The Mystery of the Russian Ransom (3 page)

I have time to write in my diary again. I can tell what happened, so far, but I don’t have a clue what any of it means. It is weird. I don’t know if I should be scared or not. The only thing I know for sure is,
I WANT OUT OF HERE!
When I think of my dad and mom and how upset they must be, I start
to cry. When I think about Muck and Mr. D and how worried
they
must be, I start to cry. When I think about Travis and if he’s hurt from that man hitting him, I start to cry. When I think about anything, I start to cry. So better not to think and just write down what happened.

I had the red tracksuit on with the golden double-headed eagle crest. I had new Nike track shoes, top-of-the-line.

The woman came to get me. She says I can call her Olga, but she didn’t give a last name. She keeps smiling at me, but I refuse to smile back. I don’t trust her.

We went out into a long hallway and down some very twisting corridors. I didn’t see a single person the whole time. Just Olga and me.

We came to a door and she opened it. We walked through a long corridor. It was cold. It was sort of like being in an arena. We followed some turns in the corridor and came to another door, which Olga opened and indicated I should go in first.

It was warm inside and the room was very large and open. There was an office area where
some people were busy on computers. I was tempted to call out to them, but something made me hold back. They never even looked up as Olga hustled me past them. It was as if I wasn’t even there. We came to another door, and she opened it up and motioned to me to step through.

It was a full gymnasium. There were treadmills and weight machines and gymnastic mats and stationary bicycles and every workout machine you could imagine.

But no one was working out.

A man and a woman came walking across the gymnasium floor. They had white coats on, almost like doctors. They acted friendly and they knew my name, though they did not tell me their names and they seemed to know very little English.

I was weighed and measured by them. Not measured just for height – they took so many measurements of me. They measured my waist, thighs, calves, butt, chest, arms, hands, feet. I thought for a moment they were going to build an actual life model of me out of clay or something.

Then they had me run on the treadmill. But
first they hooked up a tube and a mask so that everything I breathed in and out was being measured.

They ran me until they could see my heart rate was at a certain level and then they slowed the machine so that it stayed at that high rate for several minutes. When they told me to stop, I almost fell over. I was so sweaty, and my legs felt like jelly.

But they wanted more. I lifted weights for them. I did flexibility tests for them. They even had me run in quick bursts around the gym, having me explode as fast as I could for a moment, then slow down as fast as I could. On my jelly legs, it was tough.

I noticed they were filming all of this. There were cameras all along the little track, and they worked by remote control. I could see them turning with me as I went by. I felt like I was being watched by a herd of strange-looking one-eyed creatures.

It gave me the willies.

“G
et your equipment and be in the lobby in ten minutes.”

There was something about Muck’s orders that brought everything back down to earth. Travis’s head had been spinning with all the horrors that might have befallen Sarah. Sam had been in tears virtually from the moment news went around the hotel that Sarah was missing. Even Nish had seemed out of sorts. He hadn’t done anything stupid for hours – a slow day for Wayne Nishikawa.

Muck’s words changed all that in an instant. Travis had a purpose. He was to get his equipment. They were off to the rink. He could hardly collect his bag and sticks fast enough.

By the time Travis reached the lobby with his equipment, the place was buzzing with activity. Mr. D was assembling the equipment bags in a pile for the shuttle bus and collecting the sticks together so they could be stashed underneath with everything else. Mr. Yakushev and Mr. Petrov were deep in discussion with the hotel manager, and the policewoman was with them. Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbertson were sitting at a coffee table, waiting. They seemed fairly calm.

Once Travis had dropped his equipment and sat down to wait for the bus with Andy Higgins and Lars Johanssen and some of the other players, Muck moved to the center of the lobby and blew his whistle.

“He thinks this is a practice,” Nish hissed under his breath, giggling.

“Listen up, now!” Muck said, the entire lobby going quiet as he spoke. “We all know about
Sarah. Thanks to the police and Mr. Petrov, we have people out all over the city looking for her. No one knows what happened, but the police are convinced no harm will come to her. They believe they will be hearing shortly from her captors and that it will be a ransom case. They are looking for money. For Sarah’s safety, the police have not contacted the media. They want to keep things quiet so that the kidnappers don’t panic and do something stupid.

“As you may be aware, Mr. Petrov is a successful businessman, and the kidnappers must have known that he would consider the Screech Owls to be under his care while visiting his country. He is likely as much a target of this crime as Sarah is herself, and has already informed the police that he will pay whatever it takes to get Sarah back to us. This is for you to know but not for you to say. It stays with all of us in this room, understand?”

All around, there were murmurs of agreement and gratitude for Mr. Petrov’s incredible gesture.

“Good,” Muck continued. “If word got back that Mr. Petrov was willing to pay up, the ransom
would just go up and up and up. So we say nothing and we wait.

“In the meantime, we are here for a tournament. Mr. D and the parents have all agreed that the best way for the Screech Owls to spend their time is not to mope around the hotel. We can’t do anything at all to help the situation, and we know that our Sarah would want the Screech Owls doing what the Owls do best – playing hockey.”

“
Yes!
” Data shouted. He did a small wheelie in his wheelchair by shifting his upper body and pumped a fist in the air.

“
Yes!
” some others shouted.

“
For Sarah!
” Sam shouted, her eyes still red.

“Sarah!”

“SARAH!”

Travis’s world was right again – so long as he kept his mind from going in a certain direction that involved Sarah.

