Her husband put an arm around her shoulders. “Maybe it’s not the worst-case scenario. Maybe they’ve got a real lead, but they don’t want to get our hopes up.”
She was not comforted. “I don’t like the way this is going, John. Two days ago, the FBI had an agent in our house, one on our phones, and two outside. Today it’s just a local cop parked across the street. I think the Bureau is closing up shop here. And I’m absolutely terrified about what might have caused that change of heart.”
“It makes no sense to panic until we have more information,” John insisted. But deep down, he was every bit as frantic as his wife. It didn’t help that Aiden had not yet come home. Was it really all because of the weather, or was there something else in play?
It definitely rankled that his son was in the company of Emmanuel Harris. Now Harris had stopped answering his cell phone. It was infuriating and unnerving. Yet John hid those feelings from Louise, not wanting to add to her anxiety.
“Anyway, let’s just keep our heads. I’m sure Rufus will call if he hears anything.”
The Blog Hog did better than that. He showed up on their doorstep within the hour, his trusty laptop under his arm.
The local officer accompanied the visitor to make sure the Falconers were expecting him.
“This is Rufus Sehorn,” Louise explained. “He’s welcome here anytime.”
Her husband turned to the short, slight blogger with the hobbitlike features. “Tell us you’ve got something, Rufus. We’re losing our minds here.”
They sensed right away that Sehorn was bursting with news. His hands trembled as he set up his laptop on the living room coffee table. He fairly vibrated with excitement.
“This just came in this morning,” he informed them, bringing up an e-mail.
The Falconers drew close
The time is now. This is your daughter’s last chance
Bring the money to the entrance of the old Black River Mine, 3 miles south of Monkwood, Virginia, on County Road 5219
Tonight — 5 P.M.
No police, no excuses
NO MERCY
All the color drained from Louise’s face. “That’s just six hours from now!”
Her husband’s voice was shaky. “We’ll call Sorenson — forward him the e-mail. It could change his mind about the ransom money.”
Louise was in tears. “We can’t risk it! If the kidnappers get the slightest whiff of the FBI, they’ll kill her!”
“But you don’t need the FBI,” Sehorn tried to explain. “We have the money!”
Both Falconers stared at him.
“It’s true,” the blogger confirmed. “The site brought in close to four million in pledges. The donors pay by credit card through PayPal. I can have it in an hour, and we can drive straight out there. It’ll be tight, but we’ll make it.”
Meg’s father was speechless, overcome by what this odd young man was offering. Ten seconds before, there had been utter hopelessness. Now here was the Blog Hog with a way to bring their daughter home. It was as if a superhero had parachuted in to save the day.
Louise looked worried. “What do we tell the FBI?”
Sehorn regarded her earnestly. “That has to be your decision. But if it was up to me, I’d say nothing at all. Sorenson might try to stop you. He might even ambush the kidnappers by sending agents in before we can get there with the money. It’ll get botched just like the last ransom handover. I think it’s too risky.”
John Falconer nodded. It was all so bizarre — millions of dollars from anonymous online donors, a rendezvous in an abandoned mine, a secret exchange behind the FBI’s back. Not even in his Mac Mulvey novels could he ever have imagined something like this. Yet as he racked his trained mind for another way, he knew in his gut that this was their only chance.
His daughter’s life. At that moment, it was the only thing that mattered in the world.
He said, “Go ahead and pick up the money.”
“… and he’s got dark eyes — brown, I think,” Mickey was saying into the handset. “And a beard — medium bushy …”
Harris paced the hotel room like a caged tiger, listening to his prisoner describing his accomplices over the phone to an FBI sketch artist. Medium bushy! It would be a miracle to identify the other two kidnappers this way, but everything had to be tried.
The room at Blue Valley Lodge had become Harris’s base of operations. With the Forest Service out looking for Meg, and the FBI cyber task force tracing the ransom e-mails, the agent had to serve as the nerve center — an inactive role that didn’t sit well with the big man.
