The car’s front bumper made contact. Meg squeezed her eyes shut, awaiting an excruciating end. But the delicate collision felt more like a bump across the backside with a shopping cart. It knocked her off her feet, and she tumbled forward. Spidey slammed on the brakes, and the two men were out of the car.
By the time Meg struggled upright, her kidnappers were upon her.
* * *
Retired FBI agent Ernie Hoag had just found the office area when the screaming started. He rushed down the hall, coming to a sudden halt at the open door of a large storage closet. There lay his friend Brajansky, bleeding from a head wound, broken glass all around him.
He dropped to his knees and found a pulse. “Hank — can you hear me? Where’s the girl?”
When there was no reply, he leaped back up and continued his search for the source of the cries. This place was like a maze, with offices all over. Who knew where the sound could be coming from? One thing, though, was plain: It was a young kid, obviously in trouble. It could only be Margaret Falconer.
Then he saw it. Just outside a scratched and filthy window, two men were manhandling a struggling, protesting girl. The larger of them lifted her bodily, tossed her into the trunk of a dark sedan, and slammed the lid shut.
Hoag may have been retired, but the instincts were automatic. With a dexterity he didn’t think he still had, he was across the room, working at the window. It was either locked or jammed. Outside, the two men were getting into the car. Hoag picked up a chair and smashed the glass. He scrambled out to the sidewalk just in time to see the sedan disappearing around the corner.
He reached for his cell phone.
* * *
As Aiden approached the end of the block, the crowd grew denser, and he had to hug the duffel tightly to his chest. Using it as a bumper, he pushed through the crush and peered down the next street.
The sight that met his eyes was so bizarre that he wondered if the stress of Meg’s abduction had caused him to hallucinate. Two huge gray elephants were walking toward him with a majestic gait that took his breath away.
He put it all together in a flash — elephants, music, sequin-clad trainers, hundreds of kids. A circus parade!
There were tumblers, performers on unicycles, stilt walkers, pipe organs, and animal cages on wheels. It was pure spectacle —
But why would the kidnappers deliberately direct me here?
He looked to his beeper, as if expecting to see the answer scrolling across the screen. The device was silent and dark.
He did a bewildered three-sixty, scanning for some sort of clue — what came next?
That was when his gaze fixed on a figure in a doorway — and an all-too-familiar baseball cap bearing the logo of the Greenville Cubs.
In a city swarming with FBI agents, the guy following me turns out to be Richie?
Aiden was aghast. How had Richie gotten wind of all this? No. Dumb question. He was here — in the middle of an operation that could very easily get Meg killed; one that might be falling apart at this moment!
I’ve got to get rid of him!
But how? Aiden had been forbidden to talk.
Hefting the duffel, he sidled through the still-gathering crowd until he was standing in front of his school friend.
Caught out, Richie tried to explain his presence. “I’ve got your back, man.”
Aiden spun him around and pushed him face-first up against the wall. Then he pressed his own nose to the bricks and hissed, “Get out of here!”
“You need me.”
“You’re killing my sister!” Aiden seethed.
Richie was completely cowed. “How — ?”
“Go home!”
As Aiden spun around and plowed back into the crowd, a cheer went up among the spectators. The parade route was now multicolored with clowns on Rollerblades. They swarmed everywhere, handing out candy and free circus passes to the kids along the road.
The scene was so chaotic that Aiden almost ignored the commotion in his earpiece — Harris, in a state of high excitement: “… dark sedan; two men, one heavyset with a beard, one slight! Last seen at Three-forty-five Industry in Alexandria — the Quincy district! No shooting — they’ve got the girl in the trunk!”
Aiden could keep silent no longer. “Is it Meg? You found her?”
“Aiden!” Harris exclaimed. “Are you all right?”
“Where’s my sister?”
“She’s been spotted, but we don’t have her,” Harris replied. “The operation’s off. Stay put. Someone’s coming for you.”
