Force of Nature

by Suzanne Brockmann

  She squeezed his hand again, harder.

  “We’re compliant,” he told Fridge, even though he was really talking to Annie. “Call Junior and tell him.”

  “As soon as we’re out of the hotel,” the man said.

  He led them past the elevator banks, and though a door marked STAIRS.

  Which kind of took Annie’s revolt-in-the-elevator plan off the table. Thank God.

  Twelve flights of stairs took forever to walk down, but when they kept going, Robin realized they were heading down to the parking garage. Of course. Rather than trooping through the hotel lobby…

  “There might be paparazzi waiting for me in the garage,” he warned their captors.

  Annie was looking at him as if he had the fastest-occurring case of Stockholm syndrome in history.

  He looked back at her with equal disbelief.

  How could she be so willing to risk Ric’s life? Except she wasn’t, he realized. What she wanted was to go Buffy on their asses—to kick down doors until she found and rescued Ric.

  Apparently, she did not live in a reality-based world—a world where they were all going to die because of Robin’s idiocy. A world where Dolphina would get the security guards to unlock the door to his suite—where drug paraphernalia with his fingerprints all over it would be right there for them to find.

  A world where his death would be just another drug-related tragedy. He was just another star who burned too bright, too fast.

  And Jules’s name would go right beneath Peggy Ryan’s on that too-long list of agents lost in the line of duty.

  Robin wanted to throw up.

  Instead, he followed Fridge on legs that were unsteady, out of the steel door marked GARAGE LEVEL ONE. Their footsteps echoed in the emptiness as the burly man pulled him closer, his gun pressed into Robin’s side.

  “Oh, no,” Annie breathed, and he realized that that sound he’d heard was the sound of a car being locked. And, yes, that was Martell heading straight toward them, with a “Hey!”

  Robin tried to bluff—“Fucking paparazzi,” he said loudly enough for Martell to hear. “Leave me the hell alone!”

  But it was already too late. Skinny somehow realized that Martell knew them. Or maybe he saw that Martell was reaching for a weapon.

  Skinny fired, and the sound of the gunshot reverberated brain-shakingly loudly through the enclosed garage.

  Annie was screaming as Martell was pushed back from the force of the bullet, a bloom of red sprouting on the front of his T-shirt, his handgun falling and skittering across the concrete.

  “No!” Robin heard himself shouting, too. He didn’t realize he’d pulled away from the refrigerator until the man hit him, hard, upside his head. A second blow was aimed unerringly at his balls, and the pain blinded him. He hit the ground and retched.

  “How about you? You want to go a round, too?” Robin heard the man’s voice as if from a distance. He was talking to Annie, threatening her.

  Robin pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. “Annie, don’t—”

  But the gunman hit her, too, and as she went down, Robin crawled to her, to try to cover her, to try to keep her from being hit again.

  “I got his gun, his phone, and his wallet,” Skinny reported, talking about Martell. “It’ll look like a mugging.”

  “Go get the car,” the bigger man ordered.

  “We can’t just leave him here!” Annie was down but not out. “He’ll die!”

  There was a screech of tires—the car hadn’t been far. Robin felt himself picked up and thrown into the dank-smelling trunk of a Cadillac. Annie soon joined him.

  The last thing he saw before the trunk lid closed on them was Fridge’s face. “He’s already dead.” He smiled. “And you are, too.”

  As Ric watched, Junior’s men dropped the body over the side. As it hit the water with a splash, he met Jules’s eyes. Now was probably not the time to dive over the railing—next to enough C4 to put a huge hole in the side of this yacht.

  Not that either one of them thought for a moment that they had a chance to make it safely into the water without getting shot. It was a long way down from this deck to the water. And even then, at this range, the water wouldn’t slow the bullets enough to keep them from being killed.

  It didn’t even matter that Donny was back in the bridge. Junior’s other men were standing close enough so that shooting them wouldn’t have required much skill.

