Suddenly the sound of a car’s rumbling engine approached from around the side of the building and the vehicle parking in what I assumed was the rear, where the broken window faced. My heart thumped in my chest as Anna faced me with a wide-eyed look.

  We had company.

  But who would it be? I knew I’d given George a bizarre assortment of puzzle pieces to put together—basement, chickens, Hyungkoo43, city. I knew, deep down, that it would be nearly impossible for her to figure out where were and get to us in the tiny amount of time that had elapsed. I also knew that because I had called her on Anna’s phone, she might be facing some Pretty Face goons of her own. Still, I couldn’t help but hope against hope to hear George’s voice on the other side of the door. Either George had found us just in time . . . or this adventure was about to take a very dangerous turn.

  The car door slammed. Anna and I looked at each other. We could have easily gotten up and moved to look out the broken window, but I think we were both too terrified to move. Anna bit her lip. I reached over and took her hand. The sound of footsteps walked across a paved surface and then disappeared. A few seconds later we heard them approaching the heavy, locked door near the wire shelves.

  Keys. The jingle of someone picking the right one, placing it into the lock. The lock mechanism shifted, metal against metal, something that would normally barely register but that sounded deafening in the silence.

  The heavy door swung open.

  “Well, well, well.” Adam Bedrossian stood in the doorway, framed by fluorescent lights in the hallway behind him. He smiled an evil smile. “Managed to sneak your PDA in here, eh, Anna? How very Veronica Mars of you.”

  I turned to Anna and gulped.

  What was Adam about to do to us?

  What had become of Bess and George?

  And . . . who was Veronica Mars?

  CAUGHT ON CAMERA

  Adam moved into the storage room, still with the same cold smile on his face. “Did you really think you could get away from us?” he asked, looking from Anna to me. “Get your friends here and, what, break out of the basement? Run to the cops, have us arrested, happily ever after?”

  I looked at Anna and swallowed. Adam’s eyes looked as hard and black as coal.

  “Pretty Face cosmetics has many allies in the NYPD,” he went on coolly. “One phone call, and I could be there to pick you girls up. Until this pageant is over and the new Perfect Face campaign is kicked off, you girls had better get used to my company.”

  “What happened to Bess and George?” I demanded. I felt so frozen, it surprised me to hear my own voice. But I had to know.

  “Bess and George,” Adam responded, lingering over my friends’ names. “Bess and George. Ah yes. I think it’s better that you don’t know.”

  A sharp blade of fear pierced my stomach. “What did you do to them?” I demanded, my voice rising in pitch. “Where are they?”

  But Adam just waved his hand as though he wouldn’t entertain my questions any longer. “You and your friends are very lucky that Kyle McMahon is in charge,” he said simply.

  “Why?” asked Anna.

  “Because Kyle has a daughter your age,” Adam replied as though it were obvious. “He has some sympathy for you. If it were up to me . . .”

  He didn’t finish the sentence. He didn’t have to. My insides already felt like ice.

  Adam stepped forward and held out his hand. “The phone, please.”

  Anna glanced at me and then pulled it out of her pocket, where she’d stashed it. “The battery is dead,” she explained in a pleading voice. “Look, we pose no danger to you. We can’t contact anyone. If you leave us here, we promise to behave—”

  “QUIET!” Adam bellowed, taking the phone and, in one quick motion, dropping it to the cement floor and crushing it under his foot. Even though the battery was dead, I cringed to see the phone destroyed—our last, and only, connection to the outside world was gone.

  Adam went on in a low voice. “You didn’t only make the phone call. You also broke a window and activated an alarm. Don’t try to paint yourselves as a pair of harmless kittens. You are both instigators; troublemakers. If you were capable of behaving, you wouldn’t be here in the first place!” He glared at Anna. “You don’t know when to let something go. Pretty Face hasn’t done anything wrong. We have no evidence that the ingredients in Perfect Face have ever done any harm to anyone. So you need to just let it go!”

