Rattled (32 page)

Mitchell stepped out of the tunnel. “Hello, Erin.”

The room spun as Erin stumbled back. This couldn’t be real. How had he found them? She opened her mouth to scream, but nothing came out. Mitchell grabbed her arm and jerked so she fell against him. The two goons came out behind him and grinned at her.

Scream, Erin told herself. You have to warn Camie and Drew!

Mitchell yanked her around and wrapped his arm across her neck. She made a strangled noise but couldn’t speak with the pressure on her throat. She had to make noise, warn her friends! She kicked out. Her foot hit a pile of armor which collapsed with an echoing rattle. Across the room, Camie and Drew whipped around.

Erin felt something cold press against her temple.

“Hold it,” Mitchell yelled, “or Erin dies. Hands up where I can see them.”

Camie and Drew slowly raised their hands. Erin slid her gaze sideways. In her peripheral vision, she caught a glimpse of dark metal, the gun pressed against the side of her head.

“Where’s the other gun?” Mitchell asked.

Damn. Erin had forgotten about the gun, but now she remembered seeing Drew put it in the backpack, which lay at her feet.

No one answered. Drew and Camie walked slowly closer, edging away from each other as if they wanted to divide up the target.

“I said, where’s the gun?” Mitchell hauled back on the arm around Erin’s neck. She gurgled and her knees buckled. He wasn’t that much taller than she was, so his hold forced her into an awkward stance, leaning back with knees bent.

“In the backpack,” Drew said. “The black and green one.”

The smaller of the goons crouched and rummaged through the pack. He stood up with the gun and checked the bullets.

“You two, hands against the wall,” Mitchell said. “Over here where I can see you.”

Drew and Camie kept glaring at him as they moved to the wall and stood facing it, hands spread out and pressed against the stone, looking over their shoulders at Erin. “Cover them,” Mitchell said. The smaller goon swaggered over to stand 10 feet behind them, his gun ready. He sneered, his face flushed. Erin guessed that the humiliation of losing the gun outweighed the success of getting it back. She hoped he wouldn’t try to take that humiliation out on any of them.

Mitchell loosened his hold on Erin. She wondered if she should kick back, fight somehow. But he still held the gun near her head, and she didn’t see how anything she could do would save them. She wasn’t a fighter anyway. She’d gotten lucky a couple of times, but Drew and Camie were the ones with experience. If they were obeying orders for now, that must be the right thing to do. She locked gazes with Drew. If he was trying to tell her something, she couldn’t figure out what.

Mitchell let out a low whistle. Erin flinched at the feel of his breath across her cheek. She could feel his head move as he looked around the cave. “You outdid yourself,” he murmured. “A cave full of treasure.”

The big man stepped out from behind them and moved into the room, gawking at all the treasure. “What now?”

His friend answered. “Why don’t we go ahead and kill them? I don’t like them loose. That guy knows how to fight.”

Erin went numb and thought she might black out. Even in her panic at seeing Mitchell, even feeling the gun against her head, she hadn’t thought about dying. She’d been terrified at being found, then being trapped, but her mind hadn’t made the logical jump. If Mitchell wanted the treasure, he didn’t want living witnesses to fight him for it, in or out of court.

Erin tried to drag in a breath, tried to think. He was about to shoot her best friend and her lover, and she was helpless.

“We don’t want dead bodies stinking up the place while we work.” Mitchell dropped his arm from around Erin’s neck but grabbed the back of her collar and pushed her into the room. “Man, look at all this stuff! It’ll take days to get it out of here.”

Erin glanced back at him. He stared at the pile of metal bars with a greedy smile as if he hadn’t just talked casually about her dead body. She shivered, wondering how she could have ever sat across from him and enjoyed a quiet dinner. She tried not to think about that, or the threat of death. She had to stay calm, stay alert, be ready for any chance to escape or to fight. She didn’t know what she could possibly do, but she had to be ready.

“Set up the lanterns,” Mitchell said. The big man set a duffel bag on the ground and pulled out two electric lanterns. Mitchell turned to smile at Erin. She wanted to look away but could only stare into those pale eyes as if hypnotized. “So what should we do with you?” he asked.

