by E. E. Knight
“You don’t say,” Frys said, making conversation while his mind worked.
“I understand this has gone all the way to the president. He’s put them up in a hotel on the seashore south of Lima, sent a doctor and two nurses down to tend to them, even ordered one of the state-dinner chefs to supervise their meals. Questions are being asked. I fear your friend Fermi will not be in uniform much longer.”
The Prime smiled. One day, perhaps soon, Fermi would be able to laugh in the face of the president. “Anything else, Thirty-three?”
“Lara Croft knows you have left the country.”
Too late, Lara Croft.
Perhaps he shouldn’t have hurried out of Peru, but it had been necessary to gather the fourteen others of the 1 percent to witness what was being prepared at Capricorn Atoll. He had thought it would be jolly for them to travel together. But that wasn’t thinking like the Prime, now, was it? He had responsibilities.
“You know the name of the hotel where she is staying?”
“Of course,” the voice at the other end crackled.
“Contact Don Sabato. He owes Tejo Kunai a favor for improving the potency of his coca crop. Tell him Kunai is calling that favor in. Croft needs to be killed. He might use La Raza again. La Raza arranged the disappearance of that troublesome lawyer last year.”
“The president will go mad!”
“Let him. The time is coming when presidents will not matter.”
“I heard that from Kunai. Now from you?”
The Prime sighed. “With such questions, you wonder why you remain Thirty-three year after year?”
“Sorry, sir. I will call Don Sabato at once.”
“Thank you, Thirty-three. Tell him to hurry. This opportunity moves quickly.” He turned the phone off.
Alison had an I-told-you-so look on her face that he longed to wipe off. Perhaps she needed words. “You were right,” he said. “I was wrong. We should have not left loose ends.”
“We’ll hear from her shortly, I’m sure,” Alison said.
“I doubt it. Don Sabato has killed an American ambassador and three Peruvian generals. I believe his men can handle one woman. And if not, the Pacific is a very big place in which to hide.”
19
Peru did not have the world’s best beaches, but where the dramatic Pacific shoreline met the desert beauty of Andean mountains, one did without beaches and just drank in the beauty.
Lara didn’t have time for scenery, however. She read the confirmation from her favorite Pacific Air pilot, a New Zealander called “Shanks,” and snapped shut the laptop on loan to Lady Croft from the Ministry of Tourism. Ever since reading Heather’s fax, scanned and put into her priority e-mail box by Gwenn back at the Croft Foundation offices, she’d been making travel arrangements.
It had been a rough pair of days getting to Lima, then a rough three hours alternately kicking butt and dropping names in government offices. When it was done, she had a car at their disposal, a hotel suite, and round-the-clock medical care.
But Borg still didn’t have arms. His prosthetics had a new kind of mount, quite experimental, and the technology had hardly made it out of the labs yet, let alone to the otherwise adequate Peruvian hospitals. So Borg still wore his climbing arms, which he hid beneath an extra-long coat to avoid looking like a half-exposed Terminator cyborg while in public.
Lara nodded at the private-duty nurse in the anteroom of the suite and looked in on Borg. He lay with his feet propped up on the hotel bed’s headboard, snoring deep in his chest like a largish dog.
The first morning flight to Hawaii would carry them out of Peru, and from there they would travel south to Fiji. Djbril would have a fresh lot of VADS ammunition for her .45s waiting there in forty-eight hours thanks to overnight mail by a security service courier. Then Shanks would get them to Capricorn Atoll.
She’d considered trying to make a few calls to London and Washington to see if she couldn’t get the Special Boat Service or a SEAL team on board. But having friends in high places didn’t always translate into action, and she knew she didn’t have enough hard evidence to persuade reluctant governments to act. Plus, their special forces were otherwise engaged at the moment.
So it was up to her.
Again.
A hunch told her that whatever was going to happen would happen on the twenty-first of December. While the world was Christmas shopping, in the Southern Hemisphere they would be celebrating the first day of summer. Von Junst had mentioned ceremonies celebrating the Deep Ones taking place at the summer and winter solstices.
