Plan B (3 page)

Out in the hall the alarm was earsplittingly loud.

We made it downstairs and out the door, got her into the back of the ambulance—we left the gurney on the porch, to save a few precious seconds—and jumped into the front.

Benito, his face now streaming sweat, pulled the ambulance away from the house. We seemed safely on our way out when he yelled something and slammed on the brakes.

Three guards had us surrounded. Two in front and one on the driver’s side. Pointing assault rifles at us. Ready to fire.

Maybe Benito had stopped because he didn’t want to run anyone over. Maybe he stopped because he didn’t want them to fire at us. Whatever his reasoning, he’d just made a serious miscalculation. I would have kept going, force them to get out of my way and thereby hope to mess up their aim.

But there was nothing to be done about that now. I saw that he was panicking, on the verge of giving up.

Each of the guards held a black AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, a civilian version of a military infantry rifle. This was a reliable and accurate weapon, high velocity, fast handling, with not much recoil. Probably thirty rounds in the magazine. It had a range of almost two thousand feet.

Four very ugly barrels were pointed at us, swaying back and forth. One of the guards was shouting something.

“They want us to get out,” Benito said. “What we do?”

“We get out.”

“You have the gun.”

“Ever hear the expression ‘bringing a knife to a gunfight’?”

“
Madre de Dios
. They going to kill us. Now what we do?”

“Just watch me,” I said. “And stay calm.”

We got out, hands in the air. The alarm Klaxon was still going, amplified by loudspeakers out here. The front of the house blazed with emergency lights. Another guard yelled something at me, and Benito translated: “He wants our hands on our heads. He wants us to, er, interlock?—interlace—our fingers.”

We obeyed his orders. We had no choice.

The same guard, obviously in charge, shouted something else.

“He sees the pistol tucked into your belt. He says if you lower your hands even a millimeter they will pump you full of lead.”

“Understood,” I said.

Benito translated, but he didn’t have to. They knew I wasn’t stupid enough to reach for my weapon in a situation like this. Not with four semiautomatic rifles pointed at me. The guy in charge barked an order, and another one of the guards strode up to me, the matte black muzzle right in my face. I could see the selector lever, on the left side of the receiver, pointed up to Fire.

I kept the fingers of my hands interlaced on top of my head. Benito was looking at me, eyes wild, trying to communicate without words. A warning, perhaps. Maybe he was afraid I’d do something foolish.

He didn’t know me well enough.

The guard circled around and stopped behind me. The lead guard shouted something, and Benito translated: “Keep your hands on your head. Keep your fingers interlaced.”

The three other guards slowly raised the barrels of their rifles to take aim at my head and chest. I could hear the slight scrape of the guard’s boots on the pavement behind me. Then I felt his hand brush against my side as he reached for the pistol.

But I reached for it first.

*   *   *

What happened next probably took only four seconds, but it seemed to go in slow motion.

I dropped my hands and yanked the Astra from my waistband. I pulled the slide and spun around and pointed the pistol at the guy. He obviously hadn’t expected that—a handgun versus an assault rifle? sheer lunacy—so it took him a beat to raise his rifle into position. I heard the guard in charge shout,
“Fuego!”
and they all squeezed their triggers almost in unison.

And nothing happened.

They kept trying to squeeze the triggers, but their weapons wouldn’t fire. There were loud, confused shouts, curses. But no gunfire.

Then I shouted, “Hands up! Hold your rifles up over your heads, all of you! Now!”

Benito, stunned, didn’t translate, but he didn’t need to. The guard nearest me squeezed the trigger again, tried to pull back on the charging handle, but that was frozen, too.

Meanwhile, I yanked the second pistol from my belt and tossed it to Benito, who caught it in midair, looking stunned.

“I said, hold your rifles in the air!”

Two of them, understanding their predicament though not exactly how it had happened, raised their rifles in both hands over their heads. Benito racked the slide on the pistol I’d just thrown him, pointed it at each guard in succession. The man I’d identified as the lead guard, quicker-thinking than the others, reached for his sidearm with his right hand. I shouted, “Freeze!”

He kept going for the pistol.

