Harry came onto the grid and was pleased to see Malcolm back where he belonged. "Hello Harry," he said with a sad look on his face.
"Thanks for coming in," Harry replied.
"Anything for Ruth," he said sincerely. Harry nodded trying to fight away the fear that kept threatening to swallow him. At that moment the phone rang and it seemed to echo loudly in the darkness of his mood.
"Yes," Harry asked picking up the phone and putting it on speaker. He pointed to Tariq to work on a phone trace and voice recognition which Malcolm quickly helped with while Dimitri and Beth watched on silently.
"I trust we have your attention now," a male voice said.
"You certainly do," Harry said with false calm in his voice. "For your own safety you better not have hurt her."
"We'll have no need to once you deliver Sparrowhawk will we?" Harry swallowed. "Have you got the file?"
"I'm working on it," Harry said. "It's a government protected file. Its going to take me longer than forty five minutes to sweet talk politicians into giving it over to me, a section head they aren't entirely sure they trust anyway. I need more time."
"You don't have it," the man said with a sigh. "I warned you what would happen if you couldn't deliver the file. Clearly I'm not being taken seriously. I'll call again soon, you can count on it."
"Wait!" Harry shouted but it was too late. They'd gone. "Well?"
"Encrypted line," Tariq said. "Can't trace it."
"Perfect," Harry said sarcastically.
"Wait a minute," Malcolm said as his mind was whirring. "What if we tried this." Harry ignored them both as they went into a conversation he didn't have a hope of understanding.
"You two, work on the voice recognition," Harry told Beth and Dimitri. "Did you find anything on the CCTV?"
"We caught the reg number of the van they were using but it had been reported stolen a week ago so no leads there," Beth said as Dimitri began typing. "We lose it in the myriad of midmorning traffic. Even with computer tracking you can't find it. We think a couple of cameras had been blown out or purposefully broken. Either way, no joy."
"The call came from London!" Malcolm shouted. "We can't get any closer than that but they are definitely still in the city." Tariq looked particularly annoyed, mainly because Malcolm had proved he was a better computer technician than him. He would not be able to prove it twice, Tariq silently vowed as his typing commenced.
Harry closed his eyes and left them to it. He was in no frame of mind to help and was worried he'd be more of a hindrance. In his office Harry drew the blinds and collapsed in his chair. Somewhere in this city Ruth was being hurt because he couldn't deliver what they wanted. All because of what they both did for a living. He felt sick to his stomach about what they could be doing to her right now. Was she feeling betrayed that he hadn't come for her? She must be so scared. Please God let her be alright. Let her come out of this alive he silently begged.
Ruth's stomach was gnawing with hunger. She didn't know how long she could keep functioning without any food. But she would have to, she summarised. She had no choice. The door opened again and she stood up once more. It hadn't been that long since they'd last been here.
"Your lover is apparently under the impression that we aren't serious people," one man said as Ruth swallowed uncomfortably. This wasn't good news. "We gave him an hour and nothing yet, even with the warning of what would happen to you." Ruth had started shivering again and she knew it wasn't from the cold this time, it was from fear. But she was damned if she would let them see that she was scared.
Suddenly they moved very quickly. She felt her arms being grabbed and held behind her back while a different man approached her and looked at her as if pondering where it would hurt most. He threw a punch to her abdomen. He had hit her so hard that her legs couldn't support her weight anymore and she buckled, making the next punch glance off of her ribs instead of where it was intended. The men left her and she collapsed onto the floor, curling in on her injured stomach. What Ruth had been unaware of was the fact they had been filming her as she had been hit. And that video was going to be sent straight to Harry Pearce.