The Skill Conspiracy

by Pete Gustin

“They took your pictures, right, Alden?” I heard a voice from one of the newly arrived boats ask.

  “Huh?” I replied quietly.

  “They snapped your pictures before we blew them away, right?”

  I nodded.

  The man proceeded to say something in Spanish, and his boat sidled up alongside The Runner, opposite where the police boat was still tied to us.

  “Domingo?” I asked, as the large man hopped over the railing and landed on the deck next to me.

  “Hola, Alden,” he replied.

  It was Domingo, the guy from the marina in Cuba. I couldn’t process this right now. I really needed to check on my girlfriend.

  “Annie,” I said, crouching down next to her. “Are you okay?”

  She was still curled up in a tight little ball, but I was eventually able to coax her up to a seated position. I noticed that she was looking up into the sky. I followed her gaze but saw nothing there. Like, nothing except early-morning sky. Then I realized, that was probably the only place she could look where she wouldn’t see dead guys and burning destruction.

  “Annie?” I said, trying to get her to look at me.

  Slowly, her eyes met mine, but after only a moment, she looked over my shoulder and let out a gasp and a quick yelp.

  Domingo was behind me, and as I spun my head to see him, he laughed.

  I stood up, putting myself between Domingo and Annie, and asked him, “What’s going on?”

  He ignored me and spoke in Spanish to a couple of his men, apparently directing them to come onto The Runner with us.

  Domingo stepped to my left, and I quickly got in front of him, keeping myself between him and Annie. He looked confused for a moment, then smiled and said, “Oh, don’t worry, Alden. You’re safe now.”

  “Huh?” I asked dumbly.

  “I wouldn’t dream of hurting you or Annie now,” he replied.

  “Why? What’s going on?” I asked.

  He ignored me and just walked to the back of the boat, where the police had pried open those two big white containers. The two men who had joined us on The Runner were being handed large plastic crates and setting them down in front of the containers at the back of the boat.

  “What the hell?” I asked again, but didn’t even receive so much as a look in my direction.

  The two men started reaching into the containers and pulling out trays of ingots.

  Goddamn ingots. Have I mentioned that I really hate ingots?

  “Oh, come on,” I said out loud, and Domingo laughed.

  “Si, thanks for the help, Alden,” Domingo said, finally turning to look at me. His two men finished loading their plastic crates and began handing them to men on their own boat. After doing this, they were handed two new plastic crates, and they went below deck toward the seating area on The Runner.

  Now it was just Annie, Domingo, and me left on the deck, but both of the other boats still had plenty of men pointing plenty of guns in my direction.

  “Are you going to kill us?” I asked.

  “No,” Domingo said with a smile. “We’re just going to set you free, Alden.”

  This sounded super sarcastic, and I gave him an equivalently dubious look.

  “No, really,” he continued. “After we’re done taking the ingots off your boat, you and Annie can go your own way, and we’ll be going ours.”

  “Yeah?” I asked, still doubting every word that came out of his mouth.

  “Yes, Alden,” Domingo said, losing his smile and looking very serious for the first time. “Because in an effort to smuggle currency gained through the drug trade into the nation of Colombia, you and your girlfriend just assassinated fifteen federal officers.”

  “What?” I said at the same time Annie asked the same question. I looked over to her and saw that her formerly distant expression was completely gone, and that she was now fully engaged in this insanity.

  “They’ve got your pictures. They know your names, or at least the ones you were using. Clever trick that, by the way,” he said as an aside. “If I had time, I’d ask you about that. But speaking of time, it is growing short. As soon as all of these dead men here don’t check in with their superiors, someone will come looking for them, and do you know what they’ll find?”

  I’m pretty sure the question was rhetorical, so I didn’t say anything.

  “They will find their killers, you and your girlfriend.”

  “Oh no. No way,” I said in shock. Then something else hit me. “Wait, so I paid you two million dollars for the privilege of being your mule and your fall guy?”

  “Indeed you did, my friend,” came Domingo’s reply from his once again smiling face. “But don’t worry. You really didn’t even have all that many ingots on your boat. We have most of them on ours. With you just driving straight into shore like an idiot, no one was even out looking for us.”

  I felt like I was gonna throw up.

  “Why don’t you two do me a favor and hop onto the police boat over there?” Domingo said, motioning for us to move over to the vessel still tied up to The Runner.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because this boat was destroyed in the battle?” he said, gesturing to the boat we were currently standing on.

  “What? Oh, come on.” I groaned.

  “Do it now,” Domingo said in a gruff tone as he pulled a pistol from behind his back and waved it at the two of us.

  I helped Annie up off the deck and got her onto the police boat before following her onto the smaller craft myself.

  Domingo said something to the two men who had been working on The Runner, and they untied our new boat from theirs.

  As Domingo was climbing over the rail of The Runner and back onto his own boat, I called out, “Where should we go?”

  “Nowhere far?” he yelled back.

  With that, the boat he was on fired up its engines, spun almost on a dime, and sped off in the opposite direction. The other boat that had arrived with Domingo sat with their engine idling, waiting for something I couldn’t figure out. As our boat drifted slowly away from The Runner, which still had its Deep Water Mooring system engaged, I saw a man on the other boat bend down, then pick up what looked to be a bazooka.

