I guess he was going to ask me what was going on, but I interrupted him and took hold of his throat with my left hand. “You have no heart, right, Salim? So this shouldn’t hurt.”
Ceramic knives are real sharp and real hard. It slid in under his fifth rib easy. His eyes went wide and I felt his whole body spasm before it went limp and slipped off the knife into a crumpled heap at my feet. The Asian dame was backing away, with both hands held up in front of her. It was an easy throw. Nobody ever looks as startled as they do when they have a blade buried three inches into their forehead.
Emma and the girls were in the lounge area. I loped after them and yanked open the door. I grabbed Emma by the arm. “Go down. Cross the club. A man called Tom will meet you outside with a minibus. Do everything he says. You’re going home. Go!”
Wherever the hell home is.
They ran.
I heard the voice behind me. I knew I was going to hear it. It was the reason I was there.
“But they’re not going home, Murdoch, and neither are you. We finish this here, tonight.”
I turned. “Banks.”
“Close the door.”
I closed it. “This time you stay dead.”
He came at me like a puma. The speed was insane. Then he was in the air and his right leg flashed. The pain was impossible to describe and I felt myself smash against the wall behind me. My head was ringing. I couldn’t stand and I couldn’t see straight. I felt his knee press on my chest and his left fist grab my collar. I knew what was coming next and, when I felt him tense, I let gravity pull my head to the side. His fist smashed its deathblow into the wall and I heard him curse. He stood, gripping his hand and swearing.
Then he did something that made me real mad. He sneered and from my waistband he pulled my Smith & Wesson and leveled it at me. “Tonight, you die with your own gun, Murdoch!”
I’d fallen against a small table and there were spasms of pain going through my back where I’d hit it. But through the pain I saw a marble lamp overturned on the floor. My gun exploded at me, but at the same instant I lunged and grabbed the lamp. I levered myself to my feet and came at him as he was turning to finish me off. If I’d swung the lamp, he would have blocked it. But it is deeply ingrained in me—stab, don’t slash. I rammed the lamp straight into his face. He staggered back, covering his eyes, and he dropped my gun. I leaped forward and rammed again, into his chest. He screamed and I did it again and kicked him in the nuts for good measure. I picked my Smith & Wesson up off the floor. He was ten times the fighter I was and I needed a weapon.
By the time I’d picked it up, he’d rolled, jumped to his feet and was coming back at me in a flying, spinning back kick. I managed to weave and roll, but his heel caught the edge of my jaw and I staggered. He landed feet wide, knees bent, and delivered two power punches to my belly. I doubled up, retching, but the only thing in my head was don’t let go of the revolver! His right uppercut smashed into my nose and I went down on my back. As I hit the floor, he jumped with both knees up. He was going to slam down into my chest with both heels and I was going to die.
I found a strength I didn’t know I had, and I can’t explain. I just knew I couldn’t let him win. I raised the Smith and Wesson and emptied it. Everything Dirty Harry said about the Smith and Wesson 29 was true. The magnum rounds spun him in mid-air and he fell in a bloody heap. I slowly got to my feet. I pulled a box of rounds from my pocket and reloaded. I put two rounds into his head at point-blank range. If any of his neurons survived, they were going to be real lonely. Then I put two rounds into his neck and pretty much decapitated him. The last four rounds cut him in two at the waist.
I said, “Banks, tonight you die with my revolver.”
After that, I made my way down the passage to where the two goons had been sitting. I was remembering. There had been a door—the door Banks had come out of—a door I was going through. And I knew what I was going to find on the other side. The door was open. There were more carpeted stairs leading up to another level. I climbed them, feeling my whole body aching, my legs screaming with pain at every step. There was no door at the top, just a landing that expanded out into a large, open space. There was a sofa and there were two armchairs arranged around a coffee table.
