It could be debated whether stalking him down an alley would be of any help to him. So far, it was definitely of no help to her or her purpose for being in Hawaii. She was supposed to meet with Jackson a half hour ago. He wanted his update. But not having much of an update to speak of made it all the easier for Annica to abandon the meeting. The mystery man helped this, too. Cole had never showed, and so Jackson and his meetings could wait. But this man, and whatever story he had to tell, couldn’t.
Neither could she lag back in this alley. Annica suddenly realized that she had slipped back too far, playing it too conservatively. Sharky had opened up almost a block between them, far too much of a lead. So much that when he finally took a turn, leaving the alley to connect back with the streets, she was forced into a run.
As she huffed over the uneven surface, her heart thumped loudly, almost in her throat. Part excitement and part poor conditioning. She tried to swallow it all back, push the pain of her lungs out of her mind. What she really needed was to inject some energy into her legs. They’d become lifeless, atrophied from five straight days of sea travel. Of mostly sitting. Sea legs all wobbly on land.
Come on and run!
She took off, finally, past the pallets and dumpsters and the row of smoking cooks on break. From what Annica could tell, she was a whole thirty seconds behind her target. It felt like a lifetime, him having a lifetime of choices since turning the corner and disappearing from view. He could have already made his way into one of the buildings, maybe even the restaurant of the smoking cooks.
Her worries were temporarily silenced, and then amplified—at the buzzing sensation along her thigh. It wasn’t some struggling artery or muscle ready to explode, but her phone’s silenced ring. It would have to wait. The call kept vibrating as she turned the corner, as she looked up at a sign above the first door. Japanese letters. A ramen restaurant. She looked back to street level, further down the sidewalk through throngs of pedestrians. Tourists. Human traffic getting in the way of her story. Fuck. Where was he?
She couldn’t afford to lose him, not after her blown meeting and her sudden and surprising emotional attachment to this stranger. This diversion. But in her heart, she knew he had something to do with the smuggling scandal.
She started moving again, a little slower this time. She needed her vision to be steady and sharp. She needed to see him. But there was nothing down the sidewalk to suggest a fleeing man. No tall shoulders looming over the heads of pedestrians as he marched on to God knows where. She looked to the other side of the street, her gaze sweeping across, and then down the block, until she finally spotted him at the last second. He’d become a distant flicker of a shape, a split-second ghost image racing inside one of the buildings. She picked up her pace and followed after him, whoever he was and wherever he’d gone.
She arrived below a nondescript office building with a small and ineffectual magenta-and-green logo above the door. There were no words, nor any other signage. The building itself looked old, all-brick in the otherwise modern-looking downtown. It was a little unnerving, with how cold and industrial his destination looked up close. Something emanated from the walls, deathly vibes seeping from the place as if it were some type of urban slaughterhouse. Even the smell of it. Death. She’d known that from an old animal rights story she’d reported on for her college paper, the younger and more innocent Annica barely able to enter the security gates of a West Virginia pork-processing center. This place, in comparison, was too centrally located, unless it was the disguised final destination for the captured wild boar of Hawaii. Or nosy reporters.
But she wasn’t a reporter. Annica kept telling herself that. She was a business prospect coming in off the street.
She could bullshit at least a few minutes worth of snooping. Annica brushed the bangs off her eyes and then strolled through the door like she owned the place. That was the trick, to be in a rush, and always half annoyed.
But there was no one at the front desk she could probe for information. No questions asked of her, no discerning faces. Instead, the lobby was empty and deadly silent. Not even office space muzak rang through it—a blessing in any other circumstance.
She walked by the long reception desk, tempted to drag a finger through the dust. How long had this place been empty? It was odd for such a centrally located property. It stank to hell of a false front for some illegal enterprise. So much so that she wondered if she really wanted to find out what was behind the facade. That thought left as soon as it arrived. As with Sharky, she wanted answers. But she also knew they might come with a price. She would have to be smart about how she stalked around his “office,” first scanning the exits, noting them in case she’d have to leave in a hurry. There was a door behind the front desk, and another behind her to the outside street. Her only options, then, were to go deeper inside, or to just leave it altogether.
It wasn’t too late to leave. She could just walk out and refocus on her actual job here in Hawaii. No one would have to know about it, especially Jackson. Not even the man she’d been following. It could be a good, safe little non-story. But something in her needed to stay, to solve the mystery. If she could just solve it, then she’d be satisfied. Then she could move on.
The tactical part of Annica’s brain re-engaged with her surroundings, analyzing the space. It was still empty and safe. But if that changed, there were a few helpful barriers to use for cover. A large planter she could run and duck behind. Even better, a stack of cubicle partitions in the near corner. It was the first thing she thought of when she heard the muffled thuds of footsteps. The sound of the approach, like a shock wave, pushed her across the room without her even having to think, her body safely concealed behind the particleboard. Between segments, there was a small crack she could peer through, and after the door opened, she could follow him across the room.
It wasn’t Sharky, but another tall and brooding figure. The place was beginning to seem more like a slaughterhouse than real estate. This man here, with his huge, Neanderthal-like bald head, could surely offer better advice on how to kill things than how to maximize third quarter profits for your small business. She watched him lumber over to the main doorway, leaving the way she’d come in.
