“I didn’t ask you to.”
“This is a bad idea, Roo,” she said softly. “A very bad idea. I have to leave.”
Roo gripped the edge of the table and leaned forward. “They killed Delroy,” he hissed. “They killed him.”
“You need to keep your distance and gather evidence. When you go after him, it needs to be with people backing you up. In large force. Because this man is dangerous.”
Roo threw the platter and bottle into the sink. The crash of broken glass was a release from the quivering feeling he had of energy building up everywhere inside him with nowhere to direct it. “There’s no one behind me, Kit. There’s just me. I’m all that’s left. Surely you know the feeling?”
He looked back over his shoulder at her. She swallowed and looked away from him. Her voice cracked. “I know you’re hurting, we’re on the same mission, Roo. But you can’t charge in there. Please believe me.”
“And what has stepping softly around these people gotten any of us?” Roo asked. “We’re going to be careful, because, what? He is rich? Powerful? Has friends in high places? Because doing this can hurt us? I’m already hurt. I’ve already been broken.”
“Roo…”
“I don’t have time. I ran from St. Thomas, that will have repercussions. I’m no longer protected by the CIG. I have no family. I’m all there is. This is all I have.”
And saying that out loud left him feeling hollow inside.
18
Aves’s skyline glittered in the night. Roo tugged at his tux and grimaced. He’d last worn it a few years ago, and despite the weekly training, long swims, the pull-ups off the davits on the back of his boat, it still didn’t quite fit right.
He wondered if anyone noticed, and then decided to shrug it off. Focusing on it would only bring attention.
“A drink, sir?” one of the attendants asked. Her overly short cocktail dress revealed rather muscular legs. A sprinter? Roo wondered. She held up a tray of delicate glasses and looked artificially chipper.
Roo stared at the tray for a moment.
“I have a Château Margaux…” she started to say.
“Is there any beer?” Roo asked. “Carib? Red Stripe?”
“No.”
In last year’s videos there’d been a temporary bar over at the corner. “Rum,” Roo said.
“We have a wide selection…”
“Mount Gay Extra Old,” Roo said. “No ice.”
The rich, amber rum was easy to sip. The familiar semi-sweet of a good sipping rum with some fruity undertones and oak took the edge off as Roo began to circulate. The party was ostensibly a benefit. An eye-watering per-plate fee covered the overly pretentious finger foods, vat-grown steaks, and locally sourced vertical-farm grilled vegetables cooked by a chef flown in just for the occasional. Whatever was left over would be donated to a charity to help rebuilding efforts.
Mainly, Roo thought, it was a chance for the upper crust to enjoy the fact that they remained untouched by the storms.
He’d paid the donation via an offshore account, forwarded his picture and a false identity, and shown up in the gaggle of well-dressed partygoers down in the lobby.
Security guards and black-suited attendants guided them up into elevators that took them up to the roof, one load at a time.
“A super party for a super storm,” a matriarchal lady with a perfectly sculpted nose giggled. She wore a shockingly white fur around her neck.
A younger man with dark brown hair was staring at the fur. “Can I touch it?”
“Of course! It’s real Arctic fox. It’s extinct,” she said, excitement in her voice. They smiled at each other, and for a moment, Roo wondered what it would have been like to walk up here with Kit at his arm.
He shook that away.
“That must be impossible to get!”
“You have no idea.”
“Is it hot?”
“No, it’s soft and natural to the skin. Excuse me.” She grabbed Roo’s forearm with bony fingers as he slipped past her and the gathered clump of people to head inside toward the far side of the roof, near a clump of decorative tree-like solar arrays that had folded down their light-seeking leaves for the night.
He looked at her waxy perfectly taut skin and snow-white fur. “Yes?”
“Can we get some more of those little pickled things, they were absolutely delicious!”
Roo gently disentangled himself. “I’m sorry, we’re all out.”
The woman sighed dramatically. “Just my luck.”
A minor tragedy, Roo was sure.
He circled around the party again, slowly edging further and further out, until he ducked behind the solar arrays. Alone in the dark shadows he pulled out his phone and swiped to one of his running apps.
