Water Memory: A Thriller (Sentro)

by Daniel Pyne

  The captain offers only worried hesitation, because, as Sentro has correctly guessed, he doesn’t know; there’s been no communication between the pirates and their hostages because, as Sentro has also surmised, they’re not really pirates in the conventional sense, and this is anything but business as usual.

  Voices in the captain’s room begin to protest, overlapping: “You don’t need to do this” and “You’re only going to make this worse.” Sentro puts a finger to her lips—Shhhh—and Montez waves them quiet. The women get to their feet but, visibly apprehensive, make no move yet toward freedom.

  Montez gives her the company line across the hall, low: “It’s just business, señora. There are even secondary markets. Men who buy and sell shares in upcoming attacks in a bourse in Port-au-Prince. Always US dollars, delivered in sacks dropped from helicopters or parachute boxes or waterproof suitcases sent out in neutral intermediaries’ skiffs—”

  Sentro tunes him out. The tragic certainty of certain men.

  A violent surround sound explosion rolls from the game room, and Sentro hears the mercenaries burst out laughing, delighted about something they’ve done in the virtual world.

  “No more killing,” Montez pleads, as if he has any control over it.

  Beyond impatient now, Sentro rolls her eyes, checks the hallway, and dashes out toward the fire escape. She hears the captain hiss after her, “Señora, please.”

  She steps through the open door, checks back to see that she hasn’t been spotted, and hurries up squawking metal stairs to the third floor to retrieve Fontaine.

  The only way Sentro can tell the Englishwoman has moved during her absence is that she’s put on shoes. Standing by the bed, startled by Sentro’s reappearance, she offers no resistance when Sentro takes her hand like a small child and leads her out and back down the fire escape to the second-floor hostages.

  But now there are local cops in the corridor. Talking to one of the mercenaries from the game room near the main stairwell. Sentro pushes Fontaine back and stays in the fire escape shadow, straining to hear what they’re saying. Something about breakfast; a disagreement about the best rum; the voice of Carlito; and then the scarred man himself, briefly, peeling cash from a roll of bills that they pocket and exchange for a bindle of tin foil, which Carlito dances on his palm as they depart.

  Carlito glances toward where Sentro is in shadow. Stares for longer than she would like, as if he senses her there in the darkness, but finally walks back into the room.

  Sentro feels a need to quicken the pace. Tugging Fontaine with her, through the door, down the corridor, she ducks into the room where all the hostages have reunited; shocked by Fontaine’s resurrection, they stare, disbelieving, cold, their agitated murmuring silenced. Mulligan turns away from the Englishwoman and exhales. “Unbelievable.” Captain Montez stares at Sentro, angles his head, at a loss for words.

  “You think you know what this is, what’s going on here,” Sentro tells the group quickly. “You don’t. Nothing is what it seems.” From the corridor comes a loud argument between the mercenaries strategizing their next video game campaign.

  Fontaine says, “I can explain,” but then doesn’t.

  “Horseshit.” Big Bruce shakes his head, face flushed dark, stubborn. “This is such horseshit.”

  “They have the police in their pocket,” the captain agrees. “We will never get close to the docks, if that’s your plan.”

  Sentro shrugs. “That just makes the police not police, which is helpful. And we will make it. If you do what I say.”

  Fontaine stays apart from the rest, her eyes evasive.

  “You’re going to get us all killed,” Bruce whines.

  Yeah, that’s what I’m doing.

  She ignores him and asks again if anyone has a guess where the rest of the Jeddah crew is being kept. Montez starts to say something, but Charlemagne blurts that he overheard the kidnappers talking about people up on the fourth floor.

  Bruce warns her, “I’m not going to let this happen.”

  Sentro doesn’t even give him a glance. She tells the captain, “Get everyone ready to move; I’ll bring the others down.” Checking once more to be sure of a clear path, she slips out into the hallway, leaving Fontaine with the fruits of her deception.

  Carlito’s demented laughter leaks from the mercenaries at the other end of the corridor as Sentro disappears into the fire escape darkness. Another battle beginning.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  A deep gloaming predawn enfolds the Baltimore waterfront, where Reno Elsayed is running, running, in watch cap and sweats, but the blue-black Atlantic sky weeps its promise of another day. Wires snake from earbuds to the phone in his hand, and he sings along loudly in a tremulous baritone:

  You? You? You? You? You? You? You?

