The carpet didn’t have room on it for their duffel begs, but Aggie had already sewn a rope across the middle of the carpet, on which they could tie the bags. Emma pulled up one of the bags to take out an energy bar she’d stuffed in there along with plenty of bottled water. She knew better than to offer the energy bar to Jim, but she hoped he might see how relaxed and comfortable she was and lose some of his own fear.
Instead, he finally laid himself flat to throw up over the side. She stuffed the remains of the energy bar into a pocket and then rolled over to put a hand on his back. “It’s all right,” she said. “It happened to me my first time.”
“We so high up,” he said. She looked down to see a fishing boat beneath them; it looked as tiny as a bathtub toy. “Long way down.”
“Yes, but we aren’t going to fall. Not so long as we’re careful.”
“How long we fly on this?”
“About five more hours until we get to Russia.” She had shown him a map of Europe before they left and pointed to Moscow. “This is where we’re going.”
Jim hadn’t left Rampart City in a quarter-century, if ever. She still had not pried all the details of his former life from him. She might have been able to find out something online, but she decided to wait until he decided to tell her. She comforted herself in this regard by thinking it wasn’t that he didn’t trust her so much as he didn’t care about that part of his life anymore. For all she knew, he might not remember it anymore.
She had to admire his courage so far in volunteering to leave the relative safety of the sewers behind in order to fly thousands of miles on a four-by-three-foot piece of fabric. She had always known he loved her and Louise, now she understood how much.
“This very fast,” he said.
“Yes it is.” She knew it was impossible for a carpet to get airborne let alone break the speed barrier, but over the last ten years she’d come to reevaluate a lot of what she’d been taught in school that was supposed to be impossible.
“This man, why he want Louise?”
“Because she’s smart.”
“Like you.”
“Yes, like me. He wants her to work for him.”
“What he do?”
“A lot of bad things,” she said. Last time she’d met Bykov, he’d been trying to destabilize the tiny nation of Grakistan so he could rape the countryside for its abundant mineral wealth. “He’s not a very nice man.”
“How you know him?”
“I worked for him.”
“You?”
“I didn’t know who he was. I was broke and homeless and Katarina came to me saying someone wanted me to do some geological work in Russia. After I got there, I found out who Bykov was and what he really wanted.”
“What he want?”
“His son had found a meteor. He thought it might be valuable. He wanted me to study it. By then an alien life form had attached itself to his son and turned him into a monster.”
“You kill his son?”
“No, I managed to save him and give him back.”
“You give his son back and he steal our daughter?”
Emma smiled at this. Sometimes Jim saw things so much more clearly than she did. “Yes. I told you he wasn’t a nice man.”
“He not give us Louise back. We take her.”
“Yes, I don’t think he’ll just hand her over to us. Katarina was like a daughter to him and he had her killed to protect his secret.”
“When time come, you let me kill him.”
“Jim—”
He turned to her and in his eyes she saw pure fury. “I know you not killer. You let me do it. Or he come back for her again.”
Much as she wanted to argue with his logic, she knew he was right. Even if they did manage to take Louise from him, Bykov would try to track them down. With his resources, it wouldn’t matter where they went; he would find them. The only way to stop him would be to kill him. As Jim had said, though, she wasn’t a killer.
“If there’s no other way.”
“Good.” They lay flat on the carpet for a while to watch the ocean pass beneath them.
***
It took three hours to go from Rampart City to the coast of Africa. There was still nothing to see for a few minutes, until they passed beneath Morocco. She pointed to a swath of lights and said, “That’s Casablanca.”
“It smaller than Rampart,” Jim said.
“Yes, I suppose it is.”
“Pretty. Like you.” His face was less green now; his stomach had calmed enough to where he hadn’t thrown up again. He had the courage now to lean over and kiss her. She kissed him back and thought of the Disney version of Aladdin, where the thief and princess ride around on a magic carpet to a musical number. Aunt Gladys had taken Emma and Becky to see the movie over Christmas vacation that year and bought Emma the soundtrack to play instead of her opera tapes. She had never imagined she might get a chance to reenact that scene on a real magic carpet.
“What that song?” Jim asked her.
“Oh, it’s from a movie. About a handsome thief who falls in love with a beautiful princess and uses a magic lamp to impress her so they can get married.”
“I not thief,” Jim said.
As always, Emma needed a second to realize he had made a joke. She smiled and whispered, “I’m not a princess either.”
“You my princess.” They kissed again while Emma continued to hum the song. From the corner of her eye she saw the city below and wondered if anyone could see them up here. If they did, they probably wouldn’t believe it.
They rolled into a sitting position, bodies pressed against each other as they streaked over the Mediterranean Sea. Aggie had given the carpet its instructions; she had told it to stay away from populated areas as much as possible. They passed over tankers, cargo ships, fishing boats, and even warships, but few major cities.
It was still morning as they skirted Sicily and the coast of Italy. “That’s the country that’s shaped like a boot,” she told Jim.
“They make pasta there?”
“And pizza.” She squeezed his hand and then added, “A lot of important artists came from there like da Vinci and Michelangelo.”
“We take Louise there on way back.”
