Critical Space (24 page)

I could only hope that the tracker had worked, that Natalie or Corry had been able to mark my location, and that someone was on the way.

"All right," I said.

He looked relieved, spoke quickly to Katrina, who swung her legs out of the water and reached around to the back of the door, pulling a terrycloth bathrobe from the hook there. I took my jacket off, then my shirt, and when she saw my vest, she made a comment to Dan. He answered, and she nodded, as if his explanation was perfectly valid.

I stripped down and stood in the middle of the bathroom, both of them looking at me, and I decided that I was still too pissed off to be embarrassed, so I looked right back at them. Katrina moved forward with the robe, and Dan stopped her.

"Your watch," he told me. "Your earrings."

I unfastened the Oris and handed it to him, saying, "I'm going to want that back."

He was turning it in his hand, and he nodded, and I was pretty certain I'd never see it again.

The earrings were another matter entirely. I hadn't removed the two hoops since I'd first gotten them over twelve years earlier, and while they moved easily enough in their holes, I couldn't get them unfastened, even using the mirror over the sink as a guide. My fingers kept slipping off the tiny bead that closed the gap in each hoop, and I couldn't get a grip to free them. After almost two minutes of my struggling, naked, tugging on my ear, Katrina took pity on me and draped the robe across the sink, then moved in to help. She had to lean against me to get a good grip on the hoops, and the heat of her body touched mine, and her breasts pressed against my arm and chest, and my body reacted.

When they were out, she handed them to Dan, then offered me the robe.

"You have anything up in your ass?" Dan asked.

I needed a second to properly parse the sentence. "No."

"You telling the truth or do I need to check you?"

"I'm telling the truth."

He rubbed at his goatee, then held out his hand. "Glasses, now, please. You will get them back."

I gave him my glasses, and finally felt naked.

"Okay, this is good, now," Dan said. "Take the hot tub or the shower, Katrina will stay with you."

Katrina closed the door after him, then went back to the Jacuzzi, shucking what little she was wearing and lowering herself into the water with a gasp and a sigh.

"You come in?" she asked, and I caught a blurry motion of her hand that I assumed was an attempt to beckon me closer. "Come here,
da?"

I took a shower instead.

When I emerged wearing my robe, Katrina was on her back on the bed, idly toying with one of the manacles from the headboard, her hair carefully draped across her breasts. I shook my head and she finally took the hint that I had no plans to avail myself of her body. She left the bed and took some clothes from the armoire, putting on a pair of cutoffs and a yellow
Powerpuff Girls
T-shirt, then moved to the couch and switched on MTV. Every so often she would glance my way, and a couple of times she tried communicating with me in broken English, asking if I wanted anything, and each time I said no.

There were no clocks in the room but for the VCR, and that one hadn't been set. Best as I could figure from the television, it was over an hour before the woman who had been at the desk came back to check on us, carrying my glasses. I checked them before slipping them back on, but nothing seemed different about them. Katrina and she had a brief conversation that seemed to be about me, with the older woman making some interesting gestures and sounding unhappy or, at least, displeased, though whether that was with Katrina or with me, I never knew. Then she left us alone again.

This was clearly a holding position, someplace Drama wanted me stored until she was ready to move me to the next phase of the game, ideally the return of Lady Ainsley-Hunter. The longer I was in the same place, the greater the chance that someone would be able to locate me. What they did then would depend on whose head prevailed, but I suspected it would be Moore who assumed command in the field. Bridgett would be all for rushing in to save me -- she felt I was one up on her in that regard, and I think it bothered her -- but Moore would try to set up surveillance and wait for me to move again.

That was what I thought at first.

Sometime in the afternoon, though, I started wondering if maybe it had been more than simple radio trouble that had made me lose contact with everyone but Bridgett. Until I'd met Dan, I was relatively confident that Drama was working solo, and in that case she couldn't have been in two places at once, which meant she couldn't have been in position at the cemetery
and
have been in position to do harm to Moore, Dale, and Corry. But Dan's presence meant that she knew people, was willing to work with them, and consequently it was possible that she'd had someone take my friends out, in one fashion or another.

