Drone a sci fi superhe.., p.30
Drone - A Sci-Fi Superhero Thriller (The Gift Book 2), page 30
Sitting in that apartment – the one belonging to her friend – opposite Dina. I close my eyes and can see her face peering back at me; those brown eyes, that flick of black hair across her forehead. Those dimples in her cheek when she smiles.
When I open my eyes and return to this dining table again, I’m a different person; my heart is racing and my hands are shaking. I feel the nausea begin to rise within me; that familiar sickness, the eternal partner of those horrible, painful memories.
I suddenly stand up, knocking my fork on the floor. The noise of chatter in the room abruptly stops, and I find both Alessia and Forrest looking at me curiously.
“Bathroom?” I say with some amount of discomfort evident in my voice. Forrest gives me a couple of directions, and I set out down the corridor and quickly find a small, bright bathroom that reeks of cleaning products.
I quickly drop to my knees and push the toilet seat up before throwing up both courses I just ate.
I thought I was over this; what, am I now allergic to candlelit dinners now?
I wish it was that simple.
CHAPTER 51
I clean myself up and leave the bathroom. When I return to the dining room, Forrest is gone and Alessia stands at the table finishing her wine. A pair of waiting staff gathers the remaining plates and cutlery, working around the imposing figure of Alessia.
“You okay?” she asks, her expression caught between concern and amusement. “you looked a bit… wobbly.”
“Yeah, I uhh…” For a moment I’m stranded, trying to think of an excuse. Then I remember how I got here. “Maybe my stomach still disagrees with that hallucinogen you slipped me.”
She rolls her eyes and buries her face in her glass again, downing the remnants of her wine. When she resurfaces, she speaks: “Charlie’s in the next room if you want to talk.”
I nod at her before letting my eyes linger a little too long on her legs through the fabric of her dress. They’re slender but strong, and the tanned skin of her upper body takes on an almost oak-like look in the candlelight.
I manage to tear away my gaze before she notices – I hope – and leave her behind.
I make my way over to the next room – the floorboards creak beneath my feet – and I come to a large, paneled wooden door, painted a conspicuous red. I knock on it, and when I hear the guttural voice of Forrest within, I enter.
I step into a room that still seems to smell like wood varnish. There’s a large, granite fireplace dominating the space, which hasn’t quite had the time to build into a roaring flame yet. There are coffee tables full of candy bar wrappers and empty tablet packages and crushed Diet Coke cans scattered around the room.
“Kris,” the raspy, booming voice from the middle of the room says. There’s an ostentatiously red leather upholstered armchair in the exact middle of the floor facing away from me. All I can see is the back of it – large and monolithic – but I know Forrest is sitting there.
I walk up to the right side and see his lithe form, dwarfed by the armchair. He looks so weak and slight, engulfed by a piece of living room furniture. I crouch beside him, and he slowly turns his head to look at me.
“How long have you felt like this?” he asks.
Huh? I scratch my head, wondering what he’s asking and how to possibly answer.
He takes my confused look as a prompt to speak again. “Your little bathroom break. Your shaking hands.”
I pause; there’s something stuck in my throat – a denial, or a question as to what he’s talking about – but it doesn’t emerge.
“I’ve seen that 1000-yard stare before,” Forrest goes on to say. “I’ve seen it in many old friends. Former agents stationed in Beirut, Moscow, Warsaw, their minds scrambled by the ever-present risk of getting caught and tortured for their remaining days, or perhaps they just witnessed a few too many things a human should never witness.”
“Since Aljarran,” I find myself blurting out. Whatever was stuck in my throat just escaped, apparently. “Ever since I was in Aljarran, I’ve been this way.”
“Right,” he says, nodding, his eyes closed. “I suppose you saw things. Terrible things.”
“Yeah,” I reply. I feel a slight bit of nausea just saying it. “I feel like they’re never far away from my mind. All the time I’m being, I dunno, chased by shadows.”
