False Witness (40 page)

Stacie pulled a chair around and they talked about what those verses meant. David asked a lot of questions, and Stacie did her best to answer. After several minutes of discussion, and a long pause in the questions, she said softly, “It's time to surrender.”

“You really think God can accept me?” David asked. “I'm a con man. I can't even count how many lies I've told, how many people I've ripped off, not to mention the gunshot wounds and torture.”

“That's why they call it grace.”

He thought about this for a long time. He'd been around church some as a boy and had heard about the thief on the cross. Pastor Guptara in India had compared himself to the apostle Paul, one day beating up Christians, the next day becoming one of them. And now Stacie told David about Matthew, a tax collector and fellow con artist, whom Jesus called as one of his disciples.

Maybe Stacie had a point. It seemed that Jesus wasn't very fussy about how you came.

Without another word, David began praying. He surprised himself with how rapidly and naturally the words came. He felt Stacie take a hand off his in order to brush away some tears. He asked for forgiveness and mercy, confessing his sins in broad categories so it wouldn't take all night. He asked for strength and wisdom and courage for the task ahead. And because he didn't want to take any chances, at the end of his prayer he opened his eyes and prayed the words on the page in front of him.

“I confess that Jesus is Lord and believe in my heart that God raised him from the dead,” he said. “Amen.”

Stacie chuckled at that last part, but he no longer cared. He felt a wave of forgiveness and freedom—and another emotion that he had never expected. For the first time in three years, he felt like he and Stacie were truly one again.

She leaned over and hugged his neck, whispering her own prayer of thanks.

When she was finished, he closed the Bible.

“Let's go to bed,” she said. “Tomorrow could be a very long day.”

68

After several more unsuccessful attempts to engage her captor in conversation, Jamie gave up. She rode in silence for the next few hours—planning, wondering, feeling gross and powerless. She imagined a hundred different scenarios once they arrived at their location. She tried to prepare herself for anything.

The temperature had dropped several degrees, and she had grown used to the stench of her own urine. She assumed it was now late at night. Eventually the steady hum of the interstate gave way to the stops, starts, and turns of local roads. Jamie felt the anticipation tense her tired muscles. She had actually grown used to the drone of the highway and convinced herself that Stocking Man wasn't going to molest her during the trip. But now that the trip was ending, who knew what horrors lay ahead?

The truck slowed and came to a complete stop, and the engine shut off. The resulting silence had its own eerie psychological message. She felt alone. Deserted. Miles from help.

The man stepped toward her, this time holding a gun with two metal prongs on the end directly in her line of vision a foot away from her face. “This is a stun gun,” he said as Jamie stared at the prongs. He pulled the trigger, and a bolt of electricity jumped from one prong to the other, hissing like the tongue of a snake. Jamie flinched and jerked away as much as she could, terror sparking through her body.

“I'm going to untie you,” the man said. “I won't use this unless you make me. But I won't hesitate to use it if you try anything.”

“Okay,” she managed.

The man reached over and released the bottom strap first, the one tight around her calves. Next, he released the strap around her hips. As he fumbled with the top strap, Jamie heard noises outside the back door. It sounded like somebody might be removing some kind of padlock.

Her captor removed the top strap, and Jamie sat up slowly on the gurney, eyeing him to make sure it was okay. Though her hands were still cuffed together in her lap, it felt good to no longer have the straps biting into her, tying her down to the gurney.

“Thanks,” she said. Her captor nodded.

The man received a call on his cell phone. “Yes. Everything is fine. Open the door.”

Her captor held the cell phone to his ear with his right hand, the stun gun in his left. Should she lunge at him now? The doors started to creak open. Soon she would have another kidnapper to deal with. But still she hesitated.
The handcuffs. The stun gun.

As she sat there, every muscle poised to strike, torn between the danger of action and the consequences of inaction, she heard two gunshots rip through the silence of the night. There was shouting. Chaos. Another pop, more like a ping, the sound of a bullet hitting the back door. The man inside the truck grabbed Jamie and yanked her to her feet, his arm locked around her throat, the barrel of a gun against her head. She heard something clatter on the floor.
The stun gun? The cell phone?

In the next instant, the back doors, which someone had started to open, swung closed. And then, just as abruptly as the shots had started, the night turned silent again, magnifying the sound of Jamie's captor panting in her ear. Jamie could literally smell the fear.

He yelled something in Russian, and Jamie picked up two names.
Dmitri. Sergei.

Her captor waited, his breath coming in staccato bursts. But there was no answer from the outside, nothing but eerie silence.

He shoved Jamie toward the back door of the truck. “Move!”

A few feet from the door he stopped her and wrapped his left arm tighter around her neck. “Who's out there?” he yelled, this time in English.

The answering silence could only mean that her captor's accomplices had been killed or captured. Jamie felt a sudden flicker of hope, her heart hammering against her rib cage, adrenaline shooting through every fiber of her body. But in her next conscious thought, that hope crashed into grim reality. She was still a human shield, facing a door that would open to almost-certain gunfire. Even friendly fire might kill her.

If her captor didn't do it first. He inched closer to the door, pressing the gun more tightly to her temple.

“Answer me!” he yelled, holding Jamie squarely in front of him.

He waited another couple of beats, swung a leg around her, and kicked open the door. First one side, then the other.

Jamie flinched, ready for the firing squad.

69

Nothing happened. No shots were fired. Nobody came rushing at them. The night was dark, silent, and ghostly.

With the back doors open, Jamie's captor dragged her closer to the edge of the truck bed. She could see that they were in a parking lot, with distant streetlights barely denting the darkness of the overcast night. A vehicle, some kind of SUV, was parked directly behind the truck, about forty feet away. There were no signs of life anywhere.

