Witness

Never give in, never never never.

My heart was racing. Everything was collapsing. My knees were weak but I still somehow found myself standing, my hands shaking uncontrollably with the piece of paper still clutched in my hands.

I’ll let you bargain for his life if you can find me.

Damien had been downstairs. Damien had been in Church Stretton. Damien had found me. Damien was on the inside.

It was all too much to handle – the room was spinning, my stomach was sick… In a moment, I was hunched over the trash can in the corner spewing up the remnants of my morning coffee, my throat burning with the acid. And then I began to cry.

He had Harry.

What was I going to do? What could I do? There were two possible options. I could call Scotland Yard, the O.E.O., the FBI, whoever the hell would send people to help me save him. But I had to find him first.

But two words rang out to me through all of it: just you. Just me. Just me and Damien, the way it had always been. It was never about anyone else – it was never about Eric Spengler, it was never about Amelia, and then it wasn’t about Harry. It was just between us. And God only knew what would happen if he knew I’d called for help.

He was on the inside; that was obvious now. He knew to show up in a suit with a red poppy, my safety symbol. He had found out my location through the system somehow, through some intricate hacking process no doubt. Someone must have mentioned it in an email. Or they had it filed under code words. It seemed like they were always underestimating him, like I was the only one who truly believed how dangerous he was. I’d experienced first hand.

So I knew what he would do if he knew I called for help. He wanted this to be just us. Harry’s life was on the line. I couldn’t mess around, especially not this time. I had to play by his rules or else he would kill Harry. And I knew he would find out if I broke them.

I had to do it alone. I had to take on Damien Trask alone.

I broke out into sobs then, thinking of what he could possibly have done with Harry. Packed him up and thrown him in the trunk of some car? Did he have them in the front seat with a gun pressed to his temple the whole time until they reached their destination? Where did he take him? How was I going to find him and save him?

I felt hopelessly and utterly lost. I didn’t even know where to begin. He’d left me nothing to work with, nothing at all to go off of. I was trying to spin answers out of thin air.

But every moment I sat there beside myself was a moment Harry was in Damien’s hands.

That was it. The game had to end.

So I stood up, slapped my cheeks a couple times, and started thinking. It was going to take every square inch of my brain to figure out where Harry was. I sat down at his computer, running my hand over the keys that he had touched just that morning. I took a deep breath, pressing my face to them for a moment, as though whatever knowledge Harry had of his whereabouts would somehow seep into me.

I had to get him. I had to go and find him. But where was he?

The box from last night, the one that was sent to the O.E.O. Maybe a clue was there? I sat at the computer and thought about it for a moment, trying to put together all the pieces. The poppy was obvious. That was his way of telling us he was in the inside before we even knew. He must have been on the inside enough to have heard my exchange with Harry about Only Love.

That left Switzerland and Blenheim Palace. And Switzerland seemed unlikely.

Had Damien managed to get him on a plane to Switzerland? If Damien had managed to somehow get into the country, it wasn’t out of the question that he could get on a plane to Switzerland. The flight to Bern had to be at least an hour. How could he possibly expect me to get to them in twenty four hours, like the letter had stated?

The answer was he probably didn’t. If he’d taken Harry to Switzerland, he wasn’t expecting me to catch up. If they’d gone to Switzerland, Damien was planning on killing Harry.

I choked out another sob.

It couldn’t be. Bringing Harry to an airport would cause too much fuss – he wasn’t exactly low profile, and he himself said that fans had a way of finding him even when he didn’t know where he was. It was too high of a risk to put him out in the public eye.

Then Blenheim Palace.

It seemed too easy. Damien having sent the location of where he was planning on stashing Harry right to the O.E.O.? That was perhaps more unlikely than him running off to Switzerland. The proximity made sense but I was more wary than ever not to underestimate Damien.

This was the man who faked his own death and fooled an entire nation and all its armed forces, so underestimating him seemed unwise.

I sat there, unconvinced and the weight of the clock ticking sitting heavily on my shoulders. There had to be more two it. I still had something else to work with – the note he’d left with Tom downstairs. He must have chosen to leave a note to fuck with me even more… to torture me just that extra bit. I could only imagine it must have been torture for him too, to have me so close and yet know that he had to resist to make his sadistic plan a reality.

My blood ran cold at the thought of him walking just a floor below me, Harry tied in the backseat of his car, dropping off a note to taunt me. To draw me into his lair.

It was working.

I pulled out the note then, considering it carefully. I took something from him and now he took something from me. What had I taken from Damien? What could he have possibly twisted into this way? I couldn’t think of anything I’d taken from him – perhaps the normalcy of his life after I turned him in? But wasn’t he bound to be caught anyway? I firmly believed that he wasn’t smart enough to evade the law forever.

Not to be underestimated.

