The Ransom of Black Stealth One

TEN

On a Wednesday afternoon, Petra Whirled out of Brown University’s failure analysis lab in a foul mood, sockless in her Reeboks, shoving her zippered nylon bag down into the bike’s basket as if the nylon carried the image of her prof’s inscrutable face. Hsia had dinged her seven points for ignoring conventional approaches on her term project—but she could regain those points before end of term by pulling an all-nighter, doing it by the book this time.

She fitted her helmet on, thrusting stray tufts of honey-tinted hair under the helmet’s plastic rim so they wouldn’t whip into her eyes, then donned her bike chain like a necklace and swung a slender jeans-clad leg over the old American-made Schwinn. A man’s bike, not even one of the trendy foreign jobs, but the thing was sturdy as a brick with that extra bar on its frame and mounting it was no problem for someone who never wore skirts on campus. For Petra Leigh, the Schwinn made a statement as clear as Uncle Dar’s old musclecar.

She saw that the traffic on Waterman wasn’t heavy yet, and calculated she could make good time heading north along Elmgrove. To pull that all-nighter, or to snack from her apartment fridge and then meet Randy and Jason and Bev to parboil Hsia over pitchers of beer: that was what Petra thought about as she pedaled hard, giving a workout to thighs she imagined were too chunky. Jason might come on like the Western world’s most dedicated grad student, but she knew his interest in curves went beyond bridge catenaries. If she expected to pick his formidable brains next term, it was time she got him thinking about her as worthy of picking, too. What’s the reciprocal for Petra? One over Petra, she recited the engineering joke to herself. She probably wouldn’t let that happen. Jason was sweet, though still a boy in some ways…

She noticed the black Ford Tempo only as one of several cars that jiggled in her helmet’s tiny rearview. The Ford fell back, but never more than a hundred yards behind her during the twenty-minute ride to her place.

She locked helmet and bike together, noting that only one other bike leaned against the porch rail of the fine old clapboard house which was, in Petra’s opinion, going to simply collapse one of these days from the sheer weight of students and books. Her room with its shared bath was on the first floor, and Petra knocked a quick tattoo on Bev’s door as she passed it, getting no response, expecting none. She was visible from the street as she continued past the stairs and unlocked the door to her room.

That decision over the all-nighter was still to be made, or so she thought, as Petra popped a cassette into her player. The new-age synthesizer music of Kitaro, otherworldly and abstract, often helped her concentrate. She dunked a sprig of broccoli into Cheez-Whiz, began to nibble, and flopped her project notes open to Hsia’s marginal comments. Their gist was that she must walk flawlessly before she could fly over conventional stuff. But God, traditional engineering practice could be dull, dull, dull! Two stodgy approaches occurred to her immediately; she grabbed a pencil and jotted them down, with tiny draftsman’s numerals below, 0:45’ and 0:30’. It should take her no more than an hour and a quarter to dispose of both those silly exercises.

She heard the knock at the front door as it echoed down the hall, and ignored it. The knock at her own door, a minute later, made her jump. Bev never knocked like that. “Randy? Come on in, I don’t think I can—” The door swung open, but it wasn’t Randy.

“Miss Leigh?” The man was tanned, windburned, and middle-aged, reminding her of a slightly overweight Marlboro man, with graying hair that could use a trim, dressed casually in tan gabardine pants with an Indiana Jones leather jacket over a plain sportshirt. Petra’s first impression was that she had seen him somewhere before, but he did not come in. He held a flat plain-wrapped package in his free hand. “Miss Petra Leigh.” His tone said he was certain.

“That’s me,” she said, pushing away from the rickety table, faintly embarrassed to be caught with a mouthful of Cheez-Whiz.

“For you,” the man said in a gravelly voice that registered from somewhere, sometime. His smile seemed diffident but businesslike.

Petra walked to the door, knowing it was not smart to allow strange men into her room, seeing that this one did not seem anxious to enter anyway. She took the slender package, smiling her question instead of voicing it.

“I’m supposed to wait,” was all he said, nodding at the package as he handed it over. “If there’s not a note in there, somebody goofed.” Then he stepped back into the hall and pulled the door shut.

Petra tore the wrapping off to find a pound of See’s candy, the soft centers she’d loved since she was old enough to ransack a dresser drawer. For every special occasion in her life, Uncle Dar had given her a pound of See’s. She smiled and opened the note, typewritten on plain paper, and then the smile began to fade.