  Then he turned to me. “And you. You’re relentless, an instigator of the worst kind. You never know when to leave well enough alone. First, poking around into Portia Leoni’s dethroning. You practically uprooted our whole pageant! And then you had to go poking around the Pretty Face offices in New York! Kyle was right to choose you to win the regional pageant, so that we could bring you to New York and keep an eye on you. I only wish we had done something sooner about your snooping!”

  I gulped. So that was why I’d won the regional pageant. Oh well. I’d had a feeling it wasn’t because of my sparkling rendition of “On My Own” from Les Misérables or my knack for grace and etiquette.

  “What will happen to us now?” Anna asked, and I felt a wave of regret. If only I hadn’t snooped around and found Anna’s PDA! If I hadn’t called George, we would at least be safe in our basement captivity. Not to mention Bess and George would be safe.

  Adam shrugged. “That depends on how you behave,” he said lightly, but he didn’t meet our eyes. I had a terrible feeling that Adam didn’t know what would ultimately happen to us. And to be the captive of an unsure person, particularly a person like Adam who was worried about what we might do when released back into the world, was bad news.

  Adam reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of zip ties, the sort of thing you might use to tie off a garbage bag. The narrow strips of plastic were surprisingly strong, and I had seen them used to bind prisoners’ hands. “There is a car waiting outside,” he said. “You will let me tie your hands, and you will cooperate with me, because you do not want to know what will happen to you if you don’t.”

  I glanced at Anna and nodded almost imperceptibly. At this point we had to cooperate. We had no other option.

  Adam came forward to secure my hands behind my back with the zip ties, then did the same to Anna. “Now we go,” he said.

  Taking us each roughly by the arm, he led us out of the storage room, down the fluorescent-lit hall, and up a set of stairs to an outside door.

  The sunshine was dazzlingly bright, and I squinted my eyes, which had been surrounded by darkness for too long. I craned my neck, greedily trying to take in all the information I could, but all I observed before I was shoved toward the car was that we were near a large, industrial building, and the daylight suggested that it was mid-to late afternoon.

  The car was a nondescript black town car, and as we approached, the driver exited the vehicle and opened the back door. He glanced at us quickly, not meeting our eyes. I wondered just what he knew.

  I hesitated as Adam pushed us toward the car. All of the experts say to never get into a car with a captor. Once you’re in the car, they can take you anywhere, do anything to you. But what choice did Anna and I have? We were not only protecting our safety by playing along, but the safety of Bess and George . . .

  Suddenly the quiet afternoon was shattered by a loud, distorted voice. “Smile!” it screamed, so loudly amplified that I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. “You’re on camera!”

  CAB CHASE

  “What the—” Adam dropped my arm and Anna’s as he craned his neck to find the source of the voice. “Who’s there?!”

  I was craning my neck too. With one quick look behind me, I found them: Bess and George! Bess was shouting into a voice distorter, probably the same one Piper had used a few days earlier to stage a protest falsely accusing Pretty Face of cruelty to animals. And George was, indeed, filming the whole scene with a tiny digital camcorder.

  Waves of relief crashed over me. I don’t think I had ever been so happy to see my friends.

  I didn’t have much time to bask in the news, though. Right after I spotted them, Adam whipped around and lurched after Bess and George. “You there!” he cried. “Put the camera down or you’ll regret it!”

  George was already backing away, still filming Adam’s approach with the camcorder. “Nancy! Run!” Bess screamed into the voice distorter, right before she and George made a break for it themselves. I glanced at Anna. “We should split up,” I instructed quickly, already moving to run off to my left. “We’ll be harder to catch!”

  Anna nodded, and we were off.

  With no time to figure out where Bess and George had headed, I just picked a random direction and started running as fast as I could. It was hard to keep my balance with my hands still bound behind my back, but I did the best I could. We seemed to be in a small industrial park bordering the water. Since I couldn’t see land on the other side, I assumed we were actually looking at the ocean, and not the Hudson or East Rivers.

