Flight Path: A Wright & Tran Novel (11 page)

Kara felt the tears welling in her eyes. She switched her thoughts back to the hard muzzle, crushing into the base of her skull. Suppressing the sob that was building and regaining her control, she pictured her brother David with his wife. She saw her nephew and niece smiling up from a Lego-strewn floor. Snatching a breath, her shoulders heaved but she stayed quiet.

The gunman leaned in close and whispered in her ear. Softly, like a lover’s murmur, “Not a word. Not one word or you die right now. Nod if you understand.”

Kara nodded. It had been a Dutch accent but not the man that had greeted her at the harbour. The hands on her shoulders went under her armpits and lifted her back onto her feet. Forcing the images of family out of her mind, she concentrated on building up a mental picture of her environment.

She was roughly pushed and guided, her awkward footsteps tripping on a low step. The light coming through the thick hood changed and she figured she had entered a building. It felt small, constrained, a hallway. She listened and could hear another awkward set of steps being guided behind her. She knew it was Tien, but the muzzle of the gun stayed pressed into her skull and she kept quiet. After a few more steps she was dragged sharp right and into a larger room. There was still no light but she could feel more space. The guiding hands shoved her hard and she sprawled forward, hitting her shin on, and falling over, a low, hard-edged object. She half-twisted on the way down and landed on her back, partially knocking the wind out of herself with a gasp. Her bound hands were trapped between her body and the floor.

She was pulled up, twisted around, hands delved into her pockets removing her phone and the small amount of cash she had. She mentally said a thank you for the discipline that stopped her carrying any identification when she was going out on a job. Her jacket was unzipped and pulled down her arms, bunching at her wrists. Then she was pressed back against a wall and forced to sit on the floor. Her feet were brought together and a plastic tie was secured around them. She heard footsteps leave the room and the door shut. She tapped her heels on the bare concrete floor and waited, but there was no reply. Tien had been taken to a different room.

Kara realised that the bunching of her jacket at her wrists made any hope of breaking out from the plastic zip-tie an impossibility. She could also feel the locking tab of the tie had been placed to the rear of her right hand. She was struck that whoever had placed it on her, knew what they were doing. Well, she reflected, so did she.

Silently and to a long-practised rhythm, she began to count. She knew that each minute estimated would only be out by a second or two at the most. She was her own metronome and while she remained hooded and restrained there was little else to do but count and consider. As the numbers ticked over subconsciously, she put her frontal-lobes to more high-level analysis tasks.

She estimated that if she had been knocked out for perhaps five or ten minutes, then she wasn’t more than twenty minutes from the Volendam harbour carpark. They had been waiting for her. They had called her Liz. She had only used that alias with Henk, in the hotel. Had someone overheard their enquiries about boats? She thought back to the two men in the corner of the restaurant on Friday morning. Were they the people who made Swift disappear? Had Amberley’s text message put them on alert? Maybe the simple act of asking about the boats tipped them off. How had they known she w-

Kara cut herself off in mid-thought.

She thought about going back to talk to Henk on the Saturday. She had gone alone. It wasn’t a set meeting. Just her dropping in casually. She hadn’t even known if he would be there. But he had been and she had talked to him. Then she had driven back to the apartment on her own. The road to Amsterdam from Volendam had been as busy as usual.

She realised with sudden clarity that had someone been following her, she would never have picked up on it. She hadn’t arranged for Sammi or Tien to operate a trail car coming behind to monitor. She hadn’t collated car registration numbers, she hadn’t noticed if the same cars had followed her this morning. She had potentially compromised the whole lot of them. They could have been under counter-surveillance for the last day. Or more.

Worse still, Kara, Tien and Sammi had hung around the apartment. They had been easy targets for anyone mounting a surveillance operation. The potential was easy to imagine if Rik, or whoever owned the boat, was already suspicious of out-of-season enquiries coming so soon after an alerting text message from Francis Amberley. This morning would have been a simple trap. Put a decoy on the deck of the Fair Winds and if someone showed up at the harbour, it was too much of a coincidence. She swore to herself.

Her smarter, prettier, internal-self scolded her, ‘You stupid bitch, Kara. You’ve been lazy, distracted and lax. You underestimated the people you were going up against.’

