C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-ONE
J
oey was cold. So very, very cold. And scared. Shivers consumed him, convulsing him from his feet to his shoulders.
He took a deep breath and held it, trying to get control. It didn’t work. Well, maybe a little. He tried again.
His head hurt. Not in the way that it hurt when you had the flu, but the way it hurt after someone hit you really hard and made sparks fly behind your eyes. The stars were still there, if he looked for them, little colored spots that swam through the darkness in the space between his eyes and his brain.
When he first awoke, he thought maybe he was blind—it was that dark—and then he remembered them slipping the hood over his head. It was heavy and thick, and now that he thought about it, it made breathing more difficult, and that launched another bout of panic until he realized that breathing was breathing, and he was doing it.
Who were these people?
Somehow, he knew that this was about his father, because the language the men were speaking in the room sounded like Russian. Joey didn’t understand Russian, but he recognized the hard vowels and the gurgling throat sounds as the ones he heard when his dad spoke with his babushka—the lady who was married to the president of the United States, whom he wasn’t supposed to talk about.
The floor moved and made him bounce. In that moment, Joey realized that he was in a car of some sort, and that it was moving. He wondered if he was in the trunk, and that thought triggered another flash of fear over running out of air. When you’d been kidnapped and beaten, it was really amazing how many things there were to be afraid of.
Why are they doing this to me?
That was the question of questions. He’d spent the entire evening gaming—and yes, exploring porn—but that was no reason to yank him out of bed and throw a sack over his head.
And why did they have to hurt him like that? They punched him in the balls and in the stomach and yanked his arms behind him, doing that stretchy thing that Simon Parker did in gym class that made your shoulders feel like they were going to pop right out of their sockets. And then they punched him in the head. Twice. At least twice.
Maybe it was because he was fighting back so well. He liked the thought of that. He liked the thought of being tough.
Unless that toughness pissed them off and made them decide to bury him alive in the trunk of a car with a sack over his head.
The shivering returned.
“Stop it,” he said aloud. The sound of his own voice startled him.
“Josef?” a voice said. “Joey?”
“Dad?”
“Are you hurt, son?”
Joey nodded, and the nodding hurt his head. “Yes,” he said. And right away, he knew it was the wrong thing. When you’re being brave, you’re supposed to say that everything is all right. “I’m okay,” he added quickly.
“We’re going to be fine,” Dad said.
“What’s happening? Why are they doing this? I’m scared.”
“I’m scared, too, son. I don’t know why this is happening. But we’re going to be okay. I won’t let anything happen to you.”
For just the flash of an instant—the space of a heartbeat—Joey considered asking if his father’s hands were also tied behind his back, and if so, how was he going to keep anything from happening to anybody. He didn’t ask, though, because he knew that Dad was trying to be brave, too.
“Are we in a car?” Joey asked.
“I think it’s a van,” Dad said. “I think we’re being taken someplace.”
Joey felt his heart race. “Why? What did we do?”
A long silence followed.
What did we do?
How do you answer a question like that when it’s coming from a thirteen-year-old? Do you go for the harsh truth, or do you try to shield him? When you’re blindfolded and tied, the harshest truth was hard to shield.
“I don’t think we did anything, son. Don’t think that way. You did nothing wrong.”
“Then why—”
“I don’t know.” Only a couple dozen words into this, and he’d already told his first lie. He had a good idea that this had something to do with his mother’s past, but how could he say that when Josef didn’t even know about that past?
“They were speaking Russian,” Joey said. “Wasn’t that Russian? Isn’t that the language you and Babushka talk to each other in?”
“Yes.”
“What were they saying?”
“You said you were hurt. Where are you hurt?” It was a deliberate change of subject, but a topic far more important than the lethal threats of Russian Mafia thugs.
“A little bit everywhere. My head and my cheek where they hit me, but that will be okay. Mostly it’s my shoulders and wrists now.”
“From being tied,” Nicholas said.
