The Doll (27 page)

Walker shone the flashlight over the body, crumpled on a mat and twisted in a way the human form was never meant to bend. Wounds that had been hastily bound oozed pus from infection.

“Oh, Jesus,” Walker whispered, and really, there wasn’t any more to add. Logan’s eyes were glassed over in a drugged stupor. Leaned up against the wall, he stared in a way that would have been slack-jawed had his head not been wrapped with filthy bandages. His wrist was tipped back, knuckles to wall, continuing the same plaintive SOS that had first alerted them to his presence.

The euphoria of finding Logan alive—if barely—was fast followed by the nightmare of figuring out how to safely move him. He needed immediate hospitalization at a facility big enough to handle multiple trauma, and with everything that had transpired at the depot they couldn’t risk taking the truck directly to an emergency room.

Gagging against the stench, skirting urine, feces, blood, and vomit, Bradford moved behind Logan, knelt so his mouth was near Logan’s ear and his chest supported Logan’s head, and whispered the same shush of comfort a parent might use to calm a child from night terrors: They’d get him out of here, he’d be okay—had to be okay.

The mat, filthy as it was, became a means of transport.

Logan never cried out, never spoke at all, but as they worked him slowly out of the little room—inching forward along the floor, keeping movement as small as possible—the mixture of pain and gratitude came through the glassy gaze without the need for words.

In increments, they got the mat and his broken body through the door to the wider space of the semi’s container, to where the air was fit to breathe and they could pause to strategize. The Capstone team huddled so Lockreed wouldn’t overhear, but the move wasn’t entirely necessary. Having pushed his way into the crawl space and seen the human cargo, then come bolting out again, the driver kept a deliberate distance.

Behind his back, they formed plans in decisive whispers.

Bradford left the truck and backed the Explorer to the rear of the semi so it would be easier to shift Logan from one vehicle to
the next. Walker transferred the weapons cache entirely into the Trooper—she would return to Capstone and man the office while Jahan and Bradford continued across the state border with Logan. They’d take him to a hospital in Oklahoma City, which at this point wasn’t a whole lot farther than Dallas, where it would be more difficult for anyone to connect Logan to the events in Texas. They wouldn’t stay gone long, not with so many threads left untied.

Using blankets already in the Explorer and packaging from the boxes on the ground, Jahan formed a cushioned platform in the back of the SUV, and while he and Walker worked to get Logan settled, Bradford, in an attempt to cover their tracks, took Lockreed aside.

Next to the truck the driver paced, several slow steps forward and then back again, hands in his pockets, repeating the same question over and over, not to Bradford but a mumble to himself, “What do I do? What do I do?”

At a loss for words, Bradford let the man do his thing until, finally, frustrated with the irrational drama, he said, “Look, you really don’t have a lot of options.”

Lockreed stopped pacing. Turned toward Bradford’s voice.

“First, you were at the scene of the shootout. Second, you’ve seen this—seen what you’ve been hauling. Your employers are going to know and they’re going to want you dead. And, worse, even if they don’t kill you, the authorities probably already consider you an accessory.” Bradford paused. “Really, your best bet is to go to law enforcement. Get it out of the way, tell them exactly what happened tonight.”

Lockreed pulled his hands out of his pockets and then shoved them back again. “But what about when they ask me about you? Who you are and where you went? Aren’t you going to want to kill me, too?”

Bradford shook his head. “I’m not coming after you,” he said. “Tell them the truth.” He straightened and stepped toward the Explorer. “Tell them you have no idea.”

Proof of life arrived in the same way news of death had come: a noise that jarred the quiet, an alert that lit the screen with blinding revelation. Munroe stared at the phone a long while, neither moving nor blinking. The Doll Maker had made his play, and now it was her turn.

The signal was weak and the site to which Lumani’s text linked loaded slowly and incrementally, the status circle continuing its rounds, loading, loading, while inside Munroe’s chest the fist gripped harder, tighter, fingers wrapped around her spine, crushing her heart so that the pain made breathing difficult. And the voices, always the voices, incanted to the pounding of her pulse, urging toward violence, until at last, fully accessible, the video file, freeze-framed, waited to be played.

Logan.

Truly alive.

The entire clip was barely a minute, but without a doubt he was living—or had been when the footage was shot—horribly battered, but still breathing: blond hair matted with dried blood, face swollen and mottled, green eyes the equivalent of olives in tomato juice. Given the camera angle, she couldn’t see much of the room beyond the mat upon which he lay, but best guess said the space
was narrow and the walls, if the sound could be trusted, were high and made of something other than drywall.

Logan, positioned at an odd angle, faced the camera, but his eyes weren’t focused on it. “Michael,” he said, and he paused in a struggle for air, and then again as if to remember. “A message for you,” he said. His words were slurred and garbled, the distortion made even worse by the transmission. “They say you’re in Italy, not Dallas,” he said. “That you’re in a car on a country road and you fought a man and hurt him worse than he hurt you. There’s a girl beside you. They say these details are the proof you want.”

He paused again, had that dazed in-and-out quality of pharmaceuticals she’d seen in years past. Turned his head away from the camera, gazing upward at something outside the frame’s view until a noise that could have been speech drew his attention and he started again. “They say they’ll take more life if you don’t do what they want.” With an effort, he shifted to face the camera, struggled to focus directly on the lens, and said, “Michael, listen. You do what you need to do.”

The clip went dark and the connection to Logan became nothing more than a solid image waiting to be replayed. Munroe stared at the phone, and then in response to the night blindness, shut off the screen and closed her eyes. Emotion rushed in flash flood through her veins: hatred, grief, pain, and love.

