Tom Hyman (46 page)

She could see big dogs roaming the grounds below. She didn’t like dogs much anyway, and these looked especially mean. How was she ever going to get out of this place?

She thought of her mother again, and tears welled in her eyes and ran down her cheeks. Mommy had told her that if anything ever happened to her she should try to be brave. She must have meant a time just like this. Genny sniffled and brushed her tears away.

If they were going to harm her, they would probably already have done it, she guessed. So they must be keeping her here until her mother comes to get her. But why was it taking her so long?

She must have landed at the airport hours ago. Maybe she doesn’t know where this castle is, Genny worried. It was probably very hard to find.

Genny went into the bathroom and filled a glass with water.

She brought the glass out and sat down on the bed with it. She wished she had some books to read, or at least some pictures to look at. They hadn’t left anything in the room at all.

She remembered several books of hers that had castles in them.

Some of them looked a lot like this one. Cinderella was one.

Rumpelstiltskin was another. And there was one about a girl that was locked up in a castle, just like her. What was her name? Rapunzel.

That was it. She had long blond hair that she could roll all the way down the side of the castle tower until it reached the ground.

Genny tugged at her own golden locks. They barely reached her shoulders.

In another book she remembered—maybe it was Babar the Elephant—there was a door right in the floor. When Babar opened it he found a secret passage that led right out of the castle.

Genny studied the bare wood floor around her. There were definitely no trap doors in it.

She was hungry. She hoped they didn’t forget to bring her some food.

It’d be much harder to be brave if she didn’t have anything to eat.

Hours passed and no one came. Genny skipped around the room and jumped up and down on the bed for exercise. She loved to jump on beds, but her mother was always telling her to stop.

This time there was no one to tell her anything, so she jumped to her heart’s content. Then she sat on the bed and sang all the songs that she knew and told herself some stories, pretending that it was her mother reading them to her.

She frequently went over to look out the window. The driveway was on the other side of the castle, so when her mother came up the drive she wouldn’t be able to see her. But she thought she might be able to smell her scent as soon as she came inside.

She could detect scent traces of the baroness and the men who had brought her here. There were many other odors, but they belonged to people she had never seen.

As the hours passed, Genny found it getting harder and harder to be brave. If her mommy didn’t get here pretty soon, she decided, she was going to have to cry.

The first consular assistant, P. Kenneth Thorpe III, steepled his eyebrows together in an expression of mild discomfort. He was young, plump, and fair-skinned, and he took himself very seriously. “That’s quite a story, Mrs. Stewart,” he said. “You’ll have to admit.”

Anne was sitting in the small hard-backed chair facing Thorpe’s highly polished antique desk. “Is that all you can say?”

Assistant Consul Thorpe leaned back in his chair and wiggled his gold pen nervously between his thumb and forefinger. His pale blue eyes glanced around the room, as if he wished there were someone else present he could talk to, instead of Anne. “What do you expect me to say?”

Anne could barely conceal her fury. “That you’re going to do everything possible to find my daughter. And that you’re going to start doing it right now.”

The assistant consul sighed, rode his chair back up to a level position, and glanced down at the notes he had taken.

“Are you aware, Mrs. Stewart, that the Baroness von Hauser happens to be one of Munich’s—indeed, one of Germany’s-most prominent citizens?”

“She has my daughter!” Anne shouted. “I don’t care how damned prominent she is. She’s kidnapped her!”

Thorpe cleared his throat. “Yes. So you’ve told me. I might point out to you as well that the baroness is also extremely wealthy. She really has no conceivable reason to kidnap anyone.”

“I’ve explained to you what she wants. She wants information from me in return for my daughter.”

“Why don’t you just give her this information, then?”

“I offered to. But she refused.”

“But why would she do that?”

Anne clenched her fists. “I’ve told you. She’s trying to develop and exploit a genetic formula that originally belonged to my husband. The formula was used on my daughter…. Look, this is hopeless. You won’t believe anything I tell you. I want to talk to someone else.”