Had she understood how badly she had underestimated, the admonishment would have been a lot more severe.

Near Volendam, Holland.

Eighty-six minutes
.
Her count continuing, her anger festering into a blind desire to get free of her restraints and take it out on her captors.

Kara felt the air pressure of the room change as a door opened to her right. Footsteps, two sets. The plastic tie on her feet was cut. Four hands grabbed her, lifting, dragging and pushing her into the hallway, then right. She was shoved a few feet forward before being thrown left into another expansive room. Once more she stumbled, but this time she was grabbed by a third set of hands. Their owner was smaller. She was twisted around, pushed back against a wall and her feet were resecured with a plastic tie.

“Sit down,” a heavy Dutch accent, on a new voice. She figured she had heard three different voices so far. The man who had punched her at the harbour, the gunman from outside and now this
Maitre d'
. Given his approximate size, he wasn’t the fat man who had stepped off the boat. In the time she had waited alone she had been struck by the relative professionalism of her captors. They had maintained a fair degree of silence with no excessive talking, no shouting, no hysterics, but she had still heard three of them. She knew there was at least one more and she knew at least one of them was armed.

They had left her alone with no opportunity to talk to Tien. It was a classic interrogation technique that was meant to isolate, subjugate and demoralise. The first time she had been forced to endure it, almost eleven years earlier on the training course where she had discovered her real inner voice, she had indeed felt most of those emotions. Repeated exposure to the techniques lessened their impact. Kara now found that she was examining what was being done to her and rating its effectiveness. She was giving scores out of ten for prisoner handling, maintenance of isolation, clarity of purpose, use of appropriate techniques. Short of them just shooting her, she was beginning to feel a lot more comfortable.

Surprisingly, having thought they were doing well with her isolation, her hood was taken off. She blinked rapidly in the bright light of what was a dimmed room and scanned her environment. Opposite was the door she had come through: standard size, domestic, closed, a young, thin, tall man standing guard in front of it. To his left as Kara looked, a pale green wall was marked by lines of bare plaster that showed where long-gone units had once been affixed. There was a small set of shelves, empty other than a stacked set of towels in blues, mauves and greys and a box that reminded her of an old canteen of cutlery. Next to the shelves was another door, almost diagonally opposite from where Kara was seated. The fat man from the harbour was standing in front of it. The wall to the left hand side of the room had a double-width window. Like the doors, it was domestic in its size and placement. The sun filtered through medium-heavy, unpatterned, grey curtains that didn’t quite meet in the middle. Under the window were more bare plaster marks just visible above and to the side of a three-seater couch, its fabric a drab grey. To the left of the couch was a faded half-and-half stable door. The metal bolts and hinges were rusted over and a visible line of dust and grime marked where it met the floor. Kara thought it geographically appropriate that the Americans would have called it a Dutch door. To her immediate left, along the same wall she was propped against, was an old low-level sideboard. Through the gap between the legs of the man who had just removed her hood, she could see more bare plaster marks. The wall to her right was free of furniture but had a mirror, almost identical in size to the window, hung exactly to reflect the light. She looked up to see a lone, unlit, bulb with no shade. She looked down at the floor and her mind jarred. Her eyes widened and for the first time her inner voice sounded less assured.

‘Oh what the fuck have we gotten ourselves into here?’

The man who had removed her hood spoke and she recognised him as the
Maitre d’
, “Are you thirsty?”

She kept her eyes cast down and didn’t speak, but considered that she had chosen his name well. First he had offered her a seat, now he was offering a drink.

“Are you thirsty?” he repeated, more harshly.

Kara maintained her downward stare and her silence. Out of the corner of her eye she saw his foot moving and was able to tense her muscles to meet the toe of his boot impacting into her thigh. She muffled the desire to scream obscenities at him and instead fell sideways to her right. He bent and dragged her up. Then he reached behind him and retrieved a small plastic water bottle from the sideboard. Twisting the cap off he took a drink and opened his mouth wide to show he had swallowed. He held it carelessly to her lips. She gulped the water, ignoring the excess pouring down her front.

