The Midnight Caller (Jack Widow Book 6) Read online

  “Step outside and look at the number on the door.”

  “No. No. I cannot do this. No way.”

  “How can I help you if I don’t know what room you’re in?”

  Silence.

  “Ma’am?”

  “I need help.”

  “Okay. Tell me what’s going on?”

  Silence again. Then she came back on the line.

  “There’s men. They kidnapped me.”

  “Kidnapped you?”

  “Da. Da.”

  Widow automatically recognized the word as Russian for “yes,” said twice.

  “Okay. I can call the police for you.”

  “No! No!”

  “Why not? You need the cops.”

  “No police. Please. You help me.”

  No police?

  This was sounding dubious.

  Widow decided to ignore that part and he asked, “How many guys?”

  “I do not know. Maybe two?”

  “Okay. Did you get a look at them? They hurt you?”

  “No. No look. Not really. They not hurt me so far.”

  “What have they done?”

  “Just inject me with a drug.”

  Silence.

  Widow asked, “They injected you?”

  “Da. I mean yes. Some kind of sedative.”

  Two guys kidnap a woman, in The Plaza Hotel, they inject her with a sedative, and they have not hurt her?

  Sounded risky, Widow thought.

  “Who are you?”

  She started to answer, but then she said, “I cannot tell you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Please. Just come help me?”

  “Listen, ma’am, you need the cops. I’m just a guest.”

  “No! No! Police will be bad for me. Please, you help?”

  Widow paused a moment.

  Before he could answer he heard a man’s voice in the background.

  The words were loud, short, and the accent was unmistakably American. Not Russian.

  The man said, “What the hell are you doing?”

  Then he heard another male voice, farther away, in the next room, maybe.

  The second voice said, “How did you get free?”

  “Ma’am?” Widow asked, a reaction.

  “Help me!” she shouted.

  He kept listening, did not react.

  He heard a scuffle, the woman attempted to scream, but it was cut short by a loud smacking sound.

  One of the guys punched her in the face, Widow figured.

  With his free ear, he had hoped that he would hear her scream, but she had not been loud or long enough to be heard. Plus, she could have been on any floor in the hotel.

  Widow waited, listened.

  The scuffle was over quick, but he still could hear voices, too low to be understood this time.

  Then he heard scratching sounds, like someone was picking up the telephone.

  A brief silence and he heard nothing, and then a low sound that was unmistakably someone panting. Probably one of her kidnappers, listening for Widow to speak and trying to keep his loud breathing away from the phone.

  Widow spoke first.

  “Hello?”

  No response.

  “Hello?” he repeated.

  The American voice, with low panting, said, “Sorry for disturbing you, sir.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “It’s not your concern. It’s my wife. She’s had too much to drink. She gets like this sometimes. I apologize. Please, have a nice night.”

  The guy hung up.

  Widow stayed where he was. He kept the phone to his ear and listened to the dial tone.

  Was she telling the truth?

  He was almost certain that she had been. Widow had heard a lot of lies in his life and he had told a lot, in his old life. The undercover cop life required lies.

  This woman was telling the truth.

  He should have called the police. For some reason, she had begged him not to.

  Why?

  Widow hung up the phone and sat there for a long minute trying to figure out what to do.

  If she was telling the truth, then these guys were not going to kill her. Not because she had gotten ahold of the phone. They had not gone through all the trouble of keeping her alive and sedated just to kill her for trying to escape.

  Also, if these guys had access to sedatives that required injections as a delivery system, then they were more than just random street thugs.

  Getting chloroform was a hell of a lot easier than getting expensive, fast-acting sedatives that required prescriptions.

  Something bad was going on.

  Widow stood up, still naked. He rushed over to the armchair and picked up his pants, slipped them on. Then he put on the rest of his clothes.

  He walked into the living room. Left the lights off in case they were in a room across the courtyard and could see him.

  He stood out of sight of the window, and leaned just enough to peek out.

  He saw nothing unusual.

  The couple across from him was gone. There was only one woman sitting out on her balcony, smoking a cigarette, which Widow was not sure was allowed in the hotel or not.

  He ignored her and returned to the bed, dumped himself down and picked up the phone.

  He dialed zero, listened to a whirring sound and heard a click.

  A hotel operator picked up and said, “Front desk, how can I help you?”

  “Can you tell me what room just called me?”

  “Is there a problem, sir? Someone bother you?”

  “No. Nothing like that. Just a friend of mine. I forgot to get her room number from her.”

  “Would you like for me to reconnect you?”

  “No. Just give me the room number.”

  Silence fell over the line.

  Widow suspected that the operator was being reluctant. Maybe she was not sure if she could give out a guest’s room number that easy.

  “Look,” Widow said, “The truth is kinda embarrassing.”

  The operator did not answer.

  “The woman who called, I met her tonight at the bar downstairs. She just called and asked me to come to her room to…finish our conversation. But like an idiot I forgot her room number. I really wanna go visit her.”

  “I don’t know,” the operator finally said.

  “Come on. It’s my birthday. You’ll really be helping me out here.”

