As the other surprised guard raised his blaster to fire, H swung the gun in his hand, like a club, smashing it into the side of the guard’s head. The second guard followed his partner over the cliffside, a look of horror on his face as he fell. H looked around the narrow passage, making sure he had been correct when Luca had led him through here on his way up the path to the villa. This was a camera and sensor blind spot. The absence of alarms confirmed it.
He slung the blaster over his shoulder and hurried down the path toward the old boathouse, keeping his head down.
The door was still open, just as it had been when he’d passed it earlier. Somebody was slacking on the job, clearly—or perhaps the guards just thought nobody would be foolish enough to dare to sneak about an island bristling with alien weapons, under the nose of an array of cameras. He crept in cautiously and pushed the door to behind him.
There were several speedboats dry docked here in various states of disrepair, as well as boat maintenance equipment and supplies, workbenches, spare anchors, tools, and engine parts. The other side of the boathouse had been converted into a control station for at least part of the island’s security network. H scanned the banks of monitors, levers, and buttons. He found the motion sensors and central power supply to the hidden gun emplacements. He snapped that series of switches off.
* * *
“Em,” came H’s voice over her earpiece, “you’re all clear.”
On the cliffs below Riza’s villa, Em saw the gun turrets rise up out of their hidden alcoves all over the rocks above her. The guns then drooped and grew still as their power was cut.
“Copy that,” she replied.
She smiled and began to climb again, as quickly as she could toward the villa.
* * *
In the boathouse, H watched Em ascend on one of the monitors. He turned to leave just as he heard the door click open behind him. It was Luca. The big Tarantian was across the room much faster than H had thought he was capable of moving. Just as H was swinging around, Luca drove a powerful kick into H’s chest, knocking the wind from his lungs. The agent flew across the room, smashing into—and then wedging him into—one of the wooden boats stored there. The rest of the boat crashed down onto H. He struggled to free himself from the shattered boat debris.
“H, you okay?” Em’s voice sounded worried in his ear.
“Yep.” H began hurling winch hooks, wooden boards, and anything else that looked like it might hurt, at Riza’s bodyguard. “Got him right where I want him.”
The barrage of debris bounced harmlessly off Luca’s hide, not even slowing him down as he stepped forward and flipped the power to the cliff-face guns back on.
* * *
Em was still scrambling up the rock face when she heard the exposed turrets all hum back to life. They were scanning for moving targets in their zone of fire, and Em was right in the middle of it. She froze, her fingers gripping the tiny stone handholds as best she could. Several of the guns snapped in her direction, their ugly barrels searching every inch for any overt signs of life. If her grip failed her, she’d fall to her death, unless Riza’s guns blew her into particles long before she hit the beach.
“What’s happening?” she said into the comm. The line was silent.
* * *
Luca heard the sounds of splintered boards and debris shifting across the room, and turned to see if that jackass of an MiB agent was still awake and struggling to free himself. The bodyguard was surprised to find H was already standing behind him. He had a heavy, wooden oar and was in mid-swing when Luca turned. The oar smashed into Luca’s head, cracking and breaking as it did. The Tarantian crashed into a wall, sending down shelves full of paint cans and tools on top of himself.
H strode over to the security consoles and once again deactivated the guns.
“Nothing’s happening,” he said to Em. “Stick to the plan.”
* * *
Em watched the searching guns suddenly go silent and slump again into inactivity. Hesitantly, she pulled herself up to a narrow shelf of a ledge. She wiggled her numb fingers, looking for her next point of ascent and trying to keep her eyes on the guns, in case they jumped back to life.
“You sure these things aren’t going to kill me?” she asked as she began to climb again.
* * *
“One thousand percent,” H said confidently, an instant before Luca erupted out from under the mountain of heavy paint cans, sending them flying like missiles crashing into everything, even smashing and wrecking some of the security monitors and controls.
Luca snarled and launched himself at H, a blur of rage, a juggernaut of anger. He spun and drove a tree-trunk-sized leg into H’s side. H groaned as he was punted through the air, snapping through solid wooden rafter beams and crashing into another wall and the contents of its shelves.
