From below came a question in Albanian. Munroe dropped her voice an octave and, drawing on a language from long ago, yelled back, “Minjtë!” Too many words and the dialect and accent might be wrong. No answer and he would come hunting.
From below came a guffaw.
Close enough.
Carrying the dead man’s gun, Munroe worked backward toward Neeva, the weapon held two-handed and aimed toward the empty prison stairs.
When she was within whispering distance, Munroe hissed for Neeva’s attention, got her to block open the gold-shop door and follow her into the main room. Not because she owed Neeva anything, not because she wanted her help, but because she couldn’t afford to get cut off from her and have her used against her the way the prisoners downstairs might be.
For the third time in nearly twice as many minutes, Munroe crossed the wide floor space, this time quickly and without fear of being seen, to get to the stairs and down before the dead man’s counterpart got curious and headed up. Detoured around the body for Neeva’s benefit, reached the stairway, and there Neeva froze.
Munroe started down, paused at Neeva’s hesitation, and motioned her to follow. But the girl wouldn’t move. Color drained from her cheeks and she shook her head. Munroe fought back the anger.
Liability.
There were times when all the bravery in the world couldn’t compensate for trauma and flashbacks.
Liability.
It wouldn’t be easy walking down these stairs and returning to the smell of bleach and mold. Wouldn’t be easy to descend, knowing that once underground she was helpless against the metal door being locked in place, shutting her away forever. Munroe had to do it, even against her own foreboding, but Neeva didn’t.
Liability.
Two fingers to her own eyes and then to the room at large, Munroe set Neeva to keep watch. Motioned to the weapon, then to the room again.
Shoot to protect.
Neeva nodded.
Munroe blocked out the frustration. The anger. Had to focus on the now. Headed down several stairs with quiet foot placement that wouldn’t alert the guard to her presence. Listened for pacing, breathing, clothes rustling, and keys clinking, but heard nothing. She didn’t need to peer around the corner to know where he was, she’d seen it a half-dozen times during her time in this hell. Didn’t need to worry about hitting an innocent with stray bullets, because whoever was being held captive in this dungeon was locked away behind stone and steel.
Munroe turned and did a quick double-check on Neeva, whose back was to her, Jericho two-fisted and pointed toward the floor. Drew a breath, ran down the remaining stairs, and skirted the corner, firing, counting rounds, moving steadily closer, until the clip in the .45 was empty. She drew the Jericho and charged the remaining distance.
The guard had managed to unholster his weapon. Had managed to draw and get off three shots but had never made it fully out of a sitting position. He tried now, crumpled between chair and wall, to lift the weapon and fire. She stomped on his hand. Took the gun and, in a single movement, put his own weapon to his forehead and pulled the trigger. Tucked the Jericho back into her waistband and ripped the ring of keys off his belt loop.
With the dead guard’s key ring in hand, Munroe started toward the nearest cell in the underground prison. Tried keys until she found the right one. Unlocked and slid the bar free. The cell was empty, and the air filled with the same fetid stench that had been there when Neeva was inside.
She strode to the next. Unlocked it. Slid the door wide and on the mat was huddled a wretch of a child, nine, maybe ten at the most, in rags, clawing away from the door as if it might somehow be possible to become part of the walls.
Inside Munroe’s head a chorus of voices ruptured and broke free. Rage unbridled and blinding tore from her core, and her heart pounded heavy in a beat entirely different from the adrenaline rush of battle. The lust for blood, the thirst for violence, unquenchable, unspeakable: the killer fully arisen from a deep sleep; voices rising, chanting, demanding.
I have removed the bounds of the people.
Munroe turned from the doorway, found the key for the third cell, and opened this, too.
I have robbed their treasures.
Two more girls inside this one, teenagers, fifteen or sixteen, seated on the filthy pad that passed as a bed, staring silently, arms wrapped around their knees.
I have put down the inhabitants like a valiant man.
