Close Protection (10 page)

             
“Why are you trying to stop me?” Lena asked.

              “What exactly do you think you’re going to do?”

              “Stab him, shoot him, cut his throat, I don’t care.”

              “Have you ever stabbed somebody? Do you know how to work a firearm? How do you think you’d manage to go about cutting Zeus’s throat?”

              Ramon spoke in a whisper.

              Lena only became angier. She was too blind with rage to see what Ramon was doing. She didn’t need to know anything except the betrayal that she had felt and the utter certainty that fate would not deny her the chance for revenge.

              “Lena,” he said. “I’m on your side. I don’t want you to go to Cuba. I don’t want you to marry that spineless piece of shit. I don’t want to see you hurt.”

              “Then why are you standing in my way?”

              “Because if you go down there right now, you’re going to get yourself killed.”

              “So what? I don’t care if he kills me,” Lena said.

              “Well I do.”

              Ramon eased himself up to his feet and went to Lena on the bed. He moved to her side and engulfed her in his arms. He soothed her with soft words and tender touches. He told her that everything was going to be alright and she believed him.

              “I’m not going to let anything happen to you.”

              “I know.”

             
“We need a plan, and fast,” Ramon said.

              Lena looked to the scissors on the desk. Ramon rolled his eyes. She looked to the gun that she knew he kept under his arm and Ramon got serious.

              “I’ve got enough blood on my hands,” he said. “I’m not solving this with a gun.”

              “Then what?”

              “We need to make a plan to get you out of here.”

              “Well let’s just steal a car and drive away as fast as we can.”

              “How far do you think we’d get before they find us? And even if we could do that, nobody is allowed in or out of the compound without getting cleared by your father’s people.”

              Lena sighed and turned away from Ramon, laying back down in bd. She thought it was hopeless, and Ramon was beginning to think that she might be right. He didn’t have any good idea at the moment. Somehow he needed to get Lena away from here. Whether it was with him or not, she couldn’t stay here. The minor complication was that if Lena disappeared from the compound, Ramon would be held responsible, and that idea did not make him very happy.

              “Look,” he said. “We have a week to figure this out. I don’t know what to do right now, and neither do you, but let’s take stock of the advantages that we have right now.”

              “What advantages?” Lena said, holding up her empty hands.

              “Right now,” Ramon whispered, “Zeus thinks that I work for him. He doesn’t know how close we are. He doesn’t know that we’re on the same team. And I know the compound’s entire security protocol like the back of my hand.”

              “I don’t see how that helps us.”

              “It means that Zeus is going to underestimate us. Have you ever in your life disobeyed him?”

              Lena shook her head.

              “That’s good. Its going to be hard, but you need to pretend to accept his decision. Be yourself. Act like nothing has changed. We need to catch him off guard.”

              The truth was, that was going to be harder to do than they thought. Zeus was, by nature, suspicious. Ever since Lena had told him about Ramon’s imaginary flirting, he had kept a close eye on him, and he firmly believed that something was going on between them, although it was true that he was unaware as to the extent.

             
It was hard for Lena to hear what Ramon had to say. Anger had so consumed her that it was impossible for her to think of anything except taking revenge on her step-father. But she knew he was right. She was powerless against him, for now. She only had one shot. If she made herself an enemy of her father, there would be no second chances.

              What was harder for her to accept was that she and Ramon must distance themselves immediately. His logic there was sound too, but it was even harder for her to imagine parting with him that it was to resist the primal urge to attack Zeus with any means necessary. In the last week, she’d begun to depend on Ramon in a way that she’d never felt about anybody. While Tia and Michaela had kept her safe and almost happy here, Ramon made her imagine something outside of these walls.

              She’d waited eagerly for him to return when her step-father required his assistance away from Lena, and the idea of losing the relationship that she and Ramon had built made her sick to her stomach.

              But her options were clear. A week apart, or a lifetime.

              Lena had seen the way that Damien’s family kept its women. If she were betrothed to him, if she stepped foot in their family's home, the only way out would be in a casket. For a woman who had only begun to imagine a life of her own, the thought was nauseating.

              “What do we do?” she asked.

              Ramon was laying next to her, stroking her hair, his head resting against hers.

              “Do whatever Zeus asks. Play along. You can continue to voice your objections, but make no real resistance. When it’s time to act, I’ll let you know.”

              “So I just wait around until you tell me what to do?”

              Ramon looked hurt. It had not been his intention to try and control or possess her, but he realized now that he had, in his own way.

              “If you see an opportunity to get out of here, take it. In the meantime, I’ll use my position to try and find us some options.”

              And so they agreed. They would be foes until the right moment came along for them to join forces and escape their gilded cage.

Ramon slipped out of Lena’s room wearing the mask of a man who had just done his job. He went downstairs and reported immediately to Zeus.

He waited for a moment after knocking on the boss’s office door, and was

summoned inside. He told Zeus that he had secured Lena in her room and that she would be unable to make any escape. He’d also gone through the trouble of removing a number of objects that he considered dangerous, and that Lena might use in desperate circumstances to permanently break off her engagement with Damien.

Zeus thanked Ramon for a job well done, and did not let his suspicions be known. Ramon asked him how he should go about his job for the remaining week. Zeus told him that his only responsibility was to make sure that she was in condition to deliver to Damien a week from that morning. He excused Ramon, and the bodyguard stepped out into the hallway. and returned to his room.

