“Thank you,” I said. I couldn’t help warming up to him some more. I got near him, gazed straight into his eyes and kissed him again, a long, warm and wet kiss, until I felt that he was getting a bit too excited, and then I pulled back. “Don’t forget your gun,” I said, and went for the door.
CHAPTER 18
If the innkeeper was surprised to see me, the declared cripple, walking lightly out of the elevator, she didn’t show it. I’ve said it before: these Swiss people are weird, and sometimes you think you’re talking to a robot, as far as facial expressions are concerned. It didn’t really matter what she thought, though, since I wasn’t planning on coming back. We passed through reception with a light “good day,” and then scuttled to the car outside.
Conversation in the car was limited to directions that I gave Tom from time to time. I had to concentrate and get ready for when we reached the chalet. I needed to make sure that I would be able to get into the thugs’ heads, and it took me some time until I reached the first thug, the one I had named “Ugly.” The other one I named “Uglier” for distinction. Ugly was sitting at a kitchen table, drinking cheap wine that made me grimace at the taste. He was talking in a guttural language with the uglier thug, and that helped me to visualize him too. I decided on an experiment: instead of disconnecting from Thug no. 1 and then making connection with the other, as I had done until then when I wanted to switch targets, I opened my mind to Thug no. 2 without disconnecting from Thug no. 1 and found myself inside his head. This kind of head hopping can be a bit disconcerting at first, because you find yourself looking at the person in whose head you were a split second before, without experiencing any noticeable transition, but I tried that a few times until it came more naturally to me. When I was confident that I would be able to jump quickly into the thugs’ heads, I looked for Mary. She was still taped to the chair, and Vlad was still lying at her feet, motionless. I sensed how scared she was and felt pity for her. I debated whether to reassure her, but decided against it. I could have taken control of her voice and spoken to her, but that was likely to spook her even more.
I lay back in the passenger’s seat and gazed at Tom. He was driving in silence, with a faint smile on his face, as if we were about to go flower picking. “I’m ready,” I said. I touched his arm reassuringly, although it was obvious that he didn’t need reassuring.
He smiled a broader smile and instinctively touched the gun that he now kept in a holster clipped to his belt. “So am I,” he said, without taking his eyes off the road.
We had left the car behind the chalet, where the road was a little lower than the building’s level, so it wasn’t exposed to view from the chalet’s windows. Now we stood beside the door, debating what to do.
“We can’t just ring the bell,” Tom said. He had assumed a purposeful expression that gave me confidence he would be up to whatever happened. Apparently, he was in his element, walking into something that was likely to develop into a shootout.
“Of course not. Let me see what’s going on in there.” I perched against the whitewashed wall of the chalet and closed my eyes to concentrate. Uglier, the larger of the two thugs, was easier for me to locate, and in a few seconds I was seeing through his eyes. “They’re walking down the stairs to the basement. God knows what they plan to do to Mary. We must hurry,” I whispered.
Without wasting any time, Tom turned toward the side of the chalet and motioned to me to follow. A window opening into the kitchen was ajar and Tom pushed it lightly. It’s lucky that the Swiss are so trusting that they don’t put bars on their windows. Tom climbed in before me, gun in hand, and covered the room with it while I followed. In no time, we were standing at the top of the stairs leading to the basement.
“Wait!” I said. “Let me see what’s going on down there.”
I located Uglier and what I saw through his eyes scared me. His companion was standing before Mary, a whacking big knife in his hand. “I’ll count to five before this little blade starts working on you. Where is the dossier that Vlad gave you? Who did you give it to? If you have anything to say, say it now and spare yourself the pain. You’ll tell me, in the end, you know that.”
“I … I don’t know anything. Vlad didn’t give me any dossier, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I told you, please …” Mary pleaded desperately.
“Don’t say I haven’t warned you,” said Ugly, with a twisted, evil smile, which showed how much he was enjoying it.
