by Camilla Monk
“Biscuit . . . we can’t do this in an elevator.”
I gasped. “I know. And Gerone, the dome . . .”
“Exactly.”
His hand slid away from my waist to fumble with the elevator’s buttons. Time to go back to work. We pulled apart reluctantly, stealing one last kiss. The red button had stopped blinking, but the elevator still wasn’t moving. March looked around, a faint frown replacing the blissful expression on his face.
You know, when I said that being with March was a roller coaster with horrible lows, I didn’t mean it literally, of course. Except for the time we stood in an elevator, and a trapdoor opened underneath our feet.
33
The Life Aquatic
I couldn’t take my eyes off of his sculpted abs and long, muscled tail as he circled around me in the water and asked, “Sir, do you know how fast you were swimming?”
“Um, no. Actually I’m new to this beach, and I had no idea—”
“Sir, I’m going to need you to take off your trunks.”
—Tuck Chingle, Pounded in the Butt by the Shark Cops
I screamed when the floor opened beneath us. My stomach heaved with the sudden, horrifying sensation of free-falling. March was swallowed in a split second—right before I was—calling my name once in surprise. My first thought was that the elevator was falling, and I pictured us crashing several floors below in a tangle of gore and bones. It wasn’t that, but I can’t say my heart rate slowed down in any significant way when I realized we had simply been disposed of down some kind of slide.
I felt March’s hand grab one of my legs as we tumbled in darkness. There were a few turns that shook my internal organs unpleasantly. I was trying to catch my breath, and I couldn’t even manage to call for help. I caught a flash of blue before we were both plunged in cold, salty water. Pain cracked in my wrist, and incongruous thought flashed through my mind that I wasn’t supposed to get my cast wet. Hindered by clothes, my body felt instantly heavy as I paddled desperately to keep my head out of the water. I held on to March when one of his arms circled my waist, and he helped me swim toward a tiled ledge.
Through the salt prickling my eyes, I glimpsed concrete. We had been thrown into a pool somewhere in the lowest level of the dome. That, I could deal with. But the fins . . .
Wait. Waitwaitwait. The fins?
The horrifying truth dawned on me, and with it, panic electrified my body. I howled for help and jerked helplessly against March as grayish fins circled us and something grazed my legs.
My fingers dug into the wet fabric of his jacket. “March! March, it’s a shark pool! Oh my God! Oh my God!”
“Biscuit, it’s going to be all right . . . Let me get you out of the water.”
When a nose poked my butt, I shrieked so loud March probably lost some of his hearing that day. It was only when my voice broke from all that bawling that I registered the clicks and whistles echoing in the massive concrete vault housing the pool. Hold on. Sharks didn’t do that.
Sweet Jesus, how sick, how damaged do you have to be to set up an elevator trap door that throws people in a pool full of fricking dolphins? They were swimming all around us, shoving us playfully, laughing, it seemed. I’m pretty sure those whistles must have meant something like, “Ha ha, she nearly crapped herself! Did you see that, guys?”
At last, I felt the ledge under my fingertips, the altar of my salvation. March helped me haul myself out of the water while the dolphins called us stupid twats with Ricky Gervais’s voice, or so I feared. We were both lying on cold tiling, blinded by the fluorescent lights lining the ceiling, when across the room, a door slid open.
Heels clanked on the floor as March helped me up. I stood on shaky legs, watching a woman in her late forties walk around the pool toward us, flanked by a bunch of men in black suits. Her burgundy silk jumpsuit billowed with every step she took. It was the single pearl hanging from a golden chain around her neck that I recognized first. The black tresses falling onto her shoulders and framing the pearl were familiar too, as were the piercing brown eyes and honeyed skin.
The Queen had found us. Well, fished us, really.
Her light laugh ricocheted on the walls. “Dear March, it’s not often that I catch a man like you off guard.”
March greeted her with a slight bow. “I must admit I never expected to end in the pool. I’ll be more careful next time.”