  As the yacht swiftly moved to a safe distance from the explosives, Junior started setting off an array of firecrackers. Ric knew he was doing it just in case anyone was in earshot. That C4 blast was going to make one hell of a noise. A resounding boom on its own might send the Coast Guard to investigate. But if it was just part of some jerk-off having a party or trying to impress his girlfriend—well, they’d wait to check it out until they got the call saying the jerk had blown his hand off.

  “Ten more seconds,” the skinhead announced.

  It was surreal. The sun was fully up and the sky was a brilliant shade of blue. It was a beautiful Florida day, filled with promise and an ocean breeze. It was the kind of day that usually made Ric feel glad to be alive.

  The C4 exploded with a roar, sending a column of water shooting up into the air. Junior cheered as Ric found himself praying. Mother of God, if he died before he could save Annie, if Junior found her and brought her out here…

  The water settled quickly back into its usual chop, the wake from the explosion rolling out and gently rocking the yacht. It might’ve been Ric’s imagination, but it seemed as if there was a pink tinge on the surface.

  If there was, it faded quickly, even as Donny turned the yacht and took them straight through it.

  Jesus help him, but Ric found himself praying that Annie would already be dead before Junior strapped her into that C4 suit.

  Fridge and the skinny dude were getting a verbal ass-kicking by the thug called Foley—a fact that made Robin glad, despite his ongoing urge to throw up. Jesus, he was sick. His hands were shaking and he’d already yuked twice in the trunk of the car—which couldn’t have been much fun for Annie.

  “Fucking A, I’m pissed,” he could hear Foley say to his underlings. “Go back to the hotel and clean it up.”

  Robin and Annie had finally been dragged out of the car trunk and tossed belowdeck on a deep-sea fishing boat that was docked along what looked like a deserted stretch of one of Sarasota’s many canals.

  Shouting for help was an option that was unlikely to do much more than get them both soundly smacked around again. Besides, since Foley himself wasn’t bothering to keep his voice down, Robin was certain there was no one around to hear them.

  “Make sure he’s dead,” Foley reprimanded the two men who’d taken Robin and Annie from the hotel. They were, no doubt, discussing Martell.

  “He was definitely dead,” Refrigerator insisted.

  “A shot to the chest is not a double pop to the head,” Foley countered. And wasn’t that a macabre rule to live by, along with An apple a day keeps the doctor away. “Go back and make sure.”

  Skinny mumbled something too quiet for Robin to hear as Annie gently touched Robin’s shoulder. “Here,” she said, handing him a damp cloth.

  “Thanks.” He wiped his face as, up on the dock, Foley told Skinny and Fridge that he’d take care of them—them being Annie and Robin.

  “Call me when it’s handled,” Foley ordered. “Junior’ll want to know.”

  After tossing them down the companionway and kicking them into this stateroom, Foley had locked the door behind them. It wasn’t one of those flimsy airplane bathroom doors that Robin had seen on some boats. This one was solid, with a substantial lock.

  The good news was that they had the run of the room. Annie had already begun to explore while Robin had decided to keep from barfing again by going into a fetal position where he’d landed. “I’m sorry,” he told her. Of all the lousy times to get the flu.

  “Are you okay?” she asked, concern in her ey
es.

  “I’m pretty sick,” he admitted.

  Outside, on the dock, Foley was speaking again. “It’s me.” He was, no doubt, making a phone call. “I got the cargo—both of ’em.”

  Foley paused, and then laughed as Robin looked around. The cabin they were in was big enough to store a stack of suitcases and several large coolers, and still have enough space—several times over—for him to lie on the floor. There were narrow beds and cushion-covered benches around the sides of the room. They were built in, along with an array of cabinets and cupboards that made efficient use of the rest of the wall space.

  “There’s a bathroom over here, if you need it,” Annie told Robin.

  “Yeah,” Foley said into his phone. “It’s going to take me about forty minutes to reach the rendezvous point. Best go ahead and take care of the cargo you already have. I’ll take care of mine.”

  He was talking to Junior—Robin knew this with a cold sense of dread that was reflected in Annie’s horrified eyes. Dear God, if they were right, and Foley was talking to Junior, then the cargo to which he was referring had to be Jules and Ric.

