by Zoe Sharp
Can things get any shittier?
Then two from the rear seat moved around to open up the trunk and heaved something out. It landed with a dull thump in the dirt. They dragged it into view, and I saw at once it wasn’t a some-thing so much as a some-one, zip-tied and bloodied.
And I got the answer to my question.
Yes, they most certainly can.
THIRTY
“LUISA!”
For a moment, I couldn’t tell if Dawson was alive or dead. I was still struggling to process how they’d managed to catch her so fast. Then I saw her head lift and turn, almost blindly, toward the sound of my voice. There was blood down the side of her face.
“Charlie?”
Her voice was thready, with a hint of desperation. I said nothing, just took a bead on her mouth, where I knew a single shot would penetrate the brainstem and be instantly, painlessly fatal. Better than being burned alive or beheaded.
But was that what our attackers had in mind for us?
It was only the sliver of doubt that kept my finger resting lightly on the curve of the trigger, rather than squeezing it home.
“Fox!” shouted the driver of the pickup, almost jerking me into the shot from surprise alone. “Give it up and come on in, and nobody else has to get hurt.”
It took me a moment to realize that his accent was American, not Russian.
Doesn’t mean he isn’t working with them, though . . .
“Give me some incentive.”
“Apart from you being entirely surrounded and us having got a hold of your girlfriend, you mean?”
“Yeah, apart from that.”
“Hah! Well, he said you had balls. Got that right.”
“Who said?”
“Your boss—Parker Armstrong. Who d’ya think?”
I hesitated. Who I worked for wasn’t a secret. If somebody knew my name, they were likely to know Parker’s name, also. Enough to toss it into the negotiations, at any rate.
“Nice try,” I said. “What else you got?”
Even across the distance between us, and with gunfire still ringing in my ears, I caught his heavy sigh. “Don’t make us do this the hard way, Fox. You know we got you. Just put down the weapon and we can all—”
He probably finished the end of his sentence, but I didn’t hear him. All my concentration was suddenly focused on what felt distinctly like the muzzle of an assault rifle pressing into the back of my neck.
I froze. A gloved hand reached down and peeled the AK out of my slack fingers. When I tried to turn my head, I received a sharp jab against the back of my skull that rammed my face into the dirt. Rough but efficient hands patted me down, yanked my hands behind my back and zip-tied them. Then a voice above me called, “Clear.”
The pickup driver approached. “You took your goddamn time. Thought I was gonna have to keep talking to this limey bitch forever.”
I squinted up at him as he loomed over me but couldn’t see much detail against the bright sky. A big guy, full of swagger, who held his weapon slanted across his body like he rarely let go of it. Not a good combination from my point of view.
After a moment’s study, he kicked me hard in the long muscle of my left thigh as I lay on the ground. Half my leg burst into flames and the other half went utterly dead. I curved around the pain, fought not to make a sound.
“That’s for Dan, bitch. Think yourself lucky you don’t get the same as you gave him.”
Two of them picked me up by my upper arms, like I weighed nothing. They must have been stronger than they looked. I got my first chance to glance behind me, saw the silver SUV I’d spotted tailing us earlier now parked about two hundred meters away. The obliteration of the Land Cruiser had effectively masked its approach.
Still, the two guys who’d been inside had had plenty of time to take me out while I’d been lying in the road. Instead, they’d crept up on me and disarmed me instead. It went toward this being a capture mission rather than kill.
So, what happens now?
Before I could voice that thought, the two guys who’d picked me up dropped me onto my knees alongside Dawson. She still looked dazed, and when they pulled her up into a half-sitting position, she swayed drunkenly against me.
The pickup driver moved in front of us, still cradling his weapon. He was carrying an M4A1 carbine, with the under-slung grenade launcher. It was sobering to know they could have blasted us to bits at any time.
I looked at the remains of the Land Cruiser, listing heavily to one side, its body pockmarked with bullet holes.
One of the men from the Mercedes pulled our bags out of the back, checked inside, and threw them into the still-open trunk of the car.
“All set,” he told the pickup driver, who nodded to the men alongside Dawson and me.
“Get them loaded.”
“Where are you taking us?”
“You’ll find out when you get there. Don’t press your luck and my patience.”
Dawson seemed to come out of it enough to put up a token resistance when they brought up the silver SUV and swung open the rear door.
One of the men hit her, almost casually, in the fleshy vee under her rib cage with the butt of his M4. It knocked the wind and the stuffing right out of her, and she collapsed, gasping. He pulled a black hood over her head as he loaded her.
“Hey, she could suffocate under there!”
He ignored my protests, came at me with a similar hood. I reared back instinctively, and he grabbed my hair.
A sudden hoarse cry jerked them all around. From one of the unfinished warehouses on the other side of the street a slim figure dashed out, machine pistol spitting rounds in a continuous stream as he came. I recognized him at once.
“Moe! Don’t!”
“I will free you! Allahu akbar!”
“No!”
What happened was inevitable. One teenage boy against half a dozen well-armed and well-drilled soldiers. They dropped him before he’d gone more than a few meters, and kept firing long after they needed to. His body continued to dance in the dirt as every round hit until his clothes were tattered with blood and bone.