Luca hit the button again.
* * *
The guns next to Em snapped to life. She narrowly avoided the blasts and debris by ducking behind another outcropping of rock for cover.
“There’s no such thing as ‘a thousand percent!’” she shouted.
* * *
H shuffled back toward Luca, keeping on the balls of his feet, bobbing left, then right, his arms up in a classic boxer’s guard. Before H could close in to throw a punch, the eight-foot-tall brute spun with surprising agility and snapped a kickboxer’s roundhouse kick. H tried to block it with his forearms, but the sheer force behind the kick broke through his defenses and connected with the side of his head. H’s guard fell as he struggled to stay on his feet. Luca windmilled around and drove another devastating kick to H’s jaw, sending the agent reeling backward and smashing through a thick support column. “Don’t worry, I got this!”
H was on the floor, struggling to rise again. He spotted a carpenter’s hammer on the floor and reached out, almost willing it to his hand. Nothing happened. Gathering the last of his strength, H scrambled to his feet, grabbing the hammer and hurling it at Luca with all his might. This seemed strangely familiar to H for some reason. The alien bodyguard grabbed the hammer in mid-flight and tossed it aside. It was the distraction that H needed. With a snarl, the MiB agent charged in, his shoulder low, and plowed into Luca. The Tarantian stopped H cold and lifted him over his head before body-slamming him onto his back, cracking the wooden floor.
“What was that?” H heard Em’s voice in his ear, over the roar of weapons fire all around her. “It sounded painful.”
Luca pulled H’s battered form from the floor and raised him again, above his head.
“Stick. To. The. Plan,” H growled through gritted teeth. As Luca began to swing H back to throw him across the room, the agent hit the button with the tip of his shoe’s heel, shutting down the guns. H flew like a rag doll across the boathouse and collided with a wooden rowboat with bone-jarring force. He saw bright, painful light strobe behind his eyes.
* * *
Em kept climbing, listening to the sounds of the fight playing out in her earpiece. She was getting closer to the top of the cliff on the side that the back of the villa faced, putting more space between herself and the guns.
She pulled herself up a jagged outcropping near one of the deactivated turrets, paused to catch her breath, and then kept scaling the rock, trying not to think about H. The plan… stick to the plan.
* * *
H reached out as he fought to stand. Not beaten yet, his fingers found a small boat anchor and chain. He hurled it low at Luca’s legs like he was doing an Olympic hammer toss. Luca dodged the anchor but his massive legs got tangled in the chain.
Fighting to stay conscious, H yanked the chain with all his remaining strength.
27
On the cliff face, Em finally made it past the deadly maze of once-again silent guns and moved quickly toward the villa. “Okay,” she said into her comm, “I’m through. Pawny, do you copy?”
At that moment, Pawny couldn’t respond. He was busy acting like a docile creature in his jar prison. Riza had
taken him from the orangery to her villa, some way away, and was now carrying him through a series of brightly lit, well-appointed corridors and then cave-like passages carved out of living rock. She paused at a sealed door and tapped a code into a small console on the wall beside the door. The door hissed open and Riza took the tiny warrior into her cavernous office.
A series of arches opened up to give a view of the grounds; the other side gave a breathtaking view of the tranquil, sky-blue Tyrrhenian Sea, the tiny dots of island chains, and distant Vesuvius. A large aquarium tank took up a prominent place in part of the room. Pawny recognized a few of the alien species gliding through the waters of the tank. Others, like the thing that looked like a cross between a coelacanth, an electric eel, and a wasp, Pawny didn’t know and didn’t want to know.
Two Elcidean smoke treaders padded silently around Riza’s office, most of their attention on a large, ornate, and heaving-looking birdcage full of alien avians. The exotic alien pets were roughly the size, and had features reminiscent, of Earth cats. Pawny felt the smoke treaders’ eyes, each with two brilliant, orange pupils, track him as Riza passed, before they turned back to their hungry patrol of the cage. Pawny wished he still had his blaster, or at least his dagger, when he saw how the smoke treaders looked at him.
