The Shield of Darius Read online

  “I’m Sandra Silcox,” the Attaché said, extending her hand and smiling perfunctorily. “The Sherborne police called us late Friday and I want you to know how disturbed and deeply sorry we are about your husband’s disappearance.” She motioned to a satin upholstered Queen Anne chair that was uncomfortably centered across the desk from her own and sat down stiffly, opening a thin, blue tabbed manila folder.

  “We’ve been in constant touch with the police since... well, over the weekend. You know about the notices in the paper?”

  Kate nodded.

  “They’ve resulted in over a hundred calls from Birmingham and Peterborough to Penzance, claiming to have seen Mr. Sager. Every lead is being followed up but I’m afraid that so far, we’re not making much progress.”

  “Nothing promising at all?”

  “In Weymouth – which is just south of where you were at Sherborne – a fisherman reported that while working late the evening of the disappearance….” She paused and glanced at her folder. “…repairing a motor mount on his boat, he heard people boarding a launch anchored near him in the bay. It was dark and he could barely make them out, but thought there were four, and that they were loading something heavy into the boat. Port officials at Weymouth didn’t have records of the launch, and nothing else unusual was reported during the night. That’s the only solid lead we’ve had.”

  “And you didn’t follow up?”

  “I don’t follow up personally, Mrs. Sager,” Ms. Silcox said with a thin smile. “We work with local authorities.”

  “But that sounds like a fairly important lead.”

  “As I said, we do have authorities checking on these, and nothing else out of the ordinary was reported in the harbor that night. They’re still seeking other information but it’s a very difficult thing to trace.” The Attaché closed her folder and straightened even more rigidly in the chair.

  “Mrs. Sager, there are several things I would like to ask that may not be pleasant. Please understand as I do that we’re just trying to get to the bottom of this.” She folded her hands in front of her on the desktop and looked steadily at Kate, who sensed in the directness an attempt to look matter-of-fact about something that obviously wasn’t going to be.

  “Mrs. Sager, has it occurred to you that your husband might have chosen to disappear? If the reports are correct, a car came into the lot, stayed a few minutes, and your husband was gone. Perhaps he left with someone.”

  Kate knew her answer would disappoint the woman. “Of course it has occurred to me. I’d have to be either very naïve or very foolish not to have considered that possibility.”

  Ms. Silcox seemed more confused than disappointed. “And do you think he did?”

  “I’m certain he did not.”

  “How can you be certain?”

  Kate knew now why she had checked the ring. “It’s one of those things you just know,” she said. “Ben and I have had our little problems, just like everyone does. But right now our marriage is the best it has ever been.”

  “Forgive me,” Ms. Silcox said, “but I do understand there are those situations in which men leave, and their wives feel there’s been no indication of trouble or unhappiness.”

  “The wife hasn’t been paying close attention then,” Kate said coolly, wondering if the absence of the ring indicated spinsterhood or an ex who had departed with ‘no indication of trouble or unhappiness.’

  “We’ve come close more than once,” she admitted. “But there were always indicators. He was either too remote or too close. My family hasn’t made it easy. But the last few years have just been filled with the normal ups and downs of things being as they should.” She thought momentarily that she needn’t be telling this stranger all of this. But she wanted her to know that Ben wasn’t the kind of man who’d walk out on her – let alone his children.

  “I see,” Ms. Silcox said, looking down at her hands. “Perhaps there were some business pressures you weren’t aware of….”

  Kate shook her head. “We started our business together. He’s the technical end and I’m financial. We have a very successful business that develops computer language translation software, but I know much more about the finances than Ben does. We’ve just closed out our best year and are in excellent shape.”

  “Could someone have taken him for his technical knowledge?”

  Kate frowned skeptically. “It’s all available from a hundred other sources. His real talent is in seeing applications others have missed in existing technology, and in finding other people to work with him who can do the same. We’ve done well because of some innovative program designs, but there’s nothing secret about them. Anyone who’s willing to ignore copyrights could duplicate them.”

  “How wealthy are you, Mrs. Sager?”

