A Message of Hope
After Dempsey had ended the call with Knight, he had almost called Carney to tell him about the mix-up, but he had decided to wait. He pondered his decision now. This move could ruin the entire plan. If Knight got himself killed, it would mess everything up. Allowing the fiction to persist that Matt was an ex-Delta operator was playing a dangerous game.
Dempsey smiled to himself. He liked games, especially dangerous ones, especially when he had a worthy opponent like Matt. Especially when he knew that in the end he would win. Buck was coming toward him from across the wide, expansive room.
“You’ve got that look on your face, Boss,” Buck said.
“What look is that?”
“The one where the cat has the mouse in its grasp but decides to bat it around for a while before he kills it.”
Dempsey consciously made the muscles in his face relax. It might not be such a good thing for Buck to see him smiling. Buck liked games too, but his tended to lean toward the sadistic. If Buck had a mouse in his grasp, it would probably be missing a few limbs before he put it out of its misery. It was probably best to keep him focused on the job and not the game.
Buck’s feet echoed loudly as they met with the cement floor. The space they were in was large and hollow, an abandoned airfield hangar that was now leased out to movie crews. Dempsey had the whole place rented out for the week—the hangar, the airfield, and the outbuildings—under the auspices that he was scouting potential sets for an upcoming film and the producer was an ex-film star who hated publicity and would pay well to keep prying eyes away from the set.
The women and child were locked in a small room at one end of the hangar, and Zack was sedated in a room at the opposite end.
Dempsey waited for Buck to get to him before he sent him back the other direction. Sometimes the man needed to know who was in charge.
“Go get the woman and the little girl and bring them to me.”
“Okay,” Buck said, but he didn’t move right away, as if he knew Dempsey was trying to exert control and it wasn’t working. “What about the old woman?”
“Leave her there.” And then Dempsey quickly added, “Alive and unharmed.”
“Don’t you worry.” Buck twisted a toothpick between his lips. “She reminds me of my granny.”
“As I recall, you killed your granny.”
Buck screwed up his face. “She forced me to eat mush,” he said. “You should know better than to try to force a kid to eat mush.” Buck started to walk away, then stopped and stared back at Dempsey. “I don’t remember ever telling you about my granny.”
“I had you checked out. I like to know who I’m working with.”
Buck took the toothpick out of his mouth and waved it at Dempsey. “That’s a smart thing to do, Boss. A really smart thing. I always do the same thing myself, and I have to say that you, sir, have a very interesting background. Senator’s son and all that. Jilted by your country. Kicked out of the service. Somehow finding a way to build a reputation as a mercenary in foreign lands. By the way, who was that guy with the beard who showed up out of nowhere?”
Dempsey didn’t like where this conversation was going. “I told you I always have a plan B.”
“I’ll bet you do. I’ll bet you do.” Buck stopped waving the toothpick and put it back in his mouth. “I’m the same way myself.”
“Go get the woman, Buck. I need her to call her husband.”
“Yes, sir.” Buck saluted and clicked his heels. He walked away slowly as if making a statement. Dempsey was going to have to watch him. He’d hired Buck because he was known and didn’t question the job, but if he kept digging, Dempsey might just have to put a bullet in his head.
* * *
Hope’s ears were buzzing as she tried to open her eyes. For a moment, she thought maybe she had passed to the other side for the second time in her life, that she was waking up in another realm, ready to meet the angels. But that couldn’t be. The first time she had died, her head hadn’t hurt anything like this.
As the room came into focus, she saw the hospital bed she was lying on, but she wasn’t in a hospital. She was in a room about twenty by twenty feet, with cold cement walls and three beds around the perimeter. Permelia was lying in one of the beds. Hope deduced that she was all right because she was smiling and snoring loudly.
The third bed was empty. For a moment, Hope felt a wave of panic, pain, grief, and anger that grabbed at her stomach so fiercely it frightened her. Then she saw Jin’s stroller sitting a few feet away from the bed. Jin was playing with a dinosaur toy and smiling at her. Jin loved dinosaurs. She especially loved when Peng played dinosaurs with her. The knots in Hope’s stomach loosened slightly.
She slid her legs over the side of the bed and stood. Flecks of light burst in her eyes for a few seconds and then cleared. She went to Jin and inspected her for marks.