  I ran until I could barely breathe—around buildings, across driveways, down alleys. In front of an older-looking factory I found an old-fashioned boot scraper, a piece of metal that workers in the old days would use to literally scrape the dirt off their boots. Leaning down, I managed to hook a piece of my plastic bindings over its edge, then pulled up with all of my might. The force of the breaking plastic knocked me over, but my hands were finally free.

  Getting back to my feet, I took a left, and realized that the whole industrial area bordered on a small neighborhood of shops and apartments. I ran across the street and kept running—up, down, around buildings—any place I could find. Finally I paused in the middle of a crowded boulevard, looking around for any sign of Bess, George, Anna, or—gulp—Adam. Amazingly, I didn’t see any of them. As I turned toward the direction I was headed, trying to figure out what to do next, a sign on a storefront just to my left caught my attention: HYUNGKOO’S LIVE POULTRY. In spite of my panic, I smiled. That explained the chicken noises—and the source of the Wi-Fi connection I’d picked up.

  But then I made a scary realization: If I could hear the chickens from the basement we’d been held in, that meant I must be very close to where I started. I must have run in a huge circle. And that meant that Adam must be close by . . .

  “Hey!”

  A car screeched to a halt next to me. Instinctively I cowered, but then the rational part of my brain recognized the voice as George’s. Flooded with relief, I looked up just in time to see George’s arm reaching out to grab me and pull me into the cab.

  “Oof!” I cried as my knees hit the backseat.

  “Come on, Nance,” Bess said impatiently, reaching over to help me in and nodding to the driver to keep going. “We don’t have a ton of time. We just passed Adam, and he was headed back to his car!”

  George slammed the door behind me, and the cab started moving. Sprawled across my two friends in the backseat, I struggled to get up and get my bearings. “How . . . where . . . ?”

  “We’re in Queens,” Bess supplied, instinctively understanding my confusion. “Waaay out near JFK Airport; practically on Long Island.”

  “We got here just in time,” George added, leaning over to squeeze my arm. “Sheesh, Nance, we were so worried! Just a few seconds later, we would have missed you, and you’d be on your way who-knows-where with that creepy guy. Good thing you were still in the city! If we’d had to go any farther, we wouldn’t have found you in time.”

  I looked around, trying to make sense of all this. “How did you find me?”

  George shrugged. “I plugged Hyung Koo and New York into a search engine.” She explained. “Hyung Koo’s Live Poultry at 43 Belleview Boulevard was the first thing to pop up. I remembered what you’d said about the chickens, and I knew it was the right place.”

  “So we grabbed a cab,” Bess continued. “We went to Hyung Koo’s, and then we just kind of searched the area. We spotted that industrial park on the water, and there was something called PFD Research Laboratories. We decided to check it out, and that’s when we spotted you and Anna being led to the car.”

  I laughed, amazed at my friends’ resourcefulness. “And the voice distorter?”

  George and Bess looked at each other sheepishly, and George laughed. “We borrowed it from Piper,” she admitted. “We didn’t have a real plan for saving you, but we figured it might be a good distraction tactic.”

  I shook my head. “For not having a plan, you did pretty well.”

  Bess grinned. “Anytime, Nancy.”

  Suddenly I remembered what Adam had said. “Did anybody . . . threaten you?” I asked. “Chase after you, frighten you?”

  George looked surprised. “No. Why would they?”

  I sighed. “Anna told me when she regained consciousness that the phone I used to call you was bugged. Pretty Face immediately knew that we were conscious, that we had a phone, and that I had called you.”

  Bess shrugged. “I guess we got out of the hotel before they could find us,” she said. “We climbed into this cab, and by then we must have been pretty much untraceable.”

  I sighed again, with relief this time. We were driving out of the residential section, getting to the wide street that separated the waterfront industrial park from the rest of the neighborhood. Suddenly it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen Anna since I left the industrial park—and that the last time I’d seen her, her hands had been bound. Had she been caught? Was she alone? Frightened?

  I knew I couldn’t leave her here, all alone—or worse, with Adam.

  “Guys,” I said, “we have to find Anna.”