Alone again. It was time to make her move. She sneaked back around the partitions and made her way behind the desk, hoping the doorknob would be unlocked. Annica let out a small sigh of relief when it turned in her hand. She opened the door and walked into the darkness behind it. She pushed forward, ready to have an indignant response to anyone who’d confront her. Again, she felt the rightful trespasser. Just another day, coming in to work. Only she really had no idea what the work was all about. Looking around at her options, she had several closed doors at the start of a long and dim hallway. Maybe if she moved forward, there would be some open doors to peer through. Maybe she would find him inside one of them sitting at a desk just waiting for her.
But what the hell would she say?
Crap. She hadn’t thought that far. Her original goal was just to see where he had gone. Now that she was inside his destination, would she really approach him?
For once, the usually prepared and cerebral Annica was blazing a trail without a map, leading the story instead of following close behind. She was making the news, herself. She just hoped that the story would appear on the front page rather than the obituary section. That creeping sensation of death inched through her spine again, moving as slowly as she did through the hall. A cold blast of air-conditioning washed down onto her from the ceiling. Still, the smell of something pungent, a rotten, acidic smell. Rotting fruit and gasoline the further she went inside the building. Annica turned the corner, almost not wanting to, preparing herself to crash into whatever was behind it. A door. A locked door, her hand struggling with the knob.
Panic set in, icy and swift.
First, she rushed back to the original door, hoping it wasn’t similarly locked. Fuck it, it definitely was. She was trapped in a small L-shaped hallway with the c
old, stinking air blasting down on to her.
She zipped along the hall, trying every door along the way, all of them similarly locked, all the way until she realized where she really was: her trap. Here was the kill zone she’d been worrying about, and she’d stepped right into it like a hog going to slaughter. And like a cornered animal, she panicked, whirling around in a frenzy looking for an escape that wasn’t there. No doors were open to her. No way out.
Instinctively, she looked up at the ceiling and then at the corners down the walls of the hallway. And finally she saw something, a slim chance, a small paneled door. It looked like the front of an electronic control box. She ran to it, flinging open the metal door and finding a narrow crawlspace that disappeared into the dark. Immediately, her mind flooded with nightmarish images of her body getting stuck in some pitch-black tunnel. Claustrophobia and whatever else awaited her. But it all went away when she heard two voices. Two men talking to each other, and approaching.
She hunched down into the dark crawlspace, closing the door behind her and then moving forward. She had no idea where it would lead, but she didn’t care as long as it took her away from the hallway. The floor took a turn downward and she half slid down a steepening metal slope. It felt slick like someone had greased it for this very purpose, for stuffing bodies down chutes for quick disposal. The disposal of nosy trespassers, maybe. Her end was possibly coming a few stories down, deep in the basement into the bowels of the incinerator. What a great story that would be . . .
Somewhere in the darkness, along the way, her movement came to a stop. She felt nothing, not the air rushing by her, not the metal underneath. It was like she was floating, in stasis. In the dark. For that brief moment, Annica believed she was dead. It was over: the ride down, the trip to Hawaii, the story. Everything had come to a peaceful, mysterious lull, like the doldrums out in the sea, with her stuck in the blackness forever.
Death.
The afterlife, or so she assumed, came next in a bright flash. She landed hard against a metal grate. Face-first, mouth-first, teeth all biting into lips. Knees throbbing with the impact.
Her body felt like it had slammed into a brick wall. Her barrier, a metal grate. Where? What was it? When Annica opened her eyes, she could see through the barrier, seeing light that slowly focused into images between each small square. It was like she was on a type of scaffolding. A walkway, suspended above . . .
She saw the activity below, the movement of people all dressed in white overalls, several of them huddled around a conveyor belt, their arms moving in unison. It was some sort of production line.
One by one, Annica’s senses slowly came back. She could hear the faint sound of music, a radio commercial, and the sound of the workers chattering below. The low vibration of some churning machinery, the grinding of gears, tumbling metal, the beeping of a forklift. She must have been only about fifteen feet above the workers, hung up in the air. She could stay still and quiet and no one would likely notice. But for how long? And how would she ever get down? Annica looked up, craning her sore neck to check for a way off the scaffolding. There was a set of stairs at the end. So she could maybe crawl to them, sneak down, and act like nothing had happened.
When she’d climbed into the tunnel, she’d resigned herself to facing some sort of backlash. That was inevitable. But looking around in this room, with all of these people, working people, she felt better about things. She felt a little safer, not like a hog set for slaughter. They were processing something. This was a proper industrial facility.
Her biggest fear now was having some legal issue. It wouldn’t be a very nice way of starting her job in Hawaii, behind bars for the first few days, waiting God knows how long for Jackson to come and bail her out—and then give her shit for the next two weeks.
Back up on all fours, painfully, slowly, she made her way across the scaffolding, the metal grate digging into her palms as she crawled. She moved several more feet before deciding to stand. What difference would it make? She’d have to walk down the stairs, anyway.
