by SL Huang
“Then she has not been trying.”
The room felt very quiet.
“She’s not getting away with this,” I said. “I won’t let her.”
Tegan bowed his head. “Cassandra, it’s not worth it. Make your peace with her, I beg of you. Before it’s too late.”
“It’s already too late,” I said.
Chapter 19
I didn’t have a plan.
My blackmail scheme wasn’t ready, and I still couldn’t put a bullet in Mama Lorenzo’s head without making everything exponentially worse. But somehow, some way, I had to drill it into her coiffed marble skull that she was capable of pushing me too far. That there were rules to this little war of ours. That she was not fucking invulnerable.
Or maybe I was just too angry to think straight, my slow-burning guilt and rage smoldering up as soon as I left Tegan’s and filling me with the blinding need to prove I wasn’t powerless.
I didn’t buzz in at the estate’s intercom. Instead, I ran up the pillar next to the gate and vaulted over the iron spikes to land on the driveway inside. A couple of guys who were clearly private security started scrambling toward me. I shot them each in the leg and then marched up and kicked down the door.
Alarms started going off, the wails a deafening echo in the immaculate foyer. I shot the nearest alarm system box for good measure.
The housekeeper saw me and shrieked, thrusting her hands into the air and dropping the cleaning supplies she held. I strode past her through the house and burst into Mama Lorenzo’s study.
The woman herself was just rising from her chair behind the wide desk. I pointed my Colt at the center of her forehead.
“You asshole,” I said. “Somebody needs to put you down.”
“If you kill me—”
“You’ll be dead. After that, you’ll hardly care what your family does to me.”
“Though I think you would.” She was entirely serene. Jesus, the balls on that woman. Betting her life on my sense of self-preservation when I had a gun in her face.
“You underestimate how stupid I’m willing to be to get one brief moment of satisfaction,” I shot back. “This is between us. And you’re not playing fair.”
“‘Fair’ is for people who want to lose.”
“Pithy. I thought you had rules. I thought you didn’t go after innocent people.”
“What happened with Ms. Maddox was regrettable,” she allowed. “I have spoken to her.”
“And Tegan and Reese?”
She raised her eyebrows. “They were not harmed.”
“What are you on?” I cried. “Your men left them there for a day and a half! They could have died!”
“Someone would have returned today to free them. Mr. Tegan refused a perfectly reasonable offer.”
Oh.
Oh, fuck.
I might be the one who had the gun, but the power in the room had suddenly flipped, with Mama Lorenzo holding all the cards. Because until now, somewhere in my head I’d still been assuming Mama Lorenzo hadn’t known about the attack on Tegan and Reese, that her men had acted unsanctioned. Tegan—it wasn’t just that he was well-liked.
You didn’t go after Tegan. Nobody went after Tegan. Not on purpose.
Either Mama Lorenzo was flaunting remarkably idiotic hubris, or Tegan was right about how massively, unassailably powerful she was. And Gabrielle Lorenzo was not an idiot.
My mouth was dry. I didn’t know if I should keep up the bravado or run like hell.
Mama Lorenzo canted her head slightly, watching me, as if she’d only been waiting for me to catch up. “You’re proving unexpectedly irritating,” she said.
I found my voice. “Yeah, I’m like that.”
“I’ve made some inquiries about you.”
“What, after I owned your hitmen?” I managed a sneer.
Mama Lorenzo flicked a well-shaped fingernail as if she were dispensing with a fly. “They tried to impress me. They failed.”
My hands had started to sweat. Jesus, she was testing people on me. This was bad. “Your guys are after me,” I said. “Me. Not Tegan, not Reese, not Cheryl Maddox.”
“I had not thought you so concerned with the lives of others.” She smiled thinly, her voice turning heavy with the ominous weight of someone perfectly capable of carrying out exactly what she threatened. “I’ll make use of that.”
No. No. No way.
