I raise my hands to block the headlights, squint and see the driver staring back at me, his mouth open in shock.
At that moment, both of the masked men exit the van and grab my arms and begin to pull me back inside.
The car’s driver, having quickly come to terms with his shock, shouts out his open window, “What the hell is going on?”
The masked men aren’t gentle at all in the way they throw me into the van. One of them crawls up into the van after me while the other stays outside. I’m briefly aware of the car’s driver asking again what the hell is going on, and then I hear a single crack and the driver falls silent. A second later, the other masked man jumps up into the van, slams the door shut, and the van is moving an instant later, its engine screaming as it tears away from the intersection.
The masked man glares down at me, his gun in hand. He says to me, “That’s on you,” then says to the man in the passenger seat, “Give her the shot.”
The man in the passenger seat is already prepared. He pushes out of his seat, a hypodermic needle in hand, and that’s when I start struggling again, thrashing on the vibrating steel floor. Both masked men in the back need to hold me down while the passenger crouches over me and searches for a vein. He finds one and inserts the needle and plunges in whatever liquid is in there, and then he steps back, returns to his seat, but the two other men keep holding me as my thrashing lessens and everything starts to go gray and then completely dark.
Four hours thirty minutes to go.
Nine
I open my eyes to darkness.
At first, I think I’m still sleeping—I feel groggy—but I know I’m awake.
And the darkness … it’s not a complete darkness. There’s something textured about it. Something … suffocating.
I blink and immediately understand the source of the darkness.
There’s a cloth bag over my head.
It’s not tight, which was why I barely felt it at first, but now that I’m starting to come to, I realize that it is a cloth bag, just as I realize there is still duct tape over my mouth and that my wrists and ankles are still bound.
Except … no, that’s not quite right. My wrists and ankles are still bound, yes, but they’re not bound as they were before. Because now I’m sitting in a chair. One of those metal folding chairs, it feels like, the kind without any padding. My ankles are bound to the chair legs, just as my wrists are bound to the back of the chair.
Despite all this, I still try to struggle out of my restraints. It does no good. I’m just wearing myself out, so I stop and take a moment to try to take in my surroundings.
There’s a noise somewhere far away which may be a motor humming, but for the most part it’s silent.
Several seconds pass in that strange silence, and then I hear another noise, the creak of another metal chair, directly in front of me.
The cloth bag shifts as someone pulls it off my head.
One of the masked men is standing in front of me. At least, I assume it’s one of the masked men from the panel van. He holds the cloth bag at his side for a moment, his gaze steady with mine, and then he tosses the bag aside and sits back down on the metal chair facing me.
He leans forward, his elbows on his knees. “Did you have a nice nap? You were out for about an hour and a half.”
I don’t say anything because duct tape is still over my mouth. The masked man knows this, of course, but he doesn’t seem to care about my answer, even if I were able to give one.
His eyes are green. And his voice—shit, how did I not notice this before?—is Russian. At least, I think it’s Russian. He sounds like the big blonde guy from the Rocky movie.
“I know you’re scared, but there’s no reason to be. Our intention is not to hurt you. At least, we do not want to hurt you. That is entirely up to you, on how you follow directions.”
He leans forward, pinches the edge of the duct tape, slowly peels it off my mouth.
“There,” he says, leaning back as he balls the duct tape and tosses it next to the cloth bag, “now we can better have a conversation. Would you like some water?”
Despite the duct tape no longer keeping me silent, I say nothing.
The man’s eyes narrow slightly. “Do not make this more difficult than it needs to be, Holly.”
“How do you know my name?” My voice doesn’t sound nearly as scared as I thought it would.
“We know a lot about you. We know where you and your family are staying. We know what groceries you bought this past weekend. We know about all the places you have been since you arrived to Oahu.”
“What do you want?”
“It does not concern you what it is we want. That is between your father and us.”
“My father? But he—”
I don’t continue, clamping my mouth shut. The last thing I need to do is give this guy more information … though, by the sound of it, he already knows a lot.
Even though the mask hides his face, I can hear the smile in his voice as he says, “But your father is only a sergeant in the Army? That is what you believe, is it not?” He chuckles. “How naïve you are, little Holly.”
“Don’t call me little Holly.”
The man chuckles again. “We knew you would be—what is the word—feisty?”
I ask, “Did you ever see the fourth Rocky movie?”
The man says nothing.
“I watched it last summer. I watched all the movies, actually,
