英文有声《第43条疤痕》三部曲

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Chapter 18  MIREN-KOSTANJEVICA, SLOVENIA
Through the rifle scope, Lumani tracked the gray car’s approach. 
Kept the crosshairs on the windshield, on the driver, as the vehicle pulled from the road into the small gas station. 
Within the limited parking area the car waited for another vehicle to move, and when it finally did, the Opel took the empty space. 
Perfectly, as Lumani had instructed: at the far edge of the building, as far away from the fuel tanks as was possible to go, and to where, as a shooter, he could cover the widest area.
Inside the vehicle, the occupants shifted. 
The Michael woman bent and, from what movement he could see, appeared to use a tool or a piece of metal, maybe a handmade knife, to slice the tape and work it off the ankles of the doll package.
Inside Lumani’s head sparklers tickled. The unexpected was always part of the delivery. He planned on it. Counted on it.
Made contingencies against the unknown many moves in advance based upon the certainty that any man skilled enough to be pulled in for this job would inevitably believe in his own skill enough to try to disrupt it. 
Lumani had never managed a failed delivery because, in the end, no matter how skilled or how hard they fought back, pressure applied in the right places caused even the strongest men to fracture.
But this one? He’d watched her. Studied her. Observed what maybe even Uncle, the reader of people, had missed. 
This one was already fractured, and the lines between her broken pieces were not fissures but scar material stronger than whatever had once filled those spaces.
Finger resting outside the trigger guard, one eye to the scope for detail, the other pulling in the surrounding picture, he waited. 
Had the choice been his, Lumani would have said no to the stop, would have kept the convoy moving across the border and through Italy as quickly as possible. 
It was Uncle’s insistence upon maintaining doll-like perfection to fulfill the wishes of an exacting client that granted this pause— a decision that ignored the inevitability of an escape attempt.
And why not? What had Uncle to lose? Lumani was on location to ensure a job well done: here to clean up whatever mess this lack of reason caused. 
And as always, Lumani would bear responsibility for whatever failure might spawn from the decisions of a man who took success for granted and punished for infractions that were inconsequential.
Inside the car, the Michael woman tossed the blanket to the backseat, 
and in anticipation of what would follow, Lumani’s tension mounted, slow and steady, into low-grade anxiety, thick and sticky, coating each thought and pasting his gut. 
Against this he controlled his breathing and pulled into the focus of the moment.
She opened the driver’s door. Put foot to pavement and turned back to the interior. 
Through Lumani’s headpiece her voice was clear. “Don’t move,” she said. “Not a muscle, until I open your door.”
The high-powered magnification allowed him to run along the contours of her body. 
He spotted the outline of the phone in her rear pocket, car keys in her hand, 
and although he would never be certain, it appeared she’d left all the documents inside the car, which was good. 
She was planning to return to the vehicle, and this meant one less uncertainty accounted for.
The Michael woman opened the passenger door, cut the tape at the doll girl’s wrists, took her hand, and pulled her upward. 
Once the girl was standing, she wrapped an arm around her shoulders, every bit the protective boyfriend to his sickly girlfriend: 
a smooth strategy as far as controlling a package without drawing attention was concerned.
Together, stride linked to stride, they walked toward the rear of the building. 
Lumani angled, following with the rifle, waiting for the first indication that the Michael woman had chosen wrong. 
He’d not yet had to kill a driver before job completion and preferred this high-risk delivery not to be the first to force him to deliver the merchandise in the driver’s place.
Halfway to the building, she stopped and, with her arm still tight around the doll girl’s shoulders, turned so that they both faced in his direction, 
and with her mouth moving slightly, spoke words too low for the cell phone in her pocket to pick up. 
The doll girl looked up at his perch and, he could have sworn, directly at him.
Lumani froze. Movement, any movement, would only confirm what their eyesight might doubt. 
And then subtle, or perhaps not, the Michael woman nodded in his direction, as if affirming she understood, but more, that she accepted and approved. 
Against instinct, against reason and a life of service and training, against hatred and jealousy of this woman, thief of Uncle’s smiles, he was pulled like a rope into the warmth of that acceptance and approval.
And as quickly as it had come, the warmth was gone.
She turned the girl, and with their backs to Lumani, they continued toward the side of the building where the restroom doors were marked, where he had told her to go. 
Together they entered the door to a single windowless room, the door Lumani knew would be unlocked because he’d made certain of it.
He counted time, impatience growing with each long minute of disconnect. 
Women always took longer in the restroom, he knew that, but this long? 
Sound, amplified and echoing in the small tiled room, carried back as unintelligible garble. 
This would have to be corrected by a new rule: Phone always on and phone always out.
Down the block and around the corner, Arben’s car idled, waiting to follow again when the convoy started up once more.
Lumani instructed him to pull in closer.  The restroom door opened.  Lumani killed the order.
The Michael woman exited the restroom first, arm around the doll girl’s shoulders as before. 
Together they walked toward the car in a stride that had already become routine. 
Lumani waited for them to look up again, almost begged for it, craving to be seen and accepted once more, but she pushed the doll girl forward.
And then it happened: a movement so quick Lumani only understood it in mental replay. 
Not the driver making a rush for freedom, but the doll girl. She jerked. Threw an elbow into her captor’s face.
Knocked herself free and in the second it took for the Michael woman to recover, the doll girl was already running. Away from the gas station. Picking up speed. 
While the Michael woman went after her, keeping up, but not gaining. The doll girl was fast.
Lumani followed with the scope. He couldn’t shoot, couldn’t damage the merchandise, not as long as she was still recoverable, 
and he breathed against the anxiety, the mantra of imperfection, of failure and worthlessness, all winding through his head.
The doll girl changed course, down a smaller connecting street that led away from Arben, and would soon be beyond the range of Lumani’s vantage. 
Lumani reversed out of position and, with the rifle slung across his back, hand-crawled across the clay tiles to another rooftop valley, and up again, to a perpendicular crest for an altered viewpoint.
The doll girl ran full out, hair flying, dress billowing, the Michael woman still several long paces behind. 
Lumani called Arben in for an intercept, gave the coordinates, and then the doll girl changed course again, another street, 
this one more populated, heading now toward a small restaurant patio, where groups of three and four had gathered to enjoy the late-day sun.
Too much attention. If Arben closed in now, the focus would turn to Uncle’s operation. 
The doll girl was the driver’s problem. She would capture and control this wild animal, who, worth so much money, had caused no end of trouble. 
The decision was made in a half-beat of analysis, instant, decisive: strategy underscored by years of molding at Uncle’s hand, 
and for the second time in as many minutes, Lumani killed the order to Arben. “Let the girl run,” he said.
The doll girl was tiring. The Michael woman, motivated, was gaining, though at this rate and this speed there would be a full-on collision at the restaurant. 
Lumani began to descend, then hesitated. He needed to witness this last, because Uncle would want to know all.
The restaurant patrons turned toward the motion and the noise, jaws slackening, eyes widening as the doll girl plunged toward them, yelling— in English, of course. 
Lumani didn’t need to hear it to know that’s what the language was— stupid Americans, so big in their world dominance that they rarely had the capacity or the need for more than one language. 
And yet, of course, with English so universally spoken, it would be just her luck and his misfortune that someone in the crowd of this small village would understand.
The Michael woman yelled now, too, and this Lumani could hear in spite of the muffle of clothing and the overlying thud of each step against pavement.
She yelled in Italian. The tension in Lumani’s chest eased back slightly.
The chance of Italian being understood, here in this town so close to the border, was much better than English.
The collision happened in an instant and in slow motion. Patrons struggled to stand, both petrified shock and wanting to get out of the way written on their faces. 
Chairs moved. Tables jerked. Beer and wine glasses fell, wetting clothes, distracting from and adding to the chaos.
The doll girl stumbled and collapsed onto the open patio, taking a table down with her. 
And the Michael woman was there beside her, fast enough to catch her and prevent her from falling completely.
The driver cradled the merchandise, held her tightly in spite of the thrashing, and spoke to the crowd clearly, calmly, above the girl’s yelling. 
The audience, at first frozen and horrified, began to thaw and soften. Expressions shifted. Mouths moved. 
She had been understood by some who translated for the others. Space was made. Water was brought.
The doll girl still thrashed and fought and screamed in English, begging for help so loudly Lumani could hear the pleas without the bug, even from this distance; 
sound, if not exact words, bouncing off walls, carrying far in the relative silence. 
The Michael woman leaned forward and put her mouth to the doll girl’s ear, and after several seconds the flailing and the noise stopped. 
She stroked the doll girl’s hair, held her tightly, whispering and consoling. 
Offered a glass of water that had been handed over, and then, gradually, tenderly, with the audience as accomplice, stood the doll girl upright and led her away.
The structured perfection in the midst of chaos heated Lumani’s anxiety and sweated his body, spreading another layer of emotion inside his mind and stomach, a second coating of fear and hope: 
He wanted those words, whatever the Michael woman had said to pull the flame out of the fire and control it as her own.
He sucked air in greedy gulps, aware now that, mesmerized by the magic, he’d been holding his breath. 
With the inhale came the moldy, earthy scent of old clay tiles inches from his face, 
an unmistakable fragrance: same smell, other rooftops, and happier memories— if memories could ever be happy— when he’d been free to roam the streets of Dubrovnik. 
Idle time, an anomaly in a childhood he’d otherwise spent being handed off from one training master to the next: 
a chance delay, which, because Uncle didn’t want him around, had meant staying with an acquaintance who didn’t much care what he did with his time.
He’d run the streets in the early-morning dark with older boys, after the city with its perpetual summer party went to sleep. 
They’d scaled ancient walls within the coastal fortress, hopped rooftops to slide into the Franciscan courtyard and steal forbidden fruit from trees. 
Lumani was younger and smaller, and the teenagers allowed him to tag along because he was also faster and more nimble. 
They affectionately called him “Shipak.” Pomegranate. Croat teenage humor that played off Shiptari, what the Albanians called themselves, 
and he, overjoyed at the acceptance, at having some label attached— any sense of belonging— whether real or not, had never bothered to correct them.
When the hours deepened and even the boys had gone to bed, Lumani had become one with the narrow alleys, wandering like one of the city’s many feral cats, peering into windows to observe the intricacies of nuclear families, 
and at other times grabbing toeholds from stone to stone to climb into upper-story households to steal from them. 
Those two months were the first and only time he’d understood what it was to be a child, 
yet even then, at nine years old, at one with the quiet in the early-morning streets, he was already an adult in a child’s body.
Lumani breathed in the clay once more, then closed down the memories. That taste of freedom was a long time ago.
On the patio, where just a minute earlier panic had ensued, the guests reset furniture. 
Some returned to drinks and food, others continued in animated conversation, 
but all was still status quo and so Lumani skirted out of position, down and up again to where less than five minutes earlier, 
though it might as well have been three hours, he’d originally rested with his rifle.
He moved calmly, assuredly, to keep his breathing and pulse rate in check. 
The driver knew he was on the rooftop. Knew he would have had to move to follow the commotion, 
and if she was planning to bolt and leave the package behind, now, with the distractions and break in routine, would be that time.
He would never allow that. She was smart. She was devious. She was talented. But not so much as he.
He raised the rifle to his shoulder for the better view and studied her face as she walked the doll girl nearer the car. 
Her expression shifted, as if a mask of tenderness had fallen away only to be replaced by rage and anger. 
By the time the two approached the gas station, her forced long-legged stride had quickened to the point that the doll girl was nearly running to keep up.
Then the driver stopped short and knelt, forcing the doll girl down with her. Picked up a shoe and handed it to the doll girl before moving on to collect the second.
Lumani noticed then that no matter that the rest of the outfit had been spared, the tights were shredded— ruined completely— large holes and lines traced from the doll girl’s soles upward. 
They had replacements, but that would be beside the point as far as Uncle was concerned. 
Failure, no matter how great or small, no matter the circumstances or what successes had come with it, was still failure.
Lumani sighed and his stomach roiled while he debated, for a half moment, withholding this detail from Uncle.
There was no point to an omission. When Arben or Tamás reported, the truth would be made known and Lumani would suffer for his silence. Better to tell now and get it over with.
Strangely, inexplicably, he hurt, and for the first time in memory, the pain was not for himself but for another: for the Michael woman whom he both hated and from whom he’d felt acknowledgment. 
Hurt for the agony she would surely suffer in retribution for her failure.

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Chapter 17 DALLAS, TEXAS
Bradford pulled the Explorer into Capstone’s parking spot, a haphazard straddling of the line that welcomed someone to ding his doors. 
Adrenaline rush followed by adrenaline dump and around again, sleep deprivation, caffeine and sugar crashes, one after the other, combined to bring him to the point he was at now: 
a danger on the roads and virtually worthless for making rational decisions much less the quantitative leaps necessary for pulling together and putting sense to the massive amount of information that had been coming at him over the past days.
Walker wasn’t doing a whole lot better. Time was fleeing, and hope fading just as quickly.
By all accounts, the last hours had been a bust, a wasted opportunity and time lost for nothing except to mark two properties off their list of potential hiding places and prepare to move on to the next. 
From the transport depot they’d driven another thirty-five minutes to a warehouse, only to once again find no Logan, no clues nothing but a black and deserted property without security, without vehicles, and without any sign of life.
Now, within the haven of Capstone’s reception area, he buzzed the panel door open and then pointed in Walker’s direction. 
“Office. Sleep,” he said. “It’s an order. We’ll reconvene at eleven.”
Walker deflated but didn’t argue and, head hung low, followed him into the hall. She bypassed the war room for the closet to stash the vests.
Jahan turned when Bradford entered and, making eye contact, shook his head.
“I need to sleep,” Bradford said. “Unless it’s an emergency, I’m not available. Sam’s headed to the back office, same story for her. Did you pull all night?”
“I stopped at two,” Jahan said. “I’ll be ready to roll whenever you are.”
“Give me four hours,” Bradford said, and walking away added, “Put in another call to Robertson for latents, will you? 
“See if there’s something new on the prints and samples they took at Logan’s. The guy owes me, he’s gotta have something.” 
He paused, then returned to the war room and hung back in the doorway. “Anything on the lines?” Jahan shook his head once more.
“You’ve confirmed they’re all operational? Nothing’s down?” “Everything’s working. I’ll let you know if something comes. I swear.” Bradford nodded, turned again. 
Exacerbated by the sleep deprivation, waves of anxiety rolled in, and the first touch of fear licked his skin since the morning of the take-down, when he’d so thoroughly pushed it back.
Seventy-two hours and they still had nothing to go on but hope and fumes. 
If Logan was alive, they had no proof. If Munroe was pursuing whatever had brought the Doll Maker and his men calling, he’d no indication of it. 
And Neeva Eckridge? Time to shred the Tisdale contract, and say he’d been unable to reach the tracker the parents were after.
Bradford checked his phone again, a nervous answer to the same question he’d asked Jahan. 
