Adrenaline

by Jeff Abbott

  I glanced down at the sailor—and instead of a spread of blood on his shirt, a small metal dart protruded from between his meaty shoulder blades. Not a bullet. An anesthetic dart, like we were on a nature show, tagging tigers to trace their roaming. The dart was so I could be dragged back and put into whatever cage Howell wanted. They wanted their bait to be functioning.

  I fired at the gunman, who took cover behind the edge of a container, then I turned and I ran into the maze of containers. Hard right, hard right. I needed to take out the gunman. I was trying to get behind him when he descended the stairs. I hoped his adrenaline would make him rush, make a bad decision to my profit. Dim lights illuminated the stacks.

  I stopped, risked a glance around the corner. The containers were more tightly packed down here; less room to move, longer lines of sight, which meant that there was a better chance of getting caught in the open. I could hear more voices, raised, feet thundering on the steel stairs. A crowd was coming. If I shot, I’d betray my position.

  I broke the seal on a container, slipped inside, left the door open less than an inch. I counted slowly in my head. At nineteen the gunman went past me moving quickly but silently. I watched him move past the door. I stepped out of the container, slamming a kick into the back of his head like he was a wall I was running up. He collapsed and I caught the back of his shirt so he wouldn’t make a noise. With my other hand I grabbed the dart gun, fired it into his back. He rag-dolled, and I eased him to the floor. I hurried to the intersection and looked down the long, unbroken gap in the containers, and saw another man in black, accompanied by a crewman. I ran along the aisle, hearing their echoing voices clang against the steel.

  They would expect me to hide in the stacks. I would have to find another part of the ship to make my own. I had to keep moving, use the crew’s thermal signals as camouflage. Hide where the heat of the engines would mask my body’s signature. I had to hold out and get to Rotterdam. There I could vanish.

  I stopped at another intersection, for just one single moment, getting bearings, and a sting aced my throat, hard, like a hand’s swat.

  A dart. I had maybe seconds before the anesthetic worked its juice. I raised my gun at the approaching gunman. The woman in the suit now stood behind him, watching me, unafraid.

  Mila. The woman from Ollie’s bar. The whisky drinker with the fondness for wolves. Blond hair pulled back severely, eyes of quartz, a hard smile. She liked Glenfiddich whisky, and my own blood felt like a bottle had been injected straight into my heart.

  The steel of the gun slipped from my grip. I laughed as I fell to the deck.

  21

  I OPENED MY EYES TO STARLIGHT. I heard the slush of water, the soft whistle of a breeze. I lay on my back, steel for a pillow. On a container, on the deck of the ship. Above me the moon hung, ripe with light. The whistle was the wind slicing through the gaps in the container stacks. The stars lay in a diamond spill across the sky. You didn’t see the stars so clearly in a city, ever.

  Mila sat next to me. Legs crossed, wearing a trench coat, cigarette in hand, watching the smoke slide into the moonlight.

  I sat up. My arms and my shoulder ached but I wasn’t hurt.

  A darkness of ocean lay all around. I’d been out for most of the day.

  “Good evening, Sam,” Mila said.

  “Howell sent you.” My God, the trouble they had gone to.

  “Howell. Name does not ring bells for me.” Mila took a drag on the cigarette, crushed the embers against the steel. She looked out over the long expanse of the Atlantic. The helicopter was gone.

  She opened a bag and pulled out a bottle of Glenfiddich and two small glasses.

  “Well, that’s one true thing about you. You actually do like Glenfiddich,” I said.

  “And my name is actually Mila,” she said. “A doctor might say it’s not good to drink after a sedation dart, so I only give you a bit.” I held my glass and she clinked it against mine. “For medicine.”

  “What are we toasting?” I asked.

  “Freedom,” she said. “Yours. Mine. The world’s.” Mila sipped at her whisky. I didn’t want any but I took the barest taste.

  “Ollie will be missing you, his best bartender. If the wind shifts we may be able to hear his bitching.”