There was no time to think, plan, or discuss. I acted instinctively. Taking possession of Uglier’s muscles, I made him take a step forward, and with his right fist I landed a mighty blow on his companion’s jaw. Ugly took a staggering step back. He gaped at his companion with an incredulous expression on his face. “What? … Why?” he managed to say. Uglier’s thoughts were in shambles, and he was nowhere near able to formulate a coherent one. He tried to speak, but I didn’t let him and the most he was able to produce was a whining, guttural sound.
I opened my eyes for a second and gazed at Tom. “Quick!” I said. He didn’t need much explaining and immediately charged down the stairs and into the basement. I followed and parked myself at the door, ready to help, if needed. The two thugs stared at us, completely astonished.
“Hands up!” Tom barked. His size and gun were apparently convincing enough, because Ugly dropped his knife, and both thugs raised their hands up high. “To the corner of the room, on your knees, move!” Tom ordered, and they obeyed without giving him any backchat.
“Keep an eye on them,” I said. I picked up the knife and used it to free Mary from the duct tape. She was in shock and for a moment didn’t speak.
“Who are you?” she asked at last.
“We are friends,” I said, as if that wasn’t obvious already. “What’s the deal with Vlad?” I asked, pointing at Vlad’s body on the floor.
“I don’t know. He is breathing but hasn’t come around for quite a long time. But hey! How do you know his name?”
“I know a lot. About him and about you, too. I’ll explain later. Do we need him, or we leave him here?” I said, pointing at Vlad.
“The hell we leave him here. He’s valuable, and he goes where I go,” Mary said, speaking quietly, but not quite able to hide some emotion.
I kneeled beside Vlad and cut the cords that were binding his hands and feet.
“All right, then. Tom, the gentleman is not in walking condition, so you’ll have to carry him. The problem is that we have these two idiots to deal with.”
“Give me the gun,” Mary ordered. Tom took a step back, making sure to keep the thugs all the time covered with the gun. He gazed at me, and when I nodded in assent, he handed the gun to Mary. The Uglies kept silent and wide-eyed, as if waiting to see if Mary would shoot them. “I’d shoot them,” Mary said, as if reading their thoughts, “but they may come in handy, so I won’t, for now. There is duct tape over there in that drawer. Bind them so they are uncomfortable and make sure not to get in the line of fire while you do it.”
She didn’t have to tell Tom twice. In five minutes, the two thugs were bound and gagged, lying uncomfortably on their sides on the floor. We left, locking the door behind us and took the key with us for good measure.
“We need to find my purse. It must be somewhere around here, and then we may go,” said Mary.
“I believe I saw it in the kitchen, Undersecretary Payne,” said Tom. He was carrying Vlad on his left shoulder as if he had no weight at all.
Mary stopped in her tracks and gazed at him at length. “Have we met before?” she asked him.
“Of course. We were together all morning,” said Tom. He looked perplexed, and who could blame him.
“I don’t think so. I’ve never seen you in my life and I spent my morning tied to a chair … or at least, that’s all I can remember. I’ll have to make sense of all this, at some point.”
“I’ll help you out with that,” I said, “but first we need to find a safe place to sit down and talk. We can’t st
ay here, and finding a good place to go to may be a problem, seeing that we can’t go around with Vlad on Tom’s shoulder. We have wheels, by the way.”
“Agreed. Oh, here’s my purse,” said Mary. She opened it and peered inside. “The keys to my Zurich safe house are here and that’s where we go.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “The danger to us is not only from the outside. There is danger from our own people. Nobody can know where we are.”
“Listen, girl, I’m not stupid. Nobody who doesn’t need to know has a clue that this safe house even exists.”
“Good,” I said. “And the name is Tessa, not ‘girl’.”
I mean, WTF. I had just saved her ass and she was already patronizing me! I stood beside her and planted a piercing gaze in her eyes. She gazed back for perhaps thirty seconds.
