Utopian Day (25 page)

Nick Bartonovich reached over to the night stand and
picked up his phone. He looked down at the sender and wondered why
Sasha was texting him this early in the morning from the next room.
He opened the text and read the message. Then he saw the picture
that came through next and he immediately jumped up out of bed, ran
down the hall to Sasha’s room, and threw open the door.

“
Sasha!” Nick exclaimed. “Sasha,
if this is a joke, it isn’t funny. Where are you, sweetheart?”
There was no answer.

By this time, Mia had put on her robe and was
walking down the hall to Sasha’s room.

“
What is going on? Where is
Sasha?”

Nick handed Mia his phone.

“
Oh, my God!” Mia
exclaimed.

Mia and Nick began a hurried search of the house,
each of them calling her name as they checked each floor, hoping
and praying this was all a joke. When they had gone through every
room, they met back up in the kitchen. Nick placed his hands on
Mia’s shoulders and looked straight into her eyes to make certain
he had her full attention.

“
Mia, I need you to call the
airport and have them get the plane fueled and ready to go to Grand
Cayman. You stay here and get the money. I’ll call you once I’m in
the air and we can work out the details.”

Nick dressed quickly and left the house for the
airport. He pulled out his phone and dialed a number. It was 5:00
a.m. in the Cayman Islands, so it was a long shot that his office
administrator would be awake, but he dialed anyway. It rang several
times before finally going to voicemail.

“
This is Nick Bartonovich. Drop
everything you are doing and call me as soon as you get this
message. This is an emergency.”

He hit the disconnect icon on his phone. His mind
was racing. How had Sasha been kidnapped? Why was J.T. being pulled
into this? He could only speculate at this point as he drove as
fast as he could to reach the airport.

When Sasha came to, she was sitting in a captain’s
chair in the back of an RV. Her hands and feet were duct-taped to
the chair, and her mouth was gagged. She could tell by the road
noise that the RV was on the move. The drapes on the windows were
all drawn, and a curtain which separated the cab of the RV from the
rest of the vehicle was also drawn. She could hear country music
playing on the radio.

She began breathing faster as the fear hit her. She
tried desperately to break free of her restraints and to scream.
After a few minutes of struggling, she realized that she was
getting nowhere, and stopped pulling against the restraints. She
started looking around to see what information she could gather
from her environment that might help her escape or notify someone
that she was a captive.

It was an hour or more before the RV slowed to a
stop. Sasha could hear the driver getting up from the driver’s
seat. She heard the curtain rustle as the driver stepped back into
the main cabin. Sasha’s chair was turned to face the rear of the
vehicle, so she couldn’t yet see her kidnapper. A mixture of fear
and curiosity gripped her as she waited to see who it was and what
they would do next. Silas stepped in front of Sasha and sat down on
the couch across from her.

“
I’m glad to see you are awake,”
Silas began. “I’m not planning on hurting you, Sasha. You are
simply a means to an end. You see, your daddy has a lot of money.
And he owes me. But what you need to know right now is that, as
long as you do what I tell you to do, I won’t hurt you. On the
other hand, if you try to escape or start screaming, then I will
hurt you. Do we understand each other?”

Sasha nodded her head up and down to indicate that
she understood.

“
Good. Right now, we are off of
the interstate and pulled over on a side road. There’s nobody here
to hear you if you scream, so don’t even try it. I’m going to let
you go now so that you can go to the restroom here in the RV and
get something to eat and drink. If you cooperate with me, this
doesn’t have to be a horrible experience.”

Silas produced a knife and began cutting away the
restraints from one foot, then the other. He did the wrists last,
letting Sasha remove the gag herself. Sasha eyed him warily the
entire time, wondering if he was going to assault her or if he was
telling the truth. She massaged her wrists where the duct tape had
been constricting the blood flow as she walked over to the
lavatory.

