Using the unspoken communication they’d perfected during almost two years of working together, they acted immediately and in sync. Vaughn slipped off his belt and pulled Don’s head back in a sudden choke hold, and Akiko drew her weapon and brandished it near his face.
“Hey!” Don said, his eyes widening and his grasp on the wheel becoming weaker. “What do you guys think you’re doing?” he sputtered, taking one hand off the wheel to pull at the belt. Vaughn released it—slowly.
“Don,” Akiko said in a steely voice, her eyes narrowing. “How did you know about our mission in São Paolo?”
Vaughn was only holding the belt tightly enough to restrict Don, not enough to choke him. Still, the impulse to tighten it grew stronger with the conviction that they were right. “You’re the mole,” he hissed in Don’s ear, wishing he could take out the anger he was feeling on the slug in front of him.
“Guys, stop being crazy,” Don pleaded, trying to gesture with his hands and steer at the same time. “You know they brief us on all the operations over here!”
“Brief you, sure,” Akiko said. “Tell you an agent’s been taken and why. But the only ones who are briefed on individual missions are the ones who are going on them,” she said, biting off the words and pushing the gun closer to his ear.
“It’s the first rule of operations, Don,” Vaughn agreed, giving the belt a little tug just for his own satisfaction. “It’s for your safety and ours—and Steve didn’t get away too safely.”
“Big coincidence,” Akiko said, pushing the gun into his skin.
Don’s driving had slowed to a near crawl, and Vaughn released his grip a little. Don let out a rattling breath and hit the gas hard.
“Don’t get any funny ideas, Don,” Akiko said, keeping an eye on the road. “First you’re taking us to Steve, and then we’re taking you back to Langley in leg irons.”
“C’mon, guys,” Don said desperately, sweat beginning to pop out on his skin. “I can cut you in on it! There’s enough to go around for everyone, believe me,” he said, and began to blubber.
“Sure—that’s why someone was waiting for us at the safe house, right?” Vaughn asked, jerking the belt again. “Someone with some nice leg irons for me and Akiko?”
“Or someone to put a bullet in both of our heads,” Akiko said.
Don suddenly began to laugh, a wild, crazy, hysterical laugh that scared Vaughn even more than the thought that Steve might have already been shot. “You guys think you’re so smart,” he began to chatter. “But you’re not smart at all.”
“Oh, yeah?” Akiko asked. “Pull over and you’ll see how smart we are.”
Don’s laugh became louder. Before Vaughn and Akiko could stop him, he did a desperate 180-degree turn into an alleyway on the other side of the road. The car came to a screeching halt and rolled forward momentarily into complete darkness. Suddenly, Vaughn was blinded by a rack of bright overhead lights.
Throughout the few seconds of helter-skelter driving, Vaughn had maintained his grip around Don’s neck, but now he saw that Akiko had been thrown back against the car door, her pistol lost somewhere in the junk littering the floor of the car. He also saw that they were surrounded by goons—goons who were pointing Uzis straight at Akiko and him.
Vaughn released his grip on Don’s neck. The goons gestured for Akiko and Vaughn to open the car doors and get out, then yanked their hands behind their backs and secured them painfully with handcuffs.
Don stepped out of the car, still blubbering and laughing at the same time. “You said to take you to Steve,” he said in a childish, high-pitched whine. “And I did! I did! I did!”
A blond giant strode across the room. “Shaddup,” he screamed in a Russian accent, slapping Don across the face. “Stupid loud American,” he muttered, looking more closely at Vaughn and Akiko. “Do you stupid Americans have anything to say?” he asked, cracking his knuckles.
“Dmitri Ruslanovitch, I presume,” Vaughn said. “Where are the other two musketeers?”
The giant came toward him and drew back his hand. Then everything went black.
When Vaughn came to, he could hear the soft sounds of Akiko’s voice mingling with someone else’s. In his hazy, just-waking-up state, he first thought it was Nick Pastino. But that’s silly, he told himself. Akiko hates Nick—why would she be talking to him?