He really had locked Lena in her room, and he really had confiscated a number of things from her that she could use to do harm to herself. But he had also left her a number of things that she could use to harm somebody else, and had briefly instructed her in their use. For one thing, he showed her how to stab somebody with her scissors in a way that wouldn’t result in slicing her own hand open.

Up in his room, Ramon began to consider the situation. Escape through the swamp on foot would be the most accessible option. All they’d have to do was get themselves over the wall. But if Zeus’s men didn’t catch up with them, the alligators might, and even if they didn’t, it was easy to get hopelessly lost in the Everglades.

One variation of that plan was to have Gabe meet them at the road. Ramon and Lena could sneak out and walk a mile or two down the street, get in his car, and be headed north in under an hour. Getting in touch with Gabe would be hard. He no longer had his own cell phone, and Ramon knew with relative certainty that any of the phones on the Buldova estate would be eavesdropped upon.

The gate was still weak, Ramon thought. It would be weeks before any reinforcements could be made to it. The SUV he’d taken to the department store would be more than capable of plowing through it, probably without injuring any of the occupants. It was unlikely that it would remain entirely functional, and so he needed to have another car available. He had his own vehicle in the garage, with the keys. Even better than that, the garage was full of high performance sports cars with all of their keys hanging in a lockbox. Further highlighting the Buldova’s complete misunderstanding of security protocol, the lockbox could easily be picked with a paperclip. Not a great quality for the vessel that safeguards a few million dollars in automobiles. This plan wasn’t perfect either. He would have to be the one to take the gate out, which meant that Lena would need to drive the getaway car, at least from the garage to the front of the house. There would be no way to make it back to the garage on foot from the gate after announcing their escape plan to the entire estate. The trouble with that was that Lena had never once been behind the wheel of a car There was no way Zeus would let him teach her in a real car. He couldn’t even ask without raising a hundred red flags. Ramon thought he might be able to teach her with online videos, but it was a long shot.

There was a plan that Ramon did not even want to consider, which was to eliminate any resistance on the estate and simply walk out the front. It was easily the most dangerous idea that he’d had, and would certainly involve bloodshed that he was eager to avoid.

The last idea that he had was also completely unpalatable. He could wait until Lena was taken from the house and try to free her in Miami or Cuba. Security would be lighter and they would have more options for escape, but the stakes would be higher too. Any plan they put together would have to be made and executed on the fly. This wasn’t exactly an arena where Ramon felt comfortable improvising.

The impossibilities began to overwhelm him. Everything he considered seemed to end with an insurmountable obstacle. Ramon felt his breath catch and choke and tears came to his eyes. He wasn’t sure what made him feel this way, was it the possibility of losing Lena, or just that she might be hurt? He couldn’t bear either notion.

Once it was clear that his mind would no longer cooperate with him, Ramon resolved to crying in his bed and waiting for sleep to help the sorry pass.

Immediately after waking the next morning, Lena thought about what she and Ramon would do that day. When she remembered that on this morning, they would no longer be friends, her heart sank. She layed in bed for an hour, not moving, not thinking, not feeling anything. When hunger gripped her stomach, she lurched out of bed and walked to the shower, ignoring the pain in her feet. So much else hurt right now that she hardly noticed the dozens of stabbing wounds. She washed, dried, and dressed herself, and went to go downstairs.

The door was locked, of course.

Lena pounded on it and shouted that she was ready for breakfast.

To her surprise, it wasn’t Tia or Ramon that answered the door, but Zeus. She briefly considered kicking him in the groin and going back to bed, but she remembered the plan that she and Ramon had made and was docile instead.

“Are you ready to act like an adult?” he asked.

The urge to commit violence against him surged up again, and once more she stuffed it back down.

“Yes. I’m sorry for making a scene last night,” she said with her head hung. Zeus seemed to buy it.

“I know it’s hard, but you’ll see how much better this is for everyone. And I’ve talked with Damien’s father. You’ll be well cared for there. He won’t tolerate any sort of awful behavior from his son.”

Lena didn’t believe any of it, of course. She followed her stepfather down to dinner and had a seat at the far end of the table. Tia brought out her breakfast and gave her a hug before disappearing back into the kitchen. She ate silently and without any interest in her food. When she finished, she went and sat in the living room and stared at the ceiling. The TV had been returned thanks to Basil and Andris’s incessant moaning, but she didn’t feel like watching anything. She’d wondered where Ramon was, and after an hour of silent suffering, she got up and looked behind the curtains. He was out in the yard directing a small army of goons.

It looked like they were installing a new gate. The old one had been, Lena thought, purely ornamental. This one was serious. It looked like it belonged in front of a military base or secret government compound like she had seen in her shows.

She felt better knowing where Ramon was, and laid back down on the couch and began to think of ways to escape.

With the gate replaced, she could no longer simply slip out between the bars. The last one had gaps big enough that she could squeeze through, this was was reinforced with heavy gauge wiring, by the look of it.

She could still climb out of her balcony and over to the wall, but she had no idea what she’d do once she made it to the swamp. Without her phone she couldn’t exactly dial for a cab. She knew that her Zeus tracked all of her web browsing, so that wouldn’t be an option either. As far as she knew, the only secure line in and out of the house was Ramon’s cell phone, and thanks to her, it was completely out of commision.

She threw up her arms in desperation and silently prayed that Ramon was having better luck with an escape plan.