The walls surrounding Riza’s desk were covered in racks of weapons from across the universe. Riza sat down behind her desk and set Pawny’s jar beside a vaguely skull-shaped diamond sitting on a small pedestal. Riza turned Pawny’s jar around so that she could study his face. Pawny tried to act as mindless as he could. He had decided to use Agent H as his inspiration for this performance and so far it had gone off like gangbusters. “Now what am I going to do with you?” Riza cooed to Pawny. “I just want to eat you up, yes I do!”
In his tiny ear, Pawny once again heard his queen, Agent Em, speaking. “Pawny, do you copy? Pawny?”
Riza’s earpiece comm chirped, announcing a call. Her looming face shot up and away from Pawny’s jar as she tapped the comm to answer the call.
“Sebastian? Kisses. How would you like to be able to destroy entire solar systems without leaving the house?” Riza wandered over to the far end of her office. Her voice grew distant.
Pawny let out a sigh and answered Em, keeping his voice low. “It’s hard to copy when you’re being slobbered on by a psychopath,” he told her.
* * *
“You see it?” Em asked over the comm. She crouched among the rocks, just below the wide opening in one section of the cave office.
After a moment, Pawny’s voice came to her. “Yeah. I see it.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. The puzzle box was in Riza’s office, just as H had said it would be. “Everything depends on you, now,” she told him.
“Define ‘everything,’” the tiny alien whispered.
* * *
Pawny inspected the lid of the jar. Besides making the air holes, H had been sure not to tighten the lid when he put it on. Pawny reached up and began to unscrew the lid from the inside. He was acutely aware of Riza on the far side of the fish tank, the murmur of her sales pitch rising and falling almost pleasantly, as if she were selling anything other than weapons of mass murder. He was glad he couldn’t hear what she was saying.
The lid came loose and clattered as it fell onto the desktop. Pawny peeped out, his big eyes above the rim of the jar. Nothing. No indication the arms dealer had heard anything, and no sign of the alien cats. He spotted the rough-hewn corridor he was going to make a run for. With a grunt, the small soldier pushed his former prison to the edge of the desk and with a final shove let it fall.
The glass jar shattered and Riza’s head popped into view at the noise. She spotted her newest pet scuttling as quickly as his tiny legs would let him down the access corridor that led to the sauna and torture chambers. Pawny disappeared from sight. Riza rolled her eyes in frustration and sighed as she followed him out of the room.
The office was silent except for the burbling of the massive fish tank. Em appeared, climbing up the last of the rock face and entering through the open wall. She looked around the huge office and then spotted the puzzle box on the table on the other side of the room. Quietly, she made her way to it, picked it up off the table, and stole back to the window.
“And here I thought H worked alone,” Riza said. “Poor you.”
Em turned slowly. Riza was by her desk, Pawny standing on her shoulder.
“It’s been a steep learning curve,” Em said.
Riza picked up a weapon off her desk, an ugly energy pistol with a compact, wide barrel. The intergalactic criminal held it up for Em to get a better view. “Snub-nosed Karzig Annihilator.” Riza aimed the gun straight at Em. “Know what it does to a human body? Boils it from the inside out.”
“Cute,” Em said. “Know what a Pawny does to sadistic alien arms dealers?”
“No,” Riza scoffed. “What’s a Pawny?”
“I’m a Pawny, psycho!” The tiny warrior on Riza’s shoulder bit down into her flesh as hard as he could with a snarl. Riza screamed and fired, but the blast missed Em and blew out the window next to her. The agent ducked for cover, clutching the puzzle box. Riza grabbed the snarling Pawny and hurled him into an adjoining room. She fired again on the fleeing Em, who vaulted over an antique chest to avoid the second blast. The chest burst into flames and cracked apart as Riza’s blast missed her.
Em kept moving, ducking behind and jumping over various pieces of furniture in the office to avoid being hit. Riza fired again and again, but couldn’t hit her.