  Little God! Love, my loooooove . . .

  Headlights pin him, and a beige sedan angles to the curb; Elsayed feels the vehicle slow to a crawl and follow, and he correctly guesses it’s going to be some kind of official intervention. The bureau fleet car that eventually comes abreast is a dead giveaway.

  The passenger window hums down as the hair-challenged G-man behind the wheel keeps pace with his target. They trade professional looks, and Elsayed keeps jogging. His natural inclination is to make this as awkward as possible for the fed.

  For your pure eyes,

  muor But-ter-fly . . .

  Warren fumbles with his wallet, extends his ID in one hand.

  “Mr. Elsayed? Special Agent Warren.”

  Elsayed isn’t impressed, continues running. Retired military, he has a thing about civilian law enforcement. He’s always polite but pointedly dismissive.

  “Reno Elsayed.” Warren keeps rolling along next to him.

  “Lucky. Yeah, that’s me. And?”

  “Lucky?”

  “What pretty much everybody calls me.”

  “Why?”

  “We’re not having a conversation.”

  “You work with Aubrey Sentro,” Warren says.

  It’s not a question, so Elsayed keeps running.

  ButterFLY! dun, dun dun da-dun—

  But-ter-FA-LY! dun, dun dun da-dun—

  BUTTER mo-ther-fuc-king FLYYYYYYYY!

  “Solomon Systems.” Warren struggles to keep his sedan from scuffing on the gutter. “Her son’s been calling you guys; he thinks she lied to him about her employment there. That’s kinda fucked up, if you don’t mind my saying.”

  Elsayed slows to a walk, remembering that Aubrey was a fed for a short time before they met and the exquisite darker arts subsumed her. He’s never held her past against her, but she’s the exception to so many rules. What in the world could this be about? He tugs the buds from his ears, stops abruptly, his breathing steady. Waits while the fed, slow to react, hurries ahead in his federal car and has to jam the sedan into reverse to glide back to him.

  “How’s your day going?” Warren asks, smiling like a guy in a drive-through breakfast window.

  “Normal until now.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you as someone who listens to opera while you run.”

  Elsayed touches the screen of his phone, and the faint bleed of Puccini from his earbuds dies. “What do you want, Officer?”

  Warren seems to ignore the slight, slides across to the window, and drops his voice low, though there isn’t anyone on the sidewalk or street in front or behind them. “Appears like your buddy’s in a bit of a situation.”

  “My buddy.”

  “Ms. Sentro.”

  “Aubrey?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Elsayed frowns now. His stomach churns. “Aubrey’s on vacation,” he says but understands as he utters the words that the fed is about to tell him otherwise.

  Agent Warren nods. “Was.”

  And then he opens the passenger door for Elsayed to climb in.

  After the harbor cops drive off in their patrol car and vanish down the hill, Zoala crawls out of the shrubbery on hands and knees a
nd into driveway shadows to the side of the Range Rover. The sky is growing brighter, but it will be a while still before the sun breaks over the hills east of town. The boy can hear a raucous cacophony of video game gibberish from inside the building and finds himself wishing he could see what it was.

  He only knows the game Fortnite, and that only from a few times watching other kids playing it at the internet place.

  Zoala sits cross-legged when he reaches the back fender and jams a stick from his pocket into the inflation nipple on the right rear tire and jiggles it around until he hears air wheezing out.

  Then he crawls to the front right tire and does it all again, the way the American told him to.

  Captain Montez and Jesper monitor the corridor from facing doorways, tucked back, looking twitchy and unsure and listening to the mercenaries play their game. When Sentro’s face ghosts outside the fire door glass, Montez motions that it’s safe for her to join them. Crew members she’s brought down from the fourth floor remain out on the fire escape landing, shadowed faces peering in.

  Montez opens his hands: Now what?

  Sentro gestures and whispers, “Down, out, and across, to the street corner. There’s a bus coming. No sentry posted outside the building.”

