Chapter Three
Steve pulled Jack Hansen aside. "Did you find anything yet?"
"Couple things. The blood in the backseat doesn't belong to Oscar Goldman or Jaime Sommers."
"The driver?" Steve guessed.
"Nope. And that puts us in an entirely different ballpark. Also, one of your men found a bullet casing up in the hills."
"Could've been someone hunting rabbits, or pheasants -"
"It was a hollow point. For human hunting only," Hansen said. "Looks like we have a bonafide assassination attempt, a kidnapping or both. And unfortunately, you know what that means in terms of your friend."
Steve did, and the thought made his heart sink to the ground. NSB policy was to find where the high-level abductee was being held and, rather than launch a rescue attempt, they'd launch bombs.
Jack went on, "Helluva lot easier way to go than what they're probably putting her through by now."
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"We know you're awake; we saw you on the monitor," one of Jaime's captors told her. Jaime didn't move a muscle, or an eyelid. "That's how you wanna play it, huh?" He hit the switch on the metal box, and Jaime's body jumped involuntarily. She didn't moan or cry out, though, even though the pain was unbelievable. She was determined to keep her lips firmly fused shut. She opened her eyes and glared in defiance at the three men who surrounded her chair.
"What's your name, Little Lady?"
She couldn't resist. "Jane Doe."
"How do you know Oscar Goldman? You his girlfriend, or just a one-night-stand?"
Jaime looked the inquisitioner straight in the eyes. "Bite. Me." She winced in pain as she was zapped a second time. She'd been through several rounds of interrogation resistance through the OSI, but she was having trouble dealing with this.
"Ok. We can come back to that. What's the story with your leg?"
"I have two of them. They walk, run, hold me up when I'm standing -" CRACK! The one doing the talking slapped her hard across her face. Instead of the reaction he'd expected, though, Jaime smiled at him. "Gee, that kind of sweet talk'll get you just about anything..."
He hit her again, harder this time. "Don't even try to tell me you don't know what I mean. The wires; why are there wires in your leg? Is that how you kicked the door off its hinges?"
"Must've been the explosion," she said through clenched teeth.
"Your life expectancy's getting shorter by the minute, lady." He turned to his two cohorts. "Let's give that cocktail a little longer to float through her veins. She'll cooperate."
Jaime waited a few moments until their footsteps were outside the door and halfway down the hall. The electric shock and the pain of being struck had given her just enough of a surge of adrenaline to slightly loosen the strap on her right arm. Very quickly, before the men got back to the monitor, she removed the IV needle from her left arm, loosened the other arm's strap, and, unsure if it would actually go in, inserted the needle into her bionic arm. It resisted slightly but then slid under the false skin and held. She slid her arms back into the straps, leaned back, and smiled with satisfaction as she closed her eyes.
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Steve joined the search crews in the hills until it grew dark, then he decided to return to the hospital to see if Oscar remembered anything else. "He's awake," Rudy said as they walked down the hall together. "It's been a constant battle with him since he got here, though - he keeps insisting he has to help search for Jaime."
Steve frowned. "How serious are they, as a couple?"
"Shouldn't you be talking to Oscar about the crash?"
"Rudy, this isn't curiosity. To tell you the truth, I'd rather not know. But it could be important in figuring out what happened today. Please...?"
"Oscar's been in love with her for years," the doctor explained gently. "From what I hear, it's been fairly common knowledge. But in terms of expressing it, he only told her this morning. So I don't think you could really call them a couple; more like they were exploring the possibility."
"By making out in the back of his limo."
"Steve -"
"Hey, it's a free country, last time I checked. But he could've exercised a little more discretion, then maybe Jaime wouldn't be missing and in danger of having the NSB kill her, if the kidnappers don't do it first.
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Jaime hoped against hope that her captors wouldn't notice that the IV needle had switched arms. The pole was positioned at the head of the chair rather than the side, so there was a chance they wouldn't know, albeit a very slim one. If they did notice, her plan B would have to be trying to simply battle her way out. But she knew she could never outrun a bullet, especially if all three of them were armed.
Several hours had gone by, enough time for the drugs to work their way at least partially out of her system. The men probably believed her to be totally incapacitated. As her head began to clear, she tried to remember what sort of shape Oscar had been in when she took off for the hills after the assailants. She was fairly sure he'd been lying on the ground outside the limo, but she didn't know if he was hurt, or even if he was alive. That thought threatened to paralyze her, so she pushed it away and replaced it with I'm going to get out of here - for Oscar.
Finally, they were back. Jaime tried her best to appear heavily drugged even though she was almost fully alert. She felt the men staring intently at her, could feel their eyes on her although her own were half closed.
"Lady, what the hell are you trying to pull?" one of them snarled.
Jaime didn't wait to find out what he meant. She knew she had one shot now, and if she failed, she died. With one powerful motion, she threw her legs up and free of their straps, landing a good, solid kick to the chest of one of her captors, sending him at great force into a second man, leaving both of them sprawled on the floor. She pulled her arms free and took off for the door, letting the IV line and the wires pull away and fall wherever they landed. The one man still standing pulled out his gun, and on her way to the door, Jaime grabbed his firing arm and used it as leverage to flip him onto the ground as well.
The sound of gunfire followed her as she made it into the hallway, and she was confronted with three different directions in which she could go. It was then, with the gunfire coming closer, that Jaime realized she had no idea how to get out of the building.
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