Thorpe arched an eyebrow in disapproval. He didn’t appreciate this attempt to go over his head. “There is no one else here in a position to help you, Mrs. Stewart.”

“Then call the police!” Anne cried. “If they go up there they’ll find my daughter!”

Thorpe glanced anxiously toward the door, apparently afraid that Anne’s yelling might be overheard. “The police have to have a very plausible reason for doing such a thing, Mrs. Stewart,” he replied. “Search warrants are required in Germany, too, you know. Just like the United States. And for good reason. As you can imagine, Baroness von Hauser would not be very pleased to have her premises searched unless there was a very wellestablished reason for doing so.”

Anne stood up. “You won’t do anything?”

Thorpe motioned to her to sit down. She remained standing.

“I can see that you’re upset,” he said in a placating tone. “And that’s understandable, of course—if what you say is true. But Mrs.

Stewart, you must be patient. Of course I’ll do all I can. As soon as we can get a confirmation of your alleged missing husband, we’ll take matters from there. We’ll investigate. We’ll contact the appropriate authorities. If your daughter is truly missing, then I’m sure she’ll show up soon. It seems to me highly likely that she’s still with her father. If she doesn’t show up soon, we’ll urge upon the appropriate authorities that they redouble their efforts. In the meantime, you really need not worry unduly. Munich is a very safe city. There’s not nywhere near the crime here that you’d find in New York or Chicago or Los Angeles. Far from it.

The Germans are a very law-abiding people—” “And you’re a jerk, Mr.

Thorpe,” Anne cut in angrily. “A stuffy, conceited little jerk. If anything happens to my daughter, I’ll hold you personally responsible.”

“Now really, Mrs. Stewart. I can see that you’re very upset, but—”

Anne stormed out, slamming the ten-foot-high oak door to his office so hard it shook the paintings on the wall and rattled the tray stacked with empty coffee cups and saucers sitting on his secretary’s desk.

Out on the street once more, Anne glanced around her, not really seeing anything. She felt panicked and helpless. What was she going to do?

Dalton Stewart raced northward in the BMW, his mind churning.

He tried to order his thoughts calmly, rationally. He had to get Genny back. Nothing else mattered.

He looked down the highway. A big trailer truck had moved out into the passing lane and pulled abreast of the car in front of it. Now it was moving along beside the car. At 125 mph, Stewart was rapidly closing in on the truck. He slowed and flashed the high beams of his headlights several times, to no avail. He slowed further and hit the horn with his fist. The truck, now only a few hundred feet in front of him, still refused to move out of the left lane. It continued to stay precisely abreast of the sedan in the right lane. Stewart looked at the speedometer: his speed had fallen to about 85 mph.

Stewart swung into the right lane and flashed at the automobile, a black Audi. The Audi also ignored him. He swung back into the left lane and looked in the rearview mirror. Another truck-also a semi—was coming up in the right lane. A third truck moved out from behind that one to pass it.

In a few seconds the two trucks behind him had closed the gap.

The one in the right lane was now traveling alongside him. The other one was directly in back of him, practically riding on his tail.

The truck behind kept closing in. All he could see in his rearview mirror was the massive steel grille of the vehicle’s radiator.

He accelerated until he was a car length from the back bumper of the truck ahead of him. The truck behind closed right in on him, moving up just inches from his bumper. The rear end of the truck in front was now hanging right over his hood. On his right, the third truck presented a solid wall of white corrugated steel.

Four huge tires on the twin rear axles were rolling furiously along the roadway three or four feet from the side of his car. On his left, the median divider pitched down sharply and then up again at an even steeper angle, to meet the lanes on the other side.

The truck behind nudged his tail. The BMW bounded forward and bounced against the front truck’s bumper.

Stewart’s hands squeezed the steering wheel. His foot was frozen in place on the gas pedal. There was no room to maneuver.

Even the slightest change in speed would bring disaster.

But if he did nothing, they’d crush him.

