over her. “Don't stop moving—”

“I'm getting a call from Dave's cell phone,” she told him.

He pulled her back over to the building, where Sam was locking the place up. He held a finger to his lips and gave Sam the hand signal for
go.
Sam understood exactly what was happening and gave the international signal for
call me
as he nodded and hurried to the vehicles, even as Sophia pushed
talk.

“Dave?” she asked, knowing it wasn't him, it couldn't be, as she pushed the speaker button so that Decker could hear, too.

But they'd tried, with the e-mail they'd sent, to make Sophia sound like she was in completely over her head, and out of her league.

“No,” said a male voice. “And I'm not with Dave, so your friends shouldn't bother tracing this call. And even if they do? I'm on the move and I'm keeping this short. They won't find me, and Dave will die. One phone call from me, and he's dead, do you understand?”

And okay, she
was
in completely over her head. Her hands were shaking as she looked at Decker, who was the embodiment of steadiness and calm. He nodded encouragement and mouthed the words
proof of life.

“Yes,” she said, and she didn't have to force the wobble in her voice. “I understand. But I need to talk to him. To make sure he's all right.”

“He's not all right,” the man said. “And he'll be less all right if you continue with this bullshit attempt to negotiate. We have him, you want him. You'll do what we say and you'll do it now or he's dead. You stall or argue, he's dead. You tell
anyone
about this phone call, he's dead. You say anything to me but
Yes, I understand,
he's dead. Do you understand?”

Sophia couldn't help it, she started to cry. “Yes, I understand.”

“You make an excuse, and you leave—by yourself,” the man said. “We know where you are, we're watching. Anyone other than you gets into your car, Dave is dead. Anyone leaves the building after you, Dave is dead. We're monitoring calls, both from your cell phone and from the Trouble -shooters office. Anyone makes a call about this, Dave is dead. Your friends are going to tell you that I'm bluffing, that we don't have the technology to do that, but we do. The choice of whom to believe is yours, but if you believe
them?
Dave is dead.”

Decker nodded his encouragement, and through a tight throat and frozen lips, Sophia managed to say the words, “Yes, I understand.”

“Winston Park,” the man said. “Drive completely around the park— make a full circuit before you pull over and park on Barrett Boulevard. There's a webcam near the fountain. When we see you, we'll call with further instructions. You have ten minutes to get there.”

“Ten minutes!” Sophia said. “I mean,
yes, I understand,
but—”

The connection had been cut.

“We can do this,” Decker said, despite the fact that Winston Park was in the dead opposite direction from the place they believed Dave was being held. But he was already unlocking the front door, his sat phone to his ear as he called Tess.

“Get moving,” he said into his phone. “We've been contacted by the kidnappers. I've got Sophia—we'll catch up. We're shutting down the
bogus signal to the security cameras. No one should come back until this is over, or until they contact me—spread the word—but first tell me how the hell to do this.”

After Tess climbed in, Lindsey pulled the surveillance van away from the curb.

“Wait,” Tracy said. “Where's Sophia?”

And Deck? Where was Deck? She was counting on getting at least another glimpse of him as he delivered Sophia to the van. She wanted to look into his eyes and see if she'd been hallucinating when she'd seen him say what she thought he'd said.

She didn't even dare to think it—that he might actually love her, too. True, he'd made clear his intention. She knew without a doubt that after this was over, after Dave was safe, she and Decker were going to spend a significant amount of time locked, alone, in her apartment.

She was guessing it would be several days, at first. Then, he'd come home with her every night after work, when he wasn't OCONUS. And after a few weeks had passed, after the sense of urgency wasn't quite so fierce, they'd fall into a comfortable pattern where he'd visit a few times a week and maybe stay over on the weekend.

Tracy had been ready for that. She'd been willing and even content with the idea that her relationship with this incredible man would last only as long as it lasted. She'd resigned herself to the fact that, having completely fallen for him, she
was
going to end up hurt.

But that was far into the future—far enough to push away, out of sight and out of mind.

But then he'd gone and said what he'd said—maybe. He might've been saying
I love zoos.
Or
I love shoes.
Or
I lurk, too.
But her twisted sense of perception had seen it as the big proclamation with
love
as the verb, and now she was filled with the kind of wanting that could, way too quickly, turn desperate and unattractive and painfully needy.

And, if she weren't careful, everything she said or did would telegraph her single-minded goal, which was
please, please, please love me forever.

So she swallowed her question
—Where's Decker?—
aware that Jo Heissman was sitting quietly behind her, and instead asked Lindsey, “What's going on?”

Lindsey and Tess were both talking on their sat phones.

“ Uh-huh,” Lindsey said as she drove. Tracy couldn't keep herself from turning in her seat to watch out the rear window as they left TS HQ behind.

“The program is running on a laptop that I've hooked into the main system,” Tess was saying. “It's on my desk, in my office.”

“ Uh-huh,” Lindsey said again. “Roger that, ma'am. We're on the move.” She looked at both Tracy and Jo in the rearview. “Alyssa said that Deck said to get moving. Sophia's been contacted by the kidnappers. They're dealing with that.”

“
Dealing?”
Tracy asked. “How exactly are they
dealing?”

Decker couldn't get the fucking computer to work.

He had Tess on the phone, on speaker so Sophia could hear her, too, and she was saying something about the system parameters and how her laptop was connected to the main computer and, Jesus, time was running out.

He interrupted her. “If I simply pull the plug—if I disconnect your laptop from the main system—will that do the trick?”

“Well, yes, but you're not going to get it up and running again by—”

“If I don't go out there, right now,” Sophia spoke over Tess, “if they don't see me on that camera, in the parking lot? They're going to kill Dave.” She grabbed and pulled before Decker could stop her.

“Wait,” he said, but it was too late.

“Oh, no.” She immediately realized her mistake. She should have let Deck go out first, so he could hide in her car. “Oh,
shit.”

“Tess, I gotta go.” Deck hung up his phone. “Okay,” he told Sophia as he hustled her to the door. “It's okay. The north side of this building has a blind spot between two cameras.” She knew this—they'd all helped design the security system here at the Troubleshooters office. They'd put in a blind spot for this very reason—as an alternative escape route. “I'll go out the conference room window.”

“Those windows don't open,” she told him.

“Every window,” Decker said, “opens. Go—take a left out of the drive, pull over in front of the hydrant. I'll meet you out there.”

She nodded and pushed open the door.

“Soph,” he said, and she turned back. “Wait there for me. I'm right behind you. Do
not
leave without me, do you understand?”