They were not expecting me. They were expecting Banks, and they went pale when they saw me reach the top of the stairs, bleeding and disheveled, with a look on my face they could not have misread if they had wanted to. I intended to kill them, and they knew it.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Del Roble rose slowly to his feet. His thick glasses were flashing in the lamplight. Maria sat motionless, expressionless. Del Roble said, “Murdoch? Who the hell are you? What do you want?”
“Who am I?” I must have looked like spawn from Hell. I could taste the blood from the gashes on my face trickling into my mouth, and it was making my belly burn. “I’m a human being, del Roble, and I’m the meanest son of a bitch in this fucking valley of yours. What do I want? I want answers.”
He was shaking his head. “There is no way you can begin to understand.”
I took three long strides and backhanded him. He staggered and fell across the sofa, blood trickling from his nose. I leveled the gun at him. “Next time you say that to me, del Roble, I’ll blow your fucking head off your shoulders.”
I turned to Maria. “Who is the woman I know as Maria? If she is you—if she is one of you—why did you kidnap her?”
She sighed and covered her face. After a moment, she dropped her hands and began to speak. “She is me in a way you can’t under—” She stopped herself and rectified, “In a way that is hard to explain. Our constant goal is to find a way to bridge the gap between our masters and humans. That is the main purpose of all our hybridization programs. Maria is an experiment in that program.”
I snarled. “What the hell does that mean?”
“You and Maria fascinate us, Murdoch. Especially Dr. Loss—Joanna. She found you both utterly intoxicating. She came very close to rupa with you. When we took Maria, we created me with her, so that we could tap into her feelings and thoughts.” She smiled. “But you knew that, or at least suspected it. That’s why you are here.”
“So, you are a hybrid… And Maria?”
“I am a hybrid but Maria, like you, is human. When you are together, the feelings you arouse in each other are very powerful. They are almost impossible for us to conceive.” She turned to del Roble. “I can feel myself dilating, Seraph. I could come in rupa right now.”
“So you used her to punish me, to try to destroy me, but also to explore this damned rupa you are obsessed with”—I turned to del Roble—“and, at the same time, have a spy you could use close to me and my employers.”
He looked bitter. “That was the idea. How did you do this?”
I turned to Maria. “But she’s linked to your mind. And you can transmit to her and receive her.”
She smiled. “I am her, Liam, in every meaningful sense of the word. We are one.” She frowned. “But we need to help her. She is dying.”
“Is she connected to anybody else?”
She frowned, shook her head and said, “No…only through me.” And, as she said it, she realized it was the wrong answer.
All it took was a single shot to the head and Maria’s problems were all over. If I was right about the link—and I knew I was—back in Edinburgh, she would be smiling in her sleep and resting peacefully for the first time in months.
I turned to del Roble. “You’re coming back with me. You have a lifetime of explaining to do, pal.”
He burst out laughing. “You must be insane! You think I’ll come with you? How incompetent do you think we are?”
I looked at Maria then turned back to look at the stairwell, with all the ruin and dead bodies behind it. I turned back to del Roble and his mad eyes. “Pretty incompetent, del Roble. Now, we can walk out quietly, or I can blow your kneecaps off and drag you out. You choose, but one way or another, you are coming with
me.”
He raised his wrist and touched his watch. “I have to make a call.”
“Your goons are dead, del Roble, including Rinpoche, the Dharma Golika. It’s over. The fat woman has sung. Stand up.”
He stared at me. There was something kind of manic in his stare. Then he was laughing, a horrible, harsh mixture of a bark and a scream. Then it wasn’t del Roble. There was a spray of color, a crest of spines and flashing, scaly skin behind his head. His face was the face of a Komodo dragon, and his hands were claws. He rushed at me and spat. I raised my hands instinctively and felt the searing of acid burning through my sleeve. Something lashed out. I wanted to believe it was his arm, but I was pretty sure it was a tail. The pain in my leg was excruciating and, when I tried to move, my legs were paralyzed.
