by Matt Rogers
Roy said, ‘How the fuck do you know all that?’
‘I listen.’
‘We didn’t say shit in front of you. We definitely didn’t tell you our names.’
‘I listen to everything. Not just what’s said in front of me.’
20
Silence.
Ruby said, ‘Are you going to make things difficult for yourself?’
Roy said, ‘No.’
‘I’m not sure if I believe you. You’re a professional, after all. Your allegiance is to Wayne.’
‘My allegiance is to whoever is pointing a gun at my face.’
She nodded. ‘That’s the way. Back up a few steps.’
He complied. Edged backwards, almost touching the top of the staircase.
‘Stop there,’ she said.
He complied.
She looked over. ‘Girls. Leave.’
They didn’t need further prompting. They practically ran for the stairs, and she knew they wouldn’t even dream of interrupting Wayne’s meeting to alert him to the unfolding situation.
All but one…
The women disappeared, darting toward the lower decks, toward the boarding ramp. Toward precious freedom. But the staircase was narrow, and created a funnel, and Nadia found herself caught up at the back of the cohort.
Ruby said, ‘Nadia.’
She stopped in her tracks.
Ruby said, ‘Don’t move.’
She didn’t.
The other eight vanished from sight, gone for good. Ruby wondered whether they’d go straight for the nearest police station. She figured they might. It didn’t matter. By then, she’d be a ghost in the wind.
Ruby kept her aim on Roy, but readied herself to jerk the barrel across to Nadia. The woman was still facing away, frozen in place at the top of the stairwell, gazing down into the abyss, a glassy expression on her face. Roy was closer to the steps themselves, but Nadia was facing them. She was closer in proximity to Ruby.
Ruby said, ‘I’m going to take you both downstairs together.’
Nadia said, ‘Why me?’
‘You care about Wayne. You’re unpredictable.’
‘I don’t give a shit about him,’ Nadia said. ‘If what you’re saying is true, that is.’
‘I can’t take that risk.’
Ruby stepped forward.
Nadia looked over her shoulder. ‘You don’t need to worry about me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Ruby said. ‘It’s just a precaution.’
Nadia shrugged, her suspicion subsiding, her posture noncommittal. ‘Whatever helps you sleep at night. But, trust me, I don’t care about him.’
Ruby stepped closer, and then something struck her.
A possible reason for Nadia’s compliance.
She said, ‘Nadia, have you seen something?’
‘What?’
‘All this time you’ve spent with Wayne. All your closeness to him. When I told you he was selling sex slaves, you didn’t even seem surprised. Is there something you know?’
Nadia’s face fell.
She blinked hard to mask something.
Tears?
Ruby hesitated.
She said, ‘You can tell me.’
Nadia stared at the floor, slumped her shoulders, and muttered something.
Ruby stepped closer.
‘What was that?’ she said.
She came within a foot of the woman, and switched her aim back to Small. Both to keep him in place and to take the pressure off Nadia’s shoulders.
Nadia looked up. ‘I said … you’re a fucking idiot.’
The sadness vanished.
She lunged forward with ferocity and seized Ruby’s gun hand in an iron grip.
21
If it was the last-ditch effort of a loyal lover to mount some resistance, Ruby would have been able to handle it.
But it wasn’t.
Nadia wasn’t what she claimed. Ruby felt it in the woman’s grip. Her fingers were like steel traps.
Deceptive strength, just like Ruby’s.
Ruby wrenched her arm back, trying to slip out, but Nadia held tight with white knuckles. Nadia adjusted her grip so she could hold Ruby’s wrist with one hand and then backhanded her across the face, using the row of four knuckles as a blunt edge against Ruby’s cheekbone.
Something cracked under Ruby’s skin.
Deep in the side of her face.
Her jaw went numb, and she prayed it wasn’t broken. It’d spell disaster for the near future if it was. She swung the knife in a driving uppercut motion but Nadia jerked aside and the blade swung free, and Nadia used the second of opportunity to smash the gun free, then twist and catch the knife hand and bring it down against the top of the hard-backed armchair beside them. Ruby’s wrist cracked and the kitchen knife spun away, embedding itself in the cushion.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Roy lunging for the taser.
Holy shit.
She realised she’d made a huge mistake.
Roy wasn’t aware of Wayne’s illegitimate business decisions, but that didn’t automatically mean he would care if he knew.
Being out of the loop doesn’t make you a saint by default.
She’d overestimated him.
Be ruthless.
Always.
Her decency had failed her.
But she couldn’t concentrate on that, because her wrist screamed for relief and her jaw ached and her head throbbed as Nadia kept hold of both her wrists and tried to yank her off her feet.
That wouldn’t work.
Ruby skewered her legs down like they were concreted to the floor, and didn’t budge. Nadia threw herself off-balance in the process and Ruby dropped her hips lower than her adversary’s and tried her own rudimentary throw.
That did work.
With Nadia’s hips higher than Ruby’s and her balance therefore compromised, she folded forward and Ruby followed the momentum of the judo-style heave and rotated her a half-revolution in the air. Then she dropped Nadia on her back on the deck, smashing the breath from her lungs, freezing her in place.
