The airfield, and the park below, got smaller and smaller as they climbed to three hundred meters, and Hammett wondered, even if she got to the top of the damn aircraft, what the hell she was supposed to do once she got there.
She supposed she’d figure it out.
Once she reached the midpoint on the ladder, where it rested against the side of the blimp, it was much easier to climb than when it was flopping around in midair, and her pace improved. It took another painful, gasping minute to get to the apex. She sat down, holding onto the ladder, and spent a moment getting her heart rate and breathing under control. In the distance to the south, she could see the CN Tower poking up through downtown Toronto, and beyond that, the vast blue-green expanse of Lake Ontario. To the east, Canadafest, the gathering people looking like a sprinkling of multicolored sand against the green park. The outside air was cold and getting colder, and the aircraft was turning back toward the festival. Hammett assumed Isolde would buzz the crowd low to the ground, like a crop duster, but she seemed to still be ascending.
Hammett hadn’t dressed for blimp-surfing. Her boots were slick and a bit bouncy on the rubber and fabric surface of the envelope, and her sweater wasn’t warm enough in the high winds. It was about fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit on the ground. If they climbed to ten thousand feet—and perhaps the airship could—it would drop to around thirty-five. She wouldn’t live long at that temperature. Which, perhaps, was why Isolde was still ascending.
In hindsight, climbing onto a blimp may not have been the smartest decision.
Wrapping one leg around the rope ladder, Hammett dug into the duffel bag for something she might be able to use. Her fingers brushed her karambit knife, and she decided to cut a large hole in the blimp, forcing a slow descent. But it was a short blade, and even when she pushed it into the envelope all the way to the hilt—which took considerable straining and grunting—it still didn’t puncture the thick catenary curtain on the blimp’s top.
OK. New plan. A big hole wouldn’t work, but maybe a smaller hole could still be useful.
Taking out the shotgun, Hammett aimed downward. She fired, fléchette rounds blowing a fist-size hole in the envelope.
That was a start. But she needed a bigger opening than that if she was going to climb inside the blimp, lower herself to the gondola, and kill those assholes flying this thing. It was a crazy plan, and one with a very limited chance of success, but she couldn’t think of anything better.
Hammett jacked another round into the chamber and fired again, wishing she’d traded places with Chandler and gone to Mexico instead, because so far this op sucked balls.
Chandler
“When up against forces you know,” said The Instructor, “remember they may also know you.”
Special K, or ketamine, is a dissociative anesthetic, and I felt the effects quickly. My heartbeat increased first, the thrum in my ears even louder than the music. Then the aches and pains I had collected over the past days began to feel distant, and my body felt weightless, like I was floating above the ground.
“Bonita? Good, no?”
Heath spoke in my ear, but he sounded far away. “I don’t know about you, but I’m in no condition to drive home.”
“Oh, I will take care of you.”
“I was afraid of that.”
We wove through the crowd, the surreal sensation growing, of being outside of myself. I felt as if I wasn’t walking with Heath at all, but was instead a bystander watching Heath guide me through bull masks and bright pink capotes and load me into one of the green-and-white VW bugs.
On the street, lights were brighter than they should be, sun sparking off chrome and glaring off the windows of buildings, pulsing when I stared. We wove through traffic at breakneck speed, but instead of gripping the seat in front of me, I just watched people and trees whip by in time with the patter of my heart. Every little while, it occurred to me that I should get away from Heath, or better yet, kill him.
I tried to go for his good eye, then watched as my hands didn’t quite reach his face. And what seemed like a second later, I wasn’t sure any of it had happened at all.
I found myself staring out the window at a little girl, dressed in a half shirt and miniskirt. Her face looked exaggerated, made up like a hooker. A man stood near her, soliciting the driver of a car pulled to the curb. Her father? Her pimp? I wasn’t sure there was a difference. She looked seductively at the cars around her one minute, and the next she appeared to be ready to cry.