Capstone, international as it was, had voice-mail drops on six continents and in nearly twenty countries phone lines that would record and digitally transfer information to the war room a fail-safe or backup for operatives who might fall into trouble and not have international phone access.
Bradford untied the strings of the bedroll and let it loose beneath the desk.
Munroe would call. If she was alive, if she needed help, if she could get to a phone, she would call and this thought cycled through his mind as the darkness of sleep descended.
JAHAN WOKE HIM in what felt like two minutes later, and Bradford struggled to lift eyelids secured shut by grappling hooks and weighted by sandbags. 
He finally resorted to manually opening them with his fingers, squinting against the oxygen burn. 
Too many hours awake, too few asleep, and he was too fucking old to keep up a pace that had been hard enough ten years ago.
Jahan was a couple of feet from his head, squatting low and holding forward a cup of coffee. 
“It’s been four hours,” he said. Bradford groaned. “You want me to come back in ten?”
Bradford reached for his phone and with eyes still half-shut checked against hope. 
Another sixth of a day gone without a smoke signal from her. “Getting up,” he said, and reached for the coffee. “Anything new?”
“Only that Walker’s already in the war room. Unless you want to be the girl here, you best get moving.”
Bradford scooted out from under the desk, juggling the coffee with balancing upward, and left the roll on the floor.
“You look like shit,” Jahan said, and smiled. “Thanks,” Bradford said. Took a sip of the coffee. Winced.
Jahan studied Bradford’s face, his smile morphing into something closer to that of a psychiatrist observing a man on suicide watch.
Bradford held out a palm toward him. “Enough, Mommy, I don’t need this from you right now.” Jahan said, “You have a visitor.” “Visitor.”
“Yeah, some girl who won’t give her name or say why she’s here, just asked for you, says she knows you and that you’d understand. She’s got a baby with her.”
“Baby.” “Kid in a stroller, maybe two years old.” The lightbulb went on.
He’d missed a call from Alexis, Tabitha’s daughter, when he’d been visiting Kate Breeden in prison. 
Had sent Walker to check up on her but hadn’t bothered to return the call, needed to do damage control and keep her as far away from this mess as possible.
She was waiting for him on the sofa in Capstone’s reception area, stood and smiled when he walked through the door. 
Not so much happiness as relief. “I tried calling,” she said.
It was easy to see Munroe in Alexis, although the hair was lighter and at closer to five foot eight, Alexis didn’t quite have the height. 
The lanky frame was the same, as were the high, angular cheekbones and especially the eyes and because of the similarities, at the moment it hurt to look at her. But physical was where the comparisons ended. 
In contrast to Munroe, who lived on the edge, off the grid, and had killed men on at least four continents, Alexis was soft and sweet and in some ways still naive.
“I’ve been working a tough job, missed a lot of calls,” Bradford said. 
Knelt in front of the stroller, tickled Preston and got him laughing, then stood and guiding Alexis toward the door said, “Let’s talk out in the hall.”
Most who knew Munroe socially assumed from her evasive answers, and at times outright denial, that she was an orphan, or at best estranged from anyone who should matter— and for years that had been true. 
She still hadn’t spoken to either of her parents since leaving the Africa of her birth but during the months since Argentina, she had made the effort to reconnect with siblings she barely knew. 
Bradford was short on the details, but he did know that for Munroe, Alexis was a tender bond, the only one of her near relatives for whom she cared deeply.
“I can’t get in touch with Essa,” Alexis said. “We were supposed to have lunch day before yesterday, but she never showed and her phone goes straight to voice mail. 
“She told me once that if I ever couldn’t reach her, I should contact Logan or you, but nobody’s answering. Do you know where she is?”
Bradford drew down his sigh and through the mental maze searched for the right words, the right lie, that would give Alexis the warning without terrifying her. 
“I haven’t heard from her for a few days,” he said, “but I’m sure she’ll turn up.”
“You think?” “She’s pretty badass, I think she’ll be okay.”
Alexis smiled, almost blushed. “I thought maybe I’d upset her, that she didn’t want to talk to me anymore.”
Bradford nudged her toward the elevator and pushed the call button. “Well, at least I know for sure that that’s not true.”
“She was very unclear about why I’d ever need to contact you; it makes me nervous now. I know there are things I don’t know.”
Bradford dug a business card out of his wallet and handed it to her. 
“I don’t know how good I’ll be about answering my phone during this next week,” he said. “This is the office number. You think you could give a call a few times a day?”
She took the card and studied the logo, but he didn’t need to be a mind reader to know that she did it as a way to buy time, to figure out how to word the questions running through her head.
“Not to sound all paranoid,” he said, “just a better-safe-than-sorry-type thing, is there any way you and Preston could get out of town for a week or so? Anyplace you could go?”
The elevator arrived and Alexis didn’t move, just stared at him. The doors began to close. Bradford caught them. Held them open.
“What kind of trouble is she in?” Alexis said. Bradford inched the stroller into the elevator. She followed.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I really truly don’t, but I am a bit concerned, and it doesn’t hurt to play it safe, right?”
He stepped back and Alexis, arms crossed, glared at him until the doors began to close.
“Remember to call,” he said, and when she was gone, his shoulders sagged. 
Because it had been Kate Breeden who’d fed information to the Doll Maker, the issue of Alexis troubled him greatly.
Jahan was waiting when Bradford returned to the reception area. “Who was it?” he asked. “Michael’s niece.” “Looks like she could have been her sister.”
Bradford nodded, swiped his card to buzz the paneled door open, and said, “They’re a couple of years apart or something,” 
and Jahan cocked his head as if doing sibling math, then followed him into the interior.
IN THE WAR room Samantha Walker sat in Jahan’s chair, one hand on the mouse, another around her own cup of coffee, while her head tipped up toward one of the flat-screen monitors. 
She scrolled through Veers Transport freight manifests. They stood behind the chair and watched her work. 
From the data she scoured, she’d clearly spotted the same incongruity in the Veers Transport warehouse that Bradford had.
“What’s your analysis?” he asked. Without turning or breaking rhythm on the mouse, Walker said, “If we discount the trafficking, it has all the earmarks of a healthy money-laundering setup.”
“They do have to have a way to funnel and legitimize the payments for the girls,” he said. “Freight transport is the perfect cover, especially if they’re making the trip anyway.”
“But this much traffic,” Walker said. “They couldn’t possibly be moving that many out of the country. 
“Our missing-persons databases would be burning up over numbers like this. Someone would notice patterns, similarities, and begin poking around. 
“And what we’re looking at here isn’t the kind of operation that throws a bag over someone’s head and drags her over the Mexican border. This is serious organization and serious investment.”
Jahan, who had until now remained silent, said, “No freight at the depot?”
“Not a lot,” Bradford answered. “Not as much as you’d expect given the manifests, not even if they skipped the warehouse and delivered door-to-door for ninety percent of the stuff.”
“The amount of traffic may be cover,” Jahan said. “They may be transporting girls, but probably not on every trip. 
“They need the miles, logs, and manifests to build the documents for a legitimate business and then to infuse the cash into the company— to wash it. Maybe some of those manifests are legitimate.”
Walker said, “That just seems so clunky. Inefficient, you know? To keep an operation like this running just to cover the trafficking.”
“Yeah, but it’s perfect,” Jahan said. “Who would look hard at something like that? Even we wouldn’t have if we hadn’t been pointed to it. 
“This is the kind of thing that can operate out in the open for decades without drawing attention “and it probably pulls in enough from legitimate business to break even on its own.”
Bradford shrugged. “It’s a good setup for money laundering. It’s a good setup for transporting human cargo. Probably both.” 
He rested his arms on the back of the chair, his focus switching from one screen to the other. 
If he was right about Logan being held hostage in order to control Michael, then she was going to demand proof of life along the way. 
To release the choke hold so she could save herself, they needed to find Logan, find the safe house, and they were running out of time and options. 
He said, “Legitimate business or not, the question remains, where’s the human cargo?”
“There’s still the business office and house.” “I have a hard time seeing it. We’re missing something.”
Jahan said, “We’re searching for a needle in a goddamn haystack. I’d fire myself if I even faked confidence in having found everything.”
A buzzer interrupted— cue that someone had crossed the threshold of the reception area. 
Walker turned, began to stand, and Jahan said, “I’ve got it.” He left the room. 
Walker, returned to the monitors and Bradford shut his eyes, pulling in the essence of the conversation. 
Jahan returned with two bags of takeout that left the room smelling more of deli than coffee or electronics. 
Nodding at Walker, he said, “That’s my desk, I want it back.” He handed her a bag. “Get off, go eat.”
He handed the second bag to Bradford. “Talk faster than you eat, because I need to know everything you know, how it went down play by play, and then we need to get moving.”
They took turns, Bradford and Walker, reliving for Jahan the details of the early morning, half-speaking suppositions and theories between shoveled bites while Jahan recorded the facts as they knew them in threads along the whiteboard, threads that led nowhere specific and everywhere vague threads that wound around and around until the food was finished and Bradford stood. To Jahan he said, “Suit up.”
AS PER PUBLIC records, the office condo was owned by Akman, LLC, although the company’s actual business purpose was as nebulous as its name. 
Import/ export was the war room’s best guess, although of what was still open for debate. 
None of the names of Akman’s three primaries were connected to any of the supposed owners of Veers Transport though according to freight manifests, Akman did considerable business with Veers and not a whole lot else.
If that on its own wasn’t enough reason to go poking around, Katherine Breeden’s name was buried within old corporate records, making the general consensus that Akman was just another face to the same money-laundering and human-cargo operation.
Akman’s office was in Las Colinas, on the north edge of Irving, twenty minutes up from Veers Transport but for all intents and purposes, on the other side of the tracks, if not in another country completely. 
Here, stone masonry walls bordered neatly kept patches of grass, widely set apart from mirrored office towers, divided and plotted between golf-course-quality lawns and man-made ponds with pristine strip malls and business complexes competing as prime office real estate.
Las Colinas was clean, structured, cutting-edge, respectable. Definitely respectable.
A block before their destination, Jahan, behind the wheel in a suit and tie, nudged Bradford out of the inevitable sleep of a combat vet who’d learned to take whatever he could when he could because it was impossible to predict when there’d be more. 
He was awake as soon as Jahan touched his shoulder. Reached for the backpack and stepped out.
Jahan idled at the curb, waiting a few minutes to give Bradford a head start. 
An earpiece kept them connected, and Bradford continued on with the eyes of the world staring at his back, car after car flying by in an area where a man walking was about as common as a stray dog.
THE OFFICE COMPLEX was shaped like a digital figure-eight made out of single-story buildings, connected in units of three, and gapped by manicured hedging and driveway. 
Akman’s unit was in the back right corner, and although the spaces fronting the business were empty, Jahan had parked two doors down.
Bradford continued the stroll forward, approaching from the far side, backpack unzipped, MP5 inside, the butt sticking out. 
Reached the go point. Jahan stepped from the vehicle and approached Akman’s door.
Tried the handle. Knocked. Waited. No response, so Bradford slowed.
Jahan returned to the vehicle, shut the door, and held an imaginary conversation on his cell phone.
Bradford continued to the business that shared wall space with Akman. The door sign said INTELISET, with office hours scripted beneath.
Bradford opened the door and went inside. The interior was one large room with a shallow hallway off to the left that appeared to lead to a second smaller room. 
Five desks occupied the floor space; two were in use: one man, one woman, both young and in casual attire. 
Both looked up from papers and keyboards when he entered. “I’m trying to find Akman, LLC,” Bradford said.
“Next door,” the guy said, head tilting toward the wall with more emphasis than volume.
“Yeah, I tried them. Door’s locked and no one answers. I wasn’t sure if I had the right place.”
“Oh, you’ve got the right place,” the guy said. His tone carried all the disdain and scorn of a home owner toward the jerk who let his dog crap on the lawn. “That’s Akman.”
“I’ve got a courier envelope to deliver and need a signature,” Bradford said. “Any idea how they get packages?”
“Usually just collects on the doorstep,” he replied, and the woman added, “Gets cleared away about once a week, supposedly by the owners. I’ve never actually seen them.”
“Thanks,” Bradford said. The guy already had his face reburied in paperwork before Bradford turned to leave. The woman offered him a smile. “Good luck,” she said.
Even from InteliSet’s front door, Bradford could see Akman’s doorstep was free of mail, which meant either nothing had been recently delivered or someone had been by to pick it up. Bradford bent down to tie a shoelace. 
In response, Jahan stepped out of the vehicle and passing Bradford returned to Akman’s door. He reached for his pocket. Bradford stood and strode in his direction. 
Another few seconds and Jahan had opened the door, and Bradford was beside him, then past him, first into the building, weapon drawn, scanning quickly for threat, then alarm systems, then cameras, and found nothing.
Bradford tapped on the slightly open door and moved inward enough for Jahan, still the suited businessman waiting on the outside, to slip in beside him.
The interior was nearly identical to the office next door: one large room and a shallow hallway to the left, which intimated at a second room. 
There were extra windows along the right wall, a bonus of being a corner unit. 
The place was trashed in the way of a quickly abandoned campsite: 
opened food containers, used plastic utensils, a cardboard box filled with half-empty chip bags and drink bottles, and an as-yet-unopened two-liter bottle of Coke.
Furniture was sparse: a couple of floor lamps, window blinds, and a folding table to the right of the room near the windows. 
Laid on it were a heat lamp, duct tape, and a box of Ziploc bags but what caught Bradford’s attention, and jacked up his heart rate, was the baseball bat propped against the wall next to the table.
He nodded toward the piece of wood, and Jahan acknowledged it. 
Coincidence, maybe, that a bat had featured in Logan’s surveillance footage.
If one was inclined to believe in coincidence. Fuckers.
On the carpeted floor, small spots of brown flecked the multi-toned Berber in a nearly invisible trail that led from the doorway toward the table. 
Bradford followed a few steps inward and the trail ended abruptly, about ten feet from the wall. 
More of the tiny flecks speckled the white walls on an area just beyond where, according to telltale streaks, a sponge, rag— something— had wiped the rest of it down.
Bradford signaled, finger toward the hall, and Jahan moved to the second room, using his elbow to nudge the open door farther inward. 
Nodded Bradford in for a look-see. Here again no furniture, only a set of copy machines. 
Jahan backed out, and Bradford continued to the end of the hall, to the last door, which opened to a bathroom. 
In the sink, bloody and torn, a match to what he’d seen on the captured surveillance, were Logan’s pants.

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Chapter 16
The courtyard wasn’t large enough to swing a three-point turn,so Munroe took the Opel out in reverse through the thick, gated arch while Lumani stood to the side, his eyes tracking her.
The first address, with an estimated time of arrival of less than ten minutes, had already been entered into the GPS,but she wasn’t meant to stop, merely arrive, plug in the next address, and continue onward. 
In this way, she was forced to travel the exact micro route that Lumani had plotted. 
