The Silent Blade (Harry Bauer Book 6), page 14
“Yeah, I want my jacket, my wallet and my papers, and I want to go back to New York.”
Her smile was slow. “So soon? You will, don’t worry, but first we need to get to know each other. Relax, we’re going to have some fun.”
I returned the smile. “OK, Gabriella. Let’s have some fun. But don’t keep me caged too long, or I’ll start to get restless.”
“Oh? And what will happen then?”
I didn’t flinch or hesitate, but the smile died on my face. “I’ll kill you and Don Francisco, and all your men. I’ll take your money and I’ll leave.”
“Understood. It won’t take long, Harry, just a couple of days or three.” She stood, and standing up her body was everything it promised to be while she was sitting down. “Come on,” she said, “I’ll show you your room.”
We climbed the cascading staircase and crossed an acre of house by way of marble corridors. Finally we came to a set of tall, French windows at the end of the passage, which overlooked what appeared to be a small woodland. Just before them, on the left, were two doors set about six feet apart. She stopped at the first one and opened it.
“This is you,” she said, and went through.
I followed. The room was what you’d expect in a house like that. It was on the vast side of spacious, with a four-poster bed on the left, a suite of eighteenth-century furniture against the far wall, a marble fireplace and a set of folding, glass-paneled doors that gave onto a terrace. There were two other doors. One she opened to reveal an en suite bathroom. It had a freestanding tub with elaborate gold taps, a full-length mirror and a shower cubicle the size of a small house. The other door was double. She took hold of the handles and pulled both sides open. There was another bedroom, slightly larger than mine but in a very similar style.
“This is my room,” she said. “If I ever have nightmares, I may have to come and wake you up. I do have nightmares sometimes.”
“I’ll do my best to comfort you. Where does Don Francisco sleep?”
“He has his own room in the other wing. He has sleep apnea and snores. You don’t snore, do you, Harry?”
“I don’t know, you’ll have to tell me, if you ever have a nightmare.”
She placed one of her long nails on my cheek and stared at my mouth. “Oh,” she said, “if I have a nightmare, Harry, I promise you, you are not going to sleep.”
She pulled the two doors closed and crossed the huge marble floor to the door through which we had entered. There she stopped and turned. I wondered if she was going to ask me if I knew how to whistle.
“Have a shower, or a bath, you look dreadful and you smell like a stray dog. Your jacket and your wallet are in the wardrobe, but I’ll get some new clothes for you.” She smiled. “I think I can guess your size. I am going to talk to Francisco now. I’ll come back to see you in a couple of hours.”
She stepped out and closed the door behind her. I heard the lock click.
I made my way to the bathroom and stood under the shower for fifteen minutes, scrubbing myself clean and allowing the piping hot water to wash away the filth, sweat and grime of the last few days. Then I turned it to cold and stood gasping for a few seconds as the icy water drove new life surging into my limbs. After that I climbed out, toweled myself dry and stood staring at myself in the mirror. I looked a mess. My face was bruised yellow and purple, and swollen around my left eye. My ribs were also decorated with multicolored bruises. But I looked worse than I felt. I dropped the towel on the floor, went to the bedroom and opened the terrace doors. Looking over, it was a sheer drop of maybe twenty feet. If it didn’t kill you it would break your legs. I went inside and fell on the bed, smiling to myself and wondering what the hell was going to happen next.
Seventeen
What happened next was that I fell asleep for three hours. When I awoke the sun was setting outside my terrace and the evening air was full of the sound of tropical birds calling their kids home for supper.
There was another sound too. The sound of my bedroom door being unlocked. I swung down from the bed and reached for my pants. As I stood to pull them on Gabriella appeared with her arms full of shopping bags. I noticed she’d put her hair up into a low bun. It did nice things to her neck. She was smiling and stopped to let her eyes rove for a while, then said, “I don’t think you’ll be needing those.”
I dropped the pants and walked over to her. “Yeah? You bought me some new pants?” I looked in a couple of the bags. They were full of expensive clothes, suits, silk shirts, socks and shoes. I took them from her and dropped them on the floor. Then I took hold of her waist and pulled her to me. She placed her hands on my chest and suddenly her eyes looked mad.
