No Corner to Hide (The Max Masterson Series Book 2) (24 page)

he hotel suite was ornate, with baroque scrollwork and gold accents. The enormous bed weighed over 300 pounds. Its latex mattress promised to provide a pampered sleep to Vice-President Scarlett Conroy, who had traveled to New York for a meeting as Chair of the United Nations Security Committee. The room was a perk of her position, assigned by President Max Masterson as a duty that she would be expected to perform during their term. She didn’t mind. In fact, she relished the responsibility.

Scarlett was not only the vice-president. She also held the office of the position of the United States’ ambassador to the United Nations. It was an honorary post, but it cemented the world’s image of the United States. In addition to Max, she was the face of her country, and contrary to tradition, this vice-president would be busy.

Her day entailed attending long meetings, some of which exceeded three hours. It was capped by her address to the UN Security Council, a report of how the United States had coped with its first experience with large-scale domestic terrorism. She felt inadequate in that closed-door meeting, and she knew why; all they had been able to do was to avoid panic and return the nation’s capitol to the status quo.

They couldn’t prevent something that they couldn’t predict, and prevention was the key. Eliminating the threat was the only way, and they had danced around that subject all day without resolution. Her time in New York had involved twelve hours of private meetings that involved intense discussion on matters that none of them had any power to control, and she was exhausted and frustrated.

She looked out over the New York skyline from the penthouse suite and surveyed the panorama as the sun set low, creating that moment of suspension that is neither night or day. It was difficult just to imagine the sheer size of the 22 million residents of the great city. That didn’t include the commuters who entered Manhattan by train, car, and bus each day. She began to see lights inside of the buildings below, exaggerating the vastness of her view.

Savoring the end of a long day, she backed away from the floor to ceiling windows and walked across the plush carpet to the bathroom. As she walked, she kicked off her pumps and stripped out of her stylish politician dress, leaving a trail of discarded clothing and underwear behind her. By the time she triggered the automatic lights of the bathroom, she was fully nude except for her jewelry. Pausing to examine her form in the mirror, she assessed her figure. “Not bad for a politician,” she thought, and turned to face the black marble jacuzzi tub of the opulent room. “A bubble bath before dinner will be just the thing to relax me,” she surmised, and bent forward to start the flow of hot water.

Out of the corner of her eye, she detected movement on the black surface of the large vanity, and turned to focus on the bowl of the sink near her head. At eye level, a large, black, hairy spider darted forward and she fell back, hitting the floor with a startled gasp. She hated spiders. From her vulnerable angle on the floor, she couldn’t see where the spider had gone, and for a sweaty heart-pounding moment, she feared that that it had jumped in her hair.

She back-pedaled on her hands in a crab walk until she was as far as she could travel without bumping her head, and began running her hands furiously through her long auburn tresses. She stopped, imagined that she could feel something moving, and did it again. Once she was satisfied that the spider wasn’t lurking on top of her head, she slowly rolled to her knees and stood. She scanned the black marble for the whereabouts of her tormentor.

At the bottom of the sink, the creature twitched and startled her again. If it had remained motionless, she might have missed it. She hoped that this was not the jumping kind, and slowly approached the sink.
If I can only reach the faucet, I can wash it down the drain
, she thought. She was too civilized to grab a shoe to beat the life out of it, and the last time she had seen anything that resembled a weapon, she had been in the middle of the massive suite many feet away.

She gave a frantic flip to the crystal cold water faucet, and retreated two steps away from the flowing stream. She watched as the spider was washed down the drain. She let the water in the sink pour while she went back to creating her bubble bath. Once the water had filled the tub and the bubbles had reached the top in a soothing white blanket, she turned off the faucets and slid slowly into the bath.

The drenched spider began his slow and painful crawl up the inside of the sink drain, its simple mind intent on survival, not revenge. If attacked, its venomous bite would be its defense, but it lacked the ability to do no more harm to a human than a few days of pain, itching and swelling. The shock and worry to the victim would be more than enough to give it an opportunity to escape.