Jin held out the dinosaur to her. “Play, Mommy.”
“How are you, girl? You’re not hurt, are you?”
Jin giggled and waved the dinosaur.
Hope shook her head to clear it. Why were the three of them in this room? She vaguely remembered the anxious face of a man in a van. He’d said his daughter was hurt. Was he some sort of predator? Neither she nor Jin seemed to be harmed. She looked over at Permelia. Her bed was now empty.
“Looks like we’ve got ourselves a situation.”
Permelia’s voice came from directly behind Hope, and she nearly jumped out of her shoes. “Permelia, don’t do that. I thought you were asleep.”
“Faking it,” she said. “In case somebody came in. I thought I could get the drop on them. I wouldn’t mind kicking that smug little hooligan a few more times.”
“You kicked the man in the van?”
“You bet I did. Several times. I had him dead to rights on the ground and would have made short work of him if the guy with the broken nose hadn’t come up with the gun and threatened Jin. And then the bishop showed up, and another guy whacked him over the head. That’s when the young one got me with the chloroform, and now here we are.”
“Wait a minute. Did you say Zack showed up?”
“Yeah, he got the drop on the ringleader, but then a guy appeared out of the bushes and cold-cocked him.”
“Is he okay?”
“Don’t know. The guy with the beard hit him pretty hard—twice. The bishop doesn’t go down easy.”
“Who are these guys?” Hope asked. “What do they want with us?”
“The bishop knew the one with the broken nose. Said he’d been one of his students. He also said Matt was the one who smashed in his face.”
“If he was one of Zack’s students, that would mean he’s a government agent. Why would a government agent kidnap us?”
“Looks like Matt must have really ticked him off.”
“Matt really ticks off about half the people he comes in contact with,” Hope said. “But that doesn’t make them kidnap his family.”
Permelia walked around the room, lifting up the beds, poking at the walls and floors.
“What are you doing?” Hope asked.
“We’re obviously prisoners of war. Time to implement the SED protocol?”
“The SED protocol?”
“Survive, escape, disrupt. I used to date a brigadier general from the Army National Guard. The relationship wasn’t going anywhere, so I tried to get as much useful information out of him as I could, which included what to do if I was ever a prisoner. Your first obligation is to survive—no use throwing your life away needlessly. Second, you are obligated to escape if you can, and if you can’t escape, you try to disrupt the enemy as much as possible so their focus is on you and not on the rest of the good guys who might be trying to get you out. SED. Survive, Escape, Disrupt.”
“Let’s focus on the survive step right now. We don’t even know what’s going on or why they are doing this.” Hope looked around the room. “We don’t even know where we are.”
“Looks like an abandoned industrial or military installation of some kind, judging by the walls and the rust spots. I wish one of us had been awake during the drive; we could have estimated the amount of time it took for us to get wherever we are.” She looked down at Jin, who held out a dinosaur and smiled. “I guess you wouldn’t be able to tell us, would you, dear?”
“You said they used chloroform,” Hope said. “The effects would last from several minutes to a few hours. My arm is also sore, so they may have given us an additional sedative to make us sleep. My watch says it’s nine in the morning. And Jin has several empty granola bar and fruit snack wrappers in her stroller. I’m guessing it’s Wednesday and we’ve been here all night. But who knows how long we were driving. We could be in California by now.”
“What are the side effects of chloroform?” Permelia asked.
“Why? Are you feeling okay?” Permelia was in her seventies, and there was a reason they stopped using chloroform for an anesthetic.
“I feel fine. But our jailers don’t need to know that. I need to find a way to get out of this room to figure out where they’re holding us. If I can fake one of the common side effects, maybe they will take me out where I can see something.”
“The main side effect is unexpected cardio arrhythmia and death. I’m not sure you should be faking that.”
“What about nausea or diarrhea? Could those be side effects?”
“I suppose. Almost any medication can cause nausea.”
“Then that’s what I’ve got. I’ve always been good at faking nausea. Ever since I was a little girl trying to get out of going to school. I’m going to start pounding on the door and demand a bathroom, then maybe I can make a break for it and find out where we are.”
As Permelia spoke, a noise sounded at the door—a lock being opened from the outside. Before the door swung open, Permelia rushed to her bed and sat on the edge, putting her head in her hands, moaning softly.
