by Stuart Gibbs
I unclipped my carabiner and then Paul Lee’s. He immediately collapsed into a pile on the ground. “That was . . . I mean . . . ugh . . . I didn’t care for . . .”
“We’re still not safe,” I informed him.
As if to drive this point home, a few bullets pocked the temple wall close by. Dane Brammage was back on his feet on the balcony and had opened fire again. He was trying to hit Erica, but she was moving too fast for him to get a proper bead on. Eventually, Dane’s gun clicked empty, and, in frustration, he must have decided to simply take out Erica the old-fashioned way: by pummeling her. He unwrapped the harness I had bound Warren with, looped it over the fishing line, held on tight with both hands, and jumped.
His added bulk was enough to nearly rip the spear from the wall. It wobbled ominously, but held. Dane’s weight also made him move down the line much faster than any of us had, though. He quickly bore down on Erica like a freight train.
As Erica got closer, I saw that she hadn’t come through her battle with Ashley unscathed. She had welts and slashes on her arms and legs, and there was a smear of what might have been either blood or red glitter on her forehead. “Clear the way!” she shouted.
Paul Lee didn’t listen. He kept staring at her dumbly, still completely useless. I had to hook my hands under his armpits and yank him out of the way as Erica came hurtling in. She bent her legs for impact, jounced off the wall, unclipped her carabiner, and dropped to the ground, all within a second.
Dane Brammage was only ten seconds away.
Two other bodyguards arrived at the balcony. They had somewhat recovered from Erica’s attacks—one still had a piece of cactus jabbed in his scalp at a jaunty angle, while the other’s face was imprinted with a distinct waffle pattern—and they were desperate for revenge, guns clenched in their hands.
Erica pulled the fish-gutting knife from her utility belt. It glinted in the first rays of the sun.
Dane’s face furrowed in concern. It occurred to him that, in his haste to pursue Erica, he had made a terrible mistake.
Erica lifted the blade over her head and slashed through the fishing line.
It snapped and recoiled, whipping back toward the penthouse balcony with such force that it took out the two bodyguards. Meanwhile, Dane Brammage suddenly found himself hanging on to nothing but air. His momentum kept him sailing toward us—but he didn’t quite make it onto the ledge and plummeted into the shark tank below. He cannonballed so hard that a plume of water thirty feet high exploded out—along with one very startled young mako shark—drenching Erica, Paul Lee, and me. Down in the tank, the water churned, though whether this was the sharks attacking Dane or Dane attacking the sharks, I couldn’t tell. We didn’t have time to stick around to find out.
The two bodyguards had recovered—and the third one, who sported a large welt courtesy of the panini press, had joined them. They opened fire on us again.
There was only one way to go. I flung Paul Lee onto Montezuma’s Revenge before he could protest, then dove on after him. Erica came right behind us.
We rocketed down the flume, careening through the shark tank, which was roiling with activity. I thought I caught a glimpse of Dane punching a tiger shark in the face, but we were soon well past it, spinning through the corkscrew loops. Paul Lee screamed the whole way, until the floor suddenly seemed to drop out from under us and we plunged down into the pool of water at the bottom. All in all, as ways to escape professional killers went, it was rather fun.
Erica and I emerged from the water, dragging a spluttering Paul Lee between us, only to find two pool-maintenance workers staring at us in surprise.
“Um,” one said. “The rides aren’t open yet.”
“Sorry,” I said. “We just couldn’t help ourselves.”
Thankfully, the flume was designed so that the exit pool was on the opposite side of the fake temple from the penthouse, preventing the bodyguards from shooting at us anymore. We sloshed out of the pool and raced through the water park, once again dragging Paul Lee between us. The man was stubbornly refusing to be any help at all. By now, I was wearing out. My initial adrenaline rush had subsided, I had a stitch in my side, and my waterlogged shoes squelched with every step I took. But still, Erica and I pressed on, going as fast as we could, wanting to put as much room between us and SPYDER as we could.