“Hello? Alexandra Tate?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry to bother you. My name is Paul Elder. I understand that you’re a close friend of Anne Stewart’s.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, this is a little embarrassing, I’m afraid—” “Oh, don’t worry.

I love to hear embarrassing stuff.”

“Well, I’m worried about Anne. I have no right to be worried about her, but I am….”

Bored and anxious, Genny prowled around the small bedroom and bath that made up her prison. She found an old-fashioned men’s razor on top of the medicine chest in the bathroom. It had been there a long time, and the blade had rusted away.

Genny pushed the bed a couple of feet to the side and crouched down beside it. The ancient floor showed signs of dry rot. Near the wall, one of the bed’s iron legs had, over time, worn a substantial depression in one of the boards. Using the flat corner of the razor to saw away part of the edge of the board, Genny was able to get underneath with her fingers and pry up a six-inch-long fragment of one plank. It immediately disintegrated into dusty, flaking pieces.

Genny had expected that as soon as the floor plank had come loose, she would be able to look right down to the floor below.

She was disappointed to discover that beneath that board was another one.

She jammed the handle end of the razor down into the wood of the subfloor. It was punky and soft. Soon she was able to punch the handle completely through.

For half an hour she worked furiously, pulling up more pieces of rotted floor planking until she had removed a ragged, roughly rectangular section about a foot wide and a foot and a half long.

That left the subfloor. The entire surface that she had exposed felt rotted and soft, but the wood was thicker than the floor planks, and she couldn’t get her finger around the edges to pry up on them.

She stood up and jumped on the spot. It sagged, but nothing gave way.

She jumped half a dozen times, but the subfloor held.

She stopped and listened. She was afraid someone might have heard her jumping. After a few minutes, she decided that no one was coming to investigate.

She moved the bed so that one side of it lined up with the edge of the rectangle of exposed subflooring, then climbed up on the mattress. She focused on the spot, twenty inches below her feet, took a big breath, and jumped.

Both heels struck the spot together. The wood gave way with a splintering crack, and Genny disappeared through the floor.

Anne spent most of the afternoon at a Munich police station.

At first everyone appeared eager to help. But there was a language problem. The only individual who spoke English was a middle-aged desk sergeant. He ushered her into his cubicle of an office, ordered her some coffee, and listened attentively, staring alternately at her face and the front of her blouse, as she poured out her story.

When she finished, she discovered that the man’s understanding of what she had just told him was hopelessly garbled. He seemed to think that her husband and the Baroness von Hauser had run off together and taken Genny with them in some kind of transatlantic custody battle. Anne tried repeatedly to explain, but the sergeant, whose name was Ottmar Klempe, just couldn’t seem to get it straight. And he was becoming angry and impatient with her, because he thought she was questioning his ability to understand English.

When he began to perceive that she was accusing the Baroness von Hauser of kidnapping her child, he wagged an admonishing finger at her. He leaned forward across his narrow metal desk and addressed her in an ominous tone. “Der Baroness iss fery powerful. Fery, fery powerful.

You should not say about her such sings.”

Anne walked out of Klempe’s cubbyhole and returned to the front desk.

She demanded to see the chief of the Munich Police Department, or whoever was in overall authority.

l, Heidi, the young woman at the front desk, was no longer eager to help. She was annoyed that Anne couldn’t speak German. She also didn’t like her persistence. She demanded to see Anne’s pass port again, and this time she held on to it.

Klempe, meanwhile, had emerged from his cubicle and was regaling everyone behind the waist-high, glass-topped barricade that separated the department’s working area from the public lobby with his version of Anne’s story. Several employees began making loud comments; others stared at her. Anne understood very little, but it was obvious that they were discussing the merits of her charges.

She sat on one of the red-and-blue plastic chairs arranged along the wall, determined to stay until someone agreed to do something. Ten minutes later, Klempe, in an almost comically officious tone, relayed the news to her that the chief would indeed see her, but she might have to wait. He was very busy.