The Doll (7 page)

The rest of the office resembled any other random business, although from the fixtures, the window, and the radiator beneath it, she was clearly not in Texas—or the United States for that matter. Europe. She suspected the Balkans based on the languages she’d heard in the big room and the old stone architecture and the impression
of a courtyard beyond the window—beyond the man who partially blocked her view.

He sat behind the desk, hands folded upon it, head haloed by the morning light that left his face in shadow. Munroe nodded an acknowledgment. He nodded back, and if she guessed correctly, he was smiling.

He stood and reached for the vertical blinds. Tilted and pulled them across the window so that Munroe no longer squinted at his shadow and in English without any trace of the young one’s accent invited her to sit. His smile was genial, his manner gracious, and while Munroe tipped her head again, matching geniality for geniality, the primal side of her brain calculated the odds of the window frame having been reinforced, the glass replaced with shatter-proof, the difficulty with which she might plunge into him and take them both out the window to the cobblestones below.

He followed her eyes as they wandered from the dolls to the window and back again and, as if reading her reaction upside-down, said, “They are beautiful, aren’t they?”

Munroe offered a half-smile in answer.

The Doll Man stood and walked to the shelf on her left; starting near the window, with hands behind his back like a general surveying troops on parade, he worked his way along the wall, pausing to admire and occasionally reach out and touch a lock of hair or rearrange a dress.

He was five-foot-six at the most, and small, not just in height. Had he been a woman, petite would have been a better description. He was immaculately clothed in a suit, surely custom made, his tie perfectly knotted, his shoes at a high shine. Thinning hair and hands with ample sun spots put him in the upper range of sixty-plus, though from his posture and controlled energy, it would be a mistake to think of him as aging.

“Perfection,” he said, his fingers to lace, his voice soft and full of admiration. “They have no flaws, only beauty.” He paused and, still gazing at the dolls, whispered, “Only beauty.”

The man turned toward Munroe and his voice returned to room volume. “I have others,” he said, “but these are my treasures. I keep them close; they bring me joy.” He stopped to stroke a porcelain cheek and then with a sigh walked back to the desk and returned to his chair.

“But I am rude,” he said. “And you have questions.”

Munroe waited a beat, allowed silence to engulf the room while she studied him and he studied her. “Where am I?” she said finally. “And why am I here?”

“You are in Croatia for an assignment,” he said, and punctuated the statement with a dismissive wave. He shifted and crossed his legs. “To repay the debt.”

Munroe held back a snort. It would be reasonable to ask for clarification in order to understand this obligation of which he spoke so casually, as though he took for granted that she was familiar with the matter, but instinct told her to hold back. “Most people simply request my help,” she said. “No matter what it is you want, kidnapping me, putting me in a cell, and keeping me under guard is the worst kind of way to get it.”

“Yes,” he replied. “Most people would ask, I suppose. But I expect this job falls beyond what you consider acceptable. Why bother with the opportunity for you to say no? That would only make me angry.”

Munroe kept quiet while thought unspooled in an attempt to apply logic to madness. Her inner danger reading snapped like a Geiger counter to radiation, warning her not to press, prompting her to play his game. She leaned forward, matching him posture for posture. Folded her hands on the desk and said, “What can I do for you?”

The Doll Man shifted back and smiled as if he were breathing the victory of the moment, making a memory of a battle won before it had started, even though he’d known he would. His smile told of power and control in a world where he ruled supreme, a sadistic smile Munroe had seen before, that declared he owned her, and what lay beneath that smile ticked up the tempo of her heartbeat.

Motionless, expressionless, she waited until he finally leaned forward and spoke again. “You will deliver a package,” he said. “Transport from point A to point Z, so to speak.”

The words were no surprise—not given the underground from which she’d just come. “Is the package alive?”

“Yes, very much alive,” he replied, eyes lit and dancing as if he’d finally found a worthy playmate.

Munroe leaned back, slow, casual, deliberate. She studied his face, waited for cues, then continued on. “Transport a live package,”
she said. “I could probably do that, although it would depend on the package and the location. I assume that since no isn’t an acceptable answer, I’m also not getting paid?”

The man’s expression clouded. The brilliant playmate had turned into an idiot after all. “You repay the debt,” he said. “That should be more than enough.”

“What if I disagree? And what if, after all your trouble, I still say no?”

“I have ways to insist.”

“I have ways to decline.”

“You’ll pay one way or the other,” he said.

“In euros? Dollars? How much do I owe you?”

If he registered the sarcasm, he didn’t react to it. “You pay in the only currency that holds value to you,” he said. “You pay in innocent life.”

The words stung like a hard smack across the face and her eyes smarted as if she’d been physically struck. He should not know these things.

Casual indifference remained plastered on her face while deep below, in that hollow crevice where madness had lain dormant these last nine months, the slow, steady percussion of war tapped out, faint but perceptible.

“Which innocents?” she said.

He waved his hand with that dismissive gesture. “Innocents are innocents,” he said. “Is one life really valued higher than another?”

From the fear bubbling to the surface, she instinctively knew. Knew that the only way a man in his position could gloat as if he owned her was if he held what she deemed most priceless. She said, “Millions of innocents die every year, nobody can save them all.”

“Then allow me to show you.”

He reached for the phone and pressed the intercom button, and when the speaker came alive with a voice, he spoke in a language he assumed she didn’t understand summoning the person who’d answered. In the resulting wait, the Doll Man leaned back, hands folded in his lap, observing her with his sly smile.

