Page 66 of Code 6

“What?”

“I asked, are you here to see your mom? ’Cause I get it. Took me a while to put aside the anger and come visit mine.”

“No, it’s not my mom.”Far from it,thought Kate.

Happy voices from across the room caught Kate’s attention, the sound of inmates and visitors reuniting. A kiss and a hug were allowed at the beginning and end of each visit, and lonely people made the most of it. Kate watched from afar, trying not to let her gaze intrude on private moments on public display. Mothers hugged their children in the play area. Wives and girlfriends clung to husbands, partners, and significant others. The woman at the next table embraced her mother, which for some reason made Kate feel good, even though she knew almost nothing about them.

Twenty minutes passed. Still no Sandra Levy.

Kate had seen her only once before in person. An attractive woman. More than attractive, actually, though not the classic beauty her mother was. She was a brunette, and Kate wondered what that gorgeous long hair would look like with no gold highlights inside prison walls.

A guard approached the couple at the table catty-corner from Kate. They were definitely taking liberties with the “one kiss, one embrace” rule.

“And no sitting on each other,” the guard told them, as he stepped away. Then he came toward Kate and glanced at the empty chair.

“How long do you want to wait, miss?”

Kate hadn’t considered it. “As long as it takes, I guess.”

Patrick was locked inside a windowless room about the size of a closet. In fact, he was pretty sure that it was once a janitor’s closet, as it still smelled like cleaning fluids. He ate there, slept there, and tried not to drive himself crazy marking the passage of time. He’d been fed three times so far, which could mean one day in captivity. But was he getting three meals a day? No way to know when the kitchen closed at the Hostage Hotel. Bathroom breaks were completely sporadic. They took him down the hall and let him do his business when it was convenient for them, not based on the hostage’s needs.

Patrick heard the jingle of keys outside the door. “Stand in the corner, facing the wall,” the guard said.

Patrick did as he was told. The guard opened the door and tied the prisoner’s hands behind his back. Some guards were careful to tie the blindfold tightly, but this one wasn’t. Either way, Patrick was getting good at using his facial muscles to shift the blindfold just enough to get some line of sight. As the guard led him down the hallway, another guard said something, and Patrick caught a waist-down glimpse of another prisoner. Women’s shoes, he noted, and it made him shudder to think what the Hostage Hotel was like for the opposite sex.

The guard untied his hands, removed the blindfold, and opened the bathroom door. The stench had nauseated Patrick the first time, but he was getting used to it.

“Two minutes,” the guard said.

Patrick entered. The guard left the door open a crack, for somemodicum of privacy. Patrick took all of his two minutes, if only because the small window in the bathroom was his only view of daylight.

“Time,” he heard from the hallway. But it wasn’t the same guard. The voice was a woman’s, and it sounded familiar.

Olga?

The door swung open and Olga entered. She closed the door, and with her back braced against it, she spoke in a hushed but urgent tone.

“You are in a lot of danger.”

“No shit,” he said, barely above a whisper.

“Some of these kidnappers are ex-FARC but most aren’t. They’re just thugs, and money is their only ideology.”

“Are you one of them?”

“Sort of. Not really. I do certain jobs for them on a contract basis. My particular skill set makes me welcome in most any operation of this type.”

“Whoareyou?”

She didn’t seem eager to tell him, but time was short. “I was hired to make sure you didn’t bail out of the corporate adventure and go home. It was my job to make sure you were a happy boy and in no hurry to go back to the United States.”

Only by looking into her eyes did he fully understand what she was saying. “You’re... a prostitute?”

She looked away, then back. “I can leave, if you’ve got a problem with that.”

He saw his one glimmer of hope receding and rushed to stop her.

“No, don’t leave! Who hired you?”

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