“No. The neighbors are of no further consequence. Hearing his brother scream will no doubt prove a useful distraction when Diego comes. Give me the boy,” Auldborne said again.
Christina whipped the boy up from his mother’s lap and flung him towards Auldborne, who snatched him and pinned his arms at his sides. His crying hampered his breathing. Saliva dripped from his gaping mouth and snot ran down his face. The house had turned into a cacophony.
“Shh. Shhhh. Come now, we’ll be gone soon,” Auldborne assured the boy. “I just want to show you one more thing.”
“Diego’s goin’ be furious, Alex,” Tate warned, his knee pinning Miguel to the couch.
“I know,” Auldborne said, still speaking soothingly at the boy. “But what’s the first thing you do in a battle? Get the opponent out of their right mind. Right my boy?”
Auldborne tried to walk with the boy, but something his father was saying in rapid Spanish put some fight in him, so Auldborne was forced to drag him, flailing, into the back bedroom next to the wailing baby. Miguel Jr. landed several square kicks into Auldborne’s ribs and even managed to tear his shirt, popping several buttons. Auldborne dropped him with force right in front of a full length mirror by the crib. The boy bounced up and tried to run around him and back out of the bedroom door, but Auldborne yoked him about the collar just in time. This time he put the boy in a chokehold, positioning the crook of his elbow tightly over his small windpipe.
For a moment man and child looked at each other in the mirror, the boy gasping and coughing, Auldborne’s normally pale complexion pinked with the struggle and the heat. Then the boy shied away from Auldborne’s coal-gray gaze as if it could turn him to stone by reflection.
“Now then. Close your eyes,” said Auldborne, closing them for the boy as a coroner might. The boy snapped them back open and struggled to look at the door.
“No. No, no. Close them,” he said, brushing down his face again.
The boy snapped them open.
“Listen to me boy!” Auldborne hissed, his spittle flicking the boy’s ear. “I’m trying to help you! My magic bullets don’t like glass! Close your goddamn eyes!”
The boy kept them closed.
Very quickly, Auldborne ducked behind the boy, brought his gun up and rested it on the boy’s shoulder, and fired one shot into the mirror in front of them both.
The noise of the gun was especially horrendous to Miguel Jr. His ears immediately set to the muted ringing of hearing loss. The mirror made the sound a revolving door might make if it exploded shortly after brushing closed. With a whooshbang it shattered into tiny pieces and blew outward, slicing the boy with hundreds of razor sharp shards.
Miguel Jr.’s choking cries of fear fast became shrill cries of pain. Every exposed surface of his body began to seep blood. He seemed to be sweating little beads of blood from his face; from his cheekbones, and from behind the folds of his eyelids. Auldborne stood up from behind him, untouched. Behind them both the baby’s wailing was renewed.
From then on the boy had no fight. Auldborne led him back into the family room as if he was blind. His father had screamed himself hoarse, but upon seeing his son he bucked as hard as he could, to no avail. Draden Tate was simply too much weight for him.
Auldborne gently pressed his hand on the boy’s bloody face, then he opened the door and planted his hand on its pristine white front, right in the center. When he took it away there was a perfect handprint of deep red, like a horrible mockup of a child’s finger painting. Auldborne came back inside the house and closed the door with a soft click.
“Not long now.” He smiled.
Miguel Jr. went back to his unconscious mother and, weeping, burrowed his bleeding face into her apron. From where he lay pinned on the couch, his father did the same.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
THIRTY-FIVE THOUSAND FEET in the air, Ian Finn watched the digital map embedded in the seat in front of him. It showed a graphic of his airplane as it traversed from Ireland to its final destination in Portugal, where his battle awaited. He watched it crawl its way across the English Channel at an agonizingly slow pace. He’d worked out that the little airplane graphic moved a hairsbreadth every ten minutes. Far too slow. He sipped on another whisky straight from the miniature bottle. It was American whisky and it went down about as smooth as a pinecone, but it was all the airline had left.
Ian was uneasy.
