The Buried (26 page)

“Can I kill him?” Ananke asked.

“Not yet,” Orlando said.

“Can I at least hurt him?”

“Be my guest.”

The smaller man smirked. “You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed—” He screamed as a bullet from Ananke’s gun tore through his knee.

“Jesus!” Rachett said.

Orlando locked eyes with him. “Where is she?”

“She’s downstairs!”

“She’s here?” Orlando asked, surprised.

“Yeah. In the playroom.”

“Playroom?”

“It’s-it’s in the basement.”

“Show us.”

__________

W
HILE DAENG TIED
a tourniquet around the shorter man’s leg, Orlando used a portion of the sedative on the man they hadn’t shot. There was no need to waste any on the injured man, as he’d already passed out.

Rachett led Orlando, Daeng, and Ananke to a service elevator behind the stage.

As they traveled down, Orlando said, “How many more men?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

She tapped her gun against his back. “Try again.”

“I’m not sure. At least two, and maybe as many as four.”

When the elevator stopped, the doors opened onto a fairly large room that contained a few pallets of building materials but was otherwise empty.

“Which way?” Orlando asked.

“To the left. There’s a hall. She’s in the last room.”

“The playroom.”

He hesitated and then nodded.

“Are the men with her?”

“How should I know?”

Putting him in front, Orlando held on to his belt loop, her gun still pressed against his back.

As they neared the end of the hallway, a man stepped out of the second-to-last room. “Hey, I was—”

The moment he realized they weren’t his colleagues, he dived back inside.

“Mine,” Ananke said, passing Orlando.

She went low into the room, firing, and returned less than fifteen seconds later.

“Three,” she said. “They won’t bother us.”

The last door had a pictogram on it, depicting a pair of feminine eyes and a seductive smile.

“This is it?” Orlando asked.

“Yes,” Rachett replied.

“Open it.”

The man did as ordered.

Using him as a shield, Orlando scanned the space as they moved in. The playroom was a sexual dungeon, with all manner of contraptions scattered throughout the room, and designed to have multiple guests at the same time. She suddenly realized what kind of movies was shown in the theater upstairs and almost shivered at the thought. Rachett’s private sex club, where he no doubt played the welcoming host while using his guests’ sexual predilections to further his business interests.

Helen was tied to a chair with a bag over her head. No one else was present.

Orlando’s client was only semiconscious when Orlando pulled the bag off her head.

“Hey, wake up.” Orlando gently tapped Helen’s cheeks.

A blink.

“Helen, it’s Orlando.”

Helen slowly turned to her. “Orlando? What…what are you doing…here?”

“Getting you out.” Orlando cut the bindings loose. “Do you think you can stand?”

“Um, I think so.”

 Orlando helped her to her feet and held on to her as Helen took a few tentative steps, gaining more confidence with each one.

“Where are we?” Helen asked.

“Los Angeles.”

“How long?”

“You were taken two nights ago.”

As they passed Rachett and Ananke, the man glared at Orlando. “I won’t forget any of this, especially you. I’d watch your back from now on.”

“Daeng,” Orlando called.

Her friend stuck his head into the room.

“Can you take Helen for a moment?” she asked.

Once Daeng had collected the director and escorted her out of the playroom, Orlando stepped over to Rachett.

“I’m afraid you misunderstand your situation. Your life is over. That woman is not some low-level bureaucrat you can crush. She has resources available to her that you can only dream about. You might be thinking that you have friends in some pretty high places that can keep her down, but you’d be wrong. She will pay you back for your part in this. And when she does, you’re going to wish my friend here had killed you already, because at least then you might have had a nice funeral.”

With Ananke’s help, Orlando used the last of the sedative on Rachett, tied him to the chair Helen had been in, pulled the bag over his head, and left.

