Buried Secrets (13 page)

“It’s Alexa,” she said. “The video stream is back online.”

28.

We crowded around the monitor. Marcus hunched forward in his chair while Dorothy worked the keyboard.

“It just started up,” Dorothy said.

The same still photo of Alexa as a girl. Superimposed over it, in green letters: LIVE and ENTER CHAT. Dorothy moved the mouse and clicked.

Then Alexa’s face appeared again. That same extreme close-up. Eyes brimming with tears.

“Dad?” she said. She wasn’t looking straight at the camera but slightly off to the side, as if she didn’t know for sure where the lens was. “Dad?”

Marcus said, “Lexie? Daddy’s right here.”

“She still can’t hear you,” Dorothy said.

“Daddy, they’re not going to let me go unless you give them something, okay?” The picture was sort of stuttery and jittery. Not very high quality. Like TV reception used to be in the days before cable.

“Um … first, they say if you contact the police or anything they’re just going to…” She blinked rapidly, tears streaming down her cheeks. She shuddered.

“I’m so cold and I’m so afraid that I’m too weak and I can’t change,” she said suddenly, almost in a monotone. “I—I twist and turn in the darkest space and … I don’t want to be here anymore, Daddy.”

“Oh, Lord,” Dorothy said.

“Shhh!” Marcus said. “Please!”

There was a low rumble, and suddenly the image pixelated: It froze, turned into thousands of tiny squares that broke apart, and then the screen went dark.

“No!” Marcus said. “Not again! Why is this happening?”

But then the video was back. Alexa was saying, “They want
Mercury
, Daddy, okay? You have to give them Mercury in the raw. I—I don’t know what that means. They said you will.

Please, Daddy, I don’t think I can hold out any longer.”

And the image went dark once again. We waited a few seconds, but this time it didn’t come back.

“Is that it?” Marcus said, looking wildly from me to Dorothy and back. “That’s the end of the video?”

“I’m sure it’s not the last,” I said.

“IR camera for sure,” Dorothy said. Infrared, she meant. The reason for the video’s monochrome, greenish cast. A video camera like that would have its own built-in infrared light source, invisible to the human eye.

“They’re holding her in total darkness,” I said.

Marcus shouted, “My little Lexie! What are they doing to her? Where is she?”

“They don’t want us to know yet,” I said. “It’s part of the pressure, the … cruelty. The not-knowing.”

Marcus put a hand over his eyes. His lower lip was trembling, his face was flushed. He was sobbing noiselessly.

“I really do think she’s lying down,” Dorothy said. “Just based on the appearance of her face.”

“So what happened to the image at the end?” I said. “What caused it to break up?”

“Some kind of transmission error, maybe.”

“I’m not so sure. You notice that low-pitched sound? Sounded like a car or a truck nearby.”

Dorothy nodded. “A big old truck, maybe. They’re probably near traffic. Probably right off a main road or a highway or something.”

“Nope,” I said. “Not a main road. Not a busy street. That was the first vehicle we heard.

So that tells us she’s near a road but not a busy one.” I turned to Marcus. “What’s Mercury?” He lifted his hand from his eyes. They were scrunched and red and flooded with tears.

“No idea.”

“And what was all that about ‘I’m too weak and I can’t change’ and ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”

“Who the hell knows,” he said, his voice phlegmy. He cleared his throat. “She’s scared out of her mind.”

“But it’s not the way she normally talks, is it?”

“She’s terrified. She was just … babbling!”

“Was she quoting a poem, maybe?”

Marcus looked blank.

“It sounds like a reference to something. Like she was reciting something. Doesn’t sound familiar at all?”

He shook his head.

“A book?” I suggested. “Maybe something you used to read to her when she was a little kid?”

“I, you know…” He faltered. “You know, her mother read to her. And your mother. I—I never did. I really wasn’t around very much.”

And he put a hand over his eyes again.

AS WE drove away from Marcus’s house into the gloom of a starless night—away from what I now thought of as Marshall Marcus’s compound, defended as it was by armed guards—I told Dorothy about how Marshall Marcus had lost it all.