  Bess frowned. “We’ve been trying,” she said. “No trace of her. I’m afraid . . .”

  But just then, as if she’d read my mind, I spotted her. She was running out of the industrial park, and it looked as though she’d found a way to free her hands.

  She looked terrified! She ran, panting, into the street, but had to stop as a car raced by her. And then I saw who was behind her. Adam. He was hot on her heels, only about twenty feet behind her, if that. Anna looked desperately into the street as more cars sped by.

  “There she is!” I cried. “And Adam’s right behind her. We have to get her!”

  “Stop the cab!” Bess cried, leaning over to address the driver. “Right here. If we can just get her attention . . .”

  But George was way ahead of her. “ANNA!” she screamed, opening the door and waving furiously. “ANNA! OVER HERE!”

  Anna turned and spotted George, her face flooding with relief. But just as she saw us, so did Adam. And his expression was murderous. Anna started running toward our cab, but Adam was gaining on her. . . .

  By the time Anna reached the cab, Adam was just a couple of feet away. George leaned out of the cab and grabbed Anna’s arms, pulling her into the car and sending her sprawling across the backseat, the same way she’d done with me.

  Adam reached after her, and his arm was inside the taxi, blocking us from closing the door. His eyes were dark and cold, and he looked furious, ready to do almost anything to keep us from leaving him behind.

  “You were so close,” he chided in a low, serpentine voice. “You could have left without her. But now you’ll all suffer. . . .”

  All three of us were clawing at his arm, trying to push it—and him—out and away from the door, so we could close it and get away. Our cab driver saw what was going on, too, and had turned to watch the action.

  “Only four people in a cab!” he yelled, leaning back to push Adam’s hand out. “You get your own cab!”

  Between the four of us pushing Adam, and Anna kicking at him with her feet, we had almost managed to push him out of the car. My heart was pounding in my ears, my whole body filled with adrenalin. If Adam got in, if we didn’t get away from him, then this cab driver wasn’t going to be able to save us from whatever fate Adam had in mind.

  “Start driving!” Bess begged as she pushed mightily and got Adam’s arm out of the backseat.

  “Not with the door open!” the cabbie insisted.

  Adam managed to grab onto the door frame, his fingers clawing desperately at the side of the door. “You won’t get away . . . ,” he threatened. But just then, Anna righted herself on the backseat and lunged toward Adam’s hand with her head. In one quick motion she opened her mouth and bit down hard on Adam’s clinging fingers.

  “Owwwwwwww!” He howled.

  But we didn’t hear any more. Bess took advantage of his momentary weakness and shoved him hard, sending him sprawling onto the pavement. I reached after her, grabbed the door, and slammed it shut, locking it securely.

  “Okay,” Anna addressed the driver, sounding surprisingly put together as she wiped her mouth and sat upright in the seat. “We’re going to the Horatio Hotel in Manhattan, please.”

  The driver pounded the gas, and we were off.

  TRAIN TRACKS

  “He’s watching us,” Bess complained, keeping an eye on Adam Bedrossian as he grew smaller and smaller in the rearview window. “He’s writing something down. . . .”

  “The medallion number,” Anna said with a sigh, putting her head in her hands and moaning. “Ugh. This isn’t over, guys.”

  “What does that mean?” I asked. “What does it mean if he has our medallion number?”

  Anna pointed to a video screen that was nested onto the back of the cab’s front seat, facing us. “See that?” she asked.

  We glanced at the video. It was playing a touristy little intro to New York City—Visit the Empire State Building! See a Broadway show!

  “Yeah,” George said slowly.

  Anna rubbed her eyes, looking tired. “They were installed in almost all New York City cabs a while back. The cabs have those kinds of video screens. The screen makes it possible to pay by credit card, and”—she sighed—“it also has GPS.”

  It hit George first. “So anyone could tell where we are right now?”

  Anna shook her head. “That’s one good thing. Only the police and cab companies have access to the GPS information. But if Pretty Face has friends among the police . . .”

 

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