Beck & Call (30 page)

The second hoisted her and himself up. As he did, Mia used a burst of determination to kick the heavy bucket of daffodils out into the street. The bucket fell with a great
sploosh
of water, the flower bunches scattering out in their cellophane wrappers. The man who held her looked at them.

“Leave it,” the first man ordered. “We need to go.”

He closed the doors. The engine was already running. Whoever drove put the van in motion without delay. The first man produced a roll of silver duct tape. Mia knew it was for securing her. Her body shook all over, her burst of adrenaline crashing. She wanted to resist but wasn’t accomplishing anything by fighting.

“Good,” said her first abductor when she stopped. He dragged out a length of tape, severing it with his teeth.

“Pat her down for a phone,” said his accomplice. “We don’t want it pinging the cell towers.”

Crap,
Mia thought. She didn’t have a phone. She’d only been walking down the block.

The entire kidnapping hadn’t taken a whole minute.

JAKE
recognized Curtis’s
shave and a haircut
honk. Since Mia wasn’t back from the store, he grabbed her extra keys and trotted down.

Curtis drove a black ’06 Lincoln LS. According to him, the model was just old enough to blend in anywhere. When Jake arrived, Curtis leaned out the window. The aviators he pulled off were more stylish than the car.

“Where’s Mia?”

“Store,” Jake said. “You used the last of her …”

He trailed off and glanced down the street. She wasn’t among the scattering of pedestrians on the sidewalk. She’d left a quarter of an hour ago. He supposed she might be dawdling on account of being annoyed with him …

“What?” Curtis asked.

Jake’s brain jumped to a split-second conclusion.

“Something’s wrong,” he said, already jogging toward the corner.

He sped up as he heard Curtis get out behind him. The convenience store was small. It took three seconds to scan it from the door. Mia wasn’t inside.

He raised his voice to get the male cashier’s attention. “Has Mia Beck been here? Yea high. Dark hair. Came in to buy cream.”

“Mia was here,” the young man agreed, so Jake guessed he knew the store’s regulars. “She left a while ago.”

Jake’s heart gave a sickening thump.

“Out here,” Curtis called. “I found her shopping bag. With her wallet still in it.”

Jake had sprinted right by the thing. Inside the eco-friendly canvas tote was a cream carton, a paper-wrapped bagel, and a
New York Times.
Mia hated the
Times.
She must have bought it for him. It was the most useless reaction ever, but for just a second his eyes stung.

He blinked and spotted the next item of discouraging evidence.

“Flowers,” he said, pointing them out to his companion. “Fresh ones.”

The large plastic bucket lay on its side in the street, the pool of water it had contained not quite finished running off. Curtis stared down at it with him. Was it an accident that the flowers were daffodils? That had been Mia’s safe word. Had she been trying to leave a sign?

“She’s been grabbed,” he said.

“By Call?” Curtis asked. “Is he that hung up on her?”

“By Raeburn,” he said, sure of it. “Somehow he figured out she had eyes on Damien’s design.”

“Shit.” Curtis dug out his cell, his thumb starting to press 9.

“No.” Jake appropriated the phone to punch in a number of his choosing. “The police are too slow. We’ll waste time convincing them she hasn’t wandered off. I’m calling Damien. He can task a satellite to find her. Or, hell, send out a fleet of drones.”

“You’re sure we can trust him?”

“My gut’s sure. He’ll want to help her, no matter how mad he is.”

The line was ringing. His gut would have to be good enough.

~

Damien was working out his anger on his at-home punching bag. He cursed when his cell phone rang but went to look at it. The call could be business. His rage over his gullibility shouldn’t make him neglect that.

The caller ID said
Curtis Ewing
. That was Mia’s former and—he supposed—current boss. He growled at the likelihood that he wouldn’t enjoy the conversation then accepted the call anyway.

Hearing Jake’s voice and what it had to say dropped him on his ass on his workout area’s weight bench. Mia had been snatched? And Jake wanted him to help?

“Give me ten minutes,” he said when Jake seemed to be finished. “I’ll get back to you with news.”