According to the GPS, they were on the outer edge of Donji Grad, old-town Zagreb,one district in a city of 800,000 that bowed outward into a mix of functional, if not aesthetic, buildings and high-rises.
Standing beneath the arch, Lumani watched the Opel pull out onto the street and then shut the oversize gate. 
The Doll Maker’s lair disappeared, blending into a facade that was nearly identical to those on both sides of the street,one corner of each long block followed by the next, where solid walls of three- and four-story stone buildings,sidewalks, and parallel-parked cars were interspersed with ancient doors that presumably led to similar courtyards.
To the sides of the archway were window displays of two jewelry shops, gold wares on show for pedestrians passing by. 
As best as Munroe could tell, he controlled the buildings on either side of the courtyard, and the only way in was through the archway. 
Perfect cover for moving his merchandise— once beyond the gate, what went on behind his walls was for his eyes only.
On the road, away from the building, away from Lumani and the rest of the madmen, Munroe picked up the Doll Maker’s phone and turned on the screen. Neeva tilted her face toward the seat belt and closed her eyes.
Munroe’s focus shifted from the road to her hand and back again, navigating traffic while flipping through text messages,scanning each and moving on through to the end of an in-box already filled with a series of addresses meant to be her immediate dot-to-dot travel instructions.
ZAGREB TO LJUBLJANA should have been a straightforward trip from one country’s capital, along well-maintained highways, across green-forested countryside, over the border, and into the next country’s capital. 
Traveling the route of a sane person, the trip would have taken two hours, not counting delays for immigration and customs purposes. 
But just as the last few days had resembled a paranoid’s darkest delusion, so, too, did the Doll Maker’s travel plan. 
Munroe followed farther and farther along a patchwork of roads and townships that doglegged between neatly kept fields and chalet-cum-farmhouses with laundry lines, groomed gardens, and geranium-filled window boxes.
The Doll Maker hadn’t provided a reason as to why making a straight cut across borders was out of the question, but it didn’t take much to figure it out. 
Slovenia was part of the European Union’s Schengen Area, one of twenty-something countries that operated as a single state insofar as immigration control was concerned, and Croatia was not.
Inside the Schengen Area, border posts were rarely manned,and in some cases only local knowledge and a change in language or street signs indicated having passed through one country to the next. 
Among Schengen countries were no visa forms or passport stamps, no customs procedures or waits in line to continue beyond uniformed officials with the power to say no. 
But crossing from a non-Schengen country into the Schengen zone, similar to traveling between Mexico and the United States, was a different story.
Slovenia, like Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland, lay at the perimeter of the Schengen Area. 
Their territorial boundaries held the line, and on behalf of the entire zone, their major checkpoints were charged with the responsibility of filtering out the illegal for the rest.
Another address retrieved and entered, Munroe slid the phone into a holder on the console and reached for the backpack on the rear seat to pull out the map. 
Eyes shifting from road to hand, she searched until she found.
They were meant to enter Slovenia at Krasinec— barely a dot on the map— a hamlet south of Metlika, which on its own was barely a town. 
This far down the checkpoint food chain meant that they were certainly headed for a remote and isolated crossing: 
an entry point intended only for locals who lived near both sides of the border and had the plates or stickers to show for it.
The cell phone rang. Munroe stopped at an unmarked junction, conferred with the GPS, and then picked up the phone and answered it. 
Lumani said, “Find a place to stop, something out of the way, and wait until I call again.”
Munroe said, “Why?”
“That I said to do it should be reason enough.”
“It’s not.”
“You have no choice.”
“In that you are very mistaken,” she said. “Every move I make in the next twenty-four hours is a choice. Choice, Valon, that’ll affect the rest of my life. 
“At any moment I can choose to walk away, and you know it, so if you want my cooperation, you’ll give me what I want.”
A hesitation, and then he said, “We have friendly eyes in Krasinec. 
“Eyes that may or may not care what car you drive or what papers you have,“but those eyes are delayed in getting to work, so as I instructed, find a place and wait until I call.” Lumani hung up.
Neeva said, “What’s going on?” These words in a raspy whisper were the first she’d spoken since they’d been on the road. 
Munroe zoomed out on the navigation, looked at the map. “They’re coordinating something,” she said. “We need to pull over and wait.”
She headed back in the direction of a wooded area and took the car up a suspension-damning dirt track, caked hard with ruts left after a previous rain. 
Two hundred meters into the dimming shroud of forest, the track widened slightly, so Munroe turned the car, hood pointing back the way they’d come, then shut off the engine and reclined her seat.
“Now what?” Neeva said.
“We wait.”
“I’m thirsty.”
“I’m sure you are,” Munroe said.
“Hungry, too.” Neeva’s words were a plaintive whisper. “But even more than hungry, thirsty. 
“I lost track of time in the darkness, but I think it’s been at least a day since I’ve drunk anything.”
“Put yourself in my shoes,” Munroe said, and turned to look at the girl. 
“By not feeding you or giving you anything to drink, I only have to put up with your whining and a strip of tape over your mouth deals with that. 
“Your clothes stay clean, you can’t try to bite me, and I don’t have to drag my ass out of the car to hunt through whatever food they put back there.”
“I promise not to spit or throw it,” Neeva said.
“Oh, I know you won’t throw it,” Munroe said, “because I’m not cutting you loose. 
“If you eat, it’s because I put the food in your mouth. I really don’t feel like fighting with you right now.”
“I’ll behave.”
“I doubt that.”
Neeva looked up, a tear of precious water trickling down her cheek. “I promise,” she said.
Munroe stared at her a long while, trying to discern the girl from the actress, the truth from the lie, then sighed. 
She ripped a strip of duct tape, placed it over the girl’s mouth, then opened her door and stepped out. 
She’d pawed through the ratty duffel bag on the backseat before setting out, just to confirm that she wasn’t transporting drugs in addition to human cargo. 
Lumani had arranged for drinking water and packaged food: pretzels, candy, and the like. 
Nothing satisfying, just enough to push back against excuses for stopping. 
Munroe would get to them eventually, but Neeva had provided an opportunity to step out of the car without arousing suspicion.
She opened the hatchback, and hands roaming, measuring every lost second, searched side compartments, floorboard, and under the rear seat, hoping that unlike the radio, the emergency supplies had been left untouched.
One by one she recovered the pieces: reflective triangles, empty first-aid box, cheap-ass tire jack, and finally, what she really wanted: a lug wrench. 
Not as good as a crowbar for thug weapon of choice, but it would do. 
Munroe pulled the wrench and with some maneuvering got it beneath the front seat.
Then she grabbed a pack of crackers and a bottle of water from the bag in the back and climbed in behind the wheel. 
Opened the package. “Don’t say a word, behave, and you can have this,” she said, and Neeva nodded. 
Munroe inched the tape off her face. The girl didn’t fight, didn’t spit, and, more important, didn’t talk. 
The new version of Neeva made Munroe uneasy, because whatever the girl was, she wasn’t broken. 
She drank the water in deep gulps and took the crackers in steady bites, avoiding Munroe’s fingers,and when both were consumed, Munroe crumpled the packaging, tossed it into the backseat, and leaned against the headrest, hands to the base of the wheel.
Twenty minutes since the order to wait and still nothing.
Her fingers tapped out a steady Morse code of phrases, random words, a habit of deep thought that went back years,all the while wondering if Lumani, or whoever was on the other end of whatever listening devices were in the car, was wise to the patterns and if he’d understand the construct.
After another thirty minutes, the phone rang again. “Continue,” Lumani said. “After you are across the border, you’ll receive new coordinates.”
“What about the rest of the points toward Ljubljana?”
“Change of plans. We bypass the city.”
“Why?”
He hung up and Munroe swore under her breath. 
If she had any hope of establishing contact with Bradford, she needed access to civilization,had to have some idea of where they were headed in the short term so that she could project forward, strategize, figure her way out of this nightmare. 
In one swipe, Lumani had taken away what little she had counted on.
Munroe turned the ignition key and moved the car forward, back toward Pravutina, the closest dot on the map, and the border.
The crossing was a two-lane road that spanned a bridge, Croatia on one side, Slovenia on the other: 
one picturesque postcard village separated from the next by a band of water and two guard posts, one on either side, each attached to the equivalent of a carport.
Neat. Clean. Quaint. Quiet. There were no questions when they left Croatia, not even a second glance. 
If the border guard had gotten closer, had seen Neeva in the car, there might have been issues. Maybe. 
But they were leaving Croatia for Slovenia with Slovenian plates— what was there to see?
Across the bridge, Munroe stopped beneath the carport roof, and the young man in uniform stepped from his office, glanced at the car, and without pausing, turned and went back inside.
The phone rang. Munroe answered. “Continue on,” Lumani said.
Munroe checked the windows, checked the mirrors. He was out there somewhere, he had to have seen— someone had to have seen— for him to have this kind of timing. 
“Now what?” she said, but he’d already hung up, and a few seconds later the phone began to vibrate with the alert of incoming texts.
MUNROE EASED THE car forward, and for another hour and forty minutes they drove terrain that wound over hills and occasionally through tiny postcard-perfect towns. 
Continued in silence until Neeva said, “I have to use the bathroom.”
The words set off a wave of strategy inside Munroe’s head, pieces shifting, move against move, probability played against death.
When she didn’t say anything, Neeva added, “Really, really badly.”
Aside from the crackers, Neeva hadn’t eaten anything since she’d been doped up in preparation for the trip,and although she may have been given something to drink, it would have been minimal. 
Neeva knew it. Neeva knew that Munroe knew it and so had chugged an entire liter of water. 
One didn’t have to be an actress, didn’t even have to watch TV, to know that the bathroom ploy was the oldest escape tactic in the book,so either Neeva took her for a fool or she believed her acting ability trumped logic.
Munroe said, “You should have gone before we left.”
Neeva’s voice, still raspy from the beating her windpipe had taken earlier, went up a notch. 
“Please tell me you’re kidding,” she said. “One of the perks of being a kidnap victim in transport should be the right to use a real toilet, right?”
Munroe didn’t respond. Within Neeva’s plotting was opportunity. 
Unless Lumani would have his precious package use a field and risk messing up her clothes, this was a legitimate reason to stop the car within at least a touch of civilization. 
Navigation said they still had several kilometers until the next town, and the speed limits kept the going slow. 
Neeva said, “Anyway, they took the bucket away again, so the only way I could have gone was in these clothes and I didn’t want to stink them up.”
“I can’t do it,” Munroe said.
Neeva drew a deep breath. “I’ve gotta go,” she said, “and if you won’t let me stop, I’ll use the seat of this car. 
“Trust me, after the crap I’ve put up with these past few weeks, it won’t bother me one bit.”
“It’s not my car,” Munroe said, “and I don’t have to wear the clothes, so suit yourself.”
It was another long minute before Neeva spoke again, this time quieter, and once more it was difficult to tell where the actress ended and the real person began. 
“The clothes must be important,” she said. “Otherwise they wouldn’t have starved me and taken the bucket away and wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble to doll me up and put me in them.” 
She paused. “Are you really sure you want me to pee in them?”
Munroe said, “If we stop, if you try to run, if something happens to you, someone I love will die and you will have been the cause of that.”
“My bladder just wants a toilet,” Neeva said.
Munroe took her eyes off the road and glanced at Neeva. 
“If because of your actions you’re responsible for a killing, then I’ll have no reason to keep you alive.”
“Just a toilet.”
Munroe reached for the phone. Dialed one of the only two numbers the phone was permitted to call and in English, though she would have preferred to avoid it and thus keep Neeva on edge, relayed the conversation.
“Can you control her?” Lumani asked.
“That’s something over which I have no choice,” Munroe said.
“But if it’s wiser not to stop, I don’t have a problem with her using the car seat for a toilet. 
“It’s the smell I’m unsure about. Even if you have a change of clothes, only you can say how your client will react to stinking merchandise.”
A long pause and then: “I’ll call you back.” The mental gamble shifted chess pieces, conscience against conscience: 
Munroe’s instinct for survival drawing on Neeva’s determination to fight as a method toward her own means. 
If she timed it right, the immediate might save them all in the long run, painful as it would be.
Munroe put down the phone and Neeva said, “And?”
“We drive and we wait.”
Neeva turned to stare out the window, and Munroe checked the navigation. Less than half a kilometer to the next town. And then the phone rang.

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Chapter 15 ZAGREB, CROATIA
For the first time in three days, Munroe breathed outside air: late morning and early spring air, colder than Dallas and filled with the must of old stone and wood. 
Smelled faintly of diesel or oil, the way an old barn might, and after endless hours among the rot and mold and bleach of prison, it was a sweeter and cleaner high than mountain wind.
Slung over her shoulder was the backpack she’d been given, stuffed with the blanket and tape, passports, car papers, maps, and GPS from the Doll Maker. 
Neeva was still down in the hole, chained to the wall with the rubber-coated cuff and the stupid clothes the Doll Maker and his minions insisted she wear. 
Munroe would retrieve her when she was ready, but for now her focus was on the car parked inside the courtyard.
The ground was cobblestone and the walls on three sides formed part of the building she’d been in— the gold workroom and the windows to the Doll Maker’s office were directly behind her, and in front of her was she knew not what. 
The exit from the courtyard was blocked by a massive arched wooden door or gate, quite possibly centuries old, and definitely the source of the barnlike smell.
The vehicle, an Opel Astra, was a good eight or nine years old, dull gray with half-worn tires and Slovenian plates; 
a basic model, five-door hatchback, with door locks, windows, and transmission all manual, no air conditioner. 
The radio had been ripped out and the body had seen a light pole or two in its time. 
The Doll Maker wouldn’t cry if he never got this piece of property back.
Munroe circled the car, taking in the details, then stopped in front and popped the hood to check the fluid levels. 
She wiped the oil dipstick on a rag that lay to the side under the hood, checked again, then removed the brace and let the metal drop with a thud.
Lumani stood off to the side, arms crossed and leaning against a stairwell arch, 
and as had been his way thus far, he studied her as if she were a bug under a glass or an exotic caged animal, as if he expected to learn something from her. 
So she lingered, drawing out each movement far longer than she should have, attempting to provoke impatience in him, but he gave her nothing and finally said, “It’s time.”
Neeva was sitting on the mattress when Munroe came to collect her. 
The Doll Maker and his henchmen didn’t want the wild animal soiling her new clothes, so for the sake of cleanliness, the girl hadn’t been fed since she’d been dressed and wouldn’t be unless Munroe decided it was worth the aggravation.
Drugs would have made this entire venture a breeze— pop a sedative in the girl’s drinking water, say nighty-nighty, and put her in the trunk. 
For that matter, drugging the girl would have made Munroe’s involvement completely pointless, 
and were it not for this strange requirement from the Doll Maker’s client, there was a chance Munroe would still be in Dallas right now, probably on the Ducati, burning fuel under the Texas dawn.
But the customer had rules. No bruises. No drugs. Prerequisites that made no sense.
