Dazed, Amelia held her own gun in front of her with both hands, wincing at each flash, unable to decide what to do. Why did she take the visor off? She was the extra man, but she was no use, because she didn’t see fuck all. Which of them should she shoot?
A third intruder emerged from the door. Kneeling under the window, Amelia aimed and pulled the trigger, once, twice, three times. A moan, and the intruder fell. How many shots were left? She’d lost count.
Another man was flung at a step from her. She swung the direction of her weapon on him. A glare reflected by the clouds penetrating the room illuminated a face she didn’t know. She’d have to shoot him in his head, but that information refused to translate into action. Their gazes met; he was lying down, unable to defend himself, while she was towering over him with a weapon.
Mike arrived, raised a foot and lowered it onto the other man’s head.
Something entered the wide-open window with a hiss and landed in the middle of the room, bouncing twice. Straight away, it started emitting thick smoke.
“Fuck,” Mike exclaimed. “Yasir, you okay?”
Amelia’s eyes started watering. That acrid smell made her cough.
“No, my friend,” the other replied with difficulty. “I got caught … they’re too many. They’re about to enter …” He let a groan escape. “You two must go.”
“Not without you.” Mike moved through the fog to reach him in the adjacent room. She saw him bending over his friend. “I’m taking you away from here.” He grabbed him by his armpits and helped him sit.
Yasir supported himself with a hand on the table. “No, I’m done for … you know that, too.” He extended the other arm to point at something. “Give me the rifle … I’ll keep them busy … I’ll draw as many as possible.”
“No, fuck, no.” Mike was shaking his head. His outline was becoming less clear behind Amelia’s tears.
Machine-gun fire burst from the bedroom. She threw herself down, hoping that the smoke would hide her. She watched the owner of the weapon advancing towards her. The flash from the shots illuminated his face for a moment. Amelia aimed at him and shot back. The machine-gun stopped, but no moan was heard, no body falling. Her gaze turned with horror to the slide of her weapon, which was completely backward. Empty. Then beyond it there was a pair of black boots, two legs, a body, a machine-gun; the face of her murderer smiled at her.
A shot. The smiled turned off. The man fell in front of her.
“Take this!” Mike exclaimed, throwing something at her.
Amelia grabbed the magazine on the fly with her left hand, as she released the empty one, letting it slip down to the floor. She clicked in the new magazine.
More gunshots behind her, outside. Another shot at her right. Yasir, who was bent over the table in an unstable position, replied to the fire through the window.
Two more men burst into the room.
Amelia snapped to her feet, where the smoke was being dispersed by the air current, and pulled the trigger like mad, hoping to score some good shots.
Not far from her, Mike was doing the same. “Enough!” he shouted at her after a few seconds.
She stopped, awakening at once from that condition of trance. The aggressors were all down. She felt she was being pushed sideways. Mike dragged her near to the fireplace, forcing her to sit down on the floor again.
She saw him retrieve something. The light of the tablet illuminated the smoke. What was he doing?
A slight tremor and then the fireplace started moving, making her lose her balance as it revealed to her the top of a flight of stairs.
“Go down,” he whispered to her, inviting her to follow his orders quickly with a slap on her back.
She could hear some stamping all around her. They were coming. Risking a stumble, Amelia went down, bending forward. A smell of mould hit her, as she entered deep underground. Mike was on her heels. Only now she noticed that he was holding his rucksack on his shoulders. Over his head the fireplace was closing, blocking the passage.
In a few seconds it was pitch black again. And right after that, light.
She tried to shield her sight with both hands. One was still holding her weapon.
“Come on, we must go quickly.” Mike overtook her and kept going down.
Forcing herself to keep her eyes open as much as was necessary to see where she was putting her feet, she followed him.
