Chapter 31
Maryland, IDTF Black Site
The chain-link cage made it impossible for Ronnie Garcia to straighten her legs. Thin orange scrubs did nothing to protect her from the rough galvanized wire.
Her captors had taken her clothing as soon as she’d gotten on the boat, before they’d even taken off the hood. At once dazed and terrified, she’d balked at the instructions to disrobe. She’d always planned to fight under such circumstances—she was full of all sorts of worthless plans. In reality, there were just too many hands, pushing and shoving and ripping away her clothing to get it around the handcuffs. Naked with knees drawn up to her chest and her hands behind her back on the cold metal plate of the floor, Garcia had screamed threats and Cuban curses until her throat was raw. She braced herself for the worst, but they’d just stopped, snickering like cruel schoolboys at her predicament. Someone punched her hard in the kidney before removing the handcuffs.
“Get dressed,” a bored voice said.
She’d ripped away the hood to find herself alone in the room with a pudgy middle-aged man. He had a bulbous red nose and sagging eyelids as if he’d been up on an all-night bender. Blinded by the glaring artificial light of a bare bulb, she couldn’t tell if the man was scared she might try something or if he just wanted to take the opportunity to punch a girl. When he’d given her a stiff kick in the hip as he shoved her into the metal dog crate, she decided it was a little bit of both. He’d tossed the orange scrubs in before locking the gate and then disappeared through an oval metal hatch without another word. The door gave an eerie squeak as he dogged it shut from the outside.
That had been hours ago.
Ronnie arched her back, first tensing and then relaxing each muscle group in turn, starting with her feet and working upward until she reached her shoulders—a sort of static yoga that kept her from losing her mind—for the moment at least. The prison crate would have been fine for a large dog, but was intended to make human confinement as uncomfortable as possible without causing immediate physical injury. They called it “stress positioning”—and it was aptly named. Ronnie knew there would come a time when she’d welcome a beating if it meant she got to stretch her legs.
She estimated her cage to be no more than three and a half feet across, which made it little more than five feet from corner to corner, forcing Ronnie to keep her knees bent when on her back or on her side. She could sit up so long as she hunched her shoulders and dipped her head like a pouting child, but the rough link floor dug into her buttocks, bringing tears to her eyes in a matter of minutes. She found that lying on her back and planting her knees and shoulders against the floor helped spread out the pressure points and alleviate the pain for a time, but it wouldn’t be long before her muscles fell victim to the confinement, cramping into painful spasms.
The fact that they’d given her something to wear was a relief. It gave her captors something to take away—but she shoved that thought from her mind. There were too many things they could, and likely would, do for her to dwell on it in too much detail. Instead, she’d occupied her mind by planning her escape—no matter how remote the possibility.
Jericho had been a stickler for EDC or “everyday carry” from the moment she’d met him—so much so that he’d remind her that if she caught him without a firearm, a knife, a light source, and something to make fire, he would owe her a steak dinner. In addition to his EDC, he customarily had a second blade and a variety of shims, picks, and keys secreted away in his clothing. Garcia had been following his example when she’d been taken, carrying her customary Kahr PM9 pistol inside the waistband of her jeans and a Bond Arms derringer called a Snake Slayer in a Flashbang holster suspended beneath her bra. Though it offered her only two extra shots, she’d fitted the little Snake Slayer with three-inch barrels chambered for .410 shotgun shells. Loaded with buckshot, it made for a perfect get-off-me gun. In addition to the pistols, Ronnie carried a wicked little curved blade Quinn’s knife-maker friends in Alaska called The Scorn, a metal handcuff shim, and a plastic cuff key laced into her shoes.
Now, she was left with nothing but her wits and a set of orange hospital scrubs that made her feel like the victim in an ISIS beheading video.
She knew she was on some kind of boat, a big one judging from the number of stairs she’d been forced to climb when they shoved her out of the skiff. Still hooded, she’d been led along some kind of deck, through a hatch with a lip tall enough to trip over, then down another set of clanging metal stairs to the bowels of the boat. She could feel the periodic swaying and hear the clanking chain of a vessel at anchor.