Munroe cycled through languages with the teenagers, and having exhausted her repertoire of anything that might be understood in Europe, switched to hand signals, motioning the girls toward her.
They didn’t move.
She put the gun on the floor and raised her hands. Motioned again.
One of them slid off the mat and scooted forward. Munroe nudged the weapon out the door with her heel, kept her hands in the air, and backed out of the room. The girl followed.
By the strength of my hand I have done it.
Munroe pointed down the hall to the dead guard, then to herself, to the gun. The girl’s face lit into a huge smile, and chattering animatedly, she turned to the other. The second girl stood and nearly ran to the door. Munroe showed them to the previous cell where the child still huddled on the mat. The braver of the two entered, knelt, and began to talk with the girl, and when once more language became a barrier, she tried to pick up the child and the little girl screamed.
And that was when Munroe first heard the noise above: another scream, this one from someone older, more mature, followed by Munroe’s name and gunfire. Scooping the second guard’s .45 off the floor, she ran for the stairs.
Shouts. Scuffling.
Metal door shutting.
She raced the steps three at a go. Hit the door full force before it had shut, pushing it open some, although strength and momentum were dulled by the uphill climb. She shoved hard, and whoever was on the other side let go and the door swung fully open.
Munroe stood in the doorway, a clear target for anyone who wanted to take a shot, but nobody did. The Doll Maker sat on a chair near the closest desk, leaning back and smiling. He shook his finger at Munroe. “Oh, my crafty friend,” he said. “Thank you for bringing me this gift.”
To Munroe’s left, beside the door, was a man she’d not seen before, who, like Arben and Tamás, appeared to be nothing more than an interchangeable part in the Doll Maker’s machine. Beside the Doll Maker was Neeva, gun to her head, arms pinned behind her back, held in place by yet another part of the machinery.
Liability.
Like a bad case of déjà vu, she’d seen this scene play out a hundred times since the moment Neeva insisted on following her out of the consulate. A dozen arguments, untold energy toward keeping the girl from this exact scenario, and here they were.
Neeva, her expression devastated and panicked, mouthed I’m sorry.
Munroe took a step out of the doorway. If there were more machinery parts here, she didn’t see them, and the numbers made sense considering they tended to work and travel in packs of two.
The teenagers, who had remained in the whitewashed hall when she’d blown past, crept up the stairs behind her, as if they understood they had one chance at escape and she was it. They flanked behind her now.
With the dead guard’s weapon in her right hand, Munroe pulled the Jericho from the small of her back. She trained one toward the Doll Maker and the other on the thug beside the door. Sidestepped fully out of the doorway so that her back was to a wall.
The Doll Maker flicked a finger in the direction of the thug beside the door, and the man lunged, grabbed the wrist of one of the girls, and yanked her out into the room. The girl shrieked and began to cry, trying to fight. He put the gun to her head the way the other had his to Neeva, and so the young girl stood there, sobbing, docile, scared.
“Put the guns down,” the Doll Maker said. “A smart one like you knows there is no way out of here.”
“Perhaps,” Munroe said. “But I don’t have to
die alone.”
He shrugged. “So you kill me maybe. You kill one of my men maybe. You kill two innocents definitely. What do you gain?”
Munroe stepped away from the wall but kept her back guarded. Moved closer to him, running the odds, the speed, the numbers.
“You won’t kill them,” Munroe said. “They’re too valuable. Worth more to you alive, more difficult to replace than your gorillas.”
The Doll Maker turned to gaze at Neeva for a half-second. “This one, yes,” he said. “But those ones, and the baby down in the chamber, they are cheap and very easy to replace. There will be more tomorrow.”
He stood and stepped next to Neeva, his own lack of height emphasized by the way he didn’t tower over her as his thug did. Glanced at her up and down and then said over his shoulder to Munroe, “I think those girls are worth more to you than they are to me.”