ILLINOIS

H
AVING NEARLY BEEN
thwarted in Chicago and then finding the homing beacon on the girl had put Orbits on edge. Before leaving the building in Chicago, his intention had been to hire a plane to take them to Topeka, Kansas—the closest airport to the girl’s GPS coordinates. But as he was reminded after his flight from Spokane, planes could easily be tracked. Now that they’d lost their tail, staying on the road felt like the better option. Besides, Topeka was only eight hours away by car, which meant they could get there not long after midnight.

After tossing the girl’s shoes out the window, he’d stayed in the front passenger seat, staring at the road. It took a while, but around an hour southwest of Chicago, he finally started to relax, his mood helped by the auction heating up. For a while, Donnie called him with updates every five minutes or so, but as the bids began coming in faster and faster, Orbits decided to keep him on the line.

At one point there had been seven participants, but when the price continued to soar, two had fallen by the wayside. Those who remained were playing a feverish game of who would be last on top.

“New bid,” Donnie said, his voice coming through Orbits’s headset. “Fifteen million seven hundred and fifty thousand. That’s a three-million-dollar jump.”

“Who made it?”

“C.”

To participate in the auction, bidders had had to deposit five million in special accounts Donnie had set up. Once this occurred, they were assigned a letter to “maintain anonymity.” In reality, Donnie had collected the information on where each deposit had been transferred from, and already had automated bots working to uncover identities.

Bidder C had entered the auction when the price was sitting at five million. C had made a few incremental bids since then, but this was by far his or her largest jump.

If all stayed to pattern, bidder E would up the ante next, and then the remaining three—A, F, and G—would fight it out over who followed.

The delay seemed unusually long, and Orbits began to think that 15.75 million was going to be the final price. Not that he would complain.

“New bid,” Donnie said. “Sixteen even. Bidder A.”

A? Had they just lost another bidder?

“New bid. Sixteen one. G.” Donnie barely had time to take a breath before saying, “New bid. Seventeen. E.”

Apparently E was still in.

“Damn, Donnie,” Orbits said. “We’re going to hit twenty yet!”

__________

Q
UINN AND NATE
could hear only half of the conversation, but it was enough to confirm that those in the ambulance were indeed the ones conducting the auction. Not only that, it sounded like the person in charge was in the vehicle.

Quinn looked at his watch. They’d been on the road for an hour and a half. Not for the first time he wondered where the ambulance was going. They weren’t randomly heading southwest, he was sure of that. If they’d just been trying to get lost, they would have stuck to the city.

No, they had a destination in mind. He wished one of them would say where it was.

TWENTY THOUSAND FEET OVER THE MOJAVE DESERT, CALIFORNIA

“A
DDRESS CONFIRMED. TEXTING
it to you
now.”

“Thank you,” The Wolf said, and hung up.

CHAPTER
33

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA

L
IKE A NUMBER
of freelance operatives, Donnie Lupo lived in Sin City. Unlike most of them, he did all his work from his basement office, often not seeing the outside for days or even weeks on end.

He had five regular clients, and a couple dozen others who would come to him now and then with work. Ricky Orbits was one of the five biggies, and the one currently occupying most of his time.

Donnie had been asked to do a lot of things over the years, but auctioning off a woman was a first. Perhaps he should have been repulsed by the idea, but he’d shed his morals long ago in favor of making a good living.

When he set up the auction, he’d worried that Ricky’s reserve bid price was too high, but boy, had he been wrong. There was still time left and the bids were already inching toward nineteen million. With the ten-percent cut Ricky had promised him, Donnie was looking at nearly two million dollars. A tax-free payday like that would be all the motivation he needed to walk away from his job and become a thirty-three-year-old retiree.

The digital clock on his screen was counting down the time remaining. Fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds.

Donnie could barely contain his excitement.

__________

T
HE GATED COMMUNITY
was located in the Summerlin section of Las Vegas. A phone call placed fifteen minutes earlier ensured the two SUVs had no problem entering.

The house in question was located on a cul-de-sac that provided its residents with gorgeous views of the western mountains. The homes were large four- and five-bedroom places, all with identical red tile roofs, tan walls, and beautifully landscaped, drought-tolerant yards. A postcard for desert suburban life.