  “Get down,” I called to Annie and pulled her to the slightly wet floor of the police boat alongside myself.

  BOOM!

  I felt our boat get pushed back from the concussion and looked up to see some debris flying through the air. I wanted to say something, but what was there to say?

  “Fuck,” Annie muttered.

  Yeah. That seemed about right.

  The other boat sped off, leaving us in the wreckage of three vessels. The two police boats were still smoldering, one of them with its back half underwater and the front end sticking up into the air at an angle. Within moments, the rear end of The Runner started to follow suit and looked like it would be getting swallowed up by the sea in no time.

  “What do we do now?” Annie asked.

  “We gotta get out of here,” I replied.

  This boat didn’t have a captain’s area per se like The Runner did, but it did have a steering wheel and a control panel near the back of the boat. I ran back to it and found a big red button, which I hoped would fire up the engine just like it did on the soon-to-be sea floor decoration we’d driven all the way down here from Cuba.

  NO AUTORIZADO flashed up on the screen as soon as I pressed the button.

  NO AUTORIZADO the screen flashed again as I pressed the button one more time. Nothing was happening, and I didn’t need to be fluent to guess that it was trying to tell me I was an unauthorized user.

  Out of frustration more than anything else, I pressed the button one more time, prompting the same message, followed by an ear-piercing siren and a whole bunch of other text that came up on the screen.

  “What did you do?” Annie yelled, trying to be heard over the siren. I couldn’t really hear her, but I knew what she was asking.

  “I think I set off the alarm!” I
hollered back.

  “No shit,” she replied.

  25

  So the police were coming . . . again, and this looked really, really bad. Annie and I put our hands above our heads as four different police boats converged upon us. None of these were as sleek or looked as high-powered as the one we were on or the two that Domingo’s guys had blown up, but the men aboard them with their many rifles trained on Annie and me looked just as, if not more threatening. These guys looked pissed. And why wouldn’t they be? To their eyes, we’d just killed three boats worth of their brothers after a failed attempt at smuggling ingots into their country and were now trying to make our escape on one of their own boats.

  I could see that the men on every boat were screaming at us, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing over the sound of the stupid siren.

  “I can’t hear”—I was screaming at the top of my lungs—“you!” The siren cut off just before I screamed that last word.

  “Blabbidy blah blah blah blah blah blah!”

  Well, I could hear them now, but still couldn’t understand a word.

  “We surrender,” I said to the closest man on the closest boat.

  “Keep your hands up!” a man on a boat directly behind me yelled. “Keep your hands up, get down on your knees, and prepare to be boarded!”

  It felt like deja vu all over again, as one of the boats tied up to the one we were on and three men scrambled over the railing. It looked like it was about to go exactly as it had with Domingo’s men right up until the moment one of the men took two hard steps in my direction and cracked me on the head with the butt of his gun.

  Oh my God, I thought. I had a splitting headache. Maybe I drank way too much of that tequila while Annie and I were on The Runner?

  “Alden?” I heard Annie say.

  “Shut your mouth!” a different voice roared, making my head want to literally split in two.

  I opened my eyes and realized that I was not on The Runner with Annie anymore. I wasn’t on a boat at all.

  “Are you okay?” I heard Annie ask.

  “Shut up!” came that same way-too-loud voice.

  I was sitting on . . . what was this? A bench? The man right across from me was also on a bench, and he was holding a gun right in front of my face. Annie was to my right, and there was another man on another bench right across from her, and, oh no, he had a gun pointed at her face too.

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Quiet!” the man in front of me yelled.

  “Don’t point that gun at—”

  SMACK

  I got hit in the head again, and I felt everything go dark.

  Oh my God, I thought. I must have drunk way too much of that tequila on—No, wait. I’m still on that bench. But damn, why is everything moving around so much?

  I opened my eyes, and instead of also opening my mouth, I decided to stay quiet this time so I could try to assess where I was and what was going on. Taking a moment, I saw that there were two men with guns in front of me and Annie, and we were in the back of some sort of truck. The roads were definitely not very smooth around here, and we were bouncing all over the place like a bunch of popcorn kernels on an old-school hot plate. I felt like I should have been sliding right off of my bench, but my hands were somehow bound together behind my back, and I was attached to the wall of the truck. I looked over to see that Annie was in the same position, and, from what I could see, zip ties bound her wrists, and another tie attached her wrists to a small metal ring on the wall. I wriggled my fingers behind my own back and confirmed the same setup was being used on me. My head was throbbing, and I didn’t feel like I was thinking very straight, but still, there was this tiny little part of my brain that told me if I wanted to snap a zip tie, I’d need to focus all my torque on the little spot where the head of the feeder unit turned into the flat portion of the tie and twist it back and forth for as long as it took to make it snap.

  That was interesting. Apparently, another little gift from Frank.

  I didn’t know much at the moment, but looking at the two men with guns in front of me and Annie, I decided to take action and begin following the advice of that unbidden thought.

