As he came back down the escalators he saw, across the carpark, two shadowy figures at the door of his SUV. One of them appeared to be bending down to peer inside, while the other walked around the back and tried to lift the tailgate.
“Hey!” Chas shouted at the top of his voice, and he took the remaining stairs two at a time, nearly falling as he reached the foot of the escalator. He ran across the road, almost dropping his pizza as a car horn blasted and a vehicle swerved to avoid him in a screech of tyres. He ran between the potted palms and out across the asphalt. His SUV stood, where he had left it, all on its own between a set of angled white lines near the back of the lot. There was no one anywhere near it. He looked around, heart pumping, to see if he could spot the figures he had seen from the escalator. But there was nobody around. He turned as a car engine burst into life and its headlights laid down two conical beams across the tarmac. The vehicle pulled away, and Michael saw that its occupants were a young man and his girl eating ice creams and laughing.
He walked the rest of the way to his SUV and made a quick tour around it. There didn’t seem to be any damage. He unlocked it with his remote and slipped inside. He laid the pizza box on the passenger seat and let out a long sigh of relief, as a leather-gloved hand came around from behind his head and clamped itself over his mouth. Iron fingers almost crushed his jaw. He could smell the leather of the gloves, and he felt cold metal pressing into the side of his neck.
“Do not move a single, fucking muscle, you understand?” It wasn’t the low rasp of the voice in his ear that stopped him from moving. He was paralysed by pure, naked fear.
The shadow of another hand came around from behind, only this time it wasn’t leather he smelled. It was something medical. Something that made him think of hospitals. He only recognised it at the last moment. As a warm, damp, cloth was folded over his nose. Chloroform. Not very original, but very effective. He tried to hold his breath, tensing against the pressure of the hands from behind. But it wasn’t long before the weight pushing down on his chest caused him to gasp for air, and he choked, and coughed, and saw the world fade away.
Chapter Twenty-One
He seemed to be tethered to something anchored at the bottom of the sea. He couldn’t breathe, or move, but had the sensation of floating, as if in water. It was impossible to open his eyes. And as oxygen starvation increased, the pressure in his chest became almost unbearable. He tried to draw breath through his mouth, but something was stopping it. And then, as he thought despair might steal away all reason, he found himself sucking air in through his nasal passages. Long, thin columns of it that he dragged down into his lungs, almost gagging from the effort.
And it was as if the tether had been cut. He went spiralling upwards through the water. Up and up, endlessly it seemed, until at long last he broke the surface. He breathed out, but still couldn’t draw air back through his mouth. He opened his eyes. Wide. But he couldn’t see anything. He could feel the physical pounding of his heart against his ribs. The sound of it filled his head. The rushing of blood filled his ears.
And slowly, as comprehension took hold, he realised that it was consciousness whose surface he had broken, not water. He was perfectly dry, apart from the sweat that ran in rivulets down his face. He could feel it dripping from his chin. He couldn’t see for the simple reason that it was dark. Profoundly dark. He was seated, his arms bound behind him, tied at the wrists to a chair. His ankles, too, were secured, cutting off circulation, biting into his flesh. He couldn’t open his mouth because there was something taped across it, holding it firmly shut.
As his breathing became more regular, and his heartbeat less frantic, he tried to listen. But he could hear nothing. Not a sound other than the rasping of his own breath. Although he had the very strong sense that he was not alone. A smell, perhaps. Something in the air. The heat emanating from another body.
And then suddenly he was blinded. Cold, white light sent pain spiking through his brain. He screwed up his eyes against it, turning his head away as much as his bindings would allow. Hands grabbed his head roughly from behind, and forced him to look forward again. As his pupils contracted, the scene before him began to take form, like something rezzing in Second Life. An office desk. Polished mahogany. A desk lamp, its shade swivelled toward him, so that he received the full, reflected glare of its naked bulb. A man sitting in an executive leather chair, leaning forward, forearms planted on the desktop, staring intently at Michael. There was something lying flat on the desk in front of him, but Michael couldn’t see what it was.
He tried to swallow, but his mouth and throat were so dry his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth. For a moment he thought he was going to be sick and started to panic. The man nodded, and someone reached around to tear away the tape that sealed his mouth. He heard the sound of it ripping free of his flesh and the sharp sting of it as it tore hairs out of his skin. He gasped for air, and felt the threatened bile retreat to his stomach.
The man leaned forward into the light, so that Michael got a clear sight of him for the first time. He wore a plain dark suit, with a white shirt and red tie. He had ginger hair, gelled and scraped back across a broad skull. His skin was very pale, very un-Californian, and spattered with freckles. At a guess Michael would have put him at mid- to late-forties. But he was carrying a fair amount of weight and might have been older. He was clean-shaven, almost shiny-faced. His lips were exceptionally pale, and his green eyes were so cold that Michael could almost feel them on him like the tips of icy fingers.
Michael started to speak, but the man quickly raised a silencing finger to his lips. Then he waggled it backwards and forwards in front him. A tiny shake of his head.
“Just listen.”
Michael nodded.
“You are a thief, Mr. Kapinsky.”
Michael began to protest. But the man tilted his head to one side and raised a single eyebrow, and Michael shut up.
“You are a thief. And a liar. You stole more than three million dollars from our account, and if I’d let you, you would have denied it, wouldn’t you?”
Michael assumed, because this had been couched as a question, that he was expected to reply. “Yes. Because I didn’t steal it.”
“See? A thief, and a liar. Just like I said.” He raised his finger again to pre-empt any further attempt by Michael at denial. “We were most perplexed when that money suddenly disappeared from our Second Life account. Vanished without trace. You can imagine how we felt. Close to three and a quarter million is no trifling amount, Mr. Kapinsky. But just as well for us that human frailty is something we have always been able to exploit to our advantage. We are past masters in the art of bribery and corruption. In truth, it is such an easy path to tread. People are so... bribable. And... corrupt. So we had little trouble finding someone in San Francisco who would take a look for us into the Linden Lab database to tell us what had happened. As you can probably understand, we were unwilling to go through official channels. The fewer questions asked the better.”
He leaned back a little now, folding his hands in front of him on the desk.
“And what did we find? We found that our account had been erased. No record of it ever existing. And our three million plus gone, as if simply vanished into thin air. Perplexing you might think. And you’d be right. We were very perplexed, and not a little vexed. But then our friend in San Francisco stumbled across an extraordinary coincidence. A sum of money corresponding exactly to our missing cash — right down to the last cent — had been paid into another account the same day that ours went missing.”