by Camilla Monk
I stood taller, straighter. “No. Are you afraid you’re gonna end up like your father, Alex?”
He stared at me, unblinking, leaving me a spectator to whatever sick internal dialogue was playing behind those soft brown eyes. After a while, he ran a hand across his face, his fingers lingering to scratch the stubble on his chin, as I knew he did when something wouldn’t compute. He walked up to me, too close, verging on invasive. Just the way he liked it. I staggered back, my battered ballet flats crushing leaves and paint chips.
Alex cracked his neck with a tired groan. “Oh, baby . . . you think you’re getting off easy, huh?”
Not really, no.
“Then let me tell you this: I know him. He won’t touch that little doll face, but”—he lowered his voice, his words a secret between us—“he’s gonna . . . Fuck. You. Up.”
For some reason, Boxing Helena came to mind. I let the chills racking through my body run their course, focusing my efforts on standing still, straight. I didn’t want him to see that, right now, I felt like a six-year-old huddled under her covers in a dark bedroom, staring wide-eyed at the closet door behind which all the other kids claim a monster lives. Chances were Alex could smell that particular fear though, and either the Lions or the CIA must have taught him that building anticipation is 50 percent of the pleasure.
Behind me, I registered movement. Baldie had pulled out his phone and nodded to Alex, who flashed me an adolescent grin. “We’re moving.”
One of the men went to open the room’s door, and I was escorted out, Baldie and Alex leading the procession.
With the multitude of identical doors and windows, our walk down the darkened circular hallway felt like being thrown inside a spinning zoetrope, so much so that I was becoming dizzy—but it could have been the aftereffect of the drug they had injected me with earlier. Once outside, a light breeze caressed my face, which turned the sweat drops dampening my temples to ice. Half concealed by a bed of fragrant humus, a concrete path led away from the saucer and into the woods. In the distance, something roared and breathed. The ocean. The sound was getting clearer; we must be no more than a few hundred yards from the shore.
Treading deeper in a labyrinth of oddly angled trunks and gnarled branches, I thought of March and Stiles probably looking for me anywhere but here. I shivered. Beyond the woods, lurking in the dark, an ogre awaited. And he’d sent a boat—between two pine trees, a strip of sand appeared, fifty yards down a gentle slope. Dark shapes moved in the distance around what could be a Zodiac. Ashore, a single yacht awaited, all lights off, its bow a razor-thin black blade against the horizon: something designed for a fast break.
I squinted my eyes at the slope to my left. The trees and shrubs formed a mesh so thick in places that the beach was no longer visible. We would reach it soon though. There, in plain sight, there’d be no hope left for escape.
Do you remember Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator? Covered in mud, crawling in the woods, setting up traps and singlehandedly offing a beefy alien with dreadlocks and a bad braces job? Yeah, I’m not like that. I’m not sure I would have found the strength to make a run for it, had it not been for the sudden beam of blinding white light falling from the sky and swiping through the trees ahead of us.
Because I had precisely been contemplating pulling a Schwarzie on Alex and his men, the first words that flashed in my brain were: alien abduction. The distant droning of a rotor, however, suggested a helicopter instead.
Alex grabbed my arm, and he looked up. “Shit, we got company. Hurry up.”
I had no idea what was going on; I didn’t even care if the chopper was here for me or if the Croatian police were just totally hardcore about people hiking outside designated trails. I wrenched my arm from Alex’s grip with a scream and, without thinking, leaped down the slope in the dark. It was a hard landing, to say the least. Pain tore through my left wrist, shooting up all the way to my shoulder as I rolled down a bed of dirt, pine needles, and, unfortunately, rocks. A long-dead trunk stopped my fall at the same time that gunshots cracked above my head.
I caught Alex’s furious hiss. “Hold your fire! I need her alive.”
I curled into a fetal position behind the thick trunk, nursing the throbbing pain in my wrist. I prayed it wasn’t broken, but I could barely close my fingers, making me fear that some bits weren’t where they should have been. Thank God I couldn’t see how bad it looked in the dark. That helped me keep it together. At the top of the slope, heavy footsteps crushed twigs as Alex and at least one other guy attempted to skid down in the direction I’d thrown myself.