“Why do they have to do it so tight?”
Because they’re ruthless asshole bullies
, Nicholas didn’t say. “Maybe they’ll loosen them soon.”
Silence followed for the next minute or two, filled only with the hum of tires on the roadway, and the sound of his own breathing, amplified and warmed by the hood. If he were a better father—maybe a full-time father—he would know what to say to calm his son. He would tell a story or sing a soothing song. He’d do something other than tell a lie or just be silent.
“Are they going to kill us?” Joey asked. For the first time in months, he sounded like a little boy again.
“I won’t let that happen,” Nicholas said again. Another lie, because he believed that the truth was one hundred eighty degrees separated from the answer he’d just given. No guilt for that one, though. Some things didn’t need to be said aloud.
It took a crazy kind of courage to kidnap the president’s stepson—the kind of courage that he couldn’t imagine would have a good outcome for the victims.
Enter, yet again, the face of bad parenting: Nicholas had been offered yet had turned down Secret Service protection for himself and his family. He wanted nothing to do with Tony Darmond or his policies or his lies, and he certainly hadn’t wanted anything to do with his henchmen.
How’s that one working out for you now, Nicky?
He could almost hear Tony’s mocking tone in his head, almost see the self-righteous smirk.
You didn’t see much of that smirk during the last few years when Nicholas was leading the protests against the son of a bitch.
Come to think of it, after all of that, maybe Nicholas had earned some portion of the smirk he saw in his head.
So, now Nicholas’s stubbornness was going to cost the life of his son. For all he knew, Marcie might have been swept up in this, too.
No, that didn’t make sense. Whatever was happening, it had everything to do with Nicholas being related, however distantly, to the president of the United States.
“Will my hands have to be cut off because I can’t feel them anymore?” Joey asked.
“Wiggle your fingers,” Nicholas said. “Can you wiggle your fingers?”
“I think so, but they feel funny.”
“Feeling is feeling. That’s a good sign. Try moving your shoulders, too.” He tried to tell himself that this discomfort had to end soon, but reality came knocking yet again. He’d heard stories of Russian mobsters who’d learned at the feet of the KGB, who’d learned at the feet of Stalin’s torturers. The notion of taking mercy on children was an entirely Western notion. In the rest of the world, a boy was merely a future enemy, to be treated with the same brutality.
“How are we going to get away?” Josef asked.
Nicholas took a deep breath that turned out to be far noisier than he had expected. “If we find our chance, we have to take it,” he said. “But you have to leave that to me, okay? Will you promise that you’ll leave that to me?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I mean that I want you to trust me on the timing of things. If I say let’s run, we run. But if I don’t, I don’t want you running on your own. Okay?” Joey had always been impulsive, and he’d always been suspicious of authority. In his mind, Nicholas could see the boy bolting the instant that his hands were free, regardless of the likelihood of getting shot in the process. However this worked out, they would live together or they would die together. And if only one of them had to die, it would be Nicholas.
“I’ll try,” Josef said. “I promise that I’ll try.”
Nicholas heard the hedge loud and clear, and he admired it. Josef was far from a perfect kid—he got into too many fights, and he was incapable of keeping his mouth shut if someone pushed him too hard—but he was as scrupulously honest as a thirteen-year-old could be, and that was a great source of pride.
The van decelerated quickly, causing Nicholas to slide a few inches along the floor, and then it turned abruptly to the right, causing him to slide the other way.
“Whoa,” Josef said. “What the fuck—” He abruptly cut off his words.
Nicholas ignored the transgression. They were being kidnapped. Profanity was allowed.
After the turn was completed, the roadway became rougher. The bumps caused Nicholas to bounce on the floor, and the landings ignited jabs of pain through his body.
“Just hang on, Joey,” he said. “I think we’re going off-road.” He said that as if it were a good thing—or a neutral thing—when in fact, he couldn’t think of a single positive outcome from being delivered to an off-road location.