Now Ruby released her feet from the deck and simply dropped her kneecap onto Nadia’s face.
Crunch.
Nadia howled, and Ruby rolled away from her and lunged sideways for the taser Roy was reaching down for. She missed it with her outstretched hand — by less than an inch — but used the momentum of her own slide to spin on the smooth surface of the deck and lash out with a pointed toe. Which thankfully connected, and sent the taser skittering out from under the hardtop bimini, where it came to rest spinning in the sun by the bow.
She saw Roy sizing up his options.
Make a run for the taser, or stay and subdue Ruby with his bare hands.
She knew exactly what he’d decide.
Machismo and pride won, even though it was the foolish option.
If he ran for the taser, he’d certainly make it there before Ruby, given their mutual positions. He’d win in that scenario ten times out of ten. But it would mean accepting the fact that he probably couldn’t win a bare-knuckle fight against a girl who he outweighed by close to a hundred pounds.
That was an invisible blow his ego simply couldn’t take.
So he pivoted toward Ruby and raised a combat boot to stomp on her head.
She stared up at the thick sole and blanched.
Truth was, he’d win in this situation nine times out of ten.
Her odds weren’t good.
When have they ever been?
Roy stomped, and Ruby rolled.
22
The boot missed her by inches.
She felt the wood rattle beside her, and it resonated through her own skull as she rolled away from the impact, her face pressed to the floor.
There were advantages to weighing one-twenty. She was on her feet before Roy had even recovered from the stomp. He’d put his all into it, and the miss had rattled him. Imperceptibly, but enough to count. Ruby took in his squat gorilla-like f
rame and knew she could kick and punch him all she wanted and achieve practically nothing. He had a neck like a bulldog, and she figured even if she was a man that weighed north of two hundred she’d struggle knocking him unconscious.
So she steeled herself for the potential consequences and dove into an imanari roll.
An incredibly complex physical manoeuvre, reserved for seasoned Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioners, but she was a second-degree black belt under a reputable instructor, and she’d been drilling every day since the age of thirteen, and to her it was as smooth as ordinary movement.
She fell forwards and twisted so she came down on the deck across her upper back, rolling up onto her shoulders and the back of her neck. Her legs flailed in the air and she hooked them around Roy’s left leg — the one he’d used to stomp with, the one that was out of position. He realised what she was doing, but didn’t seem to worry. At least not for the first second, which was the only opportunity he had to escape. What he should have done was lunge backwards, ripping his leg free like it was in the jaws of a bear trap. Instead he faltered, wondering why a woman a hundred pounds lighter than him had just attached herself upside-down to his leg like a boa constrictor.
Before he could process exactly what had happened, she had his heel in the crook of her elbow.
She torqued it with every ounce of power in her lithe frame.
When it comes to delicate tendons, bodyweight doesn’t matter.
Technique and angles and pressure matter.
Ruby nailed all three of them.
The knee is designed to flex and extend, and that’s it. It’s not designed to deal with tibial rotation. You only need to move a heel two centimetres to cause serious, permanent injury to the knee it’s connected to.
Ruby moved it more than that.
She rotated the tibia on the femur and shredded Roy’s leg to pieces in the space of a couple of seconds.
He didn’t immediately register the pain, and awkwardly threw a clubbing right fist at a downward trajectory. She saw it coming, but knew it wouldn’t knock her out, so she held the heel hook, doing more damage with each passing millisecond.
The fist connected clean on her eye socket, and pain exploded in her head, but she kept her wits.
She let go of Roy’s leg and rolled away, springing to her feet.
Her left eye was already swelling shut.
Her orbital was possibly cracked.
It hurt like hell.
But at least she had freedom of movement.
Roy didn’t understand how compromised he was. He stood there, panting, sizing up her damaged eye, taking pride in the fact that he’d landed a clean blow. Then he took one step forward on his bad leg and the whole thing gave out like it was made of glass. His face contorted and he went down on one knee, putting both hands on the floor to steady himself, the blood draining from his cheeks and lips.
In more pain than he’d ever known.
And then he understood. He was now fundamentally useless. There were no weapons within reach, and although he could hop on one leg, she could run a whole lot faster than that.
Ruby registered the temporary victory and spun to deal with Nadia.
Her vision filled with a closed fist making a beeline for her face.
23
Prioritising Roy had been Ruby’s sole mistake.
Because the Nadia puzzle was new, and hadn’t established itself at the forefront of her mind. Up until thirty seconds ago Nadia had been a non-factor, and now she was just as dangerous and just as powerful as Ruby. Which took time to compute — time Ruby didn’t have. She’d been fighting for her life against Roy for most of the last thirty seconds, and now her brain screamed, The girl is still a threat.
But the fist was already on its way to her face by the time she processed that.
It landed on her wounded orbital, drilling white-hot pain through her head. Ruby fell back, astonished by the intensity of the blow, and in her rabid desperation Nadia leapt down after her.