While his back was turned, Munroe took another slow step toward him, and within the heartbeat of that movement, the Doll Maker grabbed Neeva and pulled her into him. He took the gun from his man and held it to Neeva’s temple. Squeezed her cheeks and turned her to face Munroe. There were tears in her eyes and her lips kept saying, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
He said, “None of them are valuable to me if I am dead, so yes, I will kill even this one, if necessary. Don’t take another step.”
Munroe stopped moving.
The Doll Maker nodded to the man from whom he’d taken Neeva, and he made for the stairs, for the second teenager who until now had stood transfixed, frozen in fear. She turned, screaming, running back down the way she’d come, and he chased and caught her. Dragged her back up the stairs by her hair while she flailed; scraped and bloodied as concrete and stone tore at her clothes and her skin. He kicked her, again and again, and she balled into the fetal position, screaming and pleading, trying to protect her head and her stomach.
The seconds passed incrementally, as if time slowed to near standstill, and but for the heartbeat thudding in Munroe’s ears, sound ceased to exist. Within the pulsing wash, one beat to the next, flashed odds and strategy.
To kill the kicking man and put an end to the madness, she’d have one shot and be forced to use her left hand; the odds were not good.
Move against move.
With that first round fired, the girl would die, possibly Neeva as well.
Weapons would turn on her. She would die. And then the teenager, and the child in the cell, and God knew who else.
Blood in her ears. Rushing. Maddening.
Decisions. Choices.
My soul chooses strangling, and death rather than my life.
She’d come this far knowing she walked into a trap. Come this far knowing she’d had a good run at life, and if it ended now, she was okay with that. She said, “Stop.”
The Doll Maker laughed but repeated the command in Albanian, and the man stopped kicking, and the girl on the floor lay sobbing, matted hair covering her face. Neeva bit on her lip and her expression hardened, face taut and focused as if she ran the same scenario, the same odds, the same probabilities and came to the same conclusion as Munroe.
The Doll Maker cackled again, as if he’d triumphed. “You are weak,” he said. “Exploitable, and only dangerous in your element when you are in control—so easy to read and manipulate because you lack the ability to make difficult decisions. A good man would have killed these women first so there would be no sword over his head and then come after me. You? You’re worthless.”
As a cloud vanishes and is gone, so one who goes down to the grave does not return.
“Kill me,” Munroe said. “I know you want to.”
“Of all the merchandise in this room,” he said, “you are the most valuable, you are most highly prized. Delivering you—even drugged—I earn ten times what this girl would fetch thanks to the enemies you have made these past days.”
“I would kill myself first,” she said.
“You are not capable of that, either.”
Neeva said, “Take the shot, Michael, please take the shot.”
The Doll Maker jabbed Neeva in the side and she winced.
“If I surrender what do I buy?”
“You buy four,” he said. “Those little pigs and this one here. I let them all go.”
“Let them go now,” she said. “And then I surrender.”
Neeva screamed, “No!” and the Doll Maker punched her again.
“I am not a fool,” he said. “You first, then the girls.”
“Let the replaceable ones go first.”
The Doll Maker smirked. “Where would they go? I put them on the street, they are found, and eventually the police are at my door. No. When I let them go, I let them go where they are no trouble to me.”
“Then we’re at an impasse.”
The Doll Maker barked a command. The thug from whom the Doll Maker had taken the gun pulled a second weapon from beneath his shirt. Before he’d fully aimed the muzzle at the prostrate girl, Munroe yelled, “No!” and the Doll Maker halted the killing. “It is your choice,” he said.
Munroe said nothing, processing, trying to find a way out of an unwinnable situation, where even taking her own life would only propagate evil.
“I will not wait long,” the Doll Maker said.
If she surrendered, she’d have no way to enforce compliance, but without surrender an immediate execution would take place.
As if reading her thoughts, he said, “Ten seconds and the girl dies.”
Neeva screamed, “Take the shot!” and once more the Doll Maker hit her, this time hard enough that the sound carried, and even from this distance Munroe could see her tears.
