Into the fire, p.26
Into the Fire, page 26
‘How are you?’ he asked.
Reeling, yearning, excited. ‘Fine. You?’
‘Not bad. What will you drink?’
‘Vodka. Very cold.’
She knocked it back, then another. Goosebumps rose on her arms.
‘You cold?’
‘The air conditioning.’
‘Here, have my jersey.’ He peeled it off. He wore a white T-shirt underneath. She could see the curve of his muscles. She could imagine the feel of his skin, smooth, marble, like Michelangelo’s David; a sculpture of perfection, with the eroticism of life. He draped his jersey around her shoulders. Her nerve endings burned with his fingerprints. She became preternaturally sensitive. The bar seemed to go quiet. The rhythm of the tango insinuated itself into her veins. Now she felt hot. She let Connor’s jersey slip to her waist. Her body felt strong, glowing, it longed to fight him, then take the delicious surrender of yielding to him. She looked into his eyes and gave him a smile of challenge. He looked back, steadily, sure of himself.
‘Shall we go?’
Connor left a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. They left the bar together, not touching, not speaking. They walked the two blocks towards where Connor had parked his car.
‘Damn,’ said Helen, stopping. ‘I left your jersey in the bar.’
‘I’ll go back to get it, don’t worry.’ Connor handed her his car keys. ‘Car’s just round the corner, just in case there’s an identical blue VW there, the number plate’s VX 264.’
‘VX 264. Got it.’ She watched him run back towards the bar, then she turned and slowly walked towards the corner.
The streetlights cast a dull orange glow on the faces of the men who seemed to loiter on every street. They never seemed to do anything, they just stood, murmuring to each other, and watching. Helen walked by them, skin tightening.
Connor emerged from the bar with his jersey just in time to see two men turn the corner at the end of the street, following at a slow jog the direction in which Helen had gone. He broke into a sprint, cursing himself.
Helen was aware of the sound of footsteps, fast and insistent. They came out of nowhere in the dark street. There was something callous in the rhythm they drummed out on the dusty pavement. She knew immediately that they were bearing down on her. Every woman’s nightmare.
All her instincts screamed at her; she desperately wanted to run, but they were too close now. She kept walking slowly, as if unaware of their intent. She resisted the urge to look around. She took her hands from her pockets. All her training came back to her, summoned unconsciously. Breathe, summon your chi, timing, commit. She readied her body and her mind. At the last minute, she spun around, her hand up in the air, palm facing the two men.
‘KIAI!’ she roared. The way of breath. Cure the angry spirit of your opponent on contact. Or capture it. The men stopped in shock, just for a moment, feet from her. The one closest recovered first. He lunged towards her. She drew back her hand, shot it out again, arm straight, struck him just below his jaw with the inner blade of her hand. He reeled over backwards, head crashing down on the pavement. Then he lay still. Keep your body moving, never be there. Helen wheeled around. If you think you’re going to be hit, just enter and raise. Your unbendable arm will stop you being hurt. She raised her arm, rigid with her chi, and shielded the punch of the second man. Think contact, wherever it goes, we’re there. The man punched again. Helen moved in, caught his hand, turned it outward towards his side, placed the knife edge of her other hand at his elbow, propelled her energy upwards and threw him up and backwards. Sumiotoshi. He crashed down on a parked car, his head breaking the glass on the windshield. He groaned, grabbed his back, tried to move. He raised his bloody head from the shattered windscreen, and slipped down over the bonnet, onto the pavement. Helen stared down at him, her eyes blazing. She turned back to the first man, who lay prone, eyes shut. She made a scissor motion with her hands, over the bodies of the two men, then she turned and came face to face with Connor. He stared at her burning eyes, took in the scene behind her. Without a word he took her arm, they both ran for his car, jumped in, locked the doors.
