The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) (22 page)

Locke started the car.

“Watching the signal move right now,” Wulf continued.

Luc had leaned forward to hear, and Locke was already passing slower drivers to reach the entrance to the E314 autoroute.

“Moving fast, straight line. They’re flying.”

No matter how fast Locke pushed his high-powered engine, they weren’t catching Christina in a car.

“Tracking north by northwest.”

“Out of Antwerp, that’s likely to be private aviation.” Since eighty percent of the world’s rough diamonds passed through the Belgian city, Stig knew the airport well.

“The speed and line confirms they’re in the air. Fact that they’re not too high for cell towers says rotary, not fixed wing. Shorter range, but below air control radar.”

“What else do you have?” Wulf wasn’t providing enough to find her.

“Car’s registered to a corporate successor to Black and Swan. Unferth’s old company.” Wulf’s voice betrayed no emotion, but after seeing what Unferth had done to Wulf’s brother, Ivar, Stig didn’t need to be sitting across from Wulf. He could imagine the other Viking’s ice-cold eyes, because his own emotions were so frozen at the thought of Christina in Leif’s hands that he would never thaw.

“Leif’s in charge now. He gave me forty-eight hours. I have to call at noon tomorrow.”

“My contacts are getting the flight plan they filed in Antwerp, although it’s undoubtedly a lie, but we’ll have the tail number. We’re pulling satellite pings as we can. The picture’s coming together.”

“Not fast enough,” Stig prodded.

“I’m wheels up from Manhattan in an hour. The jet will divert to the closest airport as the situation develops. My gut says they’re heading somewhere north, remote and private. Ideas?”

“The North Sea.” Locke’s voice was steady from the driver’s seat. “Black and Swan had a subsidiary that bid for decommissioning and environmental work on tapped-out drill platforms.”

“Who the fuck is that?” Wulf asked over the mobile connection. “What’s he know about Black and Swan?”

“He used to work for Black and Swan,” Stig answered. “Now he’s on my team.”

Locke had said that Unferth and Leif had killed his wife. He and Thomas might have many skills in common, but if Loki wanted a devoted servant, that loss was a similarity he and Thomas didn’t need to share.

Porkchop barked.

“Thor’s hammer, that’s a dog.” Wulf had to yell to be heard over the dog. “Sounds like a little one. What the hell are you doing?”

“His size is inversely proportional to his abilities as an attack animal. Like my demo man. Small guy, big boom.”

Luc gave him a thumbs up between the seats. Stig ignored how the digit trembled back and forth.

“Fine. I’ll bring plenty for him to work with. This time we’re going to blow them so high the Wild Hunt will wish they had windshield wipers.”

Chapter Twenty

If she lived through this, Christina vowed never to ride in a helicopter again. Hiding in her apartment for the rest of her life would be a good plan. Only the guy in charge and the car’s driver had joined the pilot, so they could have belted her to one of the four seats. Instead they’d thrown her on the floor of the helicopter’s cabin and left her to roll into their legs whenever they changed direction or height.

Maybe the pilot wasn’t demonstrating slalom skiing. Maybe the side-to-side movement was caused by the dark clouds and sheeting rain. Past her head was a door, more like a bus door than a car, because it had glass panels above and below a center crosspiece. Even from the floor she could see out to the gray-black water below. Impossible to tell how high they were above the surface of the featureless water. It might be the English Channel, or whatever the body of water between the Netherlands and Great Britain was called this far north.

She closed her eyes, fighting to settle her stomach enough to think. Wherever they were taking her, the flight was the place where she had the best odds. The pilot couldn’t hurt her while he flew. For an instant in the hangar she’d thought he wanted to help her, so there were only two men she’d have to overcome. Both of them wore safety harnesses holding them in place while she—if she could control her legs and balance, despite the pitching and shuddering—was free to maneuver.

Anything she tried had to be soon.

She let the helicopter’s motion roll her until her body concealed her hands and purse. After being tied for so long, her fingers struggled with the clasp, but she finally opened it and located her corkscrew. She didn’t need to see the folding tool to know the nicks in the oak handle and the dull gleam of the matte steel-finish foil-cutter and spiral screw. Since her stepfather had given it to her on her sixteenth birthday, this wine opener had never left any purse she carried. The gold-embossed logo of the Mancini Brothers winery had worn away, as gone as Big Frank, but maybe his gift could save her life.

She pictured her actions with the method she’d used in gymnastics. Visualize her moves in order, leg positions, arm positions and location of center of mass. Nail them in her mind, then execute. The sharpened spiral spike wasn’t long enough to penetrate all the way to a key organ, except maybe at a man’s windpipe, so an eye would be her best choice.

She flicked the corkscrew to the maximum point of its hinge. Her life or his. She bunched like a spring, hands under her body with the corkscrew facing down, took a deep breath and then she pushed upright while raising her weapon. Straight at the guy in charge.

