Dan’s name flashed up on the console.
“Your escort’s waiting two miles ahead. You do still have that suite at the Giants, right?”
“You bribed them with tickets?”
We kept the suite for that very purpose.
“Yeah, cost us six.”
“Fine, tell Bradley.”
A minute later, a police cruiser pulled out in front of us, matching my speed. Thanks, Dan. That was one less thing we had to worry about, but now we had a bigger problem.
“Somebody has to tell Alaric,” I muttered. “I should make the call.”
“I can do it if you want,” Black offered.
“No, it’ll be better coming from me.”
Not that there was a way to make the fact that his girlfriend had been abducted sound anything less than awful.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Hey yourself. How’s it going? Did you find Dyson yet?”
He was half joking, but I was about to ruin his mood.
“Yes, but that’s not why I’m calling. Where are you?”
“I had to go to DC for a meeting. We’ve had a flood of new business inquiries in the last week. Not sure where they’ve all suddenly come from, but we can’t afford to turn them down.” I had a good idea where the referrals had come from. Black’s guilty conscience. “Wait a second… You’re serious? You found Dyson?”
“Alaric, you need to go back to Richmond.”
He knew straight away that something was wrong.
“Why? What’s happened?”
“Bethany had a little prang in my car. There wasn’t too much damage, but we can’t find her.”
“What do you mean, you can’t find her? She wandered off?”
“We think she might have been taken.” I had to do it. I had to tell him. “Eric Ridley escaped a few hours ago.”
“What about Rune? Is Rune okay?”
Oh, fuck.
“Rune was with her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Beth said they were going to see the horses at Riverley. Hold on, I’ll call her.”
Black was already on the phone, talking softly, updating everyone on a terrible situation that was now ten times worse.
“She’s not answering.” Alaric’s panic was all too obvious. “I got voicemail.”
“We’ll send someone over to the house. We’ll find them, I promise.”
The question was, would they be dead or alive? Ridley was furious at us, he had nothing to lose, and he’d already killed four people this month. Plus he could be miles away by now.
When Alaric spoke again, it was in a cold tone I hadn’t heard him use for years. This was Alaric the assassin, the man I’d first met on an undercover job over a decade ago, not the man who’d chilled out and lightened up once he quit the Agency and joined the FBI. There may have been a lot of uncertainties at that moment, but I knew one thing for sure. Eric Ridley was a dead man.
“I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER 45 - BETHANY
“IS IT WORKING?” I asked.
“I think so. Okay, put me down now.”
I loosened my grip on Rune, and she slithered back to the floor. We’d been trapped together before, but that had been fun, a visit to an escape room for her birthday, and this was hell. For the first day in the cellar, I’d been terrified, but I’d gone beyond scared and now my only focus was our survival. And to live, we needed to drink. Eric Ridley had left us with nothing. No water, no food, no blankets. When I’d told him Rune was diabetic, he just laughed.
“Nice try,” he’d said. “Sure she is.”
“No, really.”
“Then you’d better hope Charles Black pays your ransom in a hurry.”
What, so we could die quickly? Ridley had shown no interest in keeping us alive. And would Black even pay a ransom? He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who negotiated with criminals. Alaric would look for us, I knew he would, but we’d travelled for hours to get here, stuffed into the boot of a car with our hands and ankles bound and hoods over our heads. He’d have to search half of the United States. I’d tried to leave him a clue that it was Ridley who’d taken us, but would he find it?
Meanwhile, we were on our own, apart from the rats that skittered around at night, anyway. We’d got out of our handcuffs pretty fast thanks to Judd—he’d taught Rune that it was a good idea to carry a universal cuff key, and she had one braided into her homemade necklace—but we were still stuck in a dingy basement. The only door had been locked with a key and then bolted from the outside for good measure. We’d both heard the rattle followed by the dull thunk.
The door might have been old, but it was solid. We’d tried to break it down, and all we had to show for it was bruised shoulders. On the plus side, my headache was easing now. I’d got a nosebleed when the BMW’s airbag went off, and then I’d seen stars when Ridley cracked me over the head with his gun after I punched him by his car. My knuckles hurt too. At least Rune was in better shape than me, for now at any rate. Ridley had found her phone in her pocket and thrown it away, but he’d missed the little cross-body bag under her baggy sweatshirt. She wore it close, paranoid about something so important getting stolen, and she reckoned she had enough insulin to last her for two more weeks.
Would we survive for two weeks? Earlier, I’d almost given up hope, but Rune had given me a pep talk. At fifteen years old.
“Look.” She’d smoothed out a piece of paper in the gloom. She kept that in her little bag too. “It’s from
