“Not like we don’t have a lot of practice,” the driver, Max Tariksky, said with a nod. He was Rudy’s cousin, the same age and hearty build, but forty pounds heavier. His face was round, his nose a ski slope, and his hooded gray eyes steely. He carried a 9 mm Browning under his windbreaker.

They had snatched the woman when she was on her dawn run through Rock Creek Park in Chevy Chase. Her name was Liz Sansborough, and she was a professor of psychology at Georgetown. She should’ve been an easy mark, but she was also ex CIA and rumored to have been an undercover officer. Taking no chances, Rudy had pretended to lose control of a bicycle, crashing into her, knocking her to the ground, while Max had hurried from a bench to help her stand but instead had injected her with a fast-acting sedative. They’d shoved her and the bike into the van before anyone had a chance to realize what was happening.

Now she was curled like a lemon peel on the floor behind them.

The highway bent sharply left and crested a ridge. As a mountain valley unfolded below, Max slowed the van. No vehicles were in sight. On their right an asphalt lane came into view and he turned the van onto it, braking inside the trees. Ten feet ahead stood a reinforced security gate with barbed wire on the top. On either side a chain-link fence extended into the forest. The sign on the gate warned PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESSPASSING.

Rudy jumped out, hurried to the gate, and pressed four numbers on a security pad. By the time he ran back to the passenger seat the steel gate had slid open. After Max drove through, the gate closed behind them. They now had complete control of the property’s hundred acres.

The drive wound up through oaks, pines, and poplars for nearly two miles. In this part of the Blue Ridge Mountains hunt clubs were common. The family had owned this one for nearly twenty years and was considered a good neighbor. Which meant they minded their own business. In rural Warren County privacy was next to godliness.

Checking on Liz Sansborough, Rudy saw that she’d rolled over onto her other side. He studied her in her sleek, yellow jogging clothes, her auburn hair falling out of her ponytail. With her full lips and wide-set eyes she was pretty. Her hands were scraped from when she’d tried to cushion her fall after the bicycle struck her. Other than that, she didn’t have a scratch or a bruise on her.

That will soon change, Rudy thought.

• • •

HER EYELIDS FLUTTERING, LIZ HEARD herself moan.

She felt dizzy, sick to her stomach. Where was she? What had happened? As the stench of exhaust burned her nose, she began to remember—two men in the park, a bicycle knocking her down, someone offering to help her stand, the sting of a hypodermic. Just before she passed out they’d thrown her into a van. The van. That must be where she was now.