Girl Takes The Oath

by Jacques Antoine

“Keep it down,” she hushed at him.

  “Don’t worry,” he chuckled. “People climb in and out of these ground floor windows all night. No one’s gonna notice you.”

  “Well, keep the light off anyway, okay? Just for my peace of mind.”

  Dave smiled, then turned away, suddenly embarrassed, as she stripped off the running suit and changed into CJ’s jeans, and her t-shirt and Moto jacket. She stuffed the rest into the pack and kicked it under Dave’s desk.

  “I need to find Ruochen and Diao Chan. Do you know where their rooms are?”

  “Is this about Stacie?” he asked in a shaky voice.

  Emily didn’t want to tell him anything, for fear of tempting him into harm’s way, and she remembered how quickly he inserted himself into the fight after the Boathouse party. On the other hand, keeping him completely in the dark might slow her search down.

  “Yes, and another midshipman and maybe Ruochen, too. Where do they live?”

  “They’re both in Pinckney, on the third floor.”

  “How can I find it?”

  “It’s the next dorm over. I’ll show you. We can climb in by the fire escape.”

  She felt like laughing when she caught a glimpse of Pinckney, as they followed a brick walkway through a boxwood garden. The idea of climbing up the outside of the building to gain access seemed sure to alert Security to her presence. But one glance up at the side of the building revealed students lounging on the fire escapes, deep in philosophical discussions, or just chatting aimlessly about one thing or another. Someone plucked at a banjo on an upper floor, and a few others were climbing up or down between floors, not bothering to use the interior stairs. Dave was right, no one would ever notice them.

  “Wait here,” she said, continuing her caution, but he ignored her and climbed up anyway.

  She squeezed past two guys on the second floor landing, one of whom she recognized. “Hi, Chelly,” she said, and kept on moving. Not to have said anything would probably have drawn more attention to herself, she figured.

  On the third floor, she climbed in through the window next to the fire escape and found herself in the bathroom of what was obviously a girls’ floor. It was an easy guess that the second and fourth floors were for boys. Dave followed her a moment later and the two of them stepped through to the main hallway.

  The idea of living with so little security shocked Emily, but she also saw the attraction of being able to give oneself over to a bohemian, intellectual existence, at least for the few short years of college. Even if it made them vulnerable to the intrusion of someone as violent and dangerous as she feared Diao Chan to be, the likelihood of such a person invading their space was tiny. Yet here Emily was, dealing precisely with that eventuality, and chasing the faint chance of rescuing her friend.

  A directory at the end of the hall, next to an ancient campus phone, showed who lived in each room. “Diao Chan is in 309,” Dave called over to her. Emily looked at the door, tried the knob—it turned freely, not locked—and pulled her hand away.

  “Ruochen’s room?”

  Dave checked the list: “303. It’s down here.”

  Emily pushed his hand away from the knob. “Let me take it from here.” She pushed the door open and scanned the room. Nobody home. No clues on Ruochen’s very neat desk. No clothes on the floor, nothing out of place. Hanging from the mirror over the chest of drawers in the closet, Emily noticed a gold chain with a medal, a St. Christopher medal… Stacie’s St. Christopher medal.

  This is where Diao Chan wanted her to come, but she hadn’t come alone. Dave watched from the doorway. Would that really make a difference? She noticed some smudges on the mirror, and leaned over to breathe on them, her face inches from the glass. When she turned on the vanity light, the numbers appeared—38.995, 76.528—GPS coordinates, she thought.

  “Do you have a phone?” she asked. “Quick, give it to me.” She punched the numbers into an app, and saw where they pointed: a parking structure on the north end of the Annapolis Mall, sure to be deserted at this time of night. “Great.” She cleared the program on Dave’s phone and wiped the mirror.

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  “You can’t help me anymore,” Emily said, as she pushed past him and ran down the stairs. “Go back to your room… and thanks.”

  No fire escapes on the front of Pinckney meant quiet, and a moment to think. Getting to the Mall meant a three or four mile run down West Street, which might take her twenty minutes flat out, or thirty if she paced herself. She could get her motorcycle out of mothballs at her sponsor’s house, but that would end up taking about the same amount of time, and would not make for a stealthy arrival.

