The Doll

by Taylor Stevens

  With his acknowledgment and his taunt, the euphoria that turned killing into a satisfied craving, demons battled and conquered, rose from the dead. Vision fading to gray and casting the target in vivid color, voices chanting, heartbeat quickening into the percussion of war, the urges sent her to the hunt. Lust for blood brought her to the tipping point beyond which there was no backing away from the kill. Panting, breathing against the pressure, Munroe pressed palms to her temples and physically pushed past the urges.

  Logic against desire.

  Strategy before action.

  To release them now under the watchful eye of the city cameras was to seal her fate together with his. The client passed her, gaze locked on hers as he went, smirk still wide, the story continuing in his expression. He knew her. Somehow, he knew her.

  Munroe reached Neeva and, still fighting the want, the craving, wrapped an arm protectively around the girl’s waist. Neeva handed Munroe the phone and pointed at it, eyes wide as if to say, It rang while you were gone.

  Munroe nodded. Let go of the girl, accepted the phone, and with all of the pent-up emotional energy that had gone unused in the client’s wake, threw the phone out toward the ocean.

  Munroe lifted the backpack off Neeva’s shoulders and handed her Arben’s jacket. “You did good,” she said. “Put this on, it’ll make your clothes less dramatic.”

  Neeva turned her nose up slightly. “Doubt it,” she said, but took the jacket anyway, and while Munroe stepped back into her shoes, Neeva slipped into sleeves that went past her hands. The size added comedy to the getup, but the dull navy blue also covered so much of Neeva’s dress that the vivid color all but vanished.

  The man on the wall began to stand, then paused and sat again in apparent bafflement over a course of events that had nothing to do with what he seemed to expect.

  Arben’s phone rang.

  Munroe ignored the jolt and shifted between Neeva and the wall, positioning herself so that she could observe the mark and gloat over his reaction when he turned to watch the scheduled approach and discovered plans had changed; she kept her arm around Neeva and readied to cross the street against traffic when the moment arrived.

  The client paused and turned back, and the quick flash of surprise that passed across his face phased into hostility. Munroe waited for a break in traffic. Smiled beatifically while the voices and the bloodlust urged her toward him, willed him closer, begged for a viable excuse and the pretense of an accident for the sake of cameras and passing cars so that the floodgates could release and her torment be satisfied.

  But the client didn’t move. How could he, when the location, with its cameras and high visibility, all meant to taunt authority and possibly ensnare the Doll Maker’s operation, now had the potential to be his own undoing? Eyes hard and lips pressed together, his hand clenched around the leash so tightly that his knuckles whitened.

  Arben’s phone rang again, reminder that Lumani, still out there, was aware that things were askew. For whatever reason, he hadn’t yet taken a shot.

  Munroe said, “We need to move; stay close.”

  Together they stepped off the sidewalk into the street. Munroe guided the girl, skirting across lanes during intermittent gaps in traffic. For a third time, the phone rang, and once more Munroe ignored it.

  From the other side of the road, she smiled at the client again, imprinted his face again. He would die. On Munroe’s life, she would eventually see to it that he died, but for now she had robbed him of his prize.

  Munroe turned her back and prodded Neeva toward the tunnel. They used the pedestrian passage beside the road and hurried back in the direction they’d come.

  At the garage entryway, Munroe scoped the distance and listened for sirens, searched out Lumani or any other person who would set off the inner warning sensors. The lower level had filled considerably in the minutes they’d been gone. Ignoring attention from passersby, arm still around Neeva’s waist, Munroe pushed the girl forward until they reached the Opel.

  Munroe pulled out from the parking spot and wound through the ramps toward the exit. At street level came the first sound of sirens. They arrived too slowly to have been the result of Arben’s murder being caught on camera and had certainly not come as a result of his body being discovered.

  Parking ticket to machine, cash to machine, machine arm to the sky.

  Seconds ticked along while the sirens grew louder.