The bathroom ventilation window was too small for
her to fit through and the privacy glass obstructed her view, but
she was able to get a look at the surrounding area. All she saw was
the woods. After she had relieved herself, she began looking around
for anything she might use as a weapon or to cut the duct tape
with, but she didn’t find anything. She finally decided that she
couldn’t stay in the bathroom forever and came back out.

True to his word, there was a bottle of water and a
pre-packaged sandwich sitting on the table for her when she came
out. Silas motioned for her to sit down opposite him, where the
food was placed, and she complied. She ate the sandwich, which
tasted just shy of edible, and drank half of the water before Silas
looked at his watch.

“
O.k., time’s up, back in the
chair; we have a long way to go yet.”

“
Where are you taking me?” Sasha
asked.

“
Don’t you worry your pretty
little head about that,” Silas replied.

Sasha thought about making a break for the door on
the way back to the chair, but Silas had positioned himself
strategically in front of the door as he motioned for her to sit
back down in the captain’s chair. She reluctantly complied and sat
back down. He picked up the duct tape and began securing her to the
chair once more. When he was done with the duct tape and gag, he
went back to the front of the RV and soon they were back on their
way to wherever it was that they were going. As they drove down the
road once more, Sasha prayed to God that Nick and Mia would give
this man whatever he wanted so that he would let her go back to her
family.

Chapter Forty

Nick Bartonovich exited the plane practically
jogging down the steps to the awaiting car. Tammy, his local office
administrator, was sitting in the back seat. The driver opened the
back door for Nick and then sprinted around the front of the car to
the driver’s side. Nick had prepped Tammy on the phone about what
he needed done while he was in the air. He turned to her as soon as
the door was shut, hoping everything was taken care of.

“
Give me a status report,” Nick
said.

“
He is in the house out on Rum
Point. I have a local resource out there right now watching him.
Sam was seen this morning watering his garden and hasn’t left the
house since,” she reported.

“
Good work, Tammy. Jared,” Nick
said, addressing the driver, “I want you to come with me to the
door just in case the greeting is less than amicable.”

Jared nodded as he glanced at Nick’s face in the
rearview mirror. Jared was one of a few local heavies that worked
for Nick from time to time as drivers and/or security personnel. He
was a first-rate martial artist, not to mention that he was also a
body builder who could probably bench-press a small car.

It took less than fifteen minutes to arrive at the
house. Nick didn’t wait for Jared to come around and open his door.
He exited the car and briskly walked up the ramp to the side door
of the house. Jared had to jog the first few steps to catch up.
Nick rang the doorbell and looked down at his watch impatiently as
he waited for someone to answer the door.

J.T. had just finished his morning coffee and was
about to log in to his online brokerage account to check on his
investments when he heard the door ring. He glanced over at the
security camera monitor that he had installed on the side of his
desk before getting up. When he saw who it was, he couldn’t believe
his eyes. He switched the view on the monitor to single out that
lone camera for magnification, just to make certain. His heart
started beating faster. He grabbed his cell phone and quickly sent
out a text, and then he opened a side drawer and pulled out a Smith
and Wesson .45 caliber revolver before he went to answer the
door.

Nick was reaching his finger down to depress the
doorbell once more when the door finally opened. J.T. was standing
there with the gun in one hand, pointed down at the floor. He said
nothing, but stared at Nick warily, waiting.

“
Hello J.T.,” Nick said without
smiling, “I need your help.”

J.T. was shocked a bit at Nick’s introduction. This
wasn’t the Nick he knew from years before, who demanded cooperation
at the point of a gun.

“
What are you doing here,
Nick?”

Nick reached his hand into his coat jacket pocket.
J.T. started to raise the pistol and Jared started to grab Nick to
pull him to the side of the door, out of range of the gun. Nick put
out his free hand and said, “Hold on, I’m just going to retrieve my
phone.”

Once J.T. lowered the gun, Nick slowly retrieved his
cell phone and pulled up a picture of Sasha. The resemblance to
J.T. was unmistakable. He turned the phone around and handed it to
J.T.