She reacted with the same kind of slack-jawed disbelief that I had. “You telling me this guy lost ten billion dollars like it dropped behind the sofa cushions?”

“Basically.”

“That can happen?”

“Easy.”

She shook her head. “See, this is why I’m glad I never went into finance. I’m always losing my keys and my glasses. If you can lose something, I’ll lose it.” She was multitasking, tapping away at her BlackBerry as she talked.

“Remind me not to give you any money to manage,” I said.

“You have any idea what Mercury is?”

“Marshall doesn’t know. Why should I?”

“Marshall
says
he doesn’t know.”

“True.”

“Maybe it’s, like, one of his offshore funds or something. Money he’s stashed somewhere.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“If the kidnappers know they lost their whole investment, they also know he’s broke. So

‘Mercury’
can’t
refer to money.”

“Maybe they figure he’s got something stashed away somewhere. All these guys hide chunky nuts of money away. They’re like squirrels. Evil squirrels.”

“But why not just say it straight? Why not just say, wire three hundred million dollars into such-and-such an offshore account or we kill the kid?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted.

“Well, what’s more valuable than money?”

“A virtuous woman.” Dorothy pursed her lips.

“Some proprietary trading algorithm, maybe. Some investment formula he invented.” She shook her head, kept tapping away. “A trading algorithm? Guy’s busted flat.

Whatever secret sauce the guy’s got I ain’t buying.”

I smiled.

“You think he knows but he’s not telling us?” she said.

“Yep.”

“Even if it gets his daughter killed?”

For a long time I said nothing. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?”

“You know him,” she said. “I don’t.”

“No,” I said. “I thought I knew him. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Hmph,” she said.

“What?”

“Oh, man, this can’t be true.”

“What?”

“Oh, dear God, please don’t let this be true.”

“What are you talking about?”

For a quick second I took my eyes off the road to glance at Dorothy. She was staring at her BlackBerry. “That crazy stuff Alexa was saying? ‘I twist and turn in the darkest space’?”

“Yeah?”

“I Googled it. Nick, it’s a lyric from a song by a rock group called Alter Bridge.”

“Okay.”

“The song’s called ‘Buried Alive.’”

29.

By the time I’d dropped Dorothy off at her apartment in Mission Hill, it was almost nine at night.

My apartment was a loft in the leather district, which may sound kinky, but actually refers to the six-square-block area of downtown Boston between Chinatown and the financial district, where the old red-brick buildings used to be shoe factories and leather tanneries and warehouses.

I found a parking space a few blocks away, cut through the alley into the grim service entrance and up the steel-treaded back stairwell to the back door on the fifth floor.

The loft was one large open space with a fifteen-foot ceiling. The bedroom was in an alcove, on the opposite side of the apartment from the bathroom. Bad design. In another alcove was a kitchen equipped with high-end appliances, none of which I’d ever used, except the refrigerator. There were a lot of cast-iron support columns and exposed brick and of course the obligatory exposed ductwork. The place was spare and functional and unadorned. Uncluttered.

I’m sure a psychiatrist would say that I was reacting against my upbringing in an immense mansion in Bedford, New York, stuffed with precious antiques. My brother and I couldn’t run around inside without knocking over some priceless Etruscan vase or a John Townsend highboy.

But maybe I just hate clutter.

The comedian George Carlin used to do a great routine about “stuff,” the crap we all go through life accumulating and shuffling around from place to place. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it, he said, a place to put your stuff while you go out and get more stuff. I have as little stuff as possible, but what I have is simple and good.

I went straight to the bathroom, stripped, and jumped in the shower. For a long time I stood there, feeling the hot water pound my head, my neck, my back.

Unable to get the image of poor Alexa Marcus out of my head. The raccoon eyes, the abject terror. It reminded me of one of the most harrowing Web videos I’ve ever seen: the beheading of a brave
Wall Street Journal
reporter some years ago by monsters in black hoods.

And that association filled me with dread.

I wondered what she meant by “buried alive.” Maybe she was locked in an underground bunker or vault of some kind.

When I shut off the water and reached for the towel I thought I heard a noise.

A snap or a click.