Somehow, those mentions of “fine” and “safety” made her feel less than fine and not awfully safe even with a man who was obviously a bodyguard standing right on the other side of that door. Then she had seen Mr. Smith before. Never until this instant had James Darlington Weston’s occupation seemed entirely real to Petra, and images from the “Spy v. Spy” cartoons in Mad magazine fled ludicrously through her mind. The candy was right, the nickname strictly family, and she could see a black Ford parked outside, but Uncle Dar’s initial had been scrawled in a hurry. She opened the door again. “I’ll need a few minutes,” she said to the man’s back. “You’d better come in. Have some candy,” she added as she tossed the box on the table.

He closed the door softly, then strode to the window as Petra began to stuff extra clothing into a TWA bag. “Want me to put the food into your refrigerator?” His attention to such a homey detail lessened Petra’s attack of nerves.

“If you would,” she said, folding a fresh bra, selecting a pair of medium-heeled wedgies, remembering her hand calculator almost too late. T-shirt, two pairs of L’Eggs, a skirt that didn’t show wrinkles, and a blouse that did, but whatthehell… “Do you know how long I’ll be gone? This is going to play absolute havoc with my schedule, Mr. Smith.”

“Just a day or two, I think,” said Smith, closing the refrigerator door. “It’s only a precaution, Miss Leigh. I’m sure you’ll be laughing about it by Monday. You might bring a book. I’m not the world’s greatest conversationalist.”

“I suppose you do this all the time,” she said, trying to keep the tremor from her voice.

“Not often,” he admitted, watching her zip the bag over Roark’s book on stress and strain, checking the expensive watch on his wrist. “Ready?”

“I hope so.” She hefted the little bag.

“Where’s your phone?” His smile was easy. “I need to set someone at ease about you.”

Blushing, she hauled a small pile of dirty laundry off the windowseat to reveal the Princess phone with its long curl of cord. “You never would’ve found it,” she said.

He grinned back, lifted the receiver, began to punch at buttons. But when he put the receiver to his ear, something shifted in his expression. He held the receiver out. “Is your phone bill current?”

“Of course,” she said in irritation.

He tried the operator, but had no joy. “Then we could have a problem,” he muttered. “There’s a back entrance from here, I believe.” He reached out toward her stereo, and Kitaro faded with the set’s power light.

Petra snatched the receiver, heard nothing, not even a dial tone, and felt the blood draining from her face. “What does it mean?”

“Probably nothing,” he shrugged, not very convincingly, and now a little charcoal-black automatic was in his right hand as he stood near the window. He spoke slowly and distinctly. “See that black Ford? Wait until I drive it away from the curb and to the alley. Then you go out the back way to the car, and don’t stop for anything or anybody. Is that clear?”

The gravel in that voice was now sharpened flint. It prodded, and you obeyed. She nodded, her mouth suddenly dry.

He copied her nod, reseated the handgun in his left armpit, and headed for the front entrance. Petra heard the door slam and punched nine-one-one, the first number that came to mind, into the phone. She might as well have been holding a hunk of broccoli to her ear.

Petra checked the inside lock, wishing she had time for a note to Bev, seeing John Smith through the window as he sauntered to the black Tempo. Like he hadn’t a care in the world, she thought, but that just means he’s good at what he does. I wonder if he checked the upstairs hall. She looked quickly into the hall, then saw the black sedan pull away outside and, with what she hoped was perfect timing, felt the deadbolt snap as she backed into the hall. An instant later she was pelting out the back, down wooden steps, and through a back lawn that had once known tender care, leaping over someone’s rusted hibachi, the TWA bag overbalancing her so that she almost fell before reaching the back gate.

The Ford was waiting in the alley. The man’s only comment as she dropped her rump into the seat was, “Buckle up,” and she did, letting her head fall back against the headrest, trying to take long breaths because that was supposed to help when you felt like fainting or, worse, blowing chunks of Cheez-Whiz and broccoli into your lap in a back alley in Providence, Rhode Island.

He said nothing more until they were on the turnpike, attending to his rearviews, driving wonderfully well with a fine sense of what traffic ahead was doing, or about to do. Then, “It’s a no-sweat run now, Miss Leigh. We’ll pick up Route Ninety at Worcester. Relax. Listen to the radio; read a book.”

