“Until you answer my questions. You could be bleeding to death, and I wouldn’t give you a Band-Aid—”
“I am bleeding to death.” The blood was running into his eyes, that’s why he couldn’t fucking focus. The insanity of it hit him, and he wanted to laugh. She’d knocked him out, tied him up, cut off his clothes, and stuck him with a knife, and he was trying to give her a break? Who was crazy here? Just let him get out of these ropes and they’d see how tough she was.
It hadn’t been easy tracking her down, and if it weren’t for Jordan’s Doctors Without Borders volunteer work, he would have been lost once he hit Mexico City. Fortunately, he had some experience with the area, and with Mitch’s help, was able to make arrangements for transportation—such as it was—and accommodations.
Mitch had scrounged him a copy of her driver’s license photo, which Jordan used to find the taxi driver who took her to the autobus. He made the trip to San Luis the same way she did, by kamikaze bus, and once there, he bought himself a junker pickup, and greased a few more palms, one of which had belonged to a mission worker, who loaned him the priest’s robes. The hood had come in very handy, and Jordan had known the local policia would be less likely to interfere with a man of the cloth.
Right now, his captor was nonchalantly wiping the blade clean on her shorts. He watched in mute disbelief as she snapped her wrist and stuck the knife deep in the wooden floor at her feet. It was vibrating like a musical saw. He was a surgeon, and he couldn’t have done that without amputating a toe.
“I nicked you when I cut off the blindfold,” she announced. “Scalp wounds bleed like crazy, but you’ll be fine. You should know that, Doctor.”
Crazy bitch, smug bitch. Take your pick, he thought. At least she was sweating, too. It wasn’t rolling down her face in sheets like it was his, but her throat was moist, and her clothes were starting to catch and cling to her body when she moved. Her thin cotton blouse was getting especially friendly with the curves of her breasts, which moved so freely he wondered whether she was wearing a bra. If ever a woman needed support. She wasn’t big, but she was jiggling, and it was damn distracting. He kept waiting for it to happen again when what he really wanted was some satisfaction. A pound of flesh . . . or several pounds . . . he wondered how much she weighed. That’s how many pounds he wanted.
A wail of anguish ripped through the hut, followed by a chorus of answering wails. Howlers. They were living up to their names, and Jordan could totally relate. The jungle was a cacophony of barks, squawks, shrieks, and hooting. Birdy would have had a field day imitating them. But there was one particular sound that disturbed Jordan. As far as he knew, only one kind of animal roared like that, roared incessantly: a big cat.
“You can’t keep me tied up like this.” It was his voice of unimpeachable reason. “My kneecaps are ground chuck by now. My wrists and ankles have gone dead, and gangrene is nasty stuff, in case you didn’t know.”
“Gangrene takes days to set in.”
“Not when you’re hogtied and left to rot in a steam bath.”
It was true enough, although it cut no ice with her, obviously. She was looking at her fingernails, totally bored with his whining. The sun was low in the sky now, and it had been morning when she’d knocked him out. That was at least five hours ago, but she didn’t intend to let him go. She was going to run with this ball until she scored, and she just might not let him go then, either.
So be it, he told himself. She wanted to play for life-and-death stakes, and he did that better than most, maybe even her. He’d made his reputation saving lives. She’d made hers taking them, but that would keep it interesting.
“What do I know about you?” His voice had gone intentionally cold. “I know they call you Angel Face, and that you get your kicks by seducing doctors and killing them. It’s some kind of sick revenge for what your father did to you, and it gives you the illusion of control.”
She was already shaking her head. “That’s not true. None of it is true. My name is Angela Lowe, just as you said, and I work for a biotechnology firm. I’ve never killed anyone—”
“You killed your father. I’ve got a videotape.”
Her flushed face was suddenly chalky. “A videotape? Where did you get that?”
“The CIA. You worked for them as an informant.”
“No, never.”
“You weren’t an informant?”
