they heard the man code-named Cougar reply. “In one piece.”
But before they could all relax, there was still one team member left to check.
“Lily,” said Bloch.
No answer.
“Lily, come in,” Bloch repeated.
Silence.
Chapter Three
Lily Randall woke up to the rocking of a vehicle, her left cheekbone aching from the hard floor of the van. It wasn’t long before she felt a hard tug on her hair, which pulled her up to a seated position. She tried to fight the person off but found that her arms had been tied behind her back.
She flailed, trying to wrest herself free, and found herself staring down the barrel of a gun.
“No,” the man holding it said. “Chill out.”
She complied, resting against the side of the van as well as she could, given the circumstances.
The back of the van was windowless, and she was sharing it with three men. The one opposite her, who had threatened her with a gun, looked to be, like her, nearing his thirties. He was wearing a plaid beret covering his shaved head, and when he grinned, she saw that one of his top front incisors looked to be made of gold.
They spoke in what she supposed was Czech. She had the distinct impression that they were debating whether to kill her.
Her eyes darted, straining to see the men sitting in front, looking for Lukacs among the occupants of the van. He wasn’t among them. Did the others succeed in capturing him? If so, that gave her a chance to survive this.
She ventured to speak. “You want your boss back.”
The man with the gold tooth sneered. “Not boss. No boss.”
“Still, Lukacs didn’t pay everything up front, did he?”
The men looked at each other, and she knew she was right.
“So you want him back. Maybe we can help each other out.”
Gold Tooth leaned in toward her. “What are you going to do, all tied up?”
“Call my people. We’ll make an exchange.”
The men exchanged some words. One of them raised his voice in anger. Gold Tooth snapped at him, then turned back to Lily. “Number.”
The man said something and held out his hand, and one of the others handed him a cell phone.
“Let me make the call,” she said.
“No,” the man said. “We call.”
She gave him the number—the emergency local number they had each committed to memory for the mission.
The man dialed and waited, until Lily heard the faint response—not enough for her to make out who was talking or what was said.
“Who is this?” the man demanded. Then, after the response, “We have your agent. The sexy woman with the green eyes.” Lily shuddered with revulsion at his description. He continued. “We want Lukacs back.”
Lily held her breath. She wasn’t sure whether they would make the exchange. She wasn’t even sure whether she wanted them to make the exchange. She wanted to be saved, but they had worked long and hard to catch Lukacs—a man responsible for dozens, probably hundreds, of deaths. To give her up to hold on to him—she might take it if the roles were reversed.
But they must not have made the choice, because the merc responded with, “Good. Stromovka Park, at the pond, south side, at midnight. We will exchange the prisoners then.”
He listened as the person on the line spoke. Then he brought the phone to Lily’s ear, holding it there.
“She wants to talk to you.”
“This—” she stammered. “This is Agent Randall.”
“Randall.” It was Bloch. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Keep talking to me as long as you can, understand?”
“Yes,” Lily replied and continued. “Yes, you want to do exactly as they say. I think they took me as leverage only, in case something like this happened. The impression I get is that they’re men just trying to do a job they were hired for, nothing else.”
She could practically see Bloch doing one of her death’s head smiles at how Lily was following her orders as well as subtly instructing the men holding her captive. “Do you know where you are? Any identifying elements you can tell me?”
She couldn’t see anything outside. “No. There’s nothing...nothing seems done to me while I was unconscious. These men seem intent on their job, that’s all. No reason to contact any local authorities.”
“Very good, Randall,” Bloch reassured her. “Tell me anything more.”
Lily thought furiously of some way to pass on details without alerting her abductors. “It was five,” she said. “Five o’clock your time when they took me. I don’t know how many more minutes since then...”
The man with the gun yanked the phone away from Lily’s ear.
“Stromovka Park,” he repeated for Bloch. “Midnight.” Then he hung up.
The blow came too quickly for her to dodge, hard on her right temple. She felt dizzy and retched from the pain.
“I did not let you talk to give information to your people. Do not play with me.”
The man removed the battery from the phone. Damn. There was no way Zeta could track it now.
* * * *
“I lost the signal,” Shepard said over the video connection.
Morgan walked restlessly around the living room, which held his daughter and Peter Conley. They were in a city apartment a few blocks from the historic downtown. It had belonged to an old widower who’d died heirless a few weeks before. Zeta had arranged their occupation by pulling a string of favors, which gave them a near-ideal base of operations with no paper trail.
“Of course,” Alex said sarcastically. “Don’t you always?”
“Find it again,” Morgan said.
“It’s no use,” Shepard said. “It’s gone.”
“Then do something else! Track the vehicle!”
“Spoken like a field agent,” Shepard sighed. “It’s not that simple. We don’t know which vehicle it was. Tracking the phone gives us a radius, that’s all. It was on the highway. Too many cars, too many ways to go.”
“Just get it done, Shepard.”