  Charlemagne begins to lead the passengers and crew out of the room, staying silent, pressed to one wall, women first. Shoulders round, Fontaine stays back, no reaction, just staring at the carpet. As if unable to will herself to move.

  Sentro warns her, low, “If you stay here—”

  She looks up. “I know.” Tears that Sentro can’t trust. “I know.”

  “All right.” The room has emptied. Sentro starts to follow the last men out.

  Eyes hooded, Fontaine asks, almost inaudibly, “Do we have a future?”

  “You and me?”

  “Yeah.”

  Sentro shrugs. “You’re dead.” She adds, “The future is wide open for the dead,” wanting to say more, but in the hallway she sees Bruce go the wrong way, trailed by newlywed Jack and the gimpy Mulligan. Headed down the hallway toward the main stairs and the room where the mercenaries are holed up.

  Sentro whispers, “Bruce, what do you think you’re doing?”

  “Can’t let you do this,” he hisses back at her, jaw set.

  Charlemagne has led the women to the fire door, but the remaining crew have stopped in their tracks at the sound of Bruce’s voice, and they look scared, pressed to the wall. Sentro goes after Bruce. Jack and the first mate take a stab at blocking her, but she easily feints and evades them.

  Bruce decides maybe he should run.

  Shit. “Don’t.”

  Sentro can’t make up the ground she’s lost and can only watch, dismayed, as the big stubborn man lumbers heavily to the open doorway, where Carlito and his cohorts are engrossed in their virtual bloodbath.

  She sees him call in at them, “Hey.” Out of breath, Bruce wheezes, “Just wanted to tell you—”

  Sentro can imagine the men inside reacting, startled, fumbling for their weapons, because now Bruce is backpedaling, his terrible mistake dawning, hands out in supplication. “Oh. Wait. Whoa, no, whoa whoa whoa.”

  A mercenary inside barks a warning Bruce can’t hope to understand. But a young man emerges, underfed mustache and soul patch, waving his short-stock AK automatic in front of him like a spear, saying, more or less, if Sentro’s translation is right: Go back to your room.

  Her momentum has carried her far enough to smell the cat-piss smoke of crystal meth and see the scarred Carlito on the sofa angled away from the doorway and facing the screen, oblivious, surround sound cranked to deafening in the little room, as he puts a pipe down and laser focuses on his kill tally. “Vê isto.” Watch this.

  The other mercenary, no doubt equally tweaked and standing behind where Carlito sits, for the moment does.

  Trapped in her no-woman’s-land, Sentro is tactically naked and exposed, her pulse thumping in her ears, fighting the expected flood of fear, too far from Bruce to stop what she knows too well is coming. The emerging young mercenary’s bloodshot black eyes flicker to her, confused. And then past her, down the hallway to the last of the Jeddah hostages ducking out the fire escape.

  Shit.

  Sentro flashes on the only time she was ever wounded—in a corridor like this one, where a trapped, trembling fourteen-year-old freedom fighter accidentally tapped the trigger on his automatic, sending bullets blindly ripping through cheap drywall corridor walls to drop Sentro and three others before they even knew what had happened.

  And just as randomly, in the harrowing second it takes for the mercenary to process all he’s seeing, Bruce’s frightened, awkward, off-balance retreat ends against the opposite wall, and when he pushes himself back upright, toward the advancing gunman, it registers as aggression, so—BAM—Soul Patch puts a bullet through Bruce’s chest, and the fat man is dead before he’s dropped to the carpet.

  The sharp sound of the kill shot has been swallowed and lost in the Call of Duty gunfire in Dolby 5.1 surround sound, not to mention Carlito’s delighted screams of “Morre! Die! Die! Die!” The hallway shooter looks sheepishly down at Bruce, almost apologetic, then back at his colleague, who’s torn himself away from the virtual firefight to step out from the room; the colleague clocks the dead hostage first, so he sees Sentro too late, because she’s closed the gap and is on them both before either man can react. Elbow to the shooter’s Adam’s apple the way Vic Falcone once taught her, which exposes the late-arriving hired man to the backup handgun Sentro has pulled from the sagging waistband of the gagging, disabled shooter. She shoves it into the shocked open mouth—“Shhh”—and leaves it there, staring without expression until he slowly lets his AK fall to the hallway carpet and wings his arms up to either side, hands empty, scared. For a moment they both just listen to the rapid percussion of Carlito’s apocalyptic video game mayhem.