His gun hadn’t spooked security at all. None of theirs had. He’d been on a lot of flights with his gun and getting through security was always a pain in the ass. It usually involved back rooms and hushed phone calls and waiting before they were inevitably allowed to pass. This time it was as if the transport officers were prepared for them... as if they had been through the drill before, recently. But that was impossible.
The three of them had reserved seats in the back half of the airplane. Most seats were occupied by the time the three slowly shuffled their way down the aisle. All around them people were preoccupied, settling themselves and jockeying for what space remained in the overhead bins. Many buried themselves in books or newspapers as they awaited takeoff. Some already attempted sleep, covered in blankets with their heads propped uncomfortably against the headrests or windows.
Pyper refused to fly business or first class, preferring to keep as low of a profile as possible, but she did agree to purchase three seats in the exit row. As they took their seats, the attendants closed the hatch and locked it shut. Kayla let out a breath and grinned at Ian. They were safe.
But Ian couldn’t return her half-smile. Flying was hell for him under the best of circumstances and at the moment he badly needed a cigarette, the whisky was giving him a headache even as he ordered another, and he was hot. Things just didn’t feel right. To him, the hatch doors of the airplane had never looked more like prison doors, and as the hissing sound of stale air filled the cabin, Ian noted that the encircling walls of the airplane resembled those of a coffin.
He wondered, as he watched the map, what the other teams were doing. Perhaps some were fighting as he flew. He wondered what the Americans were doing. They had drawn Japan, a formidable team, but he also thought he knew Johnnie Northern fairly well. If he was a betting man he’d place his money on Northern’s squad; on the solemn Max Haulden, and on the deceptively dangerous Nikkie Hix. All American killers, they were.
Although Ian would never admit it, he held a grudging affinity for Blue. Oddly enough, Finn met Northern before he fought him. Years ago they had drawn each other in the first round. He remembered their two teams meeting at a college campus in California, outside of a café late at night. Ian still remembered the palm trees, the fibrous strands of their fronds swaying in the hot breeze of the passing traffic. They met like medieval nobility might before a pitched battle. How strange it seemed now, tactics such as those. Neither team would dream of approaching a battle that way anymore, even with each other. They had been young, it was both teams’ first fight, and in retrospect it seemed outrageously naïve.
But looking back, Finn wasn’t convinced the approach was so bad after all. Hix had been the last woman standing, Green had lost, but it had been a good, clean fight; no team member was unduly injured, certainly no civilians had been hurt, or even inconvenienced, really. Neither team would have dreamed of shooting up a dance club, mowing down anyone just to get at each other. Things were still decent back then.
It was folly to think that anything resembling that first meeting would be feasible anymore. The Tournament was morphing: changing itself and also changing everyone involved. Ian saw that now, and it was disconcerting. What once was an experiment, a World Cup of team shooting, was turning into a war. The power each team had been given made their true colors rise to the top, and what had emerged wasn’t always pretty, specifically when it was Grey or Black.
Ian hated Team Grey and he freely admitted it. He wondered how much of this came from his father, perhaps some latent gene that had been passed on, and how much of it was simply a loathing
for what he had seen the English do over the years he had been a part of this organization. They used terror tactics. This hit dangerously close to home for him, and yet he often wondered how far he would go to bring them down. Would he cut down the innocent to cut down Auldborne?
Perhaps he and his father were more alike than he thought.
The thought chilled him and he took his last slug of whisky. He tucked the small bottle in the seat pocket in front of him with two others and was looking about for a stewardess when Kayla tugged on his sleeve. She was sunk deep into her chair, and had turned so pale that the splash of freckles across the bridge of her nose stood out like cinnamon. She was just able to peer over the seat before her and was fixated upon a point down the aisle.
“Are you gonna be sick?” asked Ian. Pyper looked up from her reading.
“We have a very big problem,” Kayla whispered.
“There’s a bag here somewhere,” Pyper said, shuffling through the pocket in front of her own seat.
“Get. Down.” hissed Kayla. She fumbled inside her front jacket pocket.
