Blue Knight (32 page)

“Olivia?” It was her father.

“I don’t have a lot of time, Dad.”

“What do you need?” She could almost feel him switching gears.

“A handful of black ops teams and a pair of Black Hawks, all suited up, fuelled up and on the spot at Bahía Coralina, Vistaria, at oh-four-thirty hours this morning.”

There was the minutest pause. Then his voice came back, hollow and distant. “I have you on speaker phone, Olivia.”

“Where are you?”

“In the situation room. You don’t need to know who else is here, because if I do this, it won’t be official.”

Her head was thumping.
If
.

“You have to do this. The loyalist Vistarians are coming in to take out the
insurrectos
holding us hostage at that time and they don’t have the tactical equipment or the numbers to do the job.” She made herself shut up. She had to let her father and the others in the room think it through. If she kept talking, they’d just get their backs up. She had to lead them to it a step at a time.

“That’s true, sir,” someone murmured in the background. “The loyalists have been out of money for a while. They haven’t been able to raise taxes while they’re sitting on that beach in Acapulco.”

“It’ll be a blood bath,” she said. “But the Vistarians are the only ones with the guts to step up to the plate. You saw what happened here this afternoon. What the
insurrectos
did. The Vistarians aren’t going to let another person die. Will you?”

There was a click and the hollowness of the line disappeared. Her father’s voice came through firm and quiet. “You haven’t spoken to me for six years, Olivia. I almost died when I saw you on that video today. Now this. You suddenly reach out and ask for the impossible.”

“It’s not impossible, Dad. You’re the President’s Chief of Staff. You can give an executive order and the military will jump.”

She could almost hear him thinking.

“No, this isn’t going to win me back, Daddy,” she said softly. “Don’t think it will. What you did was unforgiveable. But things have changed and I might be able to see my way to talking to you once more anyway, just because it’s the right thing to do. That’s all I’m asking you to do, now. Just do the right thing. Save lives, Dad, because it’s the right thing, not because it’s the political thing.”

She could hear him breathing. Thinking.

Abruptly the hollowness came back. “We’re going to need some special teams on the spot at Bahía Coralina, Vistaria, by oh-four-thirty hours this morning to liaise with the Vistarian command,” her father said, speaking to the room at large. “Do you have any black ops troops in need of sudden, rugged recreation and a few Black Hawks lying around idle down near Acapulco?”

Olivia heard a squeak of boots on the linoleum outside the office and looked up over the desk. A guard was strolling the corridor.

“Someone’s coming,” she murmured into the phone.

“Is there any other information we need, Olivia?” her father asked.

The door opened and she froze, unable to answer. She was behind the desk, crouched down low, but if she spoke, the guard would hear. There was a chance he would notice the phone was missing the hand piece, anyway.

“Is someone there?” the guard asked in Spanish. He sounded nervous.

“Have you got money on you, Olivia?” her father asked. “Try bribing him if he sees you.”

She grimaced. Her money had been taken from her, weeks ago.

The guard came around the desk and saw her. He was very young, very slender. He cocked his rifle. “Put the phone down!” he screamed.

“Oh my god!” her father cried in her ear.

“It’s all right, it’s all right!” she said to the guard in Spanish, holding up her free hand.

“Who are you talking to?” the guard demanded.

“No one. I can’t get a dial tone. See?” She held the phone out to him to let him hear for himself.

It was a natural reaction for the guard to lean forward to put his ear to the hand piece. At the same time, using her body as a shield, Olivia pressed the disconnect button on the base and held it down.

As soon as the guard leaned forward, she walloped him across the side of the face with the hand piece. It sent him staggering a few steps and most importantly, stopped the gun from pointing at her. She took off running. When she reached the foyer she broke into a sprint, her boot heels clunking across the tiles in unmusical taps. She dived into the service corridors and kept changing directions as corners appeared, until even she was not sure where she was.

Then she slowed and started picking her directions with more intelligence. She glanced at her watch. She just had to survive maybe twelve hours. That was all. For now, she would find somewhere to hole up and hide.