  The operator clicked on the keyboard, Widow heard the punching of the keys.

  “Happy birthday, sir. I guess I can do this for you. No problem.”

  Widow smiled.

  She said, “You’re in luck. The room is right around the hall from you. It’s nine-twenty-one.”

  “Thank you so very much.”

  “No problem, sir. Anything else I can help you with?”

  “You’ve done enough. Thank you,” Widow said and hung up the phone.

  Nine-twenty-one was close.

  He got up and jogged into the bathroom, turned on the sink and ran water over his face, slicked his hair back.

  Then he put his T-shirt on, left off the sweater. He put on his shoes, laced them up, left off the socks.

  Looked around the room for a weapon to use, in case he needed one.

  There was not much that looked like it would be useful.

  He opened the mini-fridge. There were bottles of beer. He considered emptying one, breaking off the neck and using it as a stabbing weapon, but that seemed extreme. Besides, he did not want to walk down the hallway carrying a broken bottle.

  He already opened the champagne bottle or he could have used it as a club.

  Widow searched the drawers in the dresser. Nothing.

  Then he looked in the drawers in the nightstands. He found a Bible. It was an old, thick hardcover, which was not easy to find. It must have been in the hotel room for ages.

  The first question that he asked himself was “Did they still keep Bibles?”

  He
flipped it open to a bookmarked page and looked at the bookmark. It was one of those Christian bookmarks offering a declaration of why he should immediately convert over. Then he stuck it back into the pages of the book at random and flipped back to the inside cover. The book was not stamped by The Plaza Hotel. It was stamped by a church on Fifth Avenue. Someone had left it. Probably someone from out of town, passing through, and stopped at the church for a Sunday sermon.

  Widow wondered if the church considered it stealing if you take a Bible and leave it with the intention of someone else finding solace in it?

  He closed it and shook it in his hand, slow, up and down, like a playground seesaw, and felt the weight. It was heavy and hard. As reading material, he was not interested. He had already read it before. But as a club, it would do nicely.

  Widow took it and his keycard and left the room.

  CHAPTER 20

  WHOEVER WAS WATCHING the girl with the Russian accent, whoever the kidnappers were, professional or not, they would be waiting for someone to come snooping around.

  The girl had broken free and had dialed Widow’s room. They may not have known whose room number had been dialed, but they would be cautious enough to expect him to come looking.

  It was stupid to go straight for their room. An amateur would go there first. No, the right approach was to go to the elevator first. He wanted to check to see if one of them was watching the elevator.

  Additionally, it made sense to Widow that the two guys he’d seen in the lobby earlier might be related, somehow.

  Maybe the guys in the room called down to the guys in the lobby. There might be two of them coming up. They might be armed.

  Widow walked casually to the elevator. He held the Bible open and pretended to be reading the Book of Job.

  As he turned the corner, he saw the elevator stop. The bell dinged. The doors opened. As he had expected, the two guys from the lobby stepped off and the doors shut behind them. The elevator moved on.

  They turned and looked left. Looked right. The guy in the polo shirt and the blazer stepped to Widow’s right. The other one followed suit and stepped back to Widow’s left.

  Widow ignored them, kept his face down, looking over the Bible. He kept his walk casual. At fifteen paces from them, he reached up and licked his finger and turned the page.

  He noticed that both of them had slowly moved their hands behind them. Both right hands. Both in the universal gesture that everyone understood as two guys with guns holstered behind them.

  Widow walked forward, acting unshaken and unimportant, which was what he hoped they would see and back off.

  Once he got within ten feet of them, he was at the elevator. He turned, reached out and pressed the down button. He lifted his head from the Bible and acted like he had not even noticed them before.

  “Oh. Hello, guys. Having a good night?”

  The guy in the blazer stepped in closer, but stayed out of striking distance. He looked at Widow, suspiciously.

  He asked, “You staying here, sir?”

  “Oh yes. But I didn’t pay for the room or anything. Can’t afford it. I’m in town for a convention. Here in the hotel.”

  “A convention?”

  “Yes. I represent the First Catholics Church of New Jersey,” he said and showed them the Bible.

  The two guys looked at each other, blankly, almost dumbfounded.

  Widow stepped closer, striking distance, and showed them the Bible’s cover.

  “This was my father’s Bible. Are you two religious?”

  The shook their heads.

  The other one, without the blazer, moved in two paces closer and stared at the inside pages of the Bible like he was suspicious of it having a hollowed-out center where Widow was smuggling a gun.

  He asked, “You’re walking down the hallway, in the middle of the night, reading a Bible?”

  “A Friday night,” the guy in the blazer added.

  “Of course. It never matters when you read the Bible. God’s message is always welcomed.”

  They looked at each other again, a quick glance, speechless and obviously not buying it.

  Widow determined within seconds that neither of these two was the leader. The one in the blazer was doing more of the talking, but he had also made more mistakes than the other guy.

  It was common practice for Widow to take out the leader first, but in this case, both men were matched.

  The one without the blazer was a little closer now, which made him a volunteer.

  The one without the blazer asked, “What message is that?”