This was the first time Erica and I had had a spare moment to talk since the dining room, and she promptly laid into me. “What the heck were you thinking?” she shouted as we ran past the wave pool. “This whole mission is toast!”
“We couldn’t just let him die!” I argued.
“Of course we could! He would have done the same to you!”
“Maybe not.”
“There’s no maybe here. The man is a scumbag. One less scumbag in the world would have been a good thing. And you just had to save him!”
A few different responses popped into my head. It seemed to me that saving anyone’s life, even a bad person’s, should have been the right thing to do. And maybe there was even something positive about rescuing Paul Lee: Perhaps the man could be of use to us, which would justify the risks we had taken. But I was too cowed and winded to make any serious arguments at the moment. All I could manage was “I’m sorry.”
Erica responded with a scowl.
We hustled past the wave pool and found ourselves back at the activity shack. Mike had returned the boat to the pier and had the engine idling. He gave us a wary look and shouted over the motor, “Did something go wrong?”
“No,” Erica shouted back. “Everything went wrong.”
A bullet ricocheted off a coconut tree ahead of us.
In the sky above us, the very parasail we had used to get to the penthouse was now drifting downward. Ashley Sparks and Joshua Hallal were harnessed into it, Ashley in front and Joshua behind. Apparently, they had BASE jumped from the roof. Joshua had a gun in his real hand, while steering with his robotic one.
If any of us had possessed a gun, they would have been easy targets. But we were unarmed. A machete was stuck in a stump close by, where some employee had been using it to husk coconuts, but a machete wasn’t much use against a gun. We had no choice but to take cover. On the wide expanse of beach, our only option was a rack of scuba tanks, laid out for an early-morning dive. Erica and I dove behind it while Paul Lee thumped face-first into the sand beside us and whimpered.
Joshua fired again. The bullet pinged off the metal tank by my head.
From the air, Ashley taunted, “Nice try, schmoozers!” which I figured was a combo of “schmucks” and “losers.” “But there’s nowhere to run! You’re screwed!”
Indeed, it seemed that we were. Joshua and Ashley would soon be in a position where they had a direct shot at us. Or, if Joshua simply hit one of the scuba tanks just right, it could explode and tear us all to shreds, since the air inside was under intense pressure. . . .
Which suddenly gave me an idea.
Before I could even think twice about it, I leapt from my hiding spot and raced the few steps toward the stump with the machete. Geysers of sand erupted as bullets hit the ground around me. I snatched the knife from the stump and doubled back, quickly calculating the angle of the tanks in the rack and the drift of the parasail.
Then, at just the right moment, I brought the blade down on the pressure valve of a tank.
The valve snapped off cleanly, and the air inside erupted through the hole. The tank took off like a rocket, blasting off from the rack and barreling right toward the parasail.
Ashley reacted a little faster than Joshua, unsnapping the straps that held her. She dropped from the chute just as the tank sailed right over her head . . .
And hit Joshua dead-on. It slammed into him with such force that it tore him right out of the parasail and carried him another several yards. He crashed down into a swimming pool and sank to the bottom.
Ashley dropped twenty feet to the ground and stuck the landing in the soft sand beneath a coconut tree. She wat
ched what happened to Joshua, then wheeled on us with a murderous gleam in her eye. “You jidiots are going to pay for that!” she screamed.
Erica grabbed the machete from me and whipped it at Ashley. To my surprise, it sailed several feet over Ashley’s head, not coming anywhere near her, and thunked harmlessly into a lawn chair in the distance.
Ashley seemed equally surprised that Erica had missed her, and quickly found the most antagonistic response possible. “Ha!” she laughed. “Nice throw, loser! You missed me by a mile!”
“I wasn’t aiming at you,” Erica said coldly.
At which point, the clump of coconuts that she had been aiming at dropped out of the tree, their stems cleanly severed, and whacked Ashley on the head.
“Youch,” Ashley said—a combo of “yeow” and “ouch”—then passed out in the sand.
I turned to Erica, feeling rather pleased with myself. “That worked out pretty well.”
