Fire in the Wind (43 page)

There was a whispered colloquy going on among the five men. White Mask crossed to her as the other four started uncertainly toward the door.

"The ambulance is on its way," said White Mask quietly. "Will you...."

For some reason their uncertainty made her triumphantly strong. And stupid. In that momentary rush of unthinking elated anger, she rounded on them.

"You mean you're not going to kidnap my father after all? You're afraid no one would pay money for a dead man?" she burst out, her voice contemptuous.

"You stupid bloody fools, don't you do any research at all? Don't you know that my father has made it impossible for the company or me to pay a ransom for him?" Her breath was coming in gasps of love and rage and fear. "But he still couldn't stop a bunch of cretins trying, could he?" She pointed to the bed beside her. "That's his second attack in a few weeks. You've probably killed him, damn you! Damn all of you and your damned mindless greed! You...."

White Mask lifted his hand to touch her shoulder. Through the mists of her rage the gentle gesture seemed unbearable from such a menacingly powerful man. She was suddenly reminded of how strong her father had seemed to her as a child, and how gentle he had always been in that long-ago past, before—Smith's throat tightened, and she shrugged off the comforting hand with animal violence.

"Don't touch me!" she shrieked. "You're all cheap cowards, afraid even to show your faces! Why don't you at least have the courage of your convictions? Why don't you stand up and show yourselves as men who get what they want by violence and murder?"

The short burst of a distant siren broke sharply on the air. Four of the men started toward the door again, while the fifth, White Mask, stayed looking down at her.

Then Shulamith St. John was very stupid indeed.

"Who are you?" she demanded suddenly. "I want to know who you are!" And without any thought of the consequences she reached up and tore the white-trimmed mask from his head. Only when she saw his face did she understand what she had done.

"Oh, my God!" she whispered in dismay. Now the silence of the room, threaded through with the nightmarish ululation of the oncoming siren, was electric with danger.

The man was dark, the skin of his hawklike face bronzed and firm, his black eyes hooded. His hair was black, too, wavy and thick, falling to his ears in two wings from a central parting. He had a high-bridged nose, and his wide mouth was grim as, his eyes boring into hers, he called something to his four masked accomplices. Then he reached for her.

Smith jumped back from him too late. His iean, black-clothed frame had already moved, imprisoning her against a muscled chest between arms of steel.

She reacted like a wildcat, spitting, clawing, cursing, but she was slim and light and he had the advantage of height and strength. She fought anyway—twisting and clawing desperately till her long red hair was tangled around his head and her own, the lace of her nightgown hanging loose, and his black sweater gaping at two places—fought with all her strength, and then some.

It was not enough. The hawk-faced man overpowered her at last, pressing her head back into his shoulder with a hand held over her face so that she could neither breathe nor scream. Then he carried her swiftly and noiselessly through the house, and, as the ambulance men burst through the front door with a clattering stretcher in tow, he moved out a back patio door into the damp, sea-scented air.

"Upstairs—the room where the light is," she heard a male voice call.

Her heart was labouring from lack of oxygen, and Shulamith stopped her frantic backward kicks at her abductor's legs and tried with her free hand to pull those large strong fingers away from her nose.

His voice said very softly into her ear, "I will let you breathe if you do not fight me. Otherwise I will force you into unconsciousness." Not waiting for her agreement, he eased his hand down away from her nose, still maintaining his sure grip over her mouth.

Shulamith dragged in a breath, her heartbeats slowing. With an effort of will she calmed her thoughts, resolutely pushing away anger, hatred and most of all fear, and concentrated on her situation.

Her abductor was strong and tall. Her toes barely brushed the ground. Her head was being pressed firmly into the hollow of his shoulder with one hand, while his other arm, wrapped tightly across her, held her arms immobile against her own body. Her toes just barely reached the ground. It would be pointless to kick, he need move his hand only slightly to deprive her of air again. His body warmed her against the damp chill of the night air, and mentally she rejected his heat. She wanted nothing from him.

The man's attention was not entirely on her, she sensed now, though his grip did not relax. She felt an extraordinary stillness about him, as though even his blood had ceased to flow; the rise and fall of his hard chest had become almost imperceptible against her back, while her own breathing was still thin and rapid.

He was listening. He had not closed the door behind them, and now he listened to the noises coming from the house as though his ears let him to see what was happening inside. Shulamith listened, too, picking up almost nothing until, after what seemed an age, there was the unmistakable sound of footsteps and a stretcher coming down the stairs and moving out the front door. Then ambulance doors slammed, and the sound of an engine roared away down the curving drive.

There was no sound of the siren, and Shulamith sucked in a shuddering breath. He was dead. Her father was dead, or they would be using the siren.

"There's no traffic in these streets," said the deep voice in her ear, and Shulamith was surprised by her response to the understanding tone: she wanted to cry. "They'll use the siren again when they reach the main streets."

She listened intently for a long moment, not knowing whether to believe or not. Then, from down the mountain, a short burst of the siren's shriek made her sag against his body with relief. Her father was alive.

He moved then, back through the patio door and across carpet and oak, through the front hall and then out into the night. At the top of the stone steps he whistled softly and waited, his hold on her not relaxing even to shift his grip or ease his muscles.

Below them, behind the black shadows of fir trees, the lights of the city centre sparkled in the black surround of the ocean, and out on the water the glint of ocean-going vessels beckoned to her, as always, with the promise of distant shores. The scene before her was so familiar that she could scarcely believe all this was really happening. Shulamith closed her eyes tightly: either the familiar beauty of Vancouver at night or her attacker would disappear, she was certain. This was a dream.