Munroe studied her nails while the inner anvil pounded plowshares back into swords, and with deep and measured breaths she braced for what was to come.

When the office door opened, Munroe didn’t turn. Her focus remained on the Doll Man, whose expression shifted with a fleeting glimpse of pleasure that passed as quickly as it had arrived.

“You’ve met Valon,” the Doll Man said, though he wasn’t looking at Munroe. The newcomer was the English speaker from the dungeon, the one important enough that he’d needed bodyguards, the one still more boy than man. Valon Lumani greeted his elder with reverence, then turned to glance at Munroe, studied her until the Doll Man arrested his attention.

Their exchange was in Albanian, and elation threatened to creep out from under Lumani’s skin as he basked in the sparse words of commendation offered by the old man. And then the Doll Man’s tone changed. “Show her,” he said, and Lumani responded by pulling a phone from his pocket. He thumbed the controls and with video playing and volume turned up, put it in front of Munroe.

Her body screamed in rebellion. Her lungs seized, the percussion beat harder, faster, while Logan, battered and bloody, refused to speak when ordered, refused to cry out when struck. The world turned a hazy black and white that blocked out everything but the man behind the desk.

The anvil hammered out the order to kill.

Blinded, unable to focus, Munroe pushed the tumult into silence, forced herself to watch the clip, to truly grasp beyond Logan to his surroundings—searching out clues to his location and finding them in split seconds of shaky footage that encompassed a table and window in the background.

A Ziploc bag and two-inch horizontal wooden blinds. Mainstays of American culture, available elsewhere but not with the convenience and price of the United States—certainly not in Europe.

In a house or an office somewhere in the U.S., Logan took another hit. More blood, more broken cartilage. A gun to the back of his head. Munroe gave no outward reaction. Inside, the pressure struggled to break free, to pull her out of the chair and over the desk, to wrap her hands around the Doll Man’s neck until his face changed color and his tongue lolled lifeless, and she stole from him his final breath the way he was stealing hers.

Lumani turned off the clip and tucked the phone away.

Munroe let air seep into her lungs in measured portions, afraid to breathe, afraid to betray the pain and fear that burned through her veins; guarded against showing the rage and hatred she felt toward this man and his protégé.

Debt.

Package.

Transport.

To kill the Doll Man now would pull the trigger of the gun at Logan’s head. She was too far away to save him from the repercussions before they exploded outward. Her mind reeled, searching for answers, searching for a way out. Munroe pointed toward the pocket in which Lumani had stashed the phone, turned to the man behind the desk, and said, “So I deliver your package, and you pay me by returning the life of that guy?”

A half-beat of disappointment registered on the Doll Man’s face before the sly smile returned and he said, “Yes, you will have repaid the debt, and I will exchange it by returning that life.”

Which was bullshit, of course.

There was no way a man with the power to find her, kidnap her, and transport her across the ocean, a man who had a dungeon hollowed out below his building, would allow her to see his face, this hideaway, one of his businesses, if he intended to let her—much less Logan—walk free. But the illusion of his control, and the appearance
that she accepted the lie, was all that mattered. She tipped her head in silent acknowledgment.

“We might have an understanding,” she said, and the Doll Man’s smile widened into a look of contentment and his body visibly relaxed.

“I’m so glad,” he said. “I much prefer to do business with a rational person. It keeps the mess to a minimum.”

A slow smile of agreement forced itself across her face. Given the state of Logan’s abused body, it would seem he didn’t dislike the mess too terribly much. “I should probably see the package,” she said.

He motioned toward the door. “Valon will show you,” he said, and then to the young man, disdainfully in their own language, with none of the passing tenderness he’d previously shown, “Bring the doll transport to me when you’re finished.”

Lumani nodded, his earlier elation replaced by something hard and expressionless. He turned to the door and, barely glancing in Munroe’s direction, nodded her forward and waited for her to move.

She stood, slow and languid.

Stepped across the floor in no obvious hurry, thoughts jumping and hopscotching from one random piece of information to another, scrambling to assemble a composite of the present and make sense of the unexplainable.

The two sentries still stood outside the office door, and with Lumani leading the way, they followed Munroe back down the gold-worker-flanked pathway, through the metal door, to the underground again, beyond the cell in which she’d been kept, all the way to the end, while the same Hungarian voices droned on as background noise.

Against the far wall of the narrow hallway was yet another guard, who rose from a metal folding chair as the small group approached. With a flick of a finger, Lumani ordered him to unlock the last cell, and the man withdrew a chain from a pocket and from the chain a key.

Clanking metal reverberated through the tight space and then the door slid open. Munroe leaned forward to enter the low doorway and Lumani put out a hand to stop her. She paused, and in that pause a spoon flew past her leg followed by a rush of garbled slurs.

The voice was female, the accent West Coast USA, and as Munroe
saw and smelled when she ducked to enter, the holding cell had the retching stench of a pigsty.

Lumani didn’t enter. Like the guards, he remained poised to allow Munroe to go in alone. Behind her, he flipped a switch and the dim light cast a macabre glow over the bedraggled creature that had retreated against the wall. Filth and rot overpowered the permeating wet of damp mold. Whatever food this girl had been given, she’d flung rather than eaten, mostly in the direction of the door. Munroe moved closer to get a better view.

The girl was shackled, one foot chained to a metal ring in the wall like a prisoner in the goddamn Dark Ages. She couldn’t crawl far off the pad that worked as her bed and had been forced to soil herself. Her clothes were filthy, stained, and torn; her hair matted, her face and arms so streaked with grime, it was impossible to see what color her skin had originally been.