Snow Blind

by Jim Heskett

  Layne sat still. “Why didn’t you kidnap me, the night your guy knocked me out?”

  Z shrugged. “He was supposed to come to your bungalow and snatch you after he’d finished with Victoria. But, you surprised him, and he didn’t recognize you in the dark. He thought you were Victoria’s boyfriend or something and he was being ambushed.”

  “So it was a mistake.”

  “In a way. He wasn’t there to kill Victoria’s ‘boyfriend,’ so he didn’t want to overstep. He abandoned his secondary objective of coming to get you and fled, like a coward. Don’t worry; that particular employee has already been dealt with.”

  Layne grunted.

  “There are people I know who want to see you die in a lengthy and painful way, for what you did in London. A public and painful sort of death, you know? I would have been quite upset if you’d died before I had the chance to meet you. Once I get this shipment off, then we can deal with how your life will end.”

  “No thank you.”

  “Come on, Parrish, let's go. I don’t like having to repeat myself.”

  Layne shook his head. He assumed his best move was to delay everything for as long as possible. He'd already been here for an hour, and he hoped the troops would be inbound at any moment now.

  Z caught the eye of the surly guard, and the man offered his baton. Z appeared to consider it, then he shook his head and made a little finger wagging motion up near the side of his face. The guard approached, rifle raised, the barrel pointed at the water. He fired a single shot only six inches away from Layne's ear.

  The blast was like thunder inside Layne's head. He grimaced, gritting his teeth. A few seconds seemed to evaporate under the pressure throbbing inside his brain. When he opened his eyes again, his ears rang with such force that he couldn't hear anything Z was saying to him. Just a set of lips moving.

  This time, when Z made another beckoning motion, Layne did stand up. Handcuffs clinked as his hearing faded in. The rifle warning shot had scrambled his brains. Add to that the remnants of the snow blindness and Layne wasn't too sure if he could actually stand and walk.

  But he did. With the two guards holding him up by the arms, Layne followed Z off the end of this boat, onto a pier. They were headed toward the shore where there sat a fleet of trucks and about a half-dozen men moving around, going about their jobs of cataloging the human slaves—the children. Preparing to sell them into servitude.

  So, including Z, Layne counted nine hostiles. That was, if he could trust his blurry vision. Nine of them would probably be too many to take on directly. But, he might not have a choice.

  “The initial raid on the SMRC,” Layne said. “Those weren’t your men, were they? You sent in a second group to kill those guys. The ones in the white jackets weren’t your crew.”

  “That’s right,” Z said.

  “Whose crew were they? Who sent the first wave to the retreat center to kill everyone?”

  Z shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Those concerns are above your head.”

  “If I’m going to be dead soon, why not just tell me?”

  “Fine. They were a holdout; a remaining order lingering from a dying regime that ain't got any power anymore.”

  Layne had suspected, but now he knew for sure. The white jacket crew had been Victoria’s people, sent in to clean up and eliminate her leftovers. Maybe she’d ordered them to come before she’d died, or maybe her death triggered them to arrive and clean up any trace of what she’d been doing up there.

  But, it didn’t matter now.

  As they escorted Layne onto the damp pier, he noted a flicker of motion just beyond the trucks. Lurking at the edges, low and stealthy. He wasn't sure at first, but after a second's consideration, he knew what he'd seen.

  Serena.

  In one quick motion, Layne jabbed a foot out to trip the guard to his right, and as that man tumbled forward, Layne snatched the sidearm from the guy’s holster. He snagged a spare magazine from his pocket with the other hand.

  Hands cuffed, Layne had a difficult time getting his finger on the trigger, but he managed to put two bullets into that guard's head before he could raise his rifle up to shoot.

  But, by the time he pivoted to face the other guard, every single one of the hostiles had their guns trained on him.