But the man's grip on her body remained real, and when she opened her eyes, so did the city.

After a moment her ears picked up the quiet sound of an engine, and through the trees along the drive a small van crept, without benefit of lights, and stopped beside them just as her abductor, moving down the broad steps, reached the ground.

Panic filled her with a renewed force, and, tasting it, Shulamith realized that she had lain quiescent in the stranger's hold for long minutes, as though his silent strength had somehow stilled her wild fear against her will. She cursed herself for a fool. If she had had little chance against one man in the past few minutes, she now had no chance at all against the additional four who were certainly in the van. As the driver's door opened she twisted and kicked with all her might, clawing behind her for any vulnerable area within reach.

The man swore, dropping his hand from her mouth to grasp her twisting body, her flailing arm. Immediately she screamed.

"Get her mouth!" the dark man ordered the other, still masked, who had climbed out of the driver's side and was now running around the front of the van to them.

Shulamith let fly the hardest kick she had delivered since her days on the high-school girls' rugby team, and the second man grunted and went down like a hewn tree. She waited in terror for the man holding her to take revenge somehow, but he was not cruel as he caught her free arm in against her body and put his hand back over her mouth again.

The man she had kicked was cursing steadily and painfully. Slowly he got up off the ground. It was Turquoise Mask.

"Rope," suggested the man who held her, and Turquoise Mask moved to the back of the van, opened the doors, and, the soft stream of his curses mingling oddly with the scraping noises in the night air, rummaged for a few moments, then stepped back with a small bundle of binder twine in his hand.

It looked wispy, like angel hair, but its roughness cut her skin, and Turquoise Mask tied her wrists tightly and cruelly in the darkness, so that the twine bit into her flesh.

Every new assault took her terror one notch higher. Being tied filled her with such a panic-stricken dread she felt as though she were hanging on to reason by a tiny thread.

The dark man placed her in the passenger seat, his hand still clamped on her mouth, the open door blocked with his body; and in the faint light coming from the house she saw that other man held a square of coarse dirty fabric. Her eyes widened in horror, and she moaned a plea and shook her head.

The dark hawk face, which she saw again for the first time since that moment in her father's room—it seemed an hour ago, though it could have been only minutes—looked consideringly at her for a moment.

"Sorry," he said, as though he meant it. "Even if you gave me your word not to scream, you are too much of a fighter to keep it."

She moaned again behind his palm, her eyes pleading and promising. A white smile lighted the shadowed planes of his strong, bronzed face; strangely, it was a smile of admiration.

"Not even for your solemn oath," he said, his eyes glinting at her. "Even if you meant to keep your word, you would not do so. That is the way of fighters. Now, if you breathe deeply and slowly and calm your panic, this will not be so bad."

She was briefly thrown into confusion by his kindness. It was a ploy calculated to put her off her guard, she realized. It was not going to work. Shulamith took the deep calming breath, but stared stonily at the man while he tied the gag into her open mouth. He spoke a few quiet words to Turquoise Mask then, closed and locked the door, and turned back up the steps and into the house. With the shock of sudden memory, Shulamith thought of the other three men. Were they still in the house or were they waiting somewhere out of sight? Were they silent in the back of the van? She repressed a shudder. She wished she hadn't remembered them.

After a moment he returned, flicking off lights as he came and locking the door. She saw his moonshadow. He had an animal grace that gave her a curious pleasure, a leanness of hip that was strangely compelling. Shulamith watched the man, whose face had a grave nobility in the moonlight, until he moved out of sight of her window. She heard his low voice in conversation with his still-masked accomplice. In the darkness she groped frantically for the door lock. She heard the click and prepared herself.

"You will ride in the back of the van," the dark man said as the door opened, while Turquoise Mask climbed up into the driver's seat beside her. She smelled his sweat, the acrid smell of fear. She wondered if they smelled her fear.

Wordlessly she slid off her seat, felt the cold pavement under her already chilled feet, and waited as the sliding door opened for her. She stumbled inside, banged her toe painfully on a metal strut, then felt carpet under her feet. The hawk-eyed man did not sit in the passenger seat but followed her into the back of the van.

"I am not going to hurt you," he said, and she could sense that they were alone. "Please sit down."

He guided her down so that she was sitting with her back against the side of the van behind the driver, then dropped lightly beside her. She discovered she was sitting on her hair, and it pulled her head. With the gag forcing her mouth open, too, her body felt twisted and uncomfortable. But she would not complain to him, or ask again for relief.

"Go," he said, and the driver pulled off his balaclava, started the van's engine and let out the clutch.

Smith lost track of direction, but they were certainly going down and not up. All she saw of the passing landscape were the treetops or street lamps, and after a very few minutes she gave up the attempt to judge the turns.

Her companion was watching her in the flickering light, and Smith caught his gaze and looked away. Wriggling, she lifted her bound hands to her neck and pulled her hair from under her. He reached and lifted a lock of it from where it fell over her arm.

"Your hair is very long," he said, in a tone of wondering admiration she was used to. Not many women could sit on their own hair these days; it often aroused comment. She stared fixedly into the darkness, ignoring him as though she hadn't heard.

"Her hair was the color of foxes," the man recited softly to himself, "or of fire." She wondered what he was quoting; she didn't remember ever hearing it before. But of course she would not ask.

The intent look in the man's hooded eyes, which were in light and shadow, light and shadow as the van rhythmically progressed past street lamps, made her think of an animal or a bird of prey. She shivered, half in fear, half with cold in the light cotton nightdress that was all she was wearing. Her mouth ached. The gag was choking, claustrophobic, and smelled of engine oil. Behind it, there was a bitter taste in her mouth. But that was fear.