Silver ota-1

by Steven Savile

  She wanted to claw his eyes out. Instead she said, “Thank you.”

  He hadn’t expected that. He thought it was the ultimate act of submission. She was giving herself to him. He kissed her then, in the soft hollow at the nape where her throat met her body, and it was almost tender. She closed her eyes. She let herself seem to sag against the chains. He felt her move and touched her again, like lovers do. It was all she could do not to lunge forward and bite his throat out with her teeth. She couldn’t do that. Not while her hands were still trussed above her head. She needed to be able to move her arms.

  Uzzi Sokol touched her belly, pressing his palm flat against the taut muscle. It was a hideously intimate gesture, worse in some ways than all of the other invasions, because of the tenderness in it. She wanted the brutality because it made it easier to hate him. She waited out his touch. He had said the others were coming soon; that meant it was now or never, and never wasn’t an option.

  She arched her back, then came forward, pressing herself up against him. She leaned in, her lips tasting the salt of passion in his skin.

  He backed away into the darkness of the cell.

  He didn’t like losing control. He didn’t want her dictating their dance, even in chains. He wanted to orchestrate every twist and shudder. He was sick. He walked away from her, five, six, seven, eight steps. She felt the chain go slack. Her arms fell to her sides. Almost immediately she felt the rush of her blood beginning to circulate properly. It was like a drug. She closed her eyes. She had one chance. She needed to stay calm. If this went wrong-if he balked or she sent the gun spinning out of reach-she was dead.

  He walked toward her, pulling the black hood off so she could see his face. He dropped it on the ground. His face was a mockery of handsome, twisted by lust. Whatever shred of decency had lived inside Uzzi Sokol was gone. All that remained was this creature driven by primal instincts.

  Orla tensed every muscle in her lower body, ready to explode into motion.

  She surrendered to her other senses, listening as he neared, listening as his breath sounded ragged and aroused in her ear, and as he came forward, losing control, Orla arched her back and drove her head forward into the middle of his face. She felt his nose explode in a spray of blood and blinding pain. Sokol staggered away from her, stunned. She heard the clatter as he dropped the Jericho and brought his hands up to his face. He screamed over and over, “You bitch! You miserable bitch!” as he stumbled backward, looking for the safety of the darkness. Orla dropped down into a crouch, praying the gun had fallen within reach. For one heart-stopping moment she couldn’t see where it had fallen. She looked about frantically. Then she saw it. It had fallen right on the edge of the darkness, out of reach. She stretched out a foot, trying to hook it with her toes.

  The barrel spun away from her.

  Orla stretched, the steel cuffs cutting deep into her wrists. The blinding agony gave her another inch. She dragged the Jericho toward her.

  Sokol came lurching out of the darkness, his ruined face like something out of a nightmare. He could barely stand. He staggered two steps sideways for every two forward. Orla reached down for the gun, the chain grating as it slid through the coupling. She gripped it with both hands and squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was deafening in the close confines of the cell. The bullet took Sokol in the shoulder, jerking him back a zombie-step. She fired again. The second shot took him in the other shoulder. He roared in agony. Blind rage drove him forward two more steps until he was close enough she could feel his erection die as the third slug pierced his skull. He collapsed at her feet.

  Gasping, Orla leaned back and tried to put a bullet into the coupling in the ceiling. She missed with the fourth. The fifth split it.

  The Jericho 941 shipped with different barrels, a 9x19mm parabellum and a.41 “hot cartridge.” The difference was three shots. She either had ten shots left or seven, depending if Sokol had kept the gun fully loaded. She prayed she wouldn’t have to find out the hard way.

  rla put her left hand against the wall and blew out the cuff’s coupling. She didn’t bother wasting a bullet on the right cuff. Nine or six left. She kept a running count. She fed the loose chain through the cuff and padded over to the open door. The gunshots had made a lot of noise. Anyone inside the building would have heard them. She willed them on. She had a gun and a need to strike back. She wanted to hurt them for what they’d done to her. She wanted to kill them for what they had done to the girl before her, and for making her watch as they did it.