“Then let us pray there is a next time.” Her voice had cooled down a notch, and I started to fear the worst when she seemed to notice me. “How do you like the Poseidon, Island?”
I managed a trembling smile. “It’s . . . nice.”
She winked. “You haven’t seen anything yet.” She snapped her fingers. “Farouk.”
As I prayed that the dolphins were the worst life-form we’d have to face in these walls, one of her bodyguards stepped forward. I hadn’t paid attention to the fluffy black towels in his arms, but when he handed them to us, I could have hugged him. Or not, because the slicked-back-hair-and-sunglasses-inside vibe was a little scary.
Guita didn’t wait for us to dry ourselves. She and her men started heading back toward the door they’d come from, visibly expecting us to follow. March and I tagged along, patting our faces dry. On the other side of the sliding door was another world. The long hall we stepped into was decorated in the purest Moorish style, its walls covered with intricate geometric tiling and elegant sculpted stone arches framing the doors and windows. It was like we’d jumped right into a spatiotemporal portal and been sent to Granada. I was willing to bet that half of that had been imported directly from Andalusia.
The only infidelity to historical detail was the breathtaking underwater view through the windows. A shoal of bright-yellow fish undulated past us. Fricking surreal.
Guita crossed the room to sit in an antique armchair that was basically wood and nacre lace. There were other chairs, and even a desk, but I gathered that here, in her lair, you were expected to stand before the Queen. So we gave the towels back to her guard and did just that. She crossed her legs and studied us, her head tilting in undisguised interest.
“I have to say, when I first received your message, March, I didn’t believe it.”
“It’s a very daring attempt,” March conceded.
“In fact,” she said with a pout, “I still didn’t fully believe it until we found this in a hallway on sublevel two twenty minutes ago.” She reached for a black box sitting on a finely carved brass tray. She opened it and took out a plastic bag, which she threw for March to catch.
While he examined it, I leaned closer to him to check its contents. Oh God. There was a pair of glasses and a gun, both smeared with blood. My heart stopped when I recognized Stiles’s magical Ray Bans. “I think they belong to one of Erwin’s men. His name is Joshua Stiles. Do you know what happened to him?”
One of Guita’s shoulders jerked in the semblance of a shrug. “We haven’t found the rest of him yet.”
I desperately wanted to believe that Alex wouldn’t kill one of his former colleagues, but a nagging little voice inside me suggested otherwise. A chill cascaded down my spine, spread through my limbs. I wanted my Facebook friend back. March’s hand clasped my shoulder, all the comfort he could provide as we stood before the Queen. I took a deep breath and stood straighter.
“I’ll give your men a full ID. He came here with six other agents,” March confirmed.
Guita curled her fingers and examined the carmine polish on her long, lacquered nails. “So, correct me if I’m wrong. At the moment, under my dome, I have at least one Lion, six to seven CIA agents, another rogue agent Erwin let loose, a few French operators thrown into the mix, an unspecified number of armed men, a disfigured madman, a weapon capable of destroying the entire resort . . . and you two.”
March gave a curt nod. “That would be correct.”
“You’ve been busy.”
He responded with a tight smile. “Perhaps a little more than I wished to.”
“H
ow do we contain this situation?”
By then, I knew that peasants of my kind were discouraged to give any amount of attitude to the Queen—or to even address her at all—but I suppose the lack of sharks in her pool emboldened me: I stepped in. “We have a plan. Something that will allow you to evacuate the dome without making it look like you chickened.”
Her eyes went wide, and she gave a snort of laughter. “That I . . . chickened?”
I wasn’t sure it was a good sign, but I forced myself to look her in the eyes and went on. “You’re supposed to gather those Towers people tonight, and Anies chose that meeting to attack you frontally. Common sense would dictate that you cancel, evacuate everyone—you included—and let the dome be destroyed if it can’t be avoided. But then the Lions win this round, and that would undermine your authority over the Board. So you’re counting on March and everyone else to catch Gerone in time.”
She sobered. “And?”