She left Borg a note to meet her at the hotel pool cabana, mentioned it to the nurse, and changed into a just-purchased black bikini, flip-flops, and new sunglasses. Air and sun poolside would recharge batteries drained by her week in the Amazon headwaters and escape from the Whispering Abyss.
The hotel, a beautiful colonial style with colonnades both facing the city and the sea, stood atop the sandy cliffs of the Costa Verde. She’d never been to this part of Lima before, the Barranco district, full of old trees and older homes, and found it utterly charming. Too bad she didn’t have time to explore.
Most months this part of the coast lay under blankets of
fog, but for a few glorious months around Christmas, the sun
turned Lima into paradise. She watched Peruvian penguins
and Inca terns search the breakwaters below the cliffs, then
found an unoccupied chaise.
Bikini: fitting nicely. Sunglasses: on. Sunscreen: slathered. Bruises: healed or covered by towel.
She’d better carbon copy her diving inventory to Shanks so he could check it over before she arrived. She didn’t sleep, but fell into something that wasn’t quite a nap, but just as relaxing. Feisty salsa music from the cabana bar forced her to tap her fingers, keeping time. She rolled over.
American and European tourists yakked with the cabana bartender about pizza, and she opened her eyes.
“What kind of cheese do they use? Do you know what deep dish is? No, not peppers, pepperoni.”
The sun turned orange as it approached the horizon. She felt rubbery; the sun had performed its usual gentle, warm massage.
She swung her legs off the chaise, saw Borg circumnavigating the pool, looking out of place in his long coat.
***
At the hotel’s rear colonnade, a sun-dried Peruvian who looked as though he was dressed for a golf game lowered a pair of microbinoculars and spoke into a cell phone. The phone was the kind that could take and send pictures. He snapped two shots of Lara Croft wrapping a towel about her waist, chose one, and hit “send.”
***
Borg spoke first. “We leave again tomorrow?”
“I want to see what they’re going to try to do with those plates. Unfortunately, anyone who might know is either dead or working for them, and I don’t think my only other source is in the mood for a third talk. How’s the head?”
He tapped the stitches. “I have an appointment with the hotel stylist. I will ask her to shorten the rest.”
“Hmmm … from the right angle, you look like Brad Pitt with bed hair. Could be worse.”
“Brad Pitt has metal arms?”
She sensed an uneasiness behind his joke. “What’s wrong, Nils?”
“I had a strange dream. It made me think of something.” They walked out to the rail looking out over the sand cliffs and the water below.
“About the Méne glyph?”
“No. No, not that dream. About Alison. You, too.”
“Men and their fantasies,” she joked.
“No, not that. I was thinking … It went bad with Alison after my accident. She hated when I touched her with the arms. The touch made her wince. She said she did not mind them, but preferred the old me.”
“Yes?” Lara asked, wondering what he was getting at.
“‘The old me.’ You never knew the old me.”
“I wish I’d known you when you were chasing Chinese figure skate
rs in Lilleharmner. I was a pretty fair gymnast at that age, and only a couple of years behind you. Maybe I’d have put English girls on your list.”
“You don’t mean—”
She took a step closer. “Nils, put your arms around me.”
Borg smiled, moved his arms.
Whirs and a click signaled that his hands had joined behind her. To Lara, they were not artificial, just the strong limbs of a strong man.
Lara patted the hair at the back of his head. “There. Your arms are around me. Your arms. You’re an incredible man, Nils.”
“But not a whole one.”
“Whole where it counts. Determination. Kindness. Courage.”
His eyebrows knitted. “You would have such a man in your life?”
“Most men can’t keep up with me. Back in the Abyss, I had a hard time keeping up with you. You saved my life after the canoe tipped.”
“Perhaps. You saved mine first.”
“I think convention demands a kiss. If not convention, then this sunset.” Lara tipped her head.
He kissed her, a little tentatively. It made her think of his reluctance to shake her hand back in London.
“You call that a kiss?” she said. “This is a kiss.”