  She ran the numbers. Schnur had claimed the Shrieks worked as blind cells, one person connected to two others, the guy below them and the guy above them in the chain. They would never risk having more than two operatives in the same place, as it exposed an extra link in the chain; and extra links weakened the chain. That was the whole point of blind cells. But Sokol had said the others would be here soon, and others was plural. The guy below Sokol in the chain, and Gavrel Schnur. Schnur had said Mabus liked to be a part of the beheadings when they filmed them. He had told her that in his office in the IDF HQ.

  Schnur was Mabus. She was sure of that. It was the only explanation that made sense. He had fed her a bullshit story about Solomon being Mabus, but that is all it was, a bullshit story. Schnur was Mabus. And if Schnur was Mabus, he not only knew who Akim Caspi really was, he was the only person who did, because Caspi was the man above him in the chain. She had had time to think about it while they hung her up like a chicken waiting for the slaughter. Akim Caspi was the man who had recruited Schnur. He had to be. There was no other scenario that made sense. Mabus was only ever the herald, the piper at the gates of dawn. Solomon, though, Solomon was the Antichrist to Schnur’s herald, the real evil-and Schnur had given them his name.

  It was a mistake.

  A slip.

  He had said more than he should have.

  And she was in the mood to make him pay for that.

  She looked down the narrow passageway but didn’t see anyone coming. There was a single naked bulb at the far end, and beneath it, the first stair leading up. She ran back to Uzzi Sokol’s corpse and took the shirt from his back. He had no need for it, and she didn’t want to step out into the middle of Tel Aviv buck naked with a gun if she didn’t have to. She’d be drawing enough attention to herself even with the shirt.

  She checked his pockets for a spare ammo clip. He didn’t have one. She could have popped the magazine and counted out the bullets, but she didn’t want to take the time-not here. She wasn’t out of the woods yet, and any extra seconds were wasted seconds.

  She buttoned the shirt up quickly and then ran down the narrow passage. There was a door at the bottom, just before the stairs, a rusty iron thing that appeared to have been welded shut. She checked it just in case. Ipasst give. That was enough for her. She ran barefoot up the stairs, slowing just before she reached the top. She checked left and right. There was no one there. Sokol had come planning to play. He’d known he was alone and would be for a while.

  She was on the ground floor now. To the right she could see the interior of a small grocery store. There were no groceries on the shelves. It had been bombed out during the hostilities. To the left was the store room. It was a perfect place to hide someone. The entire strip mall was probably deserted. She went for the door.

  The shop floor was thick with dust and broken glass. The windows had been boarded up. It was convenient. It meant no one could see inside. She walked over the broken glass, cutting the souls of her feet. She barely felt the thin shards as they dug in deep. Behind her Orla left a trail of bloody footprints.

  She looked back over her shoulder to be sure no one was following and that no one was lurking in the shelves to jump out at her. She reached the door. It was locked and chained. She didn’t hesitate. She put a single shot into the center of the lock’s hasp and unthreaded the chain as it splintered and the tongue came loose. The door itself was locked. She realized then the stupidity of shooting out the lock. The door being ch
ained on the inside meant Sokol and the others had a different way of coming and going. Probably an old goods door around the back of the shop. She couldn’t worry about it now. She had eight or five left. Another one into the lock would make it seven or four if the gun had been fully loaded when Sokol came to torment her. Less if not. The numbers were getting a little low for her liking.

  Instead of shooting the final lock she tested the integrity of the boards on the windows. They were flimsy at best. She looked around the little grocery store for something she could use. Back by the till she found one of three old shopping carts. They were buckled and twisted where the heat from the mortar fire had warped them, but they’d be fine for what she had in mind. Orla wrestled one of the carts free of the others. The wheels were buckled and it didn’t want to roll on them. It didn’t matter. She dragged it back far enough to give her a run at the boarded-up window, then launched herself at it, running full-tilt forward with the cart out in front of her like a battering ram.