Jamie's captor glanced past her shoulder—looked left, then right. He pointed his gun toward the darkness, swinging it in an arc around the area.

Suddenly it was day—blinding lights coming at them from every direction. Headlights from the SUV. Spotlights from both sides of the vehicle. Jamie reacted instinctively, taking advantage of the sudden distraction. She stomped on her captor's foot, pulled at the arm around her neck, and thrust herself downward to escape his grip. In the same instant, even before she slid free, she heard the sound of gunshots, loud blasts from all around her, blowing her captor backward into the truck. There was yelling. Arms grabbed her from the floor and pulled her to safety.

Radios started squawking. Men who looked like SWAT team members scrambled into the truck, checking her fallen captor. They helped Jamie to a patch of grass next to an unmarked car, letting her lean against its side. An officer knelt beside her. “Are you okay?” he asked.

Jamie nodded. Speechless. She tried to fight back the shock.

“Are you sure? Do you need an ambulance? Did they hurt you?”

She knew what he was really asking.
Were you raped?
“No, I'm okay.” She closed her eyes and tilted her head back, sucking in a long, deep breath. It was her first full breath, she realized, since her lungs had been placed under the viselike pressure of captivity several hours ago.

“Do you want some water?” someone asked. “Would you be more comfortable inside the car?”

She heard another voice, a few feet away, asking one of the men attending to her how long it might be before she could answer questions. They were all just disembodied shadows standing around her, silhouetted against the spotlights still shining at the back of the truck.

“Can we give her a little room for a few minutes?” a different man asked. The voice sounded familiar.

At first, Jamie thought her mind was playing tricks on her. After what she'd just been through, shock and hallucination would be a normal reaction. But when she opened her eyes, the face was there as well. If this was an illusion, her mind had quite a memory for details.

He squatted in front of her. She reached out and touched his shoulder.

“Drew?”

He nodded, brushing her hair away from her face.

After several paramedics checked Jamie out, the federal agents whisked her away from the site of the shoot-out and interrogated her about the day's events. She would have to spend the rest of the night in a local hotel, so Drew headed to the nearest twenty-four-hour Walmart with a very detailed shopping list. Size-four jeans. Ladies' underwear, size small. Toothbrush. Toothpaste. Deodorant. T-shirt, women's small. Pajamas, size small. To his credit, Drew didn't ask any questions. Jamie would probably never be able to look at him again without blushing.

The conversation with the federal agents was pretty much one-sided—they provided the questions; Jamie provided the few answers she could. She vowed that when she became a prosecutor, she would treat her victims with a little more compassion. She had to keep reminding herself that none of this was her fault.

She did learn that her kidnappers were working with the same Chinese triad that had been pursuing the Hoffmans. The triad had apparently been trying to keep the feds off-balance by contracting with a few Eastern European thugs, the same ones who had first threatened Jamie at Lake Lanier and then kidnapped her. Her captors had taken Jamie to a marina in Jacksonville, Florida, where the triad had a large yacht waiting.

They were probably planning on using Jamie to force Hoffman out of hiding. After the shoot-out, the feds had staked out the area and searched every boat at the dock. They had found the triad's yacht and gained some incriminating information but were disappointed that no additional accomplices showed up. The FBI agents continued to work leads from the cell phones and other evidence they had confiscated. They would let Jamie know of any additional apprehensions.

In the meantime, they said, it was absolutely critical that Jamie
not
contact anybody to tell them she was safe. The FBI wanted other triad members to think that the triad still had Jamie in custody. The agents were apparently setting up some kind of trap that might require them to keep Jamie hidden for a day or two.

The FBI had secured a nearby Hilton where Jamie would stay for the rest of the night and possibly the next day. Drew Jacobsen would stay in an adjoining room, and the bureau's agents would patrol the premises.

When Jamie asked if she had a choice in the matter, the agent in charge gave her a disapproving look. “Of course,” he said. “You're not under arrest or in custody. You can do whatever you want. But it's our job to protect you and apprehend the other members of the triad, and I would recommend letting us do our job.”

“I think that's how we got here in the first place,” Jamie said.

Eventually, however, she acquiesced. Jacobsen returned from his shopping trip as the questioning and evidence swabbing were winding down. They rode together in the backseat of an unmarked federal sedan to the hotel. Drew escorted Jamie to her room and asked for the fourth time whether she was really okay.

“I'm fine,” she said with as much conviction as she could summon.

“If you need to talk—anytime—just knock on the adjoining door,” Drew said.

“Okay,” Jamie responded. In truth, she had a bunch of questions for her private security guardian angel, starting with the most obvious ones: What was
he
doing here? Wasn't this a federal case? How did they find her? But she knew every one of those questions could wait until morning. Other things couldn't.

She needed to get out of her soiled clothes. She needed a hot shower. She needed a soft bed.

She needed some time alone to think.

70

Jamie didn't really even try to sleep. After what she had been through, sleep would only lead to nightmares, replaying distorted versions of the day's terrifying events. It seemed like every time she closed her eyes, she saw the man wearing the nylon stocking.

As the minutes marched by, she lay in bed with the television on and the bedside lamp burning, so many questions floating around in her mind. And so much pain. These last few days had rekindled bitter memories of her mother's death. The emotions she thought she had conquered came back with a force so great it was almost like losing her mom all over again. Losing Snowball, being held hostage, nearly getting shot—these things tormented her, like wolves fighting over a fresh kill, overwhelming Jamie's best efforts to maintain control.