Five. Four. Three. Two. One.
Harper sucks in another breath as I grip the metal pipe in my hands. After a fretful beat, she pulls open the door, hiding her body behind the wood, and there, sitting to the left of the door is the young and skinny guard, a gun on his lap. As I step forward, his sleepy eyes widen, shock registering on his face, just before I slam the pipe into his face, breaking his nose and knocking him off of his chair and onto the floor.
His gun falls next to him and I quickly kick it away. The pistol spins and slides across the acid-stained concrete. The guard tries to lift his head, groaning, his pale face splattered with blood that just keeps coming. He’s not out yet. I hit him one more time with the pipe on the side of his temple, knocking him out. His head collapses to the floor, but as I stand over him, I can tell that he’s still breathing. He’s still alive. I could hit him once more, kill him. Make it impossible for him to warn the other guards that we’ve escaped. But as I lift the pipe back in the air for the deathblow, I see his chest rise and fall. And I can’t. I can’t take another life. Not if I don’t have to.
I fly across the room, stashing the blood-covered pipe, then search the guard’s body for extra weapons. I find just a radio and tuck it into the back of my jeans.
“Harper, come on,” I whisper and she sticks her head out from around the door. Her eyes immediately expand at the sight of the guard, bloodied and beaten, on the floor.
“Is he dead?” she whispers as she takes a cautious step out of the storage room. I walk quickly across the room to pick up the pistol. I double-check it. It’s loaded. Good.
“No, but if we don’t get out of here now, I may have to kill him, so let’s go,” I whisper, walking back toward her and grabbing her by the wrist with my free hand, pulling her through the dimly lit basement. Once we get to the foot of the stairs, I put my hand up, stopping us both. I stand at the base of the staircase, the Glock 22 pointed in the air, my finger poised by the trigger. And I listen. For footsteps, for voices, for anything. But the house is still. I grab on to Harper’s wrist and carefully climb up the stairs, stepping lightly, trying desperately not to make the floorboards creak.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
I count the steps as we climb. I reach the sixth and final step, I place my weight on it lightly, and then …
Creeaaak.
Shit. I hold my breath, waiting to hear movement in the dark house, my finger still hovering near the gun’s curved trigger. But still, I hear nothing. I reach the top with Harper trailing behind me and skipping the creaky step.
Clever girl.
Harper comes up to the hardwood floors behind me. I hold my hand up again, stopping her from moving any farther, as I listen for sounds in the house. Down the hallway in front of us, I can see the glow from a light somewhere. Perhaps a light is on in the kitchen? Perhaps someone is in there making a snack? Or was it left on by mistake? Still, I listen for even the almost silent shuffle of tired, slippered feet. But there is nothing.
The hallway to my left is pitch-black. But I know the sliding glass door is that way. I turn to look at Harper, her eyes broad but her face still, the panic momentarily buried somewhere in her body. I point my head down the dark hallway and slip my free hand through hers. She squeezes me tightly, all her fear contained in that grip, as I guide her slowly across the floor.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
I take each step slowly, careful to touch down with my toe and not the clunk of my heel.
Toe. Ball. Heel. Toe. Ball. Heel.
Like dancers, we move soundlessly through the hallway, me counting the number of wary steps and the seconds I’ve been holding my breath.
Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.
After seventeen steps and even more seconds without air, we reach the sliding glass door I saw earlier with Fernando and his guards. I squeeze Harper’s hand before letting it go. I turn my head, searching the shadowy hallway, listening again for the sound of someone rising in the house, alerted that a guard is down and the captives are trying to flee. Stillness.
I look out the glass door. Beyond the dark patio, the backyard is dimly lit with just a few floodlights, but even so, I can see the fence and the barbed wire. I search for the corner, hoping that where the side and back fences meet, we’ll get a break from the sharp razors, but I can’t see that far. We’ll be running blind.