Erin swallowed, her brain scrambling for an answer. She wanted to say, “Let us go. Let us live.” She didn’t think that would work. The best she could come up with was, “There’s plenty to go around.”

Mitchell laughed. “It’s a little late for that. You should’ve shared when we asked earlier. I’m afraid that now, as the cliché goes, ‘You know too much.’ No, I think we’ll tie you up. You’ll be the hostage, to keep your friends in line. Will they behave, to keep you safe, do you think?”

Erin followed his gaze toward Drew and Camie. Drew leaned against the wall with his shoulders hunched, his fingers curled like claws, as if he wanted to rip away a section of the rock. Beside him, Camie stood stiffly, glaring back over her shoulder with a look that would’ve made a lesser man back away with his hands up—or held protectively over his privates.

“Camie will, I know,” Mitchell said. “You two have such a touchingly sweet friendship. I’m going to take a chance that you’ve charmed that fool over there enough to keep him in line. You’d better hope so, anyway. Search them,” he added to his men.

He pushed Erin through the room. “Now where shall we put you?” He stopped next to the pile of metal bars. A metal ring stuck out of the floor, about two feet from the cliff wall. Another ring jutted up four feet to the right. “Now this is handy. What do you suppose these were for? Tying up prisoners? No skeletons left behind anyway—yet. Danny! Bring those pieces of webbing.”

The big man hurried over. His name was Danny? It seemed deceptively harmless. He handed Mitchell the webbing he’d been tied up with earlier. Mitchell must have freed the men. Either he had been tracking the helicopter, or the goons had called him at some point before their capture. Had Mitchell come out after Erin, Camie, and Drew had gone in the cave, or had he been watching all along, waiting for them to do the hard work? It didn’t matter—Mitchell and the goons had the last laugh now.

Mitchell tied the webbing around one of Erin’s wrists, then pushed her to the floor and looped the webbing through the ring. He tied her other wrist to the second ring, so she knelt with her back to the wall, her arms spread open. “Now you just sit there quietly and behave yourself.” Mitchell chuckled.

The smaller goon said, “What about these two? Tie them up?”

“No, we use them as pack animals.” Mitchell pulled out a pocketknife and scraped one of the metal bars. “These are gold.” He hefted a bar. “They must weigh twenty or thirty pounds apiece, and we have to get them up that sloping tunnel. We’ll save time if we have a couple of extra helpers. I want this stuff out before anyone else comes looking.” He strode over to Drew and Camie. “I’ll be down here with Erin and a gun. You try to take off, she dies. Every time you come back in this room, you’d better be with my men. They’ll call out before they enter the room. I don’t hear from them, or you enter the room without them, she dies. You do what they say, or—”

“She dies,” Drew growled. “Yeah, we get it.”

Mitchell stepped back. “Glad you could join the team. Load up your backpacks and start carrying things out. Rudy, you go up first, with the gun, then these two. Danny can follow. Keep them between the two of you at all times, and stay ready, in case Erin isn’t as popular as she thinks she is.”

Rudy? Another innocent sounding name. The man waved his gun, looking anything but innocent. Danny emptied two backpacks and handed them to Camie and Drew when they walked over to the pile of gold bars.

Erin clenched her fists and pulled at the webbing holding her hands. She wanted to scream or cry or throw something. The first two wouldn’t do any good, and the third was physically impossible. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She couldn’t think about dying or about losing Drew and Camie. She wouldn’t be able to think at all if she focused on that. But what else was there? Anger was better than fear. She had plenty of reasons to be angry at Mitchell, but thinking about how he’d used and betrayed her made her feel more humiliated than anything.

She tried to concentrate on the present. She’d worked for so long to find this treasure, to bring something lost back into the light. He was going to haul everything away, probably melt down the gold bars, sell the historical artifacts online or something. It was bad enough that he was trying to steal her glory—her mark on the world—but even worse, he was turning an important find into nothing more than a get-rich-quick scheme.

