Boiling Point (An Ethan Galaal Thriller Book 4)

by Isaac T. Hooke

  “Chances are she’s still in the city,” Ethan muttered to himself once again. “She has to be. The Kidon aren’t going to leave without completing their mission.”

  Of course, Bretta didn’t have to stay in the city at all. Some of the Kidon could have left the city via the docks on a stolen fishing boat for all Ethan knew, bringing Bretta with them, or she could have been handed off to a second team. But he was not about to admit either possibility to himself. Not yet.

  He stood up and looked down into the street, though all he saw was Bretta’s face in his mind’s eye.

  “She’s still here,” he muttered. “She’s still here.”

  He knocked back the last of his coffee, grimacing as he swallowed down the cold dregs.

  The hessian bag was whipped off of Bretta’s head and she blinked rapidly in the sudden harshness of the bright light pointed directly into her face. She had no idea where she was. Her mouth tasted horribly sour, like she’d drank far too much coffee, and she was as parched as if she’d been sucking on a packet of cotton-balls.

  A sedative, then, she thought vaguely.

  Judging by the way her shoulders were burning––marinating in lactic acid––and her wrists hurt from where something cold and hard was biting into them, she slowly formed the conclusion that she was strung up from the ceiling. With chains. Her feet were just brushing the floor so that, she knew, if she wanted to take the strain off of her shoulders she would have to stand on tip-toes.

  She didn’t recall much after being hauled out into the fresh air of the fire-escape, dragged and carried down the stairs and bundled into a waiting car. Just a prick in the thigh that had barely registered over the overlapping waves of agony that been sweeping over the rest of her body.

  A sedative, then, she thought, and she had a feeling that she might have had the same thought just before.

  She scrunched her face up against the light, trying to peer around it, to find the person that was no doubt standing behind it watching her. “Oh, come on,” she croaked in Hebrew, “this all a bit hackneyed, isn’t it? A bit cli––”

  The first punch came from behind her. It struck her in the kidney so hard that her legs folded up and she hung clear of the floor by her wrists. She cried out; an animal noise that contained no words and yet transcended all languages. As her feet sagged to the floor again another hammer blow drove into the kidney on the other side of her back with medical precision.

  “Lo!” she screamed, her pain this time forming the single syllable Hebrew word for ‘no’.

  A few moments after that, Bretta became aware that she was also stark naked. She was not surprised. It was one of the oldest tricks in a very old, very well-thumbed book. Getting rid of a subject’s clothes was a key psychological blow in the torture process. Instantly, it stripped them of whatever dignity they might have been harboring, as well as removing the thin physical barrier between their fragile flesh and their tormentor's tools.

  She glanced down at herself. Every muscle in her tanned body stood out as if it had been etched and shaded by a very careful anatomist. Her shoulders and forearms, under the strain of the chains as they were, were clearly defined under her smooth, sweat-beaded skin. Her stomach, with its picked out abdominal muscles, would have had swarms of California gym bunnies ringing their hands and berating their trainers. Her thighs looked solid and lean enough to crush a man’s ribcage.

  And it all counted for nothing, as she hung helpless from the invisible, shadowy ceiling.

  Bretta sniffed and spat onto the floor.

  I can take whatever they throw at me, she thought. I can do this.

  Those two superbly aimed punches had cleared the lingering fog of the soporific drugs she had been administered as efficiently as a shot of adrenaline. Bretta groaned through her clenched teeth, as what felt like every bruise from her beating in the hotel came alive in a Technicolor of blossoming pain. Continuing to look down at her body, she could see bruises, abrasions and marks standing out lividly in the harsh light of the interrogation lamps; running from almost the tips of her toes, up her legs and stomach and across her breasts. Brown blood was crusted down her chest, and she could feel it caked in her hair and across her neck. How much of it was hers and how much was Boots’ was anyone’s guess.

  “You’ve been looking after yourself, Death Angel,” came Celeste’s voice from behind the light, speaking Hebrew.