He rang off. The iciness of his face warned him he was in shock. He forced himself to concentrate. WorldWide had a satellite, but tasking it wouldn’t be instantaneous. Sending out a wave of drones did no good unless they knew where to search, plus he’d be stuck here operating them. Another option occurred to him. It wasn’t comfortable, but he thought it had a better chance to produce positive results.

He gritted his teeth and dialed Zoe Raeburn’s personal cell number. She was sure to take him calling as a sign he was coming around romantically. Fuck it, though. If it got them what they needed, he didn’t care.

Zoe picked up on the second ring.

“Zoe,” he said before she could speak. “This is important. Your father kidnapped the woman you met in the bathroom at the scholarship fundraiser. He thinks she memorized the blueprint you tried to steal from me. I need to know where he’d feel comfortable taking her to interrogate.”

Naturally, Zoe didn’t accept this without question—despite knowing what her father was capable of. Damien attempted to convince her as efficiently as he could.

A hanging silence suggested he’d gotten through.

“If I tell you, will you see me again?”

Damien leaned forward to squeeze his temples. A big part of him wanted to say he’d do anything she wanted, as long as it saved Mia. He reminded himself showing weakness wasn’t a smart negotiating stance.

“Is that how you want to do this?” he asked. “To blackmail me into dating you? I thought you
weren’t
your father’s daughter.”

“Maybe I just have more faith in us than you do.”

He tried to blow out his breath silently. “I told you, Zoe, there never was an ‘us.’ A woman’s life is at stake.”

“The woman you replaced me with,” she retorted. Her gusty sigh forestalled him from arguing more. “Fine. Dad bought an abandoned paper mill in New Jersey a month ago. He’s planning to convert the property but hasn’t done it yet. The place is empty. There’s nothing near it but a buckled two lane and pinewoods. If I wanted to go Gitmo on someone, that’s where I’d take them.”

Damien suspected she enjoyed the twinge her mention of Gitmo would give him. Zoe was no monster, but she wasn’t a saint either. Ignoring that, he got the best directions she could supply, given that she didn’t have an exact address.

Now all he had to do was break the news to Jake that he was coming too.

~

In addition to duct taping her immobile, Mia’s captors had dropped a hood over her head. The van drove for quite a while before she was taken out. They didn’t cut the tape off her ankles and let her walk. Instead, they gripped her beneath the arms and hauled her, feet trailing in the dirt, into what seemed like a large building. The noises the men made dragging her in echoed. She strained to hear other sounds—traffic, people—but wasn’t rewarded. A door on a track slid grittily shut. She smelled mildew and chemicals. She was placed in a chair and secured with more tape to it.

Finally, they pulled off the burlap hood.

The light wasn’t bright but it still hurt her eyes. When her vision cleared, she saw she sat in a defunct paper factory. Giant rolls of newsprint moldered to her right on huge machines. The strutted ceiling was high above her and the floor below cracked cement. Her chair was pulled up to an old steel table. Sheets of paper lay across it, along with a cardboard box of used #2 pencils.

Okay. Mia could guess where this was going. Though the knowledge didn’t improve her situation, it steadied her a bit. One of her abductors tore the tape off her mouth. Mia worked her stiff jaw. She concluded there was no point in screaming.

“We meet again,” said a familiar voice.

Sam Raeburn must have been standing behind her. He pulled out the opposite chair and sat. If Mia hadn’t been expecting him, she might not have recognized him in his humble garb of faded flannel shirt and chinos. He seemed broader without his suits, more like the old school thug she supposed he was at heart.

His cool blue eyes were just as she remembered.

She struggled to speak calmly. “I guess this means Curtis broke the news that we can’t complete your assignment.”

Raeburn smiled faintly. “I guess this means I didn’t believe him.” He gestured for someone out of view to come closer. “Please repeat to Miss Beck what you told me.”

One of Raeburn’s flunkies pulled Miss DeWinter to his side of the table.

The appearance of Damien’s besotted executive assistant was a surprise, as was her condition. The plunging gold gown that had made her look so glamorous at the charity dinner was considerably worse for wear. More than one bout of tears seemed to have smeared her makeup, and her usually sleek russet waves had straggled beyond repair.

The hold Raeburn’s man had on her slender arm added to the impression that she might not be here voluntarily.