  Munroe ignored the itch along her skin that told her to run. Monaco wasn’t more than three miles at its longest stretch, and they were about halfway in from the north. It would take them less than ten minutes to get beyond the judicial boundaries of the city-state. Notice would go out to the French police, but once outside the city proper, where every square foot was utilized and packed, there’d be a chance to hide.

  “Are those sirens for us?” Neeva asked.

  Munroe nodded.

  “Oh my God,” she said. “Michael, stop! Stop the car. They can help us.” When Munroe’s response was to check the mirrors and pull around a slower vehicle, Neeva grabbed Munroe’s forearm and tugged.

  The reaction to the physical contact was instant and brutal, and Munroe struck without thought. Pulled back before fully connecting, and Neeva stared wide-eyed at Munroe’s hand frozen in space, angled toward her throat.

  “You need to be careful about the grabby thing,” Munroe said. She took her eyes off the road just long enough to glance at Neeva and added, “It’s not personal.”

  “Stop the car, please,” Neeva said. “Why won’t you stop?”

  “Right now, the police are not our friends.”

  “Of course they are,” Neeva said. Her tone went from excited panic to pleading. “They’ll know who I am, they can get me home.”

  Lights flashed in the rearview mirror.

  Vehicles began to pull to the sides. “The sniper sent them,” Munroe said.

  The car in front of them slowed to move aside, and Munroe jumped ahead.

  Like the one man running in a crowd of casual shoppers, she’d just clued them in to the chase. But now the road was clear. Munroe pressed foot to floor, and the Opel gave up speed reluctantly.

  With a kidnapped girl at her side and a dead man in her wake, Lumani had to know she would avoid the law. He was forcing her to choose between evils: Allow capture and lose years of her life waiting for the authorities to sort out what had actually happened, while in the meantime Neeva was sprung and delivered. Or be flushed from hiding into a waiting net.

  Munroe checked the rearview once more.

  Confirmed again that Neeva’s seat belt was fastened. Tight spaces and clearly defined roads be damned. The city had more than one way out.

  With every movement exacted in precise counterpoint to frustration and mounting anxiety, Lumani removed scope from rifle.

  Twist. Breathe. Pack. Think.

  If ever he hated Uncle, hated him to his core, this was that moment. So close. Within a minute this entire ordeal would have been over, and in that minute it suddenly wasn’t. The analysis is unassailable, Valon, the plan is perfect. If failure will be found, it can only come through faulty execution.

  Uncle the planner, Lumani the doer.

  Clearly, the plan wasn’t perfect, because the driver had just done what Uncle had said was unthinkable, impossible.

  Lumani slid out of position.

  He’d not wanted this assignment. Had begged off of it.

  Capture the driver, yes; in spite of the warnings, he could deliver her to Zagreb and put her in Uncle’s array. But the obligation of bringing the merchandise to the purchaser—he’d wanted nothing of it. Prior deliveries had been fraught with complications while the client toyed with his abettors, a veritable match of wits with Uncle that had twice nearly ended in disaster.

  Now this third was a disaster.

  At least two more men, Uncle. At least one more car, please.

  No. The answer was no, made worse because the request challenged Uncle’s infallibi
lity, spoke of doubt in the great man’s ability to predict so many moves in advance. Uncle had always been right.

  Always. Until now.

  Lumani had been given no room to refuse.

  Uncle would hear nothing of logic or reason—weak excuses, he called them—and against Lumani’s objection put the assignment with its high price for failure on his shoulders. “You are the weak spot,” Uncle had said. Derision that cut like slivers of glass, disgust reserved for garbage rotting in the sun. “You, Valon. Always remember. You.” And then pressing those slivers into Lumani’s flesh: “Do this and I release you. You can take your money and your life and go to your parties and your whores. Don’t think I’ll spare you if you refuse.”

  Resentment smoldered, hatred keeping time with movement, perfect movement, as superstitious as it was mechanical, while he jogged the steps to his car.

