They stopped, the doors opened and they stepped out. Here the carpets were purple and trimmed with gold. The walls were cream instead of white and there were lamps positioned at intervals along the walls. They were at a kind of T junction. There was an occasional table with a vase of flowers. Her guide pointed down the main stem of the T and said, “Go to the door at the end, on the right and wait. Do not knock!”
The elevator took him away. She walked down the passage, feeling she would burst into tears at any moment, but determined not to give the bastards that satisfaction. She stood in front of the door and remembered the little creep’s words, “Do not knock!”
She felt her jaw set and her nostrils dilate, reached forward and knocked firmly on the door. She immediately regretted it, but simultaneously was glad that she’d done it. She expected to be kept waiting, but the door opened almost immediately. There was a man looking down at her. He was about six-three and built like a god.
Three
A god, of course, was what he thought he was. He was bare to the waist and wore a pair of light, cotton pants. He had thick, platinum hair to his shoulders, a hard, strong jaw and deep set dark blue eyes above high cheekbones. His stare was unwavering, like that of a hunting cat.
“You were told not to knock.”
Suddenly she felt she had nothing to lose, that in the last half hour or so she had lost any shreds that remained of her life and all she had left was her dignity – or the smoldering embers of it. She looked right into his penetrating, blue eyes and said, “Fuck you. I’m a New Yorker, nobody keeps me fucking waiting. You want something with me, open the fucking door and let me in. You don’t want to let me in? Then fuck you and let me go back to my fucking home.”
His eyebrows shot up and he smiled, a bit. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck…”
“Yeah, fuck you.” Now she’d started she couldn’t stop. Maybe it was because she was terrified. Either way it helped. He said, “Is this a word you use to give yourselves strength?”
“Maybe. How the fuck do I know? What am I a social fucking psychologist? Who gives a fuck? What the fuck do you fucking want with me?”
He gave a small, odd giggle that was totally incongruent with his massive, masculine form, and stood aside to let her in.
She crossed the threshold and found herself in a spacious suite of rooms with broad windows overlooking the east coast of America. The room had a masculine elegance to it, understated in dark wood and leather, and deep smoky grays. The door closed behind her. He was still smiling. He said, “You didn’t participate.” She shrugged and made a question with her face. “Back in the shower room, you didn’t participate. Why?”
She stared at him in astonishment, made several attempts to speak, but only manage to move her hands and her lips. Incredulity seemed to have paralyzed the speech centre in her brain. He watched her with curiosity and said, “Please don’t say ‘fuck’ again.”
She said, “What the fuck?”
He sighed, “Do you know? Since I opened the door you have said ‘fuck’ or ‘fucking’ twelve times…”
“Make it fucking thirteen. No, what the fuck? Make it fucking fifteen.”
“Imagine if you had used those fifteen words to say something meaningful.”
She shook her head, “No, it was meaningful. It just wasn’t a meaning you wanted to hear, pal. The meaning was this, fuck you! Is that meaning getting through to you? And here is something else, if you want you and me…” she made a hand gesture, pointing at him with her index finger and herself with her thumb, “You want you and me to have a meaningful exchange, you better get me some fucking clothes!”
These last words were shouted. He considered her for a long moment. Finally he said, “I should beat you.”
“You wanna try? I’m an Aries. I got Mars the Moon and the Sun in Aries, in the seventh house, you know what that means, pal?”
“No.”
“It means I’m going to kick your sorry ass all the way back to the fucking planet you came from, you motherfucking piece of shit!”
Stella had always known that she had an attitude. And what she said was absolutely true. She was an Aries with a planetary distribution which inclined her towards aggression, hence her black belts in both Krav Maga and Jeet Kune Do. In fact right now she was itching for this alien piece of parrot shit to make a move. She knew just which bones she was going to break. But, nonetheless, she was surprised at the intensity of her own defiance.