  “Who are you?”

  “Mila, I said.”

  “And who is Mila?”

  “I am your friend, Sam.”

  “I can find my own friends.”

  Mila gestured across the expanse of the ship. There was no sign of the crew, no indication anyone was watching us. “Forgive me. You have so many friends. Where’s the back of the line and I’ll wait there.” Sarcasm suited her.

  But I was not in the mood for moonlight and whisky and wit.

  “Who do you work for?” And who had the considerable resources to do it, I didn’t add. Teams of men, thermal imaging, a jet helicopter. It had to be Howell.

  Or maybe Mila was part of the people who grabbed Lucy, who framed us. They might not want me coming to Europe. The frame against me and Lucy had been elaborate. But… I was just one man. This was a lot of trouble for anyone to go to. And if Mila was connected to the intruder, well, then I should have been dead already—taken back aboard the helicopter, shot, and dropped into the cold gray of the Atlantic.

  Mila took another sip of Glenfiddich. “My employers prefer to remain anonymous.”

  “Are they the same people who grabbed my wife?”

  “No.”

  “Are you from the Company?”

  “No.” And she made a slight face. “I do have an offer to make you.”

  That wasn’t hard to figure. Someone who hoped I was pissed enough at the CIA for treating me like a traitor to turn me into an actual one. “I’m not interested.”

  “I’ve arranged for cabins. Let’s go down and talk.”

  The night air on the open Atlantic was cold. I nodded. I followed her down to a cabin. The two crew members we passed stared at me with barely disguised hostility.

  “Speaking of friends,” I said, as Mila closed the door behind us.

  “Your fighting them has cost me several thousand in bribes.”

  “Sorry.” There were two beds. I sat on one. “All right. I’m listening.”

  “First of all, I wanted to talk to you, not hurt you. And I wasn’t going to spend weeks searching containers for you.”

  “You are Company.”

  Mila fingered another cigarette in her pack, but then seemed to reconsider. “Are you dense? I have said no, I am not CIA. I have been many things in my life but never that.”

  “So who are you?”

  “The question, Sam, is who are you going to be? The government spent a great deal of taxpayer money to train you, and it wasn’t to refill pretzel bowls and bruise gin in martinis and phone taxis for drunks.”

  “So you want to make the most of that investment. You and whoever you work for.”

  “Let’s discuss your wife.”

  “What about her?”

  “You must have your theories about what happened to her,” Mila said. “You don’t believe she betrayed you. Framed you.”

  “Framing me didn’t require me surviving the blast. She didn’t have to get me out of the building.”

  “But if she was a captive, why was she allowed to save you? Why would her captors help you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Perhaps she made a deal with them. Spare you, and she would cooperate.”

  I said nothing. The thought of Lucy sacrificing herself for me weighed on me like rocks tied to a drowning man.

  “But there is the question of all the money she had, all the money she moved before she vanished.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know about the money she moved. It doesn’t matter how.”

  I studied Mila’s face. I could grab her, throw her against the wall, force her to tell me who she was. But I could tell force wasn’t the way to deal with her. She had a lot of r
esources and she’d chosen to speak with me alone. As an equal, not as a prisoner. It was the first time in a long while someone acted like I could be trusted. “I can’t explain. I think she’s alive.”

  “I think Lucy Capra was a traitor, paid for her work,” Mila said evenly, “and, once she was pregnant with your child, she decided to get the hell out of the situation while she could. She was going to have to go on maternity leave in a matter of days. Her work logs, her computer activities would have been under another agent’s direct scrutiny in your office. Her trail could have been discovered.”

  I let the words settle. “You’re wrong.”

  “The alternative is a monster under the bed,” Mila said softly. “The alternative is that she never loved you, she used you, and then she framed you to look like a traitor. She murdered your friends. She made you a pawn.” Mila pulled a face. “I want to know what you truly think, Sam. You worked some of the most dangerous jobs in Europe. You cannot be a man easily fooled and have survived. Tell me what you really think.”