Erica glowered back. “Nothing about this mission has worked out remotely well at all, thanks to you. We still don’t know what SPYDER is up to, our element of surprise is gone, they’re on the hunt for us, and now we’re stuck with this blithering idiot.” She pointed accusingly at Paul Lee.
He lifted his head from the sand and said, “Well now . . . I, uh . . . you see . . .”
“Shut up,” Erica told him, then grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked him to his feet. “Come on. We need to get to safety, fast.” She looked to Mike and nodded.
He saluted her, threw the motorboat into gear—and then inexplicably leapt onto the pier, allowing the boat to speed away across the ocean without any of us in it.
I gawked at this, then turned to Erica, so astonished that I practically became Paul Lee for a moment. “Wait . . . we’re not . . . um . . . uh . . . we’re not taking the boat?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious,” Erica said.
“Then where are we going to hide?” I asked.
“The last place they’ll ever think to look,” Erica replied.
16
LYING LOW
Luxury Villa 11
Aquarius Resort
March 30
0500 hours
“Let me get this straight,” I said to Erica, trying to remain calm. “SPYDER knows we’re alive. They want all of us dead. They’re combing the entire Yucatán Peninsula looking for us. And you think the safest place to be is at the very same resort where they’re holed up?”
We had returned to our villa with Paul Lee, who now lay on the couch in our living room, curled up in the fetal position and whimpering, shaken from the morning’s events. Mike was taking a shower while Zoe was ordering room service. Murray was still sound asleep. I was freaking out.
Erica’s plan was that the boat Mike had set loose would provide a distraction: SPYDER would think we had set off across the ocean and would waste valuable time chasing the boat down. By the time they found it empty, they would figure we’d fled somewhere else. The wasting-valuable-time-chasing-the-boat-down part seemed to have worked. From our villa, we had watched SPYDER’s thugs race down to the pier, commandeer the resort’s scuba boat, and head off to sea. The question at hand now was: Once SPYDER realized they’d been duped, where would they think we had gone?
The villa had been designed for privacy, with walls and landscaping blocking the windows, but we had drawn the shades anyhow, just to be on the safe side. We were also trying to speak as quietly as possible, which was hard to do when I was on the edge of panic.
“SPYDER only knows we’re alive because of you,” Erica said to me angrily. “I’m doing everything I can to keep us that way.”
“Then shouldn’t we get as far away from here as possible?” I asked.
“That’s exactly what SPYDER would expect us to do.”
“No, that’s what a normal evil organization would expect us to do,” I argued. “But SPYDER isn’t a normal evil organization. They would expect us to do the opposite of what anyone else would expect us to do.”
“And they know we know that,” Erica insisted. “So therefore, they’d actually expect us to do the opposite of the opposite of what anyone else would expect us to do—which would be running away. Which is why we’re now doing the opposite of the opposite of the opposite of what they’d expect us to do—which is staying right here.”
I slumped into a chair. Now, in addition to being panicked, I was also so confused that my brain hurt.
“Look,” Erica said as patiently as she could. “Joshua and Warren both went to spy school with us. They know the CIA operates on a shoestring. Warren was there in Colorado for Operation Snow Bunny when they put us up in that fleabag motel. They don’t think we could afford a single room at a luxury resort like this, let alone a private villa that costs several thousand dollars a night. Once SPYDER realizes that boat was a decoy, they’ll have to decide where to focus their hunt for us. SPYDER might be a powerful organization, but it’s still small. They have limited manpower, and they can’t look everywhere. They might start hunting for us in the surrounding jungle, or maybe some of the nearby resorts, but they won’t look here. Not right away, anyhow.”
“Not right away?” Zoe echoed, hanging up the phone with room service. “That means that sooner or later, they will search here.”
“Yes,” Erica conceded. “But we’ve still bought ourselves some time to figure out what they’re up to.”
“And we’re just supposed to stay holed up in this villa until then?” I asked.