As his helpers loaded gold bars into the packs, Mitchell grabbed a saddlebag and dumped out the contents. He prodded the pile with his foot, then crouched and pulled out some coins. He held them so the light of the lantern shone on them, then dropped them into his pocket.

“So you’re just going to haul everything out of here?” Erin asked. “What about the historic value? The gold bars are one thing, but all this other stuff—” She couldn’t move her hands, but she tossed her head in a gesture meant to encompass all the treasures of the cave. “More than half the value is knowing where it came from, its history.”

Mitchell shrugged. “History is your thing, not mine. Maybe once I get all the gold and really valuable stuff out, I’ll ‘discover’ this place and let the archaeologists have it. That’s good publicity for the company, and I won’t mind seeing my picture in the news. But I’m not sharing this treasure with the government or anyone else.” He crossed to her and stroked his fingers over her cheek. She forced herself not to shrink back. “Do you know why I didn’t sleep with you?” he asked.

“Because you couldn’t get it up?” she snapped.

His fingers tightened on her cheek. “Mostly because you were taking forever to find this damn treasure, and I didn’t want you to start getting ideas about our ‘relationship.’ I also thought it might make it harder to kill you if I needed to. But if you hadn’t held out on me, if you’d been willing to share, I might have found a way to keep you alive.”

“You mean if I had thrown myself at you and given you everything you wanted, you might have just cheated me and used me but not murdered me. If you’re trying to make me regret not sleeping with you, you’re failing.”

He glared. “I’m sure you’ll have lots of regrets before we’re done.”

“Mitchell!” Camie called. “You hurt her and there won’t be enough bullets to stop me before I rip out your throat.”

Beside her, Drew gave a grim smile. “I’ll second that.”

Mitchell tapped the barrel of the gun against his other hand, as if considering putting them in their place. Erin held her breath, grateful for her friends’ protectiveness but wishing they hadn’t risked making Mitchell angry. Finally he said, “I don’t want to waste time. So long as everybody behaves, no one needs to get hurt.”

No, they just needed to die. But Erin was glad Mitchell had decided to keep things quiet for now. It gave her time to think, to come up with a plan.

Mitchell watched Drew and Camie until they headed into the tunnel with their backpacks sagging with gold bars. He flicked a glance at Erin and moved back to the pile of saddlebags across the room.

Now was her chance. For what, she had no idea. But she was alone with Mitchell, and he was distracted. If she could just get loose and overpower him somehow, then when the others came back—she was thinking too far ahead. First, figure out how to get loose.

The webbing, one-inch wide bands of flat nylon rope, lay snug around her wrists, but she had slim hands. Maybe she could wriggle free. She started with her left hand, the one without the finger brace, which would only make it harder to get through the loop. She tried to curl her palm into itself, making her hand as long and thin as possible. If she tugged hard, she’d only jam her hand into the loop of webbing. Erin tried wriggling her hand slowly against the loop. She eased the webbing over a bit of flesh on the heel of her hand, then reversed the angle to try to slide it across the back of her hand.

The webbing got stuck on the thick pad of flesh below her thumb. No matter how she moved her hand, how she pulled, she stuck. Her hands might have been slim, but so were her wrists, and with the webbing tight around them she couldn’t make her hand small enough to get through the loop.

She tried the other hand, in case that loop was looser. Five minutes later, she stopped. She wasn’t doing anything except cutting off circulation to her fingers. She scraped the webbing against the iron ring to push it back down over her wrist. She would have to try something else, maybe cut through the webbing. Wasn’t that what people did when they were tied up, found a sharp rock or nail sticking out of something and sawed through the rope around their wrists?

The problem was, her hands were separated and tied close to the iron loops so she could barely move them. She saw nothing sharp miraculously resting on the cave floor within the few inches reach her fingers had. Even if she could get something, Mitchell had tied her hands so the backs of her wrists were against the iron rings. She’d have to either saw directly on the inside of her wrist, risking cutting into her veins, or somehow twist her hand around to cut at the webbing at the back of her wrist. And she’d have to use her left hand, not her dominant right one, because of the finger brace.