He nods at me, his eyes more empathic than I’d expected from a so-called monster.
“Every so often I’ll see something or hear something, and it’s like I’m back there,” I say, my voice beginning to falter as it runs away from me. “It’s like hands around my neck, choking every last bit of life out of me, and that’s when the nausea hits.”
“They take and they take and they take,” Forrest says, his eyes burning with uncertain emotion. “You have an extremely valuable set of skills, Kris. And that’s not always a good thing. For all of your life, these skills – governments, agencies, militaries – they will seek to exploit them. And you.”
I nod. I’m sure he’s put two and two together and knows I’d still be sitting in a CIA black site if I hadn’t agreed to all the agencies’ demands.
“Do yourself a favor,” he says, his voice rattling out of his throat like the sound of an empty spray paint can, “and disappear when all this is over. No more war, no more fighting, just peace.”
He looks me in the eyes one more time before turning back to a notepad that sits beside him. In it, he scrawls sentences in some indecipherable shorthand. I climb to my feet and go to leave, but he says one more thing before I can make it out of the room.
“And hey, at least you got to change the world, maybe change the course of history,” he says wistfully. “Not a lot of people can say that.” I wonder what he means for a moment before realizing he’s probably referring to Cantara. I close my eyes and can almost feel the weight of that snow globe in my hand again.
“Yeah,” I say to him, “but did I make the world a better place?”
“We’re not doctors,” he replies. “We’re not chemists, we’re not aid workers. We’re spies and soldiers. Our skills aren’t for healing; they’re for war and deception and division.”
He adjusts his posture uncomfortably in the chair, looking like that meal took a lot out of him.
“We used to call it ‘blowback’ back in the day,” he goes on to say. “The idea that no matter how well-intentioned we were, there would always be unintended consequences to everything we did. Topple a dictator? A new one – a far worse one – rises from his ashes. Arm a bunch of freedom fighters, then suddenly see those same men standing over a new mass grave.”
He looks up at me again and I see that emotion still in his eyes. It looks like regret, in fact a lifetime’s worth of regret.
“Our plan must succeed, Kris,” he says pensively. “This is our chance to do something good, to do something right.”
I nod and go to leave the room one more time, but he isn’t done yet: “Go along to the meet up with Oscar Lopez tomorrow. I want you to feel like you have a stake in all of this. And, of course, you’ll be handy in a firefight if anything should go wrong.”
I’m slightly surprised that he asked me, but then I guess I shouldn’t be. He’s right; I’m the best man on the planet to sit opposite a bloodthirsty killer. It won’t be my first time.
I finally say my goodbyes and leave the room. In the dining room beyond, Alessia is gone and the waiting staff have already stripped the table. I make the walk straight back to my villa, ripping the bowtie from my neck as I go; it doesn’t suit me.
I get back to my accommodation and absentmindedly flick the TV on. I’m not even paying attention to it at first – I’m too busy shedding my formalwear – but when I glance up after a minute or two something catches my eye.
The orange sands, the black craters, the skeletal frames of apartment buildings and offices with windows blasted out and corners entirely reduced to rubble. It’s Aljarran on some Spanish-language news channel. Shots of convoys of Humvees and tanks and the unmistakable sprawl of a smoldering Haramat, now beset by fighting in the streets.
The post-Cantara civil war, raging on.
Blowback, Vega says.
“Yeah,” I reply, as I watch more images from a hospital; a little boy, maybe four or five, covered in white dust except for a bleeding head wound dripping dark crimson over his temple. I reach for the remote control again and switch it off.
You’re sure you want to go along tomorrow? Vega asks.
“What else am I gonna do? Sit around here? Watch more TV? I might as well make myself useful.” I think of the image of that blood-soaked kid again. “And besides, if this plan of his comes off, maybe it’ll all be worth it.
I can see why Charles Forrest is so obsessed with his plan. A blood-soaked drug lord sitting in a blood-soaked palace atop a blood-soaked pile of drug money, hoping to banish his own demons and clean his own blood-soaked hands.
