Cindy Dees - Special Forces - The Spy

She didn’t have a peanut-sized bladder, and in the absence of anything to drink didn’t particularly have to use the restroom, but she still took the chance when offered. Who knew when they would stop again? And it felt good to get up and move around, get some circulation back in her legs. Wary of her captors killing the cashier, she didn’t cause a fuss as Goldeneyes marched her inside.

She did, however, make a point of saying hello to the teen girl behind the counter and making direct eye contact with her. Maybe if this girl saw some sort of news story on a kidnapped woman, she would remember seeing Piper and call the authorities.

Goldeneyes had a painfully tight grip on her elbow as they walked past the store attendant, and Piper didn’t test his unspoken warning to behave herself. There was no telling how far his goodwill would extend, and she’d pushed it pretty hard already.

He deposited her back in the van and went inside once more, returning after a few minutes carrying several grocery bags full of sandwiches and snacks.

Oh, no. That looked like road-trip food. Which meant they still had a ways to go before reaching their final destination.

“Where are we headed?” she tried.

Her captors just stared at her stonily.

The van pulled back out onto the road, and despair washed through her. The next time they stopped, she needed to let someone know she was in trouble and to call the police. But how? With Goldeneyes hovering over her every move and the threat that his teammates would kill innocent bystanders ringing in her ears, it wasn’t like she had a lot of options.

He passed her a bottle of water. Silently, she took it and downed the whole thing. She had to give him credit; he was taking pretty decent care of her, all things considered. For the moment, at least, these men seemed interested in keeping her alive. Thank God.

At least she was able to tell by the setting sun that they were traveling more or less toward the north, and maybe slightly west. By now they had to have left Louisiana, which put them possibly in Arkansas.

They started to go up and down hills—which made sense if they were in the western portion of Arkansas, entering the Ozark Plateau. Which was both good and bad news. Good because it was lush country with plenty of food, water, shelter and cover for her eventual escape. The bad news was that it was isolated country with areas of very sparse population. She might have to evade her captors for days before she found help.

Why in the world had these men gone to all the trouble of kidnapping her just to haul her off on this extended road trip? Why not kill her in or near Houma? Did they plan to ransom her back to the Medusas? Surely they knew the US government adhered to a strict pay-no-ransom policy. And it wasn’t like she had a rich family that would cough up money for her return. Her dad owned a small auto-repair shop and her mom was a preschool teacher.

Her captors took turns napping and driving into the evening, all except for Goldeneyes. He seemed to have appointed himself her personal guard, and the other men seemed to have silently agreed to let him assume all babysitting duties.

A small blessing for which she was grateful. He seemed generally concerned about her comfort and well-being, while the other men looked at her with open contempt as if she were of no more worth or interest than a bug crawling across the floor of the van. Their dismissive attitude would be their undoing if she had anything to say about it.

It had gotten dark outside when she noticed most of the men were dozing. Only the driver and Goldeneyes were awake. His disturbingly beautiful stare was locked on her like it had been for most of the past twelve hours.

“What’s your real name?” she asked in a low voice.

“Amir.”

“Fine. Be that way. I’ll just stick to calling you Goldeneyes in my mind.”

His right eyebrow lifted faintly, but he didn’t show any other reaction.

“My name is Piper.”

He replied firmly, “Your name is Persephone Black.”

“I beg your pardon?” she blurted. He’d asked about a Mrs. Black when he’d first stormed into the school office. Was she a teacher? Why would these men kidnap an elementary school teacher?

“Your name. It’s Persephone Black. You can pretend to be anyone you want. But we know who you really are.”

What on God’s green earth was he talking about? Had they kidnapped the wrong person?

“But...you looked right at me... You said you’d seen my picture...that you knew I was the right person—”

“Quiet,” he bit out low, cutting her off.

She looked away from him and realized that the man who acted like the leader was awake, his eyes barely slitted open. How had “Amir” known the boss was awake? She hadn’t gotten the slightest indication of it—not even a hint of intuition that she was being watched. Wow. Her powers of observation were messed up worse than she’d realized. And his—they were sharp and on point.

“May I please have some more water?” she asked meekly.

Goldeneyes passed her a bottle of water without comment.

She downed it and added the bottle to the pile of trash growing in the back of the van: food wrappers and soda cans. These men’s discipline clearly did not extend to picking up after themselves. Either that or they planned to ditch the van at some point. Still. There would be fingerprints and DNA all over that trash.

With darkness, the team had taken off their sunglasses and hats, and she’d seen all their faces now. She’d watched them all evening, learning each man’s features from many different angles. The bump on the bridge of a nose, the angle of a jaw, the shape and fullness of lips, even the timbre of their voices.

She was confident she could pick out any of these men from a lineup if it ever came to that. Now she just had to make sure she stayed alive and got away so it could.

All of them except Goldeneyes were black haired, dark eyed, and their skin was caramel toned, in keeping with a Middle Eastern heritage. Two of them looked quite young, in their early twenties.

The other three looked hard as nails and closer to their midthirties in age. The older men reminded her of Gunnar Torsten. They all had the same hardness and cool, lethal confidence as her boss. She made a mental note not to mess with any of the older men.

As for Goldeneyes, he was the odd man out. Besides his fair coloring, he looked about thirty years old, and he carried himself differently than the others. At least, he did now.

When he’d stormed into the school office, he’d exhibited all the deadly confidence of the older men. But now, he slouched in the back of the van, eyes down, shoulders hunched. As if he was trying to make himself invisible to the other men. Odd. He didn’t strike her as the submissive-follower type. At all. But he was clearly acting like the low man in the pecking order.

The van slowed and turned off the winding two-lane road they’d been following up and down mountainsides for the past hour. It commenced bumping and banging over what was obviously some sort of bad dirt road.

They spent two or three more minutes getting tossed all over the back of the van, and then, just like that, the vehicle stopped. The driver turned off the ignition.

They’d arrived. Wherever that might be.

The silence and stillness were a shock to her system after spending the last twelve hours or so in the rumbling, vibrating van.

“Out,” the one called Mahmoud ordered.

Bijan, one of the young ones, opened the double back doors, and Piper glimpsed the dark silhouette of a decent-sized log cabin with a long porch across its front. Trees—deciduous, she noted—crowded close, and there was no ambient light in the sky to indicate a city of any kind nearby. Yup. These guys had brought her out into the middle of nowhere to hold for whatever dastardly purpose they had in mind for her.