But before their lips could touch again, Lara heard a metallic thunk behind her. At first she feared that some piece of Borg’s arm had fallen off. But then Borg shoved her roughly to the ground.
In a flash, she saw the grenade, a lethal cylinder spinning where it had landed.
Borg plunged down on it without a word, without and instant’s hesitation, covering it with his metallic, multimillion-dollar limbs.
Lara ripped her towel off and threw it over his hands just as the grenade went off. Borg flew back, hit the rail.
Gunfire ripped across the pool patio, followed by screams. Lara flattened at the sound, hands going to her thighs where her holsters usually rested. But not, unfortunately, at the moment.
Her ears searched for the source of the gunfire. She heard only screams from behind and in the cabana and a shout from the greenery bordering the pool.
Borg moved, his limbs blackened and badly scratched but still intact.
Lara rolled into the pool as more shots struck the pool patio near her, sending chips flying. Blood from a cut on her side—either a bullet or a ceramic chip had grazed her; she hadn’t felt the impact in the heat of the action—dissolved in the blue pool water.
A woman under a tipped-over chaise longue shrieked horribly. Children were screaming in terror.
If flesh were a conductor of emotion, Lara’s anger would have set the pool to bubbling. Grenades and machine guns near a pool filled with children! She saw a linen jacket and a tropical shirt fleeing through the shrubbery and disappearing around the side of the hotel.
Lara kicked off her flip-flops as she swam, clambered up the pool ladder, and dashed, dripping, across the patio. She hurdled a line of chaises, then a hedge, and turned the corner of the hotel in time to see the man she was pursuing disappear into a silver sedan in the hotel turnaround. The car—as she ran across the decorative stone at the edge of the pavement, she saw it was a Volvo—raced up the tree-lined hotel lane in a haze of diesel smoke, just missing a teenager driving a small motorcycle with a red plastic bin attached to the back.
The lad pulled up to the front of the hotel. As he got off the motorcycle, Lara read the white letters on the back of his red vest: CHICAGO’S HOT PIZZA and a Lima phone number.
Just a dirt bike. My kingdom for more horsepower!
No time for explanations. She snatched his helmet out of his hands as he fiddled with the box on the back of his motorcycle—it was a tiny starter Kawasaki, great gasoline mileage but woefully underpowered—and jumped into the saddle, feeling the engine’s heat on her bare legs.
“Senorita!” the astonished teen said.
“I’ll fill it up before I return it,” she said, putting on the helmet. The inside smelled of onions and Calvin Klein cologne.
She gunned it off the kickstand and changed up two gears in as many seconds. By the time she turned onto the Avenida Arequipa, she had a feel for the nimble bike, which thankfully had fairly new tires.
The Tomb Raider would need the tread.
***
La Raza, in the passenger seat of the Volvo, slapped the leather upholstery in disgust. “What do you mean you’re not sure?”
“We threw the grenade—”
“You were supposed to shoot her!” he shouted angrily at the two men in the back seat. “Walk up to the pool, pull out your guns, and shoot her. The grenades were only if she hid behind the bar or what-have-you. Don’t you hear a word said to you?”
The Volvo’s driver held down the horn and screamed obscenities at the car ahead, which was creeping past a truck.
“Calm, Jorge, no need to get us in an accident,” La Raza said. Turnip heads! But one made soup with whatever ingredients were handy.
“Now, tell me again. You shot her, and she fell into the pool.”
“Most definitely.” The machine gun man sitting directly behind La Raza searched the pockets of his linen sport coat, came up with a packet of cigarillos with a book of matches strapped to it with a rubber band. “Now, after the shooting, the smoke! It settles the blood again.” He had two red tears tattooed at the edge of his eye. In the language of prison, it meant he’d killed two men. La Raza wondered if he’d bull-shitted them to death.
The man in the tropical shirt behind the driver just looked at his feet, passing his pistol from hand to hand.
“Did you see her die?” he asked Tropical Shirt.
“I saw her fall in the pool.”