The Russians had a long history of bad things happening in the woods. Just ask the Romanov family.
As the bumps got more severe, the vehicle seemed to slow, then finally stopped.
“What’s happening?” Josef asked.
“Just try to stay calm,” Nicholas said. “I don’t know yet. Whatever it is, we can get through it.”
Just a blink later, he heard the sound of the back doors opening, and the accompanying blast of cold air.
“You two still alive?” someone said. The accent was comically thick.
“No thanks to you,” Nicholas said. The tough talk was for the benefit of his son. No boy wanted to hear his father snivel.
“Sorry about the rough ride,” the voice said. “The rest should be easier.”
“Where are you taking us?”
The question triggered laughter among whomever stood outside the vehicle.
“To La-La Land,” the captor said. “And I’m sorry to both of you for the bruise.”
Pain erupted in Nicholas’s thigh. By the time he realized they’d stuck him with a needle, he wasn’t there anymore.
It was nearly 3:00
A.M
. when they all gathered in the War Room to look at the reconnaissance photos. “This comes from SkysEye,” Venice said. While not the very latest in imaging technology, it was every bit the equal of what Jonathan had used back in the day. With a little manipulation of the computer’s mouse, they could see the texture of the mortar between the bricks.
David was clearly impressed by what he saw. “Is this the kind of detailed view military commanders get when they launch a mission?”
“Depends on where the mission is,” Jonathan said. “Not all areas of the world are as well-viewed as the others.”
They all sat around the teak conference table in various postures of engagement and exhaustion, all of their chairs cheated toward the big screen at the end of the room.
Boxers said, “I’d give you an ‘ooh’ and an ‘ah’ too, if I didn’t know I had to get in and out of there.”
Saint Stephen’s Reformatory had clearly been modified and added to over the years. The twelve-foot exterior wall covered a rectangular footprint of about four acres. Those walls contained the prison complex itself, which consisted of four three-story buildings that themselves formed a square, with what Jonathan imagined to be an exercise yard in the middle. Another larger building extended perpendicularly from the middle of the northernmost annex of the complex.
Jonathan pointed to that larger building. “What is this?”
“Used to be the main cell block,” Venice said. “Held a couple hundred inmates. The roof there is made of stained glass. All the better to inspire the residents to lead better lives.
“The jail closed its doors as a jail in 1978. Until 1952, none of the side windows in the cell blocks had glass. In Canada. Lots of prisoners died of hypothermia in the early days, but then they started stacking people eight to ten in a cell, and the hypothermia deaths plummeted. Of course, then there was the disease problem.”
Irene looked confused. “How do you know this?”
“The Internet and I are very good friends,” Venice said.
Jonathan asked, “Did you contract for thermal imaging?”
“We did,” she said, and she started tapping the computer.
The image on the screen turned to various shades of black, gray, orange, and red. Jonathan used a laser pointer to trace the northern annex, where the thermal footprint was hottest. “This seems to be the most occupied building,” he said. “They’ve clearly got the heat on, and if you look carefully, you can see an occasional human form.”
The other buildings showed cold, except for a faint pink glow from the easternmost corner of the southernmost annex. “What’s that?” Irene asked, pointing.
“With the walls and floors as thick as they are, it’s hard to tell. My guess is that they’re firing up the furnace.”
“Which means they’re expecting guests,” Boxers said.
Irene nodded. “That’s consistent with what I got from the police in Vail. I had our Denver field office ask around, and they found someone who saw Nicholas Mishin and a boy—I’m assuming that’s his son—in the grocery store around six o’clock this evening. They then verified that the house had been broken into and that neither Nicholas nor Josef were there.”
Yelena had moved to the very front of her chair. “What else did they find?”
“I told them to stop looking,” Irene said. “I told them to seal the place up. Treating it as a crime scene right now will just grab attention we don’t want. I think we’re all comfortable that we’re on the right track. If we’re wrong, we’ll know soon enough, and then we’ll pull out all the stops for the investigation.”