“What do you think you’re doing? What do you take me for, some cheap whore?”
I curled my lip and snarled, “There’s nothing cheap about you, baby. You’re high class all the way to your Lise Charmel suspenders.” I swung her around and pushed her toward the bed. “And as for your first question, I’m sick of waiting and I intend to take what’s mine.”
She swung at me with her long nails hooked into a red claw. I gripped her wrist with my left hand and with my right I cuffed her cheeks twice so they flushed pink and her hair fell across her face. She bared her teeth and hissed at me. “I’ll kill you with my own hands! I’ll tear out your eyes and skin you alive!”
I gripped her hair at the back of her neck and pulled her close, so her face was an inch from mine. I leered and growled, “You and what army, sweetheart?” She pressed hard against me. I spun her round and ripped the flimsy red dress from her body. She screamed and I pushed her face down on the bed, with her black hair strewn across her perfect back.
What followed was not my idea of a romantic evening. In my opinion, life brings enough pain as it is, without my having to go out and look for it in my leisure time. Clearly Gabriella held a different view. My purpose, right then, was to convince her that I was the man she needed to build her empire and to while away the hours in her four-poster bed. Two hours later, battered and considerably more bruised than I had been when I’d looked in the mirror that afternoon, I felt I had done a fair job.
Gabriella lay sleeping beside me, with a few bruises of her own. I withdrew my arm from under her neck and noticed a couple of hairgrips still clinging to her hair. I paused a moment in thought, then took one of the grips, and made my way to the bathroom to shower again. When I reemerged I dumped the clothes she’d bought me on the bed and started looking through them. They were unexpectedly elegant and understated.
She moaned, stretched and turned on her back to smile at me.
“You are the three Bs, Mr. Bauer.”
I pulled on a pair of jeans and said, “I’m what?”
“The three Bs, a brute, a beast and a bastard.”
I smiled as I pulled on my boots and laced them. “I thought I might find a Sig Sauer in among all these clothes.”
“Don’t get ahead of yourself, lover boy. Todo a su debido tiempo.”
“Everything at it’s proper time?” I picked up a shirt and slipped that on. “Who decides when that is? I’m not good at being told what to do.”
“We’ll decide together.”
There was a loud rap at the door and for a moment I saw real fear on her face. A muffled voice I recognized as Don Francisco’s shouted, “Mr. Bauer? You are in there?”
Gabriella jumped from the bed, grabbing at her undergarments strewn here and there. She was halfway around the bed to get her red silk dress when the door burst open and Don Francisco walked in accompanied by six men, one of whom I recognized as Fermin, all carrying guns. His face was almost purple with rage and he seemed to be chewing his own teeth.
“What,” he said and paused, staring at his naked wife as she held a pair of torn silk panties and ripped black stockings in front of her, “…in the motherfockin’ hell is goin’ on?”
I smiled as I slipped on an Armani jacket. “Mrs. Cejudo and I were just discussing the finer points of Freud’s theories on sexuality and sexual deviation.” I paused and looked him in the eye. “She made some very acute observations.”
He thrust a trembling arm and finger at her and screamed, “Llévensela! Enciérrenla!”
Fermin and two of the boys rushed at her, grabbed her by the arms and dragged her away. As she went she was screaming in Spanish. I caught references to blood and testicles, but little more.
Then he pointed the same, trembling finger at me. “And you, hijo de puta, you gonna die tonight. Tonight you gonna die!” He turned to his remaining four men. “Llévenlo al Río Guape! Mátenlo!”
I had a look at them. If they had come at me I might have stood a chance, but they knew me and they kept their distance. There was the senior guy, big gut, lots of black hair, a big moustache and a red shirt; there was the groomed guy in the Armani jeans, Boss jacket and permed hair. He was gym fit. Number three also worked out. He had a ponytail, cowboy boots and a cowboy hat. The fourth one was in his forties, the kind of guy you might meet at your local pub. But he was wiry and hard, with Indian features. He was the dangerous one.