The distant, grainy image of the rooftop wavered slightly. The quadcopter was fighting the wind to hover in place where Roo had piloted it before he’d walked into the lobby.
Now he aimed it through the air to him.
It buzzed loudly as it approached the edge of the roof and coasted into his hands like a wobbling, mechanical falcon. Roo glanced around. No one noticed anything over the sound of cocktail laughter and the live reggae band performing in the corner. The band was trying to find the right amount of laid-back bombast that left the donors comfortable.
Roo pulled three grenades off the hasty duct-tape harness, and pocketed the pistol.
He’d known there would be security in the lobby, including airport-grade scanners.
Inside his tuxedo’s inner pocket were the deck gloves with the gecko pads. He hadn’t put those on the quadcopter, because he’d been toying with the idea of breaking into the labs even if he wasn’t armed and the copter had failed. Last time he’d used these, Roo thought as he pulled them on, he’d been in the middle of the storm with Delroy.
A lifetime ago.
Roo looked over the edge of the building. Twenty stories down. He’d never been a fan of heights. Never even been in a building more than a couple stories tall before the Caribbean Intelligence Group scooped him up and gave him something better to do with his talents.
He swung over the edge.
For a moment, feet dangling uselessly, Roo found himself second-guessing the glove’s ability to hold onto his hands. The wrist strap, an advanced Velcro, bulged slightly. But after another long moment waiting for the long fall to happen, he calmed. He’d used these to go up the mast enough to know they’d hold just fine.
He began crabbing his way carefully down to the floor underneath, looking for the balcony he’d spotted when digging through public photos online of the building.
The lock to the balcony door yielded to a skeleton key that used brute force algorithms to run through wireless security until it told the door to open itself up with a satisfying click for Roo. While the skeleton key was running, Roo took the time to unwind his paracord bracelet and tied it off to the balcony.
Just in case.
He looked into the gloomy, half-lit offices and hallways, waiting for his eyes to adjust. He folded the gecko gloves and slid them into his jacket’s pockets before he stepped in.
The lights flared on. He staggered back, hands still in his pockets, blinking, and three security guards with submachine guns snugged up shoulder-high and tight stepped forward. “Mr. Jones?” called a voice from behind them.
Shit.
There was no way he could run. One step back and they’d riddle his chest with bullets. He’d make it over the balcony. His dead body would hit the ground.
Kit had been right. This was a stupid move. They knew the ostentatious balcony was their weak point. They’d set up a trap and just simply waited for him.
Roo casually stepped forward. “You know who I am?”
Inside his pocket, he flicked the pins off the grenade in each hand.
Adrien Beauchamp, hard to miss in his cream-white designer tuxedo, stepped forward to stand just behind his three guards. They wore black suits, but Roo noticed a hint of so
me tattoos around their wrists.
Not professional security, these were more neo-Nazis.
“We were warned you might try and show up here,” Beauchamp said.
“Get your hands out in the air, slowly,” one of the guards shouted, not happy with the casual chitchat, suspicious that Roo was probably up to something.
“Okay. I’m pulling them out slowly.” Roo stepped forward and held his hands out from his body. He let the grenade pins drop to the floor. “Shoot me, I drop the grenades.”
“Szar,” swore one of the men.
Adrien Beauchamp’s lips tightened. “Would someone explain to me how he walked into my lab with grenades in his pocket?”
“It’s impossible, they weren’t there. He was scanned. Closely. Everyone was.”
Beauchamp pointed at one of Roo’s hands. “It’s not impossible, because they’re right there, aren’t they?”
He turned around, but Roo stepped forward. “I wouldn’t leave, Mr. Beauchamp. I still have the grenades.”
The plutocrat slowed and waved at someone farther down the corridor. “I’m not leaving, Mr. Jones. Not yet. Besides, what will you do? Drop them and commit suicide? The fact that you still stand here in front of me indicates you’re not suicidal.”
“There’s always a first time,” Roo said, taking another step forward to keep Beauchamp close at hand. “And I’m angry enough to do something stupid on principle.”