I heard his voice call to a third man. “Get down here with me. And no one shoots. If she needs to be neutralized, I’ll do it myself.”
“Okay,” a gruff voice answered.
It was that moment the helicopter chose to return with a vengeance, thrumming closer and closer. When the beam reappeared less than twenty yards away from me, I saw Alex, briefly bathed in white light, gun in hand, before he disappeared, swallowed back by the night. I breathed through my nose and desperately tried to think. Progressing any lower down the hill would not only deprive me of the relative protection offered by the dead trunk but would also get me closer to the beach and the Zodiac waiting for my sorry ass there. And—God—the pain in my forearm was relentless, hot, raw.
I sniffed back tears and rolled to my side, careful not let my injured wrist hit anything else. Maybe the trunk was large enough for me to slip inside and hide in there. Alex and his men needed to escape the helicopter’s insistent search too. Their boat was waiting, and the clock ticked against them. Maybe if I could just scrape enough time . . .
“Baby, we don’t have all night. Don’t make me shoot you in the knee. That shit hurts.”
Alex’s voice petrified me. He was closer than I’d thought. I could pick up his soapy cologne over the mingled scents of earth and pine. Above us, the helicopter’s persistent noise felt like a drumroll in my skull. I flattened my body to the ground, deadly still. I didn’t dare release a single breath. One set of footsteps seemed to move away from the trunk, but another remained, its movements now almost imperceptible save for faint creaking sounds.
“Island. Get out!”
I saw Alex’s legs, less than ten feet away, recognized his rugged boots. The gun’s barrel glinted in the obscurity. I willed myself smaller, flatter, merged with the dirt and leaves. Invisible.
Beyond Alex and the tormented shapes of the trees, something flashed twice. A signal, coming from the beach.
A voice bellowed. “Morgan, we need to move!”
Alex swore under his breath. “Go ahead. I’ll join you in a minute!” To himself, or perhaps to me, he growled. “Shit . . . you’re here. I know you’re in here.”
When new gunshots echoed from the direction of the saucer, I figured Alex’s men had just decided to ditch his orders and try to randomly shoot me. Bullets crashed into a tree right over me. Wood splinters landed in my hair, on my face. I bit the inside of my cheek not to scream and tasted blood. Tires screeched at the foot of the building, and the gunshots were getting closer. Alex took cover behind a tree and fired a series of shots. By then I was shaking so badly I thought that alone would give my hiding spot away.
That’s when Raptor Jesus came down from the sky in his white toga. Except it was rather the helicopter’s beam . . . But one thing is certain: Agent Alexander I-refuse-to-give-up Morgan retreated. With a final expletive, I saw his boots run past me and skid down the rest of the slope, toward the beach. I didn’t try to move to see whether he was gone; I just stayed there, shielded behind my trunk, one with the earth, listening to new footsteps coming toward me. I didn’t even want to know, especially when the razor-thin red rays of laser pointers started to appear all around me. I feared my earlier guess regarding the strict enforcement of hiking policies in Croatia was correct, to the point that it involved enrolling help from special ops to take down the offenders . . .
The footsteps stopped, and I thought I hea
rd a whisper, something unintelligible. The flurry of red dots whirled my way, clustering on the trunk and the trees surrounding it. Every single muscle in my body froze.
A terrifying bark reached me. “Get out, with your hands in the air!”
American accent. Erwin’s men? For real this time? In any case, I couldn’t comply. My legs were shaking so badly I’d need both my hands to haul myself up, and that just wasn’t happening, not with the pain still pulsing through my wrist in tune with my heartbeat.
“I can’t get up.” The words were a barely audible whistle. I gulped down and gave it another try. “I can’t . . . I can’t get up.”
“Island!”