The muscles in my tense forearms ache as I scan the backyard once more, waiting for guards on their rounds to walk in front of me. But after what feels like an eternity, no one walks past. The backyard may not be manned by a guard at all. But I know nothing can really be that easy. There could be guard dogs, waiting to run us down. Shooters on the roof. Traps in the grass. Not to mention, a god damn alarm to shriek as soon as I open this door. But if we don’t get out of here now, death is not a question. It’s a certainty.
I look over at Harper. She’s staring down at the door handle, biting her lip, her arms twitching in my sweatshirt, just waiting to run. Her eyes look back up at me, her chest rising and falling quickly with uneasy breaths, and nods. As if to say, I’m ready. Let’s go.
With one hand, I grip the gun, and with the other, my fingers wrap around the door handle.
Please be unarmed. Please be unarmed.
And as I put my fingers on the door handle, I look into the glass. And in my distorted reflection, I see my mother’s face.
Help me, Mom. Help me.
I hold my breath and pull. It slides with ease. For one second, there is silence. And then … sirens.
“Shit. Run,” I yell to Harper over the grating cry of the alarm and we sprint through the patio and into the backyard. I immediately begin running to the left, toward what I hope will be a corner in the fences, with Harper on my heels.
Lights begin to turn on in the backyard, and I can hear voices yelling from somewhere inside the mansion.
Go, go, go, my mind is screaming, my legs pushing me faster and faster across the solid earth, my heels inflamed. And then I see it. A corner in the fence. A break in the barbed wire.
Forty yards. Thirty yards. Twenty yards. Ten yards. Five yards.
The fifteen-foot chain-link fence feels even higher when you’re standing underneath it, armed gunmen just seconds away from filling the backyard.
“Come on, we’ve got to climb,” I yell to Harper as I begin to scale the corner of the fence. My hands and feet crawl up the metal chains with ease and reach the top. I grab on to the metal post between the barbed wire that links the two fences together and throw my feet on the other side.
When I start climbing down, I see Harper is frozen, halfway up the fence, unsure of how to get over the barbed wire.
“Don’t think, just do it, Harper,” I scream, and suddenly, I hear the pop of a gun.
Boom. Boom.
It comes again, scurrying her up the fence. In the chaos, Harper forgets my warning, grabbing on to the barbed wire with her sweatshirt-covered hands, and screams as it tears into her flesh.
“Get yourself over, get yourself over!” I’m screaming and Harper throws her legs over to the other side, pulling her hands from the wire, half climbing, half falling to the ground.
“Para! Para!” I hear a voice command over a booming loudspeaker. Stop! Stop!
Boom. Boom. Boom.
Bullets are now whizzing near my frame, but I don’t have time to look into the backyard for the guards. I lean down to Harper, crumpled on the ground. Her hands are torn and bleeding. Still, I pull her up harshly by her wrists.
“Run, Harper,” I scream, yanking her body into the thick vegetation just beyond the fence. “Run!”
And so we run. Away from the screaming guards and the gunfire. Away from Fernando and our meeting with death. But if we don’t run fast enough, if we get caught, that meeting is still on today’s calendar. In red. And underlined.
TWENTY-SIX
Run. Run. Run.
My mind repeats only one word, screaming it like a siren. The vegetation
is thick. Harper and I keep tripping over tree branches and getting stuck in bushes. But still, we run north. We’re far enough away from the roadway so we don’t get spotted. But close enough that we know we’re heading in the right direction and won’t get lost in the thick of the Colombian wild. Because getting lost out here is almost as dangerous as facing Fernando and his hired gunmen.
Almost.
I hear the sound of a slow-moving car on the roadway again, twenty yards away.
“Car,” I whisper and grab Harper’s wrist, my hands tacky with her blood. I pull her deeper into the overgrowth and we both slide onto the ground, our bodies parallel with the earth.
