Free Focus by Annie Jocoby Page B

a few minutes, I lost all my sense of anxiety and fear. I was completely calm. I had the same feeling that I did when I first woke up in that other place – that everything was a dream. Not a good dream, but not necessarily a bad dream, either. It just seemed like a twilight netherworld, where nothing was real.
    “Okay, now, CJ,” I heard the new guy, Robert, say. “Let’s go.”
    “Okay,” I said. There was a part of me that was screaming, but that part was muted. Or buried.
    And my handcuffs were unhooked from the bed. I got up, and the new guy put his arm around me. “Don’t worry, CJ, I won’t hurt you. I’m going to set you up in a nice place where you can meet lots of new men and women. I’m going to make sure that you have good meals and a place to stay. And the way that you’re feeling right now, is the way that you will always feel, because I’ll make sure that you have plenty of morphine or ecstasy or anything that you need. You’re going to have fun, CJ. You’re going to love where you’re going.”
    Love where I was going . Intellectually, I understood. This man wasn’t going to buy me for his own personal interest, but, rather, apparently wanted me to be a working girl in an underground bordello. Or maybe work as an escort. I couldn’t be sure.
    Emotionally, I didn’t have any feelings about this turn of events, one way or another. My feelings were completely numb.
    All that I knew was that I was soon in the back of a limo with this man, and we were heading to God-knew-where to do God-knew-what. And I had no feelings about this, only thoughts.
    And these thoughts were truly hideous.

Chapter 13
Asher
    I frantically flew to my office so that I could do some cyberhacking into the accounts of Yuri Kazakov. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a tough thing to do. For me, it would be second nature. When I was young, I could, and did, hack into any database that I was ordered to. Large banks, large corporations, even governmental entities. Mainly we dealt with large banks, but I had the ability to hack into almost any computer, anywhere in the world.
    Granted, that was years and years ago, and things had changed since then. But I had kept my skills, because I believed that there would one day come a time when I would really need them, if only to foil those who would deign to do some corporate espionage on my company. I couldn’t afford for that to happen, so I always kept on the latest techniques that cybercriminals used. That was the best way to know how to combat them.
    The skills that I had learned as a defensive mechanism would come in handy here. Yuri, however, no doubt had a difficult security profile, so getting into his account would not be as easy as I would have liked. This might take days, although I hoped that it wouldn’t.
    CJ’s life depended upon it.
    Nikolai and Marisa didn’t come into the computer room. Nikolai was standing guard, just in case somebody caught on to what I was doing and decided to come in and stop me. And Marisa was in Nikolai’s care. Nikolai was surprisingly good with Marisa, who was evidently traumatized by what had happened, as anybody would be. I knew that Marisa would have to be taken to the hospital soon, if only to be checked out, but that would have to come after I did what I had to do. This project was paramount, and time was of the essence. To say the very least.
    I sat down, and got right down to business.

Chapter 14
CJ
    T he limo finally stopped in front of a club, and I was led out of the limo by this guy, Robert. We entered the club, and I saw, right away, that it was a gentlemen’s club. Which was like a strip club, but slightly higher class. It was dark and smoky, but there were also neon lights and girls dancing everywhere.
    “What is it that you want me to do?” I said, as Robert ushered me through the club into a back room. “I don’t know how to dance.”
    He smiled. “Of course you know how to dance. Everybody knows how to dance. I