He clicked his way through something, following intently, while Nicole trembled. Though it was cold in the warehouse, sweat coated her torso, drops falling between her breasts. Terror made her heart pump so hard she thought it would jump out of her chest.
Utter silence except for the genteel, expensive whir of top-of-the-line electronics, then the man sat back with a sigh. He looked at the other man, next to Nicole. “Got it.”
“Great,” the man next to her answered.
“Now.” The intruder stared coldly at Nicole, picking the gun up once more, placing it against her father’s knee again. “Has this information been forwarded? Did you send the file to anyone?”
Nicole had no idea which file he meant, but she hadn’t e-mailed anyone in the past thirty-six hours.
She shook her head and he nodded. She had no saliva in her mouth to answer.
The man had the air of someone wrapping something up. It was coming to a head. “Did you send it to the cloud?”
“I don’t use the cloud for data storage.”
He grunted. “Did you copy it to a flash drive?” She shook her head. “Show me.” His voice was low, harsh, affectless.
Nicole lowered her purse to the floor and shoved it to him with her foot, as she had with the hard disk. “In the side pocket,” she said, her dry mouth making the words hard to understand.
He extracted the flash drive, inserted it into the USB port and clicked through it. If it was on the hard disk but not on the flash drive, it must be a file that had arrived on the twenty-eighth or later.
He nodded and looked her straight in the eyes. She forced herself to meet his gaze. It was like looking into a dark abyss.
“Swear that you haven’t copied or forwarded the file.” The man pressed his gun hard against her father’s knee. Sweat broke out on her father’s face, but he said nothing.
“I swear! Please, oh please don’t hurt him!” Nicole cried. Oh God, she couldn’t stand this. Her father was so sick, so fragile. He’d been without pain medication for hours. He was in agony, she could tell.
Nicole watched the man’s eyes, watched the utter indifference to her father’s pain.
A flood of rage swept through her. This man was like every cruel man who had ever lived. He enjoyed holding power over others, he enjoyed inflicting pain, simply because he could.
He looked at her for a full minute. “I believe you,” he finally said, with a nod. “Which means we won’t be needing you anymore.”
He nodded to his partner and lifted the gun from her father’s knee to place it against his head. In the same instant, Nicole felt the round cold circle of a gun muzzle against the nape of her neck.
Oh God. This was it.
She and her father were going to die right here, right now, in a cold, empty, abandoned warehouse with the stench of machine oil and rat droppings in their nostrils, where their bodies might not be found for months. Though, come to think of it, there was the big wide ocean right outside. Weighted down with chains, no one would ever find their bodies.
Nicole wanted to plead, to ask for mercy, but there was no mercy at all in those light brown eyes, as dead and opaque as marbles.
“I guess it’s good-bye, Ms. Pearce.” The man’s hand tightened, white showing on the knuckles.
“No!” she screamed, leaping forward, trying crazily to reach her father, as if she could somehow place herself between the bullet and her father in the time it took the man to pull the trigger.
She was hauled back brutally by the hair by the other man. He knocked her to her knees and placed his gun against the back of her head again. Crazily, Nicole braced, as if that would help her deflect a bullet.
She looked over at her father through the tears swimming in her eyes. If she could at least have departed this life looking into his eyes, so they could go together…but his head lay heavily against his chest, unconscious. He’d slip from unconsciousness into death…
Two shots rang in the room and she cried out. In shock, and then, after a second, surprise. It took her seconds to get her bearings. She was…she was still alive! As was her father, slumped and pale and broken, but alive.
A pink mist had bloomed around the intruder’s head. He had an expression of utter and total astonishment. He sat on the stool for a long moment, a round pink hole in the center of his forehead. Then, suddenly, as if the weight of the gun against her father’s head were too great to bear, the pistol slipped from his hand, falling to the floor with a clatter. Then he bent forward slowly, finally tumbling to the floor.
Nicole turned around, heart racing. The man who’d been holding a gun to her head had suddenly disappeared. Just like that, in a second. Shock had her staring at where he’d been, stupidly checking the room. Finally, she looked down and there he was, sprawled on the filthy concrete floor, a pool of red flowing from his head, gun still in his hand.
None of this made any sense.
Two figures stepped forward from the doorway, appearing out of the utter darkness like ghosts. Strong, substantial ghosts, hard-eyed and carrying rifles…