“That would be nice,” Emma said. She imagined using the carpet to take Louise not only to Italy, but Greece, France, and England as well. Louise would ride between them, point with a pudgy finger, and ask, “Mommy, what’s that?”
“You sad now?” Jim asked.
“What? Oh, I was thinking about her again. How nice it would be to show her all of the sights.”
“You get chance.”
“I hope so.”
“I know so.” He kissed her again as the carpet began a course correction to take them into Eastern Europe, into the Balkans. As they passed over this rugged terrain, they startled a man herding goats; the animals ran off in all directions while the man shook his fist at the carpet.
“He see carpet,” Jim said. “We go higher?”
“We can’t go much higher or else we won’t have enough air.” She patted his arm. “Don’t worry, we’ll be fine.”
She had started to believe this as they wound their way through the mountains, into Russia. There were no signs to indicate this, but they didn’t need any. The two MiG-29 fighters that came at them with Russian markings on the wings were all the proof she needed.
“Oh no,” she said. She took Jim’s hand and then added, “Better hang on to something.”
***
Aladdin and Jasmine had never had to worry about fighter jets as they flew over the skies of Baghdad. There had been no aircraft at that time, certainly not aircraft with machine guns and heat-seeking missiles that could turn them and the carpet into so many ashes to drift down to the forest below. Not even Akako had to worry much except for the occasional aircraft carrier in the Atlantic.
“They see us?” Jim asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Emma said. The MiGs flew
about a thousand feet below them at the moment. “It’s probably a routine patrol.”
“What we do?”
“Hope they don’t spot us.” She had never been a religious person, but at times like this she said a prayer to any deity who might be out there. I only want my daughter, she thought. I only want Louise.
She put a hand on the front of the carpet and pulled back on one corner to slow it down as Aggie had shown her before they left. The MiGs became dots on the horizon; they shrunk until they disappeared entirely. “That was close,” Emma said.
“They gone now?”
“They’re gone.”
“Good,” Jim said but he didn’t let go of her.
They passed over the base where the MiGs had come from; Jim’s hand dug into Emma’s flesh as they saw rows of identical fighters parked alongside the runways. “There more of them,” he said.
“They can’t see us,” she said. The carpet’s radar signature was tiny enough that any operator would mistake them for a bird if they showed up at all. Human eyes were something else entirely, but anyone who saw them would probably be too concerned with his sanity to report it to his superiors.
She kissed Jim on the cheek to buoy his spirits. “It’s going to be fine,” she said. She had always thought the hard part would come when they got to Bykov’s estate, not to get there.
As she was mired in these thoughts, she saw another pair of MiGs come towards them—or perhaps the same ones returning to base. They were at nearly the altitude, so this time Emma doubted they would go by unnoticed. “Hold on!” she told Jim. He laid himself flat on the carpet to grab on to the edges to cling to this like a life raft.
She took handfuls of the front of the carpet and yanked back hard on it to pull the carpet into a steep climb. At times like this she wished Aggie had knit some seatbelts for the carpet. The carpet rose above the MiGs, into a bank of clouds. She wanted to sigh with relief, but the air was too thin for her to waste oxygen like that.
The carpet coasted through the clouds for a few minutes to emerge over a snowy plain. She didn’t see any sign of the MiGs and let the carpet descend back to a more comfortable height. Only then did she turn back to Jim, who still clung to the carpet. “It’s all right,” she said. “I think we lost them.”
No sooner had she said this then she saw the MiGs above and behind; they came around in a turn. “They back,” Jim said.
This time the MiGs came in for the kill. They lined up with the carpet and one launched a missile. Emma brought the carpet down in a dive; the missile bored holes in the sky before it exploded above them. The carpet managed to dart away before any of the debris could rain down on them.
Since they’d learned heat-seeking missiles wouldn’t work, the MiGs came at them faster, to get in range for their cannons. Emma mentally urged the carpet to go faster, but the MiGs still gained on them. A stream of bullets roared past the left side of the carpet; they missed Emma by less than a foot. She pulled the carpet from left to right to zigzag around to make the carpet less of a target. The MiGs tried to follow along and occasionally fired bursts from their cannons.
“I guess we’ll have to use some evasive maneuvers,” Emma said.
“What?”
“Just hang on.” Aggie hadn’t gone into how to evade fighter jets with the carpet, so Emma would have to do the best she could. She’d done some reading in fifth grade about air combat, enough that she knew how to bring the carpet down and then back up in a loop. Blood rushed to her head at the apex of the loop, and nearly caused her to black out, but she managed to hang on. She saw Jim still held on as well.
The MiGs were already coming around in their own loop; Emma didn’t waste any time to snap the carpet into a barrel roll hard to the left. Before the MiGs could catch up with that, she leveled out for a moment before she plunged in a steep dive. The wind clawed at her face a thousand times worse than on her motorcycle; her eyes felt as if they would burst at any moment.
The ground rose in front of her, a plain of white snow dotted with a few trees. She waited until the snow seemed close enough to touch before she leveled out of the dive. She saw the MiGs circle like buzzards; they had either lost the carpet or their pilots were not foolhardy enough to follow Emma this close to the ground. She turned back again to Jim, whose body trembled.