The Doll Maker counted, moving directly from two to seven. On eight, Munroe began to lower. Neeva screamed again, and once more time slowed, filtering movement and events in increments, life defined in jerky strobe-light motion.
The man by the metal door, his gun to the teenager’s head. Yanking her hair, jerking her tear-stained face upward, laughing in her ear. The girl on the floor. Huddled. The thug beside her with his weapon pointed at her, index finger stroking the outside of the trigger guard, face turned to the Doll Maker, eyes expectant and happy, waiting for the command. The Doll Maker pulling Neeva tighter. Smiling. Gloating. Jamming the muzzle of the gun against her ear. A whisper of movement on the far side of the room that could as easily have been from a draft as from a shadow, costing a half-second distraction in which the Doll Maker’s voice, stretched out and distorted, reached the number nine.
Munroe dropped one knee to the floor.
Neeva screamed, “No!” She rose on the balls of her feet so that her cheek aligned with the Doll Maker’s and her body pressed into him, tensed and shifted. Her right hand reached for the hand that held the gun to her own head, her left hand reached for his head. Not frantic. Deliberate … focused … determined, full of intent and eyes set hard.
His smile faded.
Her finger curled around the trigger.
And then an explosion of blood and bone that terminated life twice over.
Neeva and the Doll Maker fell together, slapping against desk and chair, pinball and ragdoll, collapsing finally, crooked and bent, arms and legs entwined.
IN THE TIME it took to blink, to register and understand, Munroe dropped the Jericho. Raised both hands to the .45 and, still kneeling, fired at the nearest man, the closest replaceable part in the Doll Maker’s machine: rapid pulls that emptied the magazine and sent his body jerking, falling, full deadweight onto the teenager on the floor. Turned from him to his counterpart, time held captive in that same fractured breath, the moment distilled into screams and violence, while the first man fell and the second raised his head, hesitating in the choice between killing his hostage and human shield or returning fire.
His weapon moved from the hostage to Munroe.
She dropped the .45. Scooped the Jericho. His gun leveled at the same time hers did. He knew she wouldn’t fire—not as long as he held the hostage as a sh
ield—and she knew his aim and control would be off because he was forced to shoot one-handed to maintain his hold on a moving body.
Munroe braced for the hits. Hoped to be lucky enough to take the bullets in her torso where the jacket could still protect, where the odds of him connecting to the same spot another bullet had already struck were slim; and in that breath of resignation came another spray of red mist, from the man’s head, death that had not come from her.
Time, which had until now been held taut and captive, cut loose, unspooling like the snap of an overstrained cable. The thug collapsed, leaving the hostage standing alone, screaming, trying to escape from liquid and death, as if she might, by crawling out of her own skin, be let free of the moment. Her shock and terror chorused with that of the girl on the ground, all of this a deafening noise that penetrated Munroe’s senses for the first time.
Like a runner off the starting block, Munroe bolted through the maze of desks and passageways, catty-corner across the room to where she’d spotted that shadow of movement.
The space was empty.
She turned a slow circle. Scanning, searching, while the cries and wails of the teenagers filled the cavernous room in an echoed bounce-back.
By the foot of a chair she found a single ejected shell.
She reached for the metal piece, anger coursing.
He’d found his way from Milan. Had been here. Could have ended it all by killing the man who’d caused so much suffering but had instead allowed Neeva to die and, in what he would have seen as a noble gesture, saved Munroe’s life, taking from her any chance of peace. He could have killed his uncle. Put an end to the suffering. He’d had the power to let Neeva live and had not used it, and Munroe hated him for it.
She’d allowed him life, had given him a chance, but not for this.
Not for this.
Munroe pocketed the casing as a memento, and before recrossing the room she peered into the gold shop. The woman behind the counter was dead, slumped against the wall with a single hole in her head.
The Doll Page 34