  Kate hesitated. “We have assets in the millions, but don’t really have huge amounts that could be considered liquid. Most of our value is in the company.”

  “But you think this could be kidnapping for ransom?”

  “I can’t come up with another explanation.”

  Ms. Silcox stood abruptly and closed the folder. “We’ll certainly do what we can and will keep in touch. You’re at the Hilton?”

  Kate nodded and stood, wondering as she shook Ms. Silcox’ hand if she really had been paying close enough attention to her relationship with Ben.

  By the time Kate walked the five blocks from Grosvenor Square back to the hotel and checked her muted cell phone for messages, a voicemail had already arrived asking her to call the Attaché for American Services.

  “Mrs. Sager….” Sandra Silcox sounded less businesslike over the phone. “I’m sorry this didn’t reach me before you left. I tried to catch you but you were already out of the building.” She hesitated. “Did your husband have his passport with him when he disappeared?”

  “Yes. It was in an inside pocket in his jacket. Have you found it?”

  Again the embassy official paused. “In a sense. We just received a call from officials in Manchester informing us that a person carrying your husband’s passport and meeting his description left the airport there Thursday night with a one way ticket to Paris – accompanied by a young woman on a French passport.”

  FOUR

  Ben’s mind awoke before his body. He felt only pain. Sharp explosions bursting between his temples. He cracked open his eyes and squinted dizzily at the white, mildew-spotted ceiling above him. With each throb, the ceiling seemed to sag downward, then retreat. Sag. Retreat. His gut twisted into a cramped spasm and he swallowed hard to keep from retching, gagging on his thick, pasty tongue. The room was musty. Smothering. He closed his eyes again and struggled to capture a complete thought, but found only images. The castle ruin above him on the hill. PJ on the tumbled stone wall.

  Feeling a swollen tenderness behind his left ear, Ben wondered fleetingly if he had fallen from the wall himself, and was in one of those colorless London hospitals he had seen in the city. The pain forced life into his other senses and he focused on sounds, finding the irregular drone of distant traffic. This must be London. He struggled again for images, piecing them together until they suddenly coalesced into a memory, capturing the frantic woman in the woods and the race to the van.

  As the memory developed, a pressure in Ben’s chest grew with it, crushing him downward until he could barely suck in a breath. He wanted to groan but as the sound formed, he choked it back, realizing he may not be alone. Letting his lids droop shut, he concentrated again on sounds, straining to discriminate voices from the general din beyond the room. More honking than usual in the grumble of distant traffic. Rush hour. In another direction, the faint clatter of metal against metal. Pans or garbage cans.

  Suddenly Ben’s nose intervened, sending a jolt of olfactory electricity to his brain that caromed wildly about, searching for meaning, then shot to his heart with a surge that charged it into furious pounding. It was not a solitary smell that sparked Ben’s memory, but a mixture of odors that were more vivid than sigh
t or sound. Not the sour-sharp blend of sickness and antiseptic that meant hospital, but a faint acrid odor of fetid water mixed with raw sewage. Strong spices favoring garlic that lingered in the air after a meal was cleared. Earthen buildings that smelled of damp clay, even when dry, and the sour tang of sweat from men and animals. And diesel fumes. A sky full of diesel fumes spewed from the tail pipes of a thousand Mercedes taxis and red double-decked buses. The smell was as distinctive as a signature. Ben Sager was back in the Middle East.

  The smell seeped through his nostrils and into his mouth, swallowed in a dry gulp and sucked into his lungs. It spread like a cold injection through his body, adding lead to his limbs and twisting again into a lump in his stomach. His nose must be lying, playing tricks on his already disoriented brain. He couldn’t be in the Middle East...not when minutes ago – or possibly hours – he had been stretched on the grass at Sherborne Castle. They – whoever they were – must have him in some ethnic section of one of England’s cities where customs and foods laced the air with the same memory-jarring odors.

  He tried to block out the smells and focus on the rest of his body. Though his head seemed about to burst, he couldn’t feel much of anything else, and strained to concentrate on fingers. If there were fingers, there must be arms and shoulders. Gradually he forced movement into his hands, wincing as sharp needles of pain flashed from the inside of both elbows up into his armpits. The pain was strangely reassuring.