* * * * *

Téra slipped out onto the family verandah, pulling a shawl around her shoulders. She felt light and empty, like all the pith had been pulled out of her and nothing had replaced the hollow insides.

But she didn’t hurt just now. She knew that was temporary.

Calli and Minnie were both sitting in the dark, staring out at the rolling sea. Calli wore a pea jacket and Minnie was in one of Duardo’s old army coats. Minnie sat cross-legged on her chair. Calli had her chair tilted back and one foot propped on the balcony rail. She was drinking from a bottle of Vistarian mescal.

Téra pulled up the old kitchen chair she preferred to sit on out here. “They told me where everyone went. God, Calli, Nick went too?”

Minnie gave a tiny smile. “They needed everyone. Our numbers are so few.” Her smile trembled and died.

Calli passed the bottle of mescal to Téra. “Here. It’s cold out here. It’s going to be a long night and even longer day.” She looked at her watch. “Three a.m. They should have reached the bay. Now they just have to wait for Daniel.”

* * * * *

Agonizing pain in her thigh woke her up. She was tumbling, rolling.

Hard light in her eyes. Olivia threw up a hand to shield her eyes, even as she tried to reach for her thigh.

“Get up,
puta
, or we will shoot you where you lie.”

She rolled over and got onto her hands and knees because her thigh was such a blaze of agony she wasn’t entirely certain she could stand straight up.

“Look at that, she likes it on her knees,” someone joked in Spanish.

The light was still blinding her, but she didn’t need to see past it to know what had happened. She had fallen asleep inside the storage room and they had found her. Someone had kicked her in the thigh to wake her.

At least her leg wasn’t broken. She got to her feet slowly, feeling the thigh cramp a little in protest. But it took her weight.

“Fuck, look at her man!” one of them said, almost moaning. “Let’s do her.”

“Look at those titties, man,” the other said.

“I don’t want to annoy Ibarra tonight,” a third said. “He’s too incensed about finding that Nemesis son of a whore.”

Olivia was already squinting against the light, so it gave her a way to hide her reaction to their conversation. “Nemesis” was probably Daniel, but it was the first time she’d heard he had an operational code name. The name seemed to worry the
insurrectos
.

A hand pulled at the back of her jeans. “I want those long legs around me.” The hand was pulling her steadily backward. She dug her heels in, trying to fight it, but the man was stronger than her. She reached back and tugged on his hand, pulling it out of her jeans, but he grabbed her wrist instead.

The others just stood there and watched.

Olivia was turned around by the pulling on her wrist and now she got to see the soldier who was doing the pulling. He was shorter than her and must have weighed nearly three hundred pounds. Most of that clung around his middle. He had a moustache, thick eyebrows, big florid cheeks and the dark skin of the southern Vistarians.

She shook her head and he began to smile. “Oh yes my long-legged whore. You’re going to take my cock and everything else I give you,” he said. He looked around at the others. “She looks like a delicate filly. Bet I can have her begging for it by the end.”

There was a soft chuckle that passed around the room and she realized that even if the others didn’t participate, they weren’t going to stop this.

She filled her lungs and started to scream.

“Stop her, Santez, she’ll wake someone,” came another growl.

The man holding her wrist slapped her face. It stopped her screaming long enough for her to fill her lungs again. She knew if she stopped screaming her fate was fixed.

Santez pulled out his handgun and put it under her chin and cocked it.

Olivia shut up.

He grinned, showing rotting teeth. “Yeah, you speak that sort of Spanish, don’t you?” He gave his gun to someone else. “Keep that pointed at her face where she can see it all the time.”

He grabbed the front of her shirt and ripped it so the buttons all went flying with little music tinkles as they hit the walls and metal shelving. He yanked the shirt off her shoulders.

There were murmurs of appreciation as her breasts were revealed. Even Santez smiled.

“Strip her,” he told the others.

She was lifted off her feet. Many hands mauled her body as her jeans and boots, sock and panties were snatched away from her. The hands continued to roam over her—all over her—long after the clothing was gone, probing and pinching, delving and inspecting every inch of her. Olivia closed her eyes and waited for it to be over. There was nothing else she could do.

“Attention!”