“Not for the CIA. It was the biotech company, and only because they blackmailed me.”
“It says in your dossier that you wiped your own memory because you thought they were going to kill you for what you knew. You were trying to erase some biowarfare secrets given you by a source named Adam, but you threw out the baby with the bathwater, and now there’s a period of time missing, possibly as long as a year.”
“Adam?” Her voice fell to a whisper. The constant whine of the insects drowned her out. He imagined them as big as birds. Maybe they were birds.
He watched her carefully, aware that he might have found a chink in the armor. At the very least, he’d struck a nerve. “How can you be sure you didn’t work for the CIA, unless you were bluffing about wiping your memory?”
She was watching him now, perspiration beading on her skin. If he was right, she was trying to decide how much he already knew and how much it was safe to reveal.
“I wasn’t bluffing,” she said. “I’ve been tested, hypnotized, regressed, drugged, everything. It’s all gone. I can remember nothing about the last year I was an informant and very little about the time I spent down here. What do you know about Adam?”
She’d barely taken a breath, but he let the question hang. “You might have worked for the CIA and not remember?”
“I don’t know.” A tense pause. “It’s possible.”
She’d lost the fiery color that made him think she was high, but he was even more certain now that something was wrong. Her skin was pale and clammy, and the blouse stuck to her breasts like paper. She was even showing some signs of septic disorientation, which could be triggered by fevers that cycled between heat and chills. If she’d suffered an accident, he would have guessed shock. But there was also the possibility she’d contracted something, a tropical bug. Before he could diagnose her, he would have to get close enough to check her body temperature.
“How did I kill them, the other doctors?”
She spoke from the door of the hut. Apparently she’d been drawn there by the sun, which had set the darkening sky ablaze as swiftly as if a match had been struck. Everything happened fast here, Jordan thought. The cycles were intense and instantaneous. Life was not revered or held precious, but neither was death. They were both just events, facts of existence.
As she turned back to him, waiting for his answer, Jordan understood that things could be both beautiful and unspeakably brutal in the jungle. Her question had not been an admission of guilt. She was asking for information, but he wondered about the jungle inside Angela Lowe. Inside himself. Inside everyone.
“You did it with ventricular defibrillation paddles,” he told her, “the same way you killed your father. And last week, my colleague, Dr. Inada.”
“I don’t know a Dr. Inada. I’ve never heard of him. You must believe me.”
He picked up the urgency in her faint voice and wanted to help her. It was a reflex. He’d wanted to help her when all he had was the snapshot of a desperate girl. He was even struck with the fanciful thought that there might be people you were born wanting to help, and meanwhile, you just went on living, waiting for them to appear in your life.
“Kensuke Inada died at California General of massive heart failure,” he told her. “I found him in a storage room, lying beside a v. defib unit. He had one of the paddles in his hand.”
She came toward him, but only as far as the knife in the floor, where she stopped in obvious distress. It seemed to mark a place beyond which she wouldn’t go unless forced by extreme circumstances.
“You said last week? You think I kille
d someone last week? Then why didn’t you call the police and turn me in?”
Jordan could have given her the CIA’s reason, that she was a threat to national security, but that wasn’t his reason. Maybe he was still in denial about who she was and what she’d done. He’d been trying to save lives ever since Cathy Crosby’s death, but he couldn’t save this one, and he shouldn’t even try.
And yet, as he took in the twists of scarlet that had returned to her cheeks and the deadly weapon at her feet, he wondered if there was another reason. Maybe he had a fascination with the fact that she could kill him, and maybe he thought he deserved it.
“Why didn’t you turn me in?” she repeated.
Her despair tugged at him. It mingled with his own and made his breath burn. “I don’t know.”
The pain in his knees forced him to his haunches. He dropped down and swayed forward, and a dizziness engulfed him that couldn’t have been timed better if he’d planned it. He had a concussion. He was going to black out.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
He shook his head and plunged into spiraling free fall. “God,” he whispered. The cut had started to bleed again. He could feel it trickling down his cheek and into his mouth, and the heavy metallic tang made his stomach roll with nausea. He must have been quite a sight.
