by Jeanne Adams
“I know that, in my head,” she whispered back. “But it took me a long time, maybe till now, to feel it in my heart.”
He was quiet for a long while. When he spoke, he said, “Yes. I understand that. It is in this place, knowing we may die, that we can be truthful, yes?”
Realizing he was right, she agreed. “I guess so.”
“What have we got to lose, telling our secrets here? You know mine,” he said, and she heard a deep thread of anger underlying his words. “I still live in fear of the dark, of being trapped. So. Eh-la. I must talk of the light and of other things or I will go mad. If I go insane, you will have to tie me down and force me to eat Nutella and crackers while I quibble in fear.”
“Quibble?” She hesitated, searching for what he might mean. Unaccountably, a chuckle sneaked out. What the heck could that mean? It was such a strange word to use. “I don’t think you mean... um—” She stopped, unsure of how to correct his English, worried that he’d be offended by her laughter.
“What does that mean then?” he said impatiently. “Quibble?”
“I think it means to argue.”
“No, no, that isn’t the right word.” He sounded disgusted. His irritation with the language had distracted him from his fear for the moment, so she took advantage of it.
“To quake?”
“Like the earth? To shake?” He paused, then said, “No, that isn’t it. It’s a word like making noises, animal noises, the talk and noises madmen make.”
“Oh,” she said, unaccountably delighted to figure it out. “Gibbering.”
“Yes!” he said. “That’s it. Eh-la, that is it. Gibbering in fear.” He laughed. “The point has somewhat lost its impact, however, with this discussion of words.”
“It’s better than being crazy with fear,” she offered. “Let’s play a word game.”
“Like you did, spelling into my hand?”
“I couldn’t believe that worked.”
“It was difficult,” Dav said, and she heard the chagrin in his voice. “I had to translate the letters, you see. Speaking, that is different. Writing, if I can see it, yes, that isn’t so hard. But that?” She felt him shift, heard the huff of air as he grunted. “That was hard.”
“Is it hard to learn another language?” she asked. “I learned French, but not much. I even learned some Norwegian when I worked at a gallery in college with a Norwegian owner.”
“That’s not something you’d use every day,” he said, and she heard the smile in his voice.
“No. I’ve not learned much Greek, though.”
“I’ll teach you,” he said. “Should we start now?”
“Start with hello,” she suggested, and he laughed.
The mercenary’s sightless, milky eyes were the first thing Dav saw when he woke. The midnight scavengers, unable to turn Carlos’s body off the grate, had torn into him from the back. Dav could see where the clothing was askew because the legs had been shifted and daylight flowed more freely into the cell than it had after the man died.
The gun, crusted now with dried blood, still stared down at them, an accusing empty eye with a drop of dried blood hanging from its barrel. It occurred to him that if they could get the weapon, they could shoot the lock off, but it still wouldn’t help them get the body off the grate or give them a way to climb out, so it was a futile idea.
He felt Carrie stirring in his arms and he deliberately shifted forward so the body wouldn’t be the first thing she saw. With the night passed, Dav felt more solid, more stable. He despised that the old fears still haunted him, but he had no more control over them than he did his reaction to Carrie.
“Dav?” she murmured, stretching and turning his way. He moved again, blocking her view.
“Good morning, Carrie-mou,” he said, smiling at her, knowing that if he died tomorrow, it had been a sweet joy to have been with her, made love to her. “I believe we’ll be checking out of this fine establishment today,” he joked, standing now, so her gaze followed him. “Here, let me help you up.”
She stood and he pulled her into his arms. “Carrie, you need to keep your eyes down. The view above us is very unpleasant,” he murmured in her ear. She shifted and he said, “No, don’t look.”
Pulling back a bit, she protested. “Dav, I’m in this with you. Don’t try to shield me.”
He nodded. “Just know that it is ugly, as violent death usually is, and brace yourself before you look, yes? We are going to find our door today.” He shook her slightly to ensure that she focused on him. “Yes?”
