Nightfall

by Jessica Meigs

  “Get his arms out of the way,” Chambers ordered. “And get a gag into his mouth. There’s no sense in disturbing the neighbors.” There was a rustle of fabric, and then Chambers tossed his suit coat onto the end of the table furthest from Zachariah.

  Zachariah’s heart stuttered in his chest at Chambers’ words, made even worse when one of the men crammed a dirty rag into his mouth and secured it there with duct tape. Then his hands were freed, and he nearly came off the table as his first chance at freedom was presented to him, but he didn’t make it more than a few inches off the table before he was slammed back down again. Beefy hands wrapped around his wrists, pulling, stretching his arms out above his head. The sound of ripping fabric and the brush of cool, damp air against his bare back heralded the loss of his t-shirt.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to tell me who you work for and why they sent you here?” Chambers asked again. It was a cruel question. Even if he’d wanted to, even if he’d been willing to betray the Agency, he wouldn’t have been able to answer, not with the gag duct taped into his mouth. “No? Pity,” Chambers said, and then he disappeared from Zachariah’s sight.

  Zachariah dragged a breath in through his nose, trying to breathe through the blood still oozing from it, and steeled himself for whatever was to come.

  Nothing prepared him for the sharp, biting pain of the whip that cracked across his bare back. He bucked off the table, trying instinctively to get away from the pain, but the hands wrapped around his wrists tightened, preventing any escape.

  With the second blow, he began to scream.

  Eleven

  Ashton had spent two days studying the little bit of surveillance material that Henry had given him, quickly realizing that the vast majority of it had come from Zachariah himself. Then he’d spent two more days on the ground in Bolivia, dipping deep into his personal bank accounts to pay off anyone who would talk for information before he’d managed to narrow down the neighborhood the cartel used for some of their illicit activities.

  Now he saw in an abandoned flat across from a borderline hovel, drinking from a bottle of water as he watched the activity on the other side of the narrow dirt road through the edge of the shabby curtains that hung in the window. The notepad resting on his knee was already half full of observations, thanks to the surprising amount of activity in and around the house. Three hours before, a sleek black SUV that was dramatically out of place in that neighborhood had stopped in front of the house and disgorged three men, one very well dressed and the other two obviously his bodyguards. The three men had disappeared into the house, and Ashton hadn’t seen them since.

  He wondered not for the first time how accurate his information had been. The man who’d told him about this place had been a bartender in a shithole about a quarter of a mile east of where Ashton now sat, and he’d insisted that this house was one of the places where the cartel typically brought people who gave them trouble. It wouldn’t have been beyond reason to assume that this was where Zachariah had been brought to when his cover had been blown.

  Assuming Zachariah was even still alive.

  Ashton shook his head at the thought and forced himself to refocus on the task at hand. The hovel’s front door had opened, and one of the bodyguards had stepped out, quickly followed by the second. They walked outside and circled the SUV, as if checking for anything out of the ordinary, and conferred with the two men hanging out near the front of the building—confirming what Ashton had begun to suspect, that they were cartel members in disguise. He jotted their descriptions onto his notepad in shorthand and watched as the man they guarded emerged from the hovel, his suit jacket off and slung over his shoulder, his salt-and-pepper hair still immaculately combed. His dress shirt was flecked with blood, the sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He looked familiar to Ashton, but he couldn’t put his finger on why, not with half the man’s features blocked by the sunglasses he wore.

  Ashton narrowed his eyes and sat forward on the rickety chair he’d already spent hours sitting on. He was at least ninety percent certain that the man hadn’t had blood on him when he’d gone inside the building. Which meant that, even if it wasn’t Zachariah, someone was being held in that house against his or her will.

  He wasn’t supposed to get involved. By Agency rules, he wasn’t even supposed to be there. He was supposed to leave as small of a footprint as possible in Bolivia. He was metaphorically a ghost, in and out without being seen.