  He called Arben again and for the third time received no answer, which meant the man was dead and for this he felt nothing. Overconfident and arrogant, Arben hadn’t heeded the warnings and so had brought an end upon himself. Lumani left a voice mail for the Michael woman on the off chance she took the time to listen. Beeped open the car and tossed the briefcase into the back.

  No matter what Uncle claimed, the failure was not in the doing. The failure was in the planning, in the understanding, in the predicting. You don’t need extra men or extra cars, Valon, the choke hold is the reason she complies. Yet a moment before delivery, the Michael woman had defied Uncle’s prediction and diverted.

  Failure that shouldn’t be his to bear.

  Lumani climbed behind the wheel. Revved the engine and backed out of the parking space with more noise than necessary.

  Needed to calm. Needed to think.

  Did she know about Logan’s rescue? She couldn’t. He’d listened for even the tiniest of chances that she’d somehow found a means of communication, for a signal of any kind, and had heard nothing, seen nothing. She couldn’t know … could she? Lumani questioned himself. His judgment. His ability.

  Uncle’s voice chanted inside his head: You are the weakest of them, Valon.

  She’d been parked alongside the country road in the dark when the rescue happened and still waited two hours for the footage—a lucky break that had been, filming before the mercenaries had come calling, though it had taken time to get the connections reestablished and the clip uploaded. But if she knew her friend was safe, if she was going to run, why hadn’t she done it sooner?

  Lumani pulled into traffic. In the distance the sirens wailed and from them he felt a surge of pleasure. This part of the planning, which had been made on the go and was his alone, would be more successful than Uncle’s so-called insights: When the Opel was flushed out, he would be waiting.

  That the car had to be ambushed at all, that the driver was still alive, was an unforgivable failure. He was expected to make a retaliatory kill and in a decisive second had chosen not to. Traffic and pedestrians that wouldn’t have been present even an hour earlier meant that he didn’t have a clean line of sight. He couldn’t afford the margin of error.

  Excuses, Uncle would say. In an endless maze of accusations and trains of thought jumping from one track to the next, logic would turn to absurdity, and always Lumani was to blame.

  The injustice burned hot, burned angry.

  No matter how successful he might be in fixing this, he’d still be held responsible—responsible for a failure that had not been his, for decisions that had not been his, for actions that had not been his.

  Lumani dialed Tamás. Barked a command. Hung up.

  A man’s strength was defined and proven by the strength of his enemy. He would prove to himself that he would not be beaten.

  Uncle be damned.

  On the passenger seat the tablet blinked the red lights of the Opel’s tracker, the Doll’s tracker, the driver’s tracker, all together in one movement like a big, happy, blended family. Lumani noted distance and kept time.

  His earpiece, which had until now been silent, chirped with sound from the bug inside the Opel. “I know you can hear me, Valon, I know you’re listening.”

  He swerved to avoid a car entering traffic. Was nearly to the border of the city, still a jump ahead of her. “I know your plans because I am you,” she said. “I’m inside your head. You think you know what drives me, but you don’t. You can’t outthink me, and I will outrun you.”

  Lumani smiled, pleased. A man’s strength, defined by the strength of the opponent. In response, he checked the tablet. Tamás was closing in from the other end of the city. She was between them, moving in his direction, and then, just as she’d done on the delivery, she detoured. Up. Toward the hills, away from the plan as if she’d read him. With so many directions in which she could turn, he didn’t have the manpower to corner her.

  He would let her run. Let her expend herself, and when she’d exhausted and slowed a bit, got to feeling safe, he would close in.

  DALLAS, TEXAS

  Bradford hit the call button and tried again. Maybe the fiftieth time in four hours, an unnecessary and worthless repetition, because somehow it made him feel better.

  The first time had been right after he’d left the eighteen-wheeler and climbed into the Explorer. That call had gone directly to voice mail.