As if his head had suddenly been doused in cold water, he came to violently. His head had been doused in cold water, he realized blearily, looking up at the stream that was trickling from the pipes over his head. He just thanked heaven that it hadn’t been the waste pipe that let fly on him.
“So you’ve joined us, golden boy, have you,” someone called from across the room. Vaughn tried to see who it was, but everything looked blurry and strange. “I can’t see you,” he called, hoping the voice was Steve and not his imagination.
“That’s courtesy of Dmitri Ruslanovich, who gave you a very nice pair of black eyes. He’s been giving me some in the last couple of days, too, but I’ve had a little more time to heal.”
“Steve!” Vaughn cried joyfully. “You’re alive!”
“Of course I’m alive,” Steve growled. “Thank god for this thing in my tooth—I was praying the whole time that Raul wouldn’t knock this one out when he was taking his swings at me. I lost a few, sure—but no molars. Where’s the goddamn extraction team when you need them?”
“We’re here,” Vaughn said. “We had the misfortune to run into Don on our way over, though.”
Steve made some clicks with his tongue that Vaughn assumed were supposed to be sympathetic. “You’re my extraction team?” he said. “No wonder we’re all padlocked to pipes in the basement.”
“Where is this place, anyway?” Vaughn asked. He could barely remember the car ride—they’d had a grip on Don, and then he’d escaped somehow. He tried to make out the shapes around him, but they were just a mass of blacks and grays, with an odd, squat red square thrown in for good measure.
“This is the factory we should have been looking at the whole time!” Steve spat out. “I thought that operation in São Paolo stank from the beginning, and I was right. They were just trying to throw us off from their real work here. Triple Threat hadn’t pulled up stakes here at all—they’d just transferred ownership to your good friend and mine. . . .”
“Don,” Vaughn and Akiko chorused.
“Right,” Steve said, making a long, dragging sound with his chains like Jacob Marley’s ghost. “And if I had half a thought rattling around with these marbles in my head, I’d have figured it out long ago.”
“Well, don’t feel too bad,” Akiko said. “They did have a hundred million dollars’ worth of technology to jerk us around with, you know.”
Vaughn was starting to feel the pain creep into the wooly, dense area that had previously housed his eyeballs.
“This is a rare event, actually,” Steve said. “Having all the boys at the old homestead at the same time—it almost never happens anymore. It seems they found the thought of three agents to kick around at the same time too good to pass up.”
“That’s all they’re going to do?” Vaughn asked. “Kick us around?”
Steve was silent for a moment. “Well, first they’re going to kick old Don around and make sure he’s not playing both sides, you know? Tipping off the CIA to who Triple Threat has decided to kidnap this or that week. Then they’re going to come kick us around and see if they can figure out how much the CIA knows about what they’ve got going on in this burg, and then—”
“Then they’re going to dump our bodies because it’s taking too long and pull up stakes here and start again somewhere else,” Akiko finished.
Steve sighed. “Yup, m’dear,” he said. “That seems like pretty much it.”
Vaughn couldn’t believe it. He was almost on the verge of a hysterical breakdown, and Akiko and Steve, who both had families, were blasé to the point of being absurd. Hey, guys, can we do some quick thinking to get out of here? Vaughn t
hought, but couldn’t bring himself to say it. I don’t want to spend my last days being beaten to death in a basement, and I’m sure you don’t either.
Maybe they weren’t saying anything because they’d thought through all the options—and there weren’t any.
Vaughn felt a surge of nausea, whether from his wounds or from the harsh turn his thoughts had taken, he couldn’t tell. “And the CIA won’t be able to prosecute them,” he muttered, breathing raggedly, “because they won’t have any proof to pin anything on them when they come up for air.”
“Well, no—not unless you consider those pictures I got at the embassy of three men dousing themselves with champagne proof of a crime, which I almost do,” Steve said. “But then, we didn’t have time to get those pictures of their factory in Brazil, did we, so we’ll never know. The CIA might as well strike it off their list—those guys’ll never use it again.” He sighed, a deep, rattling sigh that seemed to encompass all the sorrow in the world. “That crew knows it’s hot.” Vaughn couldn’t tell if he was sad because of their situation or because the CIA had lost the right to stake out the house in São Paolo.