He said something in Dutch before turning away. His two companions laughed and Kara processed the similarities to German. She guessed he had said something like silence wouldn’t help her, but she hadn’t a clue about the other words laced throughout the sentence. The soreness of her thigh was lost in the frustration she felt at not understanding what he had said. It was relatively unknown for her to be at such a disadvantage. The Maitre d’ sat down on the arm of the chair next to her. He wore black Chelsea-boots, jeans, a broad check-patterned, short-sleeved shirt and large, thick-framed black glasses. Kara guessed he was in his thirties, about five-foot-six, lightly built with thinning dark hair. As she had been trained to do, she automatically personalised her captors. She decided to give him a new name. He would be Buddy.

She eyed the other two men. The one to her far left was the fat man from the harbour. He looked even bigger in girth now his overcoat was gone. He wore deck shoes, beige chinos and a cheesecloth shirt which bulged out trying to cover a substantial gut. He appeared to be in his fifties. Or perhaps he was younger and it was his grey hair, hanging in straggly strands to the sides of a bald dome, that made him look aged. His neck was almost as wide as his head and his forearms ended in rolls of fat at his wrists. Kara noticed he stood with his arms folded awkwardly and had heavy strapping on his right hand. She wondered how he had worn gloves at the harbour. The bulge of his stomach was by far his most prominent feature, so Kara named him Tubbs.

The last man, almost opposite her, seemingly guarding the door through which she had come, was much younger and taller than either of his companions. Kara wondered if he was even out of his teens. He had dark brown hair, skin like milky-coffee and was at least six-foot-four, but thin. Very thin. He was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, unable to remain at peace. He wore trainers, jeans and a T-shirt with a faded picture of Einstein on it. Kara registered it and decided that Albert was a good enough name for now. She realised none of the men had jackets on and that the room was being maintained at a comfortable temperature. She wore a jumper with a T-shirt under it, her jacket still bunched at her wrists, and she was beginning to feel warm despite no visible radiators in the room. Her gaze returned to the floor.

It was covered in old, cracked, dark-brown linoleum. She looked again at the bare plaster lines on the walls and realised she was in what had been a kitchen. All of the fixtures and fittings had been ripped out but it was unmistakable. Her gaze returned to the middle of the floor, where the only discernible anomaly was located. As she half-tilted her head, trying to figure out what she was looking at, there was a knock at the door opposite. Albert jumped a little then stood aside, swinging the door open. Tien was frogmarched in by the man who had punched Kara at the harbour. He was aged somewhere between Albert and Buddy, not as tall as Albert and much leaner than Tubbs. His short hair and goatee beard made his face seem longer than it should be and reminded Kara of Van Gogh. Van would do for his name. He almost carried Tien into the room, before turning her and forcing her to sit against the wall, directly opposite Kara. He removed her hood but kept a hold on her right arm.

The two women made eye-contact and the resolve of both was immediately reinforced, strengthened a hundredfold.

‘Well haven’t you made a mistake,’ Kara thought. She blinked and had the same returned from Tien. Their defence would rely on saying nothing of value to these men. Not one word of truthful information that could reveal anything of use. Not one syllable that would give their identities away. It was all they could do. The force of the women’s shared bond, the strength they were enjoying, was practically visible and Kara wondered how the men in the room hadn’t realised they had handed the balance of power to their captives. She moved her eyes to the weight hanging in her friend’s sleeve and looked again at Tien’s face with concern. Tien half closed her eyes and gave a micro movement of her eyebrows. ‘No biggie. I’m fine.’

Kara’s temper flared and she swore to herself that as soon as she got out of this she would tear these men apart. Clenching her teeth and tensing the muscles in her jaw, she looked around the room, committing the men’s faces to memory, but then she refocussed on the middle of the floor. There were four small hollows cut into the linoleum that revealed bare concrete. The indents were spaced in a loose square about three feet apart. In each, offset to the side, was a metal ring half submerged into the concrete. Set in the middle of the square was a narrow-grated drain cover. She was still trying to figure out what it was for when a fifth man walked in.

He wore black shoes, jeans and a red polo shirt. He was trim, Kara estimated just short of six foot, dark hair, neatly cut about a face that was typical of someone who was probably in their mid-forties, except for the dark black of a web-shaped tattoo that covered his throat. Inked exactly on his Adam’s apple was the engorged body of a black widow spider.

“Hello, Liz. My name is Rik. I believe we have some mutual acquaintances?”