by Ann Michaels
Chapter 23
The night of Monday 21th November, 1988
Dana Roberts is Sally Brown
No Way Out
The uniform boys herded me, Beryl and the young, red head, into a squad car, and pretty soon, we were bucketing out of the Ruslen compound, and heading back to HQ, to have our stories and brains picked over. I wasn’t real keen to share my part of the tale, seeing as I had somehow managed to develop some pretty soft feelings toward Peter Ruslen, who, let’s face it, was pretty much a criminal and a creep. I had also managed to misplace…..OK, lose, that bloody expensive mobile telephone along the way, and so, I wasn’t real enthusiastic about facing The Sarg.
I looked out the window as we roared along New South Head Road. None of us spoke. The car felt like a space craft, rocketing away from the Earth, as the police radio fizzed and twittered with reports and messages. Beryl simply stared ahead, as though looking through the gates of hell and the red headed, young woman, wept silently, enmeshed in her private sorrow.
After some minutes, I noticed that we were about to drive past the yacht club at Double Bay and with a sudden realisation, like I had crashed through the surface of the water after rising from somewhere very deep, I remembered Kristina Ruslen and her escape plans.
‘Stop!’ I screeched.
Perhaps thinking I was about to eject the contents of my stomach into his just cleaned car, the uniform bloke, ground to a halt, as I opened the door and pelted into the darkness and toward the swaying masts of the yachts, which glowed richly as they bounced in the inky waters of the bay.
I kept running, passing a white van and a small, Toyota Corolla, in the car park, and headed toward the herd of yachts. Mid stride I was, when I felt a hard body slam into me.
‘What the hell are you doing here’, hissed Harry, incredulously.
‘I could ask you the same thing’, I hissed back.
Then Harry was kissing me, there in the dark, with an icy breeze cutting around us.
Before long, I came up for air, with every part of my body buzzing, but damn it! We had a job to do.
‘We need to make a plan’, I stuttered.
Before Harry could even open his mouth to speak, I felt a rope go around us, and squeeze tight.
We had been lassoed.
‘I learnt to do that back in the United States,’ boasted Kristina Ruslen, to the man next to her, dressed in a white uniform, with some ridiculous looking gold epaulettes on his shoulders.
‘Excellent work, Madam!’ the sycophant brayed, as though Kristina Ruslen had just won a teddy bear at a fun fair. And with the silver barrel of a gun aimed at us, Kristina Ruslen put her hands all over us, found the mobile phone and tossed it into the water. Then, we were shepherded, like some ungainly giant spider, onto the nearby Ruslen yacht.
Harry was cursing, using some very colourful language, which in no way helped matters, as we were led down a mirror lined, spiral staircase, into the bowels of the yacht, and then, along a long windowless hallway. At the end, we came to a set of carpeted stairs, where Kristina Ruslen removed a small panel on the wall and pressed a lever downward. The stairway flipped upwards, to reveal a doorway into a feebly lit room. Harry and I were shoved inside, and left staring, as the staircase fell back into place.
‘Any ideas?’ Harry asked, as he raked his hand through his hair and paced the floor.
‘Not as such’, I answered, sounding like a hysterical member of Monty Python.
Harry and I began to examine the room, with hopes of escape, but as the room had no windows and was empty of furniture, there wasn’t much to examine, or much hope for that matter.
‘I suppose they’ll be back soon’, I said, hearing the quaver in my voice.
‘No doubt, they will……. But we’ll be ready for them’, Harry added. I could see that he was worried, though, and probably thinking that we would have to try and overpower Kristina Ruslen, and the Captain, even if they still had a gun.
Harry froze mid stride and turned around to face me. ‘You’ll be going back to your usual self, he said, as he looked me over and his hands pointed toward my peroxided hair and pushed up breasts.
‘No, I thought I’d keep the look’, I replied, teasing him. ‘I’ve been getting lots of male attention, for some reason’.
Harry made a noise deep in his throat and said ‘Well, that means that I’ll have to start pumping iron and getting a few ‘tats, so I can match you……And, I’ll have to start looking at myself in the mirror a lot more’.
I knew he was joking, but I also knew that he was saying that he didn’t feel that we meshed together, looking the way I did. I found this interesting and I mulled it over in my brain for a while; I even forgot to think about our present predicament.
We waited what seemed a long time, pacing about and trying to think of a plan, when I felt cooler air and a brighter light entering the room. And sure enough, I turned around to see the staircase doorway opening.
‘You may have realised that we are already heading out to sea’, Kristina Ruslen, purred in that fake accent of hers.
I looked at Harry and saw him grow pale. It was suddenly obvious from the roll and sway of the yacht that we were no longer in the more gentle harbour, but we had been so preoccupied, we had not registered the change.
‘Not such good news is it my dears’, she said, teasingly, enjoying herself. Neither of us responded, as a huge man with a red beard stepped in behind Kristina Ruslen.
‘Liam, please tie up these interlopers, whilst I prepare their insulin shots’.
‘Yes mam’, the red bearded man, called Liam, replied robotically, as he stepped forward, holding pieces of rope. Kristina Ruslen meanwhile, raised her right hand and aimed the silver metal of her gun at us.
What could we do but submit to being tied up by the red bearded Liam, who had hands like dinner plates. I was watching Harry, though, and I noticed that Liam and he were giving each other some very intense eye contact. Did they know each other?
Then, before I could even prepare myself, Kristina Ruslen seemed to pirouette toward Harry, with the syringe and plunged it into the back of his upper arm. I was next.