Showdown Read online

  “I need you to tell me what you know.”

  “I’ve told you. We were on a cruise—”

  “No, everything. Who we are, how we were taken. What’s happened since we arrived. Everything.”

  “What did they do to you?” she asked again.

  “I’m okay. I just can’t remember—”

  “You’re bleeding.”Her eyes stared at the base of his head. “Your hair . . .”

  He felt no pain, no wetness from blood on his neck or in his hair. He lifted his head and twisted it for a look at the mattress under his hair. A fist-sized red blotch stained the cover.

  The pain came then, a deep throbbing ache from the base of his skull. He set his head back down and stared at the ceiling. With only a little effort he disconnected himself from the pain.

  “Tell me what you remember.”

  She blinked, still breathing deliberately. “You had a month off from your post in Kuwait and we decided to take a cruise to celebrate our seventh anniversary. Matthew was buying some sugared ginger when a man grabbed him and went into an alley between the tents. You went after him.

  I saw someone hit you from behind with a metal pipe. Then a rag with some kind of chemical was pushed over my face and I passed out. Today’s the first time I’ve seen you.” She closed her eyes. “They tortured me, Carl.”

  Anger rose, but again he suppressed it. Not now. There would be time for healing later, if they survived.

  His head seemed to be clearing from whatever drug they’d given him. More than likely they’d kept him drugged for days and whatever they’d put into his system half an hour ago was waking him up. That would explain his temporary memory loss.

  “What nationality are they?”

  “Hungarian, I think. The one named Dale is a sickening . . .” She stopped, but the look of hatred in her eyes spoke well enough.

  Carl blocked scattered images of whatever Dale might have done to illicit such a reaction from her. Again, that he was able to do this so easily surprised him. Was he so insensitive to his own wife?

  No, he was brutally efficient; for her sake he had to be.

  Their captors had left their mouths free—if he could find a way to reach their restraints . . .

  The door suddenly swung open. A man with short cropped blond hair stepped into the room. Medium height. Knifelike nose and chin. Fiercely eager blue eyes. Khaki cotton pants, black shirt, hairy arms. Dale.

  He knew this man.

  This was Dale Crompton. This was a man who’d spent some time in the dark spaces of Carl’s mind, making himself hated. Kelly had said Hungarian, but she had been talking of someone else because Dale was the Englishman.

  The man’s right arm hung by his side, hand snug around an Eastern bloc Makarov 9 mm pistol. This detail was brightly lit in Carl’s mind where other details remained stubbornly shrouded by darkness. He clearly knew his weapons.

  Without any warning or fanfare, Dale rounded the foot of the bed, pressed the barrel of the Makarov against Kelly’s left thigh, and pulled the trigger.

  The gun bucked with a thunderclap. Kelly arched her back, screamed, and thrashed against her restraints for a moment, then dropped to the mattress in a dead faint.

  Carl’s mind passed the threshold of whatever training he’d received. His mind cried out for him to feel nothing, to lay uncaring, cold and calculating in the face of brutal manipulation, but his body had already begun its defense of his wife. He snarled and bolted up, oblivious to the pain in his wrists and ankles.

  Naturally the movement proved useless. He might as well be a dog on a thick chain, jerked violently back at the end of a sprint for freedom.

  He collapsed back on the bed, and gathered himself. Kelly lay still. A single glance told him that the bullet had expended its energy without passing through her leg, which meant it had struck the femur, probably shattering it.

  “I hope I have your attention,” Dale said.“Her leg will heal. A similar bullet to her head, on the other hand, will produce far more satisfying results. I’d love to kill her. And your son. What is his name,Matthew?”

  Carl just stared at him. Focus. Believe, you must believe in your ability to save them.

  “Pity to destroy such a beautiful woman,” Dale said, walking to the window. “Just so you know, I argued to tie your son next to you and keep Kelly for other uses but Kalman overruled me. He says the boy will be useful if you fail us the first time.”

