sat on my legs. I was chained down now and totally exposed.
"What do you want?" I asked.
No one answered. The van pulled to a quick stop around the corner. The big Asian guy slid in, and the van started up again. He bent down, gazing at me with what looked like mild curiosity.
"Why were you at the park?" he asked me.
His voice threw me. I had expected something growling or menacing, but his tone was gentle, high-pitched, and creepily childlike.
"Who are you?" I asked.
He slammed his fist in my gut. He punched me so hard, I was sure his knuckles scraped the van floor. I tried to bend or crumple into a ball, but the restraints and the men sitting on my legs made that impossible. Air. All I wanted was air. I thought that I might throw up.
You'll be followed...
All the precautions - the unsigned emails, the code words, the warnings - they all made sense now. Elizabeth was afraid. I didn't have all the answers yet - hell, I barely had any of them - but I finally understood that her cryptic communications were a result of fear. Fear of being found.
Found by these guys.
I was suffocating. Every cell in my body craved oxygen. Finally, the Asian nodded at the other two men. They got off my legs. I snapped my knees toward my chest. I tried to gather some air, thrashing around like an epileptic. After a while, my breath came back. The Asian man slowly kneeled closer to me. I kept my eyes steady on his. Or, at least, I tried to. It wasn't like staring into the eyes of a fellow human being or even an animal. These were the eyes of something inanimate. If you could look into the eyes of a file cabinet, this would be what it felt like.
But I did not blink.
He was young too, my captor - no more than twenty, twenty five tops. He put his hand on the inside of my arm, right above the elbow. "Why were you in the park?" he asked again in his singsong way.
"I like the park," I said.
He pressed down hard. With just two fingers. I gasped. The fingers knifed through my flesh and into a bundle of nerves. My eyes started to bulge. I had never known pain like this. It shut down everything. I flailed like a dying fish on the end of a hook. I tried to kick, but my legs landed like rubber bands. I couldn't breathe.
He wouldn't let go.
I kept expecting him to release the grip or let up a bit. He didn't. I started making small whimpering sounds. But he held on, his expression one of boredom.
The van kept going. I tried to ride out the pain, to break it down into intervals or something. But that didn't work. I needed relief. Just for a second. I needed him to let go. But he remained stone like He kept looking at me with those empty eyes. The pressure built in my head. I couldn't speak - even if I wanted to tell him what he wanted to know, my throat had shut down. And he knew that.
Escape the pain. That was all I could think about. How could I escape the pain? My entire being seemed to focus and converge on that nerve bundle in my arm. My body felt on fire, the pressure in my skull building.
With my head seconds from exploding, he suddenly released his grip. I gasped again, this time in relief. But it was shortlived. His hand began to snake down to my lower abdomen and stopped.
"Why were you in the park?"
I tried to think, to conjure up a decent lie. But he didn't give me time. He pinched deeply, and the pain was back, somehow worse than before. His finger pierced my liver like a bayonet. I started bucking against the restraints. My mouth opened in a silent scream.
I whipped my head back and forth. And there, in mid-whip, I saw the back of the driver's head. The van had stopped, probably for a traffic light. The driver was looking straight ahead - at the road, I guess. Then everything happened very fast.
I saw the driver's head swivel toward his door window as though he'd heard a noise. But he was too late. Something hit him in the side of the skull. He went down like a