“Maybe,” Beauchamp said. “But while you’re willing to kill yourself, I wonder, will you be willing to kill your friend?”
He pulled a gagged and bound Elvin forward.
“Ah shit,” Roo said, looking at his friend’s broken nose and bruised eyes. Blood ran from his forearms where peeled strips of skin hung. He limped horribly on a leg where the trousers seeped dark fluid. “Elvin, I’m so sorry.”
He’d dragged another soul down into this mess. Another person had paid the price for Roo’s actions. Roo felt his stomach churn, and he bit his lip to remain focused. He felt like he’d stepped into quicksand. This had all gotten way out of hand.
Better to have remained the faceless puppet, gaining evidence, using his favors.
Gunplay didn’t just get you or the assholes shot, he thought. It also gets the bystanders. The innocents. And the blood would remain on his hands forever, no matter the justifications he had.
Elvin staggered and wordlessly sank to his knees in front of Beauchamp.
Beauchamp sighed. “I take a very close interest in people snooping around my business. It’s expensive to have a line into the local security systems, but it comes in handy when things like this happen.”
“Let him go,” Roo said. He twisted his hands, waggling the grenades. “Or tell me what you want from me to let him go. He shouldn’t have to suffer for my mistakes.”
Beauchamp smiled. “Mr. Jones, your first name might be Prudence, but you don’t seem to be letting your given name constrain your actions, which is a shame. Now you’re trying to ruin one of my favorite charity events.”
“What you want?” Roo asked, impatient, struggling to keep the men around him in sight.
“What do I want?” Beauchamp asked. “Your island dialect might charm those vapid people upstairs, but I prefer precise grammar. Details matter to me.”
Roo gritted his teeth. “What do you want, Beauchamp? What’s all this about?”
The man waved the question aside. “No, you first, Prudence. I want to know what possessed you to climb down the outside of my building. Who’s pulling your strings? Do you still work for the Caribbean Intelligence Group?” Beauchamp pulled a small silvered pistol out from under his suit jacket and pointed it at the back of Elvin’s head.
Roo stared at him. “You really don’t know why I’m here?”
“I’m all ears.” Beauchamp stared at Roo, unblinking.
“One of your pet neo-Nazis tried to kill me. I imagine they were trying to get some information that an old friend of mine left me before he died in Florida from a nasty hemorrhagic fever. One someone designed.”
“You know about that?” Beauchamp asked.
“Only,” Roo continued, “instead of killing me, they shot my nephew dead.”
One of Beauchamp’s guards lit up with fury. “You killed the men at the hotel!” he shouted, stepping forward.
“They killed my nephew,” Roo repeated. “The boy was the only family I got.”
Beauchamp waved the man back and looked at Roo with sadness. “So you know loss, Mr. Jones. True loss.”
Roo stared at him. “I know it.”
“I lost someone once. My wife. Before I had the labs, I was a vertical-farm pioneer, did you know that?”
“No, I did not.”
“She felt very strongly about trying to help people build infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We built infrastructure in one of the northern cities. One of my farms could feed some forty thousand. I did it because she wanted it, and because she was such a beautiful human being, Mr. Jones. She wanted to make the world a better place. I wanted to make it a better place for her. But to live near the border of the Central African Republic and Congo … that was not a pretty place.”
“Kinshasa is a beautiful city,” Roo said.
“She didn’t want to go to Kinshasa, where it was stable. No, it had to be where the need was greatest. And most dangerous. I’d never seen an entire fifteen-story farm torched before. The rebels dynamited it. They said it represented foreign interference. It was a symbol. So they dragged it down. But who cares, it was just material? What came next, that was worse. Because we were there to see it.”
Beauchamp looked at Roo, and he saw the deep pain in Beauchamp’s eyes.
“They tortured her, Mr. Jones. I listened to her scream for days. And then they killed her. But me, I was worth too much alive. So I lived. For three months, a captive. And I watched as the people she tried to save starved and died. Over what? A line drawn on a map? A city that was really more of a town? It wasn’t enough that she died, all her work was gutted. They killed her, and they destroyed my entire world.”