Most traffickers kept their women doped and dependent, not only for the sake of dulled compliance but also for control. 
A stable of heroin addicts was far easier to maintain than one filled with fighters and screamers like Neeva.
No bruises. No drugs. Why? A thousand possibilities could lay claim to the answer, and Munroe pushed away the desire to know. 
No matter the reason, it wouldn’t change the facts. Munroe said, “Let’s go.”
Neeva lifted her head and said, “Where are you taking me?”
Fight-or-flight reflexes long honed during Munroe’s own captivity of sorts had heightened her sensitivity to tone, body language, and expression: 
instinct that picked up nuance with radarlike clarity and in the moment set off a warning sensor. 
“I don’t know yet,” she said. “They only give me pieces of the journey, one step at a time.”
“Where do we go first?”
“Ljubljana.”
“What’s that?”
“The capital of Slovenia.”
Neeva stared back at her blankly.
Munroe pulled the roll of tape from the backpack, and going for conversation, for distraction and something familiar, said, “We’re in Croatia, Slovenia is one country west.”
Eyes to the floor, Neeva was quiet as if running numbers or trying to recall why she recognized what she recognized, and said, “I’ve been kidnapped into a war zone?”
Munroe shook her head. Slovenia and Croatia were splinters from the same origin, but Croatia, far more familiar to most Americans than Slovenia would ever be, 
meant that those who did recognize the country’s name often associated it with the destruction that took place in the nineties— 
frozen in time and recategorized as one and the same as the mass genocide and wholesale slaughter within Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Neeva was too young to have the collective consciousness. Maybe her awareness was the result of political parents. 
Either way, there wasn’t time for a geography lesson, much less a history one that covered the various Yugoslavian wars. 
“No war zone,” Munroe said. “At least not for almost twenty years. Stand up, please.”
Neeva stayed seated. “We’re crossing a border?”
“Yes.”
“You have my passport?”
“Doesn’t really matter, does it?” And she repeated the request. “Please stand up, Neeva.”
Neeva nodded. Stood. Stepped off the mattress. Munroe’s internal alarm ticked up another notch. 
She loosed the edge on the roll of tape and pulled it upward. “Hold out your wrists.”
The girl did as requested, hands forward, fingers bent into relaxed fists. 
Munroe moved forward, took Neeva’s right wrist in her left hand, felt no twinge of caution, no indication of warning. 
Leaned in closer to wrap the tape to the girl’s skin, and in that moment, Neeva’s other fist rushed toward Munroe’s eyes, a jagged edge of metal protruding, piercing upward.
Munroe jerked backward. The improvised blade missed her jawbone by a hairbreadth. 
Scraped air and came back down again in an attempt to connect with her cheek, 
and then as quickly as the strike had come, Neeva was on her back, struggling to breathe, trying to scream, 
and Munroe, on top of her, stared at her own hands on Neeva’s throat.
Slowly, deliberately, making her fingers move by force of will, Munroe released Neeva’s windpipe, while every nerve and primal instinct cried out to win and finish the kill.
Munroe drew back. Plucked the three-inch slice of metal from Neeva’s hand and mechanically examined what appeared to have once been part of a bed frame. 
“The last person who tried that is dead,” she said. Munroe tucked the piece of metal into a pocket, pulled herself off Neeva, 
and with the girl still flat on her back, tears sliding from eyes to mattress, Munroe bound her wrists in a tight figure-eight that wouldn’t allow for slippage.
Using the center of the tape as a handle, she pulled Neeva to her feet, mind replaying those fast few seconds again and again, searching for the place to fit the puzzle piece that didn’t belong: 
This strike, like the previous fight, hadn’t been the random work of panic or adrenaline or merely the actions of a girl struggling for survival. 
Neeva controlled her body with the assurance of someone who’d studied for years, maybe even competed professionally, 
but who hadn’t had much of the kind of real-world experience where instinct and speed and the ability to outthink an opponent made the difference between bleeding under the blade of a sadist or not.
“I warned you not to fuck with me,” Munroe said. “Even if I don’t want to hurt you, I will. You should have listened.”
In place of words, Neeva nodded, and Munroe patted her down, hands running underneath clothing and along seams in tempo with her irritation. 
She should have seen the strike coming long before it had happened, but although she’d sensed the warnings, she’d missed the signs, and this irritated her more than the strike itself. 
Munroe pried open Neeva’s mouth, searching for any other hidden weapons. 
Perhaps the actress in the girl had blinded her, playing the role, not unlike Munroe’s own chameleon nature that allowed her to become what people needed in order to get what she wanted.
Finding no other weapons, Munroe put fingertips to the girl’s chin and, without resistance on Neeva’s part, raised her head so that she could better view her neck and the aftermath of those few seconds.
For now, the damage was internal. With luck, there’d be no outward sign.
“I’m going to unlock you,” Munroe said. “If you move, we’ll end up playing on the mattress again and I don’t think that game is very fun for you.”
Neeva avoided eye contact, staring straight ahead with her jaw working back and forth as if she was grinding her teeth or readying to spit. 
Munroe said, “I’m doing everything I can to avoid hurting you— protecting you when I can— don’t make me regret it.” 
Then she knelt to release the shackle that secured Neeva to the chain.
Pieces of the restraint separated and dropped off, and Munroe pressed Neeva’s foot. 
“Keep still,” she said. She prodded the flesh and bone that had lain beneath the shackle. “Does it hurt?”
More than two weeks, maybe, of tugging and yanking were ample time for Neeva to bruise, cut, and harm herself— 
damage for which Munroe would be held responsible although she’d had nothing to do with the cause.
“It’s sore,” Neeva whispered, “but doesn’t really hurt.”
Munroe pressed once more, waited for a wince or a twitch, and receiving none, stood. 
The rubber coating appeared to have done its job. 
As the Doll Maker had said, Neeva wasn’t the first to be delivered under these strange requirements. 
He’d had plenty of practice keeping his merchandise damage free.
Munroe picked up the backpack and led Neeva by the elbow from the cell to the hall. 
The girl didn’t resist, but her reluctance to leave this prison was there, and why not? 
This was a world she’d learned to understand, if not navigate, and how much better the devil she knew than the one still to come.
In the hall, Arben blocked the path to the stairway. Neeva stiffened when she saw him. 
Without letting up on the pressure that moved them forward, Munroe said, “Do you know him?”
Neeva nodded.
“He doesn’t speak English,” Munroe said.
Neeva’s voice came in a hoarse whisper. “He came into my cell most often.”
“He won’t hurt you as long as I’m here.”
Neeva’s resistance lessened some, and Munroe guided her forward, single file, past Arben, who in a show of dominance refused to move, forcing them to squeeze by to get to the stairs. 
He was not subtle in his groping of Neeva, and the girl shied away from him.
There were rules about not bruising the girl, but nobody had said anything that put the big tough guy off limits. 
Opportunity would arrive eventually, and when it did, Munroe would take it and Arben would die.
Up the stairs Neeva went, with Munroe following. When they had passed, Arben kept close behind— 
far too close— so that Munroe felt his heat along her spine, felt him crawling up her neck all the way to the top of the stairs and into the main room where the gold workers toiled.
Neeva moved awkwardly, feet shuffling forward while her head turned up and to the sides, as if seeing humanity for the first time. 
Munroe, in no hurry, allowed her to take her time.
Arben pushed them forward. 
He’d stopped long enough to shut and bolt the metal door, the first that Munroe had seen or heard it close, and then coming near again, used his bulk and the invasion of space to drive Munroe faster.
With his breath once more hot against her neck, her insides rebelled; her choler rose and with it came the color change of rage.
The light of the room shifted to dull gray. Munroe let go of Neeva’s elbow. Stopped short.
Turned as if to ask a question and brought her forehead into the right side of Arben’s jaw. 
The crack of the hit and the hurt that followed brought on a touch of catharsis. 
She yearned for more, craved release in the soothing balm of pain, longed for the fight and the euphoria that a kill would bring. 
Even a boot to his scarred and angry face and the crunch of bone against flesh would suffice, but that would have been too obvious, and would force an immediate retaliation.
Munroe put her hands to her head and staggered slightly, every bit the apologetic player in an accident. “Bocsánat,” she said, backing away.
Lumani had seen the hit and he stared past Munroe with a poorly concealed grin. 
Arben, whatever he did or whatever his reaction, kept back far enough that Munroe couldn’t feel him. 
The man would want to kill her now, and this was good. Rage clouded reason, hate distorted logic.
They reached the Opel, and seeing the car, Neeva stiffened. “Don’t fight it,” Munroe said. “I don’t want to have to hurt you again.” 
She could feel the self-defense response running through the girl’s head: Never get in the car. Better to run. Better to scream fire and call for attention. Better to fight where there are people around. 
She felt Neeva’s body expand with an inhale and slapped a hand over her mouth. 
“I warned you,” Munroe said. “And I can fix it so that you don’t scream again, ever.”
Neeva deflated.
Progress.
To Lumani, she said, “Nyisd ki az ajtót,” and he stepped toward the car and opened the passenger door. 
Her hand on Neeva’s head for protection, Munroe helped the girl settle. 
With Lumani still at the door, Munroe knelt with the roll of tape and wound around Neeva’s ankles the same figure-eight she’d used for her wrists, 
then passed the tape up between the restraints, connecting them so that the girl couldn’t lift her arms to the window. 
Package secure, Munroe shifted the seat back to an incline so that one of the most recognizable faces on the planet couldn’t be seen from outside the car. 
Then draped the blanket across Neeva’s lap and feet, hiding what bound her.
Munroe stood, and closed and locked the door. 
Lumani stepped back and grinned approval— possibly respect— killer to killer, professional to professional. 
Behind him Arben glared, and Munroe paused to send a smile in his direction, nothing toothy, just a taste, enough to needle and inflame his rage.

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Chapter 14 IRVING, TEXAS
Samantha Walker laddered over Bradford’s body, from knee, to shoulder, to wall, 
and then settled, balanced, at the top and belly-crawled in a slow move toward a better view. 
She’d gone up instead of him because she was the smaller and lighter of the two, 
and her whisper fed into his earpiece: Equipment. Camera positions. Distance.
If they’d been planning to play it safe, to run conventional surveillance, this would have been the place to set up shop, 
but they didn’t have the time or the resources for smart or safe. 
Saving Munroe meant finding Logan, and tonight that meant kicking down doors.
After a long pause, Walker said, “Window. Second floor of the warehouse, north side. A yellow light just switched on.”
Bradford heard the snag in her thoughts, felt it, too, as it charged down his spine. 
Until now, the property had appeared empty, but where there were lights there were people, and people meant guards, and guards meant prisoners.
“Come on down,” he whispered. “Let’s go in through the front door.”
Walker slid backward, hung off the wall, and dropped the remaining four feet. 
“Drunk and angry?” she said.
He nodded. “Should work.”
Should. On a run like this, everything was guesswork.
While Bradford drove, Walker stripped out of her overshirt, leaving just the tight-fitting cami to conceal what little it could of her chest. 
They were possibly walking into a line of fire without protection, but they’d never get through the front door dressed for war. 
She pulled her hair out of the ponytail and ran her fingers through it. Thick black waves dropped over her shoulders.
“You sure you want to do this?” Bradford asked.
She rolled her eyes, and he said, “Okay then.”
From the end of the alley, he headed back to the main road. Stopped just before reaching the target, beyond the range of the cameras, and stayed only long enough for Walker to step out.
Bradford continued one complex south, parked where he could keep an eye on her while she meandered to the front gate, steps uneven and exaggerated. 
She pulled on the chain-link gate and shook it. Attempted to climb, one clumsy boot toe that couldn’t gain purchase. Slid down in an incoherent stumble.
Additional security lights powered on. Once more she shook the fence, shouting. Paused to wipe her nose against her arm. 
On the northeast corner of the warehouse, a camera shifted. Her performance kicked up a notch, 
and she continued, dragging her fingers along the loops of the fence, a slow stumble in Bradford’s direction, while occasionally attempting another unsuccessful climb to the top.
A side door to the warehouse opened and a solitary male stepped out. 
He was bulky, though not from fat, and short enough to look like a brick in rumpled clothes, shirt half-tucked into jeans. 
If he was carrying a weapon, he was smart enough to keep it out of sight. 
The closer he got, the softer his expression became, until, right in front of Walker, he almost looked compassionate.
Walker staggered some more, rubbed her eyes, and swiped at her nose again. 
Held a conversation that Bradford couldn’t hear because with Walker so scantily dressed there’d been no place to safely stash a wire, but he got the general idea. 
The man gestured. Walker nodded and ran her palm over her eyes, wiping away tears. 
In her lifetime, she’d taken more than one poker pot with that same act of drunken, pitiful helplessness that wrenched male heartstrings and tugged at their zippers.
The man pulled a key ring from his pocket and opened the lock to the gate. Walker slipped inside. 
The man made to relock it, but Walker’s drama started again and she strode in the direction of the door he’d exited so that he had no choice but to leave the lock and follow her.
No further camera movement, no light flickering from the few warehouse windows, no backup personnel. 
The entire response seemed to be a solitary watchman pulling night duty and sleeping on his shift.
Bradford waited until Walker was halfway from gate to building, and then moved out of the vehicle and into the night. Slipped through the opening.
Ahead, Walker stumbled slightly, and when the man dropped an arm around her and stooped to help, she glanced over her shoulder, noted Bradford, and continued on. 
The two reached the door, and as Walker passed inside, her right hand transferred from her back pocket to brush along the door frame. The door shut.
Bradford fought the urge to rush in ahead of plan to watch the back of a partner who had just broken every rule in the live-long playbook.
He’d known it would happen and still bristled. Counted seconds.
And then hand to handle, he tugged on the door. The latch, depressed by a strip of tape, opened effortlessly. 
Bradford listened, scoped out what he could, and then slipped inside.
The warehouse was truly that, a large and mostly empty building lined with industrial shelving that bore empty pallets. 
Forklifts slept nearby. Near the truck bays at the front stood a minimal amount of freight, stacked and ready for loading. 
The legitimacy took him by surprise. There had to be a holding place, a way station, some soundproof location to keep the trafficked women, 
and it made sense that if such a place existed, it would work equally well for keeping Logan. 
Everything they had learned about this warehouse, about this company, screamed that what they looked for must be here. But this place was all wrong.
To Bradford’s right, metal stairs ascended along the inner wall to the second floor, to offices apparently, which occupied only the back quarter of the building and hung over pilings and empty space, 
and from where voices now carried, one of them distinctly Walker’s being drunk, which was good.
Bradford traced the ceiling, searching out cameras, and found nothing. 
For all the electronic eyes pointed outward, security on the inside was sparse. 
He moved along the perimeter, from shelving to pallets to forklifts, and found nothing that might indicate a false-paneled room or even a hiding place beneath his feet.
The conversation upstairs continued, still only two voices. 
