Taken

“You have a ninety-six hour window from the time she was grabbed.”

“To what?”

“To never finding her.”

“Okay, okay, w-we can resolve this...”

The shithead, by the name of ‘Saint Clair’, didn’t look so haughty now, thought Bryan Mills. The little creep was backing away towards the elevator, in total shock at the sight of Mill’s emergence through the iron door, pistol in hand, after his supposed execution. Despite the urgency of the situation, moments like this were deliciously cathartic, and he closed in on the little shit with deliberation. Mills cared only about Kim, and for being so instrumental in the sex-trafficking of her, his 17-year-old daughter, the guy was a dead man no matter what and must have known it.

“I-I know how you feel,” jabbered the wretch. “W-we should talk. Okay? W-we can work this out.”

Not okay. BANG! Mills shot him in the right shoulder-bone. With a cry of pain, Saint Clair staggered backwards into the elevator, which had just opened.

“You have no idea...”

What the fuck? No idea what? How pressured his turd life is? BANG! He shot him in the left shoulder, knocking him back against the elevator wall.

“Where is she?!” demanded Mills.

“Please ... understand, please try to...”

BANG! One to his left knee. Saint Clair sprawled down into the corner, the pain of this one cutting through whatever shock-induced numbness he might be feeling from the last two.

“There’s...” He panted in agony, his face flat with trauma. “There’s a boat by the quay. Please understand ... it was all business ... it wasn’t personal...”

It was amazing how they could not only achieve eloquence, but also divulge everything they knew, when the pain was sufficient. Well, ‘boat’, ‘quay’, that was all he needed out him.

“It was all personal to me,” said Mills, and he put five bullets into his torso in quick succession.

As if on cue, the elevator doors closed, taking the fresh corpse upstairs to the thrill no doubt of the high society asshole party going on up there. To what extent was that an innocent gathering, and how many of them had knowledge of the sale of flesh going on in this basement? No time to find out; the 96 hours were up. Mills proceeded out of the building, and he was just in time to see a girl covered in a blanket being hustled into a smart grey car. Kim! – his daughter – had to be!

He gave chase on foot, and might have got close enough to get a shot at the driver or at least the tyres, but he failed to see a vehicle coming from his left. “Fuck!” he cussed, as he got bumped over the bonnet of it. Mills recovered and got up as if a man possessed, and kept in sight of the car that mattered for the half kilometre to the jetty. The men got out of it with not one but three girls, and boarded a motorized luxury yacht, a rich Arab’s or maybe a Russian ologarch.

It moved off before he had chance to get to it. Instead he flanked his way down to the waters-edge, and crept up on the one guy who had stayed with the car, smashing his face against the roof and then putting his head in the door and slamming it on him. Guy out cold, car neatly appropriated, Mills got in and drove. He reversed like a madman up the jetty to the riverside highway above. He then had to go against the one-way system to follow the yacht, like a demented arcade game slaloming to avoid disaster.

After about 5 insane minutes of this, he managed to reach the Pont Desarts pedestrian footbridge – last chance – sufficiently ahead of it. He abandoned the car and dashed out onto the bridge, climbed the railings, and readed himself. He timed the 20-foot leap so as to land on a raised roof-section and behind the one guard he could see outside. Despite hurting his ankle, the instinct of all his training carried him through a forward roll and straight onto the guard, who he got into an instant head-lock and broke his neck after a brief struggle.

Ignoring the pain in his ankle, he proceeded to below deck. Swinging from the beam of the stairway, he landed a two-footed kick on the chest of the solitary guard at the bottom of it. He recovered from the knock-back and came at Mills, who easily dodged the punch and landed a double cut of his own to face and throat to stun him. He then rugby-charged him and tipped him overboard in one flowing move, enjoying his squeals as he fell into the River Seine to maybe or maybe not drown, who cared.

Mills glimped through a couple of portholed doors three girls being hustled along by four men. He knew he’d been spotted and stepped into a little washroom and waited there silently. After a few seconds the muzzle of a revolver tentatively entered and he yanked the the arm holding it, trapping it hard in the door, then instantly landed a chop on the guy’s neck and then threw him forward to smash his face against the wash basin. He collapsed in a heap, with a couple of squeals. Mills slipped the gun inside his belt. Onward.

He crouched down by the next corner he came to, anticipating – and anticipating correctly – that another guard would be stalking from that direction. He’d have to be extra-fast, and extra-furious from now on. He leapt out at him, grabbing his gun arm and smashing the weapon up into his face with the same move. Before the fucker could regain his senses, Mills landed two knife-hand chops onto his neck with maximum force and weight, succesfully severing the spinal chord. Now he had a second revolver to slip into his waistband.

He moved on, this time jumping a bald-headed machine-gun toting fuck around the next corner. He pile-drove him in the nose and wrestled the gun safely toward the ceiling, it spraying bullets as it went. Now in the inner sanctum, there’d be more of this kind of weaponry, so there was absolutely not a second to waste. Bam ... bam, bam! Mills drew one of his revolvers from inches away to put three bullets into the guy’s body, one for the liver and one for each lung. Instant drop, the impact alone ensuring he’d never get up.