My eyes darted to March; he responded with an imperceptible nod of encouragement. I stood taller. “We came up with a compromise.”
“Which is?”
“Using the filtered water tanks to fake a structural breach and partially inundate the first floor. That will force everyone to evacuate for a good reason, and hopefully mess with Gerone’s plans.”
She rose from her improvised throne and paced in front of us. “How would you do it?”
A confident smile returned to March’s lips, one I had sorely missed. “Erwin’s Delta ops can sabotage the tanks, but their job will be even simpler and safer with the help of your engineers. The water level will never become threatening; it should rise only enough to, say, motivate your guests.”
“And after that?”
“Best-case scenario, Gerone’s plan is sufficiently derailed for us to neutralize his weapon. Worst-case scenario, he reacts fast and manages to launch an attack: we’ll ensure minimum possible casualties by provoking the evacuation.”
“In other words, you guarantee no results.”
March answered in a matter-of-fact, unapologetic tone. “Even if we manage to smoke out Gerone and Morgan, I’m afraid we face a number of contingencies as long as we don’t know where the weapon is.”
She walked to a window and gazed at the seabed beyond. “I don’t want to owe a favor to Erwin.”
“No one does,” I said. “But look at the bright side: he’s way overdue for lung cancer.”
A throaty chuckle escaped her. “People were already saying that when I met him, and that was twenty-five years ago.”
I shuddered at the thought that the Caterpillar might be immortal on top of everything else. Meanwhile, Guita strolled back to her throne and let herself fall onto the embroidered silk cushions. “All right. Tell Erwin to send down his men to sublevel three.”
I stifled a victorious Yes! and the little karate pose I mentally pictured myself performing along with it.
March’s chin ducked in confirmation. “Understood.”
Guita was no longer looking at us; I gathered that our meeting was reaching its end. It was a little risky, but I decided that this might be our last chance to address the elephant in the room. Or rather, the Lion. “What about Dries? He’s working with us; if your men target him, it’ll blow the whole operation.”
Next to me, March stiffened. Wrong move?
Her right hand clasped around her left arm in what struck me as a typically emotional gesture and, therefore, a novelty for a woman I’d always seen in perfect control of herself and others around her. “I have no idea what he was thinking coming here,” she said, sounding a little flustered. “But there won’t be any favors. The moment we’ve ascertained the dome is safe, he can expect to be treated as he deserves.”
My eyes darted left and right, at March, at her goons. Was I the only one in this room who noticed that she was in fact doing Dries a huge favor by postponing the hunt?
March wouldn’t say anything. The question sizzled on the tip of my tongue, but I decided not to ask. I feared I’d uncover yet another ghastly record of Dries’s egregious use of his magic shtick . . .
She clapped her hands twice. “Farouk.”
That guy with the shiny slicked-back hair and the sunglasses took a step forward. “Find our guests something to wear. They’re going to the opera tonight.”
March bowed his head in silent thanks, and we were about to follow Farouk when Guita’s voice stopped us. “Oh, and before I forget . . .”
We both waited for the rest, watching in mild concern as her smile returned and grew foxy.
“The elevator . . . what a show. Especially the ending.” She turned to her bodyguards. “We really enjoyed the ending, didn’t we?”
Unlike Ceraglass, my face had a regrettably high level of thermal conductivity, and it caught fire almost as soon as she was done talking. March, whose own thermal protection system rivaled that of a space shuttle’s, contented himself with clearing his throat repeatedly, as if something was stuck in there that wouldn’t go down.
Like the fact that the Queen and her goons had watched our emotional exchange and subsequent making-out like it was late-night Bravo trash.
At last, March found his voice. “We will be more cautious in the future.”
“Yeah . . . um”—I fidgeted, unable to meet their gazes—“sorry.”
She waved my apology off and locked eyes with March. “Cautious, indeed. I never knew you had such a wild side, but we wouldn’t want it to get in the way of your duty.”
March’s poker face fell back in place, a mask of icy congeniality that mirrored hers. “It won’t.”
