Tom Hyman (45 page)

Genny twisted away from him and scrambled into the backseat.

His partner opened the passenger-side front door and leaned in.

“Watch the back door!” the other one yelled.

Genny had the back door open and was squeezing out. The heavy one threw his weight against it, to force Genny back inside.

The thin one opened the other back door and reached across the seat to grab her. Genny shoved harder against the door. The heavy one tried to hold it but lost ground. The bottom edge struck him in the shin and he lost his balance.

His partner grabbed Genny’s ankle and pulled her back across the rear seat. Genny turned on him and rained a flurry of lightning punches to his face. He let go of the ankle to ward off the blows.

In that fraction of a second, Genny jumped out and dashed across the garage.

They came after her, both yelling at the third man for help.

He looked up, annoyed. He had explicit instructions to kill Stewart, and he had been keenly anticipating slamming his blackjack repeatedly against his head.

But the girl was running straight for him, and running incredibly fast.

She was not to be hurt, but under the circumstances a quick, hard crack on her skull was clearly going to be necessary.

When she was almost on top of him, he whipped the blackjack around violently, aiming for the side of her head.

He missed completely.

Her head plowed into his groin and sent him flying. The concrete floor crashed against his back. He rolled over, gasping for air.

Genny could not find her way out of the garage. The elevator car had gone back up, and she couldn’t find any stairs. As a last resort, she tried to escape up the exit ramp, but the thin man and the thickset one cut her off and grabbed her, one on each side.

She shook one off, then bit the other’s hand. He bellowed, but held on long enough for his partner to get a grip on her arm again.

She kicked and thrashed with all her might, whipping her thirty-five-pound body back and forth, trying to throw them off balance.

It was all they could do to hold on, but hold on they did.

The third man caught up to them and began slashing at her wildly with the blackjack. She dodged several blows and managed to kick him twice in the legs, but finally he locked an arm around her neck long enough to smash the blackjack against her head.

With the third blow, she collapsed into unconsciousness.

They carried her to their Mercedes, threw her in the back, and drove out of the garage, one of the men on either side of her.

They tied her arms together behind her, locked her little ankles in handcuffs, and stuffed a gag in her mouth. They weren’t taking any more chances.

Anne Stewart’s plane touched down at the Munich airport at ten A.M an hour behind schedule. Anne hurried through customs and out into the arrivals area. There was no sign of Dalton.

She waited for a few minutes, then called his office number at Hauser Industries. The woman who answered told her that he had left word that he wasn’t coming in today, that was all. Did she care to leave a message? Yes, Anne said. If he called in, tell him she was waiting for him at the airport.

For the next halfhour Anne paced the terminal, fighting down the anxiety in her stomach. Why wasn’t he here?

Suddenly she heard herself being paged, in English, over the public address system. “Will Mrs. Anne Stewart please report to the information desk on the mezzanine level?”

Anne hurried up a flight of steps to the mezzanine and looked around for the information desk. She spotted it off to the right and started toward it.

It was a small, circular counter, occupied by a young blonde in a blue uniform. Two men were standing next to her. They appeared to be waiting for somebody. One had his elbow on the counter top. He was dark and muscular, with sunken eyes, a sharp, protruding Adam’s apple, and a muscle in one cheek that twitched constantly. Anne had seen him somewhere before. She ducked quickly out of sight.

Where had she seen him? . . . The night of her dinner for the baroness on Long Island. She had gone out to the kitchen to talk to Amelia. She’d seen him there, sitting at the kitchen table with the baroness’s chauffeur. He was a bodyguard.

Were they looking for her? She decided she had better find out.

She retreated back down to the ground level, changed some American money for German marks, and found a public phone. She redialed the Hauser Industries number in Munich. The same woman answered.

“This is Mrs. Stewart again. I’m still waiting for my husband.

In the meantime, could you please put me through to Baroness von Hauser?”

“I’m afraid she’s not here, either, Mrs. Stewart.”

