Beneath Still Waters. Alex Archer
beating at some point in the past few hours. A thin line of dried blood ran from his cracked and swollen lips. When he raised his head and looked at the camera, the one eye that he could see out of was full of fear.
“Help me, Annja” he said, his voice little more than a croak coming from an obviously parched throat. It sounded as though he hadn’t had any water for hours. “You have to help me. I don’t care what he asks you to do or who he asks you to do it to. I’ll die here if you don’t do what he wants. Please, don’t let that happen, Annja, please.”
The camera zoomed in to show his face and then moved down to his body and stopped on his right hand. That close Annja could see that his last two fingers were broken and bent at odd angles.
She could hear Doug saying, “No, no, I didn’t do anything, don’t,” in a breathy gasp. She steeled herself for what was coming but she didn’t turn away, feeling as if she owed it to him to watch what was being done so that she could avenge him for all the wrongs he endured to coerce her into action.
A gloved hand reached into the camera frame. It was neither large nor small, so she couldn’t really tell if it was a man’s or a woman’s, though she suspected the former. Not because a woman couldn’t be that cruel—she knew from experience that that certainly wasn’t the case—but because her mystery man had claimed to be the one who had kidnapped Doug, and she had yet to see anything that made her think this was anything more than a single nutjob at work. As she’d expected, the individual took hold of Doug’s middle finger and without further ado snapped the bone. Doug let out a shriek of pain and the screen went blank.
Watching the kidnapper inflict pain on Doug for no other reason than to make her do his bidding filled her with a righteous fury. She vowed then and there to make him pay for what he had done.
He’d picked the wrong woman to tangle with.
Annja picked up the phone and entered the number the kidnapper had given to her.
It was answered almost immediately.
“You have the package?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve seen the DVD?”
Annja gritted her teeth and then replied in the same clear tone, “Yes.”
“You understand that I’m not kidding around?”
“Yes, I understand. Now get on with it. What do you want me to do?”
“In April 1945 a particular German aircraft went down somewhere in the Swiss Alps. I want you to find that aircraft and recover what is inside it. You have one week to do so.”
Find a plane lost in the Swiss Alps over fifty years ago? This guy was a total loon! Annja counted to ten to be sure she had a hold of her anger.
“So help me, if you hurt him any more than you already have, I will hunt you to the ends of the earth.”
The man on the other end of the phone chuckled. “You can certainly try, Miss Creed. In the meantime, I would start looking for that wreckage. One week. I will call you at exactly noon seven days from now. Keep your phone handy.”
The kidnapper hung up.
When Paul knocked on her door fifteen minutes later, Annja was sitting cross-legged on the couch, engrossed in reading the after-action reports the kidnapper had supplied. At the sound of his knock, she shouted, “Go away!” in the direction of the door and just kept reading. When she looked up moments later to double-check something she’d read in a previous report, she found him standing there in the middle of the room, watching her.
“How did you get in here?” she demanded.
He held up a small square of plastic. “You gave me a key, remember?”
Annja grunted and went back to reading.
Paul walked over and picked up one of the sheets of paper. “What’s going on?”
“Don’t touch that!” she said, snatching it out of his hands.
Paul actually took a step back at the venom in her tone. The tension in the room felt like a physical presence.
“You’re scaring me, Annja. What’s going on?”
Annja ignored him, jotting down notes on the cover of the folder the pages had come in and moving on to the next page.
“Look at me!”
This time the sharpness in his tone caught her attention. She stopped what she was doing and looked over at him, actually seeing him for the first time.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” he said gently, “but whatever it is, you aren’t going to be helped by letting it get the better of you. Take a deep breath, calm down a minute and tell me what’s got you so riled up.”
Annja realized that he was right; she wasn’t going to help Doug if she went at this haphazardly and in a panic. Yes, the clock was ticking but this is what she did. She found things that had been lost or hidden away, often for centuries. She was good at it, too. She could do this; she just needed to stay calm and to stay focused.
“I’m sorry, Paul,” she began, then told him about the phone call, the package, everything.
He didn’t believe her at first. He looked at the papers, checked her call logs, even watched the video, though he turned it off in a hurry when he saw Doug’s bruised and battered face. That was all he apparently needed to understand it was real.
His first reaction was a reasonable one.
“We have to go to the police,” he said, reaching for the phone.
Annja stretched out her hand and put it over his, stopping him.
“No,” she said softly.
“No? What do you mean no? Your friend has been kidnapped, his life threatened. You need to let the police handle this thing so they can get him back safely!”
“But that’s just it, Paul. They won’t.”
He stared at her as if she’d suddenly grown a third eye in the middle of her forehead. “What? How can you say that?” he asked, bewildered.
“Because it’s true!”
Easy there, Annja, she told herself. He’s just trying to help.
“Less than one in two victims in kidnapping for ransom cases are returned unharmed when the ransom is paid. I know. I looked it up. And as crazy as it sounds, that’s what this is essentially. A kidnapping for ransom. Our kidnapper just happens to have a really unusual demand.”
Paul looked at her, a puzzled expression on his face. “That’s what I don’t get. What does he really want? And why kidnap a television producer in order to get it? That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Actually it does, in a strange kind of way. He wants my expertise in finding lost artifacts but can’t approach me outright because he knows that I would require him to follow the law and turn the wreckage and any human remains over to the German government as befits a casualty of war.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“Anything found within the wreckage would have to be turned over, as well. That means he wouldn’t get to keep whatever the plane was carrying, and that’s what he wants. Not the plane but the cargo.”
Paul frowned. “So knowing that you wouldn’t help him steal the cargo if you did, indeed, find it, he decides to kidnap the producer of your show?”
“Not just my producer. Doug is my friend, one of the few I have. And I have a reputation for going to the ends of the earth for my friends.”
Saying