“What time is it?” Alex asked, purposefully interrupting Rodriguez’s train of thought. Alex locked eyes with the young officer to make sure the man knew that he was aware of his suspicions.
“Two-forty,” Rodriguez answered.
“There’s no reception down here,” Yaw said.
Alex was already headed back to the empty railway.
“You guys stay here,” Yaw said, before he followed Alex.
Alex stepped out onto Hill Street and held the phone out in front of him. The small digital screen showed full reception, and Alex immediately pressed the redial button. He heard the multiple beeps of the autodial, knew the numbers that each tone corresponded to, and memorized them. He held the device to his ear just as it rang. Someone on the other end picked up after the first ring.
“Alex Luthecker, I presume,” Lucas Parks said.
Alex noted that Parks’ voice was not disguised or digitally altered.
“My name is Lucas Parks.”
“I know who you are.”
“Then you know the purpose of this call.”
“If you hurt her, there’s no place in the world that you can hide from me.”
“I’m not looking to hide from you. I’m looking to speak with you. In person. There’s a plane waiting for you at the Van Nuys Airport. Be there in an hour. Alone. If you ever want to see your lady friend again.”
The phone went dead before Alex could respond.
Through the lenses of his binoculars, Anthony Logan watched as their target, Alex Luthecker, engaged in a tense discussion with the large muscular black man known, according to their intel report, as Yaw Chinomso. Logan kept watching as the two men, their conversation concluded with an apparent decision made, shook hands and embraced, right before Luthecker broke off and walked away from the subway station. Logan followed the large muscular black man with the binoculars as he disappeared back into the underground passages. Logan pulled the binoculars from his eyes. He turned to his partner, John Mitchell Jr. and the two near-crippled Russians, Drugal and Vasilevich, who sat on the rooftop next to him.
“Luthecker made the call and he’s leaving. He’s on his way to the airport,” Logan said to the others.
“How many are in the subway?” Mitchell Jr. asked.
“Product count is thirty-eight. Plus two cops, a Vietnamese local, and the black guy,” Logan explained.
“And there are no other exits out of the tunnel?” Mitchell Jr. asked.
“None that we could find.”
Logan looked over at Drugal. “Are you two up for this?”
Drugal, his jaw broken, nodded. Logan could see the anger, the thirst for revenge in the young Russian’s eyes. Logan then looked at Vasilevich, who held up a rocket propelled grenade launcher with his left hand. Logan evaluated the two Russians and shook his head. Their brief encounter with the target had resulted in both men having broken arms and one man with a broken jaw. He questioned their usefulness at this point.
Logan looked at Drugal. “You finish this last bit, you two clowns can go back home to the Barbarian.”
Vasilevich nodded and put the RPG on his shoulder, taking careful aim at the Metro 417 entrance.
“Make sure there are no survivors,” Logan told the two Russians as he got to his feet. “Wait until Luthecker is clear.”
Vasilevich said nothing. He kept the RPG tube on his shoulder, his eyes on the subway entrance.
“As soon as that asshole is gone, do it so we can go home,” Drugal said to his Russian comrade, in a broken-jaw murmur.
Less than five minutes after Luthecker left, Vasilevich took a deep breath, held it in, and pulled the trigger.
16
Say You Understand
Nikki listened to the deep rumble of the jet engines and wondered how long they had been airborne. Her head had been covered with a thick hood ever since she regained consciousness, leaving her in complete darkness. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, and her face was moist and warm from her breath recycling. Every time she tried to move, it only served as a reminder that her wrists were tightly strapped to the armrests of the chair she was sitting in. She had never laid eyes on her attackers, had never seen the attack on her person coming at all, the assault on the Block having had her full attention. The last thing she remembered seeing, before being struck in the head, was an image that kept playing through her mind—the explosion that led to the Block on 108th in Watts going up in flames.
She tried to control her fear by remembering as many details as she could. Having been blindfolded during her captivity, it left sounds and smells as her only form of recollection. She thought back to a conversation she’d had with Alex on a casual afternoon several weeks ago, before his headaches and hand tremors, about how he perceived the world, and how, with just sounds alone, so much information was available, if one could only quiet the internal dialogue and distractions. The key, he had said, was to recognize that everything in the universe had a rhythm, a vibration, a voice all its own, and in order to truly listen to it, one had to remove their own auditory prejudices, remove all impurities that were not part of the natural harmonics of the moment. And if one could do so, the music of that moment alone would tell a story.
She made real effort to concentrate. She remembered regaining consciousness to the sound of a metal roll and roar of a sliding door. This told her she was in a van. Then she had been grabbed underneath each arm and lifted to her feet by two sets of strong hands. She was forced to step out of the van and onto, what felt like, a concrete surface. Her body had immediately felt the heat of the sun, and her ears were assaulted by the high-pitched sound of idling jet engines. She remembered the noise of engines growing louder as those same forceful hands led her across the tarmac. Then she was lifted and carried up the stairs and into the aircraft. She was spun around and set down in her chair rather abruptly, her arms immediately tied to the armrests. After several minutes, she felt the airplane jerk into motion before taxiing down the runway. The engines grew loud, and she was pressed back in her seat as the jet accelerated. She felt the pull on her stomach and sudden sense of buoyancy as the jet rose from the ground. It seemed like hours ago now, but she had lost all sense of time. She realized that no one had spoken a word to her.