Visual evidence suggested that only two of the five houses were occupied at that moment, but those in the SUVs knew that the owner of a third—the house at the very top of the cul-de-sac—was also home.

They parked their vehicles on the road just outside the cul-de-sac but did not get out.

When the dash clock clicked down to two minutes left in the auction, The Wolf said, “Take us in.”

__________

B
IDDING STALLED AT
nineteen-point-five million dollars for a full five minutes.

But when the clock clicked down to two and a half minutes remaining, things began to move again. The first few bids came in at fifty-thousand-dollar increments, but as the time continued to run out, both the amounts and the speed picked up.

“Nineteen seven-seventy-five,” Donnie said into his headset. “Nineteen eight…nineteen nine twenty-five…twenty million.”

“Woo-hoo!” Orbits shouted through the phone. “Told you, man!”

“Twenty-one million,” Donnie said. “Twenty-one five. Twenty-three.” He paused, staring at the screen. “Whoa! Thirty million!”

“Are you shitting me?”

The bid seemed to stop everyone. “It’s from bidder C,” Donnie said. “Wait. Thirty-one million five. From B.”

“B? I thought B was out of it.”

B hadn’t made a bid in well over ninety minutes. “Must have just been waiting.”

Something creaked in the house above him, but Donnie was so wrapped up in the excitement that his mind didn’t register it as significant.

The bids started coming in fast again. “Thirty-four. Thirty-four five. Thirty-five. Thirty-six.” He glanced at the countdown clock. Fifteen seconds left. “Thirty-six five.”

__________

T
HE WOLF’S TEAM
had the security system disabled and the door opened within twenty seconds.

They then split in two, half searching the ground floor and half doing the same upstairs. Though the target was not on either floor, a basement door had been discovered. As soon as the door was opened, a voice drifted up.

“…thirty-eight…thirty-eight seven hundred…dear God, forty million!”

The Wolf glanced at her watch. The auction was almost over.

She motioned her team down the stairs.

__________

D
ONNIE’S GAZE FLICKED
back and forth between the incoming bids and the countdown clock.

Five seconds.

“Forty-one.”

Four seconds.

“Forty-one five.”

Three seconds.

“Forty-two.”

Two seconds.

“Forty-three.”

One second.

“Forty-three five.”

Four bids came in right as the auction ended. One was for forty-four, and three at the same higher amount. Donnie had to adjust the data so he could see the entry times to the hundredth of a second.

“Well?” Orbits asked.

“Forty-seven million,” Donnie told him, hardly believing it.

“Son of a
bitch
! Seriously? Forty-seven?”

“Yes, indeed. Forty-seven.”

Orbits laughed. “Who’s our winner?”

“B.”

“B? Well, how about that? Please inform our winner that we await the transfer of his funds. Once that’s confirmed, we’ll pass on instructions for—”

Donnie didn’t hear the rest as the headset was ripped from his ear and a hand slapped tight against his mouth.

He started to struggle, but stopped just as fast when cold steel pressed against his cheek.

“There’s a good boy,” a female voice behind him said.

Someone twirled his chair around so that he was facing the rest of the room. There were five of them, four men and one woman. In the woman’s hand was Donnie’s headset, her palm covering the mic.

“What’s your boss’s name?” she asked.

Donnie said nothing.

She looked at the man holding the gun against Donnie’s head. “Kill him.”

“Orbits!” Donnie blurted out. “Ricky Orbits.”

ILLINOIS

“O
NCE THAT’S CONFIRMED,
we’ll pass on instructions for picking up the merchandise.” Orbits paused, expecting a response. “Donnie, did you hear me?”

There was some noise over the line but no Donnie.

“Hey! You still there?”

Was that a voice?

“I think there’s something wrong with the line. Let me call you—”

“Mr. Orbits?” Not Donnie’s voice. A woman’s. “There’s been a slight change in the winning bid. The good news is that it’s in your favor. Fifty million dollars, and you give the girl to me.”