  The cart hit the boards and kept on going through them as she ran.

  She heard screaming.

  It sounded like a mad banshee inside her head.

  It took her a moment to realize it was her.

  And then the boards tore free and daylight came flooding in.

  Head down, Orla staggered out onto the street, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  She breathed in the hot morning air.

  She was alive.

  Sokol was dead.

  That was all that mattered to her.

  She stumbled barefoot toward the side of the road. She needed to get as far away from this place as she could.

  Cars passed her on the street. She held out her hand, trying to hitch a ride. A few slowed, then accelerated, seeing the gun and the mess she was in. Just when she was beginning to think there were no good Samaritans on the road to Tel Aviv a white SUV slowed. She tensed, expecting to see the toad behind the wheel. If it had been Gavrel Schnur driving she would have shot him through the windshield without a second thought. It wasn’t. It was a middle-aged man with his wife in the seat beside him. Orla stumbled toward the passenger door as the car slowed to a stop at the side of the road.

  The woman rolled down her window, took one look at Orla half-naked, battered and bruised and holding the Jericho 941 as though it were a snake, and seemed to understand. She was young, maybe twenty-five herself, but she had grown up in the conflicts of Palestine and Israel; and in Orla she saw a victim. It was as simple as that. Orla guessed the woman had made her husband pull over. The stranger didn’t ask what happened, she simply said, “Get in.” And when Orla was inside the SUV, she said, “Drive.”

  They peeled away from the curb and into the traffic.

  There was a blonde-haired doll on the backseat. They had a daughter. She wasn’t in the car with them. Orla’s stomach tightened at the realization that the Barbie-ideal of womanhood transcended state and nation. In the passenger seat the woman turned to look at Orla in the back. Orla could see a dozen questions behind her eyes, not least of which was, what have we done? It was natural. People didn’t want to interpose themselves into situations where trouble was rife. But thankfully, her first instinct had been maternal, to protect. Questions were fine now; they were out of there and getting further and further away from the abandoned grocery store by the minute.

  “Thank,” Orla said, for the second time in a few short minutes. This time she really meant it.

  “What happened to you?”

  It was the biggest of all of the potential questions. Too big for her to answer in the back of the car. Orla shook her head. She knew it would look like she was in shock. She looked at the woman and told her, “I thought I was going to die. You saved my life.” It wasn’t much of an answer, but it seemed to appease the woman for the moment at least. She had more questions, practical ones: Where are you from? Where are you staying? Do you want us to take you to the police station?

  That was the last thing she wanted. She fended the constant barrage of questions with one of her own. “Do you have a cell phone?” The woman nodded. Of course they did. Everyone in the world had cell phones these days. “Do you mind if I make a call? I need to tell people I am okay.”

  “Of course,” the woman fumbled about in her purse and handed a small gold D amp;G Motorola. Orla took it and flipped it open. She dialed in the +44 for England and prayed the dial tone wouldn’t cut off into the operator’s voice telling her that her service plan didn’t cover international calls. It didn’t. She punched in the rest of the numbers for Nonesuch.

  Lethe picked up on the second ring. He sounded like he was in the car beside her as he said, “Go for Lethe.”

  She breathed out a long shaky sigh. She hadn’t realized just how good it would be to hear a familiar voice. She closed her eyes and smiled. “Hey Jude.”

  He answered her with the rest of the famous lyric, then said, “Are you okay? Ah, hell, stupid question, I know. I mean… are you… did they hurt you?”

  “Yes,” she said, meaning yes she was okay, yes she was out of there, and yes they had hurt her, but not as much as she was going to hurt them. “I want an address, Jude. Gavrel Schnur. It should be in the Ramat district, North Tel Aviv. He’s with the IDF.”

  “I’m on it, gimme a sec. It’s good to hear your voice, Orla. I thought I’d never…” He let the thought hang. He didn’t need to finish it. She’d had the thought often enough from the other side while she was down there in the dark cellar.