I fell. I rolled onto my side. My vision was blurred. For a moment, I saw a giant lizard on its hind legs. But then it was del Roble, bending over a briefcase. He loomed over me and kneeled, and he was sliding a package under my head. He was saying, “I hit you with a paralyzing agent. It will wear off in ten minutes. In seven minutes, this incendiary bomb will go off under your head. It will burn slowly but very hot to start with, then it will explode. It will destroy any evidence of our having been here, but it will also provide you with a very painful death.” He smiled and gave a small laugh. “I wish I could experience some of your terror, Liam. I really do. You think you have stopped us, but you are so, so wrong. Nothing can stop us now. It is too late. We are past the tipping point, past the point of no return. Goodbye, Liam. It really has been a privilege. You are extraordinary.”
I acted without thinking, with the last of my strength. The acid he’d spat at me was still burning in gobbets on my sleeve and on my revolver. I swiped at his face. It was a feeble blow, but it was enough to spread his own, vile toxic spit over his eyes. I watched him, warped and sickening, stand, yelling and clawing at his face. He staggered back and fell, sitting against the wall, screaming at first, then just whimpering, with two smoldering red holes where his eyes should have been.
I tried to call out. But I hadn’t the strength and only a soft moan came from my throat. There was panic inside me, but I couldn’t use it. I wanted to live and feel, but it was like I was dead inside, and I wondered if that was the way they lived, every day of their lives—the undead—and they were trying to make us like them, while they tried to make themselves like us. I looked at him, blind and sobbing, as the paralysis took hold of me, and I felt pity.
I sagged. The device was hard under my head, like a pillow of death. I didn’t want to die. Most of all, I didn’t want to die like this, numb and unable to fight back. I battled inside to overcome the paralysis, but I couldn’t. My body was not my own. From the corner of my eye, I could see the digital timer. There was a minute and fifty seconds left. My heart was pounding but I couldn’t feel and I couldn’t move.
A minute and twenty seconds. There was a figure in the doorway—motionless. A minute and fifteen seconds. I tried to shout, to call out, but only a soft murmur came from my throat. The figure moved and disappeared. Panic gripped me, but still I couldn’t make a sound. A minute and five seconds.
Fifty-nine seconds and hands gripped my ankles and I was sliding along the floor, the device behind me. Blind, gibbering del Roble was also back there. I was through the door. Halfway down the passage, I saw a flare of white-hot light in the room. I grunted and there was some feeling in my fingers.
Then there was an arm under my shoulders, and a voice in my ear. “Come on, old chap! Can you stand?”
I tried. My legs buckled. I tried again. He’d said ten minutes. But Liam Murdoch is the meanest son of a bitch in the valley, right? I heaved and managed to get to my feet. Strong arms held me up, guiding me toward the door and the stairs and behind me the sound of roaring, searing flames.
We squeezed through the doorway and began to stumble down the steps at a half-run.
I whispered, “Hook…”
He said, “Shut up. There’s a good chap. Now, run!”
We burst through the door into the heaving bodies and the blasting music. We pushed and elbowed. Slowly my strength was coming back, but the noise and the airlessness were splitting my head and making me sick. The entrance seemed a million miles away, a small amber rectangle dancing in swarming, sweating, blearing darkness. Hook’s voice kept repeating, “One more step, one more step… Come on, old chap, just one more step,” and we were at the door and out into the blessed, cool night air. And we were staggering toward a car.
He dropped me in the passenger seat and folded my legs in. Then the driver’s door slammed. He was firing up the engine, and we were pulling out of the lot, into the traffic.
I said, “Is Maria okay?”
“Sleeping like a baby.”
I smiled. She was safe.
Epilogue
There was a stillness in the room. I don’t mean that nothing was moving. There was a lace curtain that was rippling with a small breeze. And there was a cat, part tabby with a white bib, lying in a patch of sunlight on the orange and red patchwork quilt, and his tail was twitching sporadically. It wasn’t silent, either. Birds sang outside, and there was the occasional squeak of the gardener’s wheelbarrow and the clip of manual hedge trimmers. But the small, wafting movements and the small sounds seemed to accentuate the stillness and the quiet.