“Could you tell me where she is?”

“Schloss Vogel. I’ll give you the number.”

Anne dialed the new number and was eventually put through to the baroness.

“Frau Stewart?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve received my message?” The baroness was trying hard to sound friendly.

“No,” Anne said.

“But you are at the airport, ja?”

“If you have a message for me, please give it to me now.”

Hesitation at the other end. A muffled scratching noise gave Anne the impression that the baroness had cupped her hand over the phone for a few seconds to talk to someone else. “I sent two men to pick you up,”

the baroness said. “They are at the airport now, looking for you.

They’ll bring you to Schloss Vogel.”

“I’m not going to Schloss Vogel.”

“Of course you are,” the baroness replied, her voice unnaturally cheerful. “There’s nowhere else for you to go.”

“Why? What happened to Dalton?”

“I’m afraid he’s had a little accident,” the baroness said, in a very matter-of-fact tone.

Anne clutched the receiver against her neck, too stunned to speak. She took a deep breath to compose herself. “My daughter.

Where is she? Do you know?”

“Oh, we have your daughter here with us. And she’s fine.”

“How did she—?”

“She’s just fine,” the baroness repeated soothingly. “She’s anxious to see you, of course.”

“Please bring her to the airport. As soon as you cc “That’s not possible.”

“Why not?”

“You know very well why not, Frau Stewart. I need something from you first.”

“What are you talking about?”

The baroness laughed. “You really must come to your senses, Frau Stewart.”

“I have the copy of Jupiter with me. If that’s what you want, you can have it. That’s all I have to give you. Now you must return my daughter immediately.”

“I want more than that. I want all the information in your possession—all of it. Including, of course, the correct access code.

I’ve invested a great amount of effort and money developing Jupiter.

I’m entitled to this information.”

“You’ve kidnapped my daughter.”

“Sooner or later we’ll discover our mistakes anyway, but you can save us a great amount of time.”

“I’ll go to the police, then.”

The baroness’s voice turned threatening. “Listen to me, Frau Stewart.

You’re being very stupid. My men will bring you up here and we will negotiate and reach an agreement. You and your daughter can be on a flight back to America by this evening.”

Going to the castle was out of the question. Anne didn’t even know for certain that the woman had Genny in her possession.

“There’s nothing to negotiate,” Anne answered. “I’ll tell you everything I know. I’ll give you the damned access code. I’ll give you everything. Just please bring Genny to the airport.”

“I don’t intend to come to the airport. You must come here.”

“First I want to speak to my daughter, to know if she’s all right.”

“You cannot.”

“Please, if you really have her, just bring her to the airport. I’ll give you everything I have. Please! Why can’t you do that?”

The baroness raised her voice to a shout. “There is no other way. Do you understand me? If you want to see your daughter alive again, I’d advise you to get up here as quickly as possible!”

Paul Elder arrived at his office at seven-thirty A.M. to find Carmen, his nurse, in tears.

The place had been burglarized. The waiting room and the examination room were only slightly out of order. But his small office, disorganized in the best of times, was an unrecognizable shambles.

Every drawer had been pulled open, every shelf emptied. The floor was ankle-deep in paper, books, and medical samples.

The place had been broken into before. Elder heaved a giant sigh.

“Report it to the police, Carmen. I’ll start cleaning up.”

By eightthirty a semblance of order had been restored, and Elder started seeing his patients.

The police arrived an hour later. They asked Elder what had been taken. He thought about it, looked around his office, and then decided that nothing he could think of was missing. The police went away.

At nine that evening, as Elder was preparing to lock up, he discovered what was missing: the RCD cartridge in the computer he had borrowed and not yet returned. Two spare cartridges were missing as well. The significance of the theft dawned on him immediately. Somebody was looking for Jupiter. He no longer had it, of course. He had returned it to Anne some time ago.

If there was ever an excuse to call her, this was it. He grabbed the phone and dialed her number. No answer.