Scarlett luxuriated in the tub with her eyes closed, facing the huge ornate mirror on the opposite wall. Its size gave the illusion that the large bathroom was doubled in size. She ran through her activities planned for the evening and pondered what to wear. She calculated how long it would take to prepare for her appearance at the dinner banquet, giving time to arrive fashionably late. That way, she would have a large audience for her next speech, and wouldn’t need to speak as long as usual. She began to consider whether Max’s style was rubbing off on her, but abruptly abandoned that ludicrous idea as the warm water relaxed her.

She began to sing, secure in the thought that there was no witness to hear her off-key attempt at imitating an old Lady GaGa song that was stuck in her head. She finished her rendition of “Dance in the Dark” and noticed that the water was cooler than she liked. She opened her eyes to locate the hot water faucet at her feet. From reflection in the mirrored wall behind the faucet head, she saw it. Perched on the counter of the vanity above her head, the spider twitched. This time, she screamed.

Within seconds, the door of the adjoining room burst open and two Secret Service agents entered the suite. With guns drawn they rushed toward Scarlett, who sat in the tepid water with her mouth agape and her body exposed, staring at the reflection of the spider above her head. With one scan of the room, the agents followed her gaze and assessed the threat. Without comment, one muscular agent smashed his hand down on the counter and assaulted the threat with a slap. The spider was the jumping kind. It sprung onto the back of the agent’s hand and sunk its fangs in the attacker, prompting a surprised yelp and spicy cusswords from the commando-trained former Navy Seal. The arachnid jumped again, hitting the floor as Scarlett screamed, “Get him!”

Both of her Secret Service agents, suddenly realizing that they were in the Vice-President’s bathroom witnessing her in all of her naked glory, turned their backs as Scarlett hurriedly wrapped herself in a large robe. They attempted to corner the escaping spider by moving in a crouch with their arms outstretched, looking like two farm boys at a greased pig contest. Finally, the spider was confined in the far corner of the bathroom and they made their final approach.

Then there was a bright flash and the lights went out. “Did you get him?” she screamed.

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CHAPTER 62

G

lenda Reasoner had been missing for twelve hours before the lights went out and plunged The City into ominous darkness. To pull off their grand deception, it was essential that Glenda be kidnapped and detained, together with her field crew.

If she popped up in the sea of humanity that would soon be fleeing the city, the scheme would fail. Darkhorse carefully devised the plan to set up their kidnapping while she was on remote assignment to the shipping docks on the Hudson river. The caller who had lured them to this location was reading from a script prepared by Darkhorse, but the junior editor who received the call didn’t know that.

The hook that brought Glenda and her crew out of the studios at Rockefeller Plaza was a story that she had reported about on many occasions; the vulnerability of our ports to terror attacks from containers loaded on ships originating in the Middle East, Yemen on this occasion. They were to record footage of cranes removing containers from a ship flying a Yemeni flag, while Glenda expounded on the multiple horrors that could be lurking inside their metal walls.

The location he chose was a commuter parking lot near the docks whose security cameras had been disabled. There would be no witnesses in the middle of the day when everyone was at work earning a living. By the time she and her crew had been loaded into the two white SUVS that concealed the incident from the view from the access road, the kidnapping was complete. Sixty seconds front to back, and they were on their way to Pryor’s coastal estate in the Hamptons., with the drugged and bound journalists stowed beneath a cargo cover.

She was to be kept alive in the event her life was needed for some unanticipated reason, but she would soon become dispensable, and she knew it. Her crew would be disposed of long before her usefulness to Pryor had expired. She was known for her feisty demeanor and hard-driving persistence during interviews, and her spirit was her greatest asset, but those qualities would not save her when her time was up.

She woke up hours later in a room that could have been in a four star hotel, with one difference. There were no windows, and the door was locked from the outside. Judging from the disarray of her clothes, she had been placed on the bed by her captors and fondled while unconscious, but her clothes were intact, a good indication that she had not been raped. If she had, her rapist would likely have removed her underwear and not bothered with restoring the dignity of putting them back on. Still, she seethed at the idea that they had touched her.

