He pressed a few more keys, and the images on the peripheral screens flipped to show street scenes downtown: traffic and security cameras around the courthouse.
“We’ll have to back up to about an hour ago and track forward,” Arthur murmured. The scenes on the images sped up, people scurrying down the sidewalk like insects, cars zipping in and out of frame, doors to the building swinging open and closed, over and over. They watched, all of them intent on one hoped-for figure, the middle-aged woman with short red hair, wearing the slick business suit. She didn’t appear, yet.
Maybe Mom was asleep. But no, Anna could find her when she was sleeping. So maybe unconscious—in an emergency room somewhere? Should they call hospitals?
Dad wouldn’t be acting like this if he thought it was that simple.
“Dad,” Anna said, tentative. This was thinking out loud, but if she did it out loud maybe she wouldn’t scare herself. “Have you ever heard anyone talk about the Executive?”
He turned from the screens. “The Executive? In what sense?”
“It’s just rumors. But I’ve heard a few people talking about a villain—a new archvillain, like the Destructor, but different. This one is manipulating things behind the scenes, working in secret, but through official channels.”
“And nobody knows who he is, of course. Shadowy, powerful,” he said.
“Right. It’s just that I was thinking, if … if you were a villain, and you wanted to take over the city using political channels, corporate channels, stuff like that, what would you do?”
“I would target Celia.”
“Do you think somebody might have taken her?” Anna winced, because she didn’t want it to be true, she wanted the idea to be crazy. But Arthur didn’t tell her she was crazy.
“Somebody powerful enough to be able to keep me from looking for her. It’s possible.”
Bethy was hugging herself, looking up at the screens. Then she lunged forward, pointing. “There! There she is!”
Arthur went to the control panel to stop the footage, rewind it, play it back. He spoke into the handset he’d held aside. “Captain, we’ve found her, on the corner security camera.”
Alone, their mother left the courthouse looking tired but pleased, smiling with a flash in her eyes. The hearing must have gone well. She ducked into the coffee shop on the corner, also something she’d do. They waited; Anna held her breath, like this was some kind of thriller, and the bad guy was about to strike.
Coffee in hand, Celia left the shop and continued down the street and off the screen. Anna almost screamed.
“You’ve picked her up?” Arthur said to the phone, and the image shifted. The angle from the new camera was high, looking across an intersection. Traffic camera. And there she was, approaching the intersection—until two people in dark coats and sunglasses joined her, walking on either side. They’d ducked out from a doorway, making their approach look natural—just two people who wanted a word with her. But one of them stuck something into her shoulder, through her jacket, and then a car pulled up to the curb. Before Celia could react, they’d guided her into the backseat.
Then she was gone.
“You saw that, Mark?”
Anna wished she could hear Paulson’s answer. She had to wait as they made some kind of plan. The next step was obvious: figure out who the people were and identify their car. As nondescript as they all were, there had to be some kind of identifying marks, and some kind of database they could check against. License plate, mug shots, something. They could follow the car, but traffic and security cameras could do only so much once you got out of the downtown area. The police could do this, they had the resources. Now that Paulson knew something was wrong, he could handle it.
But it might be too late. Anna wanted to find Celia now.
Bethy was glaring at her. “You couldn’t tell me? All this was going on and you couldn’t say anything? Not even a little? I kept asking if you had powers—”
“It was for your own good,” Anna said lamely. “To protect you.”
Bethy blew out a disgusted sigh.
“I’m sorry,” Anna pleaded. “I was wrong, I’m sorry.”
“No you’re not,” she muttered.
“All right, Captain. Thank you … No, I don’t think I can promise that, but I will let you know when something happens.” Arthur ended the call, dialed up a new one, while Anna and Bethy watched, entranced. “Suzanne, it’s Arthur. Would you be able to come home now?” A pause, listening. “Yes, it’s trouble. The old kind, I think. Celia appears to have been kidnapped … Yes, I know, that’s what I thought. All right, then. See you soon.” He turned to face his daughters, and Anna couldn’t tell if he really was that supremely confident, or if he was just putting on a good face for them. He was keeping his emotions under iron-fast control—he didn’t radiate anything. Not self-assurance, not fear. Just a solid, wall-like implacability. “Don’t worry, girls. We’ll find her. We’ll bring her home safely.”
“How do you know?” Bethy said, glaring and petulant.
“Because we always do,” Arthur said.
NINETEEN
CELIA woke up tied to a chair, because of course she did. If she lost consciousness in the course of a kidnapping, she woke up either tied to a chair or strapped to a sleek metal table that was part of some fearsome device of unknown purpose. The chair was always better, because it meant she was dealing with ordinary criminals with ordinary motivations and imaginations and probably not much of those. The metal table and fearsome device meant a mad scientist, someone with ambition and imagination. When the Destructor kidnapped her, she ended up strapped to a metal table under a mysterious device full of copper wires and glass domes, believing that whatever torture he had planned for her was undoubtedly worse than death.
This was a chair. She was upright. The nylon straps binding her wrists and ankles to the arms and legs of chair were tied in knots, improvised. This was a standard kidnapping and nothing to be worried about. Probably.
—Arthur, you can come looking for me now. Anytime.—
He didn’t respond. That didn’t mean anything. He might not be looking for her yet. She’d just keep thinking about him until he did start looking for her. Not hard to do. —Please, Arthur. I love you.—
Near as she could tell, her wig was still in place. The itch made it feel like it was still in place, so she’d probably been upright most of the time, the two goons carrying her between them. Her captors hadn’t blindfolded her, which meant they assumed she was powerless and that nothing she could observe would hurt them. Fair enough. She was in what looked like the unfurnished floor of an office complex, a wide-open space waiting for the partitions that would create a farm of cubicles. Evenly spaced posts held wiring and outlets, and along one side of the space was a wall of windows. They were high enough up, and she was far enough away from the windows, that all she saw was gray sky through the tinted glass. The décor was aggressively corporate: gray Berber carpeting, off-white walls, fluorescent lighting with an almost imperceptible flicker. The kind of thing you wouldn’t notice unless you had to work under it for eight hours a day. A few orphaned desks and office chairs stood here and there. Her own chair was isolated. Air-conditioning hissed through a vent somewhere. She was alone, facing away from any doors.
All she had to do was wait, practicing calm, so when her captors finally showed themselves, she wouldn’t flinch. She wouldn’t show the least bit of surprise, and certainly not fear. The old skills came back, even though she hadn’t done this in twenty years. The old habit, being the unresponsive captive, not giving them the fear they wanted. To keep that power for herself. She could be superior, even tied to a chair, looking up at them, whoever they were.