I can see the appeal in that.
CHAPTER 52
I’m sitting in a dark room disassembling my rifle. The air is unbearably hot and sticky, and there’s no color here, just scant white fluorescent light and overwhelming shadow, and the smell of motor oil seems to hang in the air. Every time I disassemble the gun – pulling out the magazine, the charging handle, the buffer spring from it – it reassembles itself as soon as I’m done.
I’m losing my patience, furiously pulling bits of steel from the weapon, throwing them behind me as quickly as I can, it’s no use. The rifle is back in one piece as soon as I’m done. I suddenly snag my thumb on a latch or lever or something and hold it up to the light to see the digit hanging limply from my hand, broken and almost torn cleanly off.
But I don’t panic; I just shake my head and continue.
I’m jolted upright by an abrupt knocking at the door and look around me to see the dark room is gone, and instead I’m sitting up in bed. The sound of bird calls and insects from outside bring me back to reality, just in time for me to get scared out of my skin by another round of loud banging on the door.
I jump out of bed and make my way over to the front door and open it to find the predictably unimpressed face of Alessia staring back at me.
“It’s eight o’clock, are you still sleeping?” she asks incredulously. She’s in black again, wearing a black tank-top and pants with that knife by her side again. “What kind of soldier are you?” I can’t think of anything to say – I’m still half asleep, running through disassembling my rifle in my mind. Alessia points at a big imaginary watch on her wrist.
“Get some clothes on and come join us in the bandstand.”
She turns and paces away, shaking her head as though I missed some all-important memo. I throw some clothes on – my previous clothing thankfully laundered by the ‘home help’ here – and march out to the bandstand.
There, I find Forrest, Alessia, and four other men, all standing dutifully, wearing camouflage pants, tactical vests, and crew-neck T-shirts. They look like the American Apparel paramilitary wing.
“Kris,” Forrest says, sitting on a steel folding chair. The chess board is gone, pushed to one side of the bandstand. There’s a piece on the floor by my feet; a pawn. “Thank you for joining us.”
I glance at Alessia, who gives me that caustic side-eye. If only she knew that a mere couple of months ago, I was a desperate lay-about working nightshifts filling sandwiches. Back then I wasn’t absolutely sure there even was an eight o’clock in the morning.
“The meeting is set up at a disused warehouse on the outskirts of Pima,” Alessia says before presumably saying the same thing in Spanish for the four men beside us. “It’ll take place at 3:00 PM, and it’ll take us five hours to get there.”
“I won’t be joining you,” Forrest says. “I can’t guarantee that Oscar Lopez won’t shoot me dead upon seeing me. I feel like that kind of distraction probably doesn’t bode well for the negotiations.”
He has a point. There’s surely limited use in taking a terminally ill man with us, especially if he’ll attract bullets like a corpse attracts flies.
Alessia gives us more details; we’re to take weapons but keep them holstered. Four of us will enter the warehouse and two of us keep watch outside. We should be in and out in no less than an hour.
Forrest then unsteadily climbs to his feet and gives us a briefing that reminds me of Baynes’ briefing at the beginning of this whole saga. He tells us our goal: to buy time. Agree to every demand but give it the longest possible timeframe.
“Sure, we’ll give up the drug business, all of it!” he shouts excitedly. “But it’ll take time! Weeks. Months. Oh, what’s that Mr. Lopez, you want to move in here? Absolutely sir, but it’ll take a few weeks to complete the formalities. That sort of thing.”
He puts his arms down by his sides and leans back into his chair. “Do everything you can just to buy us time. We need it to get the gold, smelt the gold, and distribute the gold. Nothing else matters.”
Alessia nods, her expression cold and determined.
Forrest then turns to me and asks, “Are you in?”
I look around at the faces around us; the four men – a mixture of ages from 20 all the way to 40 or so – look just as determined as Alessia. Everyone believes in the plan. Everyone is willing to risk their lives for it.