March’s shout pierced through my daze. I rolled onto my back, keeping my wrist tucked against me. For the first time since nightfall, I noticed the stars, like millions of diamonds in the clear indigo sky. Combat boots trampled the bed of pebbles and pine needles I rested on, and soon, a group of men hovered above me, looking like big insects with their black gear and round infrared goggles. I didn’t care; I could hear March wrestling his way to me past a guy telling him to stay back. I registered Stiles’s voice too, asking one of the soldiers if I was wounded.
At last, March knelt by me. “You’re going to be all right. I promise—”
“I know,” I said, my voice oddly calm, even to my own ears. “But Anies is going to be pissed.”
25
Bone deep
Long has paled that sunny sky:
Echoes fade and memories die.
Autumn frosts have slain July.
—Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
No one would tell me anything at first, but I gathered that Alex’s defection and Gerone’s plans to blow up the Poseidon Dome had set the CIA’s wheels in full motion: the unmarked ambulance I had been carried into was part of an entire convoy headed south for Dubrovnik—the closest airport.
And so, around 9:00 p.m., I lay in the back, on a fairly comfortable stretcher, while a quiet Croatian female doctor finished placing a purple sleeve around the fresh cast encasing my left hand and forearm. Clean Colles’ fracture, she’d said, showing me the broken radius in my wrist on the screen of a portable X-ray. That thing was no bigger than a two-inch-thick iPad, and I decided I needed one. For science.
Sitting by my side, March watched her every move like a hawk, his eyes occasionally narrowing whenever a particular step made me flinch. It was only after the doctor allowed me to rest my forearm on my chest and she started disposing of the remaining strips of damp cast tape in a plastic bag that he seemed to relax. He drew a deep breath and briefly closed his eyes.
I reached for his hand with my good arm, linking his fingers with mine. “Are you okay?”
The quirk of his lips was anything but happy. “I should be the one asking you that.”
Of course I wasn’t okay. Not by a long shot. And I don’t mean the wrist; that was almost a detail. “Karl had family; he mentioned his stepfather.” I blinked back the tears I could feel building in my eyes. “I don’t know his name. I just know he steals cars.”
“In Stockholm,” March confirmed. “Mr. Stiles’s colleagues were able to identify him. I’m so sorry, biscuit. His body will be brought back to his mother.”
I sniffed. “Will they tell her?”
“I believe the Säpo will leave out some details,” March replied, evidently on the same wavelength.
“He was only nineteen.”
“I know.” His eyes grew unfocused, the silence between us thick with regrets. “I made a mistake. I shouldn’t have handcuffed him.”
“It wouldn’t have made any difference. It went very fast; Alex didn’t leave him a single chance.”
Upon hearing Alex’s name, March darted a look to the doctor. Her face shielded by a curtain of brown curls, she had been busy filling some sort of report on a laptop, perhaps overzealously so, in an obvious effort to give us as a little privacy in the cramped space. Noticing March’s gaze, she pointed at the lampposts flashing by through the rear windows, and said, “It's okay, we’re almost there. I’ll go.”
Indeed, moments after she’d spoken, the van came to a stop. I craned my neck to look outside. All I could make out was a nondescript parking lot.
The van’s doors opened, and Stiles’s grinning face appeared. “Final stop, Dubrovnik Airport.”
I managed a stiff smile. “I desperately need a shower. Do you think I can take one, like in the business lounge, maybe?”
Before he could answer, the doctor squeezed past his solid frame to step outside the van, mumbling a final warning for me not to forget to protect my cast from water. Stiles watched his colleagues escort her toward a strange burrito-shaped terminal and returned his attention to me. “Actually, I think you’ll like the shower in the plane even better.”
Next to me, March went rigid. “I don’t think Island will be flying with us.”
Now why wouldn’t I?
Stiles scratched the blond bristles on his skull. “Ah, yeah, about that . . . I think you should discuss it with him. He wants to see you.”
“The Caterpillar?”
March and Stiles gave me odd looks.
“I mean, Erwin. He came all the way to Croatia?”
Stiles confirmed. “Yup. Normally he doesn’t do fieldwork, but when he got the news about Morgan, he was a little upset.”