The room was also a place to warm up and a holding cell for Mickey, who was handcuffed to the bed.
“Do you really think he might try to run away?” Aiden whispered to Harris. “He’s sorry about what he did.” The prisoner seemed especially harmless in the bright purple SKI VIRGINIA sweatsuit from the gift shop, which had replaced his drenched clothing.
“He’d better pay the Bureau back for that stuff,” was the agent’s moody reply.
They waited for news that did not come. The FBI tech crew could only report that the ransom e-mails had traveled a path as complex and interconnected as a spiderweb. It would take time to unravel it.
“Time,” Harris had told the man, “is something we have very little of.”
“Hold on a sec — I think that’s call waiting,” Mickey said suddenly. He had to pass the receiver to his cuffed hand in order to press the FLASH button. “Hello? … Sure, he’s right here — Agent Harris, it’s the Forest Service.”
Harris snatched the handset. “What have you got for me?”
All at once, the big man was fairly exploding with excitement, barking instructions into the phone.
Aiden’s heart constricted as if a surgical clamp had been applied to it. “Is it Meg?”
“A chopper detected a heat signature,” Harris reported. “They’ve got rescuers on the way.”
Mickey was on his feet now, bouncing up and down, still cuffed to the bed. “Can they see her?”
“Quiet, I’m trying to hear the transmissions from the snowmobile. Wait — they’re coming up on the coordinates — ”
Aiden clung to Harris’s arm. A heat signature — that had to be Meg, didn’t it? Who else would be out in two feet of snow?
Please be her … please be her …
“Oh, no.”
The deflation in the agent’s voice was a broadsword, slicing into Aiden. He could not bring himself to form the words, but the question hung in the air: Is she dead?
Harris let out a long breath. “I understand.... Thanks for trying.”
“What’s going on?” Mickey quavered.
“False alarm. The heat signature turned out to be a bear cub.”
Bad news … but not the worst. Not yet.
“Forest Service says it’s pretty common,” the agent went on. “Cubs come out of hibernation, see snow for the first time, and wander off.”
“But they’ll keep looking, right?” Aiden barely whispered.
Harris nodded soberly. “But once people dig out of the storm, the skiers will be taking advantage of the new powder. Then there’ll be heat signatures all over the mountains — too many for the chopper to follow. And when it gets dark — ”
Aiden felt sick. The details were different, but what Harris was describing was all too familiar: a ticking clock.
Time was running out on Meg.
* * *
Doctors John and Louise Falconer left their house via the back door. Each had spent more than a year in a maximum-security prison, yet this was the first time either of them had run from the police. They could not allow the officer parked in front of their home to see their departure.
The two criminology professors climbed the fence that separated their yard from the neighbors’. It wasn’t easy in their winter coats and heavy boots. Their destination was a place that had just seen two feet of snow.
They crossed the neighbors’ property and eme
rged on the other side of the crescent. There, waiting for them, was Rufus Sehorn, at the wheel of a huge Range Rover.
In spite of his nervousness, John Falconer was curious. “What happened to the Prius?” The Blog Hog normally drove the Toyota hybrid.
“We’re going to blizzard country,” Sehorn told them. “Only an idiot would try to drive a regular car up there.”
Louise’s question was a practical one. “Have you got the money?”
She opened the door of the SUV, and her answer lay across the rear seat. She struggled to push the large Samsonite suitcase aside to make room for herself. Her husband got it beside the driver.
“Three million,” the Blog Hog confirmed.
“I believe it,” she told him. The bag must have weighed sixty pounds. She remembered the duffel of bundled hundred-dollar bills from the previous ransom attempt several days before. It had held two million. The Samsonite was that much heavier.
Sehorn reached around from the front, holding a steaming thermos. “Anybody hungry? I brought pea soup.”
The two professors made no reply. It was not out of rudeness. Both felt nothing but friendship and gratitude toward the blogger. But the meeting that would decide whether their daughter would live or die was just a few hours away.