  Bretta grinned in spite of the pain that crackled out from her kidneys in nauseating pulses. “Oh, you know how it is,” she wheezed. “Got to pass the time somehow.” She spat again, her saliva flashing in the blinding glare of the lights.

  A fist smashed into her stomach before the glob of spit hit the ground, lifting her off her feet, driving the breath out of her. Before she had a chance to recover she was struck again. The blow hit her just under the sternum and vomit exploded out of her mouth, hot and acrid bile spraying the floor.

  “You don’t get to speak the Holy Tongue, Death Angel. You don’t get to sully it with your traitor’s lips,” Celeste said in accented English, her voice as calm and even as if they had been chatting over coffee. “Not anymore. You made your bed with the American whores so let us speak their simplistic language.”

  Bretta hung like a carcass, like a dead thing, from her chains. Her stomach heaved, the tendons in her neck staring as she fought to suck in air. A vein protruded like a throbbing worm in her forehead. A long, thick strand of drool hung from her quivering lips. After a couple of heaving tries, she finally managed to suck in a little air. Then a little more.

  “If––if I’d––if I’d known I’d be stripping off, I would have at least sh-sh-shaved my legs f-for your boys,” she gasped, spittle spraying out as she struggled to talk. She sucked a deep breath in through her nose as she took her weight on her toes. “Or should I say, boy.”

  She was expecting another blow, but none came. Finally, just when she relaxed, a kick slammed into the side of her knee and took her legs clean out from under her. Agony lanced up her thigh from the impact and she was rocked in her bonds, swaying on her chain like some sort of grizzly piñata. A sob escaped her lips then––not one of despair, for she had pretty much discarded her hope when she had sobered up enough to recognize the predicament she was in, but of pure pain––and her head drooped for a moment onto her chest.

  “I told them,” Celeste said. “I warned them. I urged them to treat you with the utmost caution. I told Benjamin that you were a viper, and yet still you killed him.”

  Benjamin. A nice name, Bretta thought, absently. She remembered the look of shock on Boot’s face as she had stabbed him, recalled the brief clinging resistance of her knife ripping out his carotid artery.

  “Men, huh,” she said weakly. “Think they know everything.”

  Celeste did not reply.

  Someone poked a finger into the back of her ribs. She gasped and jerked in her chains, trying to see behind her, through the sweaty tangle of black hair that partly obscured her vision.

  “Mia,” Celeste said, “why don’t you tidy up our former sister-in-arms. We don’t want her to miss anything, do we?”

  Mia, Bretta found herself thinking, making a mental note. Doubtless a codename, but every little bit of information helps when it comes to these slippery fuckers. Too bad I’ll probably be dead before I can tell anyone.

  Bretta’s head was jerked up and she found herself looking into the cool gaze of the woman that she had nicknamed Pixy. Up close, she was just as pretty as she had first appeared. Even though her features were hard to make out with the interrogation lights shining directly behind her into Bretta’s face, Bretta saw that the woman was just as unmoved as she would have expected a professional killer to be.

  Just another job for her, Bretta thought.

  The woman––Mia––scraped and pulled Bretta’s hair back roughly and tied it in a ponytail. While she did this, Bretta lazily contemplated trying to break the woman’s nose with a head-butt.

  What wil
l it accomplish, really? she asked herself.

  Nothing, but the look on her face might make me feel a little better, she answered herself.

  Slowly, so slowly as to be imperceptible to the woman fiddling with the hair-tie, she drew her head back. She grinned.

  A strong hand seized her by the nape of the neck and applied a scientific amount of compression to the pressure points on the side of it. Bretta’s grin turned into a rictus of pain. Her eyes locked on those of Mia.

  Bedouin.

  Mia gave her a cool, condescending look, yanked the hair-tie tight and then walked back out of sight.

  “I warned them about that proclivity you have to let your temper sometimes get the better of you too,” Celeste said, and there was the barest trace of smugness in her voice.

  Bretta didn’t reply, but she felt a slight flush rise in her bruised and blood-spattered cheeks.