“I like you,” she said at last and kept on walking.
But not for long. The exit was blocked. We stood facing three men, one fat and red-faced, another thin and pale, and the third about average in everything. Each one of them held a whacking big automatic gun in his hands, pointed at us.
CHAPTER 19
I had never seen any of those men, but Mary seemed to know the red-faced one.
“Well, well, well, look who’s here,” said Red-Faced, smirking. “Mary Payne in person. Well, well, well.”
Mary stared at him but didn’t speak. He nodded to the others, and they pushed us at gun point into the living room, where they made us sit on the floor and then tied our hands behind our backs using the cords they ripped from the curtains. They made it tight, and it hurt. Tom had unloaded Vlad unto the couch, but they pushed him down to the floor. They hadn’t bothered tying him up, and he lay there, motionless. Interestingly, they didn’t inquire after Ugly or Uglier.
From time to time, Red-Faced went to the window, pushed the curtain aside, and gazed out. They didn’t speak to us or to one another. At last, Mary spoke.
“Victor!” she called, and Red-Face turned away from the window and said “What?”
“What do you want? Why are you here?”
“You know better than to ask questions,” said Victor.
“I didn’t know that you were involved in this. What are you going to do with us?”
“It’s not for me to decide. When the boss comes, we’ll know. But honestly, I wouldn’t make long-term plans, if I were you,” he said, again with an ugly smirk that sent a shiver along my spine. Then, he returned to his window watching.
I closed my eyes and probed Mary’s mind. She knew this Victor, but hadn’t expected him to be there. He belonged to a private organization that was obviously working for a third party, who had an interest in Vlad. Apparently Vlad was hot merchandize, and not on account of his looks. The thought that Mary was having on all this were too complex, and frankly not sufficiently interesting for me to follow. What I really needed to find out was how real the danger to us was. According to Mary, we were done for. Victor was a killer, and the images that ran in her head went from us slaughtered one by one with a blunt knife, to a liquidation mob style, with a bullet in our heads. Not a pretty picture either way.
Tom stirred and gazed in my direction. “You should do what you did to me,” he murmured conspiratorially.
“Quiet! No talking!” Victor barked.
I knew what he meant, and he was right. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I was our only hope to survive. If Mary was right, we probably didn’t have much time. I closed my eyes and got into the head of the slim guy. I don’t know why he came more naturally to me than trying with Victor. His mind was sort of blank and uninteresting. He was following a beetle that walked slowly along the window sill, and it appeared to absorb all his attention. A perfect subject for me, but I had to get it right the first time because there would not be a second chance. I took control of his body—I was still amazed at the ease with which I could do it, but that wasn’t the right time for introspection. I gazed down at the machine gun he was holding in his hands, and, judging by the little red dot near the safety catch, it was ready to fire. I made him walk slowly toward us, and then he turned toward his partners. The terror in the mind of the slim guy was the worst thing that I had ever experienced, but I didn’t have the time to dwell on it. I lifted the gun so it pointed in the direction of the other two.
“Hey, idiot! Be careful with that gun, it’s loaded!” Victor yelled.
I must confess that doing what I did was the most difficult thing that I had to do in my life, at least until then. Up to that moment, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to pull the trigger and didn’t know what I would do if I couldn’t bring myself to pull it. I had trained with guns in basic training, but then I had aimed at “cardboard dudes”. These here were real people and, to keep going, I had to remind myself how bad they were, and that unless I did it, we would end up like those images in Mary’s mind.
The slim guy tried to resist but didn’t stand a chance. Slowly, making sure that the gun was still pointed in the right direction, I made him pull the trigger, letting out a burst of bullets and at the same time making a sweeping motion from left to right. It hit Victor and the other one several times, and they dropped to the floor, an expression of disbelief on their faces.
I made the slim guy throw the gun to the floor and then approach Tom.
“I’ll make him untie you,” I said without opening my eyes.