She smiled. It was a bit shaky, but it was a smile. “Yes. If you say so. We will.” The smile grew a bit broader. “You’re seldom wrong, so I’ll trust that.”
“Good,” he approved. “Carrie?”
She had looked beyond him now, and he could see the tears standing in her eyes. For a moment, she said nothing, just shuddered once—a quick involuntary movement—then turned away. “Gee, what’s for breakfast? Nutella? How yummy,” she said with false cheer. “It’s been so long since we had Nutella and crackers, I’m sure you’re just as excited as I am.”
“Sarcasm becomes you, darling,” he said, delighted that she was so strong in this situation. What a woman, his Carrie. He had known she was strong, but this? This stirred a deep admiration for her.
It reassured him to know that when they got out of here, as they went through life, as the passion left them, he would have this deep admiration to sustain them. Yes, he nodded to himself at the thought. It was good. His father had never admired anyone, much less a woman. That Dav could, and did, told him he’d sloughed off that mantle his father had imposed upon him.
Odd that, trapped and desperate, he would finally feel whole. Terrible that, as he might be living his last day, he was at last free of his father.
“Hmmm, yes, well, you might not appreciate that same sarcasm when I have to eat Nutella again tomorrow, but, for today, we’ll just go with it.”
They did the best they could to wash up, and clean up as they ate a meager breakfast of crackers and the now-sickeningly sweet chocolate nut spread. At least it was filling.
Studiously avoiding looking up, and ignoring the jungle noises beyond the grate, they both approached the wall.
“He’s going to start to stink in a few hours,” Carrie offered, not looking at him. “And there will be buzzards.”
Dav nodded, studying the wall intently. “And insects.” He kept his voice calm, but the idea of it, the idea of having to watch as insects devoured the man above them, nearly brought the Nutella back up. “However, we will be gone.”
“Right,” Carrie said, with finality. She shifted both her eyes and her body away from the noxious sight. “Let’s follow the sky line here—” She pointed to the set of carvings that whorled and shifted unpredictably, even as it made its way around the walls. “Sky is freedom in most cultures. I can’t remember enough of my Mayan studies to know if it’s right, but we’ve got nothing but time, so we’ll try it first.”
“Good plan,” he agreed, starting with the whorl above her head as she took the one closer to the Earth line, which featured stylized representations of people and plants. The gods were above it all, above the sky, above the plants and the puny worries of man.
There was no one waiting when Niko landed at the airstrip.
Something was wrong. The hackles on his neck prickled and he knew he’d been double-crossed, betrayed. Somehow.
Had his team abandoned him? Had Dav somehow figured out that it was him and gotten to his men? They were loyal, but money spoke volumes.
Who had given in? Whom had he misjudged? Had his inside man given him away?
He slipped his weapon out of its holster, motioned his pilot to pull them close to the hangar.
“Something’s not right, compadre,” Sam, the pilot, muttered under his breath. “Why is the second Jeep here? It should not be here. Where are they?”
Niko shook his head. “I don’t know, but let’s lock the plane down and get out of her
e. We’re too exposed. We check the Jeep for explosives, too, before we start it.”
“Damn, Skippy,” Sam offered, darkly. “And go expecting a trap.”
“You got that right.” Together they left the plane, checked the hangar and all the remaining vehicles. Nothing seemed out of place. The extra weapons were in their usual hiding places. Niko selected several, plus ammunition, and made sure that both he and Sam had reloads and grenades. If there were something wrong at the site, they needed to go in blazing.
Or slip away to fight another day.
“Let’s go,” he said, having checked the Jeep one last time from ignition wires to undercarriage. “We’re behind. We need to get halfway there before dark. We’ll make camp and come in at sunrise. If something’s wrong, better to see it from a distance and in daylight.”
“Right,” Sam agreed as he cranked the car and wheeled out of the hangar, fast and efficient from start to finish. A man of few words, that was the last he spoke until they reached the halfway point.