  Standing under the great east portico of McDowell Hall, which dominated the brick walkways radiating out across the sloping lawns of this end of campus, the scene of the croquet match just a few days ago… those pleasures nibbled at the edge of her consciousness. She’d avoided her friends even then, flirted with a few cadets down from West Point, and the highlight of the weekend, Perry surprised her with a visit for the first time since last fall. She’d had to disappoint him then, and probably would again, maybe many times over.

  The walkway on her right beckoned, with its pattern of horizontal bricks interrupted every few feet by a broad concrete stripe. The spacing of the stripes, too long to match an ordinary stride, suggested it had once been used for drill practice. This must have been a military academy in a previous incarnation, she thought. I wonder how many of the current, free-thinking Johnnies know that.

  No more time to spare, she took off on a dead run along the drill walk. Halfway down the slope, she noticed movement behind a boxwood hedge on her right. A dark figure, she spotted it out of the corner of her eye, but when she looked in that direction, it was gone. She knew what that meant: Kano had found her trail. She didn’t have time to stop and confer with him; and even if she had, what was there to say? Should she discourage him from following, or tell him her entire plan, such as it was?

  “Follow if you can, old man,” she muttered, and ran on.

  The path led her on to College Avenue, which she followed past the Governor’s Mansion and Church Circle. At the corner of West Street, ostensibly using the ATM at a shuttered bank—at oh-two-thirty… sure—another figure in casually dark clothing watched her pass. It might have been Connie, who she knew wanted to help, but would only be able to do so by following. Or perhaps it was one of Diao Chan’s confederates—she didn’t get a good look—and they knew where she was headed. All she could do was keep on running.

  She ducked behind a fancy hotel complex at the corner of West Washington Street and cut across to Poplar Avenue. It might shave a quarter mile off her route, and since it passed through a residential neighborhood, following her undetected would be next to impossible. Adjusting her route as she ran, instead of cutting back to West Street at the end of Poplar, she angled off on Admiral Drive, which led her around the back of the Anne Arundel County Medical Center. She hopped a fence and skirted along the last trickle of Weems Creek, sticking to the tree cover and ample underbrush.

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  Chapter Twenty Six

  The End of the Trail

  Whatever chance Kano had to catch up, or whoever else may have been trying to follow her, it probably evaporated well before Admiral Drive. But even if they’d managed to keep sight of her as far as that, Emily couldn’t imagine how anyone could track her through the lowlands around Weems Creek, whose bed had almost completely dried up this far upstream, though it may have run as recently as three weeks ago, after a rainy spell.

  For speed’s sake, she ran along the south bank, even if it left her exposed, since she was darker than anything around her. Once or twice, she crossed over to the more heavily shaded side for cover, and it made running impossible.

  Once she’d rounded the Medical Center, and it’s excessively well-lit parking lot, she crossed its main access road and cut over to a nearby bike path. Now completely exposed, he
r only interest was in speed, and the regular surface of the path allowed her to take the last few hundred yards at a dead run, sprinting the entire way on her toes.

  Peering over a concrete abutment, looking for an easy entrance, it occurred to Emily that the security cameras on the parking structure posed a problem: how to enter without alerting the security guards, who were almost certainly not prepared to face Diao Chan’s people. But if Diao Chan chose this location, then she would already have solved this problem, which probably also meant she would be able to use the cameras to track Emily’s arrival.

  Stealth was no longer possible, or even useful, Emily concluded, and walked directly into the structure through an entrance ramp on the north end. Mainly empty, except for a few stray cars that had been left overnight, or perhaps belonged to the janitorial staff, her footsteps echoed off the concrete walls and ceiling.

  How odd, she thought, that she knew almost nothing about Diao Chan, about the way her mind works or what her heart wished for. They’d met several times in the course of the school year, spoken on a few occasions, and yet she’d developed no sense of who this girl really was. She’d encountered someone like that once before, someone completely closed off to other people, even to her: Ba We. The clone was impervious, unreadable, until he saw his impending death at Emily’s hands, and then he opened up to her completely, with fateful consequences for the two of them… or the three of them. Emily had no expectation that Diao Chan would, or even could, open up to her.

