Daughter of God by Lewis Perdue

Author:Lewis Perdue
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

SEVENTEEN

In the deep mean darkness of 3 A.M., Zoe Ridgeway sat before the antiquated computer in her cell and cursed.

“Damn!” She hammered the desk with her hand. “I don’t need this shit! Not now.” The PC’s hard drive kept filling up as she transferred from the main server all of the scans they had made of photos, documents, and the detailed provenance and records that Max had meticulously kept.

Zoe pulled up Windows Explorer and looked for more files to delete; there had to be more space. She consoled herself with the blessing that they hadn’t yet shut off the main server down in the art studio and carted it away as they had almost everything else. During her handcuffed walk back to her cell that evening, the activity in the warehouse had been suddenly frenetic. Dinner arrived late, McDonald’s instead of Movenpick. The reliable predictability of the past months had been swept away by an urgency she swore she could smell on the men. She supposed they knew she would notice. Perhaps they thought it would frighten her.

But the prospect of freedom filled her with an intoxicating exhilaration that had exiled fear from her thoughts. Zoe started now to delete files on her PC with a vengeance, gutting the hard drive of every unneeded image, file, software application. Then she emptied the recycle bin. That recovered another 160 megabytes. Determined to take as much data as she could, Zoe resumed her copying as the minutes ticked by on the computer screen.

As the files made their way from the server to her hard drive, Zoe looked around once again at the preparations she had made to escape. She had dismanded the bed; the heater lay face down on the floor next to the desk, plugged directly into the wall socket by the door. She rubbed her cold hands and put them under her armpits for a moment. As noisy and pathetic as the heater had been, the chill had noticeably deepened once she had turned it off. Her captors had never provided her with a coat. So on this night she wore two T-shirts—all they had given her—her only heavy plaid flannel shirt and the wool twill pants. The cheap imitation leather flats on her feet were falling apart, but they would carry her as far as she could go tonight.

A pair of fingernail clippers—the most serious tool they had allowed in her cell—lay on the desk next to the mouse. The clipper and its tiny nail file were bent and twisted from her successful attack on the hard drive’s mounting screws and the heater’s cover.

As the PC’s hard drive clicked and whirred, her eyes went to the ceiling, to the wire grid that had once been attached to the bed frame to support her mattress. It was now suspended from the sprinkler water pipe by a length of sheet strips knotted into rope. One end of the sheet was tied at the middle of the wire grid, making it hang like a floppy upside-down “V.

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