“I know you do. I could break her over my knee like a stick.”
“You are indeed a formidable woman.”
“But you don’t look at me like you look at her.”
Of course he didn’t. No one was that good an actor.
“I am but a man, with a man’s weaknesses.”
“Meaning you’re a pig.”
Heath wasn’t going to argue with that.
He slipped on a baseball cap and sunglasses, and Earnshaw did the same. Then they caught a cab and ordered it to drop them at Benito Juárez International Airport, where Earnshaw stashed everything they didn’t immediately need in a secure metal locker in the baggage storage area. Heath kept few things beyond his Sig Sauer, Chandler’s backpack, and cash, then he paid for a month’s rental on the locker, the maximum allowed. He and Earnshaw wouldn’t go near the equipment again. But better to let the authorities find it eventually, than for weapons to get into the hands of children by discarding it in the street.
After grabbing a coffee in silence, they caught another cab, and Heath directed the cabbie to take them to the Plaza de Toros México.
Earnshaw hadn’t said a word since her accusation, and the last thing Heath needed was for her to be feeling all angry and resentful toward him going into this operation. He had to say something to smooth things over.
The trick was figuring out what.
“Chandler doesn’t have anything to do with what I feel for you.”
It was true enough. Where Heath found Chandler unspeakably hot, he barely tolerated Earnshaw, and on some days, not even that.
She knotted up her lips and stared out the window.
“I simply knew her in the past.”
She turned to look at him. “I know.”
He raised a brow.
“The Instructor told me.”
“Did he?”
“After you didn’t kill her in Maine…” Earnshaw shook her head, the beads decorating the ends of her braids clicking against one another. “I had to know what that was about.”
“So you checked up on me.”
“You’d do the same.”
He might, but he wouldn’t go through The Instructor. “He told you to keep an eye on me?”
“Yes.”
“And report back to him?”
She nodded.
“And take me out if I got out of line?”
“Yes.”
“And have I done anything out of line, Earnshaw?”
“Not until now.”
“And what did I do now that was so bad?”
“You should have killed her.”
“Then we wouldn’t know what we know now.”
“And what is that? That she knew where to find us? What good does that do?”
“It’s always good to know what your enemy knows. Especially if it involves a breach in your security. You learned that the first day of training.”
“Bullshit. You didn’t have the cojones to kill Chandler, so you left her death up to chance like some damn movie villain.”
“I left nothing to chance.”
She shook her head, sending her braids flying. “I care for you, Heath. I think you know that. But I know who butters my bread here, and it’s not you. It’s The Instructor.”
“I’ve never doubted your loyalty. Why are you doubting mine?”
“Because I saw how you look at her.”
“And how is that?”
“Exactly the way I want you to look at me.”
“Perhaps I would, if you trusted me.”
Earnshaw turned away from him and stared out the window.
Heath looked ahead, over the cabbie’s shoulder, but hardly noticed the swerving cars or heard the traffic cops’ whistles and salsa music blaring through the open window of the next car. He didn’t like being so transparent, especially not to a bruta like Earnshaw, and in the back of his mind he worried that seeing Chandler had thrown him off his game.
“I will play my role. You will spy on me for The Instructor. Chandler will take care of herself. I promise.”
She answered with another grunt.
“We’re almost there. You’d better get ready.”
She heaved a sigh and then pulled her top over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra, and the cabbie swerved a little, too busy watching her bare breasts to pay attention to traffic. She stripped off her pants as well, then dressed in a long, full skirt in red, orange, and dark green and covered in sequins. A white peasant blouse completed the outfit. In addition to a tourist look that would blend right in at the bullfight, the full skirt gave Earnshaw plenty of fabric to conceal a .44 Magnum and the Ka-Bar knife she always carried, a lucky charm she’d won by beating a Marine at arm wrestling.
Heath pulled on his black vest and red sash, and they were both dressed by the time they reached the Plaza de Toros México. While he paid the driver, she drifted into the crowd spilling from the festival and lining up at the ticket windows.
He took Chandler’s backpack and made straight for the gate, ready to put the final touches on the bullring and wait for his chance to put the plan in motion.
So The Instructor was suspicious. But the old man didn’t see everything. If he had, he’d have given Earnshaw the order to kill Heath long ago. Because by the time either of them had figured out what Heath really had in mind, it would be too late.
Julie
The end came quickly for Derek’s sister, and Derek and Julie witnessed it all. The mottled bruises covered nearly every inch of her skin. The whites of her eyes turned bright red, and she started coughing. In minutes the spittle was blood, and she was vomiting. The blood kept coming, blood pooling between muscle and skin, filling like a water balloon.
And finally her eyes grew dark, blank, and Julie could sense she was gone.
Mercifully gone.
Derek cried, and his tears were pink with blood.
Julie pounded on the locked laboratory door, begging The Instructor, someone, anyone, for something to help with Derek’s pain.
No one came.
So Julie did the only thing she could; she held his hand, held it until he passed, only letting go when his skin began to slough off.
By the time Derek finally died, Julie’s heart felt hard as a stone block. She swore, if it was within her power, to never let this happen to anyone else.