That was fine with Niko. He had too much to think about and no answers to ease his mind.
Chapter 10
It was midday and the buzz of flies and worse added an annoying accompaniment to their labors. They’d already snapped at one another twice or three times. The growing heat and the omnipresent smell of death wore on the nerves like nothing Carrie had ever experienced.
She ran a ragged, scraped finger over yet another cloud whorl in the stone, feeling despair creeping into her heart.
“Shit!” Dav cursed in English, then let fly with a string of curses in Greek, Italian and what sounded like French. She spun around, to see him shaking his hand, then pressing on his fingers.
“Dav?”
“Set my fingers in a gap in the stone, then moved wrong and caught them there.”
“Ouch,” she empathized, then jumped as a raucous screech sounded above them. The body shifted violently and the machine gun swung wildly on its strap, spinning around as buzzards or vultures came to rest on the dead man.
“Oh, my God,” Dav said, his voice echoing the revulsion she felt. Turning back to the wall, she continued to run her fingers along the carving. She had to focus. She had to find the key so she could get away from the wet tearing sounds, the squabbling squawks and shrieks as more birds came to rest above them.
“Keep looking, Dav,” she said sharply, knowing that she was going to go mad, or throw up or something if they didn’t get a break soon. She bent down to peer into a deep crevice of a whorl and saw something. “Dav, do you have my all-purpose tool?”
“Yes,” he said, but she didn’t look at him or at anything but the deep hole in front of her. She couldn’t bear it. She wanted to throw her hands over her ears and howl. It was awful.
Instead, she held out her hand. Dav set the tool in it and went back to his side of where they thought the door might be. She opened the longest blade and used it to probe down in the curl of the stone design. She pressed inward, and wiggled the blade. Why was there a hole here, in this design, in this place?
There was the faintest movement. The barest shift in the stone. She’d felt it in her hand, hadn’t she?
There! A quiver of movement. Faint and nearly imperceptible.
Had she imagined it? She stuck the blade farther in, pressed harder.
“Carrie?” Dav’s breathless use of her name made her look his way. He’d stepped back from the wall. In front of him was the faintest lip of stone, the minutest shift making a vertical line on the wall.
“Dav!” she squealed, “it worked!”
“Whatever you did, keep doing it,” he said, striding to her side.
“I put the blade in here, and pushed,” she explained, doing it again. Another whisper of sound and movement and the pivot of the door became more obvious. Instead of a typical hinge, it was shifting in the middle, like an upright paddle, spinning on a central pin.
“What if I push here?” he asked, pointing at the back edge of the shifting panel. “Do you think that would work?”
“Can’t hurt. Let’s do it at the same time,” she said, excited enough to grin at him. “Oh, my God, I never thought this could work. It still might not, but—” She stopped, not sure what to say.
“But it might,” he said, returning the grin. His white teeth made a startling counterpoint to his warm skin tone and dark, beard-roughened face. “I would love to not be here when my unlamented brother comes to check on us.”
Her heart clenched. “You think he’s coming?”
“Oh, yes. He was planning to come—they indicated as much when they put us down here. They were waiting for him.”
“Then who killed them?” she asked, totally puzzled.
He shook his head. “Who knows? This area—Central America or Mexico—is rife with rival gangs and drug lords in certain parts of it. Much of it is only recently settled into democracy, or semiregular government. There’s plenty of greed, graft, corruption and general lawlessness in a lot of the countries. Some are better than others. Let’s hope we’re in one of those.”
He braced his feet, putting his hands firmly on the shifting wall panel. “Ready?”
“Let’s do it,” she agreed. “On three.” She counted it off and pressed in on the blade as he shoved at the panel.
“It moved,” he exulted. “Really moved, look.” Five inches of the wall panel had shifted outward on the outer edge and inward where Dav had pushed at it. “Let me get the flashlight.”
He skirted around the edge of the room to their belongings, taking up the flashlight. She saw him wipe it off on the edge of his coat before he came back to where she stood, studying the wall.