“Stop, for fuck’s sake!” I yelled. “Stop firing, stop firing.”
When they did, all that was left was a pathetically small heap of sticky rags. I scrambled closer before a hand grabbed my shoulder, close enough to see one chocolate-brown eye, open and staring out of the carnage. There was nothing left behind it.
The lust for life, the enthusiasm, the cheek, guile, and sheer promise that had been Moe, were gone.
THIRTY-ONE
WHEN THE HOOD CAME OFF, THE LIGHTING WAS SO INTENSE I screwed up my eyes in response. But all I could hear inside my head was Moe’s voice drowning in gunfire. All I could see imprinted on my memory were his eyes, his tattered body. It was less painful to face reality.
I found myself in an artificially lit, artificially chilled room. Bare walls, bare floor, a scarred table, and a pair of hard chairs. The same interrogation suite décor I’d come across more times than I was happy to count.
I was pushed into one of the chairs with my hands still zip-tied. There was no sign of Dawson.
Whoever removed the hood stayed behind me, lurking. When he shifted his weight, I tensed. He was close enough for me to smell stale sweat through clothes badly laundered and worn a day too long. I beat back the fear with anger, stoked it to sustain me through what was to come. I reminded myself that I’d been here before and survived. I would survive it again.
What other choices did I have?
Out of my sight line, a door opened and closed, fast enough to indicate anger or purpose—or both. A thin woman strode into view, dressed in black. Loose trousers and a high-collar sleeveless jersey, which showed off sinuously muscular arms. Her hair was cropped short and peppered with gray, making it seem older than her face.
She was holding my battered passport, which she slapped down onto the tabletop as she walked to the far side, slumping into the chair.
&n
bsp; “So you’re Charlie Fox,” she said. Another American accent, West Virginian this time, deep and slightly husky. “Care to tell me what in hell’s name I’m supposed to do with you?”
There wasn’t an answer to that—not one that she wanted to hear and I wanted to give. I said nothing.
After a moment or two’s study, she let out a long, aggravated breath. Her eyes flicked to the man standing behind me, the one who’d brought me in and removed the hood.
“What’s the word on Dan’s leg?”
“He’ll make it. Through and through—missed the femoral as well as the bone. He’s one lucky bastard.”
I recognized the voice as the driver of the pickup. One of the men who’d butchered Moe. Unconsciously, I braced my wrists, testing the tensile strength of the zip-ties. There was little give to them. I tried to relax my shoulders but couldn’t entirely override the fight reflex.
When I refocused, I saw that the woman on the other side of the table had noted my every twitch. The narrowed eyes told me she correctly identified my motivating desire and didn’t like it much.
“Do you have any idea the trouble you’ve caused us here?”
“No,” I said. “Is it worth the life of a teenage boy?”
“Damn straight it is,” she shot back. “It’s worth a dozen of ’em.”
“In that case, I’m sorry.”
“Well, that’s something, I guess, although it’s kinda late in the day for an apology.”
“No . . . I’m sorry I didn’t aim higher.”
There was a momentary pause while the meaning of that permeated the skull of the man behind me. I heard the scuff of his boots on the concrete floor, had a flash-recall of which hand he’d had on the trigger of his assault rifle. I swayed left just far enough for the punch to my right temple not to knock me cold.
As it was, he hit me like he meant it. The blow rocked the chair off its legs. It toppled slowly enough that he could have caught it if he’d had the urge. He did not.
I landed hard on my side, the air thumping out of my lungs and a rush of pain pulsing through the impact points of my body in gut-churning waves. I turned inward, blind to everything but regaining control, to not throwing up.
By the time I came back to myself, my hands were cut loose and I was propped with my back against the wall. The room tilted wildly when I tried to move. Sweat coated my forehead in a clammy film.
The woman in black crouched just beyond striking distance, which I judged was no accident. The pickup driver stayed farther back, between me and the doorway. Not that I was in any shape to make a break for it—even if there had been a handle on the inside.
“Dammit, I thought you told me she wasn’t injured,” the woman said sharply.
“She wasn’t.” There was something defensive in the pickup driver’s tone, and I knew both of us remembered him putting the boot in. “We picked this one up clean.”
“That’s your idea of clean, is it?” I demanded, my voice a raspy mumble. “I dread to think about the state of your underwear.”
He glowered but wasn’t about to be provoked a second time.
“So why is she bleeding?”
I looked down at my shirt, saw a glistening stain on the left side that had spread onto the sleeve. The pain arrowed down into a deep throb, enough to make me gasp in time to the rhythm of it.
Somebody was dimming the lights in the room, starting in the corners and working toward the center. I tried to concentrate on holding onto the bright spots, but they kept shifting sideways. I closed my eyes.
The last thing I heard was the woman shouting for a medic.
When I opened my eyes I was lying in a hospital bed with a raised frame around the mattress to keep me from rolling out. This was further ensured by the fact that my left wrist was handcuffed to the side rail.
I inspected it with enough care to prevent the steel cuff jangling. Attaching it to my weak arm was a clever move, and I doubted it was by chance. Experience so far of these people led me to believe they did little that wasn’t calculated and planned.