Never.
Fleming
“War is about casualties, not prisoners,” The Instructor said. “Spare no one.”
Fleming parked on a side street a block away from where Rhett, Scarlett, and Bradley were holed up. She closed the Hydra window on her laptop where their tracker dots blinked, and tied Sasha to the van’s outside door handle, taking a measure of solace that if she didn’t return, someone would find the fox.
She figured, with the element of surprise, and a lot of luck, she had a nine percent chance of getting out of there alive, with Bradley.
But nine percent was a chance worth taking.
Fleming placed the five-pound bag of ice she’d gotten at a fast-food drive-through on her lap, and used a series of pneumatic pulleys to lower the boxlike steel enclosure around her reinforced wheelchair, snapped it into place atop motorcycle shocks, and rolled down the ramps and into the empty parking lot.
The chair weighed three times as much as it once did, due to the quarter-inch steel enclosure that now surrounded it. A two-stroke engine, geared to her right wheel and venting out the rear, was attached to a throttle on her armrest. She saw through a thin, eye-level slit. Her shotgun barrel fit through a small hole on the left, her Skorpion a hole on the right.
Fleming had fashioned her wheelchair into a tank, capable of withstanding small-arms fire and buckshot and speeds up to twenty kilometers per hour. It had a few other bells and whistles as well, including a compressed air mortar packed with metal screws. She was ready to kick some ass.
As long as there weren’t any stairs.
Fortunately, Fleming’s research revealed the
address didn’t seem to have stairs. It was an abandoned factory in an industrial strip, situated between Perkins Farm and the west bank of Lake Quinsigamond. Surrounded by trees, the property was formerly owned by an abrasives and ceramics manufacturer that went bankrupt years earlier. Twenty thousand square feet, with thirty-foot ceilings, it seemed like an odd place to stash a hostage.
She rolled up Atlas Street, approaching from the south, passing a lot filled with a dozen old freight containers, and coming to a tall fence cordoning off the property. Through the narrow view of her eye slit, the factory looked neglected, complete with a rusty gate and weeds growing through the cracks in the parking lot. But the chain and lock on the gate were shiny and new, and steam billowed out of one of the smokestacks near the back of the building.
For facing certain death, Fleming was surprisingly calm. In control of her heart rate, her breathing. Her mind focused. Her senses on full alert. Technically, this was the first mission she’d been on since Milan. So many times, she’d dreamed of going into the field again, both figuratively and literally. At the top of her game, she’d been as good as Chandler and Hammett. Capable. Resourceful. Deadly. When that was taken away from her, she’d remained relevant. Using brainpower instead of firepower—to a degree none of her sisters could match. But the desire to go on an actual operation, rather than coach from the sidelines, had always been on her mind.
We lament what we’ve lost, not what we still have.
Now was her chance. A slim chance, but more than she thought she’d ever get. And this was a mission she actually cared about. Fleming wasn’t trying to silence some diplomat or kill a despot.
This was Operation Save Bradley. Something that mattered.
Her days of being a mindless weapon were over. So were her days of using her brain to assist shady people who worked for shady organizations with shady goals.
Fleming was about to do something simply because it was the right thing to do.
It felt good. Damn good.
Even if it was pretty much guaranteed to kill her.
She opened the hinged front flap of her steel enclosure, leaning forward through the opening and using a lock pick and tension wrench on the padlock. Thirty seconds later she was heading for the loading bay behind the warehouse, keeping an eye out for surveillance cams. She found one, top corner of the building under the gutter, and shredded it with a fléchette round.
Now they knew she was here. It was on.
Fleming racked the shotgun, and put it in its holding clamp, barrel pointing out through the balistraria, and waited for Rhett and Scarlett to appear.
The problem was, they didn’t.
But a dozen guards armed with submachine guns did.
Isolde
“Sending others to die in combat isn’t easy,” The Instructor said. “But it beats dying yourself.”
“She’s shooting,” Izzy said to Tristan. Her thin legs were burning from working the rudders, and she was pissed off that one of those bitch sisters had hitched a ride on her airship. Her hope had been to rise high enough to freeze their unwelcome guest, but that plan changed when faced with shotguns.
“What do you want me to do about it? Yell at her to stop?”
“Go out and get her,” she said.
Tristan stared at her like a dog who didn’t understand a command. He was sitting behind Izzy in the first of eight passenger seats, his oversize frame barely fitting. Behind him, blocking the rear window view, was the Ebola tank, attached to the outside of the gondola via lift bolts and three thick chains.
The shotgun blasts continued.
“Shouldn’t we land first?” Tristan said.
“We won’t be able to land if she crashes us. You’re not afraid, are you?”
Tristan shrugged, then walked to the cabin door. He opened it up, looking at the rope ladder twisting in the wind, hanging at least two meters away.
“When I kill her, how do I get back in?”
“I’m landing right now,” Izzy said. “But you need to take her out before she does too much damage.”
Tristan nodded, then crouched at the cabin entrance and leaped out into open air, grabbing the ladder with one hand.