  “What’s going on?” I asked the man in front of me as I pulled the zip ties behind me even tighter, so I could maximize the torque and begin working at snapping them.

  “What do you think normally happens after you kill fifteen policia?” the man in front of me asked with a sneer.

  “But I didn’t—” I started to say but had to jerk my head back because the man looked like he was about to smash me with his gun again.

  “Blah blah blah blah blah,” the man opposite Annie said to the guy in front of me, who laughed in reply.

  “I want a lawyer,” I said.

  The man in front of me apparently translated that to the man next to him, and the two of them began to laugh heartily.

  I don’t even know why I said that. I think I have watched way too many crime dramas, and my dizzy brain apparently thought that was the right thing to say when you found yourself being accused of a crime you didn’t commit. I tried to shake off the cobwebs and switch tactics. “I’ve got money,” I said, looking at each of them in turn.

  The one in front of Annie apparently knew the word “money” and looked like he was actually considering it, but then shook his head.

  “Not enough,” the man in front of me said.

  “I have enough to make the two of you rich,” I said, seeing a faint glimmer of a possibility of hope.

  “No para todos,” the man in front of Annie said.

  “Not for everyone,” the man in front of me translated.

  “Everyone? Everyone who?” I asked.

  The man in front of me pointed to his badge.

  “Wait,” I said, alarm bells starting to go off in my head as I continued working at my zip ties. “Where are you taking us?”

  “To die,” the man in front of Annie said in very heavily accented English.

  “Oh no.” Annie gasped as her head sagged, and I saw her eyes fill with tears.

  “We didn’t even do anything,” she said quietly. “It’s all been one misunderstanding after—”

  “Shut up!” the man in front of me screamed.

  Annie continued to sob quietly as I noticed the road we were traveling on got considerably bumpier.

  This new road was so bad that I decided it probably wasn’t a road at all. They were driving us off to some remote location, where they were probably going to shoot us and chuck our bodies into a shallow ditch. I needed to do something, now.

  I’d been twisting and torquing the zip tie for quite some time, and I determined that the only way I was going to be able to break these restraints in a hurry was with some blunt outward force. If the ties were in front of me, I somehow knew that I could chicken wing my arms and punch myself in the stomach to break the ties right at their locking mechanism. Behind my back, though, this was going to be tricky. As the truck bounced up and down, I exaggerated the motion of the truck in order to begin yanking harder against my bonds. It wasn’t working.

  “Blah blah blah blah,” the man in front of me was saying to the man next to him.

  Annie was still sobbing, but I knew if I tried to console her or say anything to her at all I’d just end up on the receiving end of another pistol-whipping, and I needed to be conscious, if I wanted to have any hope of getting Annie out of this alive.

  The truck hit a particularly large divot, and I yanked down with all my might against the ties.

  “Hey,” the man in front of me said.

  The ties were insanely tight now. They were biting hard into my skin, and I could feel warm blood dripping on my wrists.

  “Hey,” the man said again, as I gave them one more jerk that wasn’t timed out with any particular motion of the truck.

  He flipped his gun around and pulled his arm back to crack me on the noggin just as the truck hit another huge divot in the road.

  I yelled and pulled with al
l my might just as his arm was coming forward. The ties snapped, and I reached in front of me with my right hand and snatched the pistol right out of the man’s grasp. His eyes went wide, and I instinctually flipped off the safety with my thumb. Annie called my name, and my mind began a war within itself that took place all in an instant.

  The first thing that happened was I realized that my brain was screaming for me to point the gun at the head of the man in front of me and pull the trigger. “Neutralize the threat” was a phrase that was figuratively flashing red in my mind. I ignored it, though, pointed the gun down, and shot the man in the knee. In the instant after I pulled the trigger, I reached across my own body with my left hand to push against the gun arm of the man who was taking point-blank aim at Annie’s head. I connected with his wrist just an instant before he squeezed the trigger. The shot went wild off to Annie’s and my right. Annie screamed, and I fired my weapon for a second time, this round hitting the knee of the man in front of Annie. He began doubling over in pain, and as he did, I grabbed his right wrist with my left hand, being careful to keep his gun pointed skyward, until I bent his wrist back far enough to cause it to break, which, of course, made him drop the gun.

  “Alden!” Annie was screaming.

  “I’m sorry!” I yelled to the man in front of me as I picked up the gun the other man had just dropped and put it in my back pocket. “I’m so, so sorry!”

  I hadn’t wanted to do any of that. I didn’t want to shoot anyone. As thankful as I was that Frank had stuck some skills in my head about being able to break the zip ties, I was mortified that I’d also been loaded up with these type of combat skills that were coming out during this horrible situation.

  “Oh my God!” I yelled. “How do you say I’m sorry in Spanish?” I asked the man in front of me, who had fallen to the floor of the truck and was holding his knee with both hands.

  “Chin guh tay!” he yelled at me . . . or something like that.

  I turned to the second man I’d shot and said the phrase back to him.

  “Chin guh tay. I’m so sorry. Chin guh tay. Chin guh tay.”

  “Chin guh tay!” the second man roared back at me as he sat on the bench, trying to hold onto his knee with his one working hand.