She was more surprised that this hulk, instead of trying to slap her about a bit, suddenly turned and walked away. He left the room through an automatic, sliding door and returned thirty seconds later with a huge shirt. He threw it at her. She put it on and it fit her like a dress. He gestured to a chair and she sat on the sofa.
He sat in a chair near her.
“Now,” he said, “My name is Thorvall. You are Stella. Explain to me, Stella, why you did not participate with the other women in the sexual game.”
She looked at him, like a dyslexic who is told to copy out the collected works of William Shakespeare. She turned her eyes to the immensity of the view through the panoramic window.
“OK,” she said at last. “I have no choice, right? I have to try and explain this to you?” He nodded. “Ok, so, you? You have superior technology and military might. That’s why you were able to come here and walk all over us and do what the fuck you like with us. But that’s like us. I don’t know if you know anything about human history…”
“More than you.”
“Yeah? OK. Well then you will know about when the Europeans came over to the Americas, they had massive military and technological superiority. But they were actually socially, culturally and morally inferior. And that, you fucking asshole, is your problem. You are culturally, socially and morally inferior to us. And believe me, that is not easy!”
He spread his hands. “Very well, you are getting a lot of aggression off your chest by insulting me and swearing at me, but you still haven’t explained…”
“OK! OK!” She sighed, resenting the feeling that she was actually having a conversation with this creep. “To you, sex is apparently just a biological act. You put your dick in my fanny, we rub, we come, everybody’s happy. You go and do whatever you freaks do, and I go and wait in my slave quarters for next time you feel horny. But you only think that’s OK because you’re a fu…”
He held up his hand. “Please!”
“Because you are too fucking stupid to realize that there is a lot more to sex than that, and that we have souls and feelings. And our ability to feel empathy and compassion, makes us superior to you!!
“It is an interesting argument, some of our own – I think you would call them pinko liberal bleeding hearts – might agree with you. But you still haven’t explained. Which makes me think that you haven’t actually got a valid explanation and that is why you are digressing all over the place.” He smiled. “We should eat. Is it too early to eat? You’re fun to talk to.”
“OK, asshole!” she snarled. “Sexual intercourse is about as intimate as two human beings can get. You share feelings that you can’t put into words. You touch each other in every way, physically and emotionally. There is a sharing of intimacy in sex that you can’t get in any other way. So a lot of humans are like you, and just want to fuck each other’s brains out. But usually they are sad, shallow, soulless people. Like you. But a lot of us chose, carefully, the people we want to have sex with. You understand? When you force somebody to have sex when they don’t want to, we call that rape, and it is a serious crime.”
He looked genuinely fascinated
“Shallow?”
“Yeah, you know, the opposite of deep.”
He sighed, a little irritated. “I know what shallow means, Stella, I am asking you how this relates to a person, in particular a human.”
“Jesus! I can’t believe you think you are superior to us and you can’t grasp the most elementary concepts!” His eyebrows shot up in surprise. She ignore
d him and plowed on. “A deep person has many layers to their person. It’s a metaphor, you ox! You know? Like calling you an ox is a metaphor. You are not really an ox, but you are about as stupid as one! A ‘deep’ person has layers to their psyche, they have subtle ‘depths’ that you need to explore in order to understand them. They may seem contradictory, until you understand the hidden secrets of their identity…”
“You mean they are complex.”
“Yes! They are complex, and maybe they have strong emotions that are not clinical and totally logical.”
He thought about it. “I see. And a shallow person would be clinical and logical, and have no emotional complexity.”
He nodded like it all made sense to him and said, “Well, you are definitely deep.”
“Yeah, pal. And you are definitely shallow.”
He nodded again. “Certainly, by your definition of these terms, we are a shallow culture.” He smiled. “I think we probably have a lot more fun than you, though. Now, get undressed, we are going to have amazing sex, and I promise you, you will enjoy it.”