Three of them covered me with their guns and he cuffed my hands behind my back. Then they were shoving me out of the room, kicking at me as we went. They pushed me down the broad, fanning marble staircase and dragged me, beating me as we went, out of the front door and out to the driveway. There they bundled me in the back of a black Land Rover, two climbed in the front and two got in either side of me. I could taste blood in my mouth and cramp gripping at my shoulders with my hands behind my back. There was an absolute knowledge in my mind that I was very close to the end. My belly was on fire and I knew I was staring death in the face.
But there was another certain knowledge in my mind too. That I would take each and every one of these bastards with me when I went. It was not just my death I was staring in the face. They were all going to die.
* * *
It was a three-hour drive, but it felt like double that. We headed south and east from Bogotá, climbing through mountain farmland. The headlamps, sweeping through endless bends in the darkness, picked out sleeping farmhouses, shacks and hovels. The road was narrow and pitted. The banks were steep and overgrown, and the higher we climbed the more the farmhouses and the farmland were replaced by wilderness and forest. We passed villages that were little more than roadside settlements, with some of the dwellings just wooden shacks with corrugated roofs. Eventually, after an hour and a half, we came to an intersection. There was a school and less than a handful of houses, all set around the junction of roads. The houses were all dark and quiet. The stillness was total.
The driver spun the wheel right and after a mile of more bending, winding roads, in the total darkness of the mountains, the headlamps picked out a dirt track that branched off the road to the right. He slowed and pulled off. Then we were bumping and jolting through wilderness along a track damaged by wind, rain and the passage of cattle, carts and trucks. At times we were among empty fields, and at others dense forest rose up suddenly around us, threatening to invade the road with roots and branches. Gradually, those patches of forest became more frequent and soon that was all there was. Dense trees all around us, and I knew that this was the place. This was where they were going to kill me. Nobody spoke. Each of them stared out of the windows into the blackness outside.
We came to a second, smaller track and turned right, plunging deeper into the forest. Now we wound slowly down, picking our way among roots and potholes. We came, at the bottom of the slope, to a small ford where a stream ran across the track. Here the undergrowth was thick and tangled. I saw trees half collapsed and branches scattered on the ground. We inched through them and began to climb again, more steeply this time. Occasionally the tires slipped in the mud, the engine strained as we climbed farther and ever steeper.
Then the ground leveled off and we pulled over and stopped. I felt a hot jolt in my gut. They were going to kill me. There was nothing I could think of, no option, no solution. The opportunity had not appeared. All I had left was to try and kick my way out, but they knew I’d do that and they were going to keep their distance. They would shoot me before I got anywhere near to them.
They climbed out and trained their guns on me in the back seat. “Baja! Baja del coche!”
I obeyed and climbed out into the muggy darkness of the forest. All around was the sound of frogs or toads, and the occasional night bird calling for a mate. But louder, forming a sighing backdrop to all the other sounds, was the heavy rush of water through the mass of trees.
I heard the trunk of the Land Rover slam and the guy with the hair and the Red Shirt approached and handed out machetes. Then he jerked his head at me and said, “Walk.” He pointed to a narrow path that headed in among the trees. As I moved that way, the sound of the water began to get louder. I tried to identify if it was a rapid or a waterfall. It was hard to be sure. Rapids tend to be a high-pitched hiss, where waterfalls are more like thunder. But this was neither of the two—or a mixture of both.
After five minutes of walking we came to a clearing in the forest. Moonlight streamed in from above, illuminating a gorge up ahead and across the gorge, on the far side, a steep, densely forested slope. Below, at the bottom of the gorge, was the sound of rushing water. When we were ten or twelve feet from the edge, Red Shirt’s ugly voice rasped behind me. “Stop.”
I stopped and turned around to face my killers. They had formed into a semicircle. They had their guns in their belts and each held a machete. Hot rage began to burn in my gut. They were going to hack me to death and throw me in the river. Red Shirt moved first. He rushed at me with the machete over his right shoulder. On cue the other came too. I didn’t think, I turned and ran, hell-bent for leather.