He closed his eyes, and the hut did a revolution in space. When he opened them, it flipped again. The next thing he felt was a cool washrag against his forehead. She’d crossed the barrier and was mopping his brow. He didn’t know whether or not he’d blacked out, but he was still sitting up.
“Stay awake,” she urged. “I think you have a concussion.”
“You think?” He would have laughed except for the pain.
“Is your stomach upset? Would it help you to eat?”
The thought of food made his gut churn, but it was one way to keep her close. “I haven’t eaten since yesterday.”
“I’ll get you something when I’m done here,” she murmured and continued to bathe him. The rag soothed his face and throat with cool, sweet water. It ran the breadth of his shoulders and down his arms, and then she wrung it out and started on his chest and belly, stroking with the dark wings and arrows. The faint growl that formed in his throat was a sound of relief and raw, animal pleasure.
A moment later, she’d propped his head against her shoulder and was concentrating on the blood that had caked near his eyes and mouth. When she was done with that, she pushed him lower, against her breasts, and began to clean the swollen mass on the crown of his head. He swallowed a hiss of pain. It was tender as hell back there, but he didn’t want her to stop, not under any circumstances.
“Don’t fall asleep,” she reminded him repeatedly.
He had no such inclination. What guy in his right mind would want to miss a minute of this? When she was done with the head wound, she gently scrubbed at his hair and neck, and then started down his back. By the time she got to his armpits, she’d won him over totally. How could this woman kill anyone? he was asking himself. She had the gentlest touch, the gentlest nature he’d ever encountered. He could have kissed her breasts they were so soft. It was like nuzzling into dandelion fluff or downy clouds. If he did drift off to sleep, he would dream about brushing up against her nipples, feeling them against his cheek or his lips. God.
Maybe she was more than one person. Not a premeditating killer. Not a quick-change artist. Just a multiple of Angela.
And maybe he did have a concussion.
Birds were chirping, singing wildly. Was that his head or the jungle?
At some point, he stopped reveling in the attention long enough to notice what was happening to her. Her skin was hot, but he could feel her shivering, which confirmed that she was feverish.
“It’s you who’s sick,” he said. “You’re running a fever.”
“I’m fine.”
He couldn’t summon the attention span to argue with her. She was working on his tied hands now, massaging his fingers to bring back the circulation. How could that be sexy? he wondered. Her fingers slipped through his; they curled and swirled and kneaded his palms. He was hard-pressed to remember anything ever feeling so wildly erotic. If she kept it up, he was going to have trouble with the size of his shorts. And there was something wrong with that, he told himself, something really warped. She played with sharp knives like they were flatware and oh, by the way, she killed people.
He’d heard of the Stockholm syndrome, where hostages came to identify with their captors, but he thought it took longer. Another couple of days, and he’d be helping her plan her next strike, the sucker she was going to off after she killed him. He was losing it. That’s what was wrong. Somewhere along the line, he’d surrendered his ability to detach. He couldn’t get enough mental distance to figure out who she really was. Now he had to get himself free before she could work any more wiles on him. She wasn’t a bitch, she was a witch. He couldn’t let himself think about anything but that, and if she really was physically sick, that would give him an advantage.
He removed his head from her breasts and breathed in. Oxygen to the brain, he thought, trying to rouse his nervous system from its stunned state.
“Before you get me that food,” he said, “I’ve got a more pressing problem.”
“What’s that?”
“My bladder; it’s about to burst.”
She was up and gone before he could figure out what she was doing. For someone who was septic, she was quick on her feet. He heard her going through cabinets in the kitchen, and when she returned, it was with a small bucket and a towel.
“Wait, what are you doing?” he said as she knelt in front of him.
“You said you had to go to the bathroom.”