Pea soup was the last thing on their minds.
The closer Mike Sorenson got to the mountains, the more the snow piled up. The road had been plowed, but not down to bare pavement. Rock salt, sand, and car traffic had added a layer of icy slush to the mix.
From all sides, towering drifts sent a windblown spray into his Ford Taurus. The car had run out of wiper fluid about fifty miles back. He navigated through a circle of clean glass the size of a Ping-Pong ball, his top speed maybe fifteen miles per hour.
Through the mess, he could see flashing lights. A huge salt truck lumbered ahead, inching along behind a road grader. A figure in yellow coveralls stepped out in front of the Taurus, waving. Sorenson braked to a sliding stop.
He lowered the window, and a woman leaned in. Her hardhat bore the logo of the Virginia Department of Highways. “You’re going to want to turn around. There’s a gas station about ten miles back where you can get a coffee, maybe a bite to eat.”
“Is the road closed?” the agent asked.
“Not officially, but this next stretch is no fun. We’ve had some reports of drifting. We’re recommending motorists sit out the next few hours.”
“Hours?” In agony, Sorenson consulted his watch He’d been traveling since this morning and he’d barely made it to the foothills. A few hours might as well be forever.
“Unless you’ve got chains or four-wheel drive.” She regarded the car dubiously. “Looks like you’ve got neither.”
Sorenson grimaced. The Falconer kidnapping was finally coming to a head. If that little girl was still alive, the chance to bring her home was right now! And where would the case’s lead agent be? Stuck at some greasy gas station luncheonette?
Not Mike Sorenson!
He reached into his breast pocket and flashed his badge. “This is official FBI business. I’m ordering you to let me through.”
She was unimpressed. “You don’t have to order anything. Like I said, the road isn’t closed. But you’ll want to take it slow. Could be nasty up ahead.”
“Thanks for your cooperation.” He shut the window and allowed the woman to wave him around the heavy equipment.
Thanks to the salt, a lot of the snow had melted. He steered through several miles of curves, gradually working his way up to a cautious forty miles per hour. He was anxious to get to Blue Valley and take over the investigation from Harris.
The bend wasn’t any sharper than the ones that had come before, but it was at the top of a rise, exposed to the wind. Thick, drifting snow covered the highway. Sorenson turned, but the Taurus didn’t. The Ford skated off the road and down the slope beyond it. Now he was plunging into the deep ditch, plowing through powder, his foot pressed hard on a brake pedal that was powerless to slow his descent.
And then it was all over. The Taurus sat at the base of a gully, nestled in deep snow.
He put the car in gear. The wheels spun, but there was no traction. The undercarriage rested on so much powder that the tires were well up off the ground. He shifted into reverse. Same result.
Sorenson got out of the car and looked around. High white embankments surrounded him. The snow was pristine except for his own tire tracks. There was nobody around.
“Hello?” he called.
The silence was total.
Agent Mike Sorenson had built his career on going by the rules and following procedure. But try as he might, he could not conjure up a chapter from the FBI manual that covered anything like this.
Meg had never learned the names of her three kidnappers. The monikers she gave them came from the masks they had worn on the day of her kidnapping: Spider-Man, Tiger Woods, Mickey Mouse. Spidey, Tiger, and Mickey. The Three Animals.
Two animals, really. Mickey wasn’t a part of it anymore. That became obvious in the cabin when Tiger searched Meg and came up with the nail file Mickey had given her.
Spidey’s eyes bulged. “That traitor! Didn’t I tell you he’d stab us in the back? He was making friends with this little Houdini-girl the minute he laid eyes on her!”
“That’s not true!” Meg tried to speak up for Mickey. “He didn’t give me that file; it was in my pocket all along! It’s not his fault you missed it the first time you searched me!”
Tiger’s voice dripped with sarcasm. “And how did you get it from your pocket with your hands bound behind the chair? With mind power?”
