Total pages in book: 113
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 108242 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 541(@200wpm)___ 433(@250wpm)___ 361(@300wpm)
“What can you possibly think you’ll be able to do with it?” Wallace asks, his voice pitching high, his eyes stretched open wide.
Abe hits the side of Wallace’s head with the butt of his gun. Wallace grunts in pain and stumbles back, and another masked man, this one wearing Richard Nixon, drags him from the frame.
“As you can see…” Abe sighs dramatically. “I’m still training Dr. Murrow how to behave, but I have another hostage. He knows the deal.”
He tips his head toward the camera, and Nixon returns, marching a hunched figure with a black bag covering his head into the frame.
“This is Paco,” Abe says, ripping the bag from the man’s head. “Paco, say hello to the nice people back home.”
Time has chiseled deep grooves alongside the man’s mouth and into his forehead. His swarthy skin sags around his jaw, and his once-dark hair is more salt than pepper. In his eyes, when he glances up at the camera, there’s fear and a solemn resignation.
“I said,” Abe emphasizes, “say hello to the people back home, Paco.”
There is fear and a solemn resignation in Paco’s eyes when he glances up at the camera, but he remains silent.
Abe leans down and loud-whispers, “You’re making me look bad, buddy.”
“Hello,” Paco says, the English sounding forced and foreign on his lips.
“Paco here,” Abe says, “is what I like to call disposable. Wrong time, wrong place. I don’t need him. I only need Dr. Murrow, but fret not! Paco does serve a purpose.”
Abe pulls a .357 magnum from the waistband of his camouflage pants and presses it to Paco’s temple. The older man immediately starts whimpering, eyes closed. He lifts his plastic-cuffed wrists and presses his palms together in prayer. I catch the odd “dios” and “ave maría” strung into a rosary of fear and pleading.
Abe’s voice goes wooden, his eyes like marble. “Paco’s going to demonstrate that I mean business.”
He pulls the trigger without further warning, the bullet firing into Paco’s temple in a spray of blood and violence. Paco drops like a domino, setting a billion things inside me into motion.
“Jesus!” Kimba drops the iPad onto my desk like the blood and gray matter could have splashed on her clothes. It lands facedown, and I steady my hands to turn it back over so we can keep watching.
“See?” Abe’s pleasant tone is back, his mask stained with Paco’s blood. “Business. I don’t do idle threats, Mr. Vale.”
“Who’s Mr. Vale?” Kimba asks, her voice and hands trembling.
“CEO of CamTech,” Jin Lei answers from the door. “He’s on the line.”
I don’t reply but hold up a staying finger to Jin Lei so I can watch the rest of this lunatic’s macabre show.
“You’re already responsible for the death of one innocent person,” Abe says and turns to Nixon. “Bring her in.”
Kimba and I stare at one another in a silence so tense, the muscles in my neck and back scream, braced for what will happen next.
The man in the Nixon mask guides a woman forward wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a black bag over her head. Abe pulls her to stand directly in front of him.
“Now this second hostage, though as disposable and useless to me as good old Paco…” He pauses and crosses himself with the gun. “Rest in peace, Paco.”
He chuckles maniacally.
“Where was I? Oh, yes. My other hostage. She’s probably worth more to some of you than dear Paco. I hear she’s a pretty big deal back home. Allow me to introduce the next person who dies if I don’t get my vaccine in forty-eight hours.”
He rips the bag from the woman’s head, and a river of inky hair tumbles around her shoulders. Abe presses his gun to her temple, and everything slows down. The world comes to a complete stop, and the only thing still in motion is the blood galloping through my veins like wild horses, like mustangs. Even with the riot of my emotions, an icy preternatural calm falls over me. In this moment, I know two things like I know my own name.
The first is that I can no longer call what I feel for Lennix obsession, mere attraction, or anything less than what it is. I’m absolutely, irrevocably in love with her. I know this because it feels as though Abe is holding that gun to my head. I know that if her life is over, in every way that counts, so is mine. We are inextricably joined at the heart, even separated by thousands of miles. I wish I’d been clear-eyed enough, brave enough to tell her before she left. I wish standing there in the grip of this lunatic, she already had the assurance of those words—the certainty that I love her this deeply and will not stop fighting, searching until she’s safe. Until she’s home.