“Delroy was my whole world,” Roo said softly.
“So you understand exactly how I felt when I got back to Kinshasa,” Beauchamp said. “And then, I watched the aid agencies swarm the country. You know what they did for all those homeless, starving people?”
Roo shook his head.
“They gave them free food,” Beauchamp said, disgust in his voice. “Pallets and pallets of it.”
“You act like that’s some horrible thing,” Roo said.
“And then I read a book that used an analogy that stuck with me: giving free food to starving people is just throwing fuel on the fire,” Beauchamp stated flatly. “Combine the desire to give them free food so that you don’t have to suffer the guilt of watching them starve, with the social conservative prohibition against also giving out free birth control, and you’ve basically got rabbits. They’re just going eat and fuck and then all you have are more starving people.”
“So better to let them starve?” Roo stared at the man.
“Yes,” Beauchamp hissed. “Better that they starve just once, so that untold following generations don’t live in misery and starvation.”
“So you think you can shove that generation out in front the bus and save the others by doing it?” Roo said.
“Save them. Save other people on the planet. Mr. Jones, you know we barely have the farmland to support the people already on this planet.”
Said the man who built vertical farms, Roo thought. “So all these poor brown people, after they die, what then?”
“When the black plague hit Europe,” Beauchamp said, animated, “it changed everything. Moved whole economies out of feudalism! Because suddenly human labor wasn’t cheap; too many people had died. Midden piles outside cities showed nutrition improved. Because, Mr. Jones, we’re like cockroaches. We just breed, with no acceptance of the consequences. With our planet overburdened, with ci
vilizations looking at each other’s borders, it’s time we stopped throwing fuel on the fire.”
“And you’re going to solve that, with this plague? Reduce the population through sickness?”
Beauchamp cocked his head. “Plague?”
Roo’s eyes narrowed. “The one that killed my friend, Zachariah.”
“Was that his name?” Beauchamp asked levelly. “Well, he took something from me. And I don’t like thieves, Mr. Jones. People don’t get to take things away from me, not without consequences.”
“I feel much the same,” Roo said through gritted teeth.
“I’m glad we’re on the same page.” Beauchamp racked the slide of the pistol with a clack that echoed around them.
Roo stiffened. “Wait…”
Elvin had been on his knees, dazed, for the whole conversation. Fear flickered in his eyes for a second. Then Beauchamp pulled the trigger.
Blood splattered the carpet. That was what Roo focused on: the abstract splatter of it across polished black boots and the bottom of the wall.
Elvin slumped forward awkwardly, a lifeless sack of a human now.
Roo dropped the grenades to the floor.
For a split second the guards stared at him. No one had expected him to do it. Roo stood rooted in place for a split second, not understanding what he’d unconsciously done.
Then everyone ran.
Three guards shoved Beauchamp behind a supporting beam and covered him with their bodies. One of them opened fire at Roo, who was already back out on the balcony and crouching behind the tiny sliver of wall for protection.
The grenades exploded. The doors shattered, glass raining down on the balcony.
Roo grabbed the end of the paracord bracelet he’d tied to the balcony and looped it around his ankles. He took a deep breath and chucked the third grenade in through the doors.
“Gránát!”
Roo leaped over the rail. The pop of small arms filled the air. Something smacked into his shoulder as he tumbled through the air.
The grenade made a crumping sound overhead. A sparkling cloud of glass and debris blew out into the air above Roo.
He reached the end of the paracord with a horrible smack. There was some give, built into it by the weave and because it had been designed for parachutes, but the arrest was still brutal at this length. He’d tried to jump off to the side to create a pendulum-like arc to absorb some of the impact as well, but now that meant Roo swung in an arc and struck a window hard enough to knock the air out of him. His right ankle had snapped, he realized. He could feel bone grinding on bone. Roo would have screamed, but he couldn’t get air. He just croaked, hanging upside down as glass rained down past him, slicing at his clothes.
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