  “Br––Death Angel,” Celeste’s voice said, and there was a new note in it now, a note that Bretta thought that she might have mistaken.

  “What?” she asked.

  “This is it,” Celeste replied. “This is the moment. This is the chance that I’ll afford you to tell me what we need to know.”

  Bretta sighed. She found that she suddenly didn’t have the energy to say anything pithy or clever. “You knew where she was, Celeste. You had your chance at the hotel and you blew it. You think they’re still going to be sitting there waiting for you to have another go at them? They’re gone. Long gone.”

  Bretta’s vision, already almost completely overwhelmed by the intensity of the lights beaming down at her, flashed white and a strange buzzing filled her ears.

  Dimly, she was aware that Celeste was yelling, “Not yet, I said! Wait!”

  Bretta’s mouth was filled with the taste of hot iron and salt.

  Blood?

  In utter confusion, she thought that she might still be back in her hotel room, covered in Boots’ arterial spray, and that she might have just dreamed the intervening battering she had just taken.

  The general bright light shrank down to show that she was, indeed, still in whatever room the Kidon had her held in. Someone had struck her square in the face. She ran a tongue around the inside of her mouth, found a fragment of something hard floating about in the tangy, bloody soup. She tried to spit it out, but her lips seemed to have parted company with her brain for the time being and she simply drooled the piece of tooth out. It dropped to the floor, a little white island in the growing puddle of blood.

  “Death Angel?” Celeste said, her voice echoing and reverberating down the passageways of Bretta’s mind like a rubber ball down a hallway. “Death Angel?”

  Bretta grunted.

  “This is it,” Celeste said again. Bretta could see her now. A vague shape standing just within the shadows that lay behind the lights that stood on their stands. “This is your chance.” The tone Bretta had thought she had heard was gone—Celeste’s voice had hardened again. “Tell us where the scientist is, or where she is likely to be, and we will stop this and truss you up like the traitorous pig you are and hold you until we’re able to take you back to Israel. There doesn’t need to be anymore unpleasantness. All the pain will end.”

  A hacking, burbling, snuffling sound answered these words. Bretta was clueless, at first, where it was coming from. Then she realized that she was laughing. The revolting sound was gurgling out of her quite involuntarily, somehow fighting its way past the blood and tears and fear that choked her throat and nasal passages.

  Bretta lapsed into a fit of coughing, hawking up more bloody phlegm and spitting it out so that it ran down her chin and dribbled onto her breasts.

  Celeste cocked her head to one side. When she spoke, it was with the voice of winter; merciless and inevitable. “I know you’ve taken beatings before, Death Angel.” Celeste strode forward and grabbed Bretta by the jaw, her fingers pressing like talons so that Bretta’s teeth ground into the insides of her cheeks. Then her hand slipped down to Bretta’s throat and jerked at something that Bretta had not even realized that she was still wearing.

  Her angel wing necklace was held up in front of her eyes. The little silver wing revolving slowly on its fine, silver chain. For a moment, both she and Celeste looked at it.

  Then Celeste smiled bitterly and put the pendent in her pocket.

  “You might be hurting now, Death Angel,” she said, “but I promise you, this is as good as it’s going to get.”

  22

  The morning dragged by, and yet, when both hands married up on the twelve of the annoying modernist clock in Ethan’s hotel room, it seemed to him that time had flown. Sam had failed to make contact, and only a couple of hours of the Kidon’s allotted time remained.

  Ethan, without informing Sam, had sent a simple message back to Bretta’s phone, as well as to the number the ultimatum from the Kidon had been sent from. All it had said was:

  TRADE AGREED.

  TRADE SANCTIONED.

  AWAITING TIME AND LOCATION.

  He hoped the concise message coupled with the added lie about the trade being sanctioned by the DIA would be enough to entice the Kidon to answer. So far, however, he had heard nothing back.

  Outside the window, in the streets, foot traffic had slowly petered out throughout the morning. Barcelona’s police force, masked and gloved, seemed to have only one thing to say to the pedestrians that they stopped: go home.