It was very clear in my mind. If I stayed to fight, death was certain. If I jumped into the abyss, death was highly probable. So I went with the better odds. I ran, as best I could with my hands cuffed behind my back, sensing the blades about to slash at me and tear me open. I reached the edge and leapt. Behind me I heard shouts and laughter. Ahead of me I could see only blackness, and beneath me the empty, bottomless drop.
I fell sickeningly. My body tensed for the hard, shattering impact of hard, wet stone. For an interminable moment nothing happened. And then it came. The shattering impact of ice-cold water. I plunged. My lungs went into spasm with the impact and with the cold, and I sank, kicking with my legs, struggling ineffectually with my arms, trying to free my hands, and sinking, ever deeper, with my lungs screaming for air.
My feet touched slippery rocks and I was swept forward. I kicked hard against the bottom and rose, dragged by the current. I kicked again and again, unable to see the surface in the blackness. The pain in my lungs was unendurable. Everything screamed at me to breathe. I fought it, clenching my teeth against the impulse and kicked again, and again.
And suddenly I erupted out of the water. But no sooner had I gasped air into my lungs than I sank below the surface again, unable to keep myself afloat without my arms. I kicked, surfaced, gulped air and sank again; kicked again and tried to spin, turn onto my back for better buoyancy. All the while I was aware of the current growing faster, the roar of the river growing louder, turning from a hiss to thunder.
And then, for the second time, I was swept into the void and I was falling, spinning helplessly among the shower of foam and water. If there were rocks at the bottom of the waterfall, I knew I was dead. But what there was was more water, cold and hard as I hit it. But the current had stopped and I was able to kick myself to the surface.
Here the sound of the waterfall was different, somehow stiller and quieter. I could see the foam, luminous in the moonlight, and as I swam away from it, on my back, I realized I was in some kind of large rock pool, surrounded by rainforest. The water was motionless and I pushed myself toward the bank, where a small stream spilled from the lake, out among the trees. Soon I found my feet and waded out onto the bank.
I found a rock where I could sit, but before I sat I did what I had not been able to do in the house or in the Land Rover. I felt in my back pocket and, with great difficulty, pulled out the hairgrip I had taken from Gabriella’s hair. It’s not hard to pick the lock on a pair of handcuffs. It’s actually surprisingly easy. The mechanism is pretty basic and all you need is a paper clip or a hairgrip bent to the right shape. But it’s a hell of a lot easier if the cuffs are in front. When they are behind your back, it’s damn hard. Especially when your fingers are numb from the cold. But after a couple of minutes I managed to unlock the left cuff. Then I was on my feet, stumbling toward the trees, and the general direction where I knew the road had to be.
I didn’t take long to find it. Logic dictated that the stream that was flowing into the trees from the pool had to be the same stream we had crossed at the bottom of the hill on the way up. I followed that stream at a slow run with the hot ember of rage welling in my gut. Now that my hands were free, all I could think of was that those bastards had wanted to hack me to death with machetes, and now I was coming for them.
I came to the path after about five minutes. I knew I had maybe ten minutes before they arrived, and somehow I had to stop the truck. I looked around me, breathing hard and trying to control the rising rage, forcing myself not to think of the hard, cold machete blades, but to focus instead on the resources I had around me.
I saw then again what I had seen from the window of the Land Rover: the half-fallen trees and the broken branches. I ran. I ran into the undergrowth and dragged the biggest branches I could find out onto the road. I got six of them, strewn across the path, but it was not enough. The Land Rover would roll over them and plow on. Overhead I saw a large branch, about the size of a small tree, hanging from a half-fallen pine. I scrambled up the trunk, fifteen feet over the road, and eased myself out along the damaged branch. As I approached the end I felt it bend and heard it crack. I eased a little further, looking down into the darkness with the moon glinting on the stream. I took a firm hold of the branch and swung down. It sagged, cracked and splintered. But it didn’t break.