“I can think of a lot of worse places,” Erica replied. “Though maybe we won’t need much time at all.” She turned to Paul Lee and demanded, “What’s SPYDER up to?”
The arms dealer looked up at her, startled to have been spoken to. “Oh . . . uh . . . well, you see . . . I . . . er . . .”
Erica sighed heavily. “Paul Lee, we have two days, at most, to thwart these guys. So it’d be really helpful if you could complete a full sentence before then.”
Paul Lee frowned, chastened. But then he concentrated, as though it took extreme focus for him to get more than four words out at once. “I don’t know what they’re up to.”
Erica glared at him. “We nearly got ourselves killed ten times over just now rescuing your sorry butt. The least you could do is not lie to us.”
“I . . . er . . . I’m not . . . uh . . . lying,” Paul stammered.
“Joshua wasn’t going to kill you merely to save himself a few billion dollars,” Erica said. “He also needs to get rid of you because you’re a loose end. SPYDER saves a load of money and keeps their secrets. It’s a win-win for them.”
I suddenly had a realization. “That’s what they were doing with Vladimir Gorsky at the White House!”
Erica nodded knowingly, as though she’d already put this together. But Zoe didn’t catch on as fast. “What are you talking about?”
I explained, “When SPYDER bombed the White House, it wasn’t only the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and me that they were trying to kill. Gorsky was there too. He’s another big-time arms dealer with connections to SPYDER. I saw him—and he seemed to know his time was up. SPYDER must be getting rid of every arms dealer they’ve worked with.”
Paul Lee uncurled himself and sat up on the couch, looking even more stunned than usual. “They uh . . . er . . . they bought arms from Gorsky, too?”
Erica returned her attention to him. “Why is that so surprising? You had to know they worked with lots of different dealers.”
“Yes,” Paul said. “But . . . er . . . I, well . . . you see . . . they uh . . . they bought a lot of arms from me.”
Despite her cold facade, I could tell that Erica had grown very intrigued. “Exactly how many are we talking about?”
“Megatons,” Paul replied. “Enough to wipe New York City off the map. Several times over.”
“They’re going after New York?” Zoe gasped.
“I don’t know,” Paul said for the second time. “I only meant that, er . . . well, that’s what I
, uh . . . sold them enough to, ah . . . do.”
“And this woman, Celeste, that you told Joshua about?” I said. “Where was she delivering them?”
Paul didn’t answer right away. He simply shrank on the couch, looking like a three-year-old who’d been caught coloring the walls.
Erica sat on the coffee table across from him. “I know you’re thinking about lying to us right now,” she said. “It’s in your best interests not to do that. You are only worth anything to us because you know valuable information. Meanwhile, SPYDER wants you dead. So if you don’t want us to wrap you in duct tape and leave you on their doorstep, you’d better start telling us what you know right now.”
Her threat worked. Paul Lee cracked like an egg. “Celeste isn’t a, uh . . . a woman. She’s a, uh . . . a cargo ship.”
“An entire cargo ship?” Zoe asked. “Loaded with weapons?”
“Nuclear weapons,” Paul clarified. “Delivered, um . . . well, to Ushuaia. It’s the, uh . . . well, it’s . . .”
“I know what it is,” Erica interrupted, then looked to us. “It’s a city at the southern tip of Argentina. The southernmost city on earth.”
There was a computer terminal in the room for guests. Zoe ran to it and brought up a map of Ushuaia. It was all the way down at the end of South America, surrounded by the islands of Tierra del Fuego. “Doesn’t look like there’s anything significant within a thousand miles of it,” Zoe observed.
I asked Paul Lee, “Why on earth is SPYDER sending that much weaponry down there?”
“I, uh . . . I keep telling you . . . I, er . . . I don’t know.” Paul looked to Erica plaintively. He really seemed to be telling the truth.
Erica appeared to think so too. “You sold an evil organization enough weaponry to wipe out millions of people and you didn’t even bother to ask why they needed it?”
“Er . . . ,” Paul stammered meekly. “Well . . . I . . . um . . . ah . . . er . . . no.”