Em launched herself off a settee and flew toward the opening and escape. Riza howled and launched herself airborne as well, corkscrewing her body in midair to lash out and punch Em solidly with her third arm. The punch sent Em crashing to the ground, tumbling across the expensive tiled floor. She lost her grip on the puzzle box and it clattered along the floor, ending up near the aquarium.
Riza landed in a crouch, all three of her arms outstretched to stabilize her landing. Her eyes were bright with crazy. Em groaned and pulled herself to her feet as Riza stood.
Em looked around for something, anything, she could use as a weapon. She spotted a chair only a few feet from her.
She considered bashing the chair into the aquarium and letting the hundreds of thousands of gallons of water that would pour out give her enough of a distraction to grab the puzzle box and make for the cliffs. However, it would most likely kill the beautiful and strange creatures inside the tank. No, she wouldn’t kill innocent creatures for her own benefit—that would make her too much like this lunatic.
She feinted away from the furniture and then took a quick step toward it, picked up the chair with both hands, torqued her hips to gain extra energy in the swing, and hurled it at Riza with all her might. The chair tumbled toward the arms dealer’s head. Riza fell into some kind of martial arts stance and deftly deflected the chair with all three of her arms, knocking it with a crash into a tree.
Em recalled everything she could from every Jason Statham movie she’d ever watched. She pulled her arms in tight and up at the elbows to guard her face. Riza saw the agent’s inexperience and laughed. She came in fast and hard, driving a punch to the side of Em’s head, bypassing her stiff guard and lack of footwork. Em’s arms dropped and Riza followed up with some hard jabs to Em’s face with one, then another, of her three fists.
Angry now, Em swung hard and wild. Riza blocked it with her third arm. Em charged in to try to tackle the arms dealer. She landed a glancing blow on Riza’s cheek, before Riza used Em’s own momentum and leverage to toss her across the room and into a bookcase. Em hit the floor, landing on her backside among a rain of antique books tumbling from the shelves.
Em’s hand searched about as she stood up. Her fingers touched the cool pewter of an antique candlestick that had been on top of the bookshelf.
Em grabbed the candlestick, brandishing it like a club, and came at Riza again, swinging with everything she had. Two of Riza’s arms
came up, almost crossing, and blocked the stick. Her third arm shot out and plucked it from Em’s hand. Riza tossed the candlestick aside and brought her two blocking arms down, one on each of Em’s shoulders. The pain was so great, Em’s legs buckled.
Before she could fall, Riza spun her around and smashed her into the desk, pinning her down. Riza’s hand raised above Em’s head, ready to come down with lethal finality.
28
In the corridor to one of Riza’s antechambers, Pawny climbed to his feet and shook his head to clear it from the impact. He could hear the sounds of fighting in the office, and heard Em gasp in pain. Pawny reached for his grapple gun and aimed it toward the rock surface of the wall above the distant doorway to the office and his beleaguered mistress. I’m coming, Em. Suddenly, Riza, grinning and in a fighting stance, came into sight past the doorway. Pawny lowered the gun slightly, taking aim on the unaware arms dealer’s temple.
Just as he was about to fire, a dark shape that had been scuttling silently in the shadows sprang toward the little warrior. Pawny fell, the hairy thing on top of him. For a second, he prepared to feel the claws of the treader ripping at his armor, but then he realized this was no alien cat that had jumped him. It was Bassam; Bassam the beard.
“Time to taste my wrath, pawn!” the beard sneered, its hairy tendrils entangling Pawny, keeping him from firing his wrist blaster.
“I eat beards for breakfast, Bassam!” Pawny said as the two small combatants found themselves locked in mortal combat.
* * *
Back in the office, Em, pinned to the desk and about to die, struggled to find any way she could out of Riza’s vise-like grip. Her scrambling hands found a ceramic bowl on the desk. She grabbed it, smashed it, and held on to a large, jagged piece of the pottery. Riza swung down to end the agent’s life, and at the same time Em slashed out at the arm pinning her down, leaving a wide, bloody cut.
Men in Black International Page 14