She tried to put the data together to form actionable information, to form a meaningful pattern free from prejudice, as Alex would have it, and from that, extrapolate some sort of a plan. But no matter how many times she went over it in her head, she came up with nothing useful. She couldn’t perceive any sort of pattern. To her, it was just a series of rough, unconnected events. In the end, she wasn’t Alex. At that moment she wondered where he was and realized how much she missed him, how much she could use not only his skills, but also his sense of omniscience and certainty right now.
She also realized that her wrists were beginning to hurt, and the base of her skull throbbed where it had been struck. She tried to push the pain away when her mind was unexpectedly awash in memories, random flashbacks to life moments that began with her brother Ben, the two of them growing up in Crown Point, New York, then to him consoling her when she lost her job and dashed out to California. Her mind randomly drifted to her time with Alex in Tibet, then to her training with Winn, Yaw, Alex, Camilla, and Chris on the beach, then back to her family, her life as a young girl in Crown Point. Her mind continued to chart its own course through her past before settling on her father’s face with its determined desperation, and then to her mother’s with its accompanying sadness. And then her thoughts came back full circle to her little brother Ben. It was then that she realized it was less her own strength and more his carefree happiness that had provided her with her determination, had carried her through the difficult moments of her childhood.
It caused her to cry. She tried to stop it; tried, at the very least, to stop her tears from spiraling into uncontrollable sobs. Her logical mind, her sense of determination honed from years of fighting for her sense of self in a difficult worl
d, stepped in and took over, instinctively providing a sense of control. It acted like it always had for her in a crisis, like an impenetrable wall, put up brick by brick, sealing her emotions on one side, her ability to think clearly and act on the other. And “the wall” would not allow for her to break down beyond a certain emotional release. Not now. Not until she had her freedom. She decided, that for the sake of her brother, for Alex, and most of all for herself, she would not stop trying to work the problem, not stop trying to find a way out of this. She would not stop fighting. No matter what happened next or the reason she had been taken, she would not give up. The hood was pulled from her head so abruptly it startled her from her train of thought.
“Are you hungry?” was what Nikki heard as she blinked out of the darkness and into the light.
Nikki said nothing. She looked about, trying to focus, and saw that she was on a high-end private jet, what looked to be a Cessna Citation X, similar to the one Michael Kittner, her late ex-boyfriend, had leased. She looked back to her captor and noted the sharp features, the large frame of the man who loomed menacingly over her.
“My name is Lucas Parks. And I have no intention of hurting you. That doesn’t mean I won’t if I have to.”
“Where are we?”
“Over the ocean.”
“Why have you taken me? Where are you taking me?” Nikki blurted out. She mentally chastised herself for losing control, for sounding afraid.
“I’m taking you to a safe place. And this is about your friend, Alex Luthecker.”
“Where is he? I swear, if you hurt him…”
“That’s funny, he made the same empty threat regarding your well being. He’s several hours behind us, but he’ll be along.”
“What do you want?”
“Is it true?”
“Is what true?”
“What they say he can do.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Parks couldn’t help but smile at her lie. “I suppose we’ll know soon enough.”
Nikki watched as Parks removed a KA-BAR knife, with an eight-inch blade, from a waistband sheath and stood over her.
Her blood went cold and her heart raced as she watched him move the knife close to her face. She tried not to wince when he put the blade gently against her cheek, barely touching her skin. He moved the knife slowly down her face to the corner of her mouth.
“I’d like for us to trust one another. It’s important if we’re going to get through these next few days. So I’m going to cut you loose. If you need to go to the bathroom, do it now. If you’re hungry, I’ll bring you food. Otherwise, you are to remain in this seat. If you get up, for any reason, I’m going to start with the face.” Parks pressed the blade into Nikki’s cheek hard enough to cause pain but just short of piercing the skin. “Say you understand.”
Nikki locked eyes with Parks in defiance. In his glare, she saw death. She fought the urge to swallow. “I understand.”
“Good.”
In less than three seconds, Parks cut the two zip-ties that held Nikki’s wrists to the chair. Then he spun the knife with expert precision and slammed the blade back into its sheath on his hip. He looked her in the eye to make sure she recognized his skill with the KA-BAR. “We should be on the ground in about seven hours.”
“And then what?” Nikki asked as she rubbed blood back into her wrists.
“You’ll be faced with some choices.”
Alex Luthecker handed the cab driver a one hundred dollar bill. “Keep the change,” he said to the cabbie, a man in his forties and of dark-skinned Indian descent. The cabbie thanked Alex profusely before he climbed back into a faded-yellow and beaten late-model Crown Victoria taxi. He drove off in a cloud of dust, leaving Alex standing just off the tarmac of the Van Nuys Airport.