“We make it?” he asked.
“Looks like—” she didn’t get to finish this sentence as the first missile exploded overhead. Now she understood why the MiGs hadn’t followed them down: they had entered a ring of anti-aircraft batteries. The missiles, like those of the MiGs, were heat seeking and so not overly dangerous. More dangerous were the artillery shells that exploded in bursts of black smoke. Emma looked up again to see the MiGs still following from above to keep the carpet pinned between the proverbial rock and hard place.
She zigzagged the carpet around again while she urged it to go faster. The anti-aircraft batteries couldn’t follow them forever. If they could get out of this area, then they could climb back up and worry about the MiGs—
The shell didn’t actually hit the carpet, but it exploded close enough to throw the carpet end-over-end. Emma fought to stabilize the carpet as its autopilot no longer seemed to work. By the time she managed to get it under control, she turned back to see the rear of the carpet shredded. “Jim?” she called back.
“I fine,” he said back.
“Hold on. We’re going down,” she said. There was little she could do but try to keep the carpet level as it plunged towards the ground.
Chapter 9
For a hundred seventy years she’d managed to survive mostly because she never settled down in one location. Cecelia did have an apartment at the safe house in Prague, but it was mostly where she kept her trophies, not where she actually lived. She had spent the majority of her life on boats, trains, coaches, and eventually cars and airplanes to get from one job to the next.
When she rented the apartment in Denver, she had stared at the papers for a moment. “What are these?”
“Your lease,” the landlord said. “You have to sign this so we can finalize things.”
She hadn’t been so stupid as to write “Cecelia Romeau” on the lease; that would make it much too easy for her former employer to find her. Instead she had scribbled her new name: Stephanie Rowling. She’d come up with this while she scanned the spines of books in the young adult section of the bookstore, where she’d tried to update herself on youth culture so she might relate to a ten-year-old.
In addition to an apartment lease, Stephanie Rowling also had a driver’s license, passport, library card, Visa card, and grocery store discount card. The driver’s license and passport she’d made herself; she had modified some of the fake IDs she kept in a safe box in Switzerland. For the others she had filled out forms; she always felt a nervous flutter when she signed her new name. There was something so final about the idea of a library card or grocery store card, as if she were trying to put down roots—to make herself at home.
When Agnes Chiostro had told her about her granddaughter, Cecelia at first thought it might be some kind of trick. She had tried to kill the witch and her wife the archivist. Despite the kindness the archivist had shown Cecelia after she returned from a trip back in time to meet her mother, Cecelia still wasn’t sure she could trust them.
She’d flown to Denver and then rented a car with one of her fake driver’s licenses. Like a peeping Tom she had lurked outside West Denver Elementary and waited to catch a glimpse of her descendant. Cecelia had found a picture of the girl with a computer at the library. Her name was Shelly Forbes. The mousy brown hair and elfin nose didn’t look anything like Cecelia, nor did the frightened expression on her face as she stared into the camera. The eyes, she had inherited from Cecelia, who in turn had inherited them from her mother.
It proved to be a bad idea to sit outside the school as there were plenty of girls with mousy brown hair and she couldn’t get close enough to see their eyes. It worked far better t
o wait outside the house, where she hunkered down on the front seat and used a fiber optic camera like a periscope until the little girl got off the bus. The way Shelly hugged herself as she practically ran into the house was also very unlike Cecelia—or at least the adult Cecelia. As a child in her foster home she’d been as timid, especially when it came to what her foster father did to her in bed.
Cecelia promised herself that if something similar were happening to Shelly, she would slit the bastard’s throat and take the girl with her. That began a week of covert operations around the Forbes household. While Shelly’s parents were gone, Cecelia planted some bugs and found herself a good hiding spot in a tree across the street. From there she monitored the house, to watch for signs of abuse.
From what she could tell, the only form of abuse was neglect. Both of Shelly’s parents worked; sometimes they didn’t come home until midnight or later. The babysitter they’d hired spent most of her time watching TV, except when she waddled to the kitchen to microwave a couple of burritos or something equally disgusting. This left Shelly to hide in her room, where she spent most of her time reading and scribbling in a diary.
Cecelia knew what to do. She waited until the babysitter came out one night and then followed the woman to her apartment. As a former assassin, it was easy enough for her to sneak up on the slob and put a knife to her throat. “Listen closely. I want you to stay away from the Forbes family. You’re quitting that job as of tonight, understand?” Cecelia said.
“Who are you?”
“Just a family friend.” Cecelia pressed the knife a little closer, enough that the woman whimpered. “If I hear you’ve gone to the cops or told so much as your priest, I’m going to find you and gut you. Got it?”
“Yes.”
Lo and behold there was an ad in the newspaper two days later for a babysitter. The problem for Cecelia was to get the job without violence. During one of the rare times Mrs. Forbes was home, Cecelia came over, dressed in a pink blouse and khaki pants she hoped looked dowdy and homely enough to convince Shelly’s mother that Cecelia could be a babysitter.
Tales of the Scarlet Knight Collection: The Wrath of Isis Page 114
