I’m being kidnapped. It’s finally happening.The thought rushed through Winter like a river of ice. It’d always been a possibility—and the real reason Claire seemed perpetually paranoid about his safety. He could hear the blood pounding in his ears. Was this why none of his bodyguards had been around? Had these people done something to them?
“And why not?” Winter asked as calmly as he could. As he did, one of his hands ran along the edge of the door, seeking the lock.
“They’re all auto-locked from the driver’s side,” said the woman sitting beside him. She ran a light hand across the side of her blue hijab, then regarded him with a pair of calm, deep-set eyes.
Winter’s hand stopped, and he reached instead for his phone, ready to trigger its emergency call feature. “If it’s a ransom you want,” he said quietly, “contact my manager. But I’m warning you. Claire won’t be happy to hear this, and you really, really don’t want to piss her off.”
“No ransom needed. It’s not money we’re after, Mr. Young.” The woman nodded at his hand. “Keep your phone where it is. It won’t work in here, anyway. This is just a CPU.”
Winter’s hand stopped short of the phone. “A what?” he asked.
She waved a flippant hand. “A car pick up. A meeting. We’ll only take a few minutes of your time.”
Now they sounded less like kidnappers and more like… solicitors? Winter frowned at her, his temper rising. “A few minutes? What the hell is going on? Who are you?”
They had exited the stadium gates now and were heading up the street. The woman reached into her pocket to pull something out. Winter tensed, wondering for a split second if he was going to have to wrestle a gun out of her hand—but then the woman held up a badge and flipped it open to an ID.
“Sauda Nazari, Panacea Group,” she said.
Winter shook his head. His heart was still pounding in his ears, and he blinked, trying to make sense of the situation. “What?”
“The Panacea Group. Panacea means a solution—”
“I know what panacea means,” Winter snapped. “What’s this? Who areyou, some kind of CIA agent?”
The man up front snorted. “Close. But good guess.”
Winter shook his head. This was getting more and more confusing.
“The CIA hires us for the jobs they don’t want to do,” Sauda explained.
“I really don’t need your jokes right now.”
She looked at him. “These are not the eyes of a joker, Mr. Young.”
He stared at her before she finally broke her gaze and glanced ahead at the windshield. Up in the front, the man sighed.
“What did I tell you?” he grumbled. “There’s still time to return him to the stadium. Should we just drop him off and pick someone else?”
“Give him some time, Niall.” She looked at the man through the rearview mirror and gave him a small, winsome smile. “Please, for me.”
He muttered something unintelligible again, but settled back into silence.
She turned to eye Winter. “We’re who the CIA calls when they’re looking to… outsource some work,” she said. “The Panacea Group is a private company, and we look for unconventional agents. We have a certain amount of leeway that our government-run cousin doesn’t. Less red tape, more funding, if you will. The ability to move faster. So we take on anything that slips through the CIA’s political cracks.”
“You really are serious,” Winter muttered.
“That’s what I said,” Sauda replied.
“The CIA.”
“The Panacea Group.”
“Panacea. Okay.” Winter rubbed his forehead. “Is this standard procedure, kidnapping people without telling them what you want? Isthat legal? Because I hope you know that in about half an hour, my missing status will be the top headline on every newscast in the world.”
Sauda leaned forward on her knees. “Rest assured, Mr. Young, that as soon as we finish this conversation, we will drop you off wherever you want to be.”
“And the conversation is?”