The rest seemed straightforward. Every other challenge he’d laid before me, I’d taken in stride – well, as close to taken in stride as I could get for being tracked by a vicious murderer. I deserved a chance to bargain for my love’s life. I deserved a chance to sacrifice myself to save Harry.

And that’s exactly what I planned on doing.

The last line, jotted at the bottom like an afterthought, caught my eye then. Never give in, never never never never – no punctuation, rambling, yet somehow familiar. I’d heard the phrase before somewhere a long time ago. I turned to the ceiling like I always did in times of need, trying desperately to figure it out.

I couldn’t find it. So I turned to Google instead.

My fingers felt weightless as they typed the letters into the search engine, each one hopefully bringing me a step closer to Harry. I needed him then more than ever when he was so far out of my reach. Of course it had to be that way.

Search.

Winston Churchill. Every result turned up for Winston Churchill and his famous Never Give In speech, something I’d heard when I was in high school studying World History. We’d studied Churchill, I remembered that much. But what did he have to do with anything?

I then turned to Wikipedia and began to read everything I could find about Winston Churchill, word for word, from the very beginning. It was very dense at first, leading me to no conclusions. Many things about his stay in office, especially during the Second World War. It wasn’t until I reached his childhood that it all became clear.

Churchill was born on 30 November 1874, two months prematurely, in a bedroom in Blenheim Palace, Woodstock, Oxfordshire.

Blenheim Palace.

That was enough confirmation for me to know exactly where I needed to go. Harry was at Blenheim Palace. And where Harry was, so lay Damien in wait. And the time had come for me to put an end to all of this mess, to finally confront death himself. Or die trying.

I gathered my things to go, all the fear suddenly leaving my body. It was an hour to Blenheim Palace, an hour to work myself up for this confrontation. Maybe an hour left to live. But I had to accept it. This had been a long time coming.

And it had to end.

“One ticket to Woodstock please,” I requested of the train teller, cinching the belt of my new coat around my waist as tight as it would go. Something about the compression was comforting, as though someone was holding me, telling me it was going to be alright. I had to do this, it was for the best.

It had to end.

As I sat on the train and watched out the window, the countryside melting away, I tried to remember all the moves I’d learned with Mary at self defense class. Strike upwards toward the nose with the palm of my hand. Gouge at the eyes when possible. Go for the knees and groin. I went through every type of hold I could find myself in – by the wrist, choke holds, full on tackle – and how exactly I could get out of it.

But all that training wasn’t worth much if I was up against a gun.

The time seemed to pass so quickly and yet, so slowly. I was stuck on a train headed undoubtedly to my death, the darkness rolling in like a thick cover of storm clouds. It got dark unusually early in the winter months in England, so much so I worried I would lose them entirely. Confronting Damien in the dark seemed much more threatening than in broad daylight. In the daylight, there was bound to be tourists at the palace. At night, after close…

Woodstock rolled up beside us, a picturesque village just like the others I’d tumbled through the last few months. I was beginning to grow numb to the nature of British towns, with their buildings with old brick-and-stucco façades and ages old churches atop rolling green hills. But maybe I was just beginning to grow numb in general.

I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.

“Have a good night, miss,” the attendant said to me as I departed the train, stuffing my hands into my pockets to protect from the cold. I couldn’t bring myself to respond to him. How could this be a good night? I walked until I was out of his sight and then began to run.

It was snowing.

Thin flakes of white powder floated from the pitch black sky to the ground beneath my feet, plating a layer in my path. I could feel them sticking to my eyelashes as I followed the road to the palace, my heart beating only faster and faster. In moments, I would come upon it. And then what?

Harry.

I hadn’t expected it to be as big as it was – when I finally saw it in person, my resolve deflated. The palace was huge, a massive expanse sprawling out across the grounds, several stories tall, with a half dozen corridors leading to different wings of the gothic style building. Damien could be anywhere.

I took the gates in my hands, gripping them so tight the blood ran from my knuckles, and pulled. They didn’t budge. My panic grew. I wasn’t going to be able to reach Harry in time, Damien was going to murder him, I was stuck behind these gates, I was too late…

This was too much.

I couldn’t underestimate him.

Finally, I reached into my purse and withdrew my phone. I needed to call for help. Even if I were to walk to my death, maybe they could arrive in time to save Harry. Or at least catch Damien. I’d already walked into his trap, I already played his game nearly perfectly by the rules. It was time I broke one. My fingers grazed the numbers in slow motion, snowflakes melting instantly against the screen as I stood at the gate, completely lost as what to do.

“999, state your emergency.”

“This is Mara Hitchcock, I’m in Witness Protection," I blurted, my words coming out in nearly a jumbled mess with the anxiety mounting in my voice. “He has us, he has me and Harry, we’re at Blenheim Palace –“

And suddenly, a stunningly forceful blow struck me in the back of the head and everything faded instantly to black.