“
J.T., this is your daughter,
Sasha. She is also my adopted daughter. She has been kidnapped, and
I need your help to get her back safely.”

J.T. slowly reached forth his hand and took the cell
phone from Nick. He looked down at the face smiling back at him on
the phone and felt like he had been hit with a sucker-punch in the
stomach.

“
Come in,” he said as he turned
around, still clutching the phone in one hand and the gun in the
other.

He walked slowly over to the couch. Once they were
seated on the couch, J.T. took his eyes off of the phone and looked
up at Nick.

“
This is impossible. This is a
young woman. She would’ve been born sometime when I was in prison,”
J.T. said.

“
True,” Nick replied.

“
Assuming this is true,” J.T.
continued, regaining some of his composure, “who is the
mother?”

“
Katrina Byers.”

J.T.’s mind recalled back almost nineteen years
before, to when he had met a young woman who’d worked for Nick. She
was an accountant who would give J.T. information from Nick that
was deemed too sensitive for email or other forms of communication.
They had hit it off instantly. She was funny and vivacious, full of
life. J.T. asked her out to dinner after their second meeting. It
was a risk that they might be seen together and his connection with
Nick might be discovered, but she was worth it.

Then the investigation began. Nick and J.T.
terminated communication with each other. They wanted to avoid
being discovered working together, bilking the company that J.T.
was currently working for as a CEO. He and Katrina continued to
meet on the weekends at a hideaway in the countryside so they
wouldn’t be discovered together. During one of their rendezvous,
Katrina had asked J.T. what he thought about starting a family one
day and what he thought about children. J.T., always the
self-confident, self-centered business man, told her that he didn’t
think that would fit in with his plans. He didn’t want children, he
said.

He remembered the fight they had after he made that
statement. She accused him of not loving her. He said that he
wanted to be with her, but that love, marriage, children – those
weren’t things he was interested in. She stormed out of the house
and drove back home that night. J.T. tried to contact her, but she
didn’t return his calls. Shortly after, he was arrested, and he
never heard from her again.

“
How do I know you are telling the
truth and that this isn’t just another one of your scams?” J.T.
said warily. “And if this girl whom you claim is my daughter is in
so much trouble, why isn’t Katrina here to help convince me all of
this is true?” he demanded.

“
Katrina is dead, J.T.” Nick
replied somberly.

J.T. could tell Nick was telling the truth. Nick was
many things, but in all the years he had known Nick, J.T. could
never remember one time that Nick had lied to him.

“
How?” he asked.

“
Kidney failure. She died eight
years ago. It’s a long story that I don’t have time to get into,
but Mia and I got married. We helped watch Sasha when Katrina was
sick. Katrina asked us to adopt her when she knew she wasn’t going
to make it. We did. It’s all here.” Nick put his briefcase on the
table and opened it up, dumping out a set of papers that included
Sasha’s birth certificate, the adoption papers, pictures of Sasha
with Katrina, Katrina’s death certificate, and pictures of Mia,
Nick, and Sasha together. He waited as J.T. looked through the
information. Finally, J.T. looked up at Nick.

“
This isn’t the Nick Bartonovich
that I knew,” he said finally.

Nick paused, trying to decide how to best answer
that charge. Honesty, he decided, was the best approach. “Look,” he
began, “I got cancer. I had an operation followed by a long
recovery…it changed me.”

J.T. was looking straight into Nick’s eyes, looking
for some sign of deception.

“
If I could go back and do things
differently… there are a lot of things I would change,” Nick
continued, “but right now, I don’t have time to go through all of
that. Sasha needs our help and I’m asking you to please help
me.”

J.T. picked up a portrait-sized picture of Sasha. He
could see the eyebrows and mouth were his, no doubt. The nose was
thankfully Katrina’s. He remembered Katrina’s perky nose. He
smiled. If there was any way this girl was his, and she certainly
looked like she was, then there was no way in hell he was going to
pass up the chance to help her. He wanted to get to know her, to
make sure she was o.k., and to have some kind of relationship with
her.