He kept trying the number until eleven o’clock. He knew Anne employed a live-in nanny. Why didn’t she answer? Where was everybody?

Elder took a cab to Anne’s Village address. Her name was still on a mailbox. He rang her bell. No answer.

He rang the superintendent’s bell.

After a delay, the super appeared at the door. Yes, she still lived here, but she was away. No, he didn’t know where she had gone, and it was none of anyone’s business, anyway.

The super started to close the door.

“Wait. Tell me—was her apartment burglarized recently?”

The super gave him a strange look. “You police?”

“I’m a friend. I was a friend….”

“Last night. The bastards made a mess, too. There was another lady staying there—maid or nanny or something. She moved right out.

Scared the poor woman half to death.”

Stewart let the stranger help him up. He spoke only German, so Stewart couldn’t understand him, but the gist of his questions were obvious.

What had happened? Did he need help? Did he want an ambulance or a doctor? Stewart kept shaking his head.

He picked up his wallet, lying a few feet from him on the garage floor, and checked its contents. The cash was missing, nothing else.

The man helped him to the elevator. Stewart thanked him and insisted he was all right.

Back in his apartment, Stewart examined himself. He had two swollen bruises on the back of his head. But aside from the pain, he felt normal—no memory or vision problems. He swallowed some painkillers, then took a cold shower.

There was a Mauser automatic hidden under some socks in the bottom drawer of his bedroom dresser. He dug it out, filled the clip from a box of bullets next to it, and slid it into place in the grip. He had acquired the pistol two months ago, on the Romanian black market. He had never owned a pistol before, and he had never fired this one. He wasn’t even sure why he had bought it.

Stewart suddenly missed his chauffeur and bodyguard, Gil Trabert, who was on an extended vacation in the States. He could have used him today.

He put on a lined trench coat and stuffed the pistol in the inside breast pocket. It caused the coat to bulge noticeably. He stuck the 373 box of bullets into a side pocket and went back down to the garage.

Several minutes later Stewart was out on the autobahn, heading north, toward Regensburg. He pushed the accelerator to the floor, and the BMW

screamed down the sparsely traveled highway at 125 miles an hour.

Genny grew tired of crying. She was still frightened and unhappy, but crying didn’t make her feel any better. It only made her eyes sore and her head throb.

She felt the bump over her ear. It was hot, swollen, and tender.

She looked at her knees. She had skinned them against the concrete floor of the garage when the men had dragged her to their car. She pressed her hands against them and concentrated on generating some healing power. The effort exhausted her after only a few minutes. And the knees still felt the same.

She wondered what had happened to Daddy. Why hadn’t he come to get her? She hoped he wasn’t hurt.

If there hadn’t been three of them in that garage, she thought, she could have gotten away. Anyway, she was proud of how well she had fought them off, even if they did finally catch her.

But now that they knew how strong she was, they were treating her with extreme caution. As soon as she had come to, some woman had injected her with a powerful tranquilizer that made her feel very weak and sleepy. Two men had then carried her up into the room, removed her handcuffs, locked the door, and left her.

The effects of the drug were finally wearing off, but Genny worried that the woman would come back and inject her again.

She walked over to the room’s one small window and looked out. The ground seemed a long way down. Even if she could squeeze out the window, it was much too far to jump. Beyond the fields around the castle, she could see only forest. No other houses anywhere; just very steep hills and deep woods.

How would Mommy or Daddy ever find her here?

She heard the faint, intermittent hum of highway traffic far away. She picked up other sounds—the scurry and cries of animals and insects, the chirping of a bird, the distant barking of a dog, the subdued clank of a cowbell. Several times she caught the shrill voices of children playing.

The weather was sunny, but a chill March wind was gusting.

There were still patches of unmelted snow in the forest’s most shaded spots.

If she could reach the forest, she thought, she could probably hide there until she could find somebody’s house. But it would be awfully cold at night, and they had taken her coat. And there was a high fence around the whole place.