Every bit of apprehension and uncertainty crystallized into rage. Adrenaline flooded me, the numbers shattering my senses and tearing reality apart. I lunged forward, sweeping Mama Lorenzo’s notes and papers and computer monitor off her desk in a chaotic cacophony and leaping to land on the blotter in a crouch, my 1911 pointed up under her chin. My finger was against the trigger, and I barely stopped myself.
She laughed. The sound was terrifying.
I almost didn’t catch it when her eyes slipped to the side.
My body reacted faster than my fury-soaked brain, and I dove off the desk and past her just as a rifle report echoed through the room, followed by three more. A side door was disgorging masked security, all toting the latest hardware out of Germany. Mama Lorenzo had already slipped backward, out of reach, escaping toward the side of the room—
I fired my remaining rounds through the desk, five shots that hit the first five guards each in the hip or leg, the mathematics drawing the trajectories through the wood for me. Then, while the people behind the downed men were still tripping over their comrades, I ran for the plate glass window and jumped.
I’d forgotten momentarily that the house was built into the side of a fucking mountain.
I hit the glass at a decent angle—I felt a small nick to my right elbow and that was it—but as I twisted to see a snapshot of the ground below me, my brain exploded into oh, SHIT—
I’d busted out over a sheer drop, over thirty feet of empty air between me and the mountainside.
I had an instant of weightlessness to think about it, the crash of the glass still echoing in my ears, a spectacular view of Los Angeles spread out below me, and I had no options but one.
I fell.
Calculus slammed through my head as I plummeted—I’d be hitting a near-vertical slope, with rocks, with trees, with the glass panes showering around me—shit shit shit! I had just enough time to twist and fall feet-first, and with a silent, cringing apology to the memory of Samuel Colt, I thrust out my empty 1911 a handful of instants before I hit, carving a swath into the dusty cliff and almost jerking my shoulder out of its socket but slowing my plunge just the tiniest bit. Then I kicked out a leg to brake myself with one boot, dropped the gun, and snapped into a ball as the mountainside came up to meet me.
My bodily crumple let my ankles and knees cushion most of the force as they bent and buckled, and by then I was rolling instead of falling, the mountain alternately pulverizing my feet and back and shoulders as I tumbled. A cloud of dust and gravel choked me—I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see—sturdy tree trunks whipped by on either side, near-misses that were far too close to splintering my skeleton. And then it was all rocky grass and weeds. I grabbed at the foliage as I went, ripping it out by the roots in an attempt to curb the momentum sucking me downward, the sharp blades and leaves slicing at my hands and face.
My velocity ticked down in my head, a touch lower, a hair slower. The instant it decreased just enough, I unrolled and jammed my feet out below me, digging them into the mountainside.
The impact jolted through my knees and hips and my body thumped over a few more rocks, but then my feet caught me and I jerked to a stop.
I didn’t have time to take a breath. I pushed up off the slope and continued downward at a run, leaping down the incline in a juking zigzag. The trees would help screen me, but the Lorenzo security had the high ground. If they had any good snipers…
I sprinted.
I didn’t slow down until I’d put a chunk of a mountain between myself and the Lorenzo estate, and then I only decelerated to look around and tri
angulate the way to a road—I had no idea how large Mama Lorenzo’s private army really was, or how fast she could scramble them. I rounded into a patch of woods and silently cheered when I almost crashed into another secluded house, this one much less extravagant than the Lorenzos’.
Yes!
I made a beeline for the truck in the driveway. The tires spit gravel behind me as I peeled out and careened down the slope.
My phone had somehow stayed in my pocket, banged up but miraculously still working. It had been inside my jacket, so probably my body had protected it—lucky phone. I dialed Arthur as I drove. “Are you still at Tegan’s?”
“Yeah, I thought I’d stay until—” Reception fuzzed out. “—you. Russell? Can you hear me?”
“I’m in the mountains,” I shouted. Why I thought shouting would improve a bad connection I had no idea. “Stay there, okay? Stay there!”
“If I…spotty here, too. You…”
“Stay at Tegan’s,” I bellowed. “You hear me? Stay!”