“Kayla, what are you doing—”
“Row sixteen, aisle seat,” she said, snapping the button off of the holster inside her jacket. Ian traced down the rows until he found the sixteenth. There sat a woman. Her back was to them, but she was dark skinned and had big, full hair. She turned to the side and revealed the profile of her face as she spoke to someone across the aisle. The woman did look remarkably similar to the most recent pictures of Tessa Crocifissa. Or it could just be another young Italian woman. They did have a distinctive look, after all.
“Kayla, wait a minute,” said Pyper. “Let’s not do anything foolish. If you pull that out, they’ll turn this plane right around and throw us all in jail. Think about it—why on earth would they be on this airplane?”
Kayla turned to Ian, her eyes wide as dinner plates. There was not a doubt in her mind.
“To keep you from shooting,” Kayla said slowly, as if it all had clicked in to place.
Ian looked at Pyper, and then at Kayla. Both seemed to be pleading with him, but for different reasons.
“I’mna go check,” he said, unbuckling his belt.
“Ian—”
“It’s all right, I’m just going to get a little closer.”
He stood and pulled his jacket down over his own gun, steadying himself against the seats as the plane jittered a bit. He still couldn’t tell that the woman wasn’t Tessa. He crept closer, but she was facing forward again. He would have to get in front of her or wait for her to turn around. He inched forward once more, aisle by aisle, but still without a clear view.
And then he was stopped.
A man stood up right in front of him, blocking his way. It took Ian a few moments to recognize the sneer, but even then he couldn’t quite believe it. He stood dumb. The leather bangles on the man’s wrists, the silver rings on his fingers as they rested upon the tops of the chairs to either side, the hair, slicked back in stripes as black as night.
Ignazio Andizzi grinned into his face. “Tha’s far eenough, Finn,” he said, his voice dripping with smug satisfaction.
Chapter Thirty
NORTHERN WAS UP, SPLASHING water from a pristine marble basin in the bathroom into his bleary eyes. Max refused to sleep and Northern could tell he was unhappy with the progression of things. Max was a powerful striker, fiercely loyal, but he had a way of making everyone uncomfortably aware of how he’d be running the show if he could. The last thing Northern needed right now was disruption from within.
“New plan,” he said, walking back into the bedroom.
“There was a plan?” Max asked, his voice low. Northern stopped and stared at him, face dripping wet. Nikkie closed her eyes.
“Max, are you with me on this or not?”
“What’s the new plan, John?” sighed Max.
“Nikkie and I are going across the hall, to our original room,” Northern said, snapping back the action on his .40 caliber automatic. “We’ll make a bit of noise, and with any luck, they’ll think all three of us are in there and turn their backs to this room. That’s when you jump out, pop everyone, and bam. Done and done, and I’m sleeping all the way home. First class. Quickly now, they’ve got to be close. They may be in the building.”
“And what if they come in here?” Max asked.
“They’ll buy the dummy room bit.”
“But if they don’t—”
“Then we’ll pick them off as they go to you, Max!” Northern snapped. “But they’ll buy the dummy room bit!”
Max shrugged, glanced at Nikkie, then fitted his earpiece around the back of his ear. “All right. I’ll be right here,” he said, shouldering up against the interior crook of the door.
Northern fitted his own earpiece, as did Nikkie, blinking herself truly awake. Northern eased his head out of the door, using angles to shield him as he surveyed the hallway, still empty. Only the brief crunching of a nearby ice machine could be heard. He nodded at Nikkie, who darted across the hallway, popped in her keycard to room 426, and snapped open the door. Once she was safely inside, Northern followed, both doors shut with the soft swoosh of wood on carpet, and all was again quiet.
Northern was right about one thing. They didn’t have long to wait.
The Japanese quickly learned which room the Americans were in and split up in their approach; the striker and the sweeper as one group, and the captain alone. Tenri Fuse and Amon Jinbo took the elevator to the fourth floor, and Takuro Obata took the stairway. They wasted no time.
Each walked down opposite ends of the wing like a man on thin ice, slow and low and constantly moving. An older couple hurried past Fuse and Jinbo on their way to the elevator, oblivious. They saw no one else. Eventually they came to the 430 block and they stopped, waiting for the signal from their captain to move as one. With a flick of his hand Obata called Jinbo forward and told Fuse to hold and guard the hallway.