I try to slow my heavy breathing so I can hear the car again. This is vehicle number four since we started running. And at this late hour, with so little around, I know it’s Fernando and his army of assassins looking for us.
Harper moves next to me, cracking a branch, and immediately her body freezes.
I can see the headlights going north. The driver creeps the vehicle slowly along the two-lane roadway, the car almost coming to a full stop just yards away from us. They’re close enough now that I can hear the sputter of their engine.
Please keep going. Please keep going, I plead with the driver, who has probably been instructed to kill us on sight.
Harper’s trembling fingers grab at my hand, her wounds still bleeding. The running doesn’t help. Her heart is working harder, pumping blood faster throughout her body. As soon as we got far enough away from the house, I quickly looked her over to make sure she didn’t hit one of the radial arteries in her wrist. Thank God she didn’t. Because between that laceration and her heart pumping extra hard as we run, she’d be dead by now.
The car slows down even more and above our heads, more light. Shit. They’ve got a flashlight.
Harper gasps next to me and I slap my free hand over her mouth, keeping her silent. The beam moves forward with the slow speed of the car, the light still dancing among the overgrowth, looking for us. Finally, that penetrating light disappears and the car begins to speed away. They’re going in the same direction as us. But with the unknown to the south and absolutely nothing to the east and west besides mountains and tropical forests, we don’t really have a choice. We have to make it to that village. And quickly.
“Come on,” I whisper to Harper, pushing my body off the ground. “They’re gone.”
“How much farther to the village?” Harper asks as I gingerly pull her up by her wrists, careful not to push into the deep cuts on her hands.
“I don’t know,” I answer. We’ve been running for at least thirty minutes but with so many obstacles and stops and starts, progress has felt slow. “Maybe another mile.”
“God, I’m so tired,” Harper says, her body hunched over. In the moonlight, I can see her bloody hands on her knees, my pajama bottoms smeared red and tattered from the barbed wire.
“I know. But we have to keep going,” I answer, my own breathing labored, my body throbbing with pain. But at least I have the luxury of shoes. Harper is still in the thick socks the guards gave her on the private jet. Her feet must be killing her. I’d give her my boots, but I know they’re two sizes too small for her feet.
“Okay,” Harper says, standing up straight once again and tossing her wavy hair behind her shoulders. She puts her hands on her narrow hips, sucks a deep breath through her pursed lips, and nods. “Let’s go.”
My legs carry me once again through the darkness, and suddenly, I can hear Michael’s voice calling out to me, as if I’m running intervals back at CORE.
“Come on, Reagan. Let’s go! You can run faster than that.”
I’ve tried to push our beloved trainer, killed at the hands of Santino in Indonesia, out of my mind. It’s almost too painful to think about him because all I see is his dead eyes and the deep, red tissue around his slashed throat.
So much bloodshed, so much death. So many people I love are gone. I have to keep running. So I can reach that village, reach a phone. Alert my father that they’re all in danger. That Sam is the mole. I have to save the few I have left.
One hundred yards in the distance, I see light. But it’s not the light from a car. It’s the very dim glow of a scarcely populated town.
“We’re almost there,” I whisper to Harper, holding out my arm to slow her exhausted stride. “We need to be quiet. One of the guards could be stationed at the village just waiting for us.”
“Should we keep running?” Harper asks, her voice thin with lack of oxygen. “Go to the next village or something?”
“The next village is at least another five or six miles by car,” I reply, my mind carefully going back over our route to the compound. “I’m afraid we won’t make it there before sunrise.”
“But if Fernando’s people are hiding here…” Harper begins.
“They are probably hiding everywhere,” I whisper over the sound of animals starting to wake from their slumber. The sky is still dark, but it’s like animals can feel the promise of morning. “If I think it’s unsafe, we’ll keep running or hide out or I’ll think of something. Okay?”
“Okay,” Harper relents and reaches out for my wrist. “I trust you.”
