“I am surprised. Here it is. See,” Galina said, bringing up lines curving across the country, growing dense in the Pacific Northwest. “It looks like Boise.”
He might as well have printed out an invitation.
“I’ve got to get moving. Let me know if anything else comes up.”
“To Boise?” Galina asked.
“Affirmative,” Lana replied, already sounding as though she were back in combat mode.
Chasing Tahir as well, it seemed. The Sudanese must have gleaned his own clues when he hacked the Steel Fist site, for he was already heading west.
Why? What game is he running? And who’s he bringing?
She cut her computer connection to Galina and reached for her phone when a second direct message from Steel Fist arrived on her screen: “Bring no one.”
Fat chance, you—
But Lana seized up over Steel Fist’s next words: “I’ll cut her open. I’ll kill her slowly. I want you. You come, she lives. You bring anyone, I’ll know and you’ll watch her die slowly.”
Lana’s screen went blank. When she reached for her phone a second time, she did make a call, but not the one she’d planned. She rousted Jeff, the decorated navy vet, to call upon whatever chits he might have at the Department of Defense to get Lana and Cairo on a military flight to Boise as soon as possible.
She wouldn’t bring anyone with her, but she would bring a dog.
Vinko was asleep while his alter ego online, Steel Fist, was busy conducting a forum for many of his followers. And before he awoke his system would lose every last trace of those exchanges. For Vinko, the activity might as well have been a dream that he’d never remember. After all, Golden Voice had organized all his replies from thousands of sessions, which left her fully equipped to field any query or expression of outrage with an appropriate response.
It had been an alpha test. And it worked splendidly.
Emma guessed the car was on the road for about twenty minutes, although it was hard for her to estimate with any confidence. Time felt borderless, so teeming with fear that she could have been suspended in a nightmare with no point of return.
Then they stopped and she expected to be pulled out of the trunk. Instead, the front passenger door, as much as she could tell, opened and closed, and the car sped up again.
So Art’s gone. Nothing else made sense.
It felt black as a hearse in that trunk, even with her eyes untaped, as if it were, in fact, a coffin.
At least she could breathe, but her cramps were extreme. Yet her fear overrode even that pain. I saw their faces. She kept coming back to that. They thought they’d be done with her… soon.
The car started down what felt like a dirt road. The shocks were working overtime. Then the vehicle slowed almost to a stop before rolling onto a smooth surface for a second or two.
A garage?
All but confirmed when she heard the door closing.
Then the trunk lock was popped and the driver’s-side door opened and closed.
The woman, who had yet to reveal her name, smiled at her as she lifted the trunk all the way up. It was the coldest smile Emma had ever seen.
She peeled the tape from Em’s mouth. “How’s your stomach?”
“Bad.”
“I’m going to move you. You do what I say and I won’t hurt you.”
Now. You mean you won’t hurt me right now. Just go ahead and tell me.
But Emma said none of that. Instead, she asked, “What’s your name?” Desperate as it seemed, she was trying to make a connection to her captor. She’d heard her mom talk about how that had saved the lives of some victims.
“My name? Let’s see. You can call me… Peggy.”
Emma doubted that was her name, figuring the woman was gaming her. But she did what Peggy asked, rolling onto her side and pulling her legs to her chest, which actually relieved the cramping a tiny bit.
The woman grabbed the bottom of the bag, propping Emma’s legs on the edge of the trunk, then reached in and grabbed the heavy black plastic by Emma’s shoulders. She hauled her into a sitting position with little apparent strain.
“Now I’m going to get you on your feet. Have they gone to sleep?”
“No.”
With her help, Emma stood, arms still cuffed behind her back. Peggy unzipped the bag all the way to the ground, then unfolded a pocketknife and sliced off the wet plastic cuffs on Emma’s ankles.
Facing forward, Em heard her fold up the blade, then felt a gun barrel against her back.
“Walk through that door.” It was straight ahead, already open.
In this manner Emma was directed down to a concrete basement with a drain in the middle of the floor, and an iron cage that looked like the one ISIS had used to burn to death an airman.
“Stop,” the woman ordered as they neared the cage. “I’m going to undress you and hose you down.”
“Can you take these off?” Emma asked, wiggling her hands behind her back.
“Once you’re locked in there, I’ll do that.”
Again, she handled Emma carefully, slicing off her pants, shirt, and underpants before spraying her with a garden hose. The water was cold. Emma shivered, marching into the cage as soon as Peggy opened it. More than anything, she wanted to get away from her.
As soon as Peggy closed it, she slipped a thick padlock between matching rings and snapped it shut.
“Turn around.” She reached in the cage and cut off the cuffs on Emma’s wrists. “Now take off your bra.”
“Please don’t do this to me.”
“This is nothing.”
Emma reached back, undid the clip, and handed the bra over, noticing that the bars of the cage were heavily welded. No place to sit, no toilet, not even a bucket. And her cramps were getting brutal. She thought of curling up again, but the bottom of the cage was also crisscrossed with metal bars.
“Are you thirsty?”
“Yes, I’m really hungry, too.” Even with the cramps. She hadn’t eaten since yesterday.
The woman brought over the hose and let Emma drink her fill. She said nothing about food before walking up the stairs and closing the door.
But she did leave the light on. Emma was grateful until she looked up and saw why: a ceiling-mounted camera was pointed at her. When she moved, the camera moved.
She looked more closely at the ceiling and saw two more cameras trained on her.
What’s she going to do to me?
That was when her eyes fell to the walls and floor. With the greatest apprehension she studied the room. And then she saw it. There could be no mistaking its purpose.
It was an instrument of unutterable pain.
Chapter 30
Vinko stares at his computer’s blank screen. There’s no electricity. That’s clear, and the desktop doesn’t have a battery capable of running much more than the device’s internal clock. He jumps right onto his laptop, but those batteries aren’t working. That makes no sense, unless he’s been hacked and the batteries drained while he slept.
He’s never bothered with a gas generator because his backup was always hydro from two streams that run across his acreage down to Hayden Lake. But the streams are nothing but a trickle, dried by an unusual yearlong drought.
Vinko points his binoculars up and down the lake, trying to spy lights or any other signs of power, but it’s autumn, the slow season. There’s nothing burning out there. Why would there be at this hour?
He grabs his phone. Why didn’t he think of that first? But it’s not working, either. Tiny pulses of panic thrum in the bottom of his gut.
The NSA. They know you’re Steel Fist. They could be moving in on you right this second.