Hush (9 page)

“I imagine they'll hold us until the ransom is paid.”

“Hold” didn't mean
gently
. The way the one called Eloy had been looking at her when he shoved her out of the van didn't bode well. “About that …” Now would probably be a good time to tell him just why he and his brother were being dragged willy-nilly through the jungle with her.

“Don't worry about it,” he said, using his bound hands to brush a small green lizard off his shoulder. “Gideon and I will figure something out.”

“There are
three
of us involved here,” she pointed out. “But in the interest of full disclosure, I have to tell you why we're here. It's because—”

“Save it.”

Acadia understood the situation wasn't optimal, but did he have to be so rude? She rubbed her cheek on her shoulder, retorting, “For what? Candles and dinner?”

“Until we're alone or can't be overheard. Get Gideon's attention for me.”

They were walking single file. With her hands bound at the wrist, Acadia used her fingertips to poke Gideon
Stark in the back, but he turned around so fast, and with such fury in his eyes, she fell back a step and bumped into Zak's chest.

“Easy,” Zak said, steadying her with his forearm against her shoulder.

“Sorry,” she told Gideon. He wasn't looking at her, but rather at his brother, who was right over her shoulder. Acadia could feel the tension coming off the two men in waves. Like her they were stressed; she just hoped they didn't do anything stupid in this volatile situation.

“Look. Don't engage these people, okay? I'll just tell them how to access the money, and I'm sure”—
Not in a zillion years
—“that they'll let us go.”

“How could you …
What
money?” Gideon Stark scowled, then continued walking. A flying insect the size of Acadia's fist landed on his back. The iridescent blackish green bug was a millimeter from the exposed skin of his neck. She shuddered.

“There's a Godzilla-size insect on your—Yes. There—okay. It's gone. That's what I've been trying to tell you guys for the past
hour
.” She hadn't, but she should have. “I'm the reason they grabbed you. I'm really, really sorry.”

“
You're
the reason?” Zak asked, sounding incredulous. “Who are you? Head of State? Rock star … Not an actress.”

“I work—Why
not
an actress?”

“Because you can't act worth a damn.”

“Funny,” Acadia said lightly, “that's not what Spielberg said.”

His lips twitched. “Steven Spielberg?”

“Who else?” Well, Michael Spielberg, her eighth-grade math teacher, who could never tell when she was fibbing, even when he knew she was. It hadn't been a compliment as much as a statement about him.

Acadia lowered her voice and slowed her steps so he could hear her. She hoped her voice wouldn't carry. Though the kidnappers must have a pretty good idea how much she was worth; otherwise why bother kidnapping her? “I won five hundred thousand in the Kansas lottery two months ago.”

“Ah,” Zak responded. A lot less interested, or relieved, than she'd expected.

“I still have most of it,” Acadia assured him quickly, just in case he was worried she couldn't pay at least a portion of what the kidnappers were asking. “I paid for this trip of course, for myself and five of my friends, and—”

“This isn't about you.”

She tromped through a thicket of leaves and vines to give that a moment to sink in. A toucan high on an overhead branch tilted its yellow head to watch them pass. She stepped over a pile of branches and leaves that the men up ahead had sliced to clear the path. “Wow,” she finally said, surprised. “That's pretty rude considering the circumstances. I know kidnapping is the national pastime here, but I suspect they knew who I was when they burst into
my
room instead of yours. Do
you
guys have half a million dollars?” she added sarcastically.

Gideon chuckled and continued walking.

“Gid and I own ZAG,” Zak informed her.

It took her a moment.
ZAG
? The multigazillion-dollar online search engine? “Oh.” Here she was, feeling guilty as hell, and all the time
she
was the one who'd been inadvertently scooped up in
their
kidnapping. “Then I guess
you
owe
me
an apology.”

“At this point, your lotto score is pretty worthless. As you say, kidnapping is big business in South America. They've already set a ransom demand at forty mil for me and my brother, and they don't care that you're just collateral damage. Loida Piñero set the same price on your head.”

“Forty
million
?” That was so far above what she
now
thought of as her meager winnings that it didn't even seem real.

“Wait a minute … Loida Piñero? I presume that's the name of Cruella de Vil, scary leader of the pack? How do you know her name?” Acadia demanded, sidetracked.

“She told us.”

“That's not good. She doesn't care that the three of us have seen her face and those of her men, and she told you her name? That doesn't bode well for our chances of survival.”

“Don't worry about it. They'll contact our people to make their demand.”

“
Don't worry about it
? I'm blond, not Pollyanna. I'm plenty worried. With just cause.” Blondes might have more fun, but she should've told her hairdresser to give her screaming red kick-butt hair instead of foils. Right now she needed the courage of a redhead and the
sophistication of a brunette. She was
feeling
her mousy hair right now.

“We'll be out of here as soon as the ransom's paid.”

“Liar,” she said without heat. She tamped down the fear bubbling up inside her. Freaking out and panicking weren't productive. This situation needed a clear head, and some ingenuity. And while she hoped Zak and Gideon Stark could come up with a viable plan to get them safely out of the jungle, Acadia was too used to taking care of business to trust her life to two men she didn't know. “As soon as they get the money, we'll be redundant, won't we?”

