Chapter Three

The room in which the goons had thrown Peterson was pitch black and utterly silent. Cessation of the senses can be unnerving, so coupled with his bewildering experience over the past half hour, Thomas Peterson was petrified.

Neither Gerald Flynt nor his henchmen had said anything to Peterson after they entered the house, shoved him into the room, and yanked the door shut. Peterson just stood in the darkness for a few minutes, absolutely still, feeling his heart pounding inside his chest.

As unsure of everything as he presently was, he didn’t know if taking even one step might send him down a chasm. It occurred to him to try his phone, but reaching for his pocket, he could tell it wasn’t there. He surmised one of the men must have snatched it away when they were dragging him inside.

In the darkness, he was desperately trying to get his bearings. Holding both hands out in front of himself, Peterson slowly, blindly walked forward until he felt a wall. It was smooth and cold.

He carefully made his way around the perimeter of the room by sliding his hands until he met a corner, at which time he would trace along the next wall’s surface. He deliberately made his way around the entirety of the room a couple of times, but it was still too dark to see anything, even though his eyes had plenty of time to adjust.

From what he could tell, the room was a simple square, and although Peterson was moving through it with absolutely no illumination, he never tripped, since the floor was evidently vacant. No furniture. No rug. Nothing. 

He could feel the thin outline of a door on one wall, but that surface was completely smooth as well. There was no handle on the inside, and not even hinges on the edge. Peterson was literally in a black box with no sight and no sound, except for his own breathing and footsteps. 

He felt somewhat dizzy as he began to imagine what might come next. Thomas Peterson had never been so unnerved in his life. He broke the silence and said to the emptiness: “Hello?”

It was a ridiculous gesture. Given his circumstances, what kind of reply did he expect? But he wasn’t sure what else to do.

“Hello? Is anyone there? Can you hear me?”

Nothing. So, he slowly made his way over to one of the corners, leaned his back against the two adjoining walls, and slid silently to the floor. There he sat, legs pulled to his chest, peering pointlessly into the blackness.

No one had seen the banner go up, but there it was, high on the wall, twenty feet above the floor of the largest conference room and there for all to see. It must have been some smart-ass who was attending the conference who got it up there, because there’s no way anyone could have made their way into the ballroom without a pass. 

To the perpetrator’s credit, this was no hand-painted sign. It actually was as professional-looking as any of the other self-congratulatory missives hanging in any of the other rooms, yet this one declared:

Davos WEF: Where Billionaires tell Millionaires what the Poor are thinking.

Klaus Richter was straining his neck as he leered at the message. He shouted to his crew, “Jesus H. Christ, get that goddamned thing down right now!” 

It wasn’t like the man didn’t have enough to worry about already. As the WEF’s security chief, Richter had to deal with 5,000 hired personnel each year, the clearance for the badges, the roadway barricades, the protesters, and a thousand other details.

He had held the job since 2017, and even though he turned red in the face at the most modest provocation, he actually enjoyed dealing with this circus every January. Regardless, getting snarky banners removed was not what he needed at the moment. He had plenty else to keep him occupied.

What usually surprised those that met Richter for the first time was his voice. Anyone beginning a conversation with someone named Klaus Richter in Switzerland might expect a distinctly European accent, but instead they got a thick North Carolina twang and a smile which, back home, was fondly called a shit-eating grin.

True, Richter’s family had immigrated from Germany to the U.S. many generations ago, but the rotund, almost completely bald man had been born sixty years prior in Durham and spent most of his working life at Fort Bragg. His responsibilities at Davos were far less risky and much more lucrative than those with the Army, but sometimes, like now, he was just about on his last nerve.

“Mr. Richter?”

Klaus tensed up even more and thought to himself, Christ, now what? He turned around and saw a well-dressed young man holding an electronic tablet close to his chest.

“My name is Dylan Jenkins. I’m the personal assistant to Thomas Peterson, one of the attendees here.”

“Yes?” said Richter, trying his best to sound calm.

“Is there somewhere we could go to speak for a minute? It’s important.”

Richter glanced around the large room and saw there was an empty table surrounded by chairs off to the side. “Sure, son. I can’t talk for long, but let’s go over here.”

Once they were seated, Dylan set the electronic pad on the table and turned it on. Pointing to the map on the screen, Dylan said, “As I mentioned, I work for Thomas Peterson. This is a tracking map of where he’s been since early this afternoon, and I was expecting him quite some time ago. We had a driver waiting for him, but even though we know his plane landed, he never showed up. Luckily his location app was on, so I was able to reconstruct where he went.”

Richter took a close look at the map, pivoting the tablet for a better view and pulling it closer to where he was sitting. The route displayed would be impossible for a car, since it cut across a series of low mountains and open fields. It had to have been by air, yet it terminated at a place that was nowhere near anything like an airstrip.

Richter touched the screen and traced out the path with his index finger. “Mr. Jenkins, how much time transpired from the start of this route to the end?”

Jenkins swiped the bangs off his forehead and replied, “About thirty-five minutes. And the distance was more than a hundred kilometers.”

Richter tapped his finger on a specific point of the screen and said, “Well, given the terrain of this area, and that speed, I’d say he was in a helicopter. Is there any chance he had planned to meet someone else before coming here? It’s been very busy at the airport.”

“No, sir, he would have told me. It’s simply not like him. We had agreed to all our plans when I saw him last week. We pinned down the time of his flight, the car, where he would be staying, who he would be meeting with. Everything.”

Richter leaned back in the chair, tipping the front legs off the conference room floor. After a few moments he asked, “You’ve done everything you can to reach him, right? Do you have any idea at all what might have happened?”

Jenkins pressed the power button on the tablet and said, “Mr. Richter, I’ve worked for this man every day for the past seven years. I know more about what’s going on in his life than he does. Something is very wrong here. I am absolutely certain of it.”

With the conference officially starting in just a few hours, a distraction like this was unwelcome and unexpected, but it was also serious. Although several thousand individuals came to the conference, Peterson was one of the better-known participants, especially given all the attention his company had received over the past couple years.

For a person whose job it was to keep this event safe and predictable, Klaus Richter found this news to be unsettling.

Richter put both hands on the surface of the table and stood up, pushing his chair back. “Come with me, Mr. Jenkins. I think we’d better get some extra help.”