The Asset (8 page)

“Hello?” he called out.

The pilots have to be here
, he thought.
Only an asshole would leave a sixty-­five-million
-dollar jet unattended while they went out for a Frappuccino
.

He walked through the gate, out to the apron.

“Hello? Anybody here?”

No response. No sign of anyone.

“Okay, I'm out of here,” he said to himself.

“Can I help you?” a man's voice asked behind him.

Startled, Kennedy whipped around. The man was wearing a black balaclava, pointing a gun in his face.

“What the fuck—” Kennedy began.

“Passport,” the man said sharply.

Kennedy handed it over. The mask looked at it, then shot him in the chest.

Kennedy panicked and looked down, but instead of a gaping bullet wound, he saw the red fletch of a tranquilizer dart jutting out just below his collarbone.

“Have a nice flight,” the mask said.

Kennedy fell to his knees, his vision blurring. Four more men dressed in black, also wearing balaclavas, surrounded him and held him upright. When he lost consciousness, he fell into a lightless abyss, the voice of Belle echoing around him.

I don't want to go alone.

W
hen Kennedy came to, he
was disoriented, blinded by a black canvas sack wrapped around his head, and bound tightly at the wrists and ankles. He felt like he was suffocating and struggled violently to free himself. After a few minutes of bellowing obscenities and thrashing like a caged animal, he heard the sound of the engines and realized he was crammed in the baggage compartment in the tail of the Bombardier Global 8000, and they were airborne.

He drew in long, ragged breaths to calm his nerves in the claustrophobic space, but the onslaught of worst-case scenarios invading his thoughts held him right on the knife's edge of panic. He had to force himself to focus on the facts of the situation. Like a golf shot: address every angle independently and avoid the big picture at all costs.
Who the fuck were they?
No clue. Not enough information.
Why did they want him?
That was easy. He knew more about US airport security than the head of the TSA. He was a high-value target and he was a civilian—the perfect mark.

His abductors had access to one of the most expensive private jets in the world, meaning he was dealing with a well-funded group. Maybe they were the ones behind the recent threat? It made sense. If someone wanted to know every possible security weakness at all the major airports in the United States, Kennedy would be the one to beat the information out of. He could also tell them if anything had been done to safeguard airports in
response
to the threat. He'd have laughed out loud at the irony if he weren't facing torture. They were going to do all the things to him that he'd read about the CIA doing to terror suspects, things that made him sick to think about.

The internal panic voice reared its ugly head again.

I'm not trained for this
.
I can't even hold my fucking breath in a swimming pool for more than thirty seconds, let alone survive waterboarding.

“Shut the fuck up!” he yelled to himself inside the sweltering black hood.

He heard and felt the telltale signs that the airplane had begun its descent. The clock was ticking. He knew he was a dead man, but he had to keep his head screwed on straight in case that one chance in hell to escape presented itself.

Back to the angles.
Where were they taking him?
The airplane had a range of nearly eight thousand nautical miles. Depending on how long he'd been out, they could have taken him almost anywhere in the world. When he was losing consciousness, he was pretty sure he'd heard his abductors speaking Arabic. Having lived in Israel, he knew how it sounded. The man who shot him with the dart spoke English but had a slight French accent, which meant he might be North African. The connection to France was potentially strengthened by the type of airplane—Bombardier, a French-­Canadian manufacturer.

If they were North African, they might be landing in Morocco, or more likely Algeria—somewhere they could hide him away for an indeterminate amount of time with zero cooperation from the local government if, by some miracle, someone came looking for him. This thought threw Kennedy into a very dark place. He was more than likely being taken to a hostile country to be tortured to death. When they were finished with him, they would dump his corpse like garbage, toothless and without fingertips or eyeballs, to make identification impossible. And no one was going to come looking for him. He hadn't told a soul he was going to Paris, and there were no customs records or travel documentation to track him. He was about to become the ghost Love had been talking about the night before.

The plane landed and taxied for several minutes. Kennedy listened for the sounds of other planes, but the world outside was silent. He assumed they'd taken him to a remote airstrip, which made sense, considering their cargo. He heard a door open and several pairs of strong hands dragged him
onto the floor of the main cabin. He felt a hand on his neck and hoped the bag was coming off, but the hand only checked his pulse.

“Can someone please take this hood off?” he whispered hoarsely.

No reply. They weren't even talking to each other.

“Please—” he began, but a needle pricked the side of his neck and he was out.

F
reezing, foul-smelling water thrown
in his face brought Kennedy back to life, and he woke up shivering on a concrete floor that stank of bleach and old blood. They had taken the bag off his head, and his hands and feet were no longer bound. Bright fluorescent overhead lights burned into his eyes. When he could finally focus, he saw he was in a massive meat locker, surrounded by pig carcasses and sides of beef dangling from metal hooks on heavy chains. Bone saws, long knives, and cleavers big enough to fell a tree hung on the wall above a huge steel prep table.

