Читать книгу The Shadow Project - Scott Mariani, Scott Mariani - Страница 16

At the same moment, Adam O’Connor was walking into a hotel room on the edge of the city of Graz, Austria. He dumped his travel bag and briefcase on the narrow bed, stared out of the window at the flickering neon sign of the bar across the road, then slumped in an armchair and closed his eyes.

Everything had gone exactly as the kidnappers had said it would. The room had been reserved for him, his key ready and waiting. The fat, greasy-looking guy behind the reception desk had taken only the most cursory look at his passport. No paperwork, no register to sign. Just a key and a grunt and a nod towards the lift. He wondered if the whole hotel staff were in on this too. The bastards probably were. He wanted to grab the television and shove it through the window, set the whole damn building on fire, run screaming through the streets.

But he had to do as they said. Now all he could do was wait. Wait and think about his thirteen-year-old son, imprisoned Christ knew where.

The whole journey, he’d been unable to stop thinking that Sabrina was bound to call the cops. What if she did? What if they found out what was happening? Rory would die.

And Adam wasn’t fool enough to imagine that Rory wasn’t going to die anyway, if he just blindly went along with the kidnappers’ demands. He knew enough about the way these things worked to know that things didn’t just go back to normal afterwards.

Which was why, right from the first moment he’d stood there listening to their demands on the phone, he’d made his plans.

Fuck them. They didn’t know who they were dealing with. He was going to get his son out of there unharmed, and he knew exactly how he was going to do it.

Downstairs in the hotel lobby, the fat receptionist picked up the phone and stabbed out the number he’d been given. Two rings, and someone answered. The same voice he’d heard before.

‘The American is here,’ the receptionist said. Then he put the phone down and went back to his internet poker.