Savage (Jack Sigler / Chess Team)

by Jeremy Robinson

  “By the way, I’m Felice.”

  “I remember. I’m Bishop. This is Knight.”

  Bishop and Knight. They were code names, obviously, like the callsigns that fighter pilots and military units sometimes used, but they were also the names of chess pieces, and that took her to a place in her memory she preferred not to visit. She shook her head and focused on what she was doing.

  The simple act of getting out the medical kit seemed to have a calming effect on Bishop. He took out a pair of trauma shears and cut away Knight’s right sleeve, exposing the undamaged arm. It took him less than a minute to find and sterilize an injection site, and subsequently to insert a needle catheter into a vein and begin a rapid infusion of fluid into Knight’s bloodstream.

  “What else do you have in there?” Felice asked. “We’re going to need to sew up these wounds.”

  “Not yet. I don’t know if they’re still on our six, but we have to keep moving.”

  “Where do we go? There are villages a few miles from here, but I’m not sure it’s safe to show our faces.”

  “We just have to get to the alternate LZ…” Bishop’s voice trailed off for a moment, then an ember of his earlier rage flared to life. “Damnit!”

  Felice flinched a little, but quickly laid a steadying hand on his forearm. “What is it?”

  “My glasses are gone.”

  She had no idea what he meant by that, but before she could ask for an explanation, he pulled away and took out what looked to her like a mobile phone from one of his cargo pockets. He stabbed a finger at it, then shook it, and when nothing happened, closed his fist around it. There was an audible crack as the device imploded in his grip.

  He let the pieces fall to the ground. “We’ve got no comms. No way to let anyone know we’re alive.”

  Felice grasped his arm again. “Hey. Let’s deal with one thing at a time, okay?”

  He clenched his jaw so tightly that Felice could hear his teeth grinding, but then he nodded.

  “Good. I’m going to bandage his…his face. I don’t think we should try to remove any of the metal from his wounds yet. Not until we have time to put in some sutures.”

  Bishop nodded and withheld further comment, while she packed Knight’s eye with gauze and swathed his head with a long strip of self-adhering Coban wrap. “Should we try to wake him?”

  Felice pressed two fingers to Knight’s wrist. “His pulse is strong and steady. I don’t think he’s in shock, but he’s going to be in a lot of pain. Ideally, he shouldn’t be moved at all, but since that’s not an option, getting him walking is going to be better for him than riding on your shoulder.” Felice gave a helpless shrug. “Sorry. I can’t give you a better answer. He needs a real doctor.”

  “You’ve done a pretty good job so far.”

  The compliment was so unexpected, and so totally unlike anything she thought she’d hear from this man, that she found herself laughing. “Well, I know some basic first aid. You probably know more about battlefield medicine than I do.”

  “You kept your head when I was about to lose mine.”

  Something in the way he said it made Felice realize that staying cool under pressure was of paramount importance to the big man. His comment was both high praise for her and harsh self-criticism. “Well, I have my bad days, too.”

  Bishop passed her a small foil pouch. “This should wake him up. Smelling salts.”

  Felice shook a small capsule out of the packet and crushed it, releasing a strong odor of ammonia and eucalyptus. She expected a strong reaction, but when she held it under Knight’s nose, she was startled at the violence with which the injured man returned to consciousness. He jerked and flailed his arms, as if falling out of a dream, and then let out a scream that echoed back from the jungle ceiling.

  Bishop caught Knight’s arms before he could tear at the bandage covering his face. Knight’s one good eye seemed to fix on Bishop’s face and he calmed a little, but he kept struggling to reach the wound.

  Felice reached in as well, placing one hand on Knight’s forehead and another on his chest, soothing him as a mother might soothe a feverish child. “It’s okay.” She felt a pang of guilt at the lie. It wasn’t okay, not by a long shot. “I know it hurts, but you have to settle down.”

  Whether it was her words and soft touch, or simply the return of Knight’s higher reasoning abilities she could not say, but she felt him relax beneath her hands.