  INTERLUDE 6

  London | Six years ago

  Layne, holding the AR-15, stumbles away from the wrecked BMW and toward the dance club adorned with the circular fire symbol. Glass from the car windshield still sits on his shoulders, plinking down to the ground as he marches. Slickness coats his neck, but he doesn’t stop what he’s doing to check for blood.

  He only has one thing on his mind. Busting up this dance club.

  Within a hundred yards of the building, people in line behind the velvet ropes take notice of him. Specifically, the rifle clutched in his hands. Some scream, or run, or both. Others freeze in terror. Good thing for these people Layne isn’t here to mow them down. He’s interested in what’s inside the club. Most likely, down in a basement below.

  That’s where they’ll keep their captives, those innocent men and women awaiting a life of slavery. Tired, hungry, cold and lonely. Most of them won’t even speak English, so they’ll only be able to guess at the horrors in store for them.

  Layne tears into a run, and this erases the paralysis of most in line. The front door clears—including a muscle-bound doorman—and Layne sprints inside. Music pumps and lights flash in seizure-inducing rhythm. For the first few seconds, no one even notices the bulky and bleeding blond man with the rifle, skulking through the doorway.

  It doesn’t take him long to figure out where to go. Across the room are a set of double doors. A man in a suit, holding a pistol, flashes panicked eyes at Layne and then ducks through the doors.

  Layne sprints. A few people gasp at the rifle in his hands, but if any complain, Layne doesn’t hear a word of it. A path to the doors clears like the waters parting, and Layne presses the stock of the rifle to his shoulder as he bursts through the doors.

  At first, darkness. His ears are ringing from the car crash, and he experiences an intense moment of discombobulation in the absence of light. But within a couple seconds, he orients himself. He’s at the top of a stairwell.

  A blast of fire lights up the darkness. Bits of the door behind him smash and splinter. In the brief moment of light, Layne spots a target down below, standing on the bottom step.

  Layne crouches and then returns fire with a controlled burst. He cuts through the man at the bottom of the stairs. The man staggers, and he drops his pistols on the floor. He falls from the step, pinwheeling back, and then crashes into the wall and ricochets forward. First, to his knees, and then, to the floor.

  A little voice inside Layne declares he shouldn’t be so brash. That a full assault is a bad idea. That he should apprehend these people instead of killing them.

  But, a louder voice inside Layne’s head overrides the first voice and convinces him that he doesn’t give a fuck. These people are monsters, and they deserve to die.

  Layne descends the stairs and scoops up the pistols. A flash of color appears to his left. He raises one pistol and sends a single bullet into the chest of another man who came running down the hall. This is the same fleeing guy in the suit Layne spotted moments earlier.

  The man grips his chest but doesn’t fall to the ground. Layne presses the pistol’s trigger a few more times. He misses with the first two shots, but two more punch through the guy’s neck and he finally collapses.

  The man was guarding a closed door. A dark, heavy door, and Layne knows what’s on the other side.

  AR-15 ready, he marches toward it. When he’s close enough to touch the knob, he heaves a breath and then kicks it in.

  The room is large and open, lit by a few winking fluorescent bulbs overhead. Tile on the walls, like a dirty gym locker room.

  Before Layne can study his surroundings any further, a man pops up from behind a desk at the far side.
Big guy, slicked-back hair and mirrored glasses obscuring his eyes. But the scowl, Layne can clearly see that.

  The man lifts a pistol the size of a small cannon. Looks heavy in his hand. But, he’s too far away to aim properly from the hip, so he has to bring the pistol up to eye level.

  Before he can squint down the sight, Layne is ready. His AR emits a single controlled burst, punching holes in the man’s face. He drops forward onto the desk, knocking over pens, notebooks, and a computer monitor, which cracks as it lands on the floor.

  The room settles into quiet.

  Layne now takes another look around. It is like a tiled locker room, but with desks and file cabinets and a couple of couches. An odd mixed-use space.

  And there’s blood. Blood on the floor, little spatters on the furniture. Women’s clothes. A set of rusty handcuffs and several feet of chains, hanging from hooks on the far wall.