“…but I gotcha. You going to…” He faded out again, and the phone beeped, dropping the call.
I shot him a brief text message: stay, danger. It would have to do. I couldn’t remember all the people I’d called on this phone and didn’t have time to check—driving one-handed, I popped out the battery and stowed the pieces in my pocket.
My watch was so scratched up the numbers were barely visible. Fuck, I was going to be late to my meeting with Ally Eight.
♦ ♦ ♦
I lurched into the park Harrington had directed me to more than half an hour after the appointed meeting time. I’d swapped the truck for a rundown SUV, and the thing had zero suspension, jolting up my spine at every pebble.
Hopefully the Ally Eight rep had waited. Harrington had said they represented some Japanese companies; surely they knew that in LA nobody was on time for anything.
I took a moment in the SUV to take stock and try to make myself marginally more presentable. This mainly consisted of picking twigs and grass out of my hair and smudging the most obvious dust and blood off my face and onto my jacket sleeve. It didn’t do much good. I still looked like I had gone four rounds with a maniac wielding a hedge trimmer.
I was also acutely aware I wasn’t carrying anymore, and I hadn’t had time to stop somewhere and pick up another sidearm. If Ally Eight ended up double-crossing me, I supposed I could throw my spare magazines at them. Those had survived the fall quite happily in my pockets, causing nice rectangular bruises up and down my legs.
I limped into the park, haplessly trying to blot a cut on my scalp that was trickling blood down my neck and back. I remembered Harrington’s instructions and looked around for a bench under a bronze statue.
An older Japanese woman in a pantsuit sat waiting for me. She was average-looking in all ways—not strikingly tall or short or fat or thin, her appearance neither exceptionally beautiful nor exceptionally lacking. She wasn’t young or old either, but somewhere in between, gray just starting to sprinkle her short dark hair.
It was hard to read her expression as I approached. I guessed it to be, I really hope that’s not the person I’m supposed to be meeting.
“I’m Cas Russell,” I said when I’d reached her. “Are you waiting for me? Excuse my appearance. I just had a vigorous…business meeting.”
“Oh—it’s no problem.” Her English was almost unaccented, with only the slightest edges of a different intonation rounding her words. She stood and extended a hand. “My name is Janet Okuda.”
I looked down at my right hand, which was streaked with dust, covered in scratches, and oozing blood from a torn-off fingernail, and we had an awkward moment of understanding in which I didn’t shake her hand and she plainly appreciated it.
She cleared her throat. “I understand you have a business proposition for me.”
“Yeah.” God bless Harrington. I got right to the point. “My specialty is acquiring items of value for people. I may have a source for a quantity of plutonium-238 in the form of alphavoltaic nuclear batteries. Would that be of interest to you? Or to anyone you represent?”
Her eyebrows lifted slightly, and she glanced around before stepping closer and lowering her voice. “Yes. Significant interest.”
“Excellent,” I said. “Let’s walk, shall we?”
We moved aside briefly for a cyclist to speed by before starting down the path. Okuda made sure he had passed out of earshot before adding, “I should clarify for you, Ms. Russell, because I believe there have been some rumors circulating. My clients are not interested in elemental plutonium. They require an atomic battery of a particular design, no matter what it might be powered by.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said. Dammit. Clearly someone had heard the word “plutonium,” panicked, and started gossiping about it. It was going to be a real pain in the ass if the Arkacite batteries didn’t fit her clients’ specifications—see, this was why I didn’t usually work on spec. I pulled the printouts from Arkacite’s files out of my pocket. They’d ended up in a crumpled, tight wad and I had to peel them apart. “Here’s what I know I can get for you. If this won’t work for your clients, give me the lowdown on what will, and I’ll keep my eye out.”
Okuda took the pages and stopped walking for a few moments to study them. “No,” she said slowly. “No, this is exactly what we need.”
“It is?” God Almighty, something this day had finally gone right. “Then I can get them for you.” I didn’t tell her I had them already. Best to make her think I’d have to work for them.