“I saw her blood. I know I saw blood!” Sport Coat insisted.
“Jefe,” Jorge said. “We are being followed. A motorbike is coming up fast.”
La Raza tried to see around the truck behind him. He took Jorge’s word for it. “Police?”
“A woman in a bikini. A young woman, athletic. Very attractive. Perhaps a ponytail.”
Sport Coat took the cigarillo out of his mouth. “No! She was wounded by the grenade, killed by the bullets. I saw her fall!”
“Get in the other lane!” La Raza ordered.
It was the target, the same woman as the one in the phone picture. Though she had a helmet on, there could be no mistake with such a figure. La Raza watched the girl, half mesmerized, and thought for a moment of his wife as she’d been on their honeymoon in Aruba fifteen years ago.
“Hurry, you fool, she’s gaining on us.”
***
Lara gunned the Kawasaki down the Avenida Arequipa, fearing that the Volvo would turn at Surquillo and get on the Pan-American Highway. She doubted the little Kawasaki could keep up with the Volvo there. Only her ability to nip between cars was allowing her to keep up with the car in the evening after-work traffic.
The Volvo passed Surquillo without turning. It shot along the parkland and golf courses of San Isidro, heading for central Lima. They would probably dump the car somewhere in the poorer northern sections of town and change vehicles.
The traffic dissolved into a mass of taillights as the sun continued to set.
***
“Jefe, I do not mean to tell you your business,” Jorge began, looking in the rearview mirror. “But we are four men, armed, in a car. She is one woman on a motorbike. We were supposed to kill her. Why is she chasing us?”
The fixer felt his cheeks burn. Old habits died hard; the instinct to flee a crime scene and be home in time to listen to the first reports over the radio had clouded his judgment as much as his anger toward the two third-class gunmen the Don had fobbed off on him. His wife, who thought him a security expert specializing in protecting visiting executives, always wondered Why he laughed so heartily when a movie
mentioned “professional killers.”
La Raza tightened his seat belt. “You are right. Perhaps a traffic accident, Jorge…”
***
The brake lights exp
loded in her face and the back of the Volvo rose. The analytical part of Lara Croft’s mind listened to the squealing tires: The aged Volvo diesel was either pre-antilock brakes or they’d been replaced by conventional ones. Her eyes and hands and body, connected in a loop that didn’t go through the conscious part of her brain that was now occupied with brake technology, leaned left, and the
bike jumped onto the grassy median.
Her rear wheel kicked up a rooster tail of dirt, and she shot ahead of the Volvo, now skidding a little left, starting a scherzo of squealing tires and horns behind.
The Volvo accelerated out of the skid, followed her as she turned into Lima Centro.
The chase turned into a classic duel between power and agility. After each corner, the Volvo gained on her a bit more, until at last she could make out the Mars symbol in the Kawasaki’s compact-sized mirror. Gunfire chased her up the street and around corners. A department store window fell in a shower of shards as she turned into the heart of the old city.
Where were the Peruvian police? The chase blew through more lights than she could count, swerved into and out of oncoming traffic, and was causing a fender bender every thirty seconds or so.
She turned into the Plaza Mayor and forced the issue. She swung around a horse and carriage in front of the two yellow towers of the cathedral and rode up onto the square of crisscrossing sidewalks that filled two city blocks at the center of town.
Evening strollers scattered.
The Volvo followed. Lara turned the headlight on and off and shouted, not having a horn to blow. In the distance, she saw police lights flashing.
Finally!
She shot across traffic, foot and vehicle, and up the Jirén de la Union. The glowing decorations and window displays of the stores and boutiques, filled with Christmas shoppers, cast a colorful patina on the avenue. The Volvo followed, weaving around cabs, and she exited the Plaza San Martin, a square not quite as big as the one she’d crossed at the other end of the crowded connecting street.
She saw a red and white flag ahead, before an imposing building. She drove up on the sidewalk next to the flag and forced a controlled skid to turn around, leaving a crescent tire mark. She straightened her motorcycle, faced the oncoming Volvo.