They moved together to the open side, and Dav turned on the Maglite flashlight, pointing its powerful beam down the dark corridor.
“Ugh.” Dav was the first to comment. The view was dusty, dark and cobwebby. At least she hoped the stringy things hanging in the space were cobwebs. Old ones. Unused ones.
“It reminds me of that movie,” she whispered. “The Lord of the Rings, where Frodo goes into the spider’s place.”
“Shelob.” Dav’s voice was terse, sharp.
She looked at him, surprised. Lines of strain were carved into his forehead. She remembered his confession about the locked room, the insects and rats. His fear of the inhabited dark.
Carrie rested a gentle hand on his arm. His elegant shirt, now tattered and dirty, was wet with sweat, but the fine material was still smooth under her fingers.
“Dav.” She waited until he looked at her. “We’ll do it together.”
He looked away, staring into the dark passage for a long time. Finally he nodded. “Thank God you’re here.”
It was all he said before handing her the flashlight and taking up his position on the back side of the stone again, bracing his feet and shoving with all his might. The door pivoted another six inches.
“Let me brush off the floor here,” Carrie said, stuffing the flashlight in the back of her pants, like a gangster would stow a gun. Like Dav, she skirted the edge of the room to get to their belongings. She riffled through them until she found the rough sack their food had been lowered in. Hurrying back, she dropped to her knees to use the sack like a broom or dust mop, brushing at the crackling dirt, moving it from the path of the heavy stone. At least three inches of soil had come up where they’d shoved the stone around, so she used the pliers on the all-purpose tool to dig at the packed earth, jabbing it up and scraping it away.
Once he saw what she was doing, Dav retrieved her purse. “Do you have anything else in here that’s strong enough to dig with? I could break one of the bottles, but I’d rather not do that yet.”
“I have no idea,” she said, squatting on her haunches. “Maybe.” Rummaging inside, she pulled out her makeup kit, then set it aside. Nothing in there would help. “Credit card?”
“That would work, but it’s small. What else?”
She laid out a bottle of nail polish, her wallet, a small c
omb, a case that held her business cards, an empty cell phone case, and her iPod. “Wonder why they left me my tunes,” she said, baffled.
His gaze sharpened on the item. “That’s weird. At least you can put the tunes on, block out the noise while we work,” he offered.
“Good idea,” she said, “but no. If you have to listen to it, I do too.” She surveyed the pile on the floor in front of her. “I may have some matches in one of the zipper pockets.”
“Really?” That seemed to excite him. “Those might be useful. Could you see?”
“Sure.”
“Meanwhile, I think I will destroy your card case,” he said with whimsical humor. “It seems to be the only metal thing here that might be large enough.”
He opened the silver case and slid her cards free, tidily tucking them in an inside pocket on her purse. She had opened the zippered part, and he neatly zipped it closed. When she looked at him, he smiled. “You never know, we may need the paper.”
Shaking her head, she laughed. “Save everything, right?”
“Right.” He was watching her intently, that smile still playing about his firm lips. She saw the change in his eyes, saw the moment he saw her again, as a woman. As Carrie. It was thrilling to see the intensity rise in his features, heat his gaze. With sudden passion, he leaned in, kissed her deeply. “Carrie,” he began, but she stopped him, pressing a dusty hand to his cheek.
“Shhhh. Don’t say anything you’ll regret, Dav.”
He shook his head, began to speak. “No,” she stopped him again, laying a dusty, gritty finger on his lips. “There’s time enough to say whatever you need to say when we’re out of here. Deal?”
With another quicksilver turn of emotion, he smiled again. “Deal. Remember,” he said as he turned back to his work. “I am very good at deals.”
Laughing, she unzipped the innermost pocket and hit paydirt. “Hey, I was right!” she said, pulling out not one, but two books of matches.
“So,” he said, using the unfolded card case to chip away at the cement-hard dirt. “You collect matches?”