She didn’t reply. She didn’t know what he was talking about.
Then she remembered. The way she’d sneaked in those song lyrics to tell her father what they’d done to her.
“Do you understand that your life is entirely in my hands?”
“Oh-God-kill me!” she screamed, though it came out as a strangled croak. “Just do it. I don’t care!”
“Why would I want to kill you, Alexa? It is much worse for you to be buried so deep under the ground in your coffin.”
“Oh God, kill me, please!”
“Oh, no,” said the voice. “I want you to stay alive for a very long time. Knowing that no one will ever find you. No one.”
She moaned, screamed, felt light-headed, nauseous.
“There you are, ten feet underground, and no one has any idea where you are. Maybe I go for a ride. Maybe I go for a trip for some days. I will keep the ventilation on, of course, so you won’t run out of air. You will scream and no one can hear you, and you will beat your fists and claw against the steel walls of your casket, and no one knows you are there.”
“Please, I’ll do anything,” she said. “Anything.” She paused, swallowed hard, thought she might be sick again. “You’re very strong. I think you’re a very attractive man.”
A chuckle came from the speaker overhead. “Nothing you can do to me can excite me more than watching you beg. This is very very exciting to me, Alexa.”
“My father will give you anything you want. Anything!”
“No. You are wrong. He gives nothing to free you.”
“Maybe he doesn’t know what Mercury is.”
“Your father knows. He understands very well. Do you know why he doesn’t give what we ask?”
“He doesn’t know what you want!”
“You are not important to him, Alexa. He loves his wife and his money more than he loves you. Maybe he never loves you. You are trapped like a rat and your father knows you are there and he doesn’t even care.”
“That’s not true!”
No reply.
Just silence.
“It’s not true,” Alexa repeated. “Let me talk to him again. I’ll tell him he has to do it now.”
Nothing. Silence.
“Please, let me talk to him.”
Not a sound.
In the dreadful silence she began to hear distant sounds that at first she thought were just hallucinations, squeaking from the hamster wheel of her terrified mind.
But no, these really were voices. Murmured, indistinct, but definitely voices. The way she’d sometimes hear her parents’ voices coming through the heating grates in the floor of the big old house, even though they were two floors below.
There were people up there. Probably the Owl and the others he was working with. Their voices were coming through the tube or pipe or duct that let in the fresh air. Were they with him? What if they weren’t and they knew nothing about her?
She yelled as loudly as she could: “HELP ME HELP ME HELP ME PLEASE SOMEBODY HELP ME I’M DOWN HERE HELP ME!”
Only silence in reply.
Then the distant murmuring started up again, and she was sure she could hear someone laughing.
37.
Instead of finding Alexa, we’d found her discarded phone.
A huge disappointment, sure. But the more I thought about it, the more it told us.
It told us she was probably within a hundred miles of Boston.
We knew from the hotel’s surveillance tape what time she’d been abducted. We knew from the 911 call that she’d passed through Leominster, north of Boston, less than an hour later.
Once Diana had made a few calls, we concluded that Alexa had probably been driven, not put on a plane. The only airfield nearby was the Fitchburg Municipal Airport, which had two runways and was used by a couple of small charter companies. But no flights had left between midnight the night before and six that morning.
Only fourteen hours had elapsed between her abduction and the first time her kidnappers had contacted Marshall Marcus. That included transporting her and then-if her clues were to be taken literally-burying her in some sort of crypt or vault. And setting up cameras that could broadcast over the Internet. An arrangement like that was complicated and time-intensive and must have taken several hours. So they couldn’t have gone too far.
But that didn’t narrow it down much.
I DROPPED Diana off at FBI headquarters. It was barely six in the morning, but she thought she might as well get a very early start on the day. She’d grab the techs as soon as they got in and ask them for a complete workup of Alexa’s phone.
After she got out I sat in the Defender for a while, idling in front of One Center Plaza, and thought about going home to catch a few hours’ sleep, since it was likely to be a very long day.
Until I checked my e-mail.
I found a long series of e-mails not from a name but from a number I didn’t recognize. It took me a few seconds to realize that they’d been sent automatically by the miniature GPS tracker concealed in Taylor Armstrong’s gold S. T. Dupont lighter.
Well, not her lighter, but the one I’d switched with hers when I’d “accidentally” dropped it on the cobblestones of Beacon Hill. I’d bought it at the tobacco shop in Park Square, the exact same S. T. Dupont Ligne 2 Gold Diamond Head lighter. A classic, and ridiculously expensive. But a lot cheaper, and more reliable, than hiring someone to tail her.
The tiny tracking device had been installed by an old Special Forces buddy of mine we used to call Romeo who had his own business in TSCM, or technical surveillance countermeasures. He complained bitterly about how small the lighter was. He wasn’t sure he had a tracker small enough. He wanted me to steal her cell phone: That would have been a breeze.
It would have been easier to remove one of her kidneys.
But Romeo figured out how to wedge a nano GPS device inside the lighter’s fluid reservoir. Complaining all the while, of course. Romeo, whose real name was George Devlin, was not an easy man to deal with, but he did great work.
He programmed the thing to start sending out location signals only when it was moved more than a thousand feet. Now I could see that, immediately after Taylor and I had our little talk on the corner of Charles and Beacon, she went home-or was driven home in David Schechter’s limousine-and then she drove to Medford, five miles northwest.
So who might she be meeting so urgently?
I had a pretty good idea.
38.
Twenty minutes later I was driving down Oldfield Road in Medford, a pleasant street lined with graceful old trees and clapboard houses. Some were two-family houses, some apartment buildings. Most of them were well maintained, regularly painted, their lawns neatly mowed and shrubs perfectly clipped, their driveways polished ebony. A few looked like they’d been all but abandoned by absentee landlords who’d thrown up their hands in despair at the squalor of their student tenants. The Tufts University campus was a short walk away.
The house where Taylor Armstrong had spent forty-three minutes last night was a white-painted three-story wooden house, one of the nicer ones. At six thirty in the morning, there wasn’t much going on in the neighborhood. A woman running in black-and-turquoise spandex. A car pulling out of a driveway at the other end of the block. I waited and watched the house.
Then I got out and walked past the house as if I were a neighbor out for a morning stroll. With a quick glance around, I climbed the front porch quietly, but casually, and saw a stack of five buzzers with a stack of matching names. Five apartments. One was probably the owner. Two apartments each on the upper two floors.
Five surnames. Schiff, Murdoch, Perreira, O’Connor, and Unger. I memorized them, went back to the car, hit a speed-dial button on my BlackBerry, and woke Dorothy up.