I tried to hold on to her, to my surroundings, but then she was gone, and I wasn’t sure if the girl was real or if I was thinking of Hammett’s story of when she was a girl. I felt like I was floating from the car, or maybe I was dead.
I wasn’t clear on anything else until gradually I realized I was sitting in a chair, as if I was slowly descending back into my body or waking from a dream. I didn’t have to check my wrists and ankles to know I was bound, but I did it anyway. Plastic zip ties dug into my arms, pinned behind me. My feet were bound to the legs of the chair.
The wall in front of me was in desperate need of paint, decorated with an oil portrait of La Virgen de Guadalupe in rich greens, golds, and reds and a small shelf underneath to hold votive candles. I smelled the faint scent of tamales and heard a distant announcer speaking Spanish, his voice filtered through thin walls.
Mexico City, the little girl in the streets, the Plaza Mexico, the festival where Heath…
I felt him watching me before I saw him. And when I focused on his face, the mix of hallucinations, reality, and old memories came rushing back, and for a moment I couldn’t tell one from the other.
He had changed into black pants and a long-sleeve, white shirt. “You’re back, no?”
“No thanks to you.” I remembered the sting in my arm and would have rubbed it had I not been bound. “Ketamine?”
He canted his head to the side in a half shrug. “It made you…compliant.”
“You like that, don’t you?”
“Compliant women? No. You should know that about me by now, bonita. A real man prefers his woman full of fire. But a real man also prefers his woman doesn’t try to kill him with her bare hands.”
Unable to hold his gaze, I glanced around the room. I was still under the effects of the drug and wasn’t myself. At least that’s what I wanted to believe. If I was honest, I had to admit Heath confused me. He conveyed so many mixed signals, body language, and voice inflections that I’d found him hard to read since the first day we met. Although I’d always rolled my eyes at his overtly sexual comments and stupid endearments, before I knew he was an operative, I believed the intensity between us was real. Now I realized he was playing me, he had to be, but the intensity was still there, still so natural, that it continued to throw me.
I needed time to sort imagination from memory and figure out where I was and how I was going to get out of here.
“So now that you have me, Heath, what comes next?”
“We kill you. Like Heath should have done out on the street.”
The voice was rough as number three–grade steel wool, and, apparently, female. Sort of.
I turned my head in its direction and caught a glimpse of the amazon who’d broken into the lightkeeper’s house at Heath’s side. She was even bigger than I remembered, her biceps stretching the cap sleeves of her T-shirt tight, her breasts firm even though she wasn’t wearing a bra.
I glanced at Heath. “She’s Catherine Earnshaw to your Heathcliff?”
“Just Earnshaw,” he said. “Fits her better.”
“I never figured you for a tragic lover wandering out on the moors pining for his soul mate.”
His lips crooked up on one side. “You’d be surprised.”
I met his smirk with a bored expression.
“Come on, can’t we get rid of her? I have much more entertaining things I’d like to be doing.” Earnshaw’s voice deepened, getting downright husky. A blatant come-on if I’d ever heard one. A come-on directed at
Heath.
The lips that were so cocky a moment ago tensed up in reaction to his partner, and I could see that despite her suggestive tone, he didn’t like her very much.
Of course, I doubted Heath would let simple dislike get in the way of sex. To any operative, sex was a tool, a way to manipulate. But I had to wonder if his partner understood that.
And if she didn’t, maybe I could use it to my advantage.
“What do you want, Heath?”
My words were simple, not necessarily suggestive. But as I said them, I met his gaze and held it, my eyes carrying the heat my words didn’t.
His lips twitched upward at the corners. “Tell me your secrets, bonita.”
“To you, I’m an open book.” Feeling the woman watching us, I matched his smile. As much as I hated this man, he didn’t suffer from a shortage of hotness. Playing up to him was easy, disturbingly so. Exactly what had gotten me in trouble the first time. Call it chemistry or stupidity, but liking him was as easy as breathing.