  Faced with a choice—upper parking levels or lower sub-levels—she hesitated. Then muttered to herself, “She’s a burrower,” and descended the next ramp she found. Two levels down, she heard voices in the distance and maybe caught a glimpse of a brighter light than elsewhere in the structure, probably one level below where she now stood.

  “Why not kill them now?” a male voice asked, in Mandarin.

  “We need the guizi alive, and more or less in one piece,” a familiar voice replied.

  “We can handle her,” another male voice said. “Kill them now.”

  “I think not,” the familiar voice said. “Could you handle me so easily?”

  “Surely she is no match for you, Madame Diao.”

  “I have come, and I am alone,” Emily called down from the top of the last ramp, in as bold a voice as she could manage, hoping for an effect. “Where are my friends?”

  The size of the group was daunting, seven men she could see, all in gray suits, standing in a circle on a much smaller, largely empty level, probably used to store mall vehicles. The tinted windows of a nearby van prevented her from seeing inside, but she feared it might contain even more men. Of the ones she could see, some were as large as Jiang Xi, and off to one side, Diao Chan herself, dressed in black, sneered at her. A large work-light cast a hideous glare over the entire scene, which would otherwise have been lit only quite dimly by a fixture near the top of the ramp.

  “You are no coward, Tenno-san. I have to give you that.” Diao Chan nodded and her team moved to surround Emily, escorting her down the ramp. “Bring them,” she said, and two men pulled a pair of hooded and bound figures from the van and pushed them to the floor.

  Diao Chan pulled the hood off one, revealing Kathy Gunderson relatively unharmed, but still dazed from her ordeal. “This is the one we wanted,” Diao Chan said with a sneer, and then removed the second hood. “And this one tried to stop us, so we brought her, too.”

  Stacie’s face was bruised and bloodied, her jaw and cheek swollen on one side, and one eye partially closed.

  “Stace, it’s me,” Emily said to rouse her from the stupor of someone who’s been beaten. She blinked her good eye once or twice, and then a dim recognition shone there.

  “Em, it’s you,” she croaked out. “You came for us.”

  “Enough chit-chat,” Diao Chan snarled. “We have more friends of yours, too.” She beckoned, and two more people emerged from the van: Ruochen Ma and Tim Caspar. “You have been very helpful, Mr. Caspar. We couldn’t have gotten her here without you.”

  Gunderson shook off whatever cobwebs remained in her head and looked at Caspar. “Tim, what did you do?”

  “I did what it took to settle the score with this DUB, which Casey didn’t have the guts to do.”

  “DUB?” Diao Chan asked.

  “Dumb Ugly Bitch,” Emily said.

  “That’s hardly polite, Mr. Caspar. Still, in view of your services, I think we can overlook it.”

  “Tim, no,” Gunderson wailed. “Don’t you know who these people are?”

  “Don’t you remember what she did to us in that alley?” he asked. “There was no other way to get back at her, not with her friends protecting her all the time. When she killed Casey, I knew what I had to do. We can’t have her kind in the Navy. What if she ended up commanding us?”

  “So you slipped those messages into Trowbridge’s bag?” Emily asked. “I knew there had to be an inside man. Were you hoping to incriminate him, too?”

  “Why not? The way he fawned over you, he deserves whatever happens to him.”

  “All true,” Diao Chan said, now beginning to gloat. “Except for the part about killing Mr. Bauer. I did that, with Mr. Caspar’s help.”

  Gunderson stared at her, mouth agape, and Caspar cried out, “I didn’t have anything to do with that.”

  “Oh, yes, you were a veritable fountain of information, about who hates Tenno-san, here, who her friends are, and even when Mr. Bauer usually went out each morning to exercise. But that was trivial. The important thing is we could not have isolated her so effectively without your information. And you,” she said, turning to taunt Emily, “now can you see what sort of people you’ve connected yourself to?”