Glenda rose from the bed and staggered into the bathroom. The drug was wearing off slowly. In her groggy state, she heard the sound of a key unlocking the door. She whirled and stood face to face with Adam Pryor.“You will speak the words I have programmed into the message or you will die,” he said, dispensing with the formalities of an introduction.

“I know you…I interviewed you…You’re Pryor. Homeland Security…You disappeared…They’re looking for you…” She struggled to talk through the mental haze that lingered, but only managed a soft moan. She leaned against the vanity to keep from crashing to the floor. “Sleep it off, Miss Reasoner, and then we will talk about what you will do for me.” Pryor wheeled and walked out of the room as Glenda slid to the floor.

The computer was assiduously copying her image, voice pattern and dialect, and soon her life would become irrelevant. Voice recognition technology had advanced far beyond the ability of word processing. Image emulation could dispense with the human component once the computer had inputted and filtered the data from her years of Bull Network broadcasts and live appearances. With a mental command, the operator of the Manipulator System could supply words to her image, change the color and style of her clothing, and broadcast any message. It would be a simple matter to hack into the Bull Network and broadcast seamlessly from a remote studio with their own equipment, seized and sheltered before the blast.

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CHAPTER 63

S

carlett and her Secret Service contingent walked down thirtytwo stories in the stairwell. In the time it took them to move in the darkness from the penthouse to street level, they could have traveled by elevator from top to bottom and back over thirty

times. With guns drawn they guarded the descent from the front and back, constantly trying to get a response from their communicators. There was no static. They were useless, like the TV, and the lights. Their only illumination was from a small chemical glow stick that was part of the survival kit assigned to each agent. They gave approximately five hours of light, long enough, they hoped, to get to a place where they could wait out the night. Once the glow stick was activated by bending the stick and cracking the interior case that kept two chemicals separated, the mixture emitted an eery green light. Unlike a flashlight, the glow could not be turned off and saved for later. They had five hours of glowstick illumination and no more..

Scarlett placed her left hand on the back of the Secret Service agent in front of her, and tried to hold the rail with her right. At each landing, the team would stop briefly to listen for activity, not knowing whether the incident was an attempt on the Vice-President’s life, or something much bigger.

Scarlett had enough of silence, and the sound of her voice in the darkness was startling. “I know you boys got an eyeful back there, and if you ever breathe a word of this to anyone, or if I read that some anonymous source just happened to say that I’m afraid of spiders or have a nice rack, you will all be washing dishes in the Senate cafeteria for the rest of your careers, y’all got that?”

“Yes, Ma’am,” they replied in unison. The humor of the situation had been lost on them, and they were deep in doing what they had been trained, but the agent in front let out a brief chuckle at the thought. “I heard that,” she muttered in her most threatening tone. “I…”

“Ma’am, we’re at the ground floor,” he interrupted. “Check the perimeter. Standish, you guard the Vice-President. We’re gonna go out for a little look around.” The three quietly opened the door to the darkened lobby and fanned out. In the distance in a side hallway, they could see light, and a heard a pounding noise. They approached silently and leveled their Glock 9 MMs at the sound while wheeling around the corner. At the end of the hallway, a woman in a full length mink coat, over a diaphanous nightgown stood at an ATM machine. She held a lit candelabra. She screamed.

“I was only trying to get my money out. Don’t shoot me! It’s my money in there. Damn thing doesn’t work!” She pounded on the machine one more time, as if her actions would suddenly make it spring to life and give her comfort. Her makeup was smeared from crying, and their intrusion into her agony produced a new torrent of tears. “I just don’t know what I’m going to do,” she sobbed. I can’t find my husband, and I’m all alone, and it’s dark…so dark.” She slowly slid to the floor. Her high heels slid off her feet as she plopped to the marble tile.