Black Friday (or Black Market) - James Patterson [69]
Caitlin was feeling numb everywhere; her body seemed no longer to belong to her. She found herself saying, “Thank you. I’m fine right here.”
“Your mum’s name is Margaret?” Cleverly timed.
“My mother’s name is Anna. Her maiden name is Reardon.”
“No tracking device anywhere on your person?”
“No.”
Caitlin had answered a little too quickly, she thought. Her skin went cold. Suddenly she couldn’t breathe at all.
There was no apparent reaction, nothing she could perceive as wrong from the Irish men. They seemed to believe her, not even to question what she’d said about the tracking device.
“I have to check you all the same. Pat you down. All right, here goes.”
Clumsy, male hands (Mechanic? Some kind of working man?) groped all over her body. Caitlin stiffly tensed her legs as a man’s hand wedged up between. The intruding hand felt very harsh and rude. The worst part so far. Probably not the worst she was going to experience today though.
“If you have a transmitter, we have orders to kill you ….If you don’t tell us right now. Don’t he about this, dearie. Don’t lie, missy. I’m quite serious. Do you? Do you have any tracking device? We’ll check you thoroughly, as soon as we’re out of here. Please tell me the truth.”
“I have no tracking device on me.” Inside me. Could they really find that?
There was no more talking after that. The body search ended abruptly.
Caitlin’s ears stayed plugged, as if she were trapped in a vacuum. Her heart lodged very high up in her throat. The car’s engine coughed and came alive.
Someone suddenly wiped her face with a dripping-wet hand cloth.
Jesus. The fumes were everywhere. The fumes wouldn’t let her breathe.
“No, I—”
Chapter 49
“OH, BUGGER IT. Look at this hopeless mess,” Patrick Frazier exclaimed.
Torrents of water jackhammered the Bentley that Carroll and Inspector Patrick Frazier were riding in. Rain blasted the steamy windshields, hitting with the solid force of a firehose.
It had begun to spit rain at five minutes to six. Then suddenly it was coming down heavily, piercing the mist, making it near impossible to see the road ahead.
“They’re on the Falls Road now. That’s in the rough and tumble part of Belfast,” Frazier said. “The Provisional Irish Republican Army owns it …. It’s your basic urban ghetto where they regularly ambush our soldiers. Hit and run snipers in there, mostly. Urban guerrilla warfare at its best.”
Both Carroll and Frazier were hunched forward in the front seat of the Bentley. The transmitter-beeper tracking Caitlin was coming over loud and clear. It sounded a little like a sequence of radar blips, all originating somewhere deep in Caitlin’s stomach.
Carroll couldn’t help thinking of a heart-monitoring device in an intensive care unit, something that registered one’s hold on life. Poor Caitlin. But he couldn’t have done anything to stop her from going—he couldn’t have offered himself as a substitute messenger, the instructions had been specific and final.
The monitoring blip blip blip was becoming louder now, and more stubbornly insistent.
The car with Caitlin inside was apparently slowing down. Maybe it was temporarily stopped at a street light? In heavy traffic? What now?
“Range closing fast, sir,” reported the driver.
“Hang it. They’re at the home base,” Patrick Frazier sharply pronounced. His driver immediately stepped down on the gas. The Bentley leaned forward with a thrusting surge of power.
“Either that, or they’re switching transportation,” Carroll had another thought.
Carroll’s mind cocooned tightly around the thought of Caitlin in serious danger. He was both angry and afraid.
“Let’s get in closer to her. Come on! Come on, let’s move it now!” Carroll snapped at the British Special Service driver.
Less than two miles away, the black cloth hood was raised up over Caitlin’s head; she reeled away as acrid smelling salts were passed under her nose. Her watering eyes rolled backward.
“Unhh?”
Focus. There were dull-edged silhouettes rather than faces clustered all around