I took aim and fired.

The round hit the target neatly, creasing the outside of the leather holster, sending chunks of leather everywhere. He screamed, jerking his right hand away reflexively. Startled, he dropped his rifle.

The remaining holdout gave up any thought of reaching for his pistol. Instead, he held his rifle up in the air like the others. Benito wagged his gun like some desperado in an old western and shouted at the lead guy,
“Arriba las manos!”

“Get the cuffs,” I told Benito. “I’ll cover these guys.”

Swiftly he opened the ambulance driver’s side door with his left hand, reached inside, and grabbed a fistful of flexi-cuffs.

“On your knees!” I yelled to the guards.

They promptly obeyed.

“Cross your feet,” I said. “Keep your rifles above your heads.”

We worked quickly. I kept the Astra trained on the guards, moving it from one to another, while Benito quickly and efficiently cuffed them. He was good at it. He’d done this plenty of times before, in his previous career. He had them slowly place their rifles on the ground and put their hands back up. Both of us had our pistols pointed. When you’re on your knees with your feet crossed, your balance is extremely unsteady. It’s hard to make any sudden moves. He took each guy’s pistol from its holster, making sure their hands remained on top of their heads, fingers interlaced. Then he handcuffed them.

We returned to the ambulance and drove in silence to the front entrance. We could still hear the alarm sounding from the house, but this far away the sound was more muted. As we approached the closed gates, Benito groaned. We were both thinking the same thing: The guards had put Soler’s estate into lockdown, and now here was one more obstacle to getting out of the place alive.

But to our surprise, the gates swung open as we drove up to them. The ground-loop sensor embedded in the pavement, which automatically triggered the gates’ activation, hadn’t been shut off. Maybe the guards were expecting others to arrive and didn’t want to impede access. Or maybe they’d gotten cocky and didn’t think we’d get this far.

Whatever the explanation, we reached the street ten seconds later, the sirens bleating and the flashers going. Benito didn’t speak until we reached the Avinguda Diagonal.

“What happened back there?” he finally asked.

“I took precautions.”

“What the hell are you talking about? We were almost killed!”

“Not even close,” I said. I reached into the pocket of my white doctor’s coat and fished out a handful of metal spindle-like objects. I held open my palm for him to see. Each one was about three or four inches long and looked like a very thick knitting needle but with the flanged head of a pushpin. I jingled them for a few seconds. “These little jackrabbits won’t be spooking any dogs today.”

Slowly he began chuckling, his laugh growing steadily louder. “You bastard,” he said. “You removed the firing pins. When you said you were going to get the ‘defibrillator.’ But wasn’t the weapons cabinet locked?”

“Of course,” I said, and I produced the battery-powered lock pick from my medical bag.

Breaking down a rifle, removing the firing pin, and reassembling it takes a few seconds if you’ve done it before. And I have. Better, I figured, to leave the rifles there but hobbled than to hide them someplace and force the guards to resort to their fully functioning semiautomatic pistols. That way, their hands were occupied holding eight pounds of useless metal.

“You could have told me, you know. When I saw those rifles I almost wet my pants.”

“I would have enjoyed that.”

He squinted his eyes, unamused.

“Actually, I didn’t want to spoil the surprise.” Until it was too late, of course, I saw no reason to tell him. Then I didn’t have the opportunity. “I like to plan for the worst.”

“This is plan B?”

“No,” I said. “Plan A. Turns out we didn’t need plan B.”

“Remind me never to make an enemy out of you.”

“Never a good idea,” I said.

“You didn’t kill no one.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“No. It’s better.”

“But if we’d had to…?”

He was silent for a long time. He looked back at the unconscious or maybe semiconscious girl on the stretcher in the back. “She’s fifteen?”

I nodded.

“It is good thing Soler was not in the house.”

“How so?”

“Any man who can take away the innocence of a fifteen-year-old girl…” I was surprised by the quiet ferocity in his voice. “This is a man who needs killing.”

*   *   *

Benito had hired a private medical evacuation flight, an air ambulance run by a jet charter company in Barcelona. They made all the arrangements, preclearing passports with the Guardia Civil at El Prat Airport, in order to expedite matters. When there’s a medical emergency, the Guardia Civil can be extremely cooperative.

