She pressed the tape over his mouth and smoothed the edges firmly over both cheeks. Wilson’s body tensed, his eyes going wide. Helen grabbed his left hand and yanked it across his body, slipping one loop of a zip-tie handcuff over it and cinching the loop tight around his wrist. She forced the other hand through the other loop and pulled it tight. Maybe it was the early effects of ketamine. Maybe it was shock. But Wilson barely protested as she secured the plastic cuffs to the right arm of the chair with a short length of cord.

Helen glanced over her shoulder and confirmed that everyone still appeared laser focused on the sunset—and not the man she’d just prepped for abduction right in front of them. Amazing how the human brain worked. She popped the brake on Wilson’s wheelchair and turned it ninety degrees right, ready to maneuver him toward the walkway in the center of the patio. He stiffened, straightening his torso in an attempt to slide out of the chair. She reached around the back of the chair and grabbed his man parts through the fabric of his trousers.

“I’ll rip these right off,” she hissed in his ear. “Understand?”

No response, so she squeezed tighter. “Understand? Yes or no?”

He nodded, eyes shut tight—and she wheeled him off the patio. Several minutes later, they arrived at her car, nobody the wiser from what she could tell by scanning the parking lot and building windows. Helen positioned the wheelchair a few feet in front of the trunk, ready to tip him inside after injecting him with one of the yellow syringes. She had a long drive ahead of her, which included a lengthy surveillance-detection route, just in case someone had been assigned to watch over Wilson. She popped the trunk and turned to grab him, pausing at the unexpectedly wretched sight. His hands trembled, a confused and slightly unfocused look in his eyes. The drugs had probably started to kick in.

Helen stared at him for a few moments, not sure if she was savoring the moment or regretting it. Probably a bit of both. Finally standing in front of him, face-to-face, embodied a surreal experience. She’d spent the past twenty years contemplating nearly every aspect of the man’s existence but had never met him before today—by design. She couldn’t risk the possibility that he might recognize her. That he’d somehow been warned.

She knew him only through the lens of a surveillance camera, a pair of binoculars, or the comprehensive dossier she’d assembled, which meant she really didn’t know him at all.