  “No!” Robin shouted. “You tell him to keep them safe!” but Foley surely didn’t hear him over the roar of the boat’s motor as it started.

  Martell was dead.

  Except he’d always believed that death would not hurt, that death would bring him to a beautiful, peaceful place, where gorgeous naked angels would sing him all of his favorite Motown hits.

  Wherever he was now, no one was singing him shit and the beauty factor was about a negative billion. It was cold and damp and dark and hard and dirty, and every breath he took hurt like hell.

  But since he didn’t believe in hell, there could only be one solution to this puzzle.

  He wasn’t dead yet.

  He reached for his phone, but of course it wasn’t in his pocket. If he’d gone over to the dark side of the force and decided to shoot someone and leave them to die, he wouldn’t let them keep their cell phone, either, just in case they roused before they kicked.

  So Martell bent his legs, pulling his feet up to his butt, and he pushed himself, sliding on his back along the concrete, through the puddle of blood he’d already lost. Damn, there was a lot of it, and damn, just moving a little hurt enough to make him scream.

  Maybe he’d been wrong all those years, and hell really did exist.

  Still, he pulled his legs back up, weeping from the effort and the pain, and he did it again, following the arrow that hung from the concrete ceiling, beneath the words that meant even more to him right now than life everlasting in heaven.

  ELEVATOR TO HOTEL MAIN LOBBY.

  Annie didn’t know what else to do, except keep going.

  She’d heard the same words Robin had, and she knew that when Foley used the phrase take care of them, he didn’t mean pulling an ottoman up to the sofa for their feet, and feeding them chocolates.

  He was going to kill them both.

  She knew, too, that if Junior really was with Ric and Jules, there was a good chance that they already were as dead as Martell—whom they’d left lying in a pool of blood.

  But sitting here, defeated and broken, trying to figure out how she would survive in a world without Ric’s quicksilver smile…

  It was just not her style.

  And wouldn’t she feel stupid if Foley unlocked the door, ready to drag them up onto the deck to kill them—without having discovered if one of the cabinets in the room or one of those suitcases in the corner held a cache of automatic rifles and ammo?

  Or a cell phone. A cell phone would be really nice.

  “Help me,” she told Robin as she opened the cabinets and found a fully outfitted wet bar, a stash of orange life preservers and foul-weather clothes, a collection of bikinis of all shapes and sizes—mostly tiny—and various types of fishing gear.

  He saw what she was doing, and dragged himself over to the suitcases. Apparently they were unlocked, and he pulled the top one onto the floor and unzipped it. “What the hell…?”

  Annie came over to look.

  “This is C4.” Robin looked up at her. “There’s enough here to…” He shook his head, his eyes rimmed with red. “Shit, I don’t know. Blow up Florida? I’ve never seen this much before.”

  “C4, the explosive?” she asked. It looked like blocks of whitish-gray putty, like huge chunks of that sticky stuff she’d used to put posters up on the wall of her college dorm room. “Are you sure?”

  “Very,” he said. “I played a Navy SEAL in Riptide and there’s a scene where I build a bomb. Most of it ended up cut out of the movie because it read as a little too ‘how-to manual.’ When we filmed the sequence, I used actual C4. Just like this.”

  “Are you serious?” They had him working with real explosives?

  “It’s stable,” Robin told her. “Believe me, the studio wouldn’t have let me touch it if it was dangerous. The blow-a-thumb-off part is the blasting cap, which…wow…Careful—that’s what you’ve got in there.”

  Annie had unzipped another of the suitcases to reveal sets of metal boxes—the blasting caps, eek—and coils of gray-green wire.

  “That’s something called time fuse.” Robin pointed to the coils. “Holy shit, we’ve got everything we need to blow this boat to hell.”

  Provided they knew how to hook it all together. Most people wouldn’t have a clue—which was why Foley had so casually locked them in here with all this stuff. But most people hadn’t played a Navy SEAL in their latest movie.

  Still…A movie wasn’t the same as real life.

  “You really could do it?” Annie asked Robin now. “Make a bomb? One that works?”