Four
Quite a long way from there, vertically down as the stone falls, and some miles to the north east, Erickson lay covered in leaves and peering through binoculars. He said, “Three trucks. Light guard. I can only see two mounted lasers and six outriders. Twelve men altogether.”
Alvarez scratched her head under her camouflage cap and wondered if she’d got fleas from sleeping in the barn. She said, “Is it worth it? If they ain’t bothering to protect it, it probably ain’t worth protecting.”
“Relative values, Alvarez.”
“I don’t value my relatives, Erickson. But then they didn’t value me, neither.”
He turned and looked at her to see if she was being deliberately obtuse. She grinned to show she was but he said it anyway, “It may not be valuable to them, but it may be very valuable to us.”
“I got it. I was lightning the mood. Bit of humor…”
He ignored her and pointed down at where the road passed through some tree cover. “Get Clay and Bernie. Meet me down there in five. Tell Scott to keep watch from here. If things go south they fuck off out of here. Got it?”
“Got it.”
She scrambled away through the undergrowth and he moved silently and invisibly down the slope to the tree cover. Fifteen years in the elite SAS had made this kind of thing second nature to him. A year on secondment to the Seals had found him in the States when the Olympians had arrived. His unit had been destroyed in the first week and he’d spent the last year recruiting and training a small resistance group.
He scrambled under the cover of some ferns between two huge old pine trees and set his sites on the killing field thirty to fifty feet away on the blacktop. After a couple of minutes he heard a soft rustle and whispered “Alvarez?”
Three voices came back to him, “Here,” “Bernie,” “Clay!”
He sighed and shook his head, “Be careful!” he whispered, “I think there’s a herd of fuckin’ elephants about!”
“Sorry!”
“Sorry!”
“Sorry!”
“Shut the fuck up!”
“Sorry…”
Soon they heard the soft whine of the electromagnetic engines approaching. His guys were rookies, but they’d learnt what they’d learnt at the sharp end, in real life and death situations. He trusted them and he knew that when the time came they’d act decisively and ruthlessly.
The time came.
The outriders were on hover-bikes that seemed to glide on some sort of magnetic field, but the; lasers were mounted on captured army Jeeps, and the trucks looked like captured security vans. The decision had been made that morning that the next convoy they took, they would secure at least one of the hover-bikes. The lasers were an added bonus.
They came round the bend in the road doing a steady thirty MPH and as they moved down the straight the first Jeep and the three vans came into view. Then two more outriders and the last two and the second Jeep were hidden from view by the last van. Alvarez and Clay were on the other side of the road, four square with him and Bernie on this side. Bernie and Alvarez would open up when the convoy was in the killing field. Erickson picked his target: the far side front outrider. He knew that Clay would be targeting the nearside. Once they were down, they’d spray the Jeep and the windshield of the van. Alvarez and Bernie would take the other Jeep and the other two outriders. After that it was fish in a barrel.
It went like clockwork. He secured his target at thirty feet. He heard six double-taps down the road and took out his target. In his peripheral vision he saw the other front outrider go down. He aimed at the mounted laser: driver, gunner, co-driver. One, two, three. Then he opened up on the truck and saw the windshield shatter and blood spray over the back of the cab.
He took a second to look. The second truck had collided with the back of the first. The outrider was lying in the road. Erickson scrambled to his feet and ran, with his automatic weapon at his shoulder. He skidded down the bank and ran along the road, keeping his weapon trained on the prone outrider. When he saw the blood pooling under him he raised the rifle, scanned the area and moved in on the second truck. He could see Bernie approaching the cab of the rear truck.
Erickson wrenched open the door and saw two unconscious Olympians. He grabbed the nearest and dragged him from the cab and simultaneously shot the other one in the head. It was his unlucky day. He stood on the live one’s neck and trained his gun on the rear cab. Bernie stood by the door. Erickson nodded. He yanked open the door and a body fell out. Bernie peered in, double-tapped and came toward Erickson. Five seconds later Alvarez and Clay joined them.