  “Shit!” he rasped. “It feels like there’s a knife sticking out of my eye.” His expression grew even more agonized. “Oh, God. There is, isn’t there?”

  Before Bishop or Felice could give an answer—the bitter truth or a poisonous lie—a voice shouted from somewhere nearby. It sounded to Felice’s ear like the Swahili dialect some of the expedition’s bearers had used, and while she didn’t understand a word of it, the message was clear. I’ve found them.

  The shout was followed immediately by the report of a rifle shot, then another and another. Three shots, not directed at them, but at the sky. A signal.

  Bishop launched into motion, spinning on his heel, scooping up the enormous machine gun and holding its stock to his shoulder. He swept the jungle with the muzzle but did not fire.

  He turned to Felice. “Take him. Run. I’ll find you.”

  And then he was gone, running at a gallop toward the place from which the shots had come.

  Without Bishop to hold him, there was nothing Felice could do to restrain Knight, but when he shook free of her grasp, it was not to tear at his wound. Instead, he tore the intravenous line from his arm, then groped for his rifle and rolled over into a prone firing position, facing in the direction Bishop was moving.

  Felice gripped his arm. “You heard what he said. We have to run.”

  “I don’t run,” Knight said. His teeth were clenched against the pain, but his voice was unnaturally calm.

  “But I have to,” she said, matching his tone. “And I can’t make it on my own.”

  Felice saw immediately that she had found the right pressure point. Knight’s posture relaxed, and then he sprang to his feet. “Bring the gear.”

  She closed the med kit, stuffed it into Bishop’s rucksack, and hefted it onto one shoulder. Knight was staring at something on the ground, and she saw that it was the crushed remains of Bishop’s cell phone. “Should I bring that, too?”

  When Knight didn’t answer, she gathered up the pieces and shoved them in a pocket. “Which way?”

  He stared at her, his face twisting between inscrutable stoicism and unimaginable pain. Finally, he pointed away from where Bishop had gone and then lurched into motion.

  They had only taken a few steps when the forest behind them erupted with the noise of machine gun fire.

  18

  Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo

  Asya put her fingers through the metal grating that had been erected to close-off half of the small room, turning it into a makeshift detention cell. The wire mesh barrier, the sort of thing used to block off cashier booths and the back seats of police cars was a poor substitute for iron bars, but a cage was a cage.

  One of the soldiers guarding them jabbed the muzzle of his carbine at her and grunted for her to move back. She wasn’t sure why. King and her were no threat to anyone now. Nevertheless, she moved back a few steps and looked to her brother, hoping to see the glimmer of an escape plan in his eyes.

  If it was there, she didn’t see it. King just stood there, as still and silent as the Sphinx, staring through the barrier, looking at nothing.

  As the troops had herded them through the palace, following a labyrinthine course that seemed designed to keep them away from curious eyes, she had listened as King reported everything to Deep Blue in a series of rapid-fire reports, which he disguised from their captors by feigning a cough. “We’ve been arrested.” Cough. “Regular army troops.” Cough. “Don’t know who’s behind it…” Cough. “…or if we have any allies.”

  The soldiers hadn’t ca
ught on to what he was doing, but as soon as they were in the cell, they performed a more thorough search, taking the glasses and the phones from King and Asya. Asya could see them sitting atop a folding table on the other side of the mesh. King had fallen quiet after they were shut in, and Asya knew why. Their captors would almost certainly be watching and listening carefully to see what the prisoners would reveal. Silence was absolutely necessary, but as the minutes stretched on, she began to feel truly alone.

  She was obliged to change her mind about the merits of solitude when the room door opened and Monique Favreau entered, flanked by the two-steroid monsters. They had changed out of their business formal attire, and now wore BDUs with the same camo pattern as the soldiers. Favreau had a holstered pistol on her belt while her goons carried H&K MP5s.