Men weren’t often silent around Walker, which meant that Warehouse Man was alone, and without more men, Logan, if he had ever been here, was not here now.
The office door opened, and Bradford retreated to the shadows beneath the stairs. 
Walker teased and stumble-walked her way down with the guy close behind. Fiddled with the keys to a forklift. 
Warehouse Man tried to take them from her and she slipped beyond him laughing, plugged them into the ignition, and ran the engine. 
The noise, however long it lasted, was a perfect cover for footfalls against the metal stairs. 
Bradford hurried now. Warehouse Man would only endure so much teasing and forklift play before the situation turned nasty.
The upstairs was as Bradford expected, two rooms and a restroom area the size of a small closet, 
the latter with a small outside ventilation window, which was where Walker had spotted the light.
Half of the first room was allocated for security monitors, the other half to a desk with two computer towers, one without a monitor. 
On the desk in front of the security cameras, a handgun lay naked and exposed. A nice Walker touch.
Bradford reached for the weapon, then stopped. Taking it would only alert the Doll Maker’s people to their movements. 
Bradford turned to the second room, in which was a conference table, several chairs, a coffeemaker, and a couple of filing cabinets. No Logan.
Then, even from this far back in the office he could hear the change of tone downstairs. 
The forklift had been silenced. Walker was shouting. Bradford headed out the door.
Downstairs, Walker shook a fist in Warehouse Man’s face. He tried to grab her hand, to grab her.
Bradford started down the stairs. Warehouse Man lunged at Walker and she scooted around a pallet, a lot less drunk and a lot more angry. 
The man swore at her, and with an accent thick and foreign called her a bitch and a whore.
Bradford made it to the bottom of the stairs and hesitated.
Walker screamed, “Get the hell out of my way,” 
and Bradford bolted for the exit knowing that the message had been intended for him and not the cur that stood between them.
In the parking lot he checked his watch, anxiety rising. To be on the outside while a partner was still within those walls was wrong on every level.
Half a minute and the noise moved in his direction. 
Bradford retreated toward the shadows, mindful of the cameras and of the distance yet to cover. Louder it came: Walker close and moving quickly.
Bradford bolted for the gate and reached it just as she came barreling out the door, running full out with Warehouse Man not far behind. 
Bradford faced the two, waited until Walker blew past, and then, in character, charged toward Warehouse Man. “What the fuck are you doing with my girlfriend?”
The man slowed, his hands forward indicating caution, but before he’d fully stopped, Bradford collided into him, palms to chest, instep to knee. 
The guy staggered at the shock of the first hit, buckled with the second, and attempting to right himself, swung wildly in defense.
Bradford ducked, moved into his personal space, chest to chest. 
“Keep your filthy hands off my woman,” he said, and drove forward, forehead to nose, breaking cartilage and drawing blood.
Warehouse Man reached for his face and, smearing red, howled a smarting rage. 
Right hand went behind his back to draw the weapon still sitting on the desk upstairs. 
Swearing, he threw himself at Bradford. The guy was wide and his bulk ungraceful.
Bradford sidestepped. Used the man’s weight and momentum to continue his top half forward, used a leg to keep his bottom half in place. The man hit the pavement hard. 
Bradford began to walk away. Paused long enough to point a finger at the man crawling to his knees. “You touch her again,” he said, “and I’ll kill you.”
WALKER WAS IN the Explorer, seated and buckled in, when Bradford returned. 
He slid behind the wheel, put key in ignition and foot to gas. 
Peeled out into the deserted street with far more noise than was prudent and ran a red light in the process. Damn adrenaline.
“I hope you broke his nose,” Walker said.
“Taken care of,” he said, then glanced in her direction.
Arms crossed and fists clenched, she glared through the windshield. “When this is over, when we have Logan and Michael,” she said, “I’m going back in.”
“Fair enough,” Bradford said. “Why?”
Walker turned toward him. “Because that man’s a lunatic psychopath. 
“I swear to God, there’s a body count somewhere, and if I don’t get to him first, another woman somewhere is going to get hurt bad.”
“The stuff he promised to do to you, huh?”
“Among other things.”
Bradford turned focus to the road. “Michael and Logan first,” he said. “Then we take out the trash.”

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Chapter 13
Munroe could count them by the footsteps, time them by the pace; she stepped into the hallway and stood in Lumani’s way before he reached her cell.
He breached her personal space, smiling slightly as if her antics amused him. 
Behind him were the Arbens, bullies waiting for the fight. 
One held a hanger festooned with the lace and velvet clothes that Neeva had worn previously. 
It would appear that the Doll Maker, in his fanciful wisdom, would have the girl travel in the costume— as if avoiding attention wouldn’t already be difficult enough— and had sent his men to dress the merchandise.
“Your tape and your blanket,” Lumani said, extending the items in Munroe’s direction until she took them. “Now you should move out of the way.”
She didn’t. Wouldn’t. Even if the girl at the end of the hall was nothing more than a barrier standing between her and Logan’s freedom, she couldn’t abide these men defiling the helpless with their eyes or their touch. 
“Let me have the clothes,” she said. “The package is my responsibility, I’ll see that she’s dressed.”
In the language he wrongly assumed she didn’t understand, Lumani instructed the man to pass over the clothing. 
Munroe took the hanger and turned toward Neeva’s cell, and behind her a hushed argument erupted, which ended with Lumani’s clipped instruction.
Munroe draped the dress across the empty chair at the hallway’s end, placed the blanket on the seat, and carried the tape into Neeva’s cell, 
where the screams of animal fury that had followed her out into the hall were now silent. 
Neeva was backed up against the wall, positioned in a semicrouch with a play of chain held tightly in her hand, blond ringlets a jarring, comical contrast to the primal nature of the moment.
Munroe neared and Neeva shifted, tightening her grip and maintaining position even when Munroe stopped beyond lunging distance. 
Munroe knelt so that she was at eye level. “Please don’t try to fight me,” she said. “I’ll be forced to hurt you, and that’s the last thing I want.”
Neeva didn’t reply, didn’t lower her eyes, and Munroe’s stomach churned. 
The rules said no drugs and no bruises, but there were plenty of ways to create pain that left no visible evidence— her own suffering had taught this lesson well.
“We need to change your clothes,” Munroe said. “You can do it yourself if you want. I’ll give you privacy and leave you alone, I just need to know that you’ll cooperate.”
Silence.
“Will you?”
Neeva stared blankly, posture still tense, a jungle cat waiting to pounce.
Munroe tried again. “If you keep your hands and feet to yourself and do as I tell you, I’ll be nice, but if you fight, I’ll be forced to retaliate. You only get one warning, understand?” 
She waited for a reaction, any reaction, and when Neeva continued to eye her unblinkingly, she added, “Please don’t test me.”
Neeva breathed a slow and focused in and out, not the shallow quickening that would be spurred by adrenaline and produced by fear. 
Munroe had already seen the fight in the girl, and no matter how tiny, no matter how outclassed, she wouldn’t make the mistake of underestimating the human spirit fueled by the desire to win. 
Still kneeling, still holding eye contact, she called for Lumani, choosing the language she’d been force-fed to make a point, knowing that Hungarian wasn’t his mother tongue any more than English was.
Munroe counted seconds and, without turning, knew when he stood behind her; held out her hand for the garment he surely carried. The weight of the hanger tugged on her fingertips.
Again in Hungarian, she said, “I need the chair,” her sentence clipped short because although the words were inside her head and she understood their meaning, she’d not experienced the absorption of real-life interaction that allowed for her own fluency.
She didn’t turn when he dragged the metal chair, scraping it against the concrete, into the cell. 
Didn’t flinch when, mouth inches from her ear, he whispered, “Don’t push your luck, I’m not your errand boy.”
“I need a few minutes more alone,” she said, and waited until he’d fully left before slowly, theatrically, redraping the clothes across the back of the chair. 
With one last attempt to mitigate the inevitable fight with Neeva, she said, “I know you understand my warning.” Shifted the chair so that the clothes were within reach. 
“Take the dress. I’ll turn if you want privacy, but I can’t leave until you’ve changed.”
Nothing.
“Thirty seconds before I make you,” she said, and still Neeva didn’t react. 
Munroe’s anxiety welled. This was a fight she didn’t want, one Neeva couldn’t win, yet a fight necessary to save Logan. “Time’s up,” she said. Still Neeva didn’t move.
Munroe set the roll of tape on top of the seat, stepped around the chair, and placed herself within reach of the inevitable strike. 
She stretched for the girl’s wrist and it was then that Neeva lunged, fist and chain swinging toward Munroe’s face, as if the chain was meant to go over her head like a hood.
Hand out, Munroe snagged the snaking metal. Twisted. Wrapped. Pulled Neeva off her feet.
In the delayed hesitation of Neeva’s shock, Munroe yanked again, drawing Neeva toward her, and elbow into the girl’s stomach, knocked her to the mattress. Neeva fell hard. 
Munroe dropped a knee into her and took the chain behind the girl’s head, winding it around her neck in the same choking move that Neeva had intended: 
tight enough to constrict air but not enough to crush her windpipe or leave bruises.
Neeva’s body writhed to get away, hands stretched and flexed, attempting to fight the chain. 
Munroe leaned in harder, pinched the girl’s nose with one hand, and with the chain wrapped around the other wrist to keep it tight, placed that hand over Neeva’s mouth.
Neeva grew frantic. Clawing. Kicking. Bucking. Only when Munroe felt the strength begin to leave the girl’s body did she let go. 
Neeva gasped for air and lay limp long enough to take in oxygen. 
Then, like a battery suddenly recharged, she went at it again, clawing for Munroe’s eyes, tearing at her skin.
The ferocity of Neeva’s fight, her struggle for survival— to live, to wound, to maim and kill an opponent— if only to wake tomorrow and do it again, was a vivid flashback. 
Under other circumstances, Munroe’s conscience would rise in pride and camaraderie, would turn to fight beside this girl while they dug their way to victory. 
But circumstance had turned solidarity into a hollow void and Neeva, this feral, fighting animal, into an object to be subdued in order to set Logan free.
Munroe drove a fist into Neeva’s stomach, and when the girl gasped and again struggled for air, Munroe took Neeva’s arm so close to snapping that had Neeva not screamed and frozen in the struggle, her shoulder would have gone out of joint. 
There were tears in Neeva’s eyes, and Munroe recognized in them her younger self. Not tears of self-pity or pain, but of rage and frustration.
“I warned you,” Munroe said, releasing the chain but keeping Neeva’s arm in place. “And I will hurt you more if you don’t stop.”
Neeva nodded. And Munroe, in another reflection of years gone by, understood the gesture. 
Not a concession or submission but unbearable physical pain. The nod was a way to buy time. This fight wasn’t over.
Straddling the girl, Munroe summoned Lumani, who arrived in the doorway so quickly that he had to have already been nearby, listening and possibly watching from beyond the corner. 
“Your knife,” Munroe said, again in Hungarian, and when he hesitated, she added, botched and incorrectly, “I know you have it. I won’t cut the girl.”
He bent to retrieve the blade, and when he drew closer and Neeva caught sight of him and the object in his hand, she began to struggle again.
Munroe increased the pressure and the girl screamed. Munroe reached for the handle of the knife Lumani held in her direction.
The cold metal connected with Munroe’s hand, and her sight grew dim with the rush of expectant euphoria. 
The cell faded to gray and the lust for blood rose inside, a response to the blade and the history the metal represented, an unbearable urge that screamed to be let loose.
“Leave,” Munroe said, because if he didn’t, she’d not have the control to finish what had to be done here 
and would instead turn the knife first on him and then on the Arbens, to force an escape for herself and this girl, and in the end, Logan would be lost.
Lumani didn’t move. With a knee pressed into Neeva’s chest, and gripping the knife in one hand and still twisting the girl’s arm with the other, Munroe turned her eyes to him. 
Teeth gritted, she said in English, “Leave now or there will be consequences.”
Lumani’s lips parted with unspoken words, and without breaking eye contact, he backed away as if encountering a mad dog. 
Not even waiting for him to fully exit the door, Munroe turned the knife toward Neeva and, with the blade tipped away from the girl’s throat and into the collar of the shirt, sliced through the fabric down to the elastic of the pants, and farther to the crotch. 
Then Munroe flicked the fabric away with the blade so that Neeva lay chest naked to the ceiling.
“I can get off you now,” Munroe said, “and allow you to dress yourself, or we can continue to do this the hard way.”
Neeva’s face twisted to hold back the tears. “I’ll do it,” she whispered, and her voice rasped thick and dry in response to the struggle and the pressure the chain had made against her windpipe.
Munroe backed off, a slow, staggered process of first releasing the arm, unwinding the chain, and then removing her knee and standing up. 
With each phase, Neeva lay completely still, as if she had finally understood that any movement might undo this little progress and that to concede now meant a chance to fight again later.
When Munroe was upright and had once more stepped behind the chair and the dress, she said, “I don’t want to hurt you.”
Neeva said nothing but stood and stared defiantly at Munroe for a long moment, 
and then, dramatically, every bit the actress before an audience, loosed the sliced clothing and let it drop to the mattress. 
Naked, never breaking eye contact, she reached for the dress and with some struggle slipped into it.
Clothed, she stepped barefoot and cocky off the mattress, to the floor, exaggeratingly tugging on the chain with her left leg as if to say Now what?
Munroe picked the roll of tape and the blanket off the chair, grabbed the back of it, and dragged it, the metal scraping across the floor, out into the hall, 
hating herself, hating the Doll Maker and the man-boy and the thugs and the perverse underbelly of human nature that cloaked base desire in goodness and pointed fingers and created scapegoats.
She stood in front of Lumani and, before the urge to put the blade to further use could be fulfilled, dropped the knife on the floor at his feet. 
Were there no market, no buyers, and no men willing to pay for sex, organizations that fed off human misery and criminals like the Doll Maker who stole and cashed in on the value of the female body would cease to exist.
“I want to kill you,” she said.
He smiled. Picked up the knife. “The feeling is mutual.”
“I need the key.”
“Have you damaged her?”
“I’m not stupid,” Munroe said. 
“So get me whatever else you want her to wear, shoes perhaps, so that we can be on our way.”
Lumani didn’t turn from her. Studying her face, searching her eyes in a way that betrayed more of himself than he might imagine, 
he gave the order to Arben Two in Albanian. The man turned and went up the stairs, 
and as the echoed thuds played out in the enclosed underground, Lumani’s unabashed study continued until the man returned and handed over a box.
Without conceding the stare-down, Lumani gave the box to Munroe and handed her a key. 
Only then did she avert her eyes, and that only because she had to. 
In the entirety of the alpha chest-thumping exercise, she’d read him, he’d read her, and without a word they understood each other just fine.

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Chapter 12 IRVING, TEXAS
Veers Transport was first on Bradford’s hit list for finding Logan because it had everything he looked for: Trucks. Office. Warehouse. Seclusion. Red flags.
