King's Ransom: A Thriller by E.H. Jennings

Author:E.H. Jennings [Jennings, E.H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-07-23T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

Unknown Location

Colton King knew three things with absolute certainty: it was cold, it was dark, and it was wet.

His captors had placed him in a cell made entirely of stone. The walls, floor, and ceiling were all composed of what he figured to be some kind of metamorphic rock, and every square inch was damp with moisture.

They had stripped him of his clothes and given him a pair of cloth pants and a sweatshirt, both of which had long since soaked through. If it weren’t for the man that came to visit him every eight hours, he would have succumbed to hypothermia by now.

Pushing himself onto his knees, Colton attempted to stand. It was a clumsy process but he eventually found his feet and started to stretch. His back and shoulders were painfully tight, as were his hamstrings. His right ankle was shackled to an eyebolt drilled directly into the rock wall; attempting to get free was futile, so he hadn’t even tried. He stood and stretched every thirty minutes, but that was it.

His mind, on the other hand, hadn’t stopped moving in three days.

The men who had attacked him in Paris had made a series of small mistakes.

First, they screwed up the dosage. The metal he had felt pressed against his neck in the alleyway was a gun barrel of sorts, but not the kind he had suspected. It was an injection device. When the would-be assassin depressed the trigger, Colton had felt the slight prick of a needle entering his skin.

The injection material had been a sedative cocktail of some kind. Due to the dissociative nature of his dreams while unconscious, Colton was confident one of the components was a stout dose of ketamine. His captors’ mistake had come with the benzodiazepine element—they had underdosed it.

Colton woke up in a van, his wrists and ankles bound. He was in the very back, lodged between the backseat and the hatch.

He instantly began taking in every detail. The van was travelling along a rough road, which eventually transitioned from pavement to gravel. It was also travelling up. The longer they drove, the steeper the incline became.

His captors then made their next mistake: they started talking. There were three men; two of them had a lengthy conversation, while the third man was clearly a subordinate and was told to “keep his gook mouth shut.”

Though it was possible the men were joking, “gook” indicated one man was likely oriental. The other two spoke a sloppy amalgam of Bulgarian and Serbian, almost as if they couldn’t decide which language to use. Colton got a bit lucky when one of them mentioned the time and date, which allowed him to calculate he had been unconscious for approximately thirteen hours.

The information wasn’t terribly useful. If the men had access to private wings, which he had to assume they did, thirteen hours was a meaningless figure. They could be just about anywhere in the world in thirteen hours.

He was listening to the men rattle on about their myriad experiences with prostitutes when something strange happened.

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