  “Look,” Asya remarked. “Is dragon lady, come to visit us. I knew there was reason I did not like you.”

  Favreau stood on the other side of the mesh barrier and regarded her with a bemused expression for a moment. When she turned her attention to King, her look changed to something like…hunger.

  “Who are you?” It wasn’t a demand so much as a statement of awe, delivered with all the sultriness and intensity that made most American men weak in the knees.

  Asya hoped her brother would answer with something defiant or sarcastic—‘No one you want to mess with’ or ‘Your worst nightmare’—but that was more Rook’s way of doing things. King said nothing at all.

  “No? Nothing? Perhaps I need to ask the question differently. Or perhaps…” Favreau’s lips curled in a predatory smile as she shifted her scrutiny to Asya. “Ah, I see it now. Brother and sister. Perhaps she will tell me what I want to know. Or, perhaps you will tell me to spare her unnecessary discomfort.”

  “Go fuck yourself,” Asya said.

  “Later,” Favreau replied without missing a beat. “For the moment, I think I will—”

  “You’ve already lost.” King spoke quietly, forcing Favreau to stop and focus her attention on him again.

  “Oh, I don’t think so.”

  “Mulamba’s proposed African federation would mean the nationalization of the oil and natural gas industry across the entire continent,” King continued. “Your Big Oil bosses couldn’t stand for that, so they had you arrange his abduction in London. But it wasn’t enough to just get him out of the picture. You want chaos. Chaos makes the people who live here desperate, willing to give away their natural resources for the promise of stability and a quick buck.”

  Favreau rolled her eyes and then moved over to the table where their phones and glasses lay. She tried to activate one of the q-phones but gave up when nothing happened. Asya knew that there was no way for her to overcome the phone’s biometric security, but she suspected that the phone actually was on, and transmitting every word that was said back to Deep Blue. King’s long accusatory statement had been his way of telling Deep Blue what he thought was actually going on in the Congo.

  Asya wasn’t sure how that was going to help them get out of this mess, but she trusted that King knew what he was doing.

  “Are you going to tell me who you are?” Favreau asked, setting the phone down. “You aren’t CIA. Senator Marrs believes you are, but we both know that isn’t true.”

  “Let’s talk about Senator Marrs. Are you working for him, or is he working for you?”

  Favreau laughed. “Neither. We have coincidental…sympathies.” She rolled the word around in her mouth like a sip of wine.

  “Give him a message for me. Tell him he’s wasting time. President Mulamba is free. He’s on his way back here. This little revolution is finished.”

  She made a brushing gesture with her hand. “Let him come back. It’s too late for him to make a difference.”

  “He’ll have a very compelling story to tell his people—to tell the whole world—about how you are responsible for all of this, about how you were willing to tear the entire continent apart just so you could take their oil.”

  “This is Africa,” Favreau said. “That’s how things are done here. Read a history book.”

  “Oh, I know history, believe me. And I know that sometimes, things change.”

  “You’re very sure of yourself. I like that in a man.” Favreau looked at him again for a long moment, breathing quickly as if aroused. Then she turned to one of her associates. “Take them out into the jungle and shoot them.”

  19

  Favreau watched as the two prisoners were herded out of the cell and taken away. She had considered shooting them herself, right then and there, but there was something about the man, something compelling.

  She marveled at how quickly he had dissected the particulars of what she was doing on behalf of Consolidated Energy. He hadn’t gotten everything quite right, and he’d mistakenly attributed their motives to her. In fact, she didn’t care at all whether CE got their oil and natural gas leases, or for that matter, whether the inhabitants of the region got rich or got hacked apart with long knives. Her desires were for nothing so banal as wealth and power.

  The wealthy and powerful believed that life was a game where the goal was to achieve an ever increasing amount of wealth and power, not realizing that, in so doing, they were consigning themselves to the same endless hamster wheel existence as everyone else. Favreau believed life was a different sort of game, where the true goal was to test oneself—win or die.

