Hostage Three Read Online Free Page A

average weight, hair going grey. He had a touch of a West Country accent, but that was about the most interesting thing you could say for him. For all that, though, he was basically the most powerful person on board, after Dad. I mean, Damian was the captain, but he was just there for the nautical stuff. Tony was there to keep us alive.
    First thing I did on board, I went down to my room – Dad insisted on calling it my berth – and unpacked my stuff. I had a double bed, a plasma-screen TV with a DVD player and my own bathroom. I put my photo of Mom on my bedside table, the one in the silver frame, where she’s pregnant with me, standing by the side of a pool in Greece, laughing, not caring that she’s in this green bikini with this absolutely massive stomach.
    I put all my stuff away, and that was when I found my violin. It was at the bottom of my biggest suitcase – I had a matching set from Burberry that had appeared in my bedroom at home a week before departure, to go with all the stuff I bought on Dad’s credit card. The violin was underneath my clothes, kept safe in its padded case. The breath caught in my throat.
    You see, the violin was from Before. I don’t know who packed it, my dad or the stepmother, but I guess it was my dad and he should have known better. Just looking at it brought back all these memories, fluttering at me; my memories were moths in the darkness and the violin was a light.
    For example, I remembered the private hospital, on the day the Twin Towers fell.
    I must have been ten, and my mother was a month or so into a stay in this very expensive place in upstate New York, near Cold Spring. She was getting better – she’d had a few doses of electroshock therapy, which was the only thing that ever did any good – but she’d put on weight since the day she arrived there, seventy pounds, and she was shaking.
    I also remembered the previous visit when I was in the dining hall with her and she started screaming for no reason at all, saying that the nurses wanted to poison her.
    I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking: they don’t do shit like electroshock therapy any more. You are wrong.
    This was a long time before I knew the terms OCD or Severe Clinical Depression, but, believe me, I knew all about OCD and Severe Clinical Depression.
    On September the eleventh, I had brought the violin to the clinic because I was auditioning for a new music school, and Mom said she wanted to hear me play, that it would be like sunshine in this place . So we went to her room, which was actually like a suite in a really nice five-star hotel, no matter what she said about how terrible the hospital was, and I played for her. I played one of Paganini’s Caprice s, because that was the kind of little show-off that I was.
    While I was playing, Mom smiled. I hadn’t seen her smile in weeks, and just seeing that, it was like something opened inside me, and she was right – sunshine was blazing through, lighting up everything.
    After that, we went downstairs to the common room. The TV was on. A few people were playing dominoes – I don’t know what it is about dominoes and the mentally ill, but they love that game. A few other people were playing cards or chatting. Most of them were watching the TV. That, and drooling and so on. It was super-quiet in there, like a waiting room, but I don’t know what the people were waiting for. Themselves, I guess. Waiting for themselves to get better.
    Then a few of the more alert people started angling towards the TV. Someone turned the volume up. I saw what was on the screen.
    â€” It’s the Twin Towers, Mom said.
    But I already knew that. Dad worked only a few blocks away from them, though that day he was on a business trip in Italy, which was why I was visiting Mom on my own. I wasn’t completely alone, naturally. Our driver was waiting for me on the gravelled drive, to take me back to our