Izzy offered a rare smile. She would have bet even odds he’d miss. But that big bastard had some slick moves.
She hit the air intake, filling the ballonets, beginning their descent. This little detour was a pain in the ass, but not that big of an inconvenience. They still had plenty of time to kill a half million people.
Ground zero for a pandemic. Someone would write books about this day.
That is, if there was anyone left.
Hammett
“Always remember to look behind you,” The Instructor said.
These blimps were made of some seriously tough shit, thick rubber and polyester fabric, stronger than steel. It took Hammett all of her fléchette rounds, and all but three of her piranha rounds, to make a hole in the top of the envelope big enough to climb into. That left her the armor-piercing shells to blast through the bottom, into the gondola. She also had the fire-spitting dragon’s breath rounds left, some regular shells, and her Mateba autorevolver. No doubt her opponents were armed, but probably not as well armed as she was.
Hammett got on her knees, took a big breath, and stuck her head into the hole, using the flashlight to check out what the inside of a blimp looked like. Not surprisingly, there was a lot of empty space. A fall straight down to the bottom—a twenty-meter drop—would break her legs, if not kill her. Luckily, there were several thick suspension cables that hooked into the catenary curtain at the top of the envelope, and extended down to where the gondola was. The nearest was a few feet away, on a steep angle. If Hammett could reach it, she’d be able to slide down and—
The first bullet hit her in the back, right over her heart, and was followed in rapid succession by three others before her body reacted and she rolled over. Unable to take a breath, Hammett flattened her belly against the top of the blimp and watched, horrified, as her duffel bag fell into the hole and disappeared into the darkness.
Chandler
“Sometimes the motives of others are not clear,” said The Instructor. “And that’s when you have to see past the obfuscation of their words and judge purely on actions.”
The opposite of a fail-safe, a fail-deadly system is designed to be lethal in the case of a failure. But even as the time ticked by and the cramp in my arms spread to my spine and my legs and my feet, something nagged at the back of my mind and wouldn’t let go.
Operatives in the Hydra program were trained to perform their duties quickly, efficiently, and without moral confusion. I’d been a great example of that clarity of thinking my entire career, until recent events turned my life upside down. From that point, I’d struggled. I’d been erratic. I’d let my emotions take over at times.
But what was Heath’s excuse?
Since I’d met him, he’d enjoyed talking about how we were alike, and I’d mostly chalked that up to his desire to get in my pants. But today, Earnshaw had been right. He should have killed me in the street. Instead he pretended to question me, then rigged me in this position with a grenade and left. It didn’t make sense. If Heath had confused me before, he totally discombobulated me now.
Unless there was a reason he didn’t want me to die. A reason that went far beyond sexual attraction. And if he didn’t want me to die for some reason, he would know I’d never wait patiently for his return while holding this damn M67.
What in the hell was he up to?
I concentrated on the pain seizing my muscles, imagining it flowing out through my elbow, visualizing each muscle group relaxing, staying perfectly balanced, mind over matter. This time, Hammett’s trick worked, and as the pain abated, my breathing slowed, my mind cleared.
I could still hear the television next door and smell tamales. Pigeons fluttered outside the window, and I almost felt like I was back in my old apartment in Chicago, the city where I’d first seen Heath, alt
hough at that time, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of his face.
In fact, I hadn’t realized at first that he was a threat. He had all the body language down. The small movements and attitudes that had convinced me he was a civilian, that he was doing exactly what he seemed to be doing. In that case, shopping on Michigan Avenue.
In this case…
I skimmed my fingers over the grenade, up the fuse mechanism, until…
There it was. The grenade’s pin and safety clip. Both still in place. The pin he’d brandished to convince Earnshaw hadn’t belonged to this grenade at all.
Focusing on the portrait of La Virgen de Guadalupe, I hopped across the floor, then turned around, back to the wall, and eased the grenade onto the votive shelf beneath the painting.
Once free of the explosive, I lowered myself to a sitting position on the floor and worked my leg and foot until, little by little, the zip ties slid toward my knee, then off completely. Without the tie binding my thigh and calf, the ankle fastener was easier to escape, and once I had my feet, all that was left was locating a sharp edge on the windowsill and sawing my wrist binding across it until it was thin enough to break.
They’d left nothing in the apartment, not even a used tissue, so I picked up the grenade and slipped it into one of the thigh pockets in my cargo pants, then I was out the door and down five flights of rickety wooden stairs. Outside, I ran five blocks before I was able to flag down a green-and-white Beetle. I yanked open the door and barked out, “Plaza Mexico,” before my butt hit the seat, adding, “Rápidamente,” for good measure.
Traffic was crazy, as always, and as we threaded through the streets and merged and switched lanes while zooming around roundabouts, I tried to picture what I knew of the plaza in my mind’s eye and plan the best gate to enter. It took me a few blocks to notice my cabbie was slowing down, and he’d taken a detour.
“La Plaza,” I repeated, although I knew it wouldn’t do any good.
He turned around to face me with a little snub-nose revolver in one trembling fist. “Your money,” he said in decent English.
Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Page 92