  “I know,” she said. “Tell the old man I am coming home. I’ve just got one thing to clean up first.”

  “You know what he’s going to say,” Lethe told her.

  “I know. That’s why I am telling you, not him. Have you got that address for me?”

  It was off the 481, close to the water. She knew the area. It wasn’t an area a young politician could afford, even if he was a rising star in the Likud party and favored of Menachem Begin, Shamir and Netanyahu. It was old money. Lots and lots of filthy old money. That should have been her first clue all the way back when she had been looking at the photograph of Schnur and his wife, Dassah. Schnur had to have got his money somehow, and that offshore account in Hottinger amp; Cie and all of those Silverthorn deposits were making an awful lot of sense to her now. The money came from Caspi. That was the joke wasn’t it? Made of Silver. And what was more Christian in terms of iconography than the crown of thorns? She stared out of the window, watching the streets go by.

  “Who is he?”

  “Mabus,” she said, grateful that the conversation only made sense to the pair of them. She smiled at the woman. It was meant to assure her that everything was fine. She was sure she looked mad.

  “Be careful, Orla. Promise me.”

  “I’ll be home soon,” she said. It wasn’t the promise he’d wanted, but it was the only one she was prepared to give him. She wasn’t about to be careful. The time for care had passed. She was hunting the man who had made her last few days a living hell. She hung up the phone on him and gave it back to the woman. “Thank you,” she said again. “I can’t pay for the call, I’m sorry. My money is all back at the hotel.”

  “That’s okay, honey, don’t worry. Where are you staying?”

  She gave them Gavrel Schnur’s address, the big house off the 481, down by the water.

  She watched her good Samaritans drive off into the blue sky of the coast road.

  Staying in Tel Avivwas counter-intuitive. They would expect her to run, to get as far away from them as she could. Schnur wouldn’t expect her to go to his home and wait for him. It made no logical sense. But revenge wasn’t about logic.

  There was no security gate, and no cameras that she could see. That didn’t mean they weren’t there.

  She had so many questions. She wanted to ask him to his face why he had done it. Why had he plotted with Solomon and Devere to cause so much pain. She wanted to hear him justify himself? Was he going to blame the murder of his wife? The death of his
son? And did it even matter what he said? It could never be justification enough. Hearing it might humanize the toad, but it could never make him human. Nothing could ever do that again.

  She walked toward the house.

  It was odd that he had never moved, given what had happened to his wife in the driveway, but she reasoned, perhaps he needed the constant reminder to fuel his hatred?

  It was the middle of the day, broad daylight, so most likely the toad was at work, or heading to the grocery store basement to finish her. He wouldn’t be home until later. Which would give her time to break in and cover her tracks so that when he finally came home she would be waiting for him.

  There wouldn’t be any questions, she decided.

  She didn’t want to hear his answers.

  The toad didn’t come home for three hours.

  It gave her time.

  She sat at his desk, breathing in his lingering smell. Everything in the place reeked of Gavrel Schnur. Orla sat back in his high-backed leather chair, wearing one of his wife’s dresses. They were a similar size, if not exactly the same. Schnur had maintained her wardrobes as a shrine. Every garment still hung on its hanger, immaculately pressed. Her death really had affected him. She found a photograph of Dassah and styled her hair so that at first glance the toad might think there was an old ghost in his chair. She went through his things, looking for the name Solomon. She wanted a surname. She wanted a place. Something. Anything. She wanted to link Schnur and Solomon and Devere and work out which one was the idealist, which one the fanatic and which one the opportunist. She assumed it was Solomon, Schnur and Devere, in that order, but she wasn’t about to bet her life on it.

  She rifled his drawers and searched the place for a safe. She couldn’t find one, but that didn’t mean the toad didn’t have his hiding places. Everyone had their hiding places. She tried his computer, but it was password protected; and she wasn’t remotely as tech-savvy as Lethe, so she simply pulled the hard drive out of the machine. She’d let Lethe play with it when she got home. She’d tell him it was a coming home present.