Olivia was almost dropped to the ground as the soldiers sprang to attention. She crouched, using her knees to hide as much of herself as possible, as Lieutenant Gomez stepped into the storage room. She watched him warily. His reputation for dealing with the female hostages was well known, but that was always when he had them alone.

He looked down at her. “Bring Ms. Davenport to Captain Ibarra’s office immediately,” he said, speaking to the others. “If she suffers any more…indignities, it will not reflect well upon you.” He turned back to the door. “That is all.”

“Fuck,” Santez muttered.

“You’re on report, Santez,” Gomez’s voice floated back through the door.

Santez’s face turned red and his mouth opened again. Then he closed it.

After thirty seconds had passed the soldiers relaxed. Santez kicked Olivia in the leg and she knew it was he who had woken her with a kick in the thigh. “Get up,” he snarled in adequate English. “Move it. You just got a free pass,
puta
.”

She had got more than that. When she had been struggling against the grip on his wrist she had seen the time. It was four in the morning. She had slept half the night away. Daniel should be just about at rendezvous by now. Olivia only had a few more hours to go.

* * * * *

The beach was empty, but even so, Daniel wasn’t fooled. He could feel the tension in his back and in his temples.

He gave a series of whistles.

After a few seconds that seemed to stretch for hours, the notes were returned.

Daniel felt his guts turn almost watery with relief. The tension ran out of him like water out of a glass.

Black figures rose out of the trees lining the bay. Dozens of them. Daniel walked onto the beach, letting the late moonlight pick him out. He held up both arms so they could see he wasn’t holding a gun in either of them.

Two of the black figures jogged over to him, both of them removing their helmets and balaclavas and slinging their assault rifles. The rifle the taller one carried looked suspiciously like a SIG SG 550 but it was hard to tell in this light.

The taller one lifted his closed fist and turned it in a circle and the rest of the troops all melted back into the trees.

As they got closer Daniel realized that the taller one was Duardo. He was a Colonel.
A Colonel
. Damn if he didn’t outrank Daniel again. Now Cristián’s comment made sense.

The slightly shorter man Daniel didn’t know personally, but he knew from pictures and by reputation. Mentally, he whistled.
El Leopardo Rojo,
and if rumors were right, the President pro tem of loyalist Vistaria. In person, Nicolás Escobedo’s features were just as hard, calculating and tough as they were on television and in the newspapers, but what the media missed was the hint of passion, the potential for drama. Escobedo had his human side. It was just held in tightly disciplined check. The stories about
el leopardo’s
discipline and endurance were legendary.

Abruptly, the tension was back in Daniel’s gut.

The two stopped in front of him. Daniel nodded at Duardo. “Good to see you made it.”

“Shouldn’t that be a salute, Officer?”

Daniel felt his jaw come unhinged. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Escobedo’s brow lift.

Duardo just waited.

Daniel cleared his throat. “Jesus…” He pulled himself to attention and snapped off a salute. “Reporting in. Sir.”

Duardo returned the salute.

“Your hand is bleeding,” Escobedo observed.

“Actually, it’s my arm,” Daniel said, turning his left arm around to show the other man. “A bullet winged me as I was scaling the hotel fence.”

“Then they know you’ve escaped?”

“They know they’ve lost one, but not who they’ve lost. They didn’t see my face—”

The punch came without warning, taking him under the chin and lifting him off his feet. He landed flat on his back in the sand. The wind was driven out of him. He lay stunned for barely a second before Duardo landed on top of him.

All Daniel could see in the moonlight was the classic profile of Duardo’s nose and the black of his eyes. Duardo grabbed a fistful of Daniel’s shirt and hauled his head up out of the sand as his right fist drew back.

“Ten years, you mother-fucking son of a whore,” Duardo ground out, “and you waltz in here like you own the joint.” Duardo was speaking English like he was born to it. Idiomatic. Flawless. And he was
pissed
.

“What the fuck?” Daniel breathed.

“Christ on a pony,” Escobedo breathed.

Daniel blinked. Escobedo didn’t even seem shocked at this airing of family history. More like…resigned. Perhaps even a touch amused.