by SLMN
The only blessing to save her from falling completely from the ladder was that her arm was still hooked around one iron rung. Her feet dangled, but the crook of her elbow had left her suspended, as the stiffening power shot through her.
The jolt of her bodyweight hitting her elbow and shoulder joint at once wrenched the muscles and almost tore the arm out of her socket.
As the voltage subsided, and her muscles relaxed, Passion had swung on the hooked elbow and managed to grab the ladder with her free hand.
With immense effort. she put her feet back on a rung. Her body was not working in the way it normally did because of the Taser shock, but she was aware enough to cling onto the ironwork. Rosa said, “Climb up, or I’ll zap you again.”
Passion forced her limbs to work in their confused and disorientated state, but managed to climb the last few feet of the shaft. She slithered out of the hole and collapsed exhausted on the dirt covered flagstones.
Rosa handcuffed Passion’s hands behind her back and left her there for a few moments, while she spoke to a tinny voice that replied from a speaker in the ceiling.
“I’m sorry. It got away from me. Just got away. But it’s all under control…”
“It’s not under control!” the man’s voice came back. It was filled with anger and threat. “We’ve got twenty governments wondering what’s happened to their politicians. They’re screaming because they can’t contact them. There’s rage out there because of this fuck-up, Rosa, and you’re the architect of it!”
“I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”
“You bet your life it won’t, you stupid mongrel. I’m shutting down La Isla Encantada as of now. You’re relieved of duties.”
“But…”
“No buts. The Nicaraguan forces will be there within the hour. You will surrender to them, and report back to me here at the earliest opportunity. Is that understood?”
“Yes, Owner. It is understood.”
“Cut the transmission.”
There was a hiss of static from the ceiling and then silence.
“Sorry you lost your job, Rosa, but I must also decline to give you a reference for the next one.”
Passion received a kick in the face for that. Rosa hauled her up into a sitting position and sat her against the muddy wall. “I am going to enjoy making you dead you mulato cunt.”
Passion looked up at Rosa. “I have no doubt that you will. But I can die knowing your island is history and you’re a no-mark pariah.”
Rosa’s face creased with the agony of this previously unknown humiliation. Her fists clenched and unclenched, for a moment she looked like a toddler about to stamp her feet and have a tantrum.
Passion pressed on, if the old woman was going to kill her, she might as well say what she liked. “Awww, diddums. Did daddy give you a spanked bottom?”
Rosa’s eyes flickered and rolled back in her head. She reached onto the table and picked up a long thin-bladed stiletto knife, its blade glinting dully in the meager light of the room.
Passion wasn’t giving up her tirade. “That’s it. Cut my throat out. I don’t care, you bitch. I’ve ruined your life’s work. My work here is done.”
Rosa took a step, but not towards Passion. She moved to the bed instead, theatrically pulling back a blanket. Passion saw who was there, and her heart smashed like dropped ice.
Lainey and Mary-Joy, duct taped by the ankles, knees and wrists. Across their mouths more tape, tightly wound around the bottom half of faces covering their lips, only leaving their nostrils free to breathe. Their eyes moved in panicky jerks as they became accustomed to the light outside the blanket.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” Passion said as their eyes settled on her.
Rosa snickered. “It’s far from okay, as you put it, Ms. Valdez. The three of you are going to die, and I’m going to get away. So, on balance, I think it’s going to be okay for me…you three? Not so much.”
“You don’t have to kill the girls. They’re no threat to you.”
“I know. But I’m going to kill them anyway. If I let them go, that would leave you with some hope, Ms. Valdez. Hope that they’d get away and tell the world what happened here. Now, we’ve had the hope conversation, haven’t we? I like to drain all of it. Every last drop. I see that you’ve accepted that you’re going to die, but you think you can persuade me to let these girls go—so that you don’t die in vain. Am I right?”
Passion said noting.
“But I want you to know that you died absolutely in vain, and that even at the last you were a failure. You failed to save the girls. They are going to die first, and then I am going to kill you.”
Passion’s mind raced.
If she could keep Rosa talking, she might, just might keep them all alive long enough for Sven to get there and affect some sort of rescue. Passion knew she was running out of options and the next words out of her mouth sounded as lame as they did in her head before she said them.
“What happened to the stun grenade?”
“What?” Rosa looked like she was deciding which girl’s heart she would cut out first, and genuinely seemed irritated by the question.
“I threw a stun grenade in here. It didn’t go off. What happened to it?”
Rosa tutted, shook her head and reached to the table. She picked something up and threw it at Passion’s feet where it rolled a couple of times until it was still.
It was the stun grenade, but smothered in a length of duct tape.
“You should have waited two and a half elephants before you threw it really. I simply re-depressed the spring and held it in place with tape. Next time…wait longer.”
Passion had to be impressed by someone who was as insane as Rosa still having such presence of mind.
“Nicely done.”
“Your praise is not necessary. I didn’t survive this long by not knowing how to get out of a tight spot.”
“Ok. But there’s also something else I’d like to know before I die. Please indulge me…”
“Alright, who am I to give up an opportunity to gloat? Continue.”