Suddenly Vaughn’s right leg, the one that was chained to the pipe, became hot so fast that at first he thought it was a sympathetic reaction to Steve’s uttering the word.
Vaughn jerked his leg so violently that he pulled the thin pipe partly away from the wall. A gush of searing water streamed out from the jagged edge, splashing right onto Vaughn’s lower half. As much as it hurt, Vaughn clenched his lips together and tried to not to scream, slowly edging the chain down around the edge of pipe so that his lower body was freed.
“Vaughn, what’s happening?” Akiko shouted across at him, but Vaughn couldn’t talk for the pain.
“Shhh,” Steve said. “Don’t wake the beasts.”
The gush slowed to a trickle. Almost losing consciousness again from the pain, Vaughn slowly maneuvered around on his stomach so that the chains holding his arms were on the very edge of the broken pipe. Gritting his teeth, he pulled.
“Aw!” he screamed, unable to hold it back. The pipe had cut such deep gashes into both of his arms that for a moment, he didn’t realize he was freed. He lay in a heap on the floor, unable to speak.
There was a flurry of footsteps on the stairs, then someone threw the door open. “What’s going on down there?” a voice asked in a British accent. Another voice, this one murmuring in Spanish, chimed in, and then the door slammed again.
Vaughn didn’t need a translator. The voice had said: “Let’s finish up with Don. We’ve got to get this going right now.”
It was clear what was happening—Triple Threat was on the move, and it was time to finish the job. If he didn’t do something right now, they would all be dead within a few minutes. Vaughn heaved himself upward with a groan. “I’m out,” he croaked, trying to keep the gray shapes in the room from spinning out into nowhere.
“Vaughn, we only have a minute,” Steve said urgently. “Get yourself out of here and come back for us—it’s the only way.”
“Vaughn, go!” Akiko whispered. “Get out while you can.”
Vaughn shook his head blearily. He forced himself to focus on the red square in the corner—it might be some kind of worktable, he thought. He only hoped it contained something that could break the fragile pipes holding Steve and Akiko. Thank God they never replaced the plumbing, he thought.
Vaughn staggered over to the table, feeling as if he had the worst hangover in the history of time. A series of shapes swam up to meet him, and he realized he’d smacked his head on the table and fallen. “Vaughn, on your left,” Akiko whispered, realizing what Vaughn was looking for. “Grab the pipe on your left!”
Vaughn lifted it and staggered backward again, having overcompensated mightily for the weight of the object, which he’d assumed was pinned down. “Got it,” he said, hoping the blood flowing down his arms wouldn’t make the pipe too slippery to hold.
He fumbled his way in the direction he heard Akiko’s voice coming from, but she urged him back. “Get Steve first!” she said. “Then he can get me out—you’re not going to last that much longer, Vaughn!”
Steve’s voice came from across the room. “I usually like to let a lady go first,” he said. “But I’m going to have to agree with Akiko on this one, friend.”
Vaughn pushed himself over to direction of Steve’s voice, feeling as if he were dragging three bodies behind him. He saw a square of light and came to a stop. “Okay, you’re right in front of me now,” Steve said calmly. Vaughn looked down. He thought he could see a large beige shape, like a seashell, rising in the center of his vision.
“Strike for nine o’clock, my boy,” Steve said. “And strike hard.”
Above their heads, there came the sound of running footsteps, then a shot. It was now or never. Vaughn gathered all the strength he had left. He stopped feeling the blood pouring down his arms and the searing pain in his legs. As if he were playing a carnival game, trying to bring a hammer down and ring the bell at the top of the pole, he slammed his pole with all his might.
There was a satisfying crack. “Now that,” Vaughn heard Steve say, as if from a great distance, “is what I call teamwork.”
Vaughn fell to the ground to the sound of rattling chains and hissing and the sudden noxious smell of gas. Through a dim haze, he felt Steve grab the pipe from his arms, run across the floor to Akiko, and begin to strike at the pipe she was lashed to. “Got it,” he heard Steve yell triumphantly, and in the next moment he felt Akiko’s arms lifting him to his feet.
