JOURNAL OF DIXON AINSLEY
6 August
11:47 p.m.
Suburb of Moscow, Russia
We made it.
Barely.
Going to sleep for a week. Paid garage attendant to watch car.
Bonus: Roger caught up with us five hours out of Moscow, along with the second camera crew. Roger said we’d passed the Essex team while they slept in Novgorod. Ha. Take that, you bastards.
Paulie fell asleep on bed without even taking off her clothes. Managed to get her shirt and corset off. She didn’t wake. Left the rest of her clothing. Too tired to take off so much as my tie. Screw the costume department. Sleeping in my clothes as well.
JOURNAL OF DIXON AINSLEY
7 August
6:33 p.m.
Moscow, Russia—still
We realized something was wrong when, while we were both asleep on the bed, a crash sounded from the attached bathroom.
Paulie sat bolt upright. “What was that?”
“Hrn?” It took me a moment to surface from the deep sleep I’d been in. I tugged at my tie, which was partially strangling me. “What?”
“That’s what I asked. I heard a noise.”
“Dreaming,” I said, and groggily sat up to remove my jacket, waistcoat, and blasted strangling tie.
That’s when I saw the movement from the corner of my eye.
Two men emerged from the bathroom, both dressed head to toe in black, with black balaclavas over their faces obscuring their features.
One man held a gun, which was pointed directly at Paulie.
“Holy hellballs!” she said, staring with openmouthed amazement at the men. “Dad was right!”
“About?”
She pointed at the men. “He said I’d be kidnapped if I came to Russia, and I’ll be damned if those aren’t kidnappers. Hello. Are you kidnappers?”
“Yes,” one of the men said in heavily accented English. He gestured toward me with the gun. “You. Get on your knees.”
I thought about my options, and decided I didn’t like any of them. “No,” I said, getting to my feet and moving over to stand in front of Paulie. “I don’t think I will.”
“I shoot you,” the man warned.
“I’d prefer you not,” I said politely, trying to gauge how fast Paulie could make it to the door if I distracted the two men. “I have a race to complete, and for the first time in days, we’re ahead. I’d like to build on that lead, not lie dying on a Moscow hotel floor.”
“Yeah,” she said, getting to her feet, hastily snatching up the discarded blouse and slipping it on. “What he said.”
The man with the gun hesitated, then took three steps forward. I shoved Paulie toward the door, yelling, “Run!” when a reddish black pain burst across my head, sending me tumbling down into a black pit of agony.
“—xon? If you’ve permanently damaged his brain, I’m going to come down like a can of whoop ass on you!” was the first thing I heard when I managed to claw myself out of the pit. I blinked at the lights and realized that my head was cradled in Paulie’s lap. I turned my face into her belly and enjoyed, for a moment, the lightly floral scent of her, wondering how a woman who’d driven for more than twelve hours could still smell so good.
“I say we take a finger from each,” came the low, almost guttural rumble of a man. “That way we have extra.”
“What are they talking about?” I asked Paulie’s delightful belly.
“You’re awake! Oh, thank god.” Her belly moved and soft lips commenced kissing my face. I turned my head to kiss her properly, but what felt like a massive lump on the back of my head brushed her thigh, causing red spiderwebs of pain to crisscross in front of my eyes. When my vision cleared, I found myself sitting upright, leaning against the edge of the bed. To my surprise, we were still in the hotel room.
“What happened?”
“Gun boy hit you on the head when you tried to get me to leave you. As if I’d ever do that.” She brushed a bit of hair carefully from my forehead. The touch of her fingers did a lot to ease the massive headache centered on the back of my head. “I appreciate the attempt to save me, but we’re in this together, Dixon.”
I took her hand in mine. “In what? The race? Our faux marriage? Life?”
“All of them,” she said, her eyes soft with an emotion I didn’t want to examine too much at that moment. I simply relished for a few seconds the corresponding warm glow of happiness that seemed to start in my belly and radiate outward, and instead turned painfully to look at the two men, now seated at a minuscule table next to the window.
“Are they really kidnappers?”
“Yes, unfortunately.” Paulie made a face. “If I understand their references to a friend who is in Dad’s employ, I gather whoever this dude is ratted me out to his buddies here in the motherland. The buddies work for one of Dad’s old rivals, and thus Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have popped up to hold us for ransom. Or so I assume all that finger talk is leading to.”