On the surface, the company was legitimate and profitable, and if not for the information found in the Doll Maker files, there would have been nothing about the business to have drawn the war room’s attention. 
Even Katherine Breeden’s name was no longer connected to the company, although it had once been. 
Only by following Breeden’s trail, as the dead man had, and working backward, could the connection have been made.
Veers Transport owned a fleet of fifteen trucks, most of them class-six commercial vehicles with a couple of eighteen-wheelers thrown in for good measure. 
State filings were up-to-date; there was no pending litigation; the company properly paid income, sales, and unemployment taxes; 
it provided health-care benefits to full-time employees, of which it had eighteen; 
and none of the directors or officers of the closely held corporation were connected to the names on the Doll Maker’s roster.
It had taken digging into the personal lives and histories of the primaries to sniff out the hole in the facade, 
because there was just no explaining how those who owned the company didn’t also own or rent property, own or drive vehicles, 
or how as recently as last month one of the men had listed a homeless shelter as his permanent address.
Bradford drove by for a visual first pass.
They were off Loop 12 in a commercial area dotted with importers and wholesalers spread among parking lots and wide single-story office complexes. 
The depot was directly off the road, surrounded by a chain-link fence, with a separate prefabricated building near the front and a two-bay warehouse toward the rear. 
There were six trucks in the lot, and if the entire fleet ever came home to roost at the same time, it would be a tight squeeze.
To the casual observer, security was lax if not nonexistent, but to well-trained eyes, the cameras and motion detectors were easy to spot. 
Walker said, “You’d think in an area like this they’d flaunt the security.”
“Maybe the low-key approach is for the benefit of law enforcement.”
“Perhaps,” she said, 
and Bradford continued down the strip, far past the depot, to a smaller street and from there to the first right, 
which was an alley along the other side of the ten-foot wall that separated the residential area from the commercial complexes.
Here, streetlights dotted the alley and backyards stretched from clapboard siding to chain-link fence, 
and faded and cracked plastic toys littered patchy lawns, occasionally joined or replaced by a car up on blocks.
Satellite images had pointed to this route as the least intrusive form of access to the transport company, 
and Bradford kept the vehicle creeping along the narrow pitted road until the roof of the warehouse settled into position ahead. 
He stopped in what shadow existed and allowed the length of an office complex to separate the Explorer from their target. 
Walker snapped a magazine into an MP5, and they stepped into the night.
ZAGREB, CROATIA
Flat on her back, arms to her sides, Neeva stared at the ceiling. 
The metal door was open and had been ever since she’d woken: open and wide like a tormenting bully who offered something just to take a swing if you accepted. 
Chained to the wall, ankle trapped inside the rubber-coated metal ring, the tease of escape was far worse than being locked away in darkness. 
She yanked the chain in frustration, felt the solid tug, and deflated. She’d no energy left to scream and fight.
The guard who usually sat outside her door was gone and the language recordings had stopped. 
She didn’t know if this was bad or good, because in this place change meant something worse was coming.
She’d been bathed or showered since the water attack, because she was clean and the track suit smelled freshly laundered, and her hair was really weird. Shirley Temple weird.
A shadow filled the doorway. Neeva jerked upright and backed up against the wall. 
There hadn’t been any footsteps to announce the person, not even in the silence. 
She fingered the chain, which had enough slack in it to use as a weapon if the shadow got close enough.
The person ducked to enter and then moved out of the doorway so the light wasn’t directly behind, and Neeva could see the face— 
definitely the mystery person from yesterday, although the hair was different and the person now wasn’t so much an it as a he.
“May I come in?” the person said, and Neeva stared, blinking, 
not because of the polite nature of the request but because this was the first real-life English she’d heard in so long she’d lost track, 
and it was real American English, not all accented and stilted as if one of these animals had learned it in school.
“You’re already in,” Neeva said, and he smiled, kind of sad. “Michael,” he said, and stuck out a hand.
Neeva didn’t move and after a while the hand withdrew. “You speak English,” Neeva said finally.
“Apparently, so do you,” the Michael person said. “Very colorfully.”
Neeva snorted, and Michael stepped closer. 
About halfway into the cell, he sat on the floor with his back to the wall and tipped his head toward the ceiling. 
Neeva waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. Didn’t even look at her, which was more out of character for this place than anything else so far.
“What do you want?” Neeva asked.
His face shifted toward her. “To talk with you, if you don’t mind.”
Neeva let out a bark of laughter. Chained to the wall, she wasn’t exactly going anywhere, and until now what she did or didn’t want had meant nothing. 
“Sure, talk,” she said. “But don’t you need to drop your pants and whack off first? That seems to be the order of things— that is, if you skip talking altogether.”
Almost as if to himself, he said, “You’re lucky.” The words were like a smack in the face. 
“Yeah, for sure,” Neeva said, “I’m so lucky. That’s exactly what those pervs are thinking when they honor me with their presence.”
“They’re trying to degrade you,” he said. “That’s the best they could do without touching you. 
“If you were anyone else, they would have beat and raped you. To humiliate you. Break you.”
The honesty of the explanation left Neeva without a retort, without any sense of up or down, and all the questions that had no answers came back again until Michael spoke once more. 
“I’m being forced to do a job that I don’t want to do,” he said. He turned to look directly at her. “I just want you to know, no matter what happens, this isn’t what I want.”
“I don’t see you in chains,” Neeva said. “So don’t talk to me about want.”
“I’m a prisoner here just as much as you are, wearing chains, even if you can’t see them.”
“Excuse me if I’m all out of sympathy.”
“I wanted to say it before the insanity starts,” Michael said, then stood and turned for the door. 
Neeva fought for a reason to keep him there. He was American. He was English conversation. Possibly he had answers to the big why and what. 
“You’re the person in the cell down the hall?” she said.
Michael nodded.
Neeva pulled her knees to her chest, wrapping her arms around them. “Can you answer the questions that nobody else will?”
Michael stopped and turned. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can try.”
“Why am I here?” she asked. “What do they want with me? Is it for ransom?”
He studied her as if plotting things in his head, maybe weighing answers or trying to find words, then said, “This is a holding place, a waiting area. 
“Someone put a purchase price on you and the people who control this building, the ones who kidnapped you, they’ve made it my responsibility to get you to the person who bought you.”
The words brought clarity. Neeva drew in a sharp inhale and said, “Knowing this, you’re going to just hand me over?”
Michael moved toward the door, looked back, and paused. “I don’t know you,” he said, “but I know who you are, and if I could find a way to save us all, I would, but I can’t. 
“I have a gun to my head, and the more you fight me, the harder I will have to fight you back to save my own life. You understand?”
Neeva refused to justify the pitiful excuse with a reply. Instead she crossed her arms and glared.
Michael nodded. “I’m truly sorry.” From down the hall came the sick thud of boots against the concrete. 
Michael’s head tipped up and then, as if Neeva ceased to exist, he straightened and walked out.
She tugged on the chain. Wiped away tears she didn’t even know she’d cried. 
In a fit of futile desperation she yanked harder and more frantically on metal that refused to give, while the anger and fear and frustration; 
the urge to destroy that had been building and building through the passing days; 
the want, the desperate want to hurt and maim and kill and exact revenge on anyone who’d had anything to do with this state of helplessness, came out in a curdling scream.

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Chapter 11 DALLAS, TEXAS
Miles Bradford stood in the middle of the war room and dumped two Kevlar vests on the floor. 
Jahan and Walker stared at him, both silent and sullen. “Fight it out between you,” he said. “I’ll be in my office.”
More specifically, he’d be on the floor in his office, beneath the desk, grabbing a moment of sleep before heading out again. 
He turned from the room, and the heated whispered exchange started once more behind his back. Someone had to stay behind and there were no volunteers.
It was nearly one in the morning, technically into day three of the hunt for a trace on Munroe and Logan, and they were running on empty: nerves strung a little tighter, edges a little sharper. 
Bradford’s body couldn’t handle this lack of sleep crap the way it could eighteen years ago when he was twenty and king of the world. 
He needed five minutes, ten, if he was lucky.
For a full day they’d stalked information, putting aspects of running Capstone on temporary hold to pore over gigabytes of data, tracking leads and cutting off dead ends— 
tedious brain work, numerous phone calls, and the occasional in-person visit to pull records— 
until what they had now was a short list of four valid possibilities, four locations where if Logan was being kept in Texas, they might actually find him: 
a residential home, an office condo, a warehouse, and a transport company, all within the Dallas metro area. Might find him.
At this juncture, everything was a crapshoot, and this was the best they had.
Bradford threw a bedroll under the desk. Lay feet to the window, head to the darkness,
and before closing his eyes, he checked his phone, the same flick of the wrist he’d been making at ten-minute intervals throughout the day, 
hoping against hope that either Munroe or Logan might have gained access to a phone, might have called, texted, or emailed, and somehow he’d missed the alert.
But nothing. He closed his eyes and opened them to Sam Walker’s feet.
From where she stood, he could see the bottom of the vests, one draped over each shoulder, and gripped in her right hand a backpack that held the war room’s ready stash of tracking and surveillance equipment.
The clock on his phone said fifteen minutes since he’d blinked.
“You awake?” Walker whispered. 
Just enough of a hiss to ensure that even if he hadn’t been, he would be now.
“Yeah,” he said. “What’d you get?”
“Jack stays, I go.”
Bradford scooted out from under the desk. 
“That so?” He turned his back to roll up the bed. “How’d you manage that?”
Walker sighed. “Two on, two off, and we break after dawn.”
Bradford nodded. “Does he have a shopping list?”
“He’s good with whatever we get.”
He handed her the Explorer keys. “You drive,” he said. “I’ll sleep.”
THE ARMORY WAS a war-room legend, on par with Bigfoot or the whispered rumors of Munroe’s ability to absorb languages. 
Only a handful knew of its confirmed existence, and of those only Bradford and Jahan knew where it was or how to get inside. 
The armory was just in case; it was hell-in-a-hand-basket, old habits die hard: 
a collection that had steadily grown over the years in anticipation of a scenario in which he with the biggest guns wins.
Walker pulled the Explorer out of Capstone’s garage space, and Bradford recited the address. 
She glanced at him with that look of hers but said nothing until they were off the 80, east of Dallas, a full thirty minutes from where they’d started. 
She pulled off the access road to stop in front of a twenty-four-hour storage complex and nudged Bradford awake.
The cluster of cinder-block buildings sat back off the feeder road in an area of used-car lots and bodywork and pawn shops— 
an area just derelict enough that the razor-wire fencing, powerful lights, and security cameras would have been necessary if they hadn’t already come as part of the package.
Bradford leaned over Walker, half planting himself in her lap to enter the gate code. 
She held her breath. It seemed unfair that after days of burning the midnight oil, she still smelled human and lightly floral.
The fenced gate rolled open, and Bradford directed Walker through the maze of alleys between buildings to the rear of the complex and the front of a cinder-block ten-by-twenty leased in a fake name and registered to a fake business.
Bradford stepped out, keyed the padlock open, and lifted the reinforced door up on its rollers to the midpoint, then went in under and moved through the darkness to the left wall. 
By touch he deactivated the alarm on a pad without a backlight.
If the door had passed the three-quarter mark, if he’d taken longer than forty seconds to get to the numerical pad, the storage unit would have filled with smoke and CS gas, 
and the war room, so many miles away, would have been notified that the cache had been compromised and to stay the hell away.
Bradford raised the door the remaining distance, and Walker backed the Explorer as close to the opening as the limited width of the alley allowed.
The unit housed seven fireproof gun safes, chained together and lag-bolted to the concrete. 
Bradford unlocked two. The fragrance of gun oil and metal overpowered the musk of dust from the storage space. 
He paused to scan the contents, and Walker, guiding the flashlight for his benefit, let out a low whistle.
“Armageddon, much?” she said.
“Grab that duffel bag to your right, will you?”
She swung the beam just long enough to snag the canvas and toss it in his direction. 
Paused and then also toed an empty plastic foot locker toward him. In the silence, it groaned, loud against the concrete. 
Bradford stared at her. Shook his head and returned to a safe. Pulled the door wider so that she had a clear view of the inventory.
“Pick your flavor,” he said.
Walker pointed with the light. “One for me, one for Jack.”
Bradford unracked an MP5, ran the bolt, and handed the weapon to her. Did the same for the two he placed in the locker. 
“And that sniper,” she said.
He followed the light to the lone M2010, his newest addition to the cache, 
a tool that in the right hands had an effective range of 1,200 meters: agent of death from three-quarters of a mile away.
Walker didn’t have traditional military training, hadn’t gone through a conventional war that might look good on a private contractor’s brag sheet, or give him cause to hand over such a piece. 
Instead she’d had her overly protective father who’d lived as a shooter for nearly two decades and treated her as if she was his only son. 
Walker knew more about the art of sniping than some men who’d been hunting their entire lives, 
and although Bradford wouldn’t risk putting her up against elite military, the jobs he ran typically didn’t require that level of skill.
She slid from the tailgate to take the rifle from him. Handled the piece with the same tenderness and admiration a mother would show a newborn.
Bradford collected the scope and bipod and passed them to her, then shut that safe.
Walker said, “What about plastics?” She wanted controlled explosion. 
Bradford reopened the safe, grabbed several C4 bricks and the detonators. He raised them to her. “Good enough,” she said.
He added the explosives to the duffel bag, then locked the safes. She helped him lift the supplies into the Explorer.
Against everything his heart wanted, he would use what was left of the morning’s darkness to track Logan— not Michael, Logan. 
Because Logan was here and Munroe was not, and if they were successful in rescuing Logan before the Doll Maker’s men finished him, it just might also be enough to save her.
ZAGREB, CROATIA
Valon Lumani stood in front of the wall of dolls, hands behind his back and his focus entirely on Uncle, who sat studying papers. 
In the thirty minutes since he’d been summoned, not once had Uncle acknowledged his presence.
He would stand here for a touch of acceptance, something to show that he had value in the eyes of the only father he could remember. 
And he would stay silent, because to speak and be ignored, as if he was a ghost passing unseen and unheard among the living, would only reconfirm his worthlessness, and in that lay infinitely more pain.
So Lumani stood and waited, while the events of last night became his private movie and the whispers among the men the sound track, 
words that filtered back to him as resentfulness, as accusations of favoritism, because for failure Uncle punished him with silence instead of taking flesh.
The men would never understand. For physical pain there were painkillers to last until the torment faded, 
but for emotional pain there was only the perpetual numbing of drugs and alcohol: a weakness that served to emphasize his defects and bare the humiliation in his lack of perfection. 
Physical pain would be preferable— far easier to block out and endure.
Time passed, Uncle shuffled more papers, while the actions that had forced Lumani to his knees rewound and played again. 
Even after all his training, she had used him like a puppet to make a point to Uncle, had moved with speed so stunning he’d had no time to brace for it, 
utilized surprise to lead to the hidden weapon that if he’d followed the warnings, he wouldn’t have carried.