“The grenade was good, but I still haven’t worked out how you found Mary-Joy and me at Sven’s apartment. You weren’t tracking my cellphone. I’d dumped it. It wasn’t the rented car because I’d dumped that too. How did you do it?”
Rosa wagged the stiletto at Passion. “You really want to know?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
Come on, Sven. Come on.
“Yes, I do. Please.”
“Well, it’s easier if I show you.”
Rosa leaned over the bed and pulled up clump of Mary-Joy’s hair between her fingers. Then, as Mary-Joy screamed behind the tape and struggled against her bonds, Rosa used the knife to saw a piece of flesh from the side of her skull raised up by the pulled hair. Blood splashed from the new hole in the side of Mary-Joy’s head.
“Stop! Stop!” screamed Passion as Rosa dug her fingers into the open wound, her face a puzzle of concentration.
“How’s the hope faring?” Rosa asked Passion as her fingers came away, sticky with blood. She was clutching a small square of metal. She held it up to her mouth and licked it clean.
Between thumb and forefinger Rosa presented a small circuit of glittery copper. “We chip and pin all the girls you see, but don’t tell them what we’ve done. Usually after they’ve been beaten unconscious, so that when they wake up they’re in so much pain anyway they can’t tell what we’ve done to them. Mary- Joy’s was inserted when Mr. Ralston snapped her elbow for his kicks.”
Passion’s head was swimming with grief and horror; just when she thought the island and its practices couldn’t have upset her more than they already had, there was this.
“It’s a low level passive signal,” Rosa continued like she was giving a product update seminar. “Our receivers have to be within a kilometer or so to pick up. And it’s not terribly discerning; that’s how Mary-Joy managed to get away from the compound
while we thought she was still inside. Inside the wall. Outside the wall. It’s a fine line. By the time we started looking outside the compound for her, she was already on the Enchantress. But regardless, once we knew she was in Houston and we could use the more powerful trackers available to us on the mainland, we found you both. Still impressed, or wish you hadn’t asked?”
Rosa threw the chip onto Passion’s lap while Mary-Joy writhed and bled on the bed, screaming beneath the duct tape.
“So. Any more questions, or can I get on?”
Passion was destroyed. There was nothing left to say or do. Sven was not coming, and she’d exhausted all her options.
“Please. I beg you. Don’t kill them. Kill me. But not them. Please.”
“I do love it when they beg.” Rosa moved in on Lainey, pushing her chin up and pushing the stiletto against the skin of her windpipe.
“This is my favorite bit…”
As the engine growled, the exit from the burrow out to the Enchanted Forest shuddered as an enormous impact shook the whole burrow. Lights came down from the ceiling, a wall caved in. Rosa was thrown back off her feet, and the bed was pushed aside on a blast of hot metal and grinding gears. The Humvee crashed through the doorway and forced its bulk into the hole.
Rosa was screaming.
The old woman had been thrown across the room and smashed against the wall. She was pinioned there by the oil radiator, which had fallen onto her chest, and the heavy oak table which had upended during the Humvee’s egress, crushing her legs against the stone floor.
Passion got to her feet, made sure that Rosa was going nowhere and set about freeing the girls.
She tried not to look at the Humvee. As it had crashed through the doorway she’d caught a fleeting glimpse of the driver.
It had been Huey Ralston not Sven.
Sven didn’t make it to the burrow until ten minutes later, when it was all over.
Ralston in a fit of anger or need for revenge had driven the Humvee straight at Rosa’s burrow. The impact had sent him bursting through the windshield. The crumpled metal around the windshield tearing open his neck and chest. Passion could see immediately there was nothing she could do for the man who was transfixed on the hood of the Humvee, copiously bleeding out.
As Passion had used her still handcuffed hands to release first Mary-Joy, and then Lainey, Huey Ralston’s head lifted once. His mouth was a froth of blood and gurgling breath. As the light gradually went out in his eyes, Passion was sure she heard him say, “Sorry.”
Lainey clung to Passion in the tightest hug imaginable, not looking at the wreckage of her dead father in the Humvee.
Passion hugged her back, burying her face in the teenager’s hair.
It was then, looking over Lainey’s shoulder, she saw Mary-Joy standing up from the stabbed out eyes and slit-throated corpse of Rosa. The old woman’s foot trembled for three seconds, her arm fell lazily from her face, and blood gushed down her waistcoat.
Mary-Joy’s fists were covered in gore. Her eyes were blazing and her chest heaving. She put the stiletto down on the table and said simply, “I said that I would.”
Epilogue
Mumbai baked under an oven sun.
Passion and Bimala rode the Tuk Tuk to the university, and walked into the grounds at the appointed time. Since he had left his wife Chaaya, Bharat had moved into faculty lodgings on the campus.
He came from the building at a run, sprinting in the way older men often do, arms flailing, legs pumping, mouth open and closing on a flapping jaw. Bharat was not a man who was used to moving this fast, but he was not going to waste a second by not running towards his niece.
Bimala ran from Passion’s side too and the Uncle and niece met in a crush of arms and yelps and tears. Heads turned in the quadrangle, looked at the pair initially with suspicion but then seemed to catch the infection of their happiness.