Only this time, I knew who he was, and I was ready for him. I wouldn’t let him win.
“How did you find me?” he asked.
“You’re an open book to me, too.”
“So you sensed where I would go? Mexico City, in all of the world? The Plaza Mexico, in all of Mexico City?”
“I know you like bullfighting. And, if I remember, cockfighting.”
He smiled.
Earnshaw looked from him to me and back again, then pulled out a cell phone. “I’m going to call The Instructor, ask him what he wants us to do with her.”
“Wait,” Heath said. “I have a few more questions.”
She folded her massive arms over her massive chest, her biceps popping. “Well, you better hurry.”
“Tell me about your sisters.”
One subject I didn’t want to discuss, especially not with him. “Not much to tell. I only learned I had sisters a few days ago.”
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Then I guess we’ve reached an impasse.”
“The Instructor said you were close with the one in the wheelchair, that she had been your handler.”
“A voice on the phone.”
“That’s not what The Instructor seemed to think.”
“The Instructor also seemed to think he could blackmail the three of us into working for him, and he was wrong. If I were you, Heath, I’d watch my back. He might need someone to blame this on, or something to hold over your head, and I’ll bet there’s video of you at the bullring.”
Heath’s expression didn’t change. Not surprising. He’d probably considered this possibility. “What do you know about The Instructor’s plans?”
I didn’t answer.
“Give me a minute with her, and she’ll tell us all about where her sisters are and what they know.” Earnshaw circled the room and stopped in front of me, looking like she couldn’t wait to kick my ass.
Maybe making her jealous while I was cuffed to a chair wasn’t the best idea I’d ever had.
“Should I do that, Chandler? Should I turn you over to Earnshaw? I must warn you, she would probably have a gold medal in Olympic wrestling if she hadn’t been thrown off the team for crippling her practice partners. Twice.”
“Funny. I would have guessed she’d been ousted for steroids. Or maybe they found male genitalia.”
Earnshaw lunged, but Heath stuck out his palm, holding her back.
“What do you think, Chandler? Would you like a demonstration?”
“Up to you. You need a woman to do your torturing for you, who am I to judge?”
Earnshaw’s mouth formed an ugly smile. She stepped toward me, the floorboards creaking under her bulk.
When she snaked a forearm under my chin, I wasn’t ready. Her second arm pressed down from above, and she lifted me straight out of the chair by my neck.
It was a guillotine choke, known in judo as mae hadaka jime. It could be applied two different ways: as a wind choke, that prevented air from reaching the lungs, or a blood choke, cutting off blood flow to the brain. Earnshaw opted for the wind choke, and the familiar feeling of not being able to breathe overtook me in a panicky wave.
The only thing I was missing was the water.
I wasn’t sure how Hammett’s technique would work on not breathing, but I tried it anyway.
It was a horrible failure. I squirmed and kicked, but the plastic ties kept me firmly in place. All I could do was wait to die.
“That’s enough.”
She didn’t release me.
“Earnshaw, let her go.”
She still didn’t comply.
My ears started ringing. Darkness shaded the edges of my vision. I was vaguely aware of Heath extending a pistol, pointing above my head.
Earnshaw dropped me.
The chair’s legs hit the floor with a crack. I sputtered and coughed but still couldn’t get air, and for a moment I thought she might have crushed my trachea.
“It doesn’t matter if you tell us about your sisters, Chandler. Our people already know where they are.”
It took me several of seconds of coughing before I could croak out an answer. “Then why waste time asking?”
“I just wanted an excuse to talk to you.”
Earnshaw circled me, her heavy steps creaking through the floorboards. “Kill her or I will.”
“We’re not going to kill her.”
If I wasn’t mistaken, I thought I actually heard a growl coming from deep in her throat.
“I’m calling The Instructor,” she said.