Connor drove off at speed, wheeling through the traffic, jumping the red light on Conquistadores. He watched Helen out of the corner of his eye. She had her head turned away from him, and was staring fixedly out of her side window. Her chest rose and fell quickly with silenced breaths, and her hands were clenched into fists which she jammed under her thighs as if to hide. He checked his mirror. He couldn’t see the tails, but that alone gave him little comfort. To Helen, he seemed like a man possessed, racing through the backstreets, taking one-ways the wrong way, going round in circles. She watched in silence.
They stood side by side on Connor’s balcony. For a long time neither of them spoke. Connor seemed, like Helen, to be doing his own form of meditation.
They both turned to each other together.
‘What happened?’ asked Connor.
‘Got a cigarette?’
Helen lit up and exhaled heavily, her words coming out with the smoke.
‘They were coming up behind me. Running. You know anyway, by instinct. I knew.’
‘You floored them, both of them?’
‘Yeah. I think I might have hurt them quite badly.’
‘If someone’s going to get it, better the other guy. What d’you do to them?’
‘Disabled them.’
‘Where d’you learn that, Helen?’
‘What’s it to you? Why d’you sound so suspicious?’
‘It’s a bit unusual. You have to admit that.’ Carlyle’s words came back to him; she could be CIA, DEA, she’s lethal. Not just in the way Carlyle had meant. Connor had seen enough on the street to know that, with her skills, Helen could kill. His radar flashed out a warning to him, but, in some perverse way, that only made Helen Jencks more attractive. He’d thought that the storm was swirling around Helen, maybe the storm was Helen herself.
‘What’s usual?’ Helen was saying. ‘Welcome to the twentieth century. Girls do stuff like that now.’
‘Stuff like what? Jujitsu, tae kwon-do? To that level?’
‘Aikido.’
‘What are you? A black belt?’
‘Yes. I’m a black belt. Second dan.’
Connor whistled through his teeth.
‘Nice girls don’t live in a nice world any more,’ Helen snapped. ‘They can’t, or don’t want to sit around waiting for a nice man to come and bail them out of trouble.’
‘So you bailed yourself out,’ said Connor softly. ‘What made you feel you needed to learn ? What happened to you, Hel?’
As Connor watched Helen, her eyes became distant. For a long time she said nothing.
‘I started aikido when I was seven, just after my father left. My mother encouraged me. It was very clever of her. I was angry, full of rage, and I felt so useless. Aikido got rid of some of the anger, and as I got good at it, I began to feel pretty useful.’
‘I’ll bet. You almost seem to be thriving on it. It’s as if you’ve gone up ten gears. Your face is glowing, you look fantastic.’
Helen laughed. ‘I’ve always thrived under adversity. My friend Joyce says I have an edge, and I need to sharpen it otherwise I go dead. She’s right. For four years I’ve been back in the City and it’s been civilising me, dulling me. Look, if you want an idea of what I’m really like, there’s nothing I love more than standing on deck, roped in, slamming through the sea with a force eight gale behind me and thirty-foot waves. I love that, got it? So, two little shits having a go at me, whoever the hell they might be, don’t faze me. It’s not the first time I’ve had to defend myself. I met some real bastards when I was at sea. In dodgy ports and on deck. What I want to know about tonight is why?’ She raised her hand suddenly. ‘Cancel that. Forget I ever asked. They were two yobs, out for the main chance.’ She could see disbelief in Connor’s eyes. She didn’t believe herself either. It seemed to her to be another warning, perhaps personally delivered by SIN, a possibility she didn’t want to have to deal with.
Connor got up to get a bottle of whisky.
‘Best single malt.’ He poured out two large glasses. ‘Perhaps it’s time to go home, Helen,’ he said softly. ‘You were lucky tonight. Those men might have had guns. Aikido’ll never block a bullet.’
She smiled. ‘That’s what someone else said.’
‘Who?’
‘My godfather.’
‘He sounds like a wise man.’
‘He is.’
‘So will you go home?’
She studied him for a while. She could almost feel him circling around her, the way she was him. So much hovered in the air between them, not just desire, but an awareness of danger, a sense he knew more than he was saying, and a feeling that just as she had her hidden agenda, so he had his.