Benito helped us board the converted Learjet 35, which was equipped with a flight stretcher and IV equipment and was staffed by a small medical team, a paramedic and a nurse, even though I didn’t need them. The nurse, a young man, and the paramedic, a young woman, were both Spanish. Benito explained to them that I had the patient stabilized and would supervise her care. They seemed a little put off that their services weren’t required, but they obediently took seats in the aft section of the plane and watched sullenly, with nothing to do, clearly wishing they’d brought something to read or a Sudoku book or a deck of cards or something.

Benito gave me a quick embrace and a backslap. “You have my mobile number,” he said. “If you ever need my help again…”

I nodded and thanked him.

We were airborne twenty-five minutes later, en route to London. I sat next to the stretcher, where Svetlana was strapped in, face up. Her A-shirt had come up, exposing her belly, and I couldn’t help glancing.

What I saw sickened me.

Her abdomen was crisscrossed with raised red welts that looked like they’d been made by a rawhide whip or maybe an electrical cord. I could see that the long welts extended to her lower back, and probably to her buttocks as well.

She’d been beaten, savagely and repeatedly.

But the beatings weren’t recent. Some of the welts were deep red and had begun to fade. Some of them had turned into angry new scars. There were also bruises that had gone yellow and blue and purple, indicating that they were several days old, probably more than a week.

She’d barely been a prisoner at Soler’s house for forty-eight hours. These beatings had been administered long before that.

After a while Svetlana began to stir and make little noises. Her eyes came open briefly, then closed. Her face went through a series of expressions. She wrinkled her nose, frowned. Then she made a heaving, retching sound. I was there just in time with a kidney-shaped vomit bowl and a cool washcloth.

“Hey,” I said softly a few minutes later as I released her from the gurney’s restraining straps. “Feel any better?”

She sat up and glared at me. Her eyes looked a little out of focus.

“That’s probably just a reaction to the sedative,” I said. “I’m sorry we had to do that, but you weren’t exactly cooperating. You were scared. I can’t blame you.”

“Where…where am I?” she asked in English with a strong Ukrainian accent.

I told her my name again. “Your father hired me to get you out of Soler’s house.”

“You say you work for my…
father
?”

“I don’t work for him. I was hired by him to do this one job. In about two hours we’ll be landing at Gatwick Airport. You’ll be home. Not a prisoner anymore.”

“A
prisoner
?” she said. “I wasn’t a prisoner. I was finally safe!”

I spoke very softly. “I’m sure that’s what Soler wanted you to think.”

“Goddamn you!” Then she uttered a profanity that I hadn’t heard since the Special Forces. Not something I expected out of the mouth of a fifteen-year-old girl. “Was his name Vadim Kuzma?”

I looked at her.

“This man isn’t my father! Vadim Kuzma hired you to
kidnap
me!”

*   *   *

She must have suddenly gotten self-conscious about her thin cotton A-shirt and her welts and bruises, because she folded her arms across her chest. I handed her my ancient, well-worn commando sweater. Army issue. You couldn’t buy those anymore. Now they were made of acrylic and way too scratchy. She looked at the coarse ribbed wool, the shoulder and elbow patches, with distaste, as if it were some filthy rag I’d picked up off the street, but she pulled it over her head anyway. It pooled around her, made her look like a little girl playing dress-up on the floor of her daddy’s closet.

Except for her face. There was, I now saw, a cynicism, a jadedness in her eyes that she was far too young to have.

It took a good half an hour before I was able to convince her that it was safe to talk. She clearly lived in fear of Kuzma. I assured her that I had friends in the U.S. embassy in London who could arrange for her to return to Ukraine immediately.

“I ran away from home almost two years ago,” she said. “We lived in a village in Ukraine called Povvysoke, my mother and me, but I had to leave. I was…drowning. Suffocating. I found a job in Odessa as a waitress, dancing on tables at a bar, and then a man came one day and said I was beautiful and asked if I wanted to be a model. I could make thousands of pounds a day. What should I say?”