As March helped me out of the van, I pondered the Caterpillar’s sudden appearance. On March’s wrist, the black dial of his watch indicated 9:55. Meaning it had been less than five hours since Alex had barged into our suite at the Atrium to take me. So either the US Army had dropped the Caterpillar’s sexagenarian ass into an F-35 and flown him to Croatia faster than the speed of sound, or he had gotten there the old-fashioned way, and that meant an eight-hour flight from the East Coast—at the very least. In other words, that old scumbag had known something was off before we’d even set foot on Novensia’s compound.
There were half a dozen other vehicles on the tarmac, and only one plane, an unmarked 787 Dreamliner, if my memory and my endless lurking on Wikipedia served me well. Oh, government . . . why can’t you ever enjoy the small things in life instead of the big ones?
Standing near one of the black SUVs was a dark-skinned figure whose classy trench coat looked familiar: the ever-stoic Agent Murrell. I knew almost nothing of him, save that he was part of Alex’s division and, from what I gathered, above Stiles in their internal hierarchy—that or he just liked bossing people around, and Stiles was too nice to make a fuss about it. He was the silent type, and I couldn’t say he and I had hit it off when working on the Ruby case, but at the time, Murrell had struck me as a decent, reliable guy who did what he had to.
March greeted him with a slight tip of his head, which he returned. When we both walked up to the car though, Murrell’s right hand jerked. “I’m sorry, Mr. November; for now, it’s only Miss Chaptal.”
“Our agreement specified otherwise,” March retorted icily.
I laid a soothing hand on his arm. “It’s okay. I’m not going anywhere.”
He appraised me with anxious eyes, his gaze lingering on my cast, which I kept folded against my chest—I had this irrational fear that if I let it hang at my side, the bones wouldn’t stick back together because of gravity or something. Medical hazards be damned, I forced myself to unfold my arm and held up the cast with a grin. “Don’t worry—if he messes with me, I can whack him on the head.”
March nodded with a tentative smile of his own. “I’ll wait here.”
Murrell opened the rear door for me. Immediately, the familiar whiff of sweet tobacco smoke hit me, different from the faint scent of cigarettes that always clung to Murrell’s trench coat. My heart raced a little as he helped me climb in, carefully supporting my arm. The door slammed behind me, and I was sinking in a soft leather seat, alone with the Caterpillar—or Director Erwin, if you prefer.
The cigarillo was balanced between his index and middle finger. His s
uit was the same silvery gray as his hair. Nothing filtered through the deep creases around his mouth, the many lines canvassing his face. Seeing him again, I was once again struck by how much Alex’s boss reminded me of Dries, as if some men were just destined for that life, and it was only a matter of choosing your side. I mean, even the cigarillo, right? Cigars for drug lords and Hannibal Smith, cigarillos for villains who fancied themselves too classy for the blood splattering on their suits.
His lips parted, filling the car with the gravel of a voice made hoarse by way, way too much smoking. “How have you been, Miss Chaptal? Enjoying yourself in Croatia?”
I had no choice but to inhale the curl of pungent smoke stretching between us. I looked down at the purple cast around my forearm. “Not really.”
“Ah well . . . Ours is an unpredictable business.”
“I’m not in the business.”
He coughed a chuckle. “I’m afraid that’s my call.”
No, it wasn’t. But I wasn’t here to discuss that. I looked at him straight in the eyes and, for the first time since we’d met, noticed they were a shade of brown so dark they almost seemed black. “So you knew about Alex?”
“Of course. The brotherhood approached him shortly after he had joined our ranks. Mr. Morgan was very enthusiastic about following in his father’s footsteps, for reasons I used to think were obvious.”
“He’s good at making people trust him. I bet you were looking for weaknesses to exploit, and he showed you exactly what you wanted. Alex, he’s like a mirror. You never see him; you see what he knows you need to see reflected back at you.”
A humorless smile pulled at the corners of his lips. “Spoken like a true connoisseur.”
I shrugged the compliment off. “So you planted him as a frumentarius. Or rather, he planted himself among you.”
“I take risky bets. Most of the time I win, and our country wins with me.”
“Except when you lose. When did you figure he had turned on you? I know it was before he kidnapped me.”