About twenty steps lower down, the stairs ended in what looked like a long corridor. The tunnel. That was what they’d meant. It was illuminated by many small ceiling lights, connected to each other by a conduit. The fact that the light was working meant it didn’t depend on the generator, but rather they had an emergency power supply. Actually they weren’t very bright, but after spending all that time in the dark, now she felt as if she was on a stage under the spotlights.
“Keep moving,” Mike urged her, once she had come to the bottom of the stairs. He took her free hand and pulled her to him. “You don’t need that one now.” He gestured to her gun. His had already been put back in his belt.
Amelia did the same and followed him along the tunnel. The floor was wet and slippery. A rivulet of water was flowing in the direction that they were walking in, revealing an incline. The walls were reinforced concrete. She started touching the one on her right. They weren’t running, but he was imposing a fast pace on her, so she needed to hold herself against something to avoid losing her balance.
Her eyes were still burning and her throat was aching because of the teargas. In that surreal silence she wished she could rearrange her thoughts, but it was difficult enough just staying upright.
All at once a deep rumble was heard and everything started trembling around them. Amelia shouted. Behind them, rubble of various sizes rolled down the stairs. A blast filled the place with dust.
“They are in,” was Mike’s laconic comment; he hadn’t been perturbed by hearing the explosion. It was certainly something he was expecting.
“Did Yasir …?” The question died in her mouth.
“Blew up the lodge, everybody near it and inside it.” He paused to sigh. “And himself.”
Amelia scrutinised his mournful face. That had been the plan: drawing them in, then escaping through the tunnel and blowing up most of them. But it wasn’t expected that someone would remain behind. “The others will think we’re dead in the explosion, too.”
“I hope so. Or at least I hope they’ll believe so for a while.” Mike kept proceeding with an absent gaze. Who knew which thoughts were able to unsettle him?
She saw again in her mind the gory way he had killed that man, who was disarmed. He’d said they would take no prisoners, but breaking his neck with a kick had been so inhuman. She couldn’t find a better way to define it. That man was there to kill them; how could she feel pity for him and blame Mike? No, it wasn’t pity, but a form of disgust in remembering the noise produced by the bones breaking, the sight of blood, the horrible aspect of his face afterwards. Pure horror. How could you remain insensitive in front of that?
“There was no need to kill him that way.” She had allowed her thoughts to become words. She was feeling any sort of filter connecting her brain to her mouth fail. She couldn’t even remember why she should have had one. “I had him at gunpoint.”
He didn’t slow his pace. Perhaps he would ignore her comment. What could he say? “You were hesitating.” That was what he could say. “In your shoes, he wouldn’t have.”
It was impossible for her to find something to say back. No word would be able to transmit what she felt. And perhaps he wouldn’t have understood anyway.
“It was just a number to me,” Mike said, moving his head slightly, as if he wanted to highlight that simple concept. “You hadn’t ever killed someone while looking at them in the eye.” For a moment he shifted his gaze to her. “The one you’d shot earlier blindly doesn’t count. It isn’t the same thing, you had no choice.”
“I have never killed anybody before today.” Except
Joseph. This time the filter worked well, because she succeed in not speaking. It hadn’t been her who killed her son. She knew that full well, consciously, but she felt like she had, because his death had been incomprehensible, because she had been there and could have chosen a different road, or maybe just slowed down at the junction, even if the traffic light was green. Or she could have died in his place.
“I preferred to save you one more, given that I could.”
The implied kindness of those words, of the gesture they described, were in contrast with the brutality shown when he’d done it. It seemed more suitable to the man she had met earlier and to whom she’d felt attracted.
“I’m sorry for Yasir.”
Mike pulled a face. “I don’t think so; you’ve known him for half an hour.” His kindness had disappeared again.
“I’m sorry for you, because he was your friend.”
He emitted a faint amused snort. “You barely know me, too.” Diffidence, that was what his kindness had turned to, even if he was masking it with sarcasm.
“Right now I feel like I know you better than most people I deal with every day.”
“Perception deceives us, lets us see what we want to see.” His sarcasm had now turned into cynicism.