She watched me come into the room and sit by her side, by the window. She was sitting up, with her back resting against three or four pillows, with the patchwork pulled up to her chest. She smiled. The bags had gone from under her eyes. She looked like a different person. She looked like Maria.
“Hi… You seem well. How you feeling?”
Her eyes seemed to glaze and she shifted them to gaze out at the trees in the sunlight. “I’m not sure. Something happened. I’m not sure what, but it was as though somebody pulled the plug on a huge, noisy machine that was making devils and demons in my head.” She turned to look at me. “It suddenly went quiet, and I slept. I slept like a baby for the first time in…” She trailed off and shrugged. Then she shook her head.
I said, “That’s good. It might take time to adjust. But it will all make sense…eventually.”
She gave a little frown, watching the lace curtain moving like a lazy fish in the breeze. “You killed her, didn’t you? That’s why—”
“Yes,”
“That night… They never took me to London.”
“No, they took you on a long drive to Edinburgh. They set up an apartment to replicate ours. In your sedated state, you believed it and transmitted it. It lured Rinpoche to our place, where I was waiting for him.”
She nodded. “Thank you.” Then she spread her fingers on the quilt and seemed to study them. “Russell asked me if I would help them—if I thought I could help them. I was so confused. It was as though Hell had taken up residence in my head. But this morning I have so much more clarity, Liam. I will help. We will help together, won’t we? I don’t know how yet, but we will.” Then she raised her eyes and seemed to see right inside me, to dark corners I didn’t even know I had. And she smiled. “Their plans cannot be allowed to succeed, Liam.”
I said, “I know.”
And we kissed for the first time in an eternity. And it was good.
* * * *
We found Russell in the garden, drinking tea. He had his giant sunglasses on that made him look like an albino ant with black eyes. He seemed to be staring toward the maze. Maria sat in an old, green wrought-iron chair in the shade of a cherry tree. She had no sunglasses on and watched me with a small frown, which might have been a squint because of the sun. I sat and Russell turned his eyeless glasses on me. “Cup of tea?” Before I could answer, he turned to Maria. “Will you be mother?”
She poured us a cup each and handed one to me, watching me with amused eyes.
Russell said, “You did very well, Liam, but I don’t understand why you killed Joanna. She would have been a great asset to us.”
&nbs
p; I shook my head. “She was very credible. She almost had me convinced. But a few small things didn’t add up.”
Maria asked, “Such as?”
I sipped the tea and set down the cup. A blackbird started singing on a chimneypot. “Such as… Their initial plan was to lure me to the facility, kill me, then send you back as an unwitting spy. But when I broke free, she improvised and changed her strategy. She decided to go along with me. We’d ditch you and she would become my woman. She could do invaluable research on rupa and transmit it back to del Roble, while secretly being your handler. And, above all, the most important thing was, between you, you could find out who my employers were. She really thought she had me hooked.”
I turned to Russell. “After we got out, I noticed she was real good at soothing Maria. She called her ‘baby’ and it was enough for Maria to hear her voice for her to relax and sleep. I put two and two together and made four. Loss had been grooming Maria from the start, and the implanting process had started back in London. And if that was true, her story about wanting to escape with me was bull.” I shrugged. “And if that was true, then her telepathic link with Maria had to be destroyed. So I destroyed it.”
He sipped his tea. “You certainly did that.”
We were quiet for a bit, listening to the safe, gentle sounds of the English countryside.
Finally, I said, “So, what now?”
“We keep watching, waiting and working behind the scenes to try to stop what is happening…if it isn’t already too late.”
Suddenly Maria said, “What about Anthony Cavra? Did he want to kill me?”
“No. He was deeply neurotic, but he wasn’t a killer. Loss was using him as a decoy, fueling his fantasies and encouraging his crazy beliefs. Eva befriended him. That’s the kind of girl she was. And Loss and Steve—Rinpoche—used him to lead her to Rinpoche’s apartment, where he killed her. When he went to you that night, the poor kid was trying to warn you.”
The Deepest Cut Page 29