  But if someone was being held prisoner in there, whether it was Zachariah or not, then he couldn’t stay uninvolved.

  Ashton watched as the man and his two bodyguards climbed back into the SUV and as it pulled away. Then he rose from his chair and started to gather his weapons and formulate a plan. As he did so, he unclipped his satellite phone from his belt and dialed Henry’s number to check in. As it connected and rang through to the handler’s cell phone, Ashton pinned the phone between his ear and shoulder and started loading bullets into a spare ammunition magazine.

  “You have five seconds to tell me how you got this number,” Henry’s voice said in his ear.

  “You gave it to me,” Ashton said, snapping another bullet into the magazine.

  “Ashton?”

  “Nope, it’s Santa Claus,” Ashton said. “I thought I’d call and tell you you’re getting coal again this year. Just so you’re not surprised when you open up your stocking.”

  “Ashton…”

  He sighed. “I thought I’d call and let you know I’m still alive.”

  “Well, that’s always a relief.” There was the sound of a door closing on the other end of the line, then Henry asked, “How is it going on your, ah, downtime?”

  “I made it here,” Ashton said. He ejected the magazine from his pistol and set it aside, popped the chambered round out, and started disassembling the weapon to clean it. “I also believe I may have located where Zach is being held.”

  “May have?” Henry repeated.

  “Well, I haven’t seen him with my own eyes,” he admitted. He flipped open his gun cleaning kit and started removing items from inside, lining them up on the table.

  “Ashton, for the love of God, please don’t start a one-man war in Bolivia,” Henry said with a sigh.

  “I’m not,” Ashton bit back, barely concealing his irritation. “I’m just doing a basic extraction. If any of the cartel assholes gets killed in the process, well, it won’t hurt my feelings. I’m sure the world will be a hell of a lot better without them in it.”

  “That’s not for you to decide, Ash.”

  “Don’t call me Ash.” He finished his cursory cleaning of his pistol—redundant, really, as he’d already cleaned it once today—and started to reassemble the weapon. “Look, there’s a pretty good chance that Zachariah is in that building, and the little I’ve seen suggests there’s a damn good chance he’s still alive in there. I can’t leave or move on until I know for sure.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line as Ashton snapped the final piece of the pistol into place and scooped up one of the two magazines on the table. Finally, Henry sighed and said, “Look, Ashton, just…keep the bloodshed to a minimum, would you?”

  “Always, Henry,” Ashton said. He slammed the magazine into the pistol’s grip and chambered a round. “I don’t like cleaning bloodstains out of my clothes.”

  * * *

  When Zachariah finally came to, hours after the beating he’d taken at Nathan Chambers’ hands, he found himself in a heap on the floor, covered in blood, hurting like hell, but alive. He wasn’t sure if the last one was a blessing or not.

  But what was a blessing was the fact they’d dumped him onto the floor and left him unbound.

  Zachariah tried to sit up but aborted the action halfway into it when a stabbing pain ripped through his wounded back. He could feel blood still oozing from the lashes, trickling down his skin, and he was reasonably sure that the wounds were caked with dirt from lying on the earthen floor. The filthy rag that had been used
to gag him was near his right hand, and the shredded remains of his shirt were on the floor by the bloodstained workbench. The bare lightbulb over the table swung slowly, its sickly yellow glow doing nothing to improve the appearance of the cellar. The sight of his own blood on the table sent a wave of nausea through him. He rolled onto his side and vomited into the dirt.

  After the sickness had passed, Zachariah lay there, shivering and panting, trying to ignore the foul taste in his mouth and clear his head. It was hard to do past all the pain. He gently smoothed a hand over his side, down his abdomen, trying to assess his injuries. His ribs were most definitely cracked, maybe even one or two broken, judging by the pain he felt every time he took in a breath. Cuts and scrapes marred his entire torso, and he didn’t even want to imagine what his back looked like.

  His fingers brushed against the waistband of his jeans, still unfastened, and it took everything in him to not roll back over and throw up again.