Aiden was stunned. The plan in tatters, Meg in the trunk of a car. Oh, God —
A clown with a white face and cherry-red nose glided up and held out a lollipop — a woman, he thought, judging by the small features and fine lips. Automatically, Aiden reached out and took the candy. Before he realized what was happening, the duffel was snatched from his arms, and the clown sped away with it.
Horrified understanding exploded inside Aiden with the violence of a volcanic eruption. He had just been face-to-face with one of Meg’s kidnappers! He remembered the female voice behind the Tiger Woods mask on the day his sister had been taken.
She knows where Meg is! And I let her go!
Wild with urgency, he ran out into the middle of the street. The sight that greeted him made his heart sink into his sneakers. There must have been fifty clowns over the length of the parade — a sea of white faces and red noses, all in full flight on their Rollerblades. Finding the right one —
A hand closed on Aiden’s shoulder. He turned to see a circus security guard, who told him, “Back to the sidewalk, son.”
“Your clown stole my duffel bag!” Aiden blurted.
The man was humorless and impatient. He took a rough grip on Aiden and began frog-marching him over to the curb.
There was the sound of scrambling feet. Suddenly, Richie was clamped onto the man, arms around his neck, legs hugging his midsection, piggyback-style.
“Aiden — go!”
Aiden shook himself free and took off after the Rollerblading clowns. “Agent Harris!” he bellowed as he ran. “One of the kidnappers is here! She’s in a clown suit! And she’s got the money!”
“A clown suit?” Harris repeated.
“There are clowns all over the place! It’s a circus parade!”
Harris thought it over for a second. “Can you stop the parade?”
“How? I’m not the grand marshal!”
“Find a way,” Harris ordered. “Now!”
Aiden looked around helplessly. The only circus official he could see was the security guard who was hustling Richie to the sidewalk. No way would that guy ever help. They wouldn’t stop the parade unless something really big happened — like an accident or a medical emergency, or if one of the animals got out of its pen —
No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than a large cage rolled up on a flatbed truck. The high-pitched chattering was unmistakable. Monkeys, screeching and gibbering, at least a dozen of them.
Without thinking, Aiden heaved himself up onto the flatbed, sidled around to the door of the enclosure, and released the snap lock. When the door swung wide, the monkeys, chattering their approval, streamed out at light speed, scattering over the parade and its spectators.
The reaction was bedlam. Onlookers screamed and ran in all directions. The monkeys tested their newfound freedom by using heads as perches and springboards. The jugglers and performers abandoned their routines and began chasing the escaped animals. Some of the clowns joined the hunt. Whistles blew everywhere, and the parade ground to a halt.
Mission accomplished, Aiden jumped down from the truck and pounded through the chaos in search of the kidnapper clown.
Richie appeared at his side. “Where are we going?” he puffed.
At this point, Aiden was grateful for any help he could get. “We’re looking for the clown who’s got my duffel! But be careful — she’s one of the kidnappers!”
They barreled amid milling
spectators and circus people, scrutinizing clown after clown. The only one holding anything was wrestling a captured monkey. It was scratching his red nose and white face, shrilling its protest to the world.
“She’s gone!” Aiden cried in despair.
Richie pointed. “Look!”
At the other end of the block, the figure of a clown was trying to push past a cluster of terrified spectators in order to reach a side street. The dark shoulder strap of the duffel bag was clearly visible against the fabric of the clown suit.
Aiden and Richie raced over, sidestepping children and airborne monkeys.
Spying Aiden approaching on the run, the kidnapper tried to bull her way through the crowd. But the Rollerblades on her feet were a disadvantage because they gave her no traction.
Aiden busted into the throng, pushing protesting people aside. He reached for her but succeeded only in grabbing the handle of the duffel.
“What have you done with my sister?” he bellowed.
She pulled harder on the bag, but Aiden firmed up his grip. Richie reached in, adding his strength to the tug-of-war. All at once, the strap broke. Richie and the bag flew backward, sprawling on the pavement.
