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Her gaze landed on the present message, which scrolled across the screen, but she was too far away to read it.

“I’m drained, and I have a ton of reading to do in my Securities Reg class,” she said. “I’m going to head home.”

“You go right ahead,” he said.

She rose, and as she headed for the door, she passed close enough to the computer to read the scrolling message on the screen. This one was from Sophocles:nothing vast ever entered the life of man without a curse.

She stopped at the door and looked back at her father. “Do you think Sophocles was right?” she asked, pointing at the message with a jerk of her head.

Her father shrugged it off, offering a weak smile. “I don’t know. But I do believe we all need to keep our sense of humor in this business.”

Kate left, feeling nothing in her funny bone.

Chapter 26

Patrick was sure he was alive, but only because he could feel himself sweating.

It was so hot inside the trunk of the car that he’d faded in and out of consciousness over the course of a journey that seemed to have no end. A noisy gravel road had long since given way to the monotonous hum of tires on paved highway. Minutes seemed like hours, and there was no doubt they’d been on the road all day. The rusted-out hole in the quarter panel through which he’d watched Javier negotiate with his new captors had gone black with night. The heat had actually gotten more unbearable since sunset, which told Patrick that they were at a lower elevation, no longer in Colombia’s mountains.

Finally, the car stopped. An amber glow appeared in the rusted-out hole, which moments later turned red. It confused Patrick at first, and then he almost laughed at the realization: even ex-FARC bandits slowed for yellow and stopped for red to avoid getting pulled over by police when they had a valuable hostage in the trunk.

Red turned to green, and the car lurched forward. Patrick was regaining his bearings. He heard the sound of other vehicles around him, the blast of a car horn in the distance, the rumble of a passing motorcycle. They were in a city. Based on the brief lesson in Colombian geography that Olga, the trainee, had given him in the mountains, he made his best guess:

Medellín, if they’d taken him north. Cali, if they’d gone south.

Patrick heard the car doors open and slam shut. He prepared himself for the opening of the trunk lid. He’d run through the options in his head a dozen times. If he heard no voices and had reason to believethe man popping the trunk was alone, he would attack. If there was talking—clearly more than one of them—he’d obey and take his shot later.

He heard the men talking in Spanish. There were at least three of them.

Patrick stuffed his “weapon” inside his pants. Rifling through the tool box in the pitch darkness hadn’t been easy, but he’d found a suitable tool. It was made of iron and had a claw on one end for removing nails, but it wasn’t a hammer, and it was too small to be a crowbar. It was a whatchamacallit.

The trunk popped open, and the laser-like glare of a flashlight immediately blinded him. His Plan A—attack—would have failed miserably.

“Out,” one of the men said in English.

Patrick complied, trying not to bang the metal whatchamacallit on the bumper as he climbed out of the trunk. One of the men slipped a blindfold over his eyes and tied it tightly behind his head. Another man grabbed him by the elbow and led him forward.

“Where are we going?” asked Patrick.

“Hostage Hotel,” said the man who spoke English, and he quickly translated for the amusement of his friends. They laughed, as if terrorizing the gringo was one big joke.

Patrick put one foot in front of the other, keeping pace with his captors. His blindfold was so tight that it had risen up on the ridge of his nose, giving him a narrow line of sight beneath the hem. As best he could tell, they were in an alley, which accounted for the lingering odor, a foul combination of raw sewage and uncollected garbage. The Hostage Hotel may have been a joke, but not entirely. They were at the rear entrance to an apartment building of some sort; it could well have been an old hotel. Patrick let his head roll back slightly, not too much, but just enough to peer up from beneath the blindfold and see all the way up to the third-story floor. The hotel had windows, but they were boarded over with graffiti-covered plywood.

One of the men shoved Patrick’s head forward, forcing his chin to his chest. A sudden glow from somewhere revealed that they were standing outside a metal door. The light was from a cellphone, and Patrick overheard and understood enough to know what the phone conversation was about.

Delivery.

“Delivery of what?” Patrick asked in decent Spanish.

“Shut up, gringo. This is where we find out if you are worth more alive or dead.”

The metal door opened, and someone from behind shoved Patrick inside. He stumbled over the threshold but caught his balance. He heard more Spanish—too many conversations at once for him to discern what was being said, but he’d already heard enough to realize the danger he was in. His value “dead” had been vaguely established by Javier’s roadside offer that morning:Kill him. I’ll make it well worth your while.His value alive would surely be measured in ransom.

“I can pay,” said Patrick, though truthfully he had no idea how much money was in his bank account.

“Silencio!”

That voice didn’t belong to any of the men who’d brought him from the mountains. The “hotel” manager, Patrick presumed, or maybe just the bellboy.

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