I’ll start with the good part: sublevel four was damn cool. We were given a little privacy to shower and change, in a bedroom that boasted the same Moorish design as Guita’s meeting room. I was pleased to find a hair dryer to blow-dry my cast after the dolphin attack, and—sweet Raptor Jesus—in the bathroom too, we had one of those crazy windows to watch the ocean while we bathed. Like I told March while rinsing my hair, “You should see this. I’m totally flashing that grouper, and it just stays there watching!” I suspected that March would have indeed wanted to see “this” and been the recipient of all that flashing instead, but we didn’t have time for that, and certainly not in a place that might be riddled with more cameras!
Now on to the questionable stuff: Guita and her goons somehow figured that I would make fine bait for Anies’s men, and that, to this end, I should be made visible from a distance. After I was through cleaning up and drying everything that needed to be dried, I stood in my underwear and gazed at the fire truck–red dress laid on the bed for me. Farouk—who wasn’t so bad once you got to know him—had mentioned that the pearl-embroidered bustier was bulletproof, as was March’s tux jacket. A delicate attention, but still . . .
“Is there a problem with the dress?” March asked, after he had shrugged on his jacket and adjusted his cuffs—the bowtie a maid had brought stayed in its box though. I made a note to ask him later why he never, ever put anything around his neck.
“No, I’m good. It’s just all . . . very flashy.”
Reading my mind, he went to stand behind me and massaged my shoulders in a soothing gesture. “I won’t leave you for even a second.”
I leaned into his touch and purred, “I know.”
March helped me zip the dress’s back—I can’t even begin to list all the mundane tasks that suddenly take an epic quality when you can’t bend your left wrist. There was an odd contrast between the bustier’s tight and unusually thick material and the many layers of weightless red muslin cascading down all the way to my feet and caressing my legs. A length of veil attached to the bustier would conceal my cast nicely, and I was pleased to find flat red sandals to wear with the dress: thank you, Board, for understanding that you don’t save the universe perched on four-inch heels, dammit!
Once I was done, March trailed a reverent hand down my hip. “You look beautiful.”
I blushed.
“And also ver
y red.”
That made me dissolve into a welcome fit of giggles. Even standing in a giant glass bomb, we could still laugh at each other. That was something already. He handed me the crimson clutch completing the ensemble—Jesus, all we were missing was a traffic cone on my head. The bag felt a little heavy; I opened it. Inside rested a small black gun.
“Walther P99. I thought you’d like that.”
I wasn’t sure whether to grin or to be freaked out. James Bond’s gun, yes, but still a gun nonetheless. I touched it gingerly.
“You have twelve rounds. The cocking switch is on top, and the safety is on the left side; do you need me to show you?”
“No, I think I’ve got the hang of it,” I said, gripping the gun in my right hand and feeling a button click under my thumb. Uncocked. Locked.
“Good. Keep it with you, just in case.”
“Okay.”
March’s hand rose to caress my cheek. “Island?”
“Yes?”
“I hate doing this. Once this is all over, I want us to go somewhere safe and quiet, just the two of us. And there won’t be any missions or guns in your handbag.”
I kissed his palm. “Agreed, Mr. November. By the way, did you call Phyllis?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
His lips twisted in what looked suspiciously like a pout. “I apologized.”
“And?” I insisted.
“She’s back . . . but she renegotiated her Christmas bonus.”
I patted his chest tenderly. “That bad?”
“Outrageous.”
34
Parental Guidance
“Since you won’t give your heart to me, I will find the man you love, and I will castrate him, so no other can ever satisfy you, Rica!” Ramirez growled menacingly, his thick moustache inches from her face.
—Kerry-Lee Storm, The Cost of Rica III: Shackles of Lust
“Bavaram nemishe . . . fifteen years in the business, and this is the weirdest thing I’ve ever done.” That’s what Farouk told us in the elevator taking us away from sublevel four, after he’d given instructions for his colleagues to help Ilan and the Taco Delta ops sabotage the dome’s filtered water tanks.