But Aiden wasn’t interested in two million dollars. He lunged at the kidnapper clown, determined to capture her and rescue Meg.
And suddenly he was staring down the barrel of a snub-nosed pistol.
There were screams from the onlookers and a stampede to get away. The space around them opened up as if by magic.
“Give me the bag,” ordered a cold voice.
Richie scrambled to his feet and moved forward to hand over the duffel.
“Stay back, Rich,” Aiden commanded, stepping in front of his friend. “She gets nothing until Meg goes free.”
The gun stayed leveled at Aiden’s chest. “You’re not in a position to bargain.”
Richie’s voice shook with terror. If he had underestimated the dangers of “helping” Aiden, he did so no longer. “Give it to her, man! She’ll shoot you!”
“Let her,” Aiden replied evenly, never taking his eyes from the kidnapper. It was not just bravado. He had already decided that he would rather get shot than give up his only link to his sister.
Aiden saw the gun hand twitch and understood how close to death he really was. Fear swelled in his chest, but he did not back down.
The standoff was broken by a squeal from above. In a reddish-brown blur, a small monkey dropped from a lamppost and wrapped itself around the white-painted face.
Aiden leaped forward and went for the gun. The kidnapper held on, even as she swatted at the animal that was blinding her.
Richie jumped to his aid, but Aiden ordered him away. “Go find help!”
His friend stumbled off, dragging the bag beside him. He got about thirty feet before colliding with the burly form of a Baltimore city policeman. The officer took one look at the duffel — the zipper had come undone a few inches, revealing Benjamin Franklin on the face of a neat bundle of hundred-dollar bills. Richie was in handcuffs before he could even begin to explain himself.
With another screech, the monkey leaped onto a mailbox and perched there, scolding the combatants loudly. The kidnapper kicked at Aiden’s leg with a rock-hard Rollerblade boot.
“Ow!” Aiden doubled over in pain, and she slammed the gun butt down on the top of his head. A firestorm went off between his ears. He dropped to the street, out cold.
The kidnapper Meg called Tiger stared at the precious duffel, some thirty feet away, and in the hands of a uniformed cop. In the distance, sirens — lots of them — were growing louder.
The odds were no longer in her favor.
She slipped the pistol back into a hidden pocket and glided off to join a group of clowns as they helped round up the loose monkeys. Then she was just one of many, a needle in a haystack.
She was disappointed in today’s result, but not angry. They still had their hostage. That was the important thing.
Soon it would be time to disappear from here. A moment of distraction, a quick dash down an alley, clown suit and Rollerblades tossed in the Dumpster, a few moist towelettes to clean off the makeup.
Finally, a young woman in jeans and a sweater would emerge from the lane. Just another passerby, wondering what had happened to disrupt such a pleasant circus parade.
Aiden’s head wound was treated in Emergency, but he was released immediately.
“You’re lucky,” Agent Ortiz told him on the ride home. “You should see Brajansky. Concussion.”
Aiden sucked air between his teeth. “They’re vicious, these kidnappers.”
“Actually, we think it was your sister who hit him. Mistaken identity.”
Aiden held his aching head. “She could have been rescued!”
Yet with everything that had gone wrong today, he was still able to take a tiny amount of comfort in this horrible mishap that had landed Agent Brajansky in the hospital and left Meg in the hands of her captors. What she had done proved she was tough.
She’ll need to be to come through this alive.
The reporters were back on his front lawn. They barked questions and photographed his bandaged head as Ortiz delivered him into the arms of his frantic parents.
As awful as the ransom operation had turned out to be, his parents’ grief was even harder for him to take.
“I’m fine, Mom,” Aiden tried to reassure her. “Don’t worry about me. Worry about — ” He could not bring himself to finish the sentence.
Meg. The absent Falconer cast a larger shadow than any of them at this moment. Their attempt to get her back had failed, and she was gone.
