Chapter 5

Alice woke up face down in a ditch. She was completely soaked with rain water. Her shoes were gone and her evening gown was ruined. Something warm was running down her forehead. She reached up gingerly and found a small cut on her scalp that oozed blood.

“What the hell?” she muttered. Then she remembered.

There had been something waiting for them in the road, a board, bristling with thick spikes that flattened all four tires. The taxi had skidded and rolled, and her door had come open, throwing her clear. Frightened, she explored her body with cautious hands, feeling for injuries. She counted her teeth with her tongue. Her shoulder was scraped and bruised, but other than that, she seemed to be all right. She was shivering, but she didn’t know if that was caused by the cold rain or the first symptoms of shock.

“The driver!” she said, and rose shakily to her feet. When she stood, she saw an ambulance parked in front of the overturned car. Its lights were flashing. The road was littered with broken glass. Alice smelled spilled gasoline.

Two men leaped from the ambulance and squatted down to look inside the taxi cab. One of them reached into his white tunic for something.

“Help him!” Alice croaked. “He may be hurt!” One of the men stood up and peered into the darkness toward the sound of her voice. The other extended his hand into the window of the cab, toward the driver.

There was the flat, hard sound of a pistol shot.

Alice stood for a long moment, still seeing the after-image of the muzzle flash floating before her eyes, trying to mentally process this unexpected development. She was frozen with terror. These were no paramedics. They were ruthless men who intended to leave no witnesses behind.

And they were after her.

Alice spun on her heel, choosing a line of flight. The dark highway stretched before her. How long before a car would appear, some Good Samaritan who would take her away? Would the men in white run her down with the ambulance while she tried to flag it down?

The ditch was deep, but the dark wood beyond beckoned with the possibility of safety. Alice tried to climb the embankment, but the rain had turned the earth to mud. She slipped and fell to her hands and knees. As she fell, she scooped up a handful of mud to throw at her pursuers.

They were on her before she could regain her footing. She fought them, using the martial arts skills she had learned from Master Sun Yat, but the accident had weakened her. She pummeled them with her fists until they seized her wrists and secured them with handcuffs. She was kicking and biting as they dragged her to the ambulance, but her bare feet had little effect on their shins. They threw her face down on a stretcher and restrained her there with wide canvas straps. They loaded the stretcher into the back of the ambulance, turned off the flashing lights, and drove away.

Alice was finding it hard to breathe with her face pressed into the leather surface of the stretcher. The strap across her shoulders made it difficult to raise her head. She turned her face sideways and surveyed the interior of the ambulance, seeing none of the things she might have expected, no medical equipment, no white tool chests or gleaming stainless steel. It was only a plain utility van, a prop dummied up to look like an ambulance on the outside. She guessed that these men had originally planned to create the accident and masquerade as paramedics so that they could spirit her away, unconscious or dying perhaps, right under the nose of any possible witnesses. It was a desperate plan. They had to want her very badly to risk killing her, and it was likely that she would not be kept alive any longer than necessary.

One of the men was sitting in the back with her while his companion drove. She could feel his eyes on her.

“She won’t be bad looking when we clean her up,” he called up to his partner.

Alice felt a stealthy hand slide up her skirt and squeeze her thigh. She craned her neck to see the man who was touching her and gave him a withering look. He was not impressed, and the hand explored farther until it toyed with the crease of her buttocks.

“Feisty too,” he laughed. Then he bent over Alice to whisper in her ear. “When the boss lets us fuck you, guess where I’m gonna put it.” He wriggled a finger suggestively between her cheeks. She clenched her muscles to keep him out, knowing that she was only safe from this promise as long as the strap across her knees bound her legs together.

She memorized his face, promising herself that she would find him someday and put a bullet up his ass.

“That’s right,” he mocked. “Take a good look. You won’t be talking to any sketch artists.” He threw a leg over her and straddled her chest. His weight made it difficult for her to breathe. He nibbled her earlobe as she thrashed her head about and fought nausea.

“I hope you hold out for a long time, honey. I hope you play dumb. That way I can enjoy your hot little ass for a long time.”

When they opened the van’s rear door and wheeled her out, Alice could see that they were in a parking garage. They had descended from street level, at least three stories she estimated. She considered calling for help, but the garage appeared to be deserted.

They wheeled the stretcher into an elevator, which descended so rapidly that Alice felt herself go weightless for a moment.