He was half-dressed, every piece of equipment put on in the proper order, a ritual he followed every time he dressed to play. He tugged his jersey over his head, pausing just as the
C
for
Captain
passed his lips to offer a gentle kiss from the inside that no one could see. He pulled on his helmet and tightened the chin strap. He pulled on his gloves, punched them twice and was ready.

Routine meant everything. He twirled his stick blade as he went out onto the ice. He was first through the far corner, digging in hard so his skates made a sound almost as if he were frying bacon in a pan in the morning.

Mr. D tossed the pucks over the boards. Still warm, they bounced and stuck on the wet ice. Travis tried that amazing little trick he had seen Sarah do back home in Tamarack. He almost managed to scoop the puck clean off the ice, but it slipped off the blade when he spun it and bounced away on him. He’d have to get Sarah to show him how. Once she got back. Once they got her back.

Travis shook his head hard, almost as if he could shake bad thoughts out of his head and
they’d be gone forever. He picked up another puck but didn’t try the trick. Instead, he skated in and pinged a shot hard off the crossbar.

He felt right once more.

Apart from the quick warm-up, there was no time for practice. They would start tournament play immediately. Sarah’s disappearance had so upset the Owls that their first skate in Ufa had been canceled.

They had no sense of the rink, no feeling for the larger ice surface, no feeling of comfort. All of which was fine with Travis Lindsay, Screech Owls captain. This was a game. And the Owls were a hockey team. Playing hockey games was what they did. And every single one of them was glad for the distraction.

If Muck and Mr. D were worried, they didn’t show it. Muck had somehow determined just from the warm-up that the team they’d be facing – a peewee team from Minsk – had a weak defense. Muck’s instructions were, as always, simple and to the point: “Be strong on the forecheck. See if
you can panic their defense into some turnovers.”

Travis’s line started, as it usually did. But without Sarah. Instead, Andy Higgins moved up to play center on the first line: big Andy with the long reach and the hard shot. He’d never skate as beautifully as Sarah did. He didn’t see the ice as well as she did. But Andy was still an excellent player. Just not Sarah.

Dmitri, on the other side, was deep in concentration, staring at center ice as if his eyes were lasers trying to melt the circle. Nish, of course, was back on defense. Travis looked back just before the puck dropped. Nish was looking up into the crowd, almost as if he expected fans to be carrying signs for him.

The puck dropped, and Andy used his body to keep the Minsk center from getting to it. Dmitri swept it to the side and fired it hard into the Minsk end, the puck trapped at the back of the net by the little Minsk goaltender.

Travis was first in, remembering Muck’s instructions. He went straight at the defenseman, who was looping back to pick up the puck. Normally, Travis
would do what Muck called a fly past, cutting just in front of the goal to make sure the defenseman stayed back there and tried to pass rather than carry. But Travis came straight for him, not concerned in the slightest that the defenseman could use the net as an opportunity to cut Travis off and slip away on the other side of it.

The defenseman panicked, just as Muck knew he would. He tried to bounce the puck off the boards and keep it while Travis roared past, but Travis anticipated the move and dragged his left skate so that it picked up the puck. He kicked the puck forward onto his stick and fired a hard backhand cross-ice to Nish, storming in from the blue line.

Nish wasn’t thinking about the crowd now. Nish was thinking about
Nish
. As in glory-hog, all-star, superhero, Hall-of-Famer Nish. He raised his stick high and delivered a screaming slap shot.

Travis, cutting back, saw that Nish’s shot was going to miss. But then, seemingly out of nowhere, a stick blade flashed, ticking the puck ever so slightly, and it blew high into the back of the Minsk net.

Dmitri! He had ducked in around the defenseman to defend on the shot and somehow managed to tip the shot. Sometimes Dmitri’s eye-hand coordination blew Travis away. He was so skilled, so fast.

Screech Owls 1, Minsk 0.

Travis and his line skated back to the face-off, but Muck sent out a new lineup and replaced Nish on defense with Fahd Noorizadeh.

Travis sat. He could feel Mr. D’s big hand pinch the back of his neck. He could feel Muck lightly pat his shoulder. But Travis knew what it meant: good listening, good job.

Travis could also feel a huge emptiness beside him. Sarah should be sitting there. They should be tapping gloves after a nice play.

But Sarah was not there.

I
did not sleep well. I cried myself to sleep thinking of my mom and dad and how worried they must be. If only I could get a message to them! And I had a nightmare, a bad one.

The Owls were playing hockey. It must have been a tournament, because I didn’t recognize the rink. The ice surface was huge; it seemed to go on forever – more like a frozen lake than any rink I’ve ever seen.

We were playing against a team that was really, really dirty. They were bigger and older than us, and they were going after all our little guys – especially Simon Milliken and Travis. At one point, they charged Travis so hard he went right through the boards. I don’t know where the boards came from, because there were none when the game started. They had to bring an ambulance on the ice to take Travis away on a stretcher.

Every bone in his body was broken. His legs and arms were bent in all the wrong directions. His skates looked like they were on backward. The medics had bottles of blood dripping into his arms.

But then I saw Nish. He’d decided to streak the game and had come out in nothing but his boxer shorts and skates and Jeremy Weathers’s goalie mask, and the other team was chasing after him and slapping his butt hard with their sticks. He was screaming as he skated past me – his chubby legs were churning like helicopter blades as he tried to escape.

I woke up crying and laughing. And then I realized where I was and I just kept crying.

I fell back asleep eventually. I don’t remember
what I dreamed, if I dreamed anything, but I must have been asleep because I didn’t notice that someone had unlocked the door and come in.

I don’t know if it was Olga or not. All I know is that someone came in and put something on the floor at the end of my bed.