Jinbo seemed a different man as he approached room 426. Gone were the nervous tics and twitches, gone was the boyish awkwardness. He presented an odd sight for sure, a small man, eyeglasses smudged and pinched low on his nose as he peered down the barrel of a massive gun, half again as long as his hand, and yet this was clearly his element, his aggressive posture and the hunger with which his eyes snapped up the scene in front of him stood as testament. The two men, creeping down the hallway from opposite ends, registered each other without so much as a glance. Their eyes were focused on two separate doors.
One was notched open, resting on its popped deadbolt, most likely secured by a chain slip. This was 426, the room in question, clearly occupied. It was an inviting site. Too convenient. Obata glanced at Jinbo, who cocked an eyebrow. He braced against the wall, weapon in hand. He awaited his signal to kick in the door. He was ready.
But Obata was not. Obata was looking across the hall at rooms 427 and 429. It was one of these. They would come from one of these. But how best to lure them out? He soft-stepped over to Jinbo, who stood ready to unleash hell. With a series of punctuated gestures he mimed for his striker to watch the rooms across the hall, and those only. Jinbo furrowed his brow, but turned around to face rooms 427 and 429. Obata himself would take 426.
Inside 427, Max Haulden rubbed his eyes and replaced his glasses, clear lensed wraparounds in case of fragmented glass. He pressed his ear to the door, but heard nothing. The view from the peephole showed an empty hallway, but something was up. He was suddenly possessed of an almost overwhelming urge to pop his head out and check. He thought he heard whispering. Or was it the ice machine? He readjusted his grip on his gun and wiped his brow and wondered what Nikkie and John were talking about.
Outside in the hallway, Obata nodded to Jinbo, nodded to himself, took a breath, and slammed his heel into the door of room 426. It was a violent kick, heel first, a finishing move drilled into him back in his Judo days at University. The door snapped back and the chain popped with a crack of splitting wood, but Obata didn’t move
in. Instead, he stepped back out of the doorway and pressed himself against the hallway wall once more. He decided he would shoot whoever came out of any door within this vicinity no matter who they were.
But no one came out.
For a few moments, Obata thought he might have overanalyzed the whole situation. With almost comical slowness, the door to room 426 began to close again. Down the hallway Tenri Fuse poked his head out from behind the corner, questioning. Jinbo’s guns aimed everywhere at once, but nothing moved.
The anti-climax of it all bothered Jinbo greatly. Where was the blazing retaliation? Could this be wrong room? Would Obata try to kick it open again? Two door kickings were foolish. That’s not how these things went. There was one kick and then shooting.
With three inches to spare before the door closed totally, Jinbo stuck his toe in the gap.
————
Northern heard them all along. They were remarkably quiet, like rabbits moving on a crust of snow, but he knew how to listen. Then something had given one or more of them pause. For several seconds Northern thought they might have figured out the dummy door ploy, and he thought how Max would hold it over him, saying nothing but silently gloating. He thought all of this in the four seconds it took Obata to breathe deep and kick the door to the room wide open.
But then no one came in.
This disconcerted Northern just enough to stay him as the door slowly swung closed. Nikkie looked at him, surprised more by his lack of action than by the door. And where was Max? He had to have heard or seen something by now. Wasn’t that the sign for him to start shooting?
Then someone stuck a toe in the gap, and Northern saw the thin, boyish form of Amon Jinbo, the striker, slip between door and jamb like a wraith. The metal barrel of an absurdly large revolver clicked gently against the doorframe as Jinbo brought it up to eye level. Milliseconds later it roared to life.
The wanton, destructive impartiality with which Jinbo raked the entirety of room 426 was ultimately what actually saved Northern and Hix. He shot at anything and everything, swinging in a slow, wide arc. The diodes tore through lampshades and exploded cut-glass table tops, ripped runs in the comforters, dislodged bits of plaster from the walls, and blew out both rear facing windows. The room was acrid with gun smoke and deafeningly loud.
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