“I did not think I would see you again.”
“I didn’t think I would either, Uncle Bharat.”
“Tell me everything!”
Bimala hesitated, her shoulders stiffening momentarily.
“No, Uncle. Tell me about the flowers.”
Lainey sat on the end of her bed, back in her room at the Ralston residence.
“Will you go to the funeral?” asked Passion.
“Yes.” Lainey was emphatic. “Not for him. But for mom. She needs me and…and I guess…I need her.”
Passion hugged the girl who she had promised to find and to bring home. She couldn’t put it down as a success, not with everything that had happened to Lainey. Perhaps she would heal in time, perhaps she would take over her father’s company one day and make a real success of it.
Right now however, Lainey needed time to rebuild her life and her relationship with her mom.
Passion tried to let go, but Lainey’s face was buried in her chest, her arms encircling and squeezing. Holding on for dear life.
“Will I see you again?”
“Of course, Lainey. You try and keep me away.”
“I thought…I thought they might try to stop you from seeing me. I thought…they might keep us apart.”
“They can try, Lainey, but I think they’re going to need some time to get their act together. The whole island thing might not be out in the open yet. It might be dismissed as another conspiracy theory, but their stock has dropped a long way. They operated the island on the premise they could keep everyone who visited, safe. We proved them wrong.”
“Yes. Yes we did.”
“I need to go to Washington to sort a few things out with Mary-Joy, but I’ll be back after the funeral. Okay?”
“If you don’t…I’ll come looking, I’ll find you and I’ll bring you home.”
The next hug went on for the longest time.
The Washington monument pierced the russet sky as the sun moved toward the horizon. They sat on a bench eating ice cream. The adoption procedure had been completed and Mary-Joy was now legally part of Passion’s family.
“You don’t have to call me mom.”
“I don’t want to,” Mary-Joy said adjusting the brim of the Redskins cap she was using to cover the dressing over her headwound.
“Oh.”
“You want me to?”
“No…maybe…I dunno.”
“Maybe in time I will.”
They sat in silence, licking at their cones.
“I booked the tickets.”
“Thank you.”
“We fly out on Thursday.”
“The chances of Benjie being alive are small, but I want to try. He’ll be the same age I was when I left now.”
“Oh wait. I got you this.”
Passion bent over and pulled the book from her bag, brushing some crumbs off the cover and handed it to Mary-Joy. The girl’s eyes sparkled with tears as she read the title. “The Very Hungry Caterpillar.”
“I thought you might like a new one, seeing as the old one got…well, you don’t have it anymore.”
“Thank you. Thank you…mom.”
Once they’d finished pushing each other and laughing they embraced, both ice cream cones falling to the pavement and the book’s pages flapping in the breeze.
Mary-Joy stayed back at the hotel while Passion went to where the Agency offices used to be. The flattened, half-demolished building was surrounded by police tape and chain-link fencing.
A gas leak had blown it up the same afternoon Passion had found she was unable to contact Bryan. That might have explained the inability to contact Bryan by phone, but Passion was pretty sure a gas leak and subsequent explosion wouldn’t have cancelled her credit cards.
“There’s not even gas to the building. Can you believe that?”
Passion turned to see Bryan, leg in plaster, arm in a sling, stitches all over his face, getting out of a taxi. Bryan was a short, chubby, gray-haired man in his early fifties and he was finding it difficult to juggle a crutch, a satchel, and a large brown envelope. He managed to squeeze himself ou
t of the taxi and onto the sidewalk, while at the same time dropping all three things to the pavement.
Bryan tried to get his wallet out of his inside jacket pocket, but failed because his broken fingers were in splints.
Passion paid the taxi driver and helped Bryan to a Starbucks across from the Agency building. She got them both coffees. When she returned to the table, Bryan held out the envelope.
“No sign of Crane on the island. He could have drowned in the wreck of the Enchantress, or he could have crawled away into a hole to die…”
“But…”
“A credit card signed to him for campaign expenses from Ralston was used in Managua, Nicaragua, six days after the events on the island.”
“Daniel?”
“Nothing. Wherever he is, it’s not in the United States.”
“And Detective Myer?”
“No trail at all. Last seen at work in Houston two days after what happened on the island. Officially listed as missing. No one knows where he is, not even his wife.”
There was a rack of newspapers on the wall of the Starbucks. Passion could see every front page. Today, like every other day there was absolutely zero news about what had happened on the island—to the girls they had rescued or the rich, famous and powerful people who had been spirited away by the Nicaraguan security forces.
Nothing on the internet, nothing on radio, TV nor in the newspapers.
The People behind the People may have suffered a blow with the take down of their blackmail facility, but in the grand scheme of things it was only a minor irritation. They had regained control of the narrative pretty quickly.
“What shall we do?”
“Well, Passion, there’s no Agency anymore that’s for sure.”
“But you’re still getting intel.”
“I have my sources, it’s true.”
“Are you going back to England?”
“That rather depends on you.”
“Oh?”
“These bastards blew up my job and they tried to kill my favorite employee. I think we have unfinished business, don’t you?”