“Great job!” Mary exclaimed. “I need to learn how you do that.”
I had to give it to her: if she was unfazed by what she had just witnessed, she had to be something special. Everybody else would have freaked out on the spot.
“It was you, right? You made it happen …” she asked.
I made a dismissive motion with my head and didn’t answer. I needed to concentrate. Through the slim guy’s eyes, I saw the knots that held Tom’s hands together and forced him to fumble with them until they finally came lose, and Tom was able to finish untying himself. He got to his feet, retrieved Victor’s gun, which had landed behind the couch when the bullets hitting his body had jerked it out of his hands. Tom stood there, facing the slim guy, with his finger on the trigger, looking undecided, as if he was waiting for something to happen. I worried that Tom might shoot him while I was still controlling his body. I didn’t know what would happen to me, and perhaps I wouldn’t be able to get out in time. I also didn’t want to find out how it feels to die, or whether the physical effect would transfer to my body, as had happened with Liv’s knee, and then I might die too.
Keeping control of somebody else and speaking through my own mouth at the same time is incredibly difficult, so I just spurted, “I’m gonna let go of him,” and then I did. “I’m out,” I said, and without hesitation Tom leveled the gun and shot him in the chest. The slim guy dropped to the floor, and Tom rushed to untie me and then Mary. She got up, took a sweeping look around the room, which now looked like a slaughterhouse, and then remained in silence for a few seconds.
“Guys,” she said, “I don’t know who you are, but I want you on my side. You’ll have quite some explaining to do, to make me understand, when we have a moment to breathe, but for the time being, let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Good idea,” I agreed. “How’s Vlad? He wasn’t hit, I think.”
“No, he’s okay,” said Tom, and, without any apparent effort, he lifted him up again over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
“Don’t you want to wait and see who their boss is?” I asked. “And why do you figure they never worried about the two Uglies in the basement? And what will happen when someone reports to the authorities what happened here?”
Mary stopped massaging her wrists, which she had been doing until then, and pouted her lips.
“One question at a time, okay? First of all, I know who Victor’s boss is. He’s a mercenary who used to work for a certain agency, not one of the good guys, and I want no part of him. So no, we shouldn’t wait for him. You are better off not knowing more about him and about those
pieces of meat that we left on the floor. The ones in the basement come from Vlad’s side and the others are independent. Different parties.”
Mary was holding her purse while speaking, and that reminded me of something.
“Wait a second. What would a small, green cylinder with a screw-on cap be?” I asked.
“Why are you asking?”
“There is one in your purse. Look inside.”
Mary fished in the purse, and her hand came out holding the green cylinder.
“How on earth did this get in here?” she cried, clearly surprised.
“Your secretary, Jason, gave it to you … or at least he thought he was giving it to you. Long story.”
“Jason is priceless. This solves my dilemma about what to do with those two. The gas inside this cylinder is a neat little thing based on an amnesia-inducing drug. If you are exposed to it, gone are your memories of the last 24 hours or so. All you have to do is unscrew the cap and get away in ten seconds before it discharges the gas, and bang!
“This is rich. When the police eventually gets here, they’ll find three goons who appear to have had a fight and killed one another, and two clueless foreigners bound and gagged in the basement. They’ll have a nice puzzle on their hands,” she said, now smiling with satisfaction. “Give me the key to the basement, and I’ll do that in a minute.”
She left, and we waited, with me trying not to look at the dead goons until she returned. “Done,” she said, and without further discussion we walked out.
CHAPTER 20
The house in Thalwil, just outside Zurich, was located in an elegant neighborhood, set apart from neighboring houses. It was ideal as a safe house since it had its own private parking garage with a connecting door, through which we took Vlad inside. The house had obviously been closed for some time, and the air inside was stuffy, so I hurried to open up windows to let some fresh air in. Mary guided us to a room with a single bed, on which Tom lay Vlad, and, for the first time, we had the opportunity to take a good look at him.
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