  No one had asked me that in so long. “She’s not a traitor. We were both framed. They took her, to find out what she knew. The Company’s been trying to break the back of the new order of transnational crime rings, especially those with ties to governments, whether friendly or not.”

  Mila waited.

  “Lucy would be valuable to those kinds of criminal networks. She knew more about our infrastructure, our computer systems, our ways of tracking financial data. She would be more useful to them than I would be. They would have targeted her. I think she warned me to save my life.”

  “Yes, she is useful to them,” Mila said. “And you are useful to no one now, except me.”

  “Useful to you. How?”

  “I could give you the freedom to find the truth.”

  “Freedom?”

  “Time. Resources. It’s hard to conduct an international search for your wife and child when you’re ordering tonic water by the case and cleaning the beer taps and under constant surveillance. And if they catch you now?” She shrugged. “You’ll be in their prison for the rest of your life. The waterboarding was a bitch. I’ve seen the tapes.”

  “I won’t be free as long they’re hunting me. And as long as I don’t know what’s happened to my family.”

  “They made you into a soldier for the shadows; they made you play a role where you would have been tortured to death if you’d been discovered. Smuggler, hired gun. They made you their weapon, and they don’t need you anymore, Sam. How long did you last on the waterboarding? A minute? Most people don’t make it past the twenty-second mark. You are strong.”

  “How are you not Company but you’re watching Company tapes? Did you find it on YouTube?”

  Mila risked a smile. “According to the file, you were never waterboarded. According to your file, your wife is considered missing in action and you have resigned from the CIA. Your file indicates you did not do field work, but were a minor administrator with limited duties. They’ve rewritten your history to make you unimportant.”

  “All neat and tidy. It never happened, like Howell likes to say.”

  “If Lucy was a traitor, she may have compromised a hundred agents in Europe and beyond. She might have given them secrets in trade for your life. Maybe that’s why they let her save you.”

  The thought was crushing. “Please don’t say that.”

  “Sam. You are aimless. That’s a waste. You should be aimed, like a handcrafted bullet.”

  “So where would you aim me?”

  “At some very dangerous people.”

  Recruitment. Mila wasn’t Company, but she was… big. Mila was capable of accessing my no doubt top-secret file and could have a jet helicopter intercept and search a ship, with an armed team. “I’m offering you a chance to do the work you’ve been trained to do, with support, and to regain your credibility and dignity.”

  “I’m not worried about that.”

  “Of course you are. The Company believed for months that you were a mass murderer and a traitor. Now they simply believe you’re an idiot who was played by his traitor wife.”

  “They said I was innocent, that they had proof.”

  “The only proof in your file was that you never broke. That you never changed your story. Howell argued for you to be put out as bait. That Lucy, if a traitor, would come out of hiding to kill you to eliminate you as a loose end or to keep you from coming after her. Or if Lucy had been kidnapped, then putting you out was no risk. If you ran, you ran, and they would find you.”

  “If she wanted me dead, she didn’t have to get me out of the office.”

  “Unless you living was useful to her, in the moment and its aftermath,” Mila said. “Traitors are not rational. They live in a bizarre limbo. Not poster children for the good adjustment.” Her English was nearly perfect but not quite.

  “She’s not a traitor.”

  “I should get you a T-shirt with that on it,” Mila said. “And then my Christmas shopping is done.”

  “You’re brutal.”

  “I am the first person in months, Sam, telling you the truth. Love me for it, okay?”

  “Whatever you’re peddling, I’m not interested.” I set my empty whisky glass on the table. I had hardly realized I’d downed it. “My wife is gone. I don’t care what they think. I just… don’t… care.”

  “The TV, you watch the news yesterday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Train station bombing in Amsterdam yesterday.”

  It had been mentioned on the TV in the truck stop near Albany. “I heard about it.”

