Free Dead Line by Chris Ewan

a chance to touch base with his contacts in the Naples police force. Information was his greatest ally. The latest abduction trends, the going rate Italian gangs were charging for ransoms, the number of victims who were released safely or killed – he amassed all the data he possibly could, expanding his records so he could make the best judgements when he was faced with the toughest decisions.
    His phone still wouldn’t ring.
    Why hadn’t she called? And why wasn’t she answering her mobile? He’d tried calling her many times but a recorded message kept telling him the device was switched off. He’d sent her texts. Heard nothing back.
    It wasn’t like her. She always talked with him at least once a day whenever he was away. In truth, they tended to speak to one another much more often. Usually they’d chat in the evenings. Sometimes late at night or early in the morning, too. She’d last phoned him at 7 a.m. the day before yesterday. A normal phone call. A perfectly ordinary interaction.
    And nothing since.
    He eyed his mobile. Dared it not to ring. Challenged it to remain silent.
    It didn’t make a sound.
    Something plummeted deep inside him and coiled in his gut. The something was black and slick and greasy. It turned and twisted and writhed its way into his chest, wrapping itself around his heart and lungs, squeezing and contracting. Suffocating him from within.
    He slumped onto the edge of the mattress, dust rising in the stale air.
    His flight home was booked for early the following afternoon. He had two appointments scheduled for the morning. The first was with a guy he was thinking of training up locally, a native speaker to assist him during lengthy Italian negotiations. The second was with a potential new client from the conference. An anxious middle management type who’d approached him with a sweaty brow and a wet handshake after his talk.  
    He could cancel both meetings. He could take a cab to the airport right now and book himself onto a late flight home. Or he could hire a car, drive through the night to Marseilles.
    And do what? Confirm his worst fears?
    Aimée had been taken. He felt sure of it now. Felt it, in fact, with the same conviction with which he knew that the rain would continue late into the evening, keeping him company along with his haunted thoughts as he paced the unwashed floor of his crappy hotel room and peered down over the twilit passageways, watching blurred figures scurry by, listening to the bleat of car horns and the whine of scooter engines.
    He’d already contacted someone he could trust. He’d telephoned the man after the first thirty-six hours had elapsed, dispatching him to check his apartment. He couldn’t call the police. Couldn’t risk their involvement.
    His contact had acted right away. He’d reported back within ninety minutes. There was no sign of Aimée at their home. No evidence of a disturbance. But her car wasn’t parked where Trent had said it would be. And she wasn’t in any of the local places he’d suggested.
    Trent had thanked the man, then had him check again this morning and once more in the afternoon. He had him telephone the local hospitals and a few select individuals in the city’s police stations. Same result.
    She was gone. And he was seven hundred miles away.
    If there was one consolation, it was that they’d talked about this many times; had spoken of it, more than once, as if it was simply inevitable, a circumstance they’d long been destined to face.
    At first, Trent had been little more than an irritant to some of the European kidnap gangs. And the astute operators, he suspected, had mostly been pleased with his approach. He was a professional they could work with. A guy who was willing to negotiate without any apparent interest in giving the authorities their scent. But as time wore on, as his business expanded and he became involved in more cases, then it was only logical that he might offend someone who held a different view.