She shook her head. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘Why not?’
‘I haven’t done what I came to do.’ She gave a half-smile. Implacability lay beneath. ‘Don’t ask.’
How many times had he said those words? Just as she said them. It was like listening to an echo. Connor watched her. He could feel the chaos stalking her, perhaps walking with her, seeping out of the unreadable eyes she turned on him. He wanted to warn her, to reach out and pull her to him, to banish the danger he knew surrounded her, but the part of him that was an agent felt compelled to stand back, to wait and watch as her fate played itself out. In the deepest part of him, untouched by training or mission, he vowed to stand by her, as close as she would allow him, ready to pull her out just before the fatal moment. That it was coming, he had no doubt. Extreme danger had stalked him, and that instinct, once felt, could never be forgotten.
Helen felt the weight of Connor’s eyes upon her. The desire that the attack had killed began to rise in her again, but now it was muddied. She fought it down. She had too much to deal with. She knew her days at Maldonado’s were numbered. She felt a sick foreboding at the prospect of returning to his house, but all her things were there, her money, her passport, and, more than anything, she had a sense that she had a last chance to discover something that would help her search for her father.
‘You’d better take me home,’ she said to Connor. She could see him struggling with some internal dilemma, but he said nothing, just drove her home, occasionally glancing at her with worried eyes.
He kissed her good night, stroking her cheek.
‘Be careful.’
Grim and efficient, the security guards let Helen in without a wasted word or smile. She crossed the garden to her cottage.
She glanced around her bedroom, as if uncertain what to do next, then she slowly took off her clothes and got into bed. She sat up, resting her forearms along her thighs, trying to still her mind, to weave out fears, to blank out unreason. Half an hour later, she had made up her mind. She would stay one more night, somehow get into Maldonado’s study, and search it. Then she would leave, enlist Connor’s help, and start searching for her father.
CHAPTER 63
The next morning, Maldonado watched Helen taking breakfast on the terrace from his vantage point in his study. He wheeled round to Angel.
‘She doesn’t have a mark on her. What the hell happened?’
Angel paced around the room. ‘I organised everything, jefe. Two of my men went for her.’ He glared through the window at Helen’s back. ‘She beat them up.’
‘She did what?’
‘Broken ribs. Unconscious. Concussion. Left them bleeding on the street.’
‘Who were they? Amateurs?’
‘They were good, jefe.’
‘Get rid of them. A girl beats them up.’
‘No ordinary girl, jefe. No ordinary house guest. The trap worked. Though it hurt them to say it, my men said she was awesome. Every mark on their bodies betrays her for what she is. They said she probably could have killed them if she’d chosen. She was incredibly powerful and skilled. Do you still have any doubt that she’s an agent?’
Maldonado ran his hand through his hair. The thick grey rippled over his fingers. He sat at his desk, facing Angel.
‘Surely, if she were an agent, she’d have been intelligent enough to spot the trap.’
‘She had about five seconds to think about it, then it was instinct. An agent’s instincts have been trained to fight. It takes a hell of a lot more training to cover up your training.’
‘So, she’s an agent,’ said Maldonado, slowly, unwillingly, as if he were passing a sentence of some kind. ‘One able to kill with her bare hands.’ For a long while he just stared at Helen’s back before speaking again.
‘Everything’s ready with el Dólar?’ he asked, voice grim.
Angel nodded. ‘He’s on his way. Officially, we’ll arrest him this afternoon ‘round three, while he’s having lunch with his mistress. To show how seriously we’re treating the arrest, we’ll announce that we’ve taken him to the private quarters of a senior member of SIN—everyone’ll know it’s you—for detailed questioning. The shoot-out’ll start about midnight. We make it look as if el Dólar gets away, although in reality, we keep him here, underground, with your private collection of Moche. Two days later, we spirit him away to Colombia.’