  On his knees, unable to draw a breath, the shooter is shaking and his pockmarks turning white and blue. If done right, she remembers Falcone telling her, you just bruise the hyoid, so once the guy passes out, his neck will relax, and he can breathe again. Too hard, you could kill him. Limp in her grasp, his threat sheds; he’s just a frightened young man. Not even Jenny’s age. Sentro puts her free hand on the shooter’s neck and presses the carotid until the man passes out.

  Muscles slack, he tucks over to one side, where his wheezing lungs start to suck air again.

  Eyes fixed on Carlito’s oblivious back while he continues to game, Sentro picks up the short-stock automatic and swiftly backpedals her captive down the corridor to where a shaken Captain Montez waits in the empty hostage-suite doorway. Jesper yanks the mercenary’s hands behind his back and spins him; Charlemagne has ripped the cord off a lamp and with the Jeddah cook’s help swiftly binds Sentro’s captive, hands and feet. The cook stuffs a towel in the man’s mouth; they drag him into the room and shut the door soundlessly.

  Sentro frisks him and finds a roll of cash. Mulligan is the only other hostage left inside. No sign of Fontaine.

  “I’m sorry,” the first mate tells Sentro.

  She feels no need to judge him or respond. Nobody knows how they’ll react in a crisis, and a coward in one corridor can find his courage in the next.

  It’s all a crapshoot.

  Mulligan says, “Leave me.”

  Sentro glances at Charlemagne and the cook. “No,” she says. “Nobody gets left.”

  After an all clear from the Tagalog, Montez and the Swede help the first mate go out the door. Sentro tells Charlemagne, “Go,” and watches four men disappear out the fire door to join the others.

  AK automatic slung over her shoulder, Sentro lingers to take one last worried look down the hallway.

  The shooter is still curled up limp on the carpet outside the bachelor flat, making a rasping noise. Gamer gunplay has ceased, but the theme music blares. Sentro can hear muffled self-congratulatory gloating from Carlito about a mission that he must have gloriously completed,
followed by a slow, quiet understanding that he’s alone in the room and perhaps something is amiss.

  No general alarm, yet.

  “Berto? Onde está?”

  Hurrying away, she hears the tweaker’s voice get louder: “Onde está, fuckwads? Yo.”

  Nobody answers him. The fire door clicks shut behind her.

  “O que você está fazendo no chão?! ”

  A huddled trail of hostages jogs down the darkened driveway toward the bus stop, silhouetted when round yellow lights crest the hill and the bus rolls to the curb. Doors hissing open, the hostages climb on, find seats. The driver yells at them to pay the fare. Montez and Sentro are the last to board. Sentro drops in the driver’s lap all the cash she took from Zeme’s hired man and tells him to take them to the docks.

  No one speaks as the released air brakes hiss; there’s nothing to be said.

  Sentro scans the seats and finds Fontaine sitting alone in the back, eyes on Sentro, blank.

  A sudden banging on the folding doors scares everyone as the bus begins to lurch away. Sentro pivots, aims toward the steps the handgun she took from Big Bruce’s killer.

  The bus jerks to another halt. The doors flip open, and there’s Zoala. Chattering with annoyance about almost being left behind.

  Sentro hurries him up and in, and the bus lurches onward, and she marvels, not for the first time, how her work life is often not so far removed from a strange, buggy beta version of one of the Nintendo games she tried to forbid Jeremy from wasting his time on when he was growing up.

  A helter-skelter oddball race through a dreamy nightscape of obstacles and opposition, and the reward at the end is you live to do it again.

  On a cross street two long blocks down from the art deco apartment building where his next payday is being kept, Robbens’s jaunty old Jag waits for the bus to pass.

  He taps his fingers on the wheel. Looks idly out at the dazed white faces staring back at him from the bus windows, surprised to see so many European tourists this late at night (or early in the morning?), but otherwise thinks nothing of it.