  When she was young, joining the DSGE had once seemed like the ultimate challenge, but she had mastered the spy game and eventually grown tired of it. She had been drawn to the private sector, not because of the lucrative promise of material reward, but because it was the same game she had excelled at, but with fewer rules and much higher stakes.

  The best games always had high stakes.

  Favreau was fascinated with games. She had organized the men in her ESI strike team according to a playing card system: ten men, each designated by a corresponding card value, two through ten, with ace reserved for the unit leader. The suit—spades, hearts, diamonds, and clubs—was used as the unit identifier, though rare was the situation that called for the deployment of all four units at any given time. Presently, Spades and Diamonds were in the UK, where they had carried out—and if the American had not been lying, subsequently botched—Mulamba’s abduction, while Hearts and Clubs were deployed throughout the Congo region.

  The three positions corresponding to the face cards in each suit, she reserved for special roles—consultants or, when the contract called for it, the clients themselves—and as such, it was rare to have a king, queen or jack ‘in hand.’ For her own part, Favreau, had chosen the designation ‘Red Queen.’

  One of the younger ‘cards’ had once asked if she’d taken her name from the supercomputer in a video game about zombies, and although she had no idea what he had been talking about, she rather liked the idea of both the computer and the fact that it was from a game. Her inspiration had been the character from the Lewis Carroll story Through the Looking Glass. Unlike the mercurial Queen of Hearts in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the Red Queen from Carroll’s earlier tale was a cold, calculating chess piece that embodied the simple truth that Favreau lived by: to stay alive, you have to keep moving forward. In her case, that meant running toward the fight, not away from it. Retreat was weakness, and weakness was death.

  That summarized her philosophy of life.

  Her hand dropped to the remote trigger device in her pocket. With less pressure than it would take to pull the trigger on her pistol, she could detonate the RA-115, which lay in a corner of that very room. The explosion would erase the palace and kill hundreds, perhaps thousands in the blink of an eye.

  She had no intention of doing so, but the mere fact that she could was as potent a stimulant as any illicit drug. That was true power.

  She had learned about the bomb through her personal network of intelligence contacts. A disgruntled Russian official had told her of the sale to Hadir. An informant in the terrorist group, a man who woul
d not have dreamed of selling his information to the West, but owed her a personal favor that he was eager to settle, had told her of the plot to destroy the Suez Canal. Her employers, both her superiors at ESI and the oil barons of Consolidated Energy, had given her carte blanche when it came to carrying out their schemes, so she saw no conflict in stopping Hadir personally or acquiring the bomb for her own, as yet undetermined, purposes. It had already proven quite handy at keeping General Velle in line, but merely using it as a threat—as a tool for extortion—wasn’t very satisfying.

  There was a line from an American film—Speed—which summed up her feelings perfectly. The villain of the movie, a former bomb disposal officer who had himself become a bomb wielding terrorist, told the hero: ‘A bomb is made to explode. That’s its meaning. Its purpose. Your life is empty because you spend it trying to stop the bomb from becoming.’

  That line had stuck in her memory. The tactical nuclear device would one day fulfill its purpose, and she would be the one to make it happen. That was her purpose. The bomb was the instrument—the paintbrush—with which she would create her masterpiece, but like any artist, she needed to find the right inspiration.

  She caressed the trigger and thought about the American. There was something about him, something that made her believe he might be a very formidable enemy, the very challenge she so craved.

  If her men returned and reported that they had carried out her orders, then she would know that she had read the man wrong, that he was not the man she believed him to be.

  But a gut feeling told her that her men would not be coming back with such a report. They might not ever return, in fact, and the idea brought the smile back to her face.

  20

  King did not share Favreau’s rosy optimism with respect to the matter of his own survival, but he was by no means resigned to his fate. As soon as the makeshift cell was unlocked, and he and Asya were escorted out by the steroid twins and a platoon of Congolese soldiers, he began looking for any opportunity to turn the tables on their captors.