First Daughter - Eric van Lustbader [48]
"I've got to go now, Mom." She almost choked on her emotions, had to bite back the words that threatened to keep tumbling out: Mom, Alli's been abducted. We don't know whether she's alive or dead. "Our love to you and to Dad."
She snapped the phone shut, bit down on it until the metal showed the marks of her small white teeth.
ON THAT note, maybe we should talk about Emma, your best friend," Ronnie Kray said. "Our mutual acquaintance." He slipped a photo out of the file, held it up for Alli to see. It was a snapshot, slightly grainy, of two girls walking across the Langley Fields campus. "Recognize the two of you? You and Emma McClure."
Alli, staring at the photograph, remembered the moment: It was October 1, just after noon. She remembered what they were talking about. How could she forget! Seeing that intimate moment preserved, knowing that she and Emma had been spied upon gave her the willies. Then it hit her like a ton of bricks: The surveillance had been going on a long, long time. Someone—maybe the man facing her—had wormed himself into her bed, under her skin, wrapped himself around her bones, lying out of sight while she, unknowing, went about her life. She had to fight the queasy churning of her stomach. Having read both 1984 and Brave New World, having her own life so tightly controlled, she was under the impression that she knew the meaning of intrusion. But this invasion was monstrous, Big Brother on steroids.
"I told Emma about Bark." Her mind was racing so fast, she grew dizzy, even more disoriented. "Emma told you?"
"Did she? What do you think?"
"What do I think?" she echoed stupidly. She felt as if she were in an elevator whose cable had been cut, was now in free fall. "I knew her. She couldn't, she wouldn't."
He cocked his head. "May I ask what might seem an impertinent question? What in the world were you doing slumming? Emma McClure wasn't from your socioeconomic class. She was rough-and-tumble, from the wrong side of the tracks, as we said back in the day. Not your kind at all."
Alli's eyes blazed. "That just shows how much you don't know!"
His face hardened like a fist. "I thought we were friends. I was even thinking of untying you, despite the danger it would put me in. But now . . ."
"Please untie me. I'm sorry I talked to you that way." Her cresting fear made her voice quaver like a glass about to shatter. "I'll never do it again, if only you'll untie me."
He shook his head.
The pain congealed with outrage into an intolerable barb inside her. "You can't treat me like this! My father will move heaven and earth to find me!"
Abruptly, Kray took out surgical pliers. Alli thought she was going to pass out. What was he planning to do to her? She'd seen plenty of films filled with scenes of torture. She tried to remember what happened in those scenes, but her mind was blind with panic. Her terror mounted to unbearable heights.
She watched him stand up. She was shaking now, couldn't take her eyes off the pliers, which, glowing, swung in a short arc, back and forth. Then, without any warning, Kray disappeared into the blackness.
Alli couldn't believe it, but she actually began to weep. She tried to stop, but her body wouldn't obey. Some animal part of her nervous system had been activated. What she was feeling she could neither believe nor abide: She wanted him back. The feeling was so powerful, it was as physical as the pliers.
He was her only connection to the outside world, to life. "Don't leave me alone!" she wailed. "I don't care what you do to me, I'll never tell you about Emma," she said through her tears.
"Quite the little loyalist, aren't you?" His voice came from the darkness. "No matter. As it happens, I already know all I need to know about Emma McClure."
She felt a wave of nausea as her terror ratcheted