“One finger,” the man with the gun said, gesturing with it toward us. “Two is wasteful.”
“How is it wasteful?” the second man asked, shaking his head. “One we send to Rostakova, and the other we send to the Englisher’s family.”
“Who is he? Does his family have any money? Do you know the answer to these questions? I do not, and I do not think it is smart to take a second finger without knowing the answers. Where will we keep the extra finger? I don’t want it. You know how I am about blood.”
“I like my fingers,” I said, wiggling all ten of them and feeling a bit woozy in the head region. I leaned back against Paulie and allowed her to stroke my forehead, wondering idly what she’d think of living in England. “I like Paulie’s fingers more.”
“You’re a bit wonky, aren’t you, love?” She pressed a gentle kiss to my cheek.
I turned my head carefully to look at her. “You missed my mouth.”
She smiled. “I’ll kiss it later, OK? Once you’re back to normal.”
“With or without all my fingers?”
“I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, and then whispered into my ear, “These men are speaking in English.”
“I know,” I whispered back. “I speak English, too.”
“Doesn’t that strike you as odd? For Russian mobsters, that is, in the middle of Russia?”
I turned to consider the two men, who were now arguing over the proper method of storing severed fingers so as to ensure freshness. “That is odd.”
“Quiet, you,” the man with the gruff voice said, and pulled out a large hunting knife, which he waved at us. “We discuss how to send the ransom note.”
“In English,” I said, my eyes narrowing on them. “Rather convenient that, don’t you think?”
The man looked confused.
I glanced at Paulie. She was watching me with concern. “Help me up,” I told her, and got awkwardly (and painfully) to my feet.
The two men watched us in apparent amazement.
“Right,” I said, tugging down the waistcoat that rode up on my chest and making an effort to not wince at the waves of pain that rippled across my brain. “I think we’d better get a few things straight. One, there will be no cutting off of fingers, either from Paulie or from me. Two, you may tell Mr. Rostakova that we are not intimidated, nor will we allow him to jeopardize our position in the race. And three, you both need to go to acting school if you wish to present yourselves as actual thugs capable of cutting off ransomable fingers.”
“Um.” Paulie tugged at my sleeve, and said quietly, “I think they really are thugs, Dixon, but you are dead right with the other assessments.”
“And with that, we will ask you to leave,” I said, striding to the door and opening it. “Now that you’ve woken us up, we have things to do and miles to race. Good day.”
“What’s this?” the gun toter asked, jumping up and shoving me away from the door.
“Uh . . . Dixon . . .”
“On your knees!” the other man said, his lip curling a little as he leaped to his feet.
“Give it up,” I said, bored with their playacting. I made a mental note to have a word with Paulie about her father’s actions and a discussion about what was, and what wasn’t, appropriate in parental behavior. I attempted to retake the door, but the gunman suddenly lunged at me. Something in my head snapped, and I was back fifteen years to a martial arts class I’d taken my youngest brothers to and which I’d halfheartedly participated in. I kicked the gun from the man’s hand, whirling around to slam him in the back of the head, which sent him staggering forward into his knife-bearing friend. The gunman screamed and threw himself to the side in order to avoid being gutted.
Paulie, with more gumption than I would have thought possible, snatched up a chair and brought it down over his head. He collapsed to the floor with a grunt of pain.
The knife-wielding thug snarled something that I was fairly certain was obscene, and hesitated for a second between Paulie and me. When he turned fractionally toward her, I leaped forward, slamming my fist into his nose, while punching out blindly with the other hand. Luckily, it missed the knife and landed on his collarbone, a nasty cracking noise resulting. The man screamed and dropped to his knees, making a halfhearted slash toward me with the knife before dropping it to clutch his shoulder.
“Let’s get out of here!” Paulie shouted, snatching up our phones from the nightstand and leaping over the downed man. She grabbed my arm and spun me around, half dragging me to the door.
“We can’t leave. Not until we call the police and a medic unit,” I said, stopping her.
The look she turned on me told me she thought I was nigh on mad. “Are you freaking insane?” she asked, confirming my suspicion. “We have to get out of here right now. Thank god we were too tired after dropping off Vitale to bring in our luggage.”
