“Here.” Walt grasped Jakob’s fingers, pressing his thumb against the lock screen. “Is the number in your contacts?”
It spoke to exactly how much pain Jakob was in that he offered no resistance to Walt opening his phone and digging through the contacts list. “Yes. Klein.”
Walt found the number, dialing it before putting it on speaker, shaking his head when Jakob attempted to reach for the phone.
“Klein,” Pia, the vice admiral, said upon answering. “Jakob? Are you still in Krakow with Dr. Fischer?”
“Dr. Fischer missing. Abducted.” With every word he spoke, Jakob felt crushed under the weight of his failure. “We can’t find her.”
“We?” Pia said.
Jakob’s gaze locked with Walt’s, but before he could summon the strength to shake his head in warning, Walt spoke.
“Dr. Walt Hayden here, uh, Vice Admiral. I’ve been working on the Alicja case with Annalise and Jakob.”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and Jakob resigned himself to the tongue lashing he was going to receive when he returned to Germany.
“Dr. Hayden,” Pia said at last. “You’re American?”
“Yes, ma’am. Born and raised in Charleston, South Carolina.”
“I see.”
“And while I’m not a member of the Masters’ Admiralty, my sister, Sylvia, belongs to the England territory.”
“Your sister,” Pia said slowly, though there was no question she was displeased with and confused by Walt’s presence.
Jakob sighed. He was fucked. The Masters’ Admiralty was a secret society—secret being the operative term. The fact that Walt was here, chatting to the vice admiral, was the equivalent of letting a Muggle into Hogwarts. If he could tell the vice admiral that Walt was with them on the fleet admiral’s orders, it would clear everything up. But Eric had forbidden him from doing so.
“Dr. Fischer is missing,” Jakob repeated. He’d take whatever punishment Pia saw fit to dole out to him after they found Annalise. For now, finding her, saving her, was the only thing that mattered.
“Was she targeted? A political action against a German national? Someone moving against the Masters’ Admiralty?” Pia asked.
Jakob and Walt exchanged a glance. They had no answer. Only more potential complications. Jakob tried to answer, but a fresh wave of pain swamped him. He rolled onto his side, pounding a fist into the mattress.
“Jakob was attacked too,” Walt was saying. “Someone got him with bullet ant venom.”
“With what?”
“I know it sounds crazy, but I’ve seen it before. He’s in pretty incredible pain, and there’s not a damn thing anyone can do about it.”
“Are you in danger?” Pia asked sharply.
Jakob was able to push himself into a sitting position, though he was nauseous and sweating. “Unknown,” he answered.
Walt looked at him, eyes wide, then glanced at the locked suite door, as if expecting someone to come barreling in.
There was a moment of silence, and when Pia spoke again it was with calm command. “I’m going to speak to the admiral. We will call in protection from Hungary.”
Walt looked at the phone. “We’re in Poland. Not Hungary.”
The vice admiral wasn’t talking about the country Hungary but the territory. Jakob didn’t have the energy to explain that, not when agony was rippling through him.
“You will tell the harco everything,” Pia commanded, clearly speaking to Jakob. “Do not involve the authorities.”
“No,” Jakob agreed.
“Uh, pretty sure we should call the police,” Walt added.
“Keep me apprised.” Then the phone line went dead as the vice admiral hung up.
“Why aren’t we calling the police?” Walt asked.
Jakob swung his legs off the side of the bed. “Help me to the bathroom.”
Walt slid an arm around his waist. They made it to the bathroom in time for Jakob to vomit into the toilet rather than on the bed. Walt sat on the edge of the tub next to him, silently passing him a wet washcloth when he stopped heaving.
Jakob sat back, leaning against the cool wall. He glanced down at his shoulder. A tiny pinprick incision point and a little bit of swelling. Given how much it hurt, it should have been a massive gaping wound, a broken bone, something.
“No police,” Jakob said, addressing Walt’s comment from several moments ago. “Because they will only get in our way.”
“Okay. So we just wait?”
Walt’s voice expressed exactly how horrified he was by that idea. Sitting here doing nothing while Annalise was…
Jakob couldn’t think about it too hard. Couldn’t let himself imagine what she was going through wherever she was.
“We’ll get her back,” Walt murmured. “We’ll find her.”
Walt was a good doctor. He knew what to say and how to say it. There was no denying his reassuring words and tone were on point.
Regardless, Jakob did not feel comforted.
“Call the desk. Get security footage,” Jakob gasped. “I think I know…”
“You know who injected you?” Walt was already on his feet, pulling Jakob up too, to take him back to the bed.
When Jakob walked down the street, people usually cleared a path around him—he was big, intimidating. In the chaos on the sidewalk, someone had walked right into him, colliding with him hard enough for it to hurt, and to knock him sideways into Annalise. That had never happened to him before, but given the crowd, he attributed it to the throng of people and disorder.
There’d been a sharp pain when the man barreled into him. He’d assumed he’d caught him with hardware from a bag strap, a jacket buckle, or something like that. He’d looked back to see exactly who, or what, had hit him. He had a good mental picture of a medium-height blond-haired man striding away from him through the crowd.
Then Walt had gone to help the woman, and he and Annalise had followed…at least until he started to feel sick. Annalise helped him get away from the crowd, where he’d told her about the pain in his shoulder and arm. She’d been worried he was having a heart attack and then…and then there’d been a wave of pain so intense, it had dropped him, wiped out everything else. He’d slid to the ground, unable to think beyond the pain, his whole body tensed and cramped.
He told Walt this in fits and starts while the other man was on hold with the hotel manager.
The venom from the ant—an ant—had rendered him worse than useless. Annalise was gone, and he knew she wouldn’t have left of her own accord. Walt had alerted the hotel, had been the one to search for her. Jakob hadn’t been able to do more than stagger first into the lobby, then up here into their room.
Jakob’s fear for her and guilt, along with all complete rational thought, was wiped away as a fresh wave of bone-breaking agony took him.
Twenty minutes after Walt had hung up the phone, there was a knock at the door, and Walt went to answer it as Jakob struggled to stand. According to Walt, the hotel general manager had said they needed to check with their legal counsel before releasing any security footage.
Walt opened the door, and Jakob cursed silently.
Because the man who walked in wasn’t from the hotel.