My forearm had been neatly redressed and bandaged, and they must have known I’d be reluctant to undo all that good work by useless struggling.
I was alone in the room, as far as I could tell, but I had few doubts they’d be monitoring me from somewhere nearby. It had the feel of a military medical bay rather than a civilian hospital, and not just because of the drab color scheme. It would have raised too many questions to take me too far from their base of operations.
Was that why the woman in black dressed that way, I wondered hazily. She seemed to be in charge of black ops run from a black site. It had a certain uniformity of style.
I slid my free hand under the hospital gown and touched a large dressing now taped to my abdomen, probing gently. The surface felt numb, the underlying tissue overly sensitive, maybe inflamed. I could only hope I had not managed to give myself septicemia and Parker further reason to doubt my fitness—in all senses of the word—for this undertaking.
I lay back and stared up at the shadows elongated across the industrial cream ceiling by a lamp in the corner. It was stark and utilitarian, and I felt more at home here than I did in any Manhattan apartment or five-star hotel. What did that say about me?
When I closed my eyes, Moe’s face appeared. Like a coward, I tried to push his image out of my head, tried to think instead of the Russian I’d shot in the ambush in Basra, but I couldn’t remember his face at all, and the guilt of that was heavier than the act of killing him in the first place.
I could see the way he moved, had a clear picture of the weapon in his hands, the way it swung toward me. My right index finger tightened in response, the kick of adrenaline pushing my heart rate up now, just as it had then. But for the actual life I’d taken, I felt . . . nothing.
I went over the checking of his body again, as though that might make it more real, might provoke some kind of emotional reaction. Instead, I had only a detached matter-of-factness about the whole exercise. I’d been thorough and professional. Wailing over my own actions seemed pointless, when they’d been caused by his. He was the one who’d fired first.
It was down to his bad luck—and my own skill—that I had been the one who’d fired last.
But when I replayed the end of that scene, unwinding the keffiyeh from his head, the sight made me suck in a terrified gulp of air.
The face underneath was Sean’s.
THIRTY-TWO
THE NEXT TIME I WOKE, THE WOMAN—HER CLOTHES FRESH BUT still black—was sitting alongside my bed with a manila folder open in her hands.
“Welcome back,” she said, but her tone was dry as dust.
I lifted the cuffed hand slightly. “There wasn’t much danger of me wandering off, now, was there?”
“Standard operating procedure,” she said but made no moves to unlock me.
I made a show of raising my head and looking around. “Where’s the gorilla?”
“Woźniak? Don’t worry, I put him back in his cage. At least for now.”
“Yeah, well, he looks the type to be happy enough with a tractor tire on the end of a rope.”
“He’s a tool,” she said, and just when I thought she was offering a slang insult, she went on, “a specialist tool designed to do one job, and one job only, and he does it exceptionally well. But multitasking is not on his résumé.”
“Neither are people skills.”
“You goaded him deliberately, knowing how he would react. He was behind you—you couldn’t see him—but you were braced for that punch before he even threw it.” She regarded me. Her eyes were blue-gray, sharp with a shrewd intelligence. “Why bring that on yourself, knowing you were already injured?”
I carefully eased myself more upright, used that as an excuse to put off answering a little longer.
“Maybe I felt I deserved it—for putting Moe in danger. For getting him killed.”
“I’m sorry about the boy, but c’mon—you point a gun at a bunch
of guys with that kind of training, you know you’re taking your life in your hands. But you fire a gun at them, well,” she shrugged, “it was always going to be game over.”
“What did they do with his body, by the way—leave it for the flies?”
Her face tightened. “They put him back in his truck and lit it on fire, covered their tracks. That’s SOP, too. But you already knew that, didn’t you?”
I stilled on the pillows, eyes straying to the folder, but refused to question what else she might have uncovered.
“What about Dawson, what have you done with her?” I asked instead. “Did she take her life in her hands, too?”
“She’s been attended to, and besides, she’s a contractor, Charlie, just the same as you. If she didn’t know the risks when she started out, she sure as hell does now.”
“I work in close protection,” I said automatically. “I’m not a contractor.”
“Yeah? So who, exactly, are you supposed to be protecting right now?”
“I’m looking for somebody,” I said, which was probably not telling her anything she didn’t know already. “When I find them, I’ll do my best to take care of them.” However that works out . . .
“Nice try, but from what I know, I’d say Sean Meyer neither wants nor needs any protection from you. In fact, I’d say he pretty much knows how to look after himself.”
I would not let myself react to that, other than a raised eyebrow and a short, “Meaning?” Even so, I got the feeling I’d told her what she’d been fishing for.
“Meyer’s AWOL. You’re Search and Rescue.”
It was close enough to the truth—for now.
“And what’s your interest?”
“Damage limitation. Right now, I’m trying to stop the pair of you screwing up a six-month operation with millions of dollars at stake.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “CIA? NSA? Homeland?”
She shook her head. “Now, you know I can’t tell you that.”
“Can you tell me your name, at least?”
“Hamilton.”
