Once inside, she looked around and said, “Are we safe here?”
“Maybe,” he said opening a small fridge and pulling out a bottle of water. He uncapped it and handed it to her. “At least we’re hoping so.”
After a long drink, she sagged on the bed, even as the other guy pulled up her kidnapper and dragged him to a chair in the little kitchenette area, then sat him down. They quickly tied him to the chair and left him unconscious but sitting. She watched everything happening around her as if it were a movie, as if she weren’t really connected. She kept telling her brain to figure this out and to snap out of whatever fugue she was in. But it wasn’t working.
“If you’re not cops,” she said, “shouldn’t you at least contact them?”
“We will as soon as we know what’s going on here.”
“This guy and three others kidnapped me,” she whispered. “I had just returned to my hotel room, had unlocked my door, and they snatched me up. I didn’t even get a chance to step inside. They went in, grabbed my bags to make it look like I had gone or something, and then they took me and left.”
“Right,” the first guy said. “And you are Charlotte Ankerby, correct?”
She nodded slowly. “And who are you?”
He quickly reintroduced himself and said, “Just call me Nico.”
“Nico, how did you know where I was?”
“Well, we figured that you were still in the hotel. Then narrowed it down to the laundry area in the basement or the helicopter on the roof.”
“It was both,” she said. “I don’t understand the helicopter part, but I heard the kidnappers talking about it.”
“In that case,” Nico said, “one of us needs to disappear really fast.”
He stood up but the other guy—Keane, she thought his name was—stood and said, “I’ll go. You keep an eye on these two.” And he disappeared out the door.
She looked back at Nico. “Where’s he going?”
“To the rooftop. He’ll see if you were to be taken to the helicopter waiting up there.”
“That’s not a good thing to think about, but I did wonder.”
“What can you tell me about the other men with this guy?”
“The truck was too smoky,” she said. “And unfortunately that was the biggest thing I remember about them.”
“Were they young or old?”
“Two were young,” she said. “As in very young. I didn’t know who they were or anything about them. But they were happy to be doing this, as if this was something that they hadn’t really expected to do, and they were now part of the in-group.”
He brought out his cell phone and held up a picture. “Is this one of them?”
She looked at it, frowned, and nodded. “Yes, it is. But …?”
“It’s him,” he said. “Only he’s dead. He was shot sometime in the last twenty-four hours.”
She frowned. “I can’t really tell you when, but, the last time I saw him, they were inside the big truck where I was held. Two men were smoking at the time, and all four of them were playing cards. This unconscious guy’s one of them. And the guy on your phone is one of the other ones.”
“Is he one of the ones who smoked?”
She nodded. “Yes, but I don’t know if the other kid did too.”
He flicked through his phone again and brought up another photo.
She turned her head away. “God. Is he dead too?”
“Sorry, but that’s the better of the two photos I have of him. And, yes, this kid’s dead. Is he one of the four who you saw?”
“Yes,” she said. “So two are dead, and now there’s this guy, and I don’t know where the other guy is.”
“Well, we need to find him,” Nico said. “We have a few questions we want to ask him.”
She stared at him, confused. “About me?” she asked hesitantly. A groan from the man tied to the chair interrupted their conversation. She looked over at Nico and said, “Is it wrong that I want to go over there and kick the shit out of him?”
Nico laughed. “I think that’s a very normal and healthy reaction. Except I can’t let you do it.”
“And I don’t think I’d like myself afterward either,” she said. “But to think that he kidnapped me from my hotel room and kept me locked up for twenty-four hours or longer? By the way, what day and time is it?”
“Sydney time, it’s Friday, almost midnight. If you were taken about eleven-thirty p.m. Thursday, then they held you for approximately twenty-five hours. So was there anything important that you would miss in those hours?” he asked casually, but she got the distinct impression that her answer was important.
She looked up at him and blinked. “Yes. I was supposed to give a speech.”
He turned ever-so-slowly and looked at her. “Is that the reason you think you were kidnapped? Were they intending to silence you?”
She stared back at him and blinked, but her mind churned on the idea. “Maybe? I was pretty unhappy with the way the organizers had set this up.”
“Maybe you’d better tell me about that before this guy wakes up, so I know what questions to ask him.”
She quickly explained the problem with the booking and how it had been handled. “They said that it was all arranged, but my assistant said we’d had nothing to do with it.”
“Who do you believe?”
“Honestly, I’m not sure. It could have been my assistant. She is getting older. I did honor the commitment, and I came, but I didn’t want to. I’m trying to avoid these talks and rallies. I’m focusing more on my books, putting my thoughts down for the wider audience. I feel I can reach more people that way.” He stared at her steadily, and she shrugged. “I know you probably don’t agree, but I feel like I need to do this. That it’s my path.” She tumbled over the words as she tried to make sense out of it all.