And then it clicked. From somewhere in the vast filing cabinet of her brain, she remembered the headlines. The outcry, even brief as it was in the never-ending run of bad news that filled the media every day.

In stark, bold letters, the headline flashed across her memory: ZAG OWNER LOSES WIFE IN TRAGIC ACCIDENT.

The brothers' argument in the van now made a bit more sense. It had barely registered as a blip on her radar at the time. So, Zak Stark had lost his wife. Tragic. But why did his brother have strong issues about it? Jennifer Stark had been an investigative reporter for CNN; if Acadia remembered the news correctly, she'd been killed in some war-torn country a couple of years ago. Acadia tried to remember what she'd read, desperately rifling through what few facts she'd gleaned at the time, but she didn't recall more than a few headlines.

“Redundant or not,” Zak said evenly, “Gideon and I will get you out of here.”

She hoped he could. But just in case that didn't happen, Acadia was trying to come up with an escape plan of her own. Planning, practicality, and adaptation were her strengths. They were attributes she'd needed when she'd continually changed schools. New teachers, new kids to make friends with, new everything. She'd had to draw on those same strengths when she'd had to deal with her father's diminishing capacity.

If she could just sit down somewhere cool and quiet for a while, she knew she would come up with some sort of plan. Too bad cool, quiet, and seated were out of the question for the moment. So be it. She had several ideas. None of them feasible. Yet.

“How does sitting behind a computer monitor at your fancy Internet company qualify you to liberate us from armed kidnappers?” She kept the sarcasm out of her voice with effort.

“You'd better hope we have something up our sleeves,” Zak answered, not exactly forthcoming.

Gideon paused until she was practically right on top of him. “We've accumulated some skills in the years we've been doing extreme sports,” he told her quietly. “Trust us, this isn't that much different than the Mount Kilimanjaro climb we did a few years back, right, Zak?”

“Right. Hostile natives, and an even more hostile environment.”

They both sounded as confident as she didn't feel. Climbing a mountain, while certainly dangerous, didn't quite compare to trekking into dense jungle surrounded by Uzi-carrying guerrillas. “Armed kidnappers?”

Gideon glanced over his shoulder with a grim smile. “Armed
terrorists
. They all have shitty attitudes and consider violence a conversation starter. Don't worry, honey. We're working on i—”

“
Manténgase en movimiento!”
one of the men yelled from behind them.

Acadia gave Gideon a little shove with her bound hands. “He wants us to keep moving.”

“We both speak Spanish fluently,” Zak informed her, his voice low. He was right on her heels, and the closeness of his voice made her start so that she almost walked right into a thick clump of bright red flowering vines hanging like a garland right in front of her. The twenty-foot vines, covered in flowers, were alive and moving with buzzing insects.

She walked around the clump, swatting the bugs away from her face. “Then why didn't you—”

“Because pretending
not
to understand the language gives us an edge.”

“How did you know what I was goi—”

“Going to say? Barbie, you're an open book.”

A drop of sweat trickled down her temple, making her skin itch. Acadia bit her tongue. There was no point in engaging him in an exchange. There wouldn't be a winner, and arguing would just irritate them both.

Acadia put one foot in front of the other and kept her gaze on the middle of Gideon Stark's sweat-stained back. Three small capuchin monkeys swung from branch to branch at eye level, sweet little white faces turned to watch the humans' progress, black eyes curious.

“Look,” she said calmly after about fifteen minutes of human silence, “I don't know you. I'm sure you mean well, but don't make promises you can't possibly keep. We all know that when they have what they want, they'll kill—”

“Zakary.”

Acadia glanced up at Gideon's warning tone, expecting to come eye to eye with some large man-eating animal or, worse, the lead kidnapper, gun in hand, murder in her eyes. Instead she saw a clearing in the jungle, foliage hacked back and wide-open space filled with a dozen or more armed men. Waiting for them.

This was it, then. The end of the road.

FOUR

T
he compound, comprised of a handful of small cement and stone buildings, squatted in a large clearing hacked out of the living walls of the jungle. Piñero and another half dozen camo-dressed, well-armed men were their welcoming committee as they emerged from the trees. A baker's dozen.

Zak knew the odds—shitty before—were now considerably worse. Piñero berated the men for taking so long, and got them to hustle the prisoners into their jail cells with customary guerrilla flair.

There was no use fighting the shove of the gun butts as the three of them were herded between piles of rudimentary building materials. They passed cinder blocks, bags of cement, tools, a large water tank, a cookhouse, and a building large enough, Zak imagined, to house at least half the men. All the comforts of home.

Men. Guns. Tools to entrench, and enough supplies to sustain the guerrillas for—how long? he wondered. It was obvious their kidnappers were part of a well-organized, well-funded group. Funded by whom? Certainly not Loida Piñero. Her men feared her, sure. But
it couldn't be as simple as that, not with this setup. Zak bet it was more likely some fat cat with seemingly clean hands, sitting in a big office in Caracas. He'd find out who after he got the three of them out.