The walls of the brightly lit room, maybe twenty feet across at their widest point, sloped rapidly inward, leading Ronnie to believe her dog crate prison was located near the bow. The steady knock of an auxiliary engine thrummed behind the bulkhead nearest the same hatch where the fat bully had disappeared. Tall shelves stacked with engine parts, oil, and hydraulic fluid ran along both of the sloping exterior walls. A metal ventilation grate on the bulkhead above her had been sealed over with canned foam, leaving the air dank and cloyingly still. The overpowering smells of diesel fuel and the dirty bilge coming up through the floor grate filled the humid enclosure and made Ronnie feel as if she was being poached.
Lost in thought, she nearly jumped out of her skin when she heard the hatch squeak open. Two men stooped to enter one at a time. First in was the same doughy bully who’d punched her in the back. Next came a younger man she’d not seen before. He had bright red hair and a disarming smile that reminded Ronnie of a GQ model. She might have said he looked kind had he not been a willing party to keeping her in a cage. The redheaded pretty boy carried a bottle of water and an energy bar. He squatted down next to the crate and waved the water back and forth, taunting her.
“So this is the sweet thing they’re all talking about,” he said. This one must have held some sway in terms of leadership on the boat because he carried her Scorn on his belt. He took the Snake Slayer out of his front pocket and twirled it around his finger by the trigger guard like a kid pretending to be an Old West gunfighter. “A girl could hide a little pistol like this in all sorts of places,” he said, leering through the chain link. “Maybe I should give you a little more thorough search. . . .”
Garcia let her eyes play up and down the young man, imagining the joy she’d feel when she planted her fist in his throat. She said nothing. It would do no good to antagonize her captors, but she didn’t intend to cooperate with them either. She knew the drill. He wasn’t likely to give her the food or water, no matter what she did.
GQ stared at her for a long moment, his leering grin growing more sickening the longer she looked at it. Ronnie fought the urge to cower when he stuffed away the derringer and took a key from his pocket. He unlocked the two padlocks that secured the front of the cage that acted as a door and threw the water bottle and protein bar inside. Once he’d locked it again, he pulled out the Scorn and began to run the curved blade along the outside of the cage, clicking against the wire while he hovered over her.
“Evidently, you’re some kind of badass high-value target who should scare the shit out of me,” GQ said, reaching in to tickle her shoulder through the chain link with his left hand. She flinched and he jerked away, grinning at the game. “If it was up to me you’d be wearing nothing but French maid panties and chained to the galley makin’ us sammiches.”
“You’re a sick little man, postalita,” Ronnie blurted out, resolving to bite his fingers off if he was ever stupid enough to stick them through the wire again.
“Whatever.” GQ looked over his shoulder at his partner. He stuck the Scorn back in its sheath and rubbed his hands together as if he was eager to start some new game. “You bring ’em?”
For the first time since they’d come through the hatch, Ronnie realized the fat one had kept his hands behind his back, out of her sight.
“You mean these?” The other man grinned. He was fat enough that he couldn’t manage a smile without squinting his eyes. He produced two cattle prods, each comprised of a battery box and a set of metal forks at the end of a two-foot fiberglass rod. He held up both devices and nodded at GQ. “Choose your weapon.”
Ronnie felt as if she might vomit. Months of training, hours of lectures, nothing prepared a person for this. She pressed herself against the cage, drawing her arms and legs inward, as far away from the two men as she could get.
“We have a job to do,” GQ said, taking one of the cattle prods and whooshing it back and forth through the air like a sword. He looked at Garcia and shrugged. “Just following orders.”
“Orders?” Ronnie heard herself whispering.
“Yep,” GQ said. He moved to the other side of the cage, opposite the end where the pudgy agent had taken up a position with his prod. “Our orders are to . . . soften you up before Mr. Walter gets here. So, we’re gonna play us a little game of bitch hockey, and you get to be the puck.”
Garcia wanted to scream, to cry out for her father, for Jericho. She’d read the manuals. She’d watched the videos. There would be a time when her mind would come unwound, when she’d be able to do little but whimper, but that time was not yet. So, she clenched her teeth and waited for them to begin.