  Chambers hadn’t been kidding when he’d said that he was going to make things difficult for him. The three men had been downright cruel, Chambers taking sadistic pleasure in inflicting pain on him, in making him scream. And he had most certainly screamed. He’d screamed until his throat was raw and his voice hoarse, and then he’d kept screaming until he couldn’t manage anything above a whisper.

  It hadn’t stopped until Chambers had gotten what he’d wanted out of Zachariah. And then Zachariah had prayed for death, had prayed that Chambers would kill him, so he could escape both the pain he’d endured and the shame he’d felt for spilling his guts.

  But no, Chambers hadn’t even granted him that small mercy. Instead, he’d continued on, more pissed off than ever before, until Zachariah had lost consciousness. Then he’d been dumped on the floor, discarded like a pile of trash.

  Zachariah braced his hands against the dirt floor and pushed himself up on trembling arms, sitting sideways against his hip and trying to find the strength to sit up the rest of the way. He wanted to lay down so badly it hurt all the way down to his bones, but he couldn’t. He had to be ready for when those bastards came back. He wanted to go down fighting, not lying on the floor like a whipped dog.

  He hoped, though, that that wouldn’t end up being necessary. The Agency’s extraction team had to be coming for him any day—any hour, any minute—now. They had to. He didn’t have the strength to get out on his own. He didn’t want to die down there in some dark, damp hole of a cellar. It was too much like dying in his own grave.

  Zachariah shunted those thoughts—and the despair they caused him—to the side and tried to focus. If he had to fight, he’d need a weapon. The cellar was bare, save for the workbench and the rickety wooden chair he’d spent three weeks tied to. He hobbled toward it, moving with the speed and grace of a decrepit old man; when he finally reached it after several long, agonizing moments, he dropped to his knees, ignoring the jolts of pain in his joints at the action. What was a little more pain added to what he was already feeling? He studied the chair, looking for a way to take it apart, but it was no use; he simply didn’t have the physical strength anymore to do it.

  He eased back against his heels, tears of frustration welling up in his eyes. He wiped them away angrily with the back of his dirty hand. He was twenty-five years old, a grown man. He refused to cry there in the dark. He refused to show any weakness that could be used against him.

  He wanted Ashton. It was a childish thought, born of hope and infatuation and a single night of semi-spontaneous, tipsy sex in a hotel room. There was literally no hope of him being on the extraction team; there were specialized teams for that, people trained in certain tactics, and level tens were almost never sent out with them. Ashton probably didn’t even know he was missing.

  The sound of a key in the lock above him brought his attention back to his surroundings. “Oh, Jesus,” he whispered hoarsely before he could stop himself. He slunk back behind the chair, hands curling around the wood, ready to use it as whatever flimsy protection he could muster.

  The door creaked open, and a man—not Nathan Chambers—called down in Spanish, “Oh, little American boy! We brought you someone to play with!” Raucous laughter echoed down from above, then what sounded like a dog’s long toenails clicked on hardwood. The stairs groaned under the weight of something heavy. Then the door slammed closed once again.

  Something was breathing heavily in the vicinity of the stairs, a sound that made the fine hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He squinted into the darkness up the staircase, trying to see what horrible fate awaited him. Whatever it was, it had begun to descend the stairs, and he tensed as a massive form came into view.

  He barely suppressed a gasp of alarm as the largest wolf he’d ever seen stepped off the stairs and looked right at him.

  Then it charged, its teeth bared in the dim light, heading right for his throat.

  Twelve

  Ashton waited until night had fallen before he made his move. The dirt street outside was quiet, lit only by the full moon high above, and from his spot between the building he’d been watching from and its neighbor, he could see the two outdoor guards still loitering outside, trying to act casual and blend in like they belonged there. In the house, through the dirty windows, Ashton could make out shadows; his count put the men inside at six. He could handle eight men with no problem. For a level ten field operative, that was a cakewalk.