In front of Uncle’s eyes, he had been humiliated, and he had failed. 
The successful completion of his latest mission, the orchestration of perfection in Texas, all the history of success was now so far away— nothingness, erased like marks in sand on the beach.
The only thing that mattered was the moment, and the moment for him was failure.
Uncle paused from his papers to pet the silky hair of a nearby doll, his action distracted and peaceful in the same contented way an old woman might stroke a cat. 
This had always been the way of the old man: love and attention lavished upon nonliving things while breathing flesh and blood held no space in his heart.
The door reverberated with a knock, and Lumani’s heart answered with its own beat. 
He had been humbled last night by a woman, outsmarted in a way that none of Uncle’s men had ever managed. 
He wanted what she had, even if she was only a woman, and that realization brought a touch of fear, and more, the rush of feeling alive.
The door opened. Lumani didn’t turn. The Michael woman stepped inside and Uncle glanced up from his papers, his expression transforming from indifference to a welcoming smile.
“My friend,” he said, and motioned for her to sit.
Hatred and jealousy crested over Lumani’s rush. 
She, through no good thing, she, this woman, this disposable commodity that would be used and destroyed, had earned another smile that should have been given to him.
The woman sat, then slow and deliberate turned to look in his direction. 
Without words she spoke to him, and without words said that she knew his thoughts, his prison. 
He focused on the desk to ignore her, though his heartbeat quickened again. 
If he could have, he would have gone to her now and forced her through her pain to allow him her secrets.
Instead, frustration and resentment seeped through his pores.
The movements of Uncle and the Michael woman seemed to set out in slow motion. 
Uncle reached into a drawer for the car keys and GPS system, the map, the passports and car papers: 
as transport, she was given full responsibility for the package, would be alone in the car with it. 
More conversation until Uncle’s voice cracked through the mirror of oblivion and Lumani raised his eyes to find both Uncle and the woman staring at him.
His face flushed. He hadn’t heard the words, but he knew their intent, the purpose for which he’d been summoned, 
and so he straightened, pulled the phone off his belt, and approached the woman. Offered her the phone, careful this time to keep a safe distance.
He would have liked to have read from her body posture that no strike was imminent, 
but he hadn’t anticipated the attack in her last night and did not trust himself to properly gauge her now. 
She took the phone and stared at him again, as if attempting to read him the way he had tried to read her.
Lumani, offering nothing, stepped back; she glanced at the phone and tapped the screen to play. 
She wanted proof of life and they were happy to make sure the evidence was plenty, but no matter what Uncle had promised, live streaming wasn’t going to happen. 
There was too much risk that Logan might, in some coded language, give away information that would aid her in circumventing well-laid plans, even from half a world away.
Lumani studied the woman for reaction, and as he had done, she offered nothing. Unreadable. 
She raised her eyes to his when the clip ended and handed back the phone. 
Uncle pushed the supplies in her direction and she considered them a moment before speaking. 
“I want duct tape and a blanket,” she said, and when Uncle protested because none was at hand, she replied in his own words, “No drugs, no bruises.”
She would get what she wanted because Lumani would be tasked with making sure of it, though nothing in that regard was said here in this room. 
The client was impatient and demanding. If they couldn’t deliver on his schedule, he would rescind his order, 
or worse, up the stakes and create more hoops for them to jump through, else the doll would have to be terminated. 
Uncle risked losing his investment, so therefore Lumani would provide and they would leave today, 
even if it meant this afternoon, which would turn this delivery into a minimum two-day event.
Uncle spoke again, words of control, words of deterrence, to keep this woman from straying from the plan; every action had consequence, each delay a price. 
He offered her another smile, a smile that made Lumani’s insides burn. 
The Michael woman stood and Uncle handed her a cell phone. “This phone is your life,” he said. “Don’t lose it. Keep it on always.”
The phone was the line of communication through which they were tethered, the means through which she would receive instructions for each leg of the journey. 
It was also bugged for sound and tagged for location so that they could electronically see and hear her always. 
Should she choose to risk damage to Logan by pulling the battery, the car held similar equipment. But these things Uncle never mentioned.
Lumani, with his rifles, with his training, would be the one to ensure that she didn’t deviate from the plan, the one to report the moves upon which Logan’s life depended.

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Chapter 10 ZAGREB, CROATIA
Munroe sat on the mattress, back to the wall, eyes closed, forearms resting against her knees. 
To wait in darkness was familiar from long ago, to allow the night to swallow her and take with it the fear of helplessness and the impatience for action.
One breath followed another while inside her head countermove played against counterstrategy, and she ordered and reordered, ended and started over in an attempt to see past the ruin, 
until noise in the hallway pulled her from her trance back to the madness. The door slid open. She opened her eyes. 
Arben filled the space, his body a silhouette against the hallway light, and he didn’t say anything, as if his presence was all the order she would need. 
Beyond him was another shadow— most probably the nameless guy, Arben Two. 
Neither man entered the cell, and this time the big man didn’t flinch when she stood and walked toward him.
Munroe followed Arben down the narrow hall, up the stairs, and through the gold-working room, which was now dark and deserted. 
Artificial light from the outside filtered in through the windows, casting just enough of an ambient glow on empty workstations that flashlights weren’t needed, 
and up ahead yellow light and muted conversation filtered out of the Doll Maker’s office.
Arben rapped on the door and opened it without waiting. Nodded Munroe inside, and for the third time that day she found herself in the presence of the crazy man. 
This time he sat on the edge of his desk, assessing a life-size doll seated on a chair in the middle of the room. 
Lumani was to the right, standing military at-ease. He turned toward her only long enough to acknowledge her presence and then, expressionless, returned focus to his uncle.
Munroe stepped into the room and the creases in the Doll Maker’s forehead relaxed. 
He smiled and motioned her closer. “Come, come,” he said. “She’s here for you to see, your package.”
Munroe moved to the center of the room and circled the chair, speechless, tempted to reach out to touch the soiled, matted blond hair that had been transformed into perfect silky ringlets.
Hair, makeup, clothes, Mary Jane shoes— Neeva was an exact replica of a doll, 
every aspect perfect and convincing down to the bright blue eyes, which were glazed, heavy-lidded, and staring straight ahead in a drugged stupor.
The Doll Maker said, “She’s beautiful, yes?” and Munroe nodded, because in truth Neeva took her breath away. 
Here it was obvious why the screen came to life when Neeva was on it, why the world raced to find her, and most important, why it would be impossible to hide her in transport.
The Doll Maker straightened, and while Munroe continued to study the girl, he passed to the shelves behind her. 
“My client has rules,” he said.
Munroe turned to face him.
He pulled down a smaller version of Neeva, who, like the living girl, was dressed in green velvet. 
“No bruises,” he said. “No scars. No drugs. She must remain perfect and undamaged, and any deviation is considered failure.”
He cradled the doll. “Rules,” he said. “How to control an animal with such handcuffs, I don’t know, but she’s your problem now.” 
He looked up and smiled. “This one comes from Italy. Not custom-made, but beautiful nonetheless.” 
And then, as if there had never been an interruption or a derailed train of thought: 
“My customer grows impatient, especially considering the news and the attention. The price is good, but nothing is worth the scrutiny this brings on us.”
Munroe turned from him back to Neeva, whose eyelids drooped and opened again. To the Doll Maker she said, “You said no drugs.”
He shrugged. “It couldn’t be helped. It was the only way we could get her cleaned up, but it will be out of her system soon and no one will know. 
“It’s our secret and we can’t repeat it. You’ll have to find another way to control her.”
“No bruises.”
“Yes, yes,” he said. “It’s tedious, but the merchandise must remain undamaged, those are the instructions.”
“Why?” she asked.
The Doll Maker shrugged. “Who can say, and who cares? For a good customer that pays, we do what we do and ask no questions.”
“So this is not the first?”
The Doll Maker cooed slightly, fingers resting on brunette curls, lifeless eyes to lifeless eyes. 
“Not the first,” he said. “And if you succeed, not the last.”
Munroe continued her way around Neeva, one in a line of stolen lives. 
She said, “And if I fail?”
“No failure.”
“Ever?”
“Not without a price.”
Completing another circle, focus always on the girl, she said, “It’s a lot that you expect of me. 
“You with your guns and your men have had to drug her to control her. I’m but one person and you want me to do what you can’t.”
“It’s not my problem anymore,” he said. “You do it. You fix it. You follow the rules. 
“If you break them, if you fail, the innocent suffer. When you’ve delivered and I’m paid my money, I let your friend go.”
“And me,” Munroe said. “Let’s not forget that I’m also your prisoner.”
“I let you go, too,” he said. He still stared at the doll in his arms, and Munroe’s eyes left his face, for the walls, for the ceiling, 
for the reason that not one blink or blush, not one muscle in his body had betrayed his lie.
“I’ll need your plan,” she said.
“Through Italy and into France,” he said. “The two days to allow for any possible delays. 
“One day straight if the package behaves.”
Not highly likely.
“The easiest way to deliver would be to fly her,” Munroe said. “The same way that you got me here, probably the way you got her here, and you really don’t need me for that.”
“You can transport her any way you wish,” he said. “She’s your problem and your responsibility. But you will have to provide your own jet and pilots.”
Munroe walked yet another slow circle around the chair, analysis disguised as interest in Neeva’s doll-perfect clothing. 
Inside her head the permutations of getting airborne played against the odds of making a break with Neeva and rescuing Logan before the crazy man and his minions caught on and killed him first.
No matter which way the pieces moved, Logan was always too far away. She needed time. Needed to drag this out as long as possible. 
To the Doll Maker she said, “If I drive?”
“I’ll provide a car.”
“Is it a stolen car?”
“The plates are good,” he said as if that was all that mattered, and then added, with a toying smile, “and I will pay for gas.”
“Tomorrow, so that the drugs have time to flush out of her system?”
The Doll Maker nodded.
Munroe pointed to Neeva. “Are you taking her back to the cell?”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Until we are ready for transport.”
“She’ll get dirty again.”
“The mattress has been changed,” he said, “but still, such a waste.” 
He took the doll from his arms to rest her on the desk, then walked to Neeva. Ran his fingers through her curls and along the outer seam of the lace and velvet dress. 
“It would be so much more pleasant if we could keep her like this. She is a true doll. Made to order. A collector’s item. It’s no wonder she fetches such a high price.”
The Doll Maker nodded toward Lumani, who called the Arbens inside. 
Together, they lifted Neeva by her elbows and instead of dragging her out the door they worked her nearly useless legs forward.
Upright, Neeva was even more childlike than she’d appeared while seated. 
Tiny and slender, she stood five foot two at the most, probably closer to five flat— 
everything opposite to the larger-than-life personality, the image on the big screen that created something much greater out of this little person.
“What will they do with her?” Munroe said.
“Undress her and put her to bed.”
His words and the nonchalance with which he spoke them sent blood rushing to her head. Munroe took a step in Neeva’s direction, to block the way. 
An involuntary movement, an urge to protect and intervene so strong that it overcame reason and took her by surprise nearly as much as it did the Arbens, who paused in their exit. 
She took another step, this time deliberate, and another until she was solidly between Neeva and the door.
The Doll Maker smiled as if reproving a young child. “It won’t do to become attached to the merchandise,” he said, 
and when Munroe didn’t move, he added, “She is worth more to me whole than whatever temporary use the men might make of her.”
Slow and hesitant, she stepped aside and the Doll Maker smiled, triumphant, wordless in his gloating, 
while the Arbens walked Neeva out the door and Munroe stared after them.
When the door had shut, the Doll Maker said, “You will stay in the holding area. We’ll leave your door open, 
“but if you attempt to climb the stairs, we will take measures against your collateral. You understand this?”
Munroe nodded, still moving with the trancelike tempo of the conversation, navigating around the chair so that this time her path took her in Lumani’s direction.
Throughout this entire exchange the young man had remained silent and motionless, his gaze following his uncle like that of a loyal dog waiting for approval, waiting for orders. 
Each measured step brought her closer to him, though her attention remained entirely on the Doll Maker, who continued in his smugness.
In a movement both sudden and violent, Munroe turned midstep and in the heartbeat of Lumani’s delayed reaction, she punched fingers to his trachea and grabbed his wrist.
She jerked his arm behind his back and shoved him, gagging, to his knees. 
Lumani’s free hand flexed and reached for his shin, and she, knowing that in his moment of panic he would attempt to access any weapon he carried, moved faster than he did, finding and unsheathing his knife.
The handle connected with her palm like a creation returning to its mold, metal against skin, familiar and soothing, calling out to be used, begging to shed blood. 
She pressed the flat of the blade to Lumani’s throat and held it there.
At the desk, the Doll Maker picked up his doll and, ignoring Munroe and Lumani, cradled her again. 
In his indifference, as in his lies, no tell of betrayal marked his face, no body language spoke his hidden thoughts. 
The Doll Maker smiled at the porcelain face that stared lifelessly at him. Without looking up, he said, “You’ll pay for this failure.”
Lumani twitched and Munroe drew the flat of the blade across his neck to prevent instinct from slitting his throat. 
“Is it worth the price of this one?” she said. “Or the destruction of the package?”
“I’ll get what I need with or without you,” the Doll Maker said.
Munroe pulled Lumani to his feet and stepped back from him. Slid the knife along the floor in his direction. 
“I also have a choice, and I think we’ve both made our points,” she said. “I want to see Logan, video streamed live so I can confirm his current condition.”
“I can arrange that,” the Doll Maker said.
“By tonight?”
“It’ll be done,” he said. “Tomorrow.”
“I’m going downstairs,” she said. “You don’t need to guard me. Leave me alone and let me know when the girl is awake.”

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Chapter 9
GATESVILLE, TEXAS
It was nine in the morning when Bradford drove into the parking area of the Mountain View prison unit. 
He had no legitimate reason for being here on such short notice, much less on a weekday and outside of visiting hours. 
It had taken an hour and a half on the phone during the drive down, and two hours this morning, asking favors and pulling strings, to make certain he’d get this far.
He’d rolled into town at ten last night and spent the remaining hours between dark and dawn at a nearby hotel, grabbing what little rest he could from a mind that wouldn’t shut down. 
Replays and guilt. Possibilities and connections. 
Questions that didn’t have answers, until after a while it had all run together in a muddy pool and the sun began to rise.
Bradford switched off the ignition. Before stepping out, he emptied his pockets, dumping everything, phone included, into the console. He repocketed his ID. 
None of the rest was allowed into the visitation area anyway, and the unnecessary clutter would only slow things down during the security screening.
He paused before shutting the door, hesitant to move forward. 
Not because of what he might find, but for what, even after coming all this way to reach, he might not yet acquire. 
There were answers here, he was certain of it, but even after the warden had granted the exemption necessary for this visitation, he still didn’t know if Katherine Breeden would see him.
Breeden was a lawyer, a damn good lawyer— thorough, clinical, brilliant, warm, and ruthless— a lawyer in prison for a murder she didn’t commit. 