“Jesus,” Mia burst out. “Are you okay?”

“
Slut
,” was Ms. DeWinter’s feral response to that.

“Now, now,” Raeburn soothed. “Just tell her what you saw.”

“You broke into his office!” she accused. “You tricked him into putting your palm print in his system: you and that horrible Jake person. I saw everything from his bathroom while I waited for him to come back.”

“You were hiding in his bathroom?”

“I was
waiting
,” she said haughtily. “I had to straighten out our misunderstanding. He knew I still my access card. He
meant
for me to speak to him.”

This was a bigger load of crazy than Mia could argue with. “Why tell Mr. Raeburn what you saw?”

“He’d approached me before. He knew Mr. Call relies on me. He thought I’d get him what he wanted, but I was loyal.”

“Not this time, though.”

Ms. DeWinter tossed her head. “Someone has to put you in your place.”

Ms. DeWinter seemed not to understand she was now sharing that
place
with Mia. Or maybe she did. The assistant was pretty good at denying obvious things.

Raeburn appeared to have enjoyed this exchange.

“There you have it,” he said. “I know you’ve got what I want inside that interesting head of yours. All that remains is for you to put it on paper.”

Mia suspected once she did she was toast. She knew Damien was the plan’s true creator, and that made her a liability. To make things trickier, now that she saw the lengths Raeburn would go to get it, she realized the navigation thingie must be pretty damn important. Even if she believed he’d let her go afterward—an increasingly unlikely scenario—she didn’t dare hand it off to him. Maybe he’d simply take credit for designing the system, or maybe he’d do something worse.

When he and Damien butted heads at the charity dinner, Damien claimed Genbolt had already behaved in ways that weren’t in the best interest of U.S. troops. Her present situation made the assertion even more credible. This was cutting edge technology. What if Raeburn sold it to the highest bidder?

Mia didn’t want to be responsible for betraying her own country.

Hopelessness threatened to overwhelm her, but she fought it.
You just need to stall,
she told herself.
Jake and Curtis will find you soon.
They were smart. They’d realize she’d been taken.

“Not to be trite,” she said. “But you can’t get away with this.”

“Can’t I?” Raeburn asked. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. No one knows where you or Ms. DeWinter is. I have all the time in the world to convince you to cooperate.”

He couldn’t believe that. He had to know Jake and Curtis would search for her.

Before she could decide if she should say so, he folded his big hands on the table and leaned closer. “Fortunately, I don’t need all the time in the world. My associates—” he nodded toward her captors “—possess a number of enhanced interrogation skills. Do you honestly think it would take more than ten minutes of waterboarding to break a sweet little girl like you?”

One of his associates cracked his knuckles. Mia couldn’t contain a shiver. She’d seen news footage of that form of torture and had been horrified. She couldn’t swear she’d stand five minutes of simulated drowning.

Sadly, Raeburn had no trouble reading her reaction.

“You know,” he said, “I suspected we’d end up here the moment I saw you with Call at that charity dinner. I tried to warn you, but you wore your heart on your sleeve the same as my daughter. Women never understand men like him don’t commit.”

That’s
what his talk about Damien changing up his type had been aiming at? To prove he was a playboy?

“I thought you didn’t recognize me that night,” she said. “You’re a better actor than I realized.”

“You’re not the first to underestimate me,” he said blandly. He took one of the pencils from the cardboard box and laid it in front of her on the top sheet of blank paper. “Now, shall my associate free your hand, or will we be doing this the hard way?”

Shit,
Mia thought. Raeburn was an engineer, not as brilliant as Damien, but he’d know if she presented him with a copy that made no sense. Though she racked her brain, she couldn’t think how else to delay.

“Cut me loose,” she surrendered.

One of the goons moved to do it. Both had taken off their sunglasses. Maybe it was the effect of their matching beards, but they looked alike enough to be brothers. Once her right hand was free, Mia shook the circulation back into her fingers. So nervous she felt sick with it, she picked up the pencil.

She was immediately sorry Raeburn had seen her do this trick before. When she failed to sketch quickly enough to suit him, one of his associates “encouraged” her with his fist.