“Vaughn, we’re getting out of here,” she said desperately. “I don’t care if I have to drag you, but you have got to try to stand up at least, okay?”
He heard the cellar door fly open and the sound of footsteps on the stairs. Behind him, someone was breaking glass, and there was the rush of wind and light striking his face. He felt arms lifting him, then dragging him away on the rough ground. There were more shouts from the basement, coming closer.
He heard a click, and soft whirr, like a lighter being struck.
“My lady,” Steve murmured to Akiko. “You are about to be so glad that I had that smoking habit.”
11
VAUGHN AND AKIKO SLOWLY walked away from the crowd of mourners dispersing from the dark gray headstone at the top of the hill.
It had been a brief graveside service, with only Steve’s immediate family and a few other officials from the CIA in attendance, Betty among them. Steve’s children turned out to be red-headed twin girls and an older son, a tall, somber boy with Steve’s dark hair. The expression on his face brought back memories of the other CIA funeral Vaughn had attended.
No one could have predicted what had happened after Steve had tossed the lighter into the basement with its hissing pipe of rapidly dispersing gas. Steve had thrown himself on top of Akiko and Vaughn to shield them, and he’d done that job—his last—successfully. But his own body hadn’t been able to withstand the force from the large chunk of the outer wall that had collapsed in the explosion and fallen directly onto the three of them.
Steve, Vaughn had thought over and over again during the three weeks he was in the hospital recovering. Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve, Steve.
He’d awakened to find Akiko sitting at his bedside. This time, there was no confusion. He saw the bandages on his arms and legs, he knew what he did for a living, and he knew exactly where he was.
“Steve’s dead,” he said simply.
Akiko looked back at him. A nurse rushed to his bedside and began to check his vitals. “Yes,” she replied. “Now can you tell me your name?”
Nearly a month had passed since then, and his physical wounds had healed. The mission had been a success—the bodies of Triple Threat and Don Hewitt had been recovered from the rubble, and ProTem was no more. But as he walked from Steve’s grave, his heart hollow, Vaughn knew he would never entirely recover emotionally from the loss of the man who had saved his life.
He and Ak
iko walked back to the car in complete silence. He knew that it would be a while before he was ready to speak again. As he went to the passenger’s side to open the car door for her, he saw that tears were spilling down her face, and her shoulders were shaking with sobs.
“Hey,” Vaughn said, putting his hand on her shoulder briefly, then helping her into the car, leaning past her and around to put the seat belt over her small shoulders. “Hey, shhh,” he said, clipping the metal clasp into place.
“They were so young,” Akiko choked, covering her face with her hands.
For a minute, Vaughn had no idea who she was talking about. But as he walked around to the driver’s side of the car, got in, and put his key into the ignition, he finally realized who the “they” was: Steve’s children.
“Akiko, they’ll be all right,” Vaughn said, letting the keys fall into his lap for a second and putting his arm around her shoulders. “Losing my father was the hardest thing I ever had to get through. But all my life, I’ve believed that he didn’t die in vain.” Vaughn took a deep breath, trying to keep back the tears that were creeping into his own eyes. “I’m following in his footsteps now, and I know that working for the CIA is also a way of honoring how he died.” He squeezed Akiko’s shoulder. “What Steve died for is important, Akiko—he saved our lives, and his work will allow a lot of other families all over the world to stay safe.”
Akiko caught a rattling sob midway up her throat. “But I want my family to stay safe, Vaughn,” she protested. “And I never realized just how much I did until now.”
Vaughn rolled down the window to let the unseasonably warm air waft into the car. He could still hear the voices of other mourners walking back to their cars and the rumbling sound of their engines turning over.
Akiko had calmed herself down and was wiping her eyes with a tissue. “I know the work we do is valuable, Vaughn,” she said, her chest still heaving with choked sobs. “It’s only today that I’ve realized that I’m not willing to give up my life for it.”
The Pursuit (Alias) Page 11