“And what about him?” Charlotte asked, pointing to their tied-up prisoner. “He’s being taken somewhere else too?”
One of the new guys walked up to the prisoner and smacked him hard under the jaw. When he went out cold, the new guy quickly untied him and picked him up over one shoulder, then walked him out of the room.
“This is highly illegal,” she whispered in horror.
“So says you,” Keane said. He nudged her forward. “Come on. We only have two minutes with the security cameras. Let’s go.”
Still wrapping her mind around what was going on, she was half dragged while she half ran down to the far end of the hallway, where they ducked into the staircase and went up. As soon as they reached the fourth flight of stairs, she was getting tired, on top of already feeling shaky from what was going on. Adrenaline only carried one so far. She both wanted to run around in the same place and collapse at the same time.
“It’s the adrenaline,” Nico said at her side. “When it’s pumping through you, it’s powerful, but, when it’s gone, the weakness is just as bad.”
“Why are we standing on a landing in the stairwell?” she wailed. “I’d love to sit down.”
“Waiting for this camera to go off.”
Just then they received a beep on a phone or a watch or something. She couldn’t even see what made the noise, and they didn’t look to confirm, but immediately they opened the door, and she was taken to the room straight across the hallway. Once inside, they locked the door and then turned and smiled at her.
“Now you’re safe again,” Nico said.
“Are you sure?”
He nodded. “Sit down and eat your apple.”
She stared at the apple in her hand, took a big bite, more because she needed something to stop her jaw from clenching than anything. She collapsed on the bed closest to her and said, “What was that all about?”
“Obviously somebody knew where we were and where the prisoner was,” Keane said coolly. “We had to make sure that, if our prisoner or our gunman or his driver had had time to get a message out, nobody would find us before we changed locations again.”
“Shouldn’t we get out of this hotel then?” She glanced around at the walls closing in on her. “Surely it’s not safe to be here at all.”
Nico smiled and nodded. “We’re making that happen too.”
“Good,” she said. “An airline right back home again works for me, by the way.”
“Well, it won’t work so well for us,” he said. “Again we don’t want your face on any of the customs and immigration points of entry.”
“Why not?”
“So nobody knows where you are,” Nico said. “The best thing for you is to just rest.”
“A little hard to do,” she said. “My nerves are on edge.”
“Well, there’s a minibar,” Keane said helpfully. “How about a shot of whiskey?”
“How about coffee?” she shot back. “I didn’t get to have mine.”
“We can get you some room service again,” Nico said cheerfully. “But I highly doubt caffeine will help with the nerves.”
“I’m not sure I care at this point,” she said. “Coffee’s a comfort as much as anything.” Then she got more comfortable on the bed and wondered about what exactly just happened. What really blew her away was the efficiency with which things happened. “So, if you can make all this happen—dead bodies disappear, et cetera,” she said, “you do have a plan to get me home, right?”
“Right,” Nico said. “It’ll be a little unorthodox though.”
“I don’t care how orthodox it is,” she said. “I still have my passport, so I can get into the country from any point of entry.”
“Exactly,” he said. “So it might surprise you which point we end up choosing.” But he refused to say any more.
That bothered her too, but she couldn’t do a whole lot about it. She found herself shivering as she laid here on the bed.
Nico made a grunt and came over and picked up a blanket from the other bed, then tossed it over her. “It was adrenaline. Now that’s shock,” he said. “Curl up. Know that you’re safe and that we’ve got this.”
And, for the first time, she started to believe it. “I’d do a lot to avoid being recaptured again,” she whispered.
He ever-so-gently stroked her cheek and whispered back, “I have no intention of losing you again.”
She closed her eyes and huddled under the blanket, her body slowly calming down. She didn’t even want to dwell on the crime-scene cleanup, but it was hard not to when she saw just how efficient and smooth the other people’s actions had been. She couldn’t imagine what all these guys were trying to do and how much effort they had gone through to do it.
A whole team had come in and swept out the place, then cleaned it up and swiped it of fingerprints and that body. … Sure, a service elevator was here, and it wasn’t even that far away, but somebody had shut down the cameras to let them all escape detection. The same thing had been done to the cameras that had enabled her kidnappers to get her out of the original hotel room and to move her out too. “Who was that who took off with the prisoner?”
“A government agency rep.”
“Do you think our prisoner was connected with some government plot?” she asked, bewildered.
“Not necessarily,” Nico said. “We have to consider all avenues.”
“Like what?”
“Like your family,” Keane said suddenly.
She looked at him in surprise, but Nico’s phone buzzed, gathering her attention now.
He looked up to read the text and walked to the front door. “Coffee’s here.” He opened the door and pulled in a cart.
And she realized that the text had