She handed the papers back, a small smile touching her lips. “We do have a time incentive. I will give you a significant bonus for sooner delivery.” She held eye contact with me. “For instance, today.”
I squinted at her. “How big of a bonus?”
Her slight smile grew. “I thought so.”
Either my lack of skill at subterfuge had bitten me in the ass again, or she knew someone had stolen from Arkacite. The latter wouldn’t surprise me—Harrington always seemed to have his fingers in a dozen corporate espionage pies; why wouldn’t Okuda have found out Arkacite had been broken into the night before?
“How big of a bonus?” I asked again.
She smiled even more broadly, and from there it was just haggling.
Chapter 20
I figured as long as I was on the move, my mobile wouldn’t compromise me—I’d have to pick up a new one, again—so I put the phone back together on the way back from the meeting with Okuda. I had a promise to keep to Arthur, after all, and with so much going on, the sooner I got this taken care of the better. Time to dial up the Chief Executive Officer of one of the largest tech companies on the planet.
Imogene Grant answered right before the call went to voicemail, her voice slow and suspicious. “Hello?”
“Hi,” I said, yanking on the SUV’s wheel to get around a tractor-trailer—I was pretty sure the power steering was gone. “I’m the person who has Liliana.”
Grant inhaled sharply. “You’ve gone way too far this time. Did you think our message was exaggerating? We will destroy you for this, both publicly and privately!”
“I doubt that,” I said. “What message?”
She hesitated, and when she spoke again her voice was much less certain. “Whom do you represent?”
“Whom do you think I represent?”
She snapped back to harshness. “If you are attempting to become another player in this game, this will not go well for you. I promise you that.”
“What game?” I asked curiously.
She didn’t answer right away. I floored the accelerator on the SUV while I waited; it reluctantly dragged its way toward freeway speed. Grant finally found her voice. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one who’s got your tech,” I repeated. “I called to negotiate.”
Again she took a moment to respond. I was starting to think this conversation was confusing her just as much as it was confusing me. “Why would we negotiate with you?” she
asked at last. “We have all of the legal standing.”
“Which you’re clearly not interested in using,” I pointed out. “You haven’t even reported what was stolen. You don’t want the details out there. Trust me, if you try to make this into a criminal case, we will make your technology very public very quickly. Not to mention that we have Liliana right now, so as far as I can figure, we have all the leverage.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Besides which,” I continued, “I don’t know who you think you’re dealing with, but I really don’t care at all what’s legal and what’s not. If you don’t negotiate with us, your little foray into humanoid robotics disappears forever. Period. End of story.”
“What do you want?”
“To sit down and talk to you. Figure out a way to make everyone happy. I’m just a nice, accommodating person like that.” And someone who wanted to get a suddenly-pro bono case over and done with as fast and cheaply as possible.
“All right. We’ll…talk.” The words sounded like she dragged them out through gritted teeth. “On one condition—you tell me who you’re working for right now. Otherwise I call the nice detective and tell him we figured out exactly what was taken.”
I had to bring Warren to negotiate anyway, and if Grant started talking to the police, he was the first person they would look at. “Okay,” I said. “But be warned, if I catch one hint any of you are coming after my client, I will target you personally. Ask Albert Lau about that—he met me.”
“You!”
“Yup, that was me. And I work for Noah Warren.”
This time the silence was filled with disbelief and rage, before Imogene Grant exploded, “Him?”
♦ ♦ ♦
I detoured to swing by one of my storage lockers to pick up another sidearm, this one a heavy steel HK P7M10. Next stop was an electronics store to buy a new phone, as well as a few spares—the rate I was burning them on this job was outrageous, even for me. Equipped again, I drove back to Miri’s, mulling blackly about my Mafia problem.
I didn’t know where to go from here. My barely-begun blackmail plan had started feeling laughably flimsy, like going up against Mama Lorenzo with toothpicks and twine, but I didn’t have any other ideas. At least, not any good ones.