I’ll give her this: she had more strength than it appeared. She had me out the door and midway down the hall before I managed to stop her a second time. “Paulie, we can’t leave your father’s men lying on the floor. We must call the police to report the attack—even if it was a sham—and get them some medical aid.”
“Gah!” she said, slapping her thighs in annoyance. “They aren’t my father’s men, don’t you see? Yeah, he must be behind this attempt to try to scare me so I’ll sit at home and do nothing with the rest of my life, but I can assure you they are just hired goons and have no further allegiance to him, and therefore to me. And now you’ve hurt them.”
“That’s why I insist we get them medical aid. Honestly, Paulie, for a woman who made such a big fuss about helping a man who robbed us, you are being particularly unfeeling toward actually wounded men.”
The sound of crashing furniture and breaking ceramics emerged from the room, followed by the knife man, bleeding from his nose and holding one shoulder higher than the other. He also held the knife, and snarled viciously when he saw us.
“You’re adorable when you’re noble, but I’d really rather not be kidnapped for real. Come on!” She dashed off toward the exterior staircase.
“Hell!” I swore, and ran after her.
“It’s like we’re in a James Bond movie!” Paulie cried when I jammed a trash can under the door to the exterior stairs, hoping to slow down the knife thug. Paulie streaked down the stairs, her skirts held high in her hands and the back of her blouse flapping open.
“I am not even close to being James Bond,” I replied, leaping down the stairs two and three at a time. Above us, an ugly grating noise, followed by the sound of something large and metal being thrown down the stairs, gave our feet wings.
“Do you have the key?” I asked when Paulie reached the bottom of the stairs and dashed outside, skidding when she made a sharp ninety-degree turn to head for the entrance to the parking area.
“Yes. Thank god we don’t have to crank these cars to get them started.”
“Meet me here,” I said, taking up a stand at the entrance of the underground car park.
She glanced over her back, pausing to shout back at me, “What are you doing?”
“Making sure we aren’t followed.”
“How are you going to do that?”
“I have no bloody idea,” I said softly, and shouted for her to go on and fetch the car.
She disappeared into the darkness, and I looked around for something to use as a weapon. There was nothing other than a kiosk where a bored-looking teenager sat with a cigarette clinging to his lower lip, the yellow-and-black-striped barrier that rose when cars were allowed to leave, another trash barrel, and a couple of orange traffic cones.
“Why didn’t I watch that MacGyver show that Elliott loved?” I growled to myself as I picked up the cones and wondered if they could be considered lethal weapons. “I bet he’d have no trouble making nuclear warheads out of these.”
The teen, a boy of probably seventeen or eighteen, watched me with an unmoving expression, his cigarette never wavering from where it hung off his lip.
“I don’t suppose you have a gun?” I asked him.
He didn’t even blink, just watched me with a look that said he was utterly bored by me, the parking lot, and probably everything in the world. A tiny bit of ash fell off the end of his cigarette.
Footsteps sounded loudly right ahead of the thug, who skidded to a halt at the sight of me. He was breathing heavily, his mouth, chin, and shirt bloody, and he still held that damned knife. I waved my cones at him. “Now, see here. We are not your enemies. Yes, I disabled you, but that is because you and your friend tried to kidnap us. Or pretended to. So really, you have no one but yourself to bla—”
He lunged before I finished speaking, and I swung first one cone, then the other, and finished up with a kick to his left knee.
“Well, what do you know?” I asked, eyeing him when he rolled around on the pavement, alternately clutching his knee and his shoulder. “They are weapons.”
A roar sounded from within the garage. The Thomas Flyer raced up the incline to the exit, like some great white beast surging forward to consume its prey. Paulie was at the wheel, her hat jammed on her head crookedly, her goggles glinting in the dull yellow sodium lights, and her white veil streaming backward a good fifteen feet.
“Get in!” she yelled, waving one arm frantically.
“You’d better open it up,” I said loudly to the parking lot attendant, but he stared dully first at me, then at the man on the ground, then finally to the Thomas Flyer as she roared up to me.
“Jump!” Paulie shouted, clearly not intending on waiting for the barrier to be raised. I thought of pointing that out to her, realized there was no time, and swung myself up onto the sideboard when she passed me, throwing myself into the backseat just as she hit the barrier and drove off into the night.
The last sight I had of the parking lot attendant was him leaning out of his window, watching us, the cigarette still dangling from his lip.