Hakim woke fully, startled by the vivid image of Amélie in danger, and he held his head in his hands. The room hadn’t changed. The locked door still taunted him, and the bed was still hard. He smelled tobacco smoke drift underneath the gap and heard the faint voices of jokes told in French with a North African accent.
This wasn’t about Amélie.
He started at the beginning. He was calm. He knew that his head was his best ally. The moment he allowed passion to surface, he was dead. He refused to accept emotion into his psyche. Only responding to each situation as it presented itself would give him the best chance of seeing his family again.
His stomach rumbled. Hunger was just one process in the road to dehumanising a prisoner, and he prepared himself mentally for the effects that a lack of food would have on his body. As long as he was given water… He drifted off again. Thoughts of who might have taken him, or who wanted him, but more importantly, why, invaded his mind, and he opened his eyes. At a guess, he reckoned everything usually boiled down to money. His father was rich beyond most people’s imaginations and thus an unsurprising target. What Hakim couldn’t figure out, though, was how whoever had taken him had pulled off getting through the ironclad security paid for by his father. Betrayal? Bribery?
And that led him back to Jean-Luc.
Jean-Luc would never betray his father. From the moment the jet hit the tarmac to the doors opening and the two men boarding, he never heard Jean-Luc speak. Was this significant? All he could surmise was that he’d been overpowered. The vision of the gun pointed at him evoked a physical response even now in sleep, and he tumbled off the bed. Startled, he continued his trawling of his memory. The gun. That had been the moment that time stopped.
He’d known then, with certainty, that he was to be taken. He sat next to the bed, head in hands, recollecting every detail.
The men had cable-tied his hands behind his back and hooded him, before ushering him down some steps and into a waiting vehicle, which had sped off as soon as the door was slammed. In the seconds before the head cover blanked his vision, he’d committed their faces to memory, and one of them he recognised. That’s when he calmed himself and began tracking every sound, movement, smell, and any other sensory information he could grab. He’d felt around: there was no one in the back seat with him. He’d listened carefully to the engine. His father had introduced him to the world of motor vehicles when he was still a toddler and he could pinpoint most noises made by a wide variety of them. This one was a Range Rover. Thoughts of his father induced feelings of shame once more and he cursed himself for his trusting ways and the embarrassment he’d caused to his father and his good name. The appearance of a new bodyguard, about a month previous to him leaving Paris for the summer, was something that Hakim nonchalantly accepted, but now he knew that it was something that he should have questioned.
Stop. No emotion.
He’d counted time. They’d travelled in that first vehicle through busy Paris streets. He heard shouting, car horns, cyclists’ bells and the driver cursing under his breath as they sat in traffic. Hakim memorised every detail.
Then they’d come to some kind of queuing system, and Hakim had known that they were waiting to get through a péage. The familiar nosing forward, then the electric window coming down and the machinery accepting the driver’s cash and dispensing change told him this. Of course, his captors wouldn’t have an Emovis Tag, which allowed them to pass through the tolls automatically, as that would have been traceable.
He knew he’d landed at two twenty in the afternoon, local time, having taken off from Algiers at eleven a.m. – Paris was an hour ahead – and he figured they’d travelled – allowing fifteen minutes to leave the airport – for forty minutes at an average Parisian inner-city speed, with stops and starts, of perhaps twenty kilometres per hour. That meant they hit a péage around ten kilometres away from Paris-Le Bourget. He believed they’d driven away from the city, and that was about the same distance to the Paris ring road, the A86. They’d left the city. Another ten minutes later, they hit another péage, and as the window rolled down, Hakim heard children’s chatter from a nearby car. They were talking about Disneyland. They were east of the city. Hakim figured that the vehicle in which he sat must have excellent black-out windows, else he’d be forced to lie down.
His senses kicked in to full swing after the initial adrenalin rush, but he refused to feel the discomfort of sitting forward because his hands were bound, and he ignored the fear and the bumping around in the back seat, because he wasn’t strapped into a seat belt. He’d honed in on the physical processes happening inside and outside his body by concentrating on tiny details. He heard every stone under the tyres, every gust of wind knocking the car, and smelled the driver’s cologne. He was like a wolf on the plains tracking deer; moving stealthily and silently, out-smarting his enemy.
After some time, though, he could no longer ignore his hands, which were turning numb behind his back, so he tried to wriggle his fingers to keep the circulation going, trying to control his heartbeat so he didn’t overheat. The last thing he needed was to lose a finger or two to lack of blood supply. The plastic binding was tight, but he could take it. He was