The door inched open a crack, and Hope could see a bright blue eyeball scanning the inside of the room from left to right like a vulture looking for stray bits of carnage abandoned on the asphalt.
The door opened slowly, and a smile appeared. Behind the smile was a round boyish face and, underneath the face, a body that seemed reluctant to follow. It was the man from the van.
“Sorry to bother you, ma’am,” the boy said to Hope in an apologetic Southern drawl, but his eyes remained on Permelia. “The boss says I should bring you to him so you can make a call to your husband.”
Permelia moaned more loudly.
“What’s the matter with your grandma? Is she okay?”
Hope glanced toward Permelia, who had her arms wrapped around her body and was shivering violently. Permelia was overdoing it, but Hope played along. “I think she’s reacting to the chloroform. You might want to get her to a bathroom if you don’t want to clean up a mess.”
The young man sighed. “All right,” he said. “But after I take you to the boss. He says he needs you now. I guess you better bring the baby with you.”
Hope didn’t waste any time arguing. She wanted desperately to speak with Matt and to try to find out what was going on here. The young man held the door for her as she stepped out, but he didn’t turn his back on Permelia as they left the room. He also didn’t forget to lock the door on the way out.
They stepped out into a room large enough to fit a football field. The ceilings were so high Hope supposed she could fly a helicopter through the interior. It was open and largely empty. A few doors were etched along the perimeter, concealing rooms Hope guessed were like the one where she and Permelia had been sequestered. She saw a single table and some chairs near the other end of the building and the figure of a man in the distance.
She grabbed the handles of the stroller until her knuckles whitened. This place made her feel small—small and alone, as if she had been sucked off the face of the earth and been cast into the vast universe.
The sounds of their feet and the rubbing of the stroller wheels echoed as they inched their way closer to the man. When they reached him, he stood and held out a phone.
“Mrs. Knight, my name is Dempsey. I need you to call your husband. You can tell him you are okay and unharmed. You can tell him you are being held against your will by two armed men. You can even tell him you love him.” The man’s voice went from conversational to cold. “But if you try to give him any more information, if you try to give him hints about our location, if you try to convince him to go to the authorities, let’s just say there will be consequences.” As he said this last part, he glanced down at Jin.
Hope felt the anger start to rise in her chest again. She wanted to pounce across the table and scratch out the man’s eyes, but instead, she took the phone from his hand and nodded.
“Just press the dial button. The number is already plugged in.”
Hope did as he said and waited for Matt to pick up.
He answered on the first ring. “Dempsey?”
“Matt, it’s me.” She thought she heard him suck in his breath on the other end. “I’m okay. Jin’s okay, and Permelia is okay too, just a little nauseated from the chloroform.” Permelia would be angry with her if she blew her cover. “I think Zack is here too, but they knocked him out, and I haven’t seen him.”
“Where are you? Where are they holding you?”
Hope looked at Dempsey and spoke carefully. “I’m not sure, but they won’t let me say anything about it. Only that we are being held against our will. There are two of them, Dempsey and another young man. The second one has been polite. Not so much with Mr. Dempsey.” Hope glanced at Buck while she was speaking, and he beamed at her description. Dempsey glared at Buck. Maybe she could use that later.
“Matt, how are you? How is Peng?” The man with the broken nose narrowed his eyes. This was not part of the script. He held out his hand for the phone, but Hope didn’t give it to him.
“Don’t worry about us,” Matt said. “Just know I will come get you.”
The man was coming around the table. She didn’t have much time. “Remember the last thing that I told you when you left the house this morning? When you held me in your arms? I don’t want you ever to forget that.” Dempsey pulled the phone from her hand as Matt responded.
“I love you too,” came through the phone as Dempsey pulled it away from Hope’s ear.
Dempsey spoke into the mobile. “Isn’t that sweet. The celebrated covert agent has become domesticated. That’s all for now. Stand by for a text with further instructions.” He hung up the phone and then connected it to a laptop and began typing.
Hope breathed a sigh of relief and frustration. It appeared Dempsey hadn’t picked up on the message she was trying to send Matt. The problem was, Matt didn’t seem to pick up on the message either.
Sometimes men could be so dense.