  Ethan had watched the Guàrdia Urbana de Barcelona traipse up and down the streets, flagging down cars with illuminated batons, questioning unsuspecting pedestrians and generally acting in a way that Ethan found reminiscent of some police states that he had had the misfortune to find himself in from time to time.

  Ethan had been through a lot with Bretta. They had found themselves in more precarious scrapes than he really cared to remember, and always they had come through them alive. If he had had to think of the most likely way in which he might lose one of his team––and he was superstitious enough not to have ever dwelt on it––he supposed it would have been on a mission; cut down in a hail of gunfire, blown up, killed protecting or rescuing some nameless high value target or––most likely of all––hit by some stray round or ricochet.

  Didn’t ever think that I’d lose one of my crew just by sitting on my ass doing nothing, he thought sourly.

  He shook his head and rubbed at his face with his hands.

  Then his phone went off.

  Ethan snatched it up off of the glass coffee table.

  “Yeah?” he said, picking up.

  “Hola, señor,” the familiar voice of the concierge came over the line. “The ESSO sweep has been completed. The interior hallways and basement parking garage are clear of surveillance devices.”

  “Thank you,” Ethan said, and hung up.

  He paced the floor for several seconds, shooting glances at the phone. Then he got up and started walking toward the window.

  The phone rang.

  Ethan darted back and picked it up.

  “It’s me,” Sam said. That she called now, so soon after the concierge, told him Sam had been waiting for the ESSO sweep to complete as well. It was likely go time.

  “Black Swan,” Ethan replied. His voice was curt but his tone was level.

  “I have a small team––all I could put together on such short notice and with these travel restrictions in place––ready to rendezvous with you and your operatives,” Sam said.

  “My remaining operative, you mean,” Ethan said.

  Sam ignored the comment. “Are you ready for the address?”

  “Go ahead,” Ethan said, flipping open the secure note-taking app on his phone.

  “All right. Outside La Monumental––it’s the famous bullring on Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes. There will be a two matching vehicles waiting for you. You’ll know them when you see them,” Sam instructed him in her usual clinical manner.

  “Copy that,” Ethan replied. “When?”

  “If you get your after
-burners on you should be able to get there on foot in about half an hour,” she replied.

  “We’re leaving now?” Ethan asked.

  “Affirmative,” replied Sam.

  “On foot?” Ethan said.

  “That’s correct,” she told him. “With things being as they are; I’ll need you to go to the extract team. I can park a couple of company cars outside a building as important and iconic as La Monumental and they look like unmarked cop cars. I drive them to the hotel at which it’s known that you are staying and they look exactly like what they are. Then they go from being cars into RPG magnets. You know what the Mossad are like. You know what they are capable of when they get the bit between their teeth.”

  Ethan paused. The professional soldier within him was warring with the other part of him––the part that was roaring and rattling the bars of the cage that he had locked it away in while he was on mission––that wanted to scream at Sam to do everything in her damned power to help him track down Bretta.

  “There’s not enough time, Sam,” was all he could screw himself to say.

  Sam knew exactly what he was talking about. There was a pause on the other end of the line.

  “Just get the HVT to the exfil, Copperhead,” she finally said. “That is your primary––your only––concern at this point. I shouldn’t have to remind you that you are still very much on mission, and if you don’t want me to come down on you like a fucking JDAM, you better get your ass to that extraction point and deliver me that package. Do you copy?”

  The pause that followed opened up between them like an expanding mushroom cloud. Harsh, sharp words popped into his head, circling Bretta’s face, as he remembered the smile she had given him as she closed the door on him the night before.

  But he doused those words, and said instead: “Copy that, Black Swan. Copperhead is Oscar Mike.”

  Ethan, Kiana and William moved with a confidence that not a one of them felt, leaving the relative safety of El Hotel Arintero and heading out into the quickly emptying Barcelona streets. Kiana and Ethan walked ahead of William––hand in hand, just a couple out for a stroll––while the big Texan followed at a distance, his eyes scanning the streets around them without looking like he was doing so.