“No, you’re not. Chandler is our insurance policy, Earnshaw.”
“Insurance?”
“Chandler is right about The Instructor. After today, he’ll own us, and while that might not bother you, it’s not happening to me.”
Earnshaw looked from him to me, as if struggling to follow.
“Who better to blame for a terrorist act than a terrorist? Chandler already assassinated POTUS. After that, killing thousands of Mexicans is nothing.”
Earnshaw frowned, as if she was still unconvinced, but at least she didn’t give my neck another one of her bear hugs.
“You want to keep her here?” she asked.
“I think it’s wise. Go get ready.”
Once Earnshaw left the room, Heath leaned close, his breath tickling my ear. “The day I met you, I knew you were the only one who could keep up with me.”
Unable to hit him or kick him or even give him a head-butt, I settled for spitting. I hit him in the neck, my dispatch sliding down over his collarbone.
He gave me a smile, totally unfazed, then lowered his lid in a wink.
Earnshaw clomped back into the room, carrying two loaded-down duffels and my backpack. “You’re not going to just leave her zip-tied to the chair, are you?”
“No, I have something special planned.”
He handed his pistol to Earnshaw, then pulled a knife from his belt and sliced through the ties binding my ankles to the chair.
“Stand up.”
I hesitated, getting the feeling I wasn’t going to like this one bit.
“Don’t give Earnshaw a reason to shoot you.”
I wasn’t sure she would require much of a reason, but I decided to keep that comment to myself. Instead I pushed to my feet, my wrists still secured behind my back.
Heath shoved the chair clear, unzipped one of Earnshaw’s duffels, and produced a bundle of the long, nylon ties. “Now let me see you demonstrate vrksasana.”
“Yoga?”
“What’s the matter, Chandler? Not feeling Zen?”
I shifted my balance to my left foot, raised my right, and rested the sole against my inner thigh, toes pointing downward to my knee. I raised my chest and focused forward, my arms bound behind my back.
“Very nice.”
Heath encircled my raised leg with one of the zip ties, tightening it until my calf and
thigh were bound closely together, my knee at a sharp angle. Using another, he fastened my ankle to my thigh as well, locking me into a tree pose I couldn’t escape. Then he dipped his hand back into the bag and pushed something into my hands.
Most of the object was composed of a sphere, a little over six centimeters in diameter and weighing approximately four hundred grams. I knew what it was before my fingers brushed the fuse mechanism at the top.
“Now get a good grip,” Heath said. He gave the M67 grenade one last little tug and held up the pin for Earnshaw to see. “Think she’ll get away so easily now?”
Earnshaw grunted and handed back his pistol.
“If you have stamina and strong muscles, bonita, you’ll live long enough to take the blame for infecting Mexico City with the Ebola virus.”
“And if I don’t, I blow myself up.”
Heath smiled. “You are used to risking your own life. That isn’t enough to keep you in line. But apartment walls in Mexico are thin. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the neighbors joined you.”
“You really are a heartless bastard,” I said.
He leaned closer, his smile fading. “You hurt me.”
“Not as much as I want to.”
“And what if The Instructor keeps to his word, and we don’t need someone to pin this on?” Earnshaw asked.
“Then I imagine, after some time, even the most hearty of stamina will run out.” He ran a finger down the side of my face. “Adios, querida. Maybe I will see you again.”
Arms already starting to cramp, I silently cursed the day he was born.
Heath
“Part of any operation is recognizing that every player has his or her own agenda,” said The Instructor. “The better you are at discerning the aims of others, the better your chances of using them to get exactly what you want.”
“I know you want to fuck her,” Earnshaw said the moment the apartment door closed behind them. She carried two bags, one filled with weapons and equipment, the other with her disguise for today, and despite the obvious weight of the former, she hefted it as if it were nothing.
Heath groaned inwardly. “Earnshaw. Such language coming from a lady.”
Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Page 91