You shouldn’t, I feel like saying. What have I done for her? Except get her kidnapped and nearly killed. We may be out of that storage room and miles away from the compound, but we have yet to truly escape. The center of my chest feels like it’s collapsing in on itself at the thought of making it this far and still being forced to watch my best friend die.
I feel for the gun in the back of my jeans. Amazingly, it’s still there. I pull it out and unclick the magazine, running my finger along the ammunition, feeling for the smooth and rounded end of each bullet. Fifteen. Fully loaded. I slam the magazine back into the pistol and it clicks into place.
“Think we’ll need that?” Harper asks, eyeing the Glock in my hands.
“We might,” I whisper, but I’m not sure if she hears me over the sound of the cracking branches and songs from nocturnal insects.
The light pierces through the thinning vegetation, bringing the village into view. Tin roofs cover several homes on reedy stilts and as my eyes look from house to house, I realize some don’t even have the luxury of a sturdy roof over their heads, protecting them from Mother Nature’s wrath. Some homes are covered by straw or reeds.
“Hang on,” I whisper, putting a protective arm across Harper’s rib cage as we near the edge of the overgrowth. “Let me check first. Stay here.”
Harper freezes, and in the very dim light, I can finally make out all the features on her face. Blood is smeared across her right cheekbone, most likely from her hand but possibly a cut from a branch striking her. Her hazel eyes are weary and exhausted but her jaw is tight, her face surprisingly fierce, readied for fight or flight. As I turn away from her, I pray we won’t have to do either.
“Be careful,” she whispers and I nod without glancing back. My feet step cautiously through the last of the foliage until I’m standing within the last few feet of cover. One more step and I’ll be fully visible to anyone on the other side.
With my gun pointed in the air, my finger poised near the trigger, I push away the final bits of branches and leaves, peering out onto the empty roadway. My head swivels north and then south. I listen for the sputter of an engine in the distance, for the sound of rocks scraping against the dirt and crunching beneath tires. I hear nothing. In front of me are two dozen small houses, all built with a varying array of manufactured and earth-made tools and products. Thatched roofs and aluminum and two-by-fours and plywood make up these dwellings, and I have to wonder if this little village will even have a phone. They barely have electricity. I step farther out onto the road, pointing my gun out in front of me, readying myself for the pop of gunfire. But nothing comes. The village lightly hums with the hush of sleep.
“Harper,” I whisper. I hear movement in the brush before her face warily peers out from behind a bush. “We’re clear. Co
me on, we’ve got to move.”
With my gun outstretched in front of me and my eyes searching every home and every tree for a shooter, we sprint across the open roadway and immediately duck our bodies back into the cover of darkness between two small homes.
“Stay close to the house,” I whisper to Harper, and push my hand against the center of her chest until her body is parallel with the unsound house, hidden from the sporadic light of the roadway. “Let’s keep going.”
Harper pushes every inch of her frame up against the wall, moving her feet carefully from side to side, as if she’s standing on the ledge of a building, just one strong gust of wind away from free-falling to the ground. We move along the wall, my gun still pointed in the air, my finger suspended near the trigger. We need to explore this village and see if we even have a hope and a prayer of finding a phone or Internet access or some way of reaching Cam and my father. I’d take messenger pigeons at this point if they could fly all the way up to DC.
Crack.
A startled breath sucks through my open lips and the two of us freeze midstep. Someone is here.
Is it a villager? Fernando? An assassin? An animal?
Harper grabs at my arm, digging her nails into my flesh, the same questions most likely swirling through her frantic mind.
Crack.
It comes again. And it’s close.
Harper’s nails dig deeper into me, her fear forming a death grip on my much-needed limb. I turn toward her, mouthing the words “Let go.” I need to get myself to the edge of this house and see just who may be on the other side. Her fingers finally relent, dropping from my skin and falling to her side.
“Stay here,” I mouth to her before turning back around, my feet immediately carrying me closer and closer to the sound.
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