It wasn't a thought that made sitting on the couch, watching yet another overproduced and underlit music video, easy to take. I got up and started to pace around the room. I opened the armoire, looked inside for something that might fit me. Not only was there nothing I could put on without splitting, there was nothing appropriate to my gender. I contemplated trying to leave the room, but had a strong suspicion that I'd just end up in a lot of pain, or worse, unconscious. I didn't want that; I didn't want to miss anything.

Just as I thought I was going to go well and truly stir-crazy, the door opened and Dan returned, carrying a paper sack from The Gap.

"Clothes," he informed me, throwing the bag on the bed. "Put them on quickly, please, we have to go."

He turned to Katrina and the two began talking as I dumped out the contents. None of my original clothes were there; everything was new. There was a set of replacement underwear still in its wrapping, and a box of Nike sneakers. The pants were black with cargo pockets, and the shirt was a simple white T-shirt with a pocket over the left breast. There was even a belt.

Everything fit, and I was dressed before Dan and Katrina had stopped talking.

"Where's my watch?" I asked.

"Sorry."

"My father gave me that watch for my thirtieth birthday. I want it back."

"You talk to 'Tasha about the watch, okay?"

"Am I going to see her?"

"Soon now, very soon." He studied me with something like approval. "Katrina says you didn't touch her."

"She's lying. We broke the bed."

He laughed. "Sure you did, sure, okay. Now we go, you follow me."

"I follow you," I said, and I did, right out the door and into the two men I'd seen downstairs when I'd first arrived.

It was my own fault, I'd let my guard down and I walked right into it, and as each of the men grabbed my arms, Dan turned around and nailed me in the solar plexus. I lost my breath and most of my balance and before I'd begun to recover either, he'd taken my glasses and pocketed them. From another pocket he produced a black cloth bag, and he had it over my head, had it tied, before I could protest, yet alone resist.

"Sorry," he said. "Saves time."

Then something hit me on the back of the head, and instead of just seeing black because my head was in a bag, I saw a whole different darkness.

He used ammonia to bring me back, waving the broken ampoule under my nose until the shock and pain charging through my sinuses forced my eyes open. The disorientation was instant and, for seconds, total, and my first instinct was to fight, so I tried swinging at the man who was causing me pain. The punch connected with his jaw and he grunted, dropped the ammonia, and grabbed my arms. It took another couple of seconds with him shouting at me before I understood what it was he was trying to tell me.

"You're to meet her!" Dan was saying. "Now, you're going now, Mr. Kodiak! Stop fighting me, you're going now!"

I stopped struggling, trying to recognize the face in front of me. I was on my back, on something hard, and when I tried to sit up, Dan shoved me back down. He was hard to see, and the space past him was utterly dark, and I knew I'd lost my glasses again.

"You're done, yes? No more fighting?"

"No more fighting," I agreed.

He let me go, moving back on his haunches, his head down. From his jacket pocket he produced my glasses. I put them on, realized I was in the back of a delivery van of some kind. As I sat up the ammonia still lingering in my sinuses made me sneeze, and my head hurt so badly I wanted to weep.

"You going to puke?" Dan asked.

"No." I massaged my forehead, trying to soothe the pain. "You didn't have to knock me out."

Again, he sounded apologetic. " 'Tasha's orders. We had to take you back to the street, long drive, she didn't want you making talk, you understand."

"You could have gagged me."

"She said knock you out, I do what she says."

He reached past me and pushed open the doors at the back of the van, climbed out, and offered me a hand. I ignored it, swung my legs around slowly, and got out.

It was night, though how late I couldn't tell, and at some point while I'd been out it had rained, because everything around us glistened with reflected light. The humid air stank of feces and rotten food, and I looked around and saw water and then the length of Manhattan in the distance, and I realized I was smelling the Hudson. A sign at the corner of the street said we were at Frank Sinatra Park.

"Hoboken."

