Night Over Water by Ken Follett

immediately after the snatch and get him on the phone with Carol-Ann at the right moment. They were rational people, then, but they were prepared to break the law. They might be anarchists of some kind, but most likely he was dealing with gangsters.
    Where had they taken Carol-Ann? She had said she was in a house. It might belong to one of the kidnappers, but more likely they had taken over or rented an empty house in a lonely spot. Carol had said it had happened a couple of hours ago, so the house could not be more than sixty or seventy miles from Bangor.
    Why had they kidnapped her? They wanted something from him, something he would not give voluntarily, something he would not do for money— something, he guessed, that he would want to refuse them. But what? He had no money, he knew no secrets and no one was in his power.
    It had to be something to do with the Clipper.
    He would get his instructions on the plane, they had said, from a man called Tom Luther. Might Luther be working for someone who wanted details of the construction and operation of the plane? Another airline, perhaps, or a foreign country? It was possible. The Germans or the Japanese might be hoping to build a copy to use as a bomber. But there had to be easier ways for them to get blueprints. Hundreds of people, maybe thousands, could supply such information: Pan American employees, Boeing employees, even the Imperial Airways mechanics who serviced the engines here at Hythe. Kidnapping was not necessary. Hell, enough technical details had been published in the magazines.
    Might someone want to steal the plane? It was hard to imagine.
    The likeliest explanation was that they wanted Eddie to cooperate in smuggling something, or somebody, into the United States.
    Well, that was as much as he knew or could guess. What was he going to do?
    He was a law-abiding citizen and the victim of a crime, and he wanted with all his heart to call the police.
    But he was terrified.
    He had never been so scared in his life. As a boy he had been frightened of Pop and the devil, but since then nothing had really petrified him. Now he was helpless and rigid with fear. He felt paralyzed: for a moment he could not even move from where he stood.
    He thought of the police.
    He was in goddamn England. There was no point in talking to their bicycling local cops. But he could try to put a telephone call through to the county sheriff back home, or the Maine State Police, or even the F.B.I., and get them to start searching for an isolated house that had recently been rented by a man—
    Don’t call the police. It won’t do you any good, the voice on the phone had said. But if you do call them, I’ll fuck her just to be mean.
    Eddie believed him. There had been a note of longing in the spiteful voice, as if the man was half hoping for an excuse to rape her. With her rounded, belly and swollen breasts she had a lush, ripe look that—
    He clenched his fist, but there was nothing to punch but the wall. With a groan of despair he stumbled out through the front door. Not looking where he was going, he crossed the lawn. He came to a stand of trees, stopped and leaned his forehead against the furrowed bark of an oak.
    Eddie was a simple man. He had been born in a farmhouse a few miles out of Bangor. His father was a poor farmer, with a few acres of potato fields, some chickens, a cow and a vegetable patch. New England was a bad place to be poor: the winters were long and bitterly cold. Mom and Pop believed that everything was the will of God. Even when Eddie’s baby sister caught pneumonia and died, Pop said God had a purpose in it “too deep for us to comprehend.” In those days Eddie daydreamed about finding buried treasure in the woods: a brass-bound pirate’s chest full of gold and precious gems, like in the stories. In his fantasy he took a gold coin into Bangor and bought big soft beds, a truckload of firewood, pretty china for his mother, sheepskin coats for all the family, thick