‘Leaving a trail of bodies behind tonight,’ interrupted Maldonado. ‘Perhaps we could solve two problems at once,’ he said, almost in a whisper. He rubbed his hands over his face. ‘What choice has she left me?’ He got to his feet, crossed the room to the window. He gazed out at Helen. ‘How could she do it? She’s so beautiful, the daughter of a man I once loved.’ He looked inside himself and knew that the small part which kept him from falling over the brink into insanity still loved Jack Jencks. That love had made him, against his better judgement, allow Helen Jencks to remain in his care as the evidence against her escalated. With her incandescence, with the blood of her father pumping so visibly in her veins, she had brought life and hope to his atrophying good. And all the while, she was spying on him. Betraying him. Her destruction in his eyes killed a little bit more of his scant resources of good. The pain in that was extraordinary. It surprised him; he had thought his capacity to feel pain had long ago died. He gouged away at it. It reminded him that he was still human, still felt like a man. A wave of bitter despair and futility engulfed him. What was left of his finer feelings changed nothing. He would go on, like he always did. He was too far gone on his bloody voyage to turn back now. No one could swim against that river of blood. It struck him as the ultimate irony that, despite his much vaunted power, he had long since lost his freedom. All his actions seemed to him preordained. He tried to console himself with the argument that, as an agent, Helen knew the risks, knew the consequences. He doubted that she could have discovered much that would have harmed him during her stay, but he could not be sure of that, and, in any case, the real danger to him was the fact that she had gained entry to his house, possessed as she was of the ability and opportunity to kill him. Word of that would seep out. The agents of his myriad enemies would take encouragement from Helen’s example, the attempts to kill or destroy him would escalate, unless he took the necessary measures to restore his credibility. Part of him admired Helen for what she had done, as much as he damned her for committing him to action. He wished to God she was innocent, but wishing changed nothing. The only thing he yearned for these days was that his own death, when it came, would be swift. He had agonised for years with his desire to hasten his own death, but the survival instinct in him was too strong, and he seemed cursed to live on, moving relentlessly down his bloody path, while around him others fell.
He turned back to Angel. ‘Have her killed tonight. Get a professional. No mistakes this time.’
CHAPTER 64
Helen waited for her chance to get into Maldonado’s study all day. She walked around the garden, as close to the house as casual strolling would allow. She swam in the pool, trying to shake the tension which stalked her. It seemed the house too was in the grip of some unnamed suspense. Strange men appeared. She could hear their voices, low and urgent, in conference with Maldonado in his study. Maldonado stayed there all day, and when he moved to the dining room for a brief lunch, Helen heard the low murmur of the strange male voices seeping out of the study. As twilight faded, her frustration grew, along with the sense of unease that had plagued her all day. She felt that time was against her, that the spikes of some hidden mechanism were grinding on relentlessly, counting down the seconds that were dripping from her fingers like blood. She shivered in the growing night, resolved to try one more time.
At eleven, as she peered from her windows across the garden, she saw the lights go out in Maldonado’s study. She took her pinpoint torch from her sponge bag, pulled on trainers, slipped out of her bedroom window, and stole across the garden.
She slipped down against the wall beneath the open window to Maldonado’s study. She waited for a couple of minutes, just to be sure no one was inside, then she glanced around quickly, before hoisting herself through the window. She dropped into a crouch inside the room, heart pounding. She waited until her eyes grew accustomed to the darkness, and then she began her search without using her torch. She pulled at the desk drawers. All of them were locked. She scanned the shelves, her eyes coming to rest on a series of box files beneath the shelf of tortured Moche. She pulled down one box, opened it, turned on her torch, and began to flick through the reams of paper. She found nothing. She replaced the box file and pulled down a second. She was halfway though when she heard voices. She flicked off her torch and hunched down under Maldonado’s desk. Her body gave a racking convulsion of fear as the voices came nearer. She struggled to still it, horrified by her response, which seemed to be beyond the normal spectrum of fear. It was as if her body knew something she didn’t. She imagined hands upon her, saw in her mind the men from last night, shuddered again as the voices drew level with the door, then passed.