But that was too terrible to talk about. So Mom and Dad obsessed over Aiden’s head, Brajansky’s concussion, and the fact that Richie had spent three hours in jail while the FBI and the Baltimore PD had wrangled over custody of the two million dollars.
“Richie really came through for me today,” Aiden admitted grudgingly. “He’s a good friend.” It was a tribute to the legendary Pembleton stubbornness. The kid had been determined to help, and — against all odds — he had.
“Richie needs to keep out of this,” put in Agent Harris, entering from the kitchen. “He could have gotten shot today.”
“I might have gotten shot if he hadn’t been there to help me,” said Aiden stiffly. “And you’ve got him to thank for saving your ransom money. Remember, he stayed on my tail when all your trained agents got left in the dust.”
Harris had the grace to look embarrassed. “Believe me, I’ve been hearing that all day from my bosses and every reporter in town. Your friend the Blog Hog has already started telling the world what incompetents we are.”
Louise Falconer was not sympathetic. “Rufus Sehorn’s Web site has been our only communication with the kidnappers. We should be giving him whatever information he needs and trusting him to use it well. Maybe they’ll contact him again.”
“Your trust should be in police work, not Internet gossip,” Harris warned. “We’ve got agents going over every inch of that warehouse. Trace evidence is checking the clown suit we found in the Dumpster. And Hoag has a description of the car and two letters of the license plate. The alert is back up again. We’ll find her. It’s only a matter of time.”
Time. The word hung in the air. How much time did Meg have left?
* * *
The sound of grinding metal on metal pulled Meg back from the edge of consciousness. She opened her eyes into the same blackness that had surrounded her for who knew how many hours. She was still in the trunk.
Suddenly, a silver drill bit penetrated the shell around her, punching down toward her face. She screamed and tried to shrink out of its way, conking her head on a tire iron. Hot metal fragments rained down on her cheek.
Horror and disbelief blazed in her heart. Am I being murdered?
It seemed like a strangely cruel way to execute a hostage.
All at once, the roar ceased, and the spiraling drill bit pulled back. It was re
placed by a tiny shaft of light.
“Think that’s enough air?” asked a rough voice. Spidey.
“Another one,” Tiger replied.
The roar swelled again, and the drill burst through in another spot.
Air holes. So she wasn’t being killed.
Not yet.
She lay there, curled into a shaking ball, banishing the tension from her body as she conquered her terror. The thought that she was still alive was a welcome one. But it took some getting used to.
Earlier, she had thought that the method of her execution would be carbon monoxide. The air in the trunk had been suffocating, the smell of car exhaust overpowering. They had driven around for what had seemed like forever. All Meg had wanted to do was breathe.
She must have been still conscious when they had rendezvoused with Tiger, because she remembered the conversation:
Spidey: “Where’s the money?”
And Tiger’s furious reply: “That Aiden Falconer will pay for what I suffered today!”
Meg had almost cheered. Way to go, Aiden! But that had been the fumes talking. Her one faint chance — that the ransom had been paid, and she was about to be released — was gone. No happy ending. No hope.
When she had finally slipped into a dozing stupor, it had crossed her mind that she would probably never wake up. She had even said a silent good-bye to Mom, Dad, and Aiden. It had just been a moment, and a half-conscious one at that. But it was one she would never, ever forget.
Now, gulping fresh air through newly drilled holes, her backbone stiffened as her head cleared. She would see her family again. She couldn’t imagine how, but it was going to happen. If the kidnappers thought they had defeated Meg Falconer, they had another thing coming. This black car would not be her coffin!
She had no way of knowing that the black Buick sedan was now pale green. She had no way of knowing that it stood drying in the middle of a huge deserted hangar, west of Washington, D.C., that had once housed a Goodyear blimp.
She had no way of knowing that the search for her was far, far away.
KIDNAPPED
BOOK ONE: THE ABDUCTION