  He’d left messages, sent texts, and without a response, kept trying, until finally he got a mechanized voice that he didn’t need to understand to know that the number had been disconnected.

  Munroe’s handcuffs were off, and he had no way to communicate the news to her, no way to know if she was even still alive or if his contribution to the party had come too little or too late.

  He pushed that thought aside. Logan was safe. That mattered on its own, regardless of whatever else played out, and from the whatever else followed the fear and he pushed that away, too.

  If she was still alive, the most probable scenario was that she’d get ahold of another phone and call the voice drop again, but according to his frequent check-ins with Walker, that hadn’t happened, either.

  It was nearing four in the morning when Bradford pulled into the parking space beside the Trooper. He and Jahan had dozed in the emergency room after bringing Logan in, had waited around just long enough to ensure that he was stable before making the three-hour trip back to Dallas. Bradford had done the driving and now, blurry-eyed and sleep-deprived, made for the office.

  The Capstone reception area was empty and low-lit when they stepped through the doors, three days’ worth of boxes and mail delivery still cast to the side and ruining the carefully crafted image of the normally meticulous front room.

  Jahan swiped his card and buzzed them through the panel. On the other side, Walker waited in the war room. She shook her head before Bradford could ask the question: Still no news out of Europe.

  “Anything from Adams? Gonzalez?” he asked.

  “There’s a court date, but no updates. All continues as it was.”

  “Adams still in Houston?”

  “Burning dollars, hanging around, feeling useless.”

  “Kate Breeden will make a move,” Bradford said. “Trust me, the timing isn’t coincidental.” He paused. “What about Alexis? Tabitha? Have you checked them again?”

  “Knocked on the door of one pretending I’d got the wrong address. Called the other, same story, and then about two hours ago Alexis called the office. Everything’s normal.”

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Just go sleep,” she said. “There are a few minor things on the board, not anything you have to look at right away, and there’s nothing more we can do here—not without news.”

  Bradford nodded and headed for his office, for the bedroll, for whatever sleep he could grab in the moments of silence, because even with Logan tucked away and out of state, this thing wasn’t over yet, wasn’t anywhere close to over.

  Underneath the desk, he turned away from the world, sleep fell hard, drawing him fast and deep into a turbid blackness, where bef
ore he’d even fully stretched out, relief from feeling and relief from burnout cocooned him in silence and forgetfulness.

  Was awakened just as suddenly, thrust into the middle of war: explosion, shaking and reverberation, shattering glass, crunching metal, and the smell—that indelible burning, acrid stench of unnatural death.

  The survival brain that had lived through more firefights than he could count had him crawling down the hallway, bracing for a secondary explosion, moving closer to the cries for help, the cries of combat, the cries of the maimed and bleeding; dialing 911 as he went because halfway down the hall full awareness kicked in: He wasn’t in a combat zone but the Capstone office; the rooms weren’t dark but filled with daylight.

  Silence followed the explosion, silence like a black hole that drew in and devoured everything. Bradford yelled for Jahan. For Walker. Heard her plaintive wail, a call for help, and moved toward the sound, toward the paneled reception door that had blown inward, the walls ripped and twisted. Skirted glass from the interior, shattered and littered across the carpet.

  Sirens filled the background.

  Walker’s plea called to him, and through quicksand and over fire, he slogged in slow motion to the reception threshold and found her just beyond the door, on the floor, her head leaning against the wall of the desk.

  Blood, so much blood.

  On his knees, he reached for her, hands searching both tender and frantic, trying to find the source of the bleeding.

  “FedEx package,” she whispered.

  “Shhhh,” he said.

  He tore her shirt and bared her skin. Gaped and stuffed the material into the largest hole.

  Helpless. He was helpless.

  Her skin was clammy. He reached for her wrist and checked her pulse.

  “FedEx package,” she said again.

  Tenderly, he moved her so that she lay flat. Had nothing with which to elevate her feet. “Hang in here,” he said. “Help is coming.”