Or nothing.

I stopped, listened a moment longer, then began toweling myself off.

And heard it again. Definitely something.

Inside the apartment.

30.

I stared out through the halfway-open bathroom door, saw nothing.

In such an old building in the middle of a city at night, there were all sorts of sounds.

Delivery trucks and garbage compactors and screeching brakes and car doors slamming and buses belching diesel. Car alarms, night and day.

But this was coming from inside my apartment for sure.

A
scritch scritch scritch
from the front of the loft.

Naked, still wet, I let the towel drop and nudged the bathroom door open a bit wider.

Stepped out, dripping on the hardwood floor.

Listened harder.

The
scritch scritch scritch
even more distinct. It was definitely inside the loft, at the front.

Both of my firearms were out of reach. The SIG-Sauer P250 semiautomatic pistol was under my bed. But to reach the bedroom alcove I’d have to pass them first. I cursed the idiotic layout of the place, putting the bathroom so far from the bedroom. The other weapon, a Smith & Wesson M&P nine-millimeter, was in a floor safe under the kitchen floor.

Closer to them than to me.

The wooden floors, once scarred and dented, had been recently refinished. They were solid and silky-smooth and they didn’t squeak when you walked on them. Barefoot, I was able to take a few noiseless steps into the room.

Two men in black ambush jackets. One was large and heavily muscled with a Neanderthal forehead and a black brush cut. He was sitting at my desk, doing something to my keyboard, even though he didn’t look like the computer-savvy type. The other was small and slender with short mouse-brown hair, sallow complexion, and cheeks deeply pitted with acne scars. He sat on the floor beneath my huge wall-mounted flat-screen TV. He was holding my cable modem and doing something with a screwdriver.

Both of them wore latex gloves. They were also wearing new-looking jeans and dark jackets. Most people wouldn’t notice anything special about the way they were dressed. But if you’ve ever worked undercover, their clothing was as conspicuous as an electronic Times Square billboard. It was carry-conceal attire, with hidden pistol pockets and magazine pouches.

I had no idea who they were or why they were here, but I knew immediately they were armed.

And I wasn’t.

I wasn’t even dressed.

31.

I wasn’t scared, either. I was pissed off, outraged at the audacity of these two intruding into my living space. Messing with my computer and my new flat-screen TV.

Most people feel a jolt of adrenaline and their heart starts to race. Mine slows. I breathe more deeply, see more clearly. My senses are heightened.

If I simply wanted them to leave, I’d only have to make a sound, and they’d abandon their black-bag job and slip out. But I didn’t want them gone.

I wanted them dead. After we’d had a conversation, of course. I wanted to know who’d sent them, and why.

So I backed into the bathroom and stood there for a moment, still dripping on the floor, considering my options, thinking.

Somehow they’d gotten in without setting off the alarm. They’d managed to defeat my security system, which wasn’t easy. The front door was ajar, I noticed, and one of the big old factory windows was open. I doubted they’d entered through the window, on that busy street.

That would have attracted all kinds of attention, even at night: I was on the fifth floor. But to have gotten in through my front door meant knowing the code to disarm the system.

Obviously they hadn’t expected me to be home. Nor did they see or hear me come in through the service entrance at the back of the loft, which I seldom used. They hadn’t heard me showering at the other end of the apartment: In this old building, water constantly flowed through the pipes.

My only advantage was that they didn’t know I was here.

Looking down at my pants, heaped on the bathroom floor, I ran through a quick mental catalogue. Just the usual objects that can be used as improvised weapons, like keys or pens, but only at close range.

This was a time when a little clutter might have been useful. At first glance, I saw nothing promising. Toothbrush and toothpaste, water glass, mouthwash. Hand towels and shower towels.

A towel can be an effective makeshift weapon if you use it like a
kusari-fundo
, a Japanese weighted chain. But only if you’re close enough.

Then I saw my electric razor. I’m normally a blade guy, but in a rush, electric is faster. Its coil cord was about two feet long. Stretched to its full length it would probably reach six feet.

I slipped on my pants, unplugged the razor, then padded silently, stealthily, into the main room.