She shook her head, aware that his peripheral vision was so practiced he could study her while looking straight down the turnpike. “I’m too wired, Mr. Smith. You are Mr. John Smith,” she said with exaggerated coolness.

“Yes and no; why kid you? Call me John. Johnny if you like it better.”

“Then you’ll have to call me Petra, if that’s allowed.”

For the first time he laughed, and that was unsettling because, dammit, now she knew the man was familiar. “Sure,” he said, “so long as we remember you’re my boss’s boss’s boss, once removed.”

It began to seem as if the Cheez-Whiz would stay down, after all. “Is there anything about this that you can tell me?”

“Not a lot, M—Petra. There are several ways to zap a phone line. I’m surprised they didn’t just monitor it; that’s what I would’ve done.”

Unable to keep the edge from her voice: “How many times have you tapped my telephone, John Smith?”

“I never have—but if I had, I’d have to lie about it.”

“That’s no answer.”

“Bingo,” he said, and pointed to a sign: Worcester 12 mi.

Petra rummaged in her bag, but left the Roark book where it was. There was simply no chance that she could concentrate on engineering stress when her own internal stresses remained so high. You’ve always thought intelligence work must be wonderful and exciting, idiot. Nobody ever told you a simple ride in a car could turn your knees to silly putty and your stomach into a butterchurn. But the ride couldn’t be all that simple. She had been in danger—might yet be in danger. Petra sighed and closed her eyes, reclining in the seat a bit, willing herself to breathe regularly, think and act regularly.

After ten minutes or so, her eyes snapped open. “Why don’t you just call on your radio and tell someone about my telephone? Don’t you guys carry some scrambler gadget?”

“When we have a transmitter,” Smith agreed. “I’m not carrying one. Nobody backing me up, so it’d be pointless.”

“We could stop and phone.”

“Affirmative, we could phone, if we could stop, but negative, we can’t stop. Orders,” he shrugged.

“Stopping must be a high-stress point,” she guessed.

“You could put it that way. It’s a window of very high vulnerability, is how we’d put it.”

Petra chuckled. “That must make life interesting when you have to go to the bathroom.”

“Life is always interesting. And yes, we’ll make a rest stop in Albany.”

“And after that?”

“I’ll call from there and find out,” he said, and saw her head jerk in surprise. “Hey, they don’t tell me everything either.” He yawned, a deep inhalation that pushed his chest and belly against the restraint belts. “Can’t afford much of that,” he said, and fumbled into the footwell behind her seat for a moment, bringing out a cheap plastic thermos canister which he thrust between his knees to unscrew its cap one-handed. “You a coffee drinker?”

“Show me an engineer who isn’t,” she snorted.

“I’ve got this down to a science,” he said, “but you might hold the cup for me.”

She did, watching him pour a half cupful. Then he put the thermos between his knees again. “Some of those packets of sweetener in the glove box, I think,” he said. Holding the cup of hot coffee in one hand, Petra began to poke with the other into the little storage compartment.

She did not see what he was doing with his left hand at the lip of the thermos, but when she turned back to him, he was turning onto Route Ninety. “You must’ve used it all,” she said.

“Oh, well.” He took the cup from her and sipped, squinting into the late afternoon sun as the Ford’s nose turned westward. “Gaah. I’ve tasted better,” he said, but went on sipping.

With the last sip, he stifled another yawn in his teeth and handed her the cup. “You’d best have some too,” he said, “in case you have to drive awhile. I haven’t had much sleep,” he added.

Without apology, Petra pulled a Kleenex from the packet in her bag and swabbed the cup clean as she’d been taught by her mother when drinking after strangers. It did not occur to her, when pouring from that thermos, that she was trusting this stranger in ways far more intimate than a shared cup.

Her face a parody of itself, Petra stuck her tongue out after her first sip. “Gaah is right, John.”

“Call it insurance and drink the lousy stuff. We can get a refill in Albany,” he said. She sipped slowly and obediently, and all too trustingly. And somewhere between Worcester and Springfield, she began to nod, only faintly aware when he lifted the cup from her indolent fingers, and the sun was in her eyes and the muted thrumm of the Ford lulled her into complete lassitude.

Petra was snoring lightly when the Ford stopped for fuel in Rotterdam, west of Albany. She did not wake when it turned southwest in the dusk on Route Eighty-eight, nor when the headlights first began to reflect from signs mentioning Elmira. She did not even open her eyes when, sometime later, the adhesive tape began to encircle her wrists and ankles.