“Yes,” I reply. “I’ll do it.” I see Alessia smiling to herself in my peripheral vision.
“Beautiful,” Forrest says with a tired grin. “Let’s prepare ourselves.”
A couple of hours later the van is packed, and after giving one final pep talk Forrest has disappeared back to his mansion accompanied by his doctor.
Thankfully, it isn’t the same van they used to bring me here. Instead, it’s a newer gray model, lightly specked with mud and four seats in the back.
We pack a bag with ammunition, six handguns, and a first aid kit, along with a set of 12 packed lunches thoughtfully prepared for us by Forrest’s kitchen staff. We even pack a set of folding chairs. I guess he does think of everything…
Alessia drives and I climb into the back, sitting alongside three of the other guys. The back door to the van is shut, and we’re shrouded in darkness again, save for one small, dirty window letting in a sickly dark beam of sunlight. We’re packed in pretty tightly; three sweating sardines in one dusty gray tin.
Still, even with the absence of light in here, I can see the guy opposite smiling at me.
“So, you’re the man who took out three of Oscar Lopez’ guys the other night?” he asks me in almost perfect English.
I smile with polite surprise, and acknowledge, “Yeah, that’s me.”
“You’re an American?” he asks. I nod. “A friend of Mr. Forrest’s from back in the day?”
“Not really,” I reply as the van’s engine roars to a start, shuddering through the seats. “Let’s just say we worked for the same boss.”
I feel the wheels below us begin to turn – hearing that crunch of gravel and dirt beneath the tires – and prepare myself for five hours of this. Is it strange for me to say the wait is as daunting a prospect as sitting across from Oscar Lopez?
“You believe in him, don’t you?” the man with the good grasp of English asks me. He has a black goatee beard and thick black eyebrows, as well as thick-rimmed glasses sitting comfortably on his nose.
“Believe what?” I ask.
“Do you believe this is really going to work?” he asks, his eyes wide and expectant. “Do you think he can get all of those families out of the favela?”
I hesitate, struggling to think of a way to answer his question honestly. Do I believe he can pull it off? I don’t know yet, but I’m confident by now he’s trying.
“I’m from a family of eight, we all came from the favelas,” he says pensively. “My father was killed in a gas station robbery when I was six years old. My two oldest brothers were murdered by Galo Lopez’ men. I get paid handsomely, but I’d do this for nothing.”
He gestures up and down the back of the van to the other two men, who sit beside us – one of them cleaning his handgun and one of them listening to our conversation.
“Everyone has similar stories; everyone grew up with nothing. That’s why we’re here. We believe in Mr. Forrest and his plan. Ignacio here and I were running cocaine for rival dealers. Before we met Mr. Forrest, we’d have shot each other in the street. But now? We’re pulling in the same direction.”
He speaks with a hopeful fieriness; I just sit back and listen.
“Life here is dominated by the drug trade. Everyone is touched by it. Wives lose their husbands to it. Mothers lose their children,” he says mournfully. “If he can do what he’s promising to do, all of that will be history.”
“You think so?” I ask.
“Everyone that used to be preyed on by the drug cartels – everyone indebted to those monsters, or with nowhere left to turn – will be free. They’ll be able to start their own businesses. Spend time with their kids. The drug trade will disappear.”
I smile back at him supportively. What do I even say? That I don’t know what proportion of his desire to help the poor of Madrevaria is driven by a genuine concern, and what proportion is driven by his obsession with sticking one giant middle finger at the suits at the CIA?
“Let’s get through today first,” I end up telling him, making a show of crossing my fingers. He looks back at me with a resoluteness I’ve seen a lot here. Whatever his true motivations, Forrest has succeeded in uniting these people and giving them something to believe in.
So long as his crazy plan can succeed…
CHAPTER 53
Wakey wakey.
I open my eyelids, both of which feel like they’re weighted with lead, even though I’ve surely only been asleep for 20 minutes. Vega’s voice brings me back to the real world.