She rose to her feet and kept moving, as calmly as she could, her face relaxing somehow back into that bored expression despite the pain of her joints. Complete normalcy, like crossing the catwalk above a production line had been just part of her daily routine. She almost felt normal about it, too, until one of the metal panels beneath her gave way with a loud crack, the walkway dipping down half a foot and hanging there.
She quickly got back down on all fours, instinctively. If she was going to fall, she’d rather take a few feet off of it. She hung there, suspended, trying desperately to ignore all the pairs of eyes that must have been on her. She shuddered, feeling the urge to move again, to crawl away from their attention. The voices wafting up, the urgent tones, spurred her on. Move. She tried crawling again, sliding quickly off the hanging tile and onto another. And then it happened so fast she heard and felt nothing but air.
5
Annica
She woke up on her back, sore as hell, and under the wide-eyed gaze of several white-clad workers. They wore masks, but their surprise shone through. Locals, middle-aged men and women. For the moment, they were silent.
The conveyor belt she’d apparently landed on had stopped moving. Jagged little edges of things stuck underneath her, jabbing against her skin and along her spine. She tried to move immediately, but then hands came down, holding and stopping her. Voices, too, everything trying to hold her in place, telling her to wait, to relax, to stay. But despite the pain in her back, she just wanted to get off the belt and get the hell out of there. It wouldn’t matter if her legs were broken, if she’d have to crawl out with pure upper body determination. It wouldn’t matter how much she was bleeding. She just needed to be gone, as far away as possible from this room and these people, and the man she’d once had the stupidest idea to try following.
She raised her head off the belt, scanning around for her nearest exit. And then the wave of voices came back.
“Don’t move.”
“You’re hurt.”
“Just hold still.”
They all came in jumbled, the voices, the hands.
“Hold still!”
She was so not going to hold still.
“Stop!” a man yelled, his hands coming down and holding her body more firmly, almost crushing her against whatever she was lying on. What was it? Florescent light bulbs? There was a crinkling sound underneath, and from the room, footsteps. A whole army of them rushing in as rapidly and urgently as the voices.
One of the faces was finally revealed to her, a hand pulling away the mask to reveal a young woman’s frightened expression. “Please stay still,” she said. “We’re getting help for you.”
What was there left to say to these people? For as badly as her body felt, Annica didn’t want to stay lying there. She didn’t want their help. She struggled against their hands again, her muscles feeling weaker this time. And then, over all the noise, the loudest voice of all. “Hold her down!”
She stopped moving. Struggling against their combined weight was pointless. She lay still, waiting. The loud voice, the seeming leader of whatever this operation she’d had just landed on was. When his face appeared above her, unmasked, she couldn’t stop herself from letting out a gasp. It was the sound of terror and it seemed to startle her rescuers, who drew back, staring at the new arrival. And he was staring at her—the man she’d been following. Sharky. Those same eyes, now bulging out, that same mouth, still mournful, beautiful, but now twisted with concern. His chest was heaving, like he’d run some distance. Only a few minutes ago, she’d been the one struggling to catch up with him. And now here he was, his hand dropping to her arm, patting her.
“Are you okay?” he said.
She had no idea how bad it was. She had no idea about anything. Lying on her back still, in this strange room and under these strange faces, the world seemed chaotic and distorted. She had fallen some distance through the air, from a life that had finally become ordinary a
nd safe, to this. What the hell was this?
“Can you hear me?” Sharky had said it twice, with Annica just picking up on it.
“Yes.” She could almost feel his gaze, his attention gently sweeping across her face like the tips of feathers. He winced, almost as if he could feel her pain.
He winced again at the sound of another voice, out of her field of view. The most authoritarian yet. “Get her up.”
“She’s hurt,” Sharky said.
“Get her up,” was the answer, hard and loud like a prison guard. “Get her up and get her out of here.”
“Can you sit up?” Sharky asked her.
She sat without a word, but with a long groan instead. Her tailbone felt like it had been replaced with a burning hot piece of coal.
“What hurts the most?” he asked her. “Is your arm okay?”
She could only mumble something unintelligible.
“You’re lucky this beltway has some give to it.” He stuck his arm out. “Ready?”
“Huh?”
“Let’s go,” came the voice. “Get her moving.”
She grabbed hold of him, her hand squeezing around his forearm as it flexed and pulled her down off the table onto two shaky legs. They were shaky, but holding. She was amazed they hadn’t shattered in a million pieces.
“There you go,” Sharky said, brushing random bits of crud off her shoulders. “You landed perfectly. Or else you wouldn’t be standing.”
Someone in the background started shouting to the workers, convincing them that the “show’s over” and how they needed to clean up her mess. Immediately, the worker ants were activated, Annica surrounded by a flurry of activity. It was dizzying. Her head spun, either from the disorientating effect of this strange environment, or how she landed into it. And she started feeling that hot pressure again, like the sea sickness, but this time on land. It grew worse when she saw the man who’d been barking all the orders. The heat rose continually as he approached, her face feeling the hot blast of air from his angry mouth. “What the fuck is this?” he shouted. “Who are you?”
Dark Salvation (DARC Ops Book 7) Page 3