Using what felt like his last ounce of strength, he dragged himself off the floor and got to his feet. His legs, screaming in pain with the jabs of a million pins and needles from hours of bad circulation, buckled, and he wasn't sure if his dead-fish arms could break his fall. A man grabbed him by the arm from behind, steadying him. When he walked around to face Kennedy, he wasn't wearing his balaclava, but Kennedy could tell by the eyes, deep brown and softly menacing, that it was the man who had shot him with the tranq dart at LAX. Definitely Arab, with a full beard and a scar under his eye.

“Can you hear me?” the man asked.

“Yes, I can hear you,” Kennedy croaked.

“Good. Do you know your name?”

“Fuck you.”

No response.

“Do you know what year it is?”

“What do you want, asshole?” Kennedy asked through gritted teeth.

The man rested the barrel of a gun on Kennedy's forehead.

“I'm not playing with darts anymore, so you should be more polite.”

He walked to the door of the meat locker and knocked, signaling his men to unlock it from the outside. It sounded like they were using a padlock, which meant that the door was not going to be a viable escape route. Two more men entered, and someone outside locked them in again. Both were clean-shaven and also appeared to be Arabs. One of them was short and runty with fierce glowering eyes, and carried a military-style duffel bag. The other was heavyset, with a pockmarked face and huge burn-scarred hands.

They spoke to the man with the beard in what Kennedy thought might be Farsi, their voices intense and increasingly argumentative. During their heated exchange, Kennedy scanned every inch of the meat locker and saw no additional exits. There were large blood drains in the floor though, making it possible to smash through the tile and squeeze into a drainpipe. It wasn't a great option, especially when Kennedy thought about crawling through coagulated animal blood, but it would make it difficult for them to extract him.

A deep, mechanical sound shook the room. Elevator motor. The drains on the floor probably meant he was in the basement, so he might be able to find a way out if he could get to an upper floor.
What else?
The cold air needed to preserve the meat was likely being pumped into the room from the ceiling, as it would be too heavy to rise. He examined the ceiling for vents. There were a few, but nothing large enough to accommodate him. It was beginning to look like the blood drain was his only option when he saw a large square opening—maybe four feet by four feet—on the ceiling in the far corner of the room.
Maybe an HVAC service port?

His mind was working overtime, analyzing every detail of the room. In the corner were stacked boxes with French words written on them, and what appeared to be a safety instruction sign, also in French, was riveted above a wall-mounted first aid kit. If he was in France, rather than North Africa, then it was possible the opening in the ceiling was put there originally as a bomb shelter escape hatch. Hundreds of old buildings in France and England had them during the endless German bombing raids
of World War II. And they were often in the basement—the equivalent of a concrete-fortified bunker. If he was right about the location, and if this building were World War II era, and if it indeed was a bomb shelter door . . .

Kennedy's deductions were interrupted when he heard the heavy zipper rip open the duffel bag. The bearded one reached in and handed his heavyset associate a long serrated knife. Then he handed the runt a video camcorder. As they zip-tied his hands, Kennedy understood why the ISIS beheading victims he had seen in photographs just before their execution looked like deer in headlights. He was going to be slaughtered like one of the pigs mocking him at the end of a metal hook. The panic racing through his veins nearly made him pass out, but he bit his tongue hard, drawing blood, and the pain kept him conscious.

The heavyset man grabbed Kennedy by the hair and showed him the dirty knife.

“I will ask you questions, yes?” said the bearded man.

“Yes,” Kennedy said, trying to sound strong.

“If you do not give me the answers I want, he will cut off your head like one of these pigs and your American friends will see you on CNN.”

The man with the knife grabbed a hanging pig carcass and sawed its head off in a few sickening strokes. Kennedy tried not to puke.

“If you tell me what I want to know, I will shoot you in the head and you will die quickly, with honor.”

“I will cooperate,” Kennedy said.

The runt with the camera started arguing with the bearded man. It heated up quickly, and the bearded man backhanded him.

“He says you are a soft little woman who knows nothing and I should kill you as a political statement,” the bearded man said. “I hope you have something useful to say.”

“What do you want to know?”

“TSA security-pad codes for every major airport in US. Highest-level access.”

Kennedy felt the blood rush out of his face. He hadn't memorized them. There were too many. And his TSA contacts usually escorted him around anyway. It must have been written all over his face because the runt started in again, pointing and shouting at Kennedy. He and the bearded man almost came to blows again. The bearded man angrily bellowed at
both of his cohorts, and they all went back outside the meat locker, where they got into a violent shouting match.

Kennedy knew it was time to do or die. He brought his arms under his butt and wriggled until he could step through and get his hands in front of him. Then he raked the zip tie on a bone saw blade until it cut through and freed his hands. He grabbed one of the loose carcass hooks from a metal basket and slipped the hook tine through the latch on the door, locking it from the inside. It would hold, but not for long.

Moving quickly, he grabbed the bone saw and a long extension cord hanging near the prep table. As he ran to the back corner of the room, the men shattered the glass on the door's porthole window and opened fire, but they didn't have a clear shot through all the carcasses. Kennedy took cover and looked for a way to get up to the panel on the ceiling. One of the pig carcasses was hanging on a chain next to it. He plugged in the bone saw and secured the cord so it couldn't come unplugged, then slung the saw and extension cord over his shoulder and climbed up to the top of the carcass.