“She's with the Guardlan!” I yelled at the top of my voice. “She's with the Guardian! She's press!”
Adanne kicked and twisted, and I tried to roll the two cops off my back.
But it was too little too late. Adanne was still shouting when they stuffed her into the black sedan, slammed the door, and drove off in a hurry.
Cross Country
Chapter 109
A FEVERED VOICE inside my head was screaming for me to help Adanne, but I knew I should think things through before I tried anything.
I had no idea, and no way to find out, if the car they had put me in was following Adanne's. I was in a police unit, though. Small and cramped by DC standards. Smelling strongly of tobacco and sweat and somebody's urine. Were these men policemen?
I sat sideways on a ripped vinyl seat in back. My hands were cuffed, and a rusted metal security grate was a few inches from my face. My shoulder throbbed and I was afraid it was broken. But that was the least of my worries right now. What I cared about most was Adanne and what was happening to her.
“Where did they take her?” I asked. The two uniforms in front wouldn't even turn to look at me. I couldn't provoke them.
“Talk to me. Tell me where we're going,” I demanded to know.
Then I saw for myself, and it couldn't have been any worse.
The first thing I recognized was the signpost at the turn-off for Kirikiri. Then the familiar concrete walls and razor wire crisscrossing the top.
Oh hell, no.
I felt like I'd fallen into some kind of hell on earth. Going in here the first time had been bad enough, but heading back when I knew what to expect?
It took the two cops and two more prison guards to get me out of the car and inside the jail.
I thought they would drag me up to the wards-but we went down instead. Down couldn't be good. Where was Adanne? Was she here too?
My feet bumped over stone steps, then onto the compacted dirt floor of a barely lit corridor. It looked and smelled like the cell block upstairs, but when we passed through one of the reinforced steel doors, I saw they all opened onto the same enormous space.
There was a low ceiling that dripped some kind of sludge, and a row of retrofitted support columns ran right down the middle of the room. They extended into deep shadows on either side.
A blank space. For torture? Interrogation? Execution?
Everything was left to the imagination-on purpose, I was sure.
The police and guards left me there, with my hands cuffed tightly behind my back, secured around one of the posts. The column was rusted steel, about four inches thick, and going nowhere. Just like me.
I stopped struggling as soon as they walked away. Better to save my strength, I figured.
I didn't know who wanted me here-the Tiger? The police? The government?
Someone else?
A multinational corporation, for God's sake? Maybe that was it. Anything was possible here.
If I was extraordinarily lucky, Flaherty would come looking for me again; and if I was even luckier, he'd be able to find me down here. But that could take days, and then more time to find Adanne.
If she was still alive.
If they hadn't gotten the secrets out of her.
If…if…if…
Cross Country
Chapter 110
A LIGHT CAME on… two lights actually.
Quickly, one after the other.
I didn't know how many hours had passed. Or what time of day it was. I knew that I hadn't slept.
The man I now thought of as the police commander, the one I'd hit with Adanne's car, stood by one of the doors.
His hand was still on the wall switch. Two single-bulb fixtures shone brightly overhead. They weren't meant to be easy on the eyes, or the brain, or the soul.
“Tell me what you know about the Tiger,” he said as he strode forward. I noticed he'd changed suits-and that there was a rectangle of gauze taped to his forehead.