Erickson said, “This one’s alive. I want to talk to him.”
Alvarez said, “How many HBs we get?”
Bernie said, “This side I think we got all three.”
Clay was six-six at least, with a chest like two oil drums and a voice like tectonic plates slowly getting mad at each other. He said, “Then we got six bikes and two lasers. Now we just need to learn how to use ‘em.”
“Good. Bernie, wake this tosser up. Don’t hurt him. Don’t kill him. Be courteous and explain it’s in his interest to cooperate. If he does, we might trade him for one of our own.”
Bernie frowned. “They ain’t caught any of us.”
“He doesn’t know that, does he? Get him to tell you how the fuckin’ bikes work. Now we’ve got a light cavalry. And light artillery. We are coming up in the world. Alvarez, Clay, let’s see what’s in these vans.”
Erickson went to the front van. He shot out the lock and wrenched open the door. He found what he’d expected to find: a dozen beautiful, frightened women. He smiled at them and said, “Hello girls. All right?”
They looked at him, then at each other and then back at him again. The one who came closest to having something approaching a personality said, “Are you going to hurt us?”
He winked at her. “Nah, I’m going to be ever so gentle. Come on!”
He jerked his head and they filed out of the van to stand blinking in the sunshine. Moments later they were joined by twenty-four other gorgeous young women.
“What are you going to do with us?”
“I wish I bloody knew. Come on, for now we’ll get you somewhere more or less safe. Clay, take’em up to the camp and send some guys down to drive the Jeeps up. Bernie. Alvarez, let’s go see how Bernie’s getting on.”
Bernie was getting on fine. He and the trooper were bending over the bike talking like old buddies. As they approached the guy turned and looked scared. He was good-looking, like everybody else they had ever seen from the ships. He spoke with an accent that might have been Scandinavian.
“Hi, should I salute? I am not sure…”
Erickson shook his head. “No, just answer all my questions and we’ll get along fine. What’s your name?”
“Olaf.”
“Olaf? As in the Nordic name, Olaf?”
“Yuh…
“OK. Can we use these things?”
Bernie answered for him.
“Yeah! They’re really simple. It’s an anti-grav cell. He has no idea how it works, but it’s something to do with decelerating gravitons. The controls are easy. If you can ride a bike you can ride one of these.”
“Good, we’ll take one each and pull the others behind.” He pointed at Olaf. “Do anything stupid and I will not kill you, understood? But you will wish I had. And I am not being funny. I mean it. We intend to survive and win. Got it?”
Olaf frowned. He looked bemused. “Yuh…”
They spent the night in an abandoned cabin to the east of Catskill. There were thirty-six beautiful young women, fifteen motley freedom fighters from every walk of life except the military, one SAS lieutenant and, apparently, and alien from Denmark or Sweden, or perhaps Norway. They all gathered around the fire and Erickson spoke to the girls.
“I have been fighting the invaders since the day they arrived, a year ago. I have trained these warriors. I have fought with the best elite fighting force in the world. And believe me, this bunch here,” he pointed at his band with a smile of pride, “…are nothing like as good as them! But they are good, and they are getting better, and we are going to win.” He turned to Olaf who was staring at him in utter fascination. “And if I let you go, Olaf, you can take that message back to your masters, and tell them I mean it.”
“No, please don’t let me go…”
“Now, you lot…” He looked at the girls and shook his head in mild despair. “You can stay with us if you want. But if you do you are going to toughen up pretty damned quick. We ain’t going to carry you. Here, you pull your weight, you fight for our collective survival, or you die. Your other option is to go back wherever you came from and take your chances, hope they don’t come for you again. Think about it tonight, and you can give me your decision tomorrow morning.”
There was some discussion and the girls wandered off. Erickson pointed at Olaf and said, “You. Come here. I want some fucking explanations.”
To Love A Hitman Page 42