She was there, not because she wasn’t smart enough to disentangle herself from the corrections system as quickly as she’d been dumped into it, but because Bradford had seen to it that she wouldn’t try.
His success had taken ten minutes from start to finish, a conversation that had wrapped his metaphorical arm around her neck and put her in a choke hold, 
back when she’d been sitting behind bars in county, with bail set so high she couldn’t post a bond and flee, awaiting a trial being pushed through with impossible speed. 
Bradford hadn’t seen her since and it was difficult to know what to expect, what angle of approach would get what he wanted from a woman he was blackmailing into silence.
She had to know he was coming. What was the point in being diabolically brilliant if there was no one around to admire the effort?
Even if Breeden hated him, he was one of the few to whom she could gloat, 
perhaps the only one who could appreciate the endurance and tenacity necessary for a woman in her position to exact any form of revenge— assuming she’d had anything to do with Munroe’s abduction. But she had to have.
Breeden had taken the fall for a crime that wasn’t hers because, to paraphrase a man Bradford had once known, she was risking her life to save it from a greater fear. 
Based on what he’d seen on those credit-card receipts, the people Breeden had kept silent for, the people she’d feared, were the kind of men who minced bodies into pieces rather than risk the repercussions and sting of betrayal.
Out of the aftermath of Munroe’s Africa assignment, in the last pages of that story, 
had come the documents that outlined corporate shells, legal structures, and the mechanisms through which a criminal organization run by a man known only as the Doll Maker moved, transported, and sold human souls.
Here, in the United States, Breeden had made it possible.
Bradford had stumbled upon the connection shortly before she’d been arrested, the same papers he’d shown to Walker and Jahan the day before, and used that information to control her. 
The dossier of investigations and dirt digging had uncovered what Breeden had created on American soil, 
and then in the threads of splotchy documentation went further, tracing back to Europe, 
drawing connections between the apparently legitimate businesses in the United States and a worldwide market that sold girls into sexual slavery.
None of the information Bradford held was specific enough to be provable, 
but it was enough to call attention to an organization that had thus far operated across borders invisibly and with impunity. 
He had taken the information to Breeden and threatened to make it all public in her name, knowing Breeden understood that if he did, these same men would guarantee her permanent silence.
Blackmail was as close to a death threat as Bradford could offer, and it had done the job. 
Breeden had kept silent, and he still didn’t know if she’d been aware from the beginning who her clients were and of the tender life they sold, 
or if her choice to facilitate these crimes had been accidental and he’d been the one to bring her the news.
At the time it hadn’t mattered. Breeden’s hands were certainly dirty in other affairs, and though she may not have been guilty of the murder, she wasn’t innocent, either.
Bradford shut the vehicle door and made his way inside, to face the screening procedure and the metal detectors and to move on finally to the common room, 
where those not on offenders’ visitation lists had through-the-glass, noncontact visits with inmates.
He was here because, despite what he still didn’t understand about Breeden’s prior involvement with the Doll Maker, the events of yesterday had been too precise to have been random, too accurate to have been accidental. 
Someone was feeding information to high-level filth, and Kate Breeden was the only possible pivot upon which all the pieces turned. 
Assuming he’d put the puzzle together properly, she would want to see him, if only to feel the triumph of his pain, and perhaps from this weakness he would learn what he wanted.
Bradford was directed to a chair by a prison guard, and waiting for him on the other side of the glass was Breeden. 
She smiled when she saw him. Not happiness, per se, or gloating. 
Something closer to the relief of seeing a face from beyond the walls, no matter how much she hated it, because that was better than nothing at all.
She didn’t wait for him to speak or even allow him a chance to fully settle and put the phone to his ear before she said, “Miles, what a pleasant surprise. I expected you eventually, of course, but certainly not so soon.”
Her words, the first third of which he’d lip-read, took the wind out of him. 
He’d come to find out what she knew— what she’d done— had tossed around opening lines and approaches, hoping to explain his presence without showing his hand, and she’d shut him down before he’d started.
His face must have registered surprise.
Breeden laughed. “Oh, Miles,” she said, “don’t be such a douche. 
“If you’ve been clever enough to come to me, then surely you had to know I’d be waiting for you.”
He swallowed bile and waited a half-beat. “What have you done, Kate?”
She smiled, Cheshire cat–like. “That’s such an open-ended question with so many potential surprises. Let’s be more specific, shall we, darling?”
“We both seem to know why I’m here, and we both know what I hold, so let’s just get on with it, okay?”
Her fake smile faded. “Well,” she said, scooting back. “Obviously, cordiality is not your forte. 
“As glad as I am for company, if you can’t be polite, if you can’t at least pretend to drag the conversation out with flattery or talk about the weather, I think I’m quite finished here.”
Phone still pressed to her ear, she moved to stand.
Bradford said, “How’s the food?”
Breeden laughed again. “That’s much better,” she said, and returned to the chair. “The food fucking sucks, thank you very much.”
“I like your choice in clothing,” he said. “It suits you.”
“Now you’re pushing your luck.”
“Do you like your roommates?”
She sighed and exhaled toward the ceiling as if she was blowing cigarette smoke. “College was worse.”
“Where’s Logan?”
She turned her eyes to his. “Things were going so nicely, and you’re ruining the fun.” 
She paused and then, as if the idea of Logan bored her, said, “I haven’t the foggiest clue.”
“But you knew they’d take him?”
“Oh, please,” she said. “Me? Locked up in here?”
“Look, Kate,” he said. “I’m not here to prove or disprove anything. I don’t have a recorder on me, I’m not taking notes, I’m not going to quote you, I’m not here to make your life difficult. 
“I just want to find Michael. The men who took Logan have already broken bones, he’s cut and bleeding bad, and I’ve got it on tape. 
“I need to find him before they kill him. Do you know where he is?”
“I don’t,” she said.
“Nor do you care.”
“No, not really.”
“And you had a hand in this?”
She shrugged. “Wouldn’t matter either way, would it? I’m already locked up, aren’t I?” 
She smiled again knowingly, teasingly, and Bradford understood then, ran the numbers, the timing, and it made sense now how it was that those who had taken Munroe had known where to find her. 
“You pointed the Tisdale family toward me to get to Michael, didn’t you?” 
Breeden didn’t answer, but her smile widened, as if it pleased her that at least he grasped her brilliance.
“They’re going to kill her,” Bradford said. “You know that, right?”
“Maybe,” Breeden said. “And maybe you should have thought about that before you put me in a room with no way out as a way to protect her.”
“I didn’t put you here.”
“Well, you made damn sure I wouldn’t get out,” she said, and then let out another long exhalation of imaginary smoke. 
“Someone always loses, Miles, and this time it won’t be me.”
“The information isn’t going to go away.”
She smiled once more, this time witheringly. “That’s the problem with men like you, all tough guy and bang-bang,” she said. 
“You’re stupid and short-sighted. Honestly, I don’t know what Michael sees in you— you don’t exactly play in her league.” 
She leaned back, phone placed on the desk, and stared at him a long while before returning to the handset and speaking again. 
“Do you know why Michael partnered with me?”
“Yeah, I do,” Bradford said.
“She didn’t allow me close because I was a lawyer, or even a friend or surrogate mother figure—”
He cut her off. “I know why she partnered with you, Kate. Does it make you feel good to say it?”
Breeden continued as if he’d never spoken. “I am as tough and devious as she is, Miles. You’d be wise to remember that.” 
She paused. Turned her eyes directly to his. “There’s not a thing you can do to me now,” she said. “If that information leaks, they’ll know it didn’t come from me.”
Bradford leaned toward the glass. “If that’s true, then there’s no harm in telling me where they’ve taken her.”
She rolled her eyes. “You really aren’t the brightest bulb in the box, are you? You have the information. You’ve always had it. Go be a good little boy and figure it out for yourself.”
He waited for the sting of frustration to pass and then, calm, emotionless, said, “You’re right, I’m not the smartest man. 
“Perhaps I should ask for help in figuring this thing out— maybe from the media and law enforcement.”
She laughed once more. “Oh, Miles, darling, such pleasant entertainment you provide today. 
“You already had your shot at trying to destroy me,” she said. “You’re good, but you aren’t that good. 
“I’m free of you now and I do find your myopia pathetically amusing, running here and there, so focused on Logan that you can’t see the bigger picture. 
“Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t possibly help someone so hopelessly obtuse.” She paused, nodded knowingly. 
“Don’t waste what precious little time you have.” And with that she put down the phone, stood, turned, and walked toward the guard on the other side.
Bradford watched her go, and when she was fully out of sight, he, too, stood. 
On his way out, he detoured for the additional hassle and bureaucratic aggravation necessary to gain access to Breeden’s visitor records. 
Pinpointing who she’d been talking to was easy considering there was only one name on record, though not one he recognized.
In the Explorer, Bradford shut his eyes and ran through their conversation, making mental notes and jotting words down on paper so as not to forget them. 
Lack of sleep and twenty-four hours of stress was starting to take a toll and irritation was setting in, made worse because he was now uncomfortably into his second day in the same set of clothes.
He pulled his phone from the console. Missed call from Samantha Walker. No voice mail, just a text asking him to get back to her. 
And a missed call from Alexis, Tabitha’s daughter, which got his mind churning. 
He waited until he was on the road, heading east on 84, before he returned Walker’s call.
“What did you get?” she asked.
“Enough to know we’re moving in the right direction,” he said, “but not enough to take a shortcut. You at the office?”
“I’ll be there in five,” she said. “I’m on my way back from Addison Airport. Why?”
“I’ve got a name for Jack to run, can you pass it along?”
“Yeah. And I’ve got a name for you,” she said.
“Who?”
“Michael Munroe.”
“You’re shitting me.”
“Nope. They had docs in her name— or I should say his name. And the guy accompanying her— him— is Valon Lumani.”
Bradford swore under his breath. The name Lumani was familiar to him from the blackmail pages. 
He was a kid, trained monkey and right-hand man to the Doll Maker, an orphaned nephew who had been under the Doll Maker’s wing since he was in diapers. 
That Lumani had been personally sent to collect Munroe was telling, as was the fact that he’d come prepared with documents for Munroe’s male persona. 
But the detail that put Bradford’s foot to the floor and sent the Explorer surging was that Lumani had traveled under his own name.
If the profiles assembled in the documents were accurate, the Doll Maker was a perfectionist, a stickler for detail, 
a man who lopped off fingers and toes, sometimes arms and legs, to punish those who failed to meet his expectations. 
If the nephew wasn’t worried about putting his real name on the line, then they weren’t worried about Munroe coming back after them.
He said, “Off the top of your head, who do we have on reserve?”
“Adams and Gonzalez.”
Men that didn’t get a lot of hazard time but were kept on call in case personnel was needed on short order. 
They weren’t vested as part of the core team but had been with the company long enough to step in just about anywhere when needed. 
“Bring them both in and set them up for surveillance,” he said. “I’m going to need them for round-the-clock tracking.”
“For how long?”
“As long as it takes. I’ll pay the bill out-of-pocket, so don’t harass me about the resource expense, 
“and I need you and Jack to start breaking down threads from that dossier and see what you can pull.”
“We’ve been on it all night,” she said. “I’ll call the guys in as soon as I get back to the office.”
“Listen,” he said. “I need you to do me a favor and swing by a couple of places— just drive-by stuff, see if you spot anything out of place: surveillance, odd activity, that type of thing.”
“Okay,” she said, but he could hear the sigh in her voice. “Where to?”
“Michael’s sister’s place. I just need to be sure we’re not overlooking anything.”
“More hostages?”
“Yeah, exactly. I’ll text you the details.”
He sent Walker the information, set down the phone, and stared through the windshield at the three hours of road ahead. 
He didn’t have the manpower, the resources, to protect everyone. 
His mind churned over what Breeden had said, and more specifically what she hadn’t. 
She’d pointed the Doll Maker’s men toward Munroe and Logan, but the why escaped him. 
What need did a man like the Doll Maker have that he would send his nephew to collect Munroe? Certainly not as a favor to Breeden. 
If this was meant to avenge the business lost since Breeden had been in prison or to release the choke hold and allow Breeden to work again, they would have simply killed Munroe and come after Bradford. 
Instead, Munroe was missing and they’d abducted Logan.
They needed Munroe for something, but that on its own made no sense. 
Her skills were overkill for the type of operation the Doll Maker ran, and bringing her on against her will meant absorbing an enormous risk. 
You brought Munroe in when the job required stealth and brains and a chameleonlike quality, a job where a strategist, tactician, and linguistics expert was your safest bet. 
You didn’t bring her in to do a job your men had been doing on their own for a decade, 
you brought her in when the stakes were high, when you were moving something that… And then it hit him. Neeva Eckridge.
He saw it now, the bigger picture, how Katherine Breeden the facilitator had offered Vanessa Michael Munroe as a fix to the Doll Maker’s problem of transporting the most sought-after face in the world. 
Breeden, who, outside of Logan, knew Munroe better than anyone.
Breeden was no longer afraid because she’d brokered a deal in exchange for her own life. 
If the Doll Maker should fail, Munroe’s only option would be to destroy him, and Bradford’s blackmail would be useless. 
If the Doll Maker succeeded, Munroe would die, and because of the brokered deal, Bradford’s blackmail would be useless. 
No matter the outcome, one of Breeden’s enemies would fall. No matter the outcome, Kate Breeden had already won.
MILES BRADFORD WALKED through the doors of Capstone Consulting to the sight of Samantha Walker in the middle of the reception area, sorting through a pile of boxes that were part of the steady stream of mail received on behalf of team members stationed abroad. 
She looked up when he entered, nodded an acknowledgment, and said, “Drove by both places, and everything seems to be normal. For now. 
“Reserves will be here in thirty minutes. Jack’s in the war room. I’ll be there in just a sec.”
He swiped his key card, the door buzzed open, and he stepped through. 
Beyond the dividing glass walls, Jahan’s head shifted up from the keyboard toward one of the monitors, which displayed a rapid database scan that paused occasionally to ping information.
Jahan didn’t turn when Bradford entered the war room, so Bradford let him be and instead stepped to the left side of the whiteboard, 
which was now heavily marked with fresh diagrams and notes, details his home team had obviously been puzzling over for far too many hours. 
The Doll Maker documents had been deconstructed and scrutinized, each thread of a potential trail broken down into further paths with dead ends crossed off and possible leads highlighted.
Names.
Companies.
Purchases.
Vehicles.
Properties.
Bradford wasn’t the only one running on lack of sleep.
With his back still turned, he said to Jahan, “These guys actually own stuff here in Dallas?”
A long pause and many keystrokes later Jahan answered. “Not sure yet,” he said. “We’re running into dead ends, a few red herrings. 
“Not everything’s as accurate as we’d hoped. We’re still trying to sort the valid from the rest.”
Considering the original information source, the news wasn’t entirely surprising. “Did the papers exaggerate?” Bradford said.
【字数上限，抱歉】