  Widow could see his forearm muscles twitch and his veins pop. He was gripping and upholstering his gun.

  Right then, at the moment that Widow was calculating, the bell on the elevator dinged.

  Both men glanced up and looked behind Widow, a fast set of glances, but slow enough for Widow to make his move.

  He held his breath, pivoted from his left foot, and slammed the spine end of the Bible straight into the voice box of the guy in the black sweater.

  It was a vicious blow, a little too vicious. A part of him hoped it was not enough to kill the guy. No need for that, not when he had not fully vetted them as bad guys just yet. He knew they were not FBI or police, but they could have been CIA. That would have been highly unlikely and illegal, not that that had ever stopped them before.

  The guy in the black sweater let go of his gun and tumbled back against the wall, wheezing, which reminded Widow of the Irish John from the day before.

  At the same time, he was distracted for a split second by the thought.

  The guy in the blazer was a lot faster than Widow had hoped. He did not waste time trying to draw his gun. Instead he rushed forward and pushed Widow straight back onto the elevator.

  The blow did not cause any damage to Widow, but it did get him off guard and he went off his feet.

  He was lucky enough to grab a quick handful of the man’s blazer and they both ended up hitting half of the elevator floor, half of the hallway carpet.

  Widow kept the Bible in his other hand on the way down.

  The two men hit hard. Widow took the brunt of it. He ignored the sudden pain because acknowledging it would give the other guy a second of advantage.

  Which the other guy was expecting because he went for the gun with his right hand. Widow held the Bible in his right. He slammed his left hand, hard, and clamped down on the guy’s forearm, holding his arm and gun hand locked behind him.

  Instead of changing his tactics, the guy did exactly what he had expected Widow to do; he flinched, dwelled on his stuck hand.

  Widow whipped his right shoulder back and up, flinging his arm as far back and as fast upward as it would go in the short distance between his elbow and the floor. He threw a short, but powerful right jab, using the spine of the Bible as a pair of knuckledusters.

  The book hit the guy square in the bridge of his nose, cracking it, breaking it, making an obvious hole in the guy’s face.

  Blood gushed out like a runaway fire hose, like a cracked-open hydrant on a hot day.

  Within seconds, enough blood sprayed out onto Widow’s face to blind him, if it had sprayed in his eyes, which did not happen because he’d turned his face away enough.

  The guy’s right hand went limp for a split second and then reversed its pull to fighting back. Widow released it and the guy grabbed at his broken nose, or broken face, however he wanted to look at it.

  Widow rolled him off and scrambled to his feet.

  He kicked the guy over on his side and jerked the gun out.

  It was an unusual handgun. He recognized it as a Maxim 9, which was a futuristic-looking gun because half of it, from the handle past the trigger, resembled a Sig Sauer Special Forces handgun and the muzzle looked like a pulse phaser from Captain Kirk’s personal arsenal.

  He had never held one or seen one before in real life, only read about them in Forbes, as a new, expensive toy for collectors. The problem with that statement was that i
t was not available to the public, not as far as Widow knew.

  The reason it was not available was that the boxy end part was a built-in silencer.

  From what he could remember reading it was whisper quiet. A great noise suppressor. Normally, they are not silent at all. Normally, a forty-five handgun like this, equipped with a suppressor would sound like a loud cough when it was fired inside a place like The Plaza Hotel.

  Not the Maxim 9. If the claims in the article by the manufacturer were true, then it was more like a quick hiccup.

  The other thing that stuck out to Widow was the “unavailable to the public” piece of the article. So far there had been only one buyer of this weapon that he knew of and it was the CIA. The rumor, not mentioned in the article, was that it was being tested for wet work teams, which are essentially death squads run by the agency. These were Special Forces guys with a little more bloodlust than the average soldier. And they were no longer military. These were guys who were either privately contracted by the Pentagon, CIA, or held as exclusive employees, without the paperwork attaching them to the government.

  The whole thing only meant that they were not to be trifled with.

  What the hell are they doing kidnapping a foreigner on American soil?

  Widow did not want to kill them, not without some answers.

  Suddenly, he noticed the wheezing from the other guy had stopped. He turned to look and saw the guy was half-standing, his back to Widow.

  The windpipe must have been okay, after all.

  He reached for his gun, slowly pulled it out.

  It was the same Maxim 9 handgun.

  Widow could have shot him in the back or even the leg. That would have put him down long enough for Widow to disarm him.

  Instead, Widow hurtled the hardcover Bible at him like a major league pitcher. The book smacked the guy clear in the back of the head and hard. It was as hard as Widow could throw. If it had been a large rock, the guy would be dead from a crushed skull. But it was only a book.

  The Bible bounced off his head and landed on the floor.

  The guy tumbled forward in a heap and crashed first into the wall and then slid down to a cushioned bench. He did not get back up.

  Widow looked both ways up and then down the hallway, in case someone came out of a room to investigate the ruckus. No one came out.

  Then he stuffed the Maxim 9 into the back of his chinos. It was a little loose because he was not wearing a belt, but it stayed put well enough.