  “I don’t think you can call it a bomb if it doesn’t work,” he pointed out. “But yeah. I mean, I’ve never used real blasting caps, but…Yeah. I could do it.”

  So, great. They could kill Foley by blowing up the boat. Of course, being locked belowdeck meant they’d die, too. It was not quite the plan Annie had hoped to come up with.

  “I’ll need a knife to cut the time fuse,” Robin continued. “And we’ll need matches.” He laughed derisively. “And massive doses of Tylenol to bring this fever down. My hands are shaking. This is going to be hard to do.”

  He honestly believed he had the flu.

  “Blowing ourselves up seems like it should go, oh, say, last on our list of options,” Annie told him. She was still hoping to find an AK-47. She opened one of the coolers and…Dear God. “Um, Robin, did your character in Riptide by any chance know a lot about bombs?”

  The thing at the bottom of this cooler looked an awful lot like a makeshift bomb on some kind of a timer. It hadn’t been turned on—the LEDs were unlit and weren’t counting down, thank God—but it still managed to look dangerous with all the wires and jerry-rigged parts.

  “Who would put a bomb in a cooler?” Robin asked as he came to look at it. “You don’t think…?” He looked up at her.

  Annie knew what he was thinking—she’d already gotten there herself. “A cooler nuke?” It sounded so unlikely that it just might be possible. But this thing looked as if it had been made by someone’s insane uncle Bob in the basement of his soon-to-be foreclosed-upon house. “Aren’t most small nukes made with parts stolen from the former USSR?”

  Except there it was, down toward the bottom of the thing, beneath the snarl of wires: a metal piece that had Cyrillic writing.

  “It looks…awfully amateur for a nuke,” Robin said. “But my experience comes purely from watching James Bond movies. I probably wouldn’t be able to recognize a real assassin with a blade-edged bowler hat, either.”

  Annie laughed, despite the knot in her stomach, despite Martell’s brutal murder, despite her fear for Ric’s safety, despite her fear of her own potentially impending and surely painful death.

  Robin was smiling, too, but his smile was not one of humor. It was tight and grim and it matched the almost unholy spark of light in his eyes.

  “Whatever it is,
let’s not let these motherfuckers use it,” Robin said. “Help me rig this C4 to blow. Find me some matches. We don’t need a knife. We’ll just use the shortest coil of cord.” He unwound one of the coils of what he’d called time fuse. “This’ll do it. It’s shorter than I thought. We’ll light it when we hear Foley coming below. It’ll give us lots of time—around ten minutes for a piece this long—figure between thirty and forty seconds a foot. We let him drag us up on deck, where we bash his head in, grab a life preserver, jump overboard, and swim like hell. You can swim, can’t you?”

  Annie nodded.

  “Good,” Robin said. “We better work fast. The boat’s moving slowly, which means we’re probably still either in the canal or the harbor. As soon as we reach open water, Foley’s going to put the pedal to the metal. And when we’re out of sight of land, he’s going to come below, and take care of us.” His eyes were grim. “Let’s be ready for him.”

  When Junior’s cell phone rang, Ric glanced at Jules, who was on the same page.

  This was not good. He, too, had picked up all the signals that Junior was killing time, waiting for something to happen—like a phone call telling him that Robin and Annie had been contained.

  “Here we go,” Ric murmured as Junior, clearly pleased about something, hung up his phone.

  “Fallback’s the galley,” Jules told him, his voice low. They couldn’t have been in a better position for that. They were standing a few long strides from the half flight of stairs down. Junior and his men were all closer to the back of the boat—the stern.

  And sure enough, “Okay, boys,” Junior said, and his men all drew their weapons. “Surprise,” he told Jules and Ric as five gun barrels were pointed at them.

  “Yeah,” Jules said, intentionally sounding bored. “Not really.”

  If they could get their hands on even just one of those handguns, they could hold Junior and his men off indefinitely, from the safety of that galley.

  “How’s this for a surprise, then?” Junior said. “You remember Foley, don’t you, Ric? He’s got your Amazon of a girlfriend.” He looked at Jules. “And your…dick-loving faggot of a boyfriend.”