  There are three cages along one wall, each wide enough to house several people. Like something for vicious animals, with barely enough room for a human to stand up straight.

  Layne’s eyes adjust, and he has to stare for a few moments to understand what he’s seeing. These cages did house several people before, but no longer. All the people in the cages are now dead. Blood everywhere, covering the corpses and splashed over the bulk of the interior.

  Each cage has a single slop bucket. The sight of these three plastic pails will stay with him for many years to come. He will sometimes dream about buckets and not know why, only that he wakes up sweating, thinking about something awful and a little too blurry to recall.

  Layne stumbles toward the cages. He estimates that the remains of twenty women are in there, ages about eighteen to twenty-five. Some of them still have normal color, not yet in rigor mortis. They’ve been killed within the last few hours.

  Twenty dead. Slaves, all of them. Unwilling captives.

  Layne drops to his knees and sets the AR on the floor. His body feels heavy. Something inside of him has broken. He heaves a giant breath and then expels it in an earthquake of a shudder.

  “Layne!” comes Daphne’s harried voice, somewhere behind him. “Oleg and I are incoming in five paces! Do not shoot!”

  Her voice spends a few seconds bouncing around between his ears, and then he understands the words. Layne removes the pistols from the back of his waistband and sets them on the floor in front of him. Cold killing machines. Then, he turns his palms up and stares at the grooves in his flesh, lined with blood. His blood or someone else’s, he doesn’t know any longer.

  “Layne,” says Daphne, now standing a few feet behind him. “What the hell happened here?”

  Layne lifts his head, staring at the dead man slumped over the desk. Blood slides down his fingertips, dripping onto the floor below like a leaky faucet. “We could have saved them. Not these women, but the ones in the Suburban. We could have gone after them.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Daphne says as she approaches him from the side. She kneels next to him.

  Still, he does not meet her eye. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  Now, he does look at her. “None of this matters anymore. What they did, what you will do, or what I did before this. No more rescue missions. No more assassinations. No more long nights taking pictures of targets and days combing through evidence. No more kidnapping foreign politicians. I’m retired, Daphne. Consider this my last act as a member of the team.”

  51

  After the gunshot, Serena hustled toward the sound. When she neared the water, she noted a series of trucks lining the edge of the beach. Only a half a dozen men or so. Most of them were armed, facing away from her, observing a scene on a docked boat. Two natural walls of trees bracketed either side of the beach, providing ample cover for their activities.

  Layne was on that boat. A pulse of anxiety ran through Serena when she realized the figure sitting at the edge of an open shipping container was indeed him. The bullet she’d heard fired a few seconds before had not killed him. He didn’t even look shot.

  He seemed haggard in his chair, shoulders slumped and mouth open. His hands were cuffed together, but it didn’t appear as if they’d worked him over. A few cuts and bruises here and there. She could see redness around his eyes, presumably still from the same snow blindness that had messed up Harry.

  There were a couple of armed guards on either side of him, and standing in front was the mythical blue-eyed Asian named Z. Same guy she'd seen in the photographs from the gala. After a week dedicated to hunting him, it made perfect sense that Layne would just sorta stumble upon him, with little effort on his part.

  When Z ordered the guards to pull Layne to his feet, Serena knew she had to close in. They were either taking him somewhere to shoot him, or to transport him off the island. Either option meant she’d lose him.

  She still opted for stealth. Her eyes scanned the surroundings for a few seconds to consider her best route of attack.

  The closest guard was only fifteen feet in front of her. In the grass just beyond the beach. Standing next to a truck, he was watching the scene unfold at the dock. Lazy eyes staring straight ahead. His hands were only loosely clutching a rifle, and his stance said he would rather be somewhere else.

  She crept up to him and readied her knives. The first knife, she jabbed into the man's back, the other slashing across his throat. She clutched him to her chest and dragged him backward. There wasn’t enough time to hide his body, so she let him fall to the ground. He made a soft thump in the spongy green grass below.