“But sometimes it’s all we have.” With the passing of time, Amelia had become a master in bombarding her perceptions with stimuli, to avoid facing reality. “I liked you better when I thought you were a good man.”
“And I liked you better while fucking you, at least you kept silent,” he retorted, without hesitation, ill-concealing his annoyance.
Strangely enough, she didn’t feel humiliated by that remark. She’d expected it. “Do you see? You can’t shock me anymore. Once your mask is gone, from time to time you feel the need to hurt who’s beside you, to affirm your position of superiority.”
As an answer, Mike lengthened his stride, pulling her along. She’d hit the nail on the head.
“But perhaps I’m wrong, I’ve never been so good at understanding people. Maybe this is the reason why I attract arseholes. I must have a kind of magnet.” She waited for any reaction from him, but there was none. “Present company excluded, of course.”
He let a half smile escape. “Instead, I must have a kind of magnet for bitches.” He turned to watch her. “Present company excluded … of course.”
And Amelia took the bait, in defiance of all her good resolutions. “Fuck off!”
Mike laughed.
“You’re an arsehole.”
“And you’re a bitch.”
She screwed up her face, blaming herself for being dragged into that pointless argument. He kept insulting and mortifying her, and she couldn’t oppose him in any way. All that enraged her.
“Come on, you must admit it.” It seemed that he still hadn’t had enough. His sneer didn’t predict anything good. “After being kidnapped, the accident, the trekking … your only thought was to score a shag. You almost raped me.” And he laughed at his own joke.
“Hark at him!” Amelia had some difficulty in remaining serious, too. “You turned me inside out. I’m still sore!”
“Oh, poor thing.”
“I’m serious,” she said, now calmer. “I liked your gentle version. If I’d known what type you were, I wouldn’t have tried to rape you, you can be sure.”
“You don’t convince me. You still like me, perhaps even more.”
“You’re so full of yourself …” Amelia let his hand go and shoved him to move him away. But she put a foot on the rivulet of water and lost balance.
Mike grabbed her arm, preventing her from falling. “Careful,” he scolded her. Any trace of hilarity had gone. “If you break something, I’ll be forced to leave you here. I won’t drag useless loads.”
She tried to shoo him away, but he seized her chin and pushed her against the wall. Her head hit it, causing an intense stab, but Amelia didn’t dare whisper a single word. She could feel the cold and the moisture of the concrete passing through her clothes and reaching her skin. But Mike’s eyes before her were even icier. She couldn’t make out how much truth was in his menaces. Every time she thought he exaggerated intentionally to frighten her, but then he did it again and the doubt was instilled in her again. What terrified her more was that she couldn’t read him.
Then he kissed her. She tried to push him away, but in vain. At last she found herself surrendering, as she perceived a sudden surge of excitement. But in that very moment he withdrew.
He scrutinised her, amused. “As I said.”
He’d just wanted to show he was right. It was another way to confirm his superiority. “I’ve understood you, you know? You’re a manipulator. You behave like this to keep control over me.”
He shook his head a bit. “You’re wrong, I’m just schizophrenic.” He smiled. “I have no ulterior motive.”
Amelia decided not to mind those words. She preferred her theory. “It isn’t true. The truth is that you like me, too.”
He let her go. “That’s obvious, otherwise you’d be dead by now.”
6
The manhole opened with a faint squeak and the fresh night breeze filled the well, reaching Amelia at the bottom of the ladder. She observed Mike looking out, then climbing the last rungs and exiting. He’d told her to wait, but when he disappeared from her sight, she was caught by anxiety and started climbing, too.
She had almost reached the top, when his face peeked out from the manhole and looked at her with a scolding air. She expected another malicious remark, which involved her being in a hurry or stupid or, for a change, a bitch, but he said nothing. He offered her a hand and she grabbed it, letting him help her ascend.