"Hoboken," Dan confirmed cheerfully, slamming the rear doors. Then he came around to where I stood, handed me a paper lunch bag, and then passed me and climbed behind the wheel.

"Wait," I said.

"No. No more waiting," he replied, starting the engine with one hand and slamming the door with the other. He leaned out the open window. "Good to meet you, Mr. Kodiak."

For some reason, I shook his hand when he offered it. Maybe it was my expression or my grip, but it gave him a last laugh, and then he put the van in gear and pulled out. I watched as the taillights went down the block, then slipped around a distant corner.

There didn't seem to be anyone else around. A couple of boats were out on the Hudson, moving lazily on the water, and I saw the lights of a helicopter as it lifted off from the heliport on Thirty-fourth Street. Seconds later, the sound of the rotors reached me, then faded. From Hoboken I could hear traffic, automobiles on the main roads, but there didn't seem to be a lot of them, and I thought it had to be past midnight, if not later. To the north, over the river, I could see the lights spanning the GW Bridge. A couple cars were parked along the curb nearby, though there was no sign of any of the owners. One of them was a Ford Escort, and I looked at the license plate and confirmed that it was the same one I'd driven from the cemetery.

I remembered that I had a paper bag in my hand and decided now would be the best time to open it. Inside was a key, another cheap Motorola walkie-talkie -- this one blue -- and my watch. The key went with the Escort.

I put the watch on my wrist, the key in my pocket, and dumped the bag in a trash can at the edge of the park before switching on the walkie-talkie. Then I pressed the transmit button.

"I'm here," I said.

"I know, "
Drama said.
"How's your head? "

"It hurts. Are we almost finished? It's been a long day."

"For us both. If you 're asking if I'm ready to return her, the answer is yes. Shall I tell you how this will work? "

"Please."

"I am sitting behind an Accuracy International AWM, which is pointed at your principal's head. As long as you do as I say, sighting her will be all that I do. However... "

"I understand."

"I never doubted that you would. You will keep the radio on and I will direct you to her location. Begin by turning to your left and proceeding to the corner. Stay to the sidewalk. At the corner, turn right and keep walking. I'll let you know where to stop. "

Turning left meant leaving the park and walking down Third Street about twenty yards, putting my back to the Hudson. On my right, a chain-link fence stood about eight feet high, topped with barbed wire. Beyond it, in the darkness, I could see what had once been space for piers and warehouses, but was now nothing more than an enormous expanse of broken pavement, scattered with rusting pieces of scaffolding and some very determined weeds that had managed to push through the cracks in the concrete.

The corner was River Street, and I made the right, still following the fence. Fifteen feet or so along, the weeds thickened, spilling through the fence, and a large sign hung on the chain-link, stating that the area was slated for development, to be "reborn" as something called The South Waterfront. I'd read about it in the papers, but never actually been down here before. A lot of construction was planned for the area, Sinatra Park being only a small part of it. Office buildings and hotels were supposed to start going up soon, financed by the likes of Trump and Lefrak. There had even been talk of attempting to move the Stock Exchange from New York to the location, but it would never happen.

"What did you think of Dan?"
Drama asked.

"Interesting fellow," I said. " 'Tasha?"

"Just a name. "
She said it dismissively.
"There's an opening in the fence another five meters or so from your position. You can make it if you crawl."

It took another minute before I found the gap, obscured by weeds. The ground nearby was deep with broken glass and trash, and I had to belly-crawl to get through the gap, and I took it slow. Even knowing that Drama was nearby with a rifle, I found myself more afraid of catching tetanus from a rusty nail. I couldn't remember the last time I'd been immunized.

When I was through I got to my feet, brushing myself off, looking around. A couple of towers for power cables stood nearby, anchored to concrete slabs. Past them were chunks of abandoned machinery, broken and rusted pieces. As I came around a tower, I got a good look at the space. There was almost no cover to speak of for at least one hundred yards, and even though the streetlights didn't do much to illuminate the area, anyone looking with Nightvision or infrared would have no difficulties picking me out.