behind her back with flex ties, and sat her up against the passenger-side wall. I knelt in front of her and quickly patted her down. Nothing. Whatever she was carrying, it must have been in the mailbag. Larison started going through it. He would disable her phone and confirm there were no tracking devices. Not likely there were, but it was possible Horton had implemented backup measures, hoping to protect her just in case.
I looked into her eyes. I could see she was coming back to herself. We didn’t need to do anything to resuscitate her.
After a moment, she blinked hard. She looked around the van, and then at me. “What the fuck?” she said. “Who are you? What is this?”
“It’s a kidnapping,” I said, using a word she would clearly understand and that would provide some immediate context amid her current confusion. “This isn’t a joke. It’s about your father. Colonel Horton. You understand?”
“My father…what did he do? What the fuck?”
“It doesn’t matter what he did. All you need to know is that he owes us something and we’re using you to get it. Do you understand?”
She looked from my face to Larison’s and back, and I could see how scared she suddenly was. She didn’t answer. I realized there was no need to let her see the bodies of the men her father had sent. She was frightened enough as it was.
“We’re going to take your picture now,” I said. “To show to your father.”
Larison handed me a copy of that day’s Los Angeles Times, which we’d scooped up from a driveway on the way to the motel that morning. I propped it on her lap. Larison moved in close and snapped a few shots with her phone. We’d send Horton the proof from his daughter’s own phone. That would increase his sense of how thoroughly we controlled her, and keep our phones clean.
I took the newspaper off her and tossed it aside. “We’re going to try to make this go smoothly. But there are two ways you could get hurt. One is, if your father doesn’t do what we want. Two is, if
She was breathing hard now and I knew she was fighting panic. Fighting it well. I respected her for it. And with the respect came a sudden and surprising dose of self-loathing.
I suppressed the feeling. I’d deal with the emotional fallout later. Like I always had before.
I looked in her eyes. “You’re worried that we’re letting you see our faces, is that it?”
She nodded. She was smart-smart enough to know that if a kidnapper lets you see his face, it means he’s not worried about you being a witness later. Meaning, probably, he’s not planning on letting you be alive later.
“It doesn’t matter if you see us,” I told her. “Your father is going to know exactly who we are. And he’ll explain to you when this is done why you can’t go to the police. So we’re not worried about you seeing our faces. Does that make sense?”
She nodded again.
“All right,” I said. “I get the feeling you’re smart. So you probably know about secondary crime scenes, and how you should never let someone take you to one, because once you’re at the secondary crime scene, the criminal can do anything he wants to you. And that’s true. But the thing is, you’re already at the secondary crime scene. We’re alone in this van, we have total control of the environment, and total control of you. If we wanted to hurt you, we’d be hurting you right now. But we’re not. And we want to keep it that way. Are you with me so far?”
“Yes,” she said, and I was glad she felt in control enough to trust herself to speak.
“In a little while,” I said, “we’re going to transfer you. First to another car, then to a hotel room. We’re going to keep your wrists tied and before the transfer we’re going to blindfold you, but we don’t want to make you any more uncomfortable than that. We don’t want to gag you, for example. I don’t know if you’ve ever been gagged, but I can tell you, it’s a horrible way to spend a few days. Much worse than you’d guess. Mimi, are we going to have to gag you?”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Are you going to try to run away? Or fight us? Or in any way not do what we tell you to do?”
“No.”
“Look, for me, this is mostly just business.” I tipped my head toward Larison. “But for my associate here, it’s extremely personal. You don’t want to give him a reason, okay? Trust me, he’s looking for one.”
She looked past me at Larison, and I could tell from her expression that she believed. Believed utterly.
I let another moment go by, then said, “But I’m sure you’re going to be fine. Now, do you have any questions?”
She nodded. “Where are you taking me?”
“I can’t tell you that, other than to say it’s someplace where we can manage you, and where no one’s going to be able to find you until we let you go. Anything else?”
“What did my father do?”
“You’re going to have to ask him that. Anything else?”
“Yeah. Why do you keep asking me if I want to ask you anything, when you know you’re not going to answer?”
I smiled sadly, admiring how quickly she’d mastered herself, and liking the moxie she’d accessed even in the midst of shock and distress.
“You ask good questions,” I said. “I’m sorry I can’t answer them all. I can tell you this, though. We’re going to change cars a couple times. You and I are going to ride in the trunk in one of them. And it’s going to be at least a few hours before we’re someplace comfortable, someplace with a bathroom. If you need to go before then, we’re going to need to put you in an adult diaper. Can you make it?”
“You can’t be serious.”
“I’m trying to make this as easy on you as I can, Mimi. But yeah, you better believe that I’m serious.”
Kei declined the diaper, and I was relieved. Maybe it wasn’t worth much under the circumstances, but I really didn’t want to subject her to the indignity. This was going to be hard enough as it was.
We spent the next two hours driving under virtually every overpass on the 101, the 110, and the 10, and going in and out of various underground parking garages, too. I took the passenger seat; Larison stayed in back with Kei. When I was satisfied, I called Dox. “You ready?”
“Ready, partner.”
“All right. We’re on our way.”
We made a left off Venice Boulevard onto South Redondo. As we came to the stop sign on Bangor Street, I saw the Fusion, waiting to make a right-Dox. He pulled out ahead of us, and we followed him south toward the 10. As soon as we were under the overpass, Dox cut right and swerved to a stop on the sidewalk. The trunk popped open. Treven hit the hazard lights, cut right onto the sidewalk and then back onto the street, skidding to a stop so that the passenger side of the van was right alongside the open trunk of the Fusion. I jumped into the back and slid open the side door. Larison was already standing there with Kei, still wrist-tied and now blindfolded. The two of us lifted her easily into the trunk and I squirmed in beside her. Larison slammed the trunk shut and Dox peeled out back onto the road, accelerating to the end of the tunnel, then rapidly decelerating and emerging at a normal speed. Treven would be right behind him in the van, same timing, same formation as when we entered.
What we were doing was creating a kind of shell game using the overpasses and the garages. We still didn’t know how Horton had tracked us to the Capital Hilton, and our working assumption was that he had used spy satellites. We had to assume he had access to the resources of the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. If so, and if he had a fixed point for a target-such as, say, Dulles Airport, or outside his daughter’s house-it was possible he could track that target from the fixed point to wherever the target went, virtually indefinitely. If our working assumption was right, we’d been lucky in Washington, maybe in the hotel parking garage, maybe elsewhere between D.C. and Los Angeles. But we didn’t want to rely on luck again. Every time we drove the van under an overpass, or in and out of a garage, we created the possibility that we’d switched Kei into one of the dozens of vehicles that emerged from under the overpass at around the same time we did, or from the garage afterward. Multiply this dynamic by dozens of overpasses and garages times dozens of cars, many of which would themselves continue under other overpasses and into other garages, and we could create a dataset too big for Horton to act on, at least in the time we would permit him.