“I snuck it out and hid it in my sleeve while you were tying me up,” Meg blustered. It was an obvious lie, but she wanted to take the heat off Mickey. Who knew what kind of revenge the two kidnappers might take on him?
“What are we going to do?” asked Spidey. “We’re leaving a ticking bomb out there — a guy who could finger us in a heartbeat.”
“Not without fingering himself first,” Tiger soothed. “He’s weak. He hasn’t got the guts to go to the cops. Let him crawl back into whatever hole he came from. That’s one less way for us to split the ransom.”
Spidey grunted his reluctant assent. It was hard to argue with more money.
“Let’s keep our eyes on the ball,” Tiger continued. “This is almost over. And that means we’re both going to be rich.”
Meg’s ears perked up. “Almost over?”
“That’s right, Margaret,” Tiger told her. “If you can behave yourself and not do anything stupid, you’ll be back with your family very soon.”
Meg nearly choked. Back with her family? Really? These past days — fighting to escape, fighting just to survive — she had reached a point where merely staying alive seemed like a long shot. Was it possible that this horrible nightmare might actually be coming to an end?
Tiger supplied more details. “Your parents are on their way right now with the cash.”
It was straight out of thin air, completely unexpected. The prospect of a reunion with her family kindled a longing so raw, so powerful that it rendered her helpless — incapable of any action other than waiting and hoping.
Could it be true? She’d been lied to so many times by these criminals.
Tiger smiled at her doubt. “Trust me.”
Meg did not trust Tiger and Spidey. And obviously, the feeling was mutual, because the next thing Spidey did was tie her to a chair.
Meg’s mind was awhirl as he bound her wrists. She wanted to believe that her parents were on the way to buy her freedom. But did it make sense? Where would two college professors come up with three million dollars?
Trussed up like a turkey, she judged time by the progression of shows on the cabin’s small TV. It was three and a half interminable hours before Spidey undid the ropes and marched her outside. Tiger was working with a broom, sweeping the snow off something short and squat, with huge tires. It was the ATV — the three-wheeler t
hey had used to chase her in the woods.
“I thought we were waiting for Mom and Dad,” Meg protested.
“We’re meeting them somewhere else,” Tiger told her.
Meg regarded the ATV dubiously. “All three of us will never fit on that thing.”
“My Rolls-Royce is in the shop,” Spidey growled. “Get on.”
A sudden rustling in the nearby trees drew her attention. She looked to the source of the sound, and her hopes evaporated. It was not a potential rescuer, but the bear cub that had shared her shelter during last night’s blizzard.
In spite of her disappointment, she felt a surprising surge of warmth. What a tough little guy to follow me all the way here!
Spidey noticed the newcomer, too. “Holy — ” In a flash, he pulled a pistol from his jacket and squeezed off three quick shots at the cub. The bullets tore through the brush and thudded into tree trunks, missing the target. Frightened, the young bear fled for the cover of deeper woods.
Meg was furious. “Stop it! Stop shooting!”
Tiger was angry for a different reason. “Put the gun away. Do you want to attract every cop in the county?”
Spidey’s normally red face was pale behind his beard. “That was a bear!”
“It was just a baby,” Meg insisted coldly. “Poor guy’s just looking for its mother.”
“I don’t care! I don’t like bears!”
“It followed me for miles and never touched me,” Meg retorted.
“Let’s get moving,” Tiger said pointedly. “We don’t want to be late.”
The three of them were a very tight fit in the ATVs saddle. Meg sat behind Spidey, the driver. Her hands were wrapped around his midsection, her wrists bound together in front of him. To be pressed up against this awful man, unable to move, was beyond torture. Tiger brought up the rear.
As they roared off, Meg’s eyes found the spot where the cub had stood before Spidey had opened fire.
We’re on exactly the same page, Junior, she reflected grimly. We’re both hoping for a big family reunion. She couldn’t escape the feeling that the creature’s chances were much better than her own.