She looked around, disoriented. She was in the middle of the wood again, in the dark, surrounded by menacing shapes. An insect flew near her, drawing her gaze up. There was something in the air. The smell of burnt wood. Now she could make out a glare over the tree tops.
She heard the squeak again and turned to Mike, as he was covering the entry of the tunnel with some foliage. What did it matter hiding it now? The hunting lodge was destroyed, he wouldn’t use it anymore. But she decided not to make any remark.
Once he’d finished his work, he straightened up and, perhaps attracted by that light, started looking in the direction of the fire.
“Someone will call the fire fighters; they’ll trace it back to you.” Amelia surprised herself as she caught a certain amount of apprehension in her voice. Once back home, she would be forced to tell everything to her colleagues, including Mike’s identity, so it didn’t make any difference whether they would trace him back. But should she really do that? She was in debt to this man. She found herself imagining alternate versions of the facts she could report to her chief. Bullshit. None would hold up.
“The lodge wasn’t exactly mine. The person to whom it was assigned doesn’t exist.” He straightened his shirt and turned to the opposite side.
“And anyway your name isn’t exactly Mike Connor, right?” How silly of her. She didn’t know his identity. Whatever she reported, it couldn’t harm him.
She realised that he’d moved away to a few steps behind her and was showing no sign of stopping. She reached him with a brief sprint. She was about to ask where they were going, when he stopped. She followed suit and then it occurred to her that a big off-road vehicle was in front of them. The car that Yasir had left near the tunnel. Amelia smiled. Was it really over?
Mike reached the driver’s side and she headed for the passenger’s one, almost jumping for joy. He opened the door, letting the overhead light turn on, and sat at the steering wheel, pulling the door closed. The car was unlocked. And maybe the key was inside. She opened her door too, and looked in.
He took out his rucksack and put it in the backseat. “Well? In or out.” He was staring at her now. “Just hurry.”
She decided not to reply. She sat down and closed her door. She cast a last curious glance at the rucksack, before the light turned off. She heard
the engine start. Ah, she hadn’t noticed where the key had been. But who cared in the end? “Do you maybe have some water in your Mary Poppins’s bag?” she asked, pointing out the backseat.
“You’ll find one in the storage pocket of your door.” Huh, she would’ve rather had a look inside that rucksack. She didn’t know why, but she was intrigued by the fact that he never separated himself from it. Maybe she would’ve found some more clues to unravel the mystery hovering around him.
The car started moving forward, slowly, with its headlights off. Amelia gave up and reached out in search of the bottle. She was really dying of thirst. Who knew in which compartment of the car she would scrape up an aspirin? She probed the left part of her head with her hand, pressing against her eye and temple.
“Give me a hand, check behind and around us, and tell me if you see any light.”
She felt the cylindrical shape of a little plastic bottle. She took it out, opened it, and drank a sip.
“Do you understand?”
She almost choked herself as she tried to reply. “Yes …” She coughed. “Okay.” A jerk made her hit her head against the window. “Ouch.” Exactly where it hurt.
“Fasten your seat belt.” Mike’s indulgent tone reminded her of her mother.
Why the heck had she made that comparison?
She put the water back and obeyed. Oh, well, she knew. Her mother had the bad habit of telling her what to do. And in the end, she was always right. Now Amelia felt awkward just like it had happened every time she’d been given an order by her mother.
“As soon as the fact you’re alive becomes public, they’ll find out I didn’t die there. And they’ll resume looking for me.” It was one of his observations. He was expressing it with indifference, it didn’t seem like it worried him.
But Amelia was surprised. She was just reflecting on the fact that the police could get to him, but the real problem wasn’t the police. Whoever wanted him dead wouldn’t stop until they were certain they had got rid of him. “I could say I escaped, alone, before the lodge exploded.” That was the solution she was looking for. After all she’d been kidnapped, she was a victim. They would believe her. “You’d gain some time. It’ll take a while before the bodies are identified.” However a new idea was taking shape in her mind.
Kindred Intentions Page 10