  “Tim, you fool,” Gunderson cried out. Meanwhile, Ruochen inched her way back to the van, no doubt hoping not to draw any attention to herself.

  “Not so fast, little one,” Diao Chan said, and motioned to one of her men to pull her back. “We haven’t forgotten this little friend of yours,” she said to Emily.

  “She’s nothing to me. I thought she was your friend.”

  “Don’t lie to me. We know you contacted the traitor, Jiang Xi. Perhaps you thought to protect her family. But all things will be revealed soon enough, Tenno-san, and all our enemies will be destroyed.” She held out her hand, and one of her men handed her a semi-automatic pistol, then seized Ruochen and forced her to her knees.

  “If she is not your friend, you won’t care if I blow her brains out,” she said, placing the barrel against the back of Ruochen’s head. Emily shrugged.

  “This isn’t what I signed on for,” Caspar cried out, and in that instant Diao Chan swung the gun around and shot him in the chest. The impact drove him back into a concrete pillar, and the terrific noise of the blast seemed still to echo in everyone’s ears as Caspar slid down to the floor.

  Once the noise had settled, she nudged Ruochen’s neck with the gun, and the girl shrieked, feeling the barrel a second time, and whimpered quietly. “Shall we reconsider this little one’s fate, Tenno-san?”

  “Fine,” Emily said. “Let them go, all of them, and I won’t resist.”

  “Bind her,” Diao Chan shrieked, practically delirious with pleasure at her triumph. One of her men, the largest, pulled cuffs from a jacket pocket and let them swing lazily from his fingers. She placed her hands behind her back.

  “No, Tenno,” Gunderson cried out unexpectedly. “Can’t you see, she’ll kill us no matter what you do?”

  Diao Chan grinned and made a flippant gesture with the gun: “I still can, you know. Remember our deal.”

  Emily lowered her head and allowed the large man to step behind her.

  When the lights went out, the sudden darkness caught everyone by surprise, and it took a few seconds for eyes to adjust. Until they did, a figure lunging at them from the shadows caused considerable mayhem. The familiar sound of blade on flesh, Emily couldn’t help recognizing it: Kano had arrived. She saw his outline on the right,
and one man fell with a groan, another gurgled out his last breath from the floor, and she could see just well enough to follow the glinting blade slice through the back of another’s neck—maybe not dead yet, but he’ll walk no more.

  The gun roared three times, and in the muzzle flash Emily saw Kano struck at least twice, and once in the chest. He staggered backwards, stunned, and dropped the wakizashi he’d used to such deadly effect, and finally collapsed against the van, dead.

  Once the light was restored and the carnage fully visible—three men dead, one more, the largest man, bleeding profusely from wounds somewhere on his chest and left leg—Diao Chan bent over to examine Kano.

  “One of yours, I think, Tenno-san. He’s still breathing, faintly… probably not for much longer. Shall I finish him?”

  “It looks to me like the arithmetic of our situation has changed,” Emily said. “Three dead, another wounded, only three left to help you, and tending to the big guy will slow you down. Let my friends go now… cut them loose and let them walk up the ramp, and I won’t cause any trouble.”

  Diao Chan picked up the wakizashi, hefted it in one hand, as if she might actually accept Emily’s offer. Standing over Stacie, she sneered, raised the gun and fired twice into the wounded man’s chest, then watched as his respiration ceased. The three remaining men stepped back, stunned, until she barked out an order Emily didn’t understand, and they straightened up—probably more frightened of Diao Chan than anything else.

  “I think I’ve solved your arithmetic problem, and what makes you think I need your cooperation, when I can just beat it out of you?”

  “Because you need me alive.”

  “You think you’re strong enough to face me? How do the tough guys in the movies say it... ‘you want a shot at the title?’ Fine.”

  She handed the gun and short sword to one of her men, who began to protest to “Madame.” She waved him off and made a slang remark Emily couldn’t quite follow which seemed to reassure all three men. It must have been a joke, perhaps in Cantonese, about how she would easily defeat the riben guizi, the Japanese devil.