Even in the face of torture and his own demise, Logan understood.

Do what you need to do
.

Resolve etched and cracked. Threatened to shatter completely.

Logan was still alive.

She could still finish this job—deliver the package and save her brother.

No. If Logan could be freed, it would be Bradford—if he was still alive—who would have to save him. Mentally downshifting, she pushed aside the anguish. When this was all over, there would be time enough to grieve.

Do what you need to do
.

Munroe exhaled. Pulled in another breath and held it long, and with each long draw, let go another portion of the present, bringing into its place the pure focus of assignment. If sacrificing Logan
was the price to be paid to spare Neeva, it wasn’t enough to merely save her. For every Neeva with powerful parents and for whom the media hounds were out sniffing scent, there were a hundred thousand other trafficked girls and women that the world, either through ignorance or indifference, wrote off or forgot altogether. No, if Logan was the price, then his blood would purchase more than one life, and sacrifices be damned, she would wait as long as possible, get as near the delivery point as possible, and from there take her chances.

T
HE STREETS OF
Genoa at five in the morning were like the streets of many cities in the early pre-dawn: relatively quiet and mostly deserted. Lumani’s route took them from rural roads directly into the populated areas and finally to the roadway that ran parallel to the ocean. Not the faster highway that tunneled through mountains and made a beeline for the French border, but the smaller provincial road, without tolls, that followed the curve of the coast.

In either direction the ocean was stippled with dots of light, spliced with harbors and coves where boats and yachts, from dinghy to the obscene, could slip in to anchor and then move on again. Pieces of mental strategy shifted again: Transfer Neeva from dry land into the belly of a yacht, and the girl would never be heard from again.

Dawn arrived by the time they’d passed Ventimiglia, the sun low on the horizon and the ocean’s blue now distinguishable from the sky. The streets were still quiet, though it wouldn’t be long before civilization began to stir, and it was helpful that Neeva had fallen asleep yet again. The final address in the array of texts dead-ended in Menton, a few kilometers beyond the French border.

Munroe reached the checkpoint, a setup similar to the small provincial outposts they’d passed when crossing from Croatia into Slovenia: a station with an overhang. She slowed the car, Lumani’s documents on hand should they have to stop, but the exit and entry booths were empty and they passed into France with the same fanfare as crossing a street.

The phone on the console vibrated. Munroe picked it up, highlighted the text, and stared hard at the newest round of driving directions.

Took her foot off the gas pedal, downshifted, and slowed, searching out an empty parallel space along the curb. She pulled the emergency brake and cut the engine. Neeva slept on, so Munroe removed the keys and stepped out of the car.

In rebellion she dialed, and Lumani answered on the second ring. She offered no hello, how are you, or
are you out of your fucking mind
. Instead she said, “It makes no sense to take her in there, there’s no logic to a move like this.”

“You’re not here for opinion,” Lumani replied. “You have a job to do, you follow instructions, and that’s all.”

Munroe dragged in a breath and pinched the bridge of her nose, pulled into the present and pushed past the exhaustion and emotional overload. With so little access to Lumani, every second mattered.

She drew him into her head and breathed him into her lungs.

“You’re right,” she said, voice softer, tone contrite. “You’re right and I agree with you—I’m only here to do the job. And I think, like you, I just want this over. But tell me, Valon, from a professional standpoint, does this feel right to you? Having come so far, don’t we risk things going to hell at the last minute?”

“It’s not ideal,” he said.

Munroe leaned low to check on Neeva and then said, “You have no choice either, do you?”

“Always the client’s rules,” Lumani replied. “There’s nothing more to tell you than this is where we go. There will be more instructions when we reach the destination.”

“But the price for failure is yours.”

“Yes,” he said, and the word was barely above a whisper.

She pulled his mind into her body, put his emotion in her chest.

“My delay forced this, didn’t it?” she said.

“Only the daylight,” he said.

“And because of my actions, if having to go in during the day creates failure, that failure will be yours.”

“And yours,” he added.

“There’s a horrible frustration in having to pay the price for someone else’s choices,” she said. “I’m sorry for having brought repercussions down on you. If this delivery blows up on us, will you suffer badly?”

A long pause of silence, then he ended the call.

Munroe focused on the ground, processing. He’d given her what she needed to know, and she in turn had scattered seed that might lay fallow or might, if she was lucky, eventually sprout into saplings strong enough to split the hardened topsoil that kept him as the Doll Maker’s doer.

Munroe’s fingers tapped against the hood in contemplation. They were heading into the Principality of Monaco, which, at less than one square mile of land, was the world’s second smallest and most densely populated country, tax haven and playground to the rich, best known for the Monte Carlo and the Formula One Grand Prix: a square mile of mountainside; tiny, winding, congested roads, of underground parking lots and tightly packed high-rises, all less than twenty minutes away along this coastal route.

Under the cover of darkness, the handoff might have made sense, but this early in the morning, taking Neeva into the heart of the city-state begged for attention and made something of a proverbial suicide mission out of what should have been a straightforward exchange, merchandise for payment.

Monaco.

Insanity.

It didn’t take teenage years spent running guns and drugs across unmarked borders to know that the current arrangement wasn’t the type of planning produced by a person or organization that wanted to guarantee a mission’s success. This was a move that taunted and challenged authority to discover and stop it.

Instructions from the client.

Of course.

A bored, intelligent, sadistic, and very wealthy client: annoyed at the delay, toying with the criminals, playing games with them. Raising the ante. Setting them up for failure.