Located in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, the Van Nuys Airport was a public facilities used by private, chartered, and small commercial aircraft only. Even though no commercial airlines flew in or out of the airport, its twin parallel runaways were long enough to accommodate any sized aircraft. Popular with celebrities, businessmen, and the wealthy, the airport was the only facility in Los Angeles outside of LAX that could handle commercial-sized aircraft capable of overseas flight.
Alex hustled across the well-worn pavement and quickly made his way to One-Six-Right, the call moniker for the longer of the two landing strips, where he was told his plane would be waiting.
Alex took note of the two large men who stood at the base of the boarding staircase as he approached the private Boeing 737 aircraft. The hard-looking guards in black suits eyed Alex with intent to intimidate and both made sure he saw that they carried a sidearm.
“Stop right there,” the first guard said, holding his hand up as the other quickly began to frisk Alex.
The guard moved his hands over Alex’s waist and pockets. He stopped when he felt an object in Alex’s left front pocket. The guard quickly stepped back and pulled his 9mm sidearm free from its holster, pointing the weapon directly at Alex’s head. “What’s in your pocket?”
“A totem.”
“A what? Never mind. Let’s see it. Nice and slow.”
Alex dug in his pocket and pulled free the small stone figure that Kunchin had given him in Tibet. He held it out for the guard to see.
“What is it?”
“Seng Ge. The Snow Lion. She protects me.”
The guard laughed at both the trinket and Alex’s sentiment. “That’s not going to help you where you’re going,” the guard responded as he holstered his weapon.
“Take it,” the other guard said.
“Why?”
“Two-Good. He’s into that shit.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. All that Indian nonsense.”
The guard that frisked Alex shook his head in disbelief before he snatched the stone figure from Alex’s hand.
“Go,” he told Alex before shoving him toward the boarding staircase.
Alex looked away as he quickly climbed up the boarding staircase. He now knew that Kunchin had foreseen this moment in Alex’s fate, something Alex himself could not do, and that the gift of the small stone figure was not random.
As he reached the top of the stairs, Alex took one last look at the airport, before his eyes settled once more on the two men who had just frisked him. If I had more time, he thought, I would tell each man what I saw when I read them, and that I know every detail of their existence, patterns that began before they were born. He wished he had time to tell them what he saw when he looked into their souls and stripped away the necessary illusions that violent men needed to keep sane. He wished he had time to show them what intimidation really was. He turned around and entered the aircraft.
“Not one word, or you get the bat across the skull,” David Two-Good said to Alex the second he cleared the doorway and stepped into the fuselage of the 737.
Alex looked at the Native American man who stood across from him. He recognized Two-Good’s size, posture, and small movements immediately. This man was one of Nikki’s kidnappers. This man knew where they were headed, and, in fact, where Nikki would be held.
Alex glanced at the baseball bat that Two-Good nervously held low and at the ready. Alex knew because of his training with Master Winn—along with his ability to read this man’s fate—it would take little effort to divorce him from his weapon.
But now was not the time.
“Not one word or you get the bat, and your girlfriend gets the knife. Nod if you understand,” Two-Good added.
Alex looked Two-Good over, his eyes moving with REM rapidity, absorbing every detail with a sense of determination. Alex made sure that Two-Good saw it.
“What the fuck,” Two-Good said in reaction to the movement of Alex’s eyes, instinctively taking a step back and raising the baseball bat in self-defense.
Alex’s eyes then went still, and he locked them onto Two-Good’s. Alex slowly nodded that he understood.
“Sit down right here, and don’t move,” Two-Good said, pointing to a large, comfortable-looking seat located near the plane’s fuselage.
Alex walked past Two-Good and sat down.
Two-Good approached and quickly slapped a handcuff across Alex’s right wrist, snapping the other cuff to a small metal bar that had been screwed into the armrest.
“Not one word,” he reminded Alex. Alex nodded and smiled slightly in response.
Two-Good slowly turned away and headed toward the front of the plane. He took a quick glance back at Alex.
“What the hell did he just do to me,” Two-Good wondered before he pulled a cell phone from his pocket and held it to his ear.
“Tell the boss I have the package, and we’re en route,” Two-Good said into the phone. As he put the phone back in his pocket, he noticed his hand was shaking.
Alex watched as the guard who had frisked him only moments earlier entered the aircraft. He watched as the man whispered something to Two-Good before handing the Native American, Seng Ge, the small stone snow lion he had just taken from Alex. Two-Good looked at the figure in his hand for several seconds before looking back at Alex. The guard quickly exited the plane, and Two-Good pulled the large entrance door to the craft shut, pushing the large metal lever lock into place until Alex heard the click of latches.
Two-Good stole yet another quick glance at Alex before he sat down and buckled his seat belt.
The two men sat in silence for several minutes before the engines began to rumble louder, and the plane began to move.
Alex sat back in his chair and thought about the man who sat several rows in front of him. He tried to compress the details of Two-Good’s life into a narrative, one that when inevitably shared, would both drive and alter the man’s fate. Alex was aware that he already made David Two-Good extremely nervous—without the man understanding exactly why.
There is time, Alex thought to himself. There is time to tell him why.
Rise: Luthecker, #2 Page 12