  Mila slid a stack of pictures to me. A stack. I flipped through them. Several of the pictures caught the magnified face of a young woman. Attractive, dark-eyed, much of her face masked by a scarf around her throat, pulled high to her nose as if warding off the chill. She wore a long-sleeved shirt and jeans.

  “Who is she?”

  “The daughter of a man I know. A nice young woman. Yasmin Zaid. She’s from London. She has never been in any trouble; she has a doctorate from Oxford. Blameless life. She’s been missing for three weeks and yesterday she shows up, walking through Amsterdam Centraal, with a backpack on her shoulder. It had the bomb inside, I believe.” Mila slid another photo out. “The man walking four feet behind her…” Her voice trailed off.

  I felt a jolt in my chest. It was the same man who’d driven my wife away in the Audi. The hair was cut into a short burr, makeup smeared over the scar that lay near his eye. But I knew the shape of his face, the question-mark scar seared into my head.

  22

  I SEE A SLIGHT RESEMBLANCE,” Mila said.

  I looked up from the photo. “You think this young woman bombed…”

  Mila handed me another picture. The same woman, hurrying out of the station, no backpack, the man who took my wife close behind her. I glanced at the time stamp.

  Mila followed my gaze. “The bomb detonated ten minutes after Yasmin Zaid left, in a store inside the station.”

  I studied the girl’s face. A blank canvas, waiting for the delicate touch of the brush. She didn’t look afraid or excited about her bombing mission. She was… blank. Behind, the scarred man was grinning ever so slightly.

  “He certainly matches your description. He has… affected or influenced Yasmin Zaid. Perhaps as well your wife. Gotten good people in his thrall. To commit violence.”

  “I don’t understand. Is he a terrorist?”

  “No. I don’t believe he is. No one has claimed responsibility for the blast, and it wasn’t placed on a train, where they could have killed many more people. They could have blown up Yasmin if they were simply using her as a tool. Instead, they blew up a little newsstand that sells candy and paperback books and magazines. It makes no sense, from the standpoint of an extremist. Like the London office bombing.”

  I thought of the Money Czar—I had always been sure our investigation of him drove the London bombing. From her accent, Mila was Russian—could she be con
nected to him? But she wouldn’t be hiring me; she’d just kill me. I put the picture down. “I imagine the Dutch police are looking for them.”

  “The Dutch have not identified her, but they will be using face-recognition software. Even with only a partial match on her face, it’s only a matter of time before she’s identified. Perhaps days.”

  “How did you get these photos? Have the Dutch authorities released them?”

  “No.” And she didn’t say more.

  “Why tell me your troubles?”

  “I want you to find Yasmin and bring her back to me.”

  “I’m not going to work for you. I can’t.” My voice sounded hollowed, like a ghost’s. “The Company—”

  “Bah,” Mila spat, like the word was a nail. “Stop pretending to be such a nice guy. Stop playing by their rules, Sam. Their rules put you in jail when you were innocent. Their rules presumed your guilt when they should not. If you could, you’d want to find the man who took her, to know why he killed your friends, what he’s done with your wife and child. Don’t lie to me. It’s a fever in your blood. To find them.”

  A slow, awful fire burned in Mila’s voice.

  “Lucy and your child are your holy grail, Sam. I know you.”

  “You don’t know me.”

  “Of course I do. You are all about fighting the evil, Sam. You joined the Company for revenge. A revenge you can’t ever get.”

  I froze. Mila raised an eyebrow at me.

  “The desire for revenge drove you to the Company, and now revenge can drive you to find the man who tore apart your family. Oh, what a shrink could make of you.”

  “I just want Lucy and the baby back,” I said. “I don’t want revenge.”

  “Don’t believe revenge isn’t fantastic,” Mila said, “until you’ve actually exacted it.” She shrugged. “I find revenge absolutely thrilling and satisfying.”

  I reached for the Glenfiddich, refilled our glasses.

  Mila sipped the whisky. It was a nice big, comradely gulp. “If you come to work for me, you will have a free hand to look for her. I am best boss ever.”

  I didn’t say anything for a long minute.