  The Englishman put the gun on the sill, unlatched the window, and pulled it up. A fresh breeze carried a lone bird’s chirping into the room. It’s spring, Carl thought. I can smell fresh grass and spring flowers. I can smell fresh blood.

  The Englishman faced him. “A simple and quite lethal device has been surgically implanted at the base of your hypothalamus gland. This explains the bleeding at the back of your head. The device will release chemicals that will destroy your brain within ten seconds of being released, an event that will be triggered by any attempt to remove the device or by a remote signal. Your life is in our hands. Is this clear?”

  The revelation struck Carl as perfectly natural. Exactly what he would have expected, knowing what he did, whatever that was.

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Your mission is to kill a man and his wife currently housed in a heavily guarded hotel at the edge of the town directly to our south, three miles distance. Joseph and Mary Fabin will be in their room on the third floor. No one else is to be killed. Only the targets. You have two cartridges in the gun, I suggest you use them wisely. No head shots,we need their faces for television. Do you understand?”

  A wave of dizziness swept through Carl. Aside from a slight tick in his right eye, he showed none of it. Beside him, Kelly moaned. How could he ignore his wife’s suffering so easily?

  Carl eyed the pistol on the sill. “I understand.”

  “You’ll be watched closely. If you make any contact with the authorities, your wife will die. If you step outside the mission parameters I’ve outlined, she dies. If you haven’t returned within sixty minutes, both she and your son will die. Do you understand?”

  His mind screamed in protest. He spoke quickly to cover any fear in his eyes. “The name of the hotel?”

  “The Andrassy,” Dale said. He walked over to Carl, withdrew a knife from his waistband, and laid the sharp edge against the red nylon rope that tied Carl’s right leg to the bed frame.

  “I’m sure you would like to kill me,” Dale said. “This is impossible, of course. But if you try, rest assured that you, your wife, and your son will be dead within the minute.”

  “Who are the targets?”

  “They are the two people who can save your wife and son by dying within the hour.” The man cut through the bonds around Carl’s other ankle and then casually went to work on the rope at his wrists. “You’ll find some shoes and clean clothes outside the window.”With a faint pop the last tie yielded to the Englishman’s blade.

  Kelly whimpered and Carl looked over to see that her eyes were open again. Face white, muted by horror.

  For a long moment, lying there freed beside the woman he loved, Carl allowed a terrible fury to roll through his mind. Despite Dale’s casual dismissal of him, he knew that he stood at least an even chance of killing him.

  A terrible set of emotions collided in his chest. He wanted to touch Kelly and tell her that she would be okay. That he would save her and their son. He wanted to tear the heart out of the man who was now watching them with a disconnected stare, like a robot assigned to a simple task.

  He wanted scream. He wanted to cry. He wanted to kill himself.

  Instead, he lay still.

  Kelly closed her eyes and started to sob softly. He wished she would stop. He wanted to shout at her and demand that she stop this awful display of emotion. Didn’t she know that emotion was now their greatest enemy?

  “Fifty-eight minutes,” Dale said. “It’s quite a long run.”

  Carl slid his feet off the bed, stood, and walked
to the window, thinking that he was a monster for being so callous in her moment of horror, never mind that it was for her sake that he steeled himself.

  I’m in a nightmare, he thought, reaching for the gun. But the Makarov’s cold steel handle felt nothing like a dream. It felt like salvation.

  “Carl?”

  Kelly’s voice shattered any reprieve the gun brought him. Carl was sure that he would spin where he stood, shoot Dale through the forehead, and take his chances with the implant or whatever other means they had of killing him and his family. The only way he knew to deal with such a compelling urge was to shut off his emotions entirely. He clenched his jaw and shoved the gun into his waistband.

  “I love you, Carl.”

  He looked at her, forcing emerging terror back. “It’ll be okay,” he said. “I’ll be back.”

  He grabbed both sides of the window, thrust his head out to scan the grounds, withdrew, shoved his right leg through the opening, and rolled onto the grass outside. When he came to his feet he was facing south. How did he know this was south? He just did.

  He would go south and he would kill.