Which was a blessing in disguise.
Once again, the overwhelming allure of momentum.
Nadia had landed the punch, and her best bet now was to turn and sprint for one of the weapons discarded across the deck, but she figured if she threw another barrage of strikes at Ruby she’d have the same success.
She didn’t.
Ruby could only see out of one eye, and her head throbbed in agony, and her wrist ached, and the skin across her back had been burned by her imanari roll across the deck, but dealing with adversity was second nature to her. All her training, all her preparation, had been focused on that sole purpose.
She could operate better in unimaginable pain than most people could at full capacity.
She landed on her back, and Nadia leapt on top of her and threw another right hook, but this one wasn’t as measured. There were variables in the mix — the weight distribution, the interference of moving bodies, the awkward angle.
Ruby jerked her head to the side and Nadia’s knuckles crashed into the deck, drawing blood, rattling the bones in their sockets.
Ruby used the hesitation to buck her hips and execute a jiu-jitsu sweep, reversing the weight distribution so that Nadia sprawled to the deck and Ruby rolled over on top of her.
From there it was simple.
A slicing elbow to the bridge of Nadia’s already-broken nose to freeze her in place, and then a colossal headbutt to her chin, maybe breaking her jaw, maybe not.
Knocking a couple of teeth loose, at least.
Ruby recognised that Nadia had been neutralised and started rolling off her semi-conscious form, but then she caught something in her peripheral vision that made her switch course.
She saw a bulky silhouette in a position it wasn’t supposed to be.
He moved.
Worst case: he has a gun.
She executed the same sweep, but this time in reverse, rolling Nadia’s groaning form back on top of her.
Just in time.
Roy fired the taser gun, and the two barbed darts slammed home against Nadia’s back. Ruby saw the thin copper wires connecting the barbs to the fired gun, and the next moment Nadia jerked and bucked against her, in the grip of the violent electric current.
Ruby remained unaffected. Because both barbs were in Nadia’s back, the current only passed across that surface, failing to power through into the person underneath. Suffering neuromuscular inhibition, Nadia dropped completely out of the fight.
Ruby threw her motionless body aside and made to leap to her feet.
Then her eye caught a glint, right near her head.
The kitchen knife.
She snatched it up, rolled over and plunged the blade through Nadia’s skull.
Mercy had already cost her once.
24
When she levered upright, Roy hadn’t moved.
He stood motionless, clutching the useless taser gun, mouth agape over how brutally Ruby had killed his ally. Now it was one-on-one, and Roy had no cartridges to reload the taser, and his left leg was shredded, and the Glock was closer to Ruby than it was to him.
Defeat.
Final.
‘Zafir’s men are downstairs,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to have to deal with them. You should give it up.’
Ruby almost laughed. ‘You don’t even believe what you’re saying.’
Roy clammed up.
He knew it was the truth.
The warlord’s entourage were rank amateurs in comparison to Wayne’s. Nothing rivalled spec-ops experience — especially not a trio of scrawny sociopaths whose greatest feat was the killing of unresisting innocents in Yemen.
Roy said, ‘So that’s that.’
‘That’s that.’
‘Now you should shoot me.’
‘Not yet.’
Roy stared at her. ‘You know… I actually respect you, lady. Don’t give me another chance. Don’t be that stupid.’
‘No one’s fired a shot yet,’ Ruby said. ‘The rest of them a
re downstairs, oblivious.’
A pause.
Then a nod.
‘Pick up the radio,’ she said.
He searched for it and found it under the armchair by the stairwell, at least eight stride lengths away.
He grimaced. ‘Can you get it for me?’
‘No.’
She stayed silent. Then she skirted sideways and snatched up the Glock as a final guarantee of victory.
Roy’s face fell. He said, ‘I can’t cover that distance.’
‘You did when I was wrestling with Nadia.’
Roy looked at her corpse. ‘Wayne’s not going to be happy about that.’
‘Who was she?’
‘His head of security.’
Ruby stared. ‘She was your boss?’
A nod. ‘She always found it best to hide in plain sight.’
‘What is she?’
‘Ex-IDF. And ex-Mossad.’
‘I’ll be damned.’
It struck Ruby that she’d misinterpreted her first conversation with Nadia.
It had been there in front of her face all along.
‘He takes care of me. He’s taken care of me for a long time.’
‘But you’re not together.’
‘Does it look like we are together?’
There hadn’t even been a confirmation of her role as Wayne’s lover.
Ruby had only assumed.
Nadia had toyed with her this whole time.
A façade just as impressive as hers.
She glanced down at the corpse and regarded the woman with some measured level of respect. But not for long. Ruby’s eye socket was ballooning, and the headache wasn’t getting any better, and she figured her wrist was more damaged than she thought.
It ached to hold the knife down by her side.
She said, ‘Get the radio.’
Roy contorted his face and sucked up the pain, and started to hop. Each motion sent a wave of visible agony across his face. He wasn’t putting his left foot down, but the movement alone shifted the torn tendons and ligaments around, squashing any hope of resistance.