  Serena paused a moment to let the sudden swell of adrenaline abate. Then, she skirted to her right and quickly dispatched the second guard. For this one, she only used one knife. Because he was so close to the others, she wrapped her hand around his mouth and dragged the blade across his throat. She tried to haul him backward, but he struggled against her, even as he bled out. He was so tall and thick, she had to skitter away from him to avoid his big frame toppling her to the ground.

  Serena systematically moved to her right again and killed the third guard. By her account, there were now three left at an area near the front of the trucks, all of them guarding a gang of six children in chains. Plus, the two hostiles on the dock with Layne, and Z.

  They started escorting Layne off the boat and onto the dock. She could see Layne's eyes flicking around, studying the area. He was going to try something, and soon. Whatever he did, she would need to sync and follow. Since he was in the most immediate danger, that made him the variable.

  Serena didn’t trust herself with operational improvisation. Daphne might accuse her of throwing out mission protocols to do whatever she wanted, but the truth was, Serena liked having a plan. She liked knowing where the boundaries were.

  With both knives ready, she considered how to make the quickest path to the guards hovering near the captive children. She pushed deep breaths in and out, trying to lower her heart rate.

  And then, for a brief second, her eyes met Layne's. The shared look seemed to stretch on forever, and she tried to understand what he would do next, but there was no time to interpret.

  The series of events that followed happened without warning.

  He snatched at a guard's gun. Fired a few quick shots. Serena now understood the time for stealth was over. Even handcuffed, Layne had managed to wrestle control of the weapon away in under one second.

  She reacted. Knives away, pistols out. But, when she reached down to grab her gun, something smacked her in the back of the head. Her eyes crossed, and the world went dark as she tumbled to the ground below.

  Consciousness slipped away.

  52

  With his newly acquired gun, Layne put a bullet in the other guard on the pier. Both of them were dead, so the most immediate threat had been solved. He ignored Z for a second since he wasn’t armed, as far as Layne knew. Always neutralize danger in order of gravity.

  In that moment of Layne’s hesitation, Z jumped from the pier, down int
o the water. It turned out to be a smart move on his part because the hostiles on the shore opened fire. There definitely seemed to be fewer of them than before, which must have been Serena’s doing. Still, it would only take one bullet to end his life.

  Layne dropped to his stomach, using a crate sitting nearby on the pier as cover. Probably a terrible option for cover, but it was the best he had.

  He popped up and squeezed off a few shots. One tagged a hostile in the chest, and he stumbled back, bumping into the line of trucks. A rifle flew from his hands and landed on the truck’s windshield, cracking it.

  A flurry of bullets soared in Layne’s direction. How many had Serena taken out? She’d obviously been sneaking around, using stealth to thin out their numbers. He could see two remaining for sure, but there may be others, using the trucks as cover.

  The captive children were still huddled together on the other side of the beach, but the men guarding them had strayed and spread out. Layne hoped the kids would run to safety, but he didn’t expect them to. In a panic, they would likely freeze in place.

  The crate in front of him was crumbling, now almost disintegrated under the sporadic barrages of gunfire. Layne twisted and rolled off the edge of the pier. He splashed into the water. Bullets sliced through the murky blue around him, and he struggled to move with his hands bound.

  When Layne lifted his head above the water to heave a breath, he witnessed Z scrambling up onto the shore. The big man headed straight for the area Layne had seen Serena earlier, a thicket of grass and trees just beyond the beach. Layne opted to continue ignoring him for now. Deal with the ones still shooting.

  Where was Serena?

  In the water, he ducked underneath the pier and aimed the pistol at the exposed legs of one of the hostiles. Layne spat a few shots, and one of them tagged the man in the thigh. He roared and staggered forward, then Layne fired a few more bullets into the man’s stomach. After three shots, he finally fell on top of his rifle. Eyes open, his chest deflated as he died in the sand.