“Yes, but I meant, I thought—”
“You thought I’d untie you?”
Her lips quivered, trying to control some urgent impulse. He assessed it as a nervous smile, but maybe that was wishful thinking.
“What I’m going to do,” she said, “is unzip you and take you out of your shorts, and then I’m going to make sure you don’t wet the floor.”
“Jesus,” he muttered, agony in his voice. If she wanted to torment him, she’d picked exactly the right way. He heard the zing of his descending zipper and flinched. The next thing he felt were a pair of silken hands, touching him, releasing his partially swollen member.
It wasn’t unusual to be semihard when your bladder was full, but semi apparently wasn’t enough for her. She was all over him, and he was huge immediately. This woman had more control over his body than he did. And then there were other complications. It was very difficult to urinate with an erection. You didn’t have to be a doctor to know that.
She was on her knees now and gazing up at him, the picture of downy, doe-eyed innocence. His downy innocent. A faint smile appeared on her lips.
“I think we have a problem,” she said.
CHAPTER 15
HE tossed a few kernels of buttered popcorn into his mouth and crunched down softly. He preferred dark places, and movie theaters were dark in a way that allowed you to be with people yet still be alone. You didn’t get the usual horrified stares and whispers. The handful of others in the theater were mesmerized by the screen and seeing things far more grotesque than the solitary burn victim sitting in their row.
Not that it would have fazed him greatly if they had been horrified. He was used to that by now. His own father had been openly disgusted and had accused him of heinous things, including setting the fire that burned him. The old man had long considered his only son and heir a disappointment, and there’d been no contact for years, except through the family attorneys, who were always threatening to cut him out of the will. That didn’t faze him greatly, either. Fuck them all.
The jumbo tub of popcorn got propped against his knee while he quenched his thirst with a Coke, which was probably swimming with enough sugar and caffeine to jump-start his car. He had no issues with artificial stimulants. In fact, he thr
ived on them, including noisy, ultraviolent special-effects movies.
Espionage thrillers were his favorite, but it amused him when the secret agents wore earpieces and paced the room while they talked on the phone. The hands-free devices looked like the microphones rock stars used, and they might as well have been. The potential for eavesdropping was enormous.
Some time ago he had switched to secure E-mail. He rarely used phones at all anymore, except for the cell phones he had equipped with surveillance devices and GPS chips. He’d given Jordan Carpenter such a phone with instructions to use it if he should travel outside the United States. According to the satellite link, Carpenter was now in the Gulf of Mexico, and according to Firestarter’s other sources, he’d followed Angela Lowe down there.
Firestarter had known that Lowe was smart enough to try to cover her trail. She’d disappeared before. He’d also known that Carpenter wouldn’t know to cover his trail, and his trail would lead to her. Could be this will work out fine, he thought, helping himself to another mouthful of popcorn. He chewed slowly, savoring the butter and heavy salt. Maybe it would only take one stone to get all the birds. That would be neat and tidy, although perhaps too neat and tidy for his taste. If there was one thing he loved, it was movie excess.
ANGELA walked outside with the bucket, spotted a nearby freshwater stream that emptied into the ocean, and tossed the contents. This was not polluting the earth, she told herself as she rinsed out the bucket upstream. This was contributing raw material to the flow of life.
The water felt blissfully icy to her overheated skin. She splashed some on her face, savored the cool relief, and imagined herself lying placidly at the bottom of the streambed, as still as the smooth black stones while crystal clear water rippled over her. If her fever got worse, she would do that. She would submerge herself in the stream until she was as cool as a stone.
Cree-cree-creee, kweeup kweeup kweeup, cree-cree-cree . . .
Cackling laughter brought her head up, and as she gazed at the luxuriant green canopy overhead, she saw that the trees were teeming with life. There were vibrantly colored birds and winged insects and probably reptilian creatures that looked like branches and moved nothing but their mile-long tongues. A mother monkey diligently groomed one of her three wooly babies.
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