  Now toes. Toes meant feet and legs. There was sensation there too. Not pain as much as cold. That wasn’t reassuring. His bleary mind vaulted to an article he had read about phantom pain, the continued jangling of nerve endings in a limb that has been severed. My God, he thought. They’ve cut off my legs! He forced his eyes downward to see if his toes were actually there. They stuck up naked and bluish against the far wall, looking as if they belonged to someone else. He willed movement into them and they twitched almost imperceptibly. The modest success relaxed him and he drew a long, deep breath to slow his racing heart.

  Fully opening his eyes, Ben studied what he could of the room without moving his head. The mildew spots spread across the whitewashed ceiling and onto the wall a foot to his left. New sensation in his body told him that he was lying on a decent mattress and from the height of the ceiling, he must be two or three feet above the floor. The wall beyond his toes stretched six feet to the right to a closed door, and beyond that…. He decided he must be alone and turned his head slightly to the right, seeing beyond the door a small inner room that reminded him of the bathroom of a cheap hotel. In fact, this looked very much like a hotel room. No overhead light. A paintless scar where a chain lock had once been on the door. He often passed through a section of Leeds on his way to the Tech building that looked and smelled like it had been lifted right out of Karachi. Pakistani women in native dress. Window signs in Arabic and Farsi. Shops piled with spices, vegetables, and hammered metal pots. And open markets hanging with strings of garlic and pink naked lambs and chickens. Whoever clubbed him had taken him to an ethnic district of one of these sprawling cities. London. Maybe Birmingham, Leeds, or Manchester. He wondered if he was tied to the bed.

  Forcing his head farther right, he glanced across the room. He wasn’t alone. A thin pale-skinned man with salt and pepper hair and a short white beard sat cross-legged on a bed opposite, dressed in loose fitting pajamas and leaning forward, peering at Ben with concerned suspicion. Between them was an empty table with two backless stools. No other furniture. At Ben’s movement, the man pushed back against the wall, turning his head quickly aside and staring blankly at the door to the room.

  Ben looked at him until the man slowly turned to study him again through furtive, sunken eyes.

  “Who are you?” the white bearded man demanded sharply. The voice was American, deep and raspy that made the words sound like they were coming from one of Ben’s voice simulator programs.

  “Where am I?” Ben asked thickly. The words burned in his throat and made his own voice foreign.

  “Who are you?” the man demanded again.

  “Benjamin Sager,” Ben said through chalky lips, his tongue searching his mouth for a trace of moisture.

  “Where you from?” the man demanded.

  “Baltimore,” Ben murmured.

  “Baltimore U.S.A.?”

  Ben nodded slightly. “Am I tied up?”

  “Nope,” the man said simply, then unfolded his legs and put his feet on the floor, leaning forward on the bed and appearing to relax a little. He watched Ben for a moment in silence then said, as if continuing the same thought, “...but you’ve been drugged a while. You’re likely to have one helluva headache for the next few days. Want to sit up?”

  “No. I think I’ll stay put for a few minutes. If I move too much, I think I’ll be sick.”

  The man leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and nodded slowly. “You’ll get to feeling better as soon as you move around some.”

  “How long have I been here?” Ben asked.

  “Just got here. But you may have been traveling a lot longer than that.” The man glanced toward the door and continued in a forced whisper. “The bastards forgot to steal my watch until after I woke up, and I noticed it was five days from the time they snatched me till I came to in here.”

  Ben tried to raise his head but found his neck too weak to support the throbbing mass, and let it fall back onto the mattress.

  “Five days?”

  “Yep.” The man focused on him again. “Don’t know where we are, but it was five days before I woke up. Or…,” the man mused again, “I guess they could have set the date on my watch forward. Hadn’t thought of that ‘till now.”

  “Five days? Five days?” Ben repeated it slowly, trying to get his mind around it. “Who’s they? Do you know who has us?”

  The thin gray figure shook his head “Don’t know who’s got us. Arabs, I think.” He pronounced Arabs as if it were two words. A-rabs. Despite the rest of his discomfort, the pronunciation grated against Ben’s ears.

