Page 45 of France Face-Off
“What if she’s being kidnapped?” Saying the words made it all the more disturbing. “The bomb threat could’ve been a diversion to get her out of the building.”
“We thought of that. But we can’t be certain.” Lucie said something to someone in the background. “Striker, we’ve chartered a plane, and it’s scheduled to take off in twenty minutes.”
Striker clenched his fists. “Twenty minutes is twenty minutes too late.”
“She has the tracking device on her still. We can follow her. Get to the airport. We’ll find her.”
“Just stop the damned plane.”
“It’s too late,” Lucie said. “It left the ground.”
Chapter 11
A splitting headache woke Alex. She hadn’t felt this kind of pain since she’d had too much vodka with her friends at a nightclub in Moscow. The trouble was she couldn’t remember drinking anything. She couldn’t remember what she’d been doing to cause so much pain.
The last thing she did remember was…the summit…leaving the hotel through a rear door…a bomb threat.
She blinked her eyes open and frowned. This wasn’t her hotel room, and it wasn’t Daniel’s.
No, Daniel wasn’t right…
Dane. But he liked to be called Striker. Why was her head so fuzzy, and what was that roaring noise?
The room she was in dipped. She tried to put her arms out to steady herself, only to discover she couldn’t move them. Alex looked down at the duct tape wrapped around her wrists. She tried to move her legs but couldn’t. They were bound at the ankles.
Then it all came back to her.
The bomb threat. The truck. The men in coveralls, wearing baseball caps, who’d grabbed her.
Her heart pounded against her chest as she stared around at the walls surrounding her. They weren’t like normal walls, and she was in a small space with small round windows, lying across a couple of seats. And that roar like jet engines…
She was in an airplane.
Alex raised her bound hands to her right breast, where she always tucked the flash drive in her bra. Her breath caught in her throat, and she almost moaned out loud.
It was gone.
The thunk of something dropping below her and snapping in place indicated landing gear had been deployed. But where were they landing? And who had taken her?
She struggled to sit up, just to fall back onto the seat as the plane landed hard on the tarmac and screamed to a stop.
Two men appeared above her, grabbed her beneath her arms and hauled her to her feet.
“Who are you?” she demanded. “Where are you taking me?”
One of them stuffed a wad of cloth in her mouth. The other man dragged a cloth sack over her head and body, and then lifted her up, slinging her over his shoulder.
She bounced along, the man’s shoulder digging into her belly as he descended the stairs out of the plane and walked across a hard surface. When he stopped, he dropped her onto another hard surface that smelled of rubber and oil. Then something slammed over her, taking away what little light had made it through the thick canvas of the sack that had been thrown over her.
An engine started. Not the roaring engine of a jet airplane, but a smaller one, like that of a car. Soon, they were moving along what sounded like paved roads with the occasional pothole.
Alex figured she was in the trunk of a vehicle.
The wad of cloth in her mouth gagged her. For several minutes, she pushed at it with her tongue until she finally shoved it past her teeth and spit it out. Once she was able to breathe normally, she wiggled and scooted, trying to work the bag off her body. After several failed attempts, she finally managed to push it up over her head. Still trapped in a dark, confined space, she had only herself to get her out of this mess. Striker wouldn’t have any idea where they’d taken her. He might even think she’d taken the opportunity to leave the summit and go back into hiding. She wondered if he’d be sad that she hadn’t come to say goodbye.
Her heart ached at the thought of never seeing him again. He’d been the only person in a long time that she’d wanted to be around. The only person she’d trusted.
And making love…
