PMadriani 12.5 - The Second Man by Steve Martini Page B

there was no telling what he might do.
    She headed for one of the bedrooms. She stepped inside, looked around, saw what she wanted, then sat on the bed as if she were testing the mattress.
    Akers glanced at her a ­couple of times through the open door, a sullen expression on his face.
    She leaned toward the head of the bed and looked behind the door to see if there was a lock on the inside. There wasn’t.
    She crossed the living room and did a tour of the bedroom on the other side. It was the same. Both rooms had the same amenities. Neither one of them had a door that locked. But both of them had extension telephones on the bedside tables. Joselyn leaned through the open door of the second room, smiled broadly at Akers, and said: “I think I’ll take this one if you don’t mind.”
    â€œWhatever.”
    â€œDo you have a preference?” she asked.
    â€œWould it matter?”
    â€œOf course it would. If you prefer this room I’ll take the other, it’s fine.”
    â€œYou decide,” he said. “You seem to know everything else.”
    The last thing she wanted to do was argue with him. His mood was impossible to gauge. One minute he was euphoric, hopelessly in love, the next he was petulant, irritable, and sulking.
    â€œLater, I’ll cook dinner if you like.”
    â€œWe’ll see,” he said.
    She stepped back inside and closed the bedroom door behind her.
    She walked straight to the ladder-­back chair against the wall. It was solid oak and heavy. Joselyn carried it to the door, and, trying not to make a sound, she propped the back of the chair under the brass doorknob.
    She stepped to the side of the bed and started to reach for the phone. Then she stopped and thought for a moment. Given his level of paranoia, Akers might be testing her, listening in on the phone in the other room.
    Slowly, as if she was defusing a bomb, Joselyn carefully lifted the receiver, replacing its weight with her finger on the button in the center of the cradle. She held the button down, raised the receiver to her ear, then slowly lifted her finger as she listened. She strained to hear any sound of Akers breathing on the line. Instead, there was stone-­dead silence, nothing, no sound at all.
    She reached down and pressed zero on the phone. The line was dead. She dropped the receiver on the bed and lifted the phone from the table. There, underneath it, lay the severed end of the telephone line. The tiny plastic jack in the back of the phone was missing.
    Akers had cut the line and removed the jack so there was no way to fix it. Then she remembered. When they first arrived in the room he had tested both of the beds. When he finally came out, he was cleaning his nails with one of those small, folding, tactical knives, the kind with razor-­sharp blades and a box cutter.
    Suddenly, she was exhausted. She couldn’t keep her eyes open. The stress, the tension was catching up with her. Maybe if she relaxed, lay down for just a few minutes, she could think more clearly. She settled onto the bed and put her head down on the pillow. The next thing she knew she was out.
    A KERS FOLDE D THE knife and put it back in his pocket. He didn’t bother to hide the severed wire from the phone in the living room. Instead, he just let it fall to the floor. He knew that by now she would have discovered the one in the bedroom.
    He reached into his other pocket and pulled out a small, black plastic box. It was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. It was a pocket-­sized portable electronic jammer. Used to jam radio signals across a broadband, it would block cell phone, Wi-­Fi, and Bluetooth signals for anything within a hundred meters. The military used them on missions where it was critical to shut down local cell communication in case the air cover failed to take out fixed infrastructure.
    He checked to make sure the jammer was on and the batteries fresh. Then he dropped it into the center