  “I don’t see much of them, and they never say anything,” the bearded man continued. “A guy came in and gave me a speech just after I got here, but all he said was that if I tried to get out, they’d kill us all.”

  “All? Are there others here?”

  “Not in with us. You’re the first American person I’ve seen since I got here, and I haven’t really seen anyone else. But I’m pretty sure there’s more in the building, including one woman. I heard her screaming one night.”

  Kate? The thought again sent the jolting charge to Ben’s heart. Had they taken his family too? He struggled to raise his right arm from the mattress and winced at the pain in his elbow.

  “That’s going to be sore for awhile. They’ve been feeding you and keeping you doped up through needles. Both arms. One of mine still gives me fits.” The man stretched out his left arm and rubbed absently at the inside of his elbow.

  “The woman you said is here. When did she get here?”

  “Don’t know. This was quite a long time ago.”

  Ben tried his own left arm and felt the same hot sting at the elbow. He pushed onto his right side, but collapsed back onto his back. The man sprang forward and hurried across the room, lifting him into a sitting position with his back against the wall and his legs hanging loosely over the side of the narrow bed. Ben noticed that he also had on the loose striped pajamas. A pair of round-toed shoes made of a coarse, flax-colored weave and soled with tire rubber lay beside the bed. Their backs were crushed flat to make them open-backed slippers.

  The man sat beside him with his feet tucked under his legs and gently shook Ben’s hand. He smelled faintly of urine and unwashed clothes.

  “Jim Cannon,” he said brightly. “Salem, Oregon.”

  “Benjamin Sager,” Ben repeated. “Baltimore, Maryland.”

  “Can’t tell you how happy I am to see another friendly face, Benjamin – though I hate to see someone else in this mess.”

  “J
ust ‘Ben’ is fine. And what kind of a mess are we in?”

  Jim Cannon looked confused. “You got any idea why you’re here?” he returned the question.

  Ben tried to shake his head but there was still too much pain. He settled for a negative grunt.

  “Me neither. And don’t expect to find out. The last I knew, I was on vacation in Portugal. Left my wife at the hotel in Lisbon early one morning for a jog along the waterfront. As I ran up this one little hill, a woman came screaming out of her house, yelling that something was wrong with her baby. At least that’s what I thought she was saying. Anyway, I ducked in to help her and wham! Out went the lights. I woke up here and haven’t been out of this room since.”

  “You just get here too?”

  Jim sniffed coldly, pointing to the wall above his bed. “Looks like The Count of Monte Cristo or something doesn’t it. But if my marks are right, I’ve been here almost eighteen months. Course I could have missed a day or two when I was sick, and I didn’t think about them setting my watch up.”

  Ben managed to turn his head and squint at Jim Cannon. “You’ve been here eighteen months?” His hazy brain worked the statement over and over, not wanting to accept it.

  “Seventeen months, three weeks and two days.”

  Ben pushed stiffly forward to the edge of the bed and stared at the marks Jim had etched into the wall. “Help me walk around a little. I need to clear my head. Is there any water in here?”

  Jim twisted over beside him and Ben draped an arm over the man’s wide, bony shoulders. When they stood, Jim was almost a head taller, but stooped forward as they eased around the room.

  “Yeah, there’s water, but I wouldn’t drink it.”

  “What’s in there?” Ben nodded toward the bathroom.

  “Sink, toilet, shower with no water, but water from a tap down near the floor. There’s a big brass pitcher thing and a bowl in the sink that I can fill up to wash and dump water down the john. Works okay if you pour water down it. No paper though, but you’ll get used to it. Guess that’s true about why they don’t eat with their left hand!” He chuckled under his breath. “I tried to drink the water in the jug when I first got here, but it gave me the runs something awful. If you don’t think that was a mess. Now I just stick to the tea. I think you’d better wait for the tea to have a drink, or you’ll get them too. They finally brought the bowl to use in the sink so the water doesn’t run out, but you can’t shave. No razors in this place and no hot water. But there’s a brass pitcher with a long curved neck.”