Holt Fast, My Love
Part 5: Reassessment
He soundlessly shut the panel and retreated. An hour
and a half later, the Gulfstream was in the sky heading for Venezuelan
waters. Four men accompanied him: the current pilot and co-pilot
and their reliefs who were sound asleep in the rear of the cabin.
The ten-hour flight gave him time to think. With his eyes closed
and head tipped against the leather of the headrest, he should have
slept. But what he’d found behind the electrical panel nagged at
him. On the surface, the board appeared to be part of a high
level, well-designed security system--perhaps bordering on the side of
paranoid. In truth, it bore many of the elements he personally
preferred.
But when he’d opened the panel and began tracing wires, two of the
connections curved into the wall and back out again. He didn’t
see them at first, as they were hidden in the cluster of wires near the
back. He’d stripped off his gloves, touched the odd tangle and
found the culprits.
The prickling of his neck hair had warned him to look harder at the
situation. Mentally, he’d drawn a picture of the layout.
His jaw tightened when he realized that a trap waited to snap around
him with all the ease of Laura’s kidnapping. If he didn’t take
care of the hidden connections, one kind of warning would sound.
If he did, another would sound, letting Tigano know exactly who had
broken into his home. The whole setup was brilliant, and
Remington couldn’t see a way to defeat it. Not yet.
One thing was clear. He had to retrieve Laura before taking the
steps necessary to neutralize Tigano. At the moment he had zero
proof of the man’s involvement and no other leverage to use to keep him
at bay.
Without any answers for the moment, he set the problem aside as one
would an empty tray of canapés--still messy and had to be
addressed but could wait a bit--and turned his mind to Laura.
His lips curved into a half smile. She hadn’t yet lost her
composure on the telephone--no panicking about the situation, no
pleading for him to hurry. He’d heard the fear in her voice, just
as he’d heard the iron control that held it in check in order to feed
him information from her end with her usual finesse.
In spite of it all, he was rather chuffed at some of the conversations
they’d had. Unlike most of their previous ones, Laura laughed at
his innuendos and returned them with aplomb. Those exchanges told
him exactly how much faith she had in him. Not once had she
expressed doubt about his ability to find her, although if she had, he
would have been terribly disappointed.
He closed his eyes in anticipation of holding her before the next day
was out.
*****
Laura paced on the beach. She knew Remington had some harebrained
scheme up his sleeve and wasn’t telling. They’d spoken twice
today--the first time at the designated four-hour time so Remington
could tell her they’d zeroed in on three small islands near
Venezuela. She’d swum a victory lap around the island while the
phone charged up afterward.
The second conversation, coordinated by Mildred, had been two hours
later as Remington boarded a private plane. He’d asked her to
mark her island so he could recognize it from the air. They’d
agreed not to use a bonfire because they didn’t want to attract the
wrong sort of attention.
But the elation of knowing he was on his way was tempered by the
nagging feeling that he was up to something dangerous.
Laura began laying out trinkets and small items from the house on the
beach. The eventual destruction of these expensive decorations
would be a petty revenge on her part. She hoped some of them were
valuable. And with a flash of insight, she knew what her partner
was doing.
To Part 6
13
January
2010