  There would, however, have to be bloodshed, despite what he’d said to Henry.

  Ashton had spent part of the evening gathering supplies, including a beater of a car that he’d parked at the opposite end of the alley. He didn’t know what condition Zachariah would be in, and he had thought it reasonable that he should take precautions in case he was bad off. Now he was reasonably sure he was ready to metaphorically charge the enemy castle and save his fellow agent.

  It was time to begin.

  Ashton tugged his mask down over his face and eased to the end of the alley, aiming his pistol. Two shots, muffled by the silencer on the end of the weapon, were all it took to drop both of the men playing lookout. Before the second man had even finished dropping to the ground, Ashton was moving, rushing to the front entrance. He pressed against the wall beside the door, listening carefully for any sign that he’d been heard. When nothing was forthcoming, he grasped the doorknob, easing the door open a fraction, just enough so that he could see inside. A swift headcount revealed that all were accounted for. With a short nod to himself, he flung the door open the rest of the way and aimed around the doorframe. He fired his bullets in rapid succession, taking out all but one of the cartel members inside. The man, though wounded, yelled something in Spanish that Ashton didn’t understand. He’d lost count of his shots, so he ejected the partially empty magazine, pocketed it, and replaced it with a full one. Once the pistol was reloaded and a round chambered, Ashton circled the doorframe and fired a single shot. The yelling man fell back, a bullet hole in his forehead, the cell phone he’d been shouting into tumbling to the floor.

  Ashton strode forward, sweeping the room as he moved. When he reached the phone, he brought his heel down onto it, shattering it with a crunch of glass, metal, and plastic.

  “Child’s play,” he whispered.

  With the entry room cleared, Ashton moved deeper into the house, searching and clearing the rest of the rooms, hoping he’d find Zachariah in one of the small bedrooms. But when the last room he checked turned out to be empty, Ashton felt a surge of despair well up in him, an emotion that surprised him with its intensity. He’d genuinely hoped he’d find Zachariah in the house, that he’d be able to drag him out of whatever mess he had gotten himself into, but he’d obviously played his cards wrong. By the time he backed out of this and managed to track down where Zachariah was actually being held, the younger man would probably be dead.

  The thought had barely crossed his mind when his ears registered what sounded like a fight somewhere below him. Frowning, Ashton started searching for a door leading to a basement or an
underground level. He made two passes through the ground-floor level before he spotted the narrow wooden door in the kitchen, held shut by a padlock. As a crash sounded below, he raced to the door and began to frantically try to figure out how to get in.

  * * *

  As the large gray-and-black wolf lunged at him, Zachariah grabbed the chair in front of him and lurched to his feet, staggering backward with the chair in his hands like a lion-tamer at a circus. His movement threw off the wolf’s aim, and its teeth sank into the chair with a crunch of splintering wood. The force of the animal’s weight at the impact sent Zachariah back into the wall, slamming his already bruised and battered body against the dirt and knocking what air he had in his lungs right out of them. Struggling to stay on his feet and keep his grip on the remains of the chair, he tried to breathe as he stumbled sideways, seeking cover from his attacker.

  But there was no place to go, he quickly realized. He was trapped in a cellar with a wolf, of all things. There would be nothing resembling a dignified death for him. Instead, it would be agonizing, painful, and he’d be fully aware of every moment of it as the beast’s razor-sharp teeth tore into him.

  The wolf lunged at him again. He gasped and blocked the attack with the chair; more of the chair splintered away, leaving him with just the backing. Part of it was jagged where the end of it had broken free. With a surge of adrenaline, he tore away the excess with his bare hands, creating a makeshift stake to try to protect himself with. Wielding it like a sword, he backed away from the animal, watching as it paced back and forth before him, prowling, likely preparing for its next attack. Zachariah sized it up in return, knowing that he’d only get one shot to save his own life; if he missed it the first time, he wouldn’t get another chance to try again.