With her full weight backing her thrust, the worm screw went in her target more easily than she’d expected, all the way until the bottom edge of her linked fists slammed into the bony ridge of his eye socket. Light-colored goo spurted from the eye, followed by blood. Blood gushed on his face and her hands and wet dots sprayed her cheeks as he yelled louder than the roar of the helicopter.

She must be screaming too, because her mouth was open and her chest heaved, but she didn’t have time to fall apart.

She yanked on her weapon at the same time the helicopter floor bucked, knocking her off balance and preventing her from putting any force into her pull.

He grabbed her forearm to lock her next to his seat while she struggled to remove the corkscrew from his eye socket.

Then the other man, the one she hadn’t stabbed, wrapped an arm around her shoulders and tried to pry her off the man in the chair. Not the way she wanted to go, not without her weapon.

Like the hospital laundry chute, she used her thighs to push. Because she was small, she could lift her legs and plant her shoes on the chest of the man whose eye she’d punctured. She pushed hard with her legs and simultaneously pulled her arm to escape his hold.

The corkscrew popped out, his grip broke, and she and the man behind her went flying across the small cabin. Linked together, they hit the wall next to the door. Her feet scrambled for purchase on the vibrating side of the helicopter. She kicked out and down as hard as she could, trying for leverage.

Something moved under her sole.

The door popped open.

Rain and wind slashed her in the face. The gale filled her ears, and knives of cold and wet tore at her. An alarm blared in the chaos.

The man screamed in her ear. They were going to fall out.

The floor shifted, the opening suddenly forty-five degrees above her as if the pilot realized what had happened and banked or turned to tumble them away from the opening.

Now they were both on the floor. The man’s arm dropped away and she could breathe, great gasps of freezing wind that filled her chest with pain. Her shoulder burned where she’d hit the floor, unable to break her fall. The bolted legs of an empty seat filled her vision.

The helicopter dipped again, the wrong way, as the maelstrom outside sucked at her, but she jammed her bound hands between the seat struts. Her arms went as deep as her elbows, and her fingers found a protruding piece of metal, a sort of handle or cleat.

Desperate hands scrabbled at her clothes, yanking, but she kicked out. The man locked on to her waist, his weight heavier than her arms could support. Her shirt rode up and the pebbled metal floor abraded her skin as she was pulled from the seat that anchored her. Water everywhere. Water made her shoes slide as she tried to dig her toes into the floor.

“Leif!” the man clutching her shouted. “Leif! Help me!”

For the extended second that the plea hovered in the air, her gaze fused with the single eye of the man in charge. Leif. He was laughing, lips pulled back to show his feral teeth and his tongue hanging out of his mouth like a coyote. He would let his own man die for amusement.

Her arms and spine stretched as if she was a human rope extending inch by inch from the weight of the man clutching her waist. Her arms were nearly numb from being bound for an hour, and her shoulders wouldn’t hold much longer.

She wanted to live. Anger beat down her fear and gave one more burst to her legs. She would live. Kicking was useless, so she lifted her right knee sideways, sliding it along the deck. More than anything, she didn’t want to go out that door. She tucked her bent leg as high as she could and pushed it back and up, not managing as much force as a forward press, but unexpected. His right arm lost contact with her waist. She bucked and kicked backward again, and then suddenly all his weight was gone.

She didn’t even hear a scream.

Her shoulders popped with relief. Spread flat on the floor, she had no idea what to do next, but she knew this fight wasn’t finished when she lifted her gaze to the remaining man.

He was unbuckling his harness.

She drew her knees underneath her body, ready to stand, but he grabbed her hair and yanked—that hurt, hurt worse than her shoulders or hands. Her wrists scraped into the metal struts under the seat and she couldn’t hold on.

He lifted and slammed her into a seat, snapping the harness across her lap and chest even though her bound arms didn’t fit in their spots. The whole time he worked, he had his body braced between the seats, far from the open door. He was too careful.

Her hands remained tied in front. As soon as her captor fastened the buckle, he closed another zip tie to link her restraint to the seat belt so that even if she unlatched the release, she’d remain attached to the loosened strap unless she broke the plastic.

Although the air cutting through the open door froze her face and chest, leftover warmth from the ejected man’s body cradled her back, a live demonstration of how little time had passed.

The man whose eye she’d destroyed gripped her chin, his face a foot from hers. Nothing fresh oozed from the mangled mess left in the socket. The blood had darkened and crusted into chunks closer to his former eye and smears down his face and chin. Red had soaked the front of his blue sweater, darkening it, and spatters marked his collar and cuffs. She hadn’t realized an eye would bleed that copiously. Maybe she’d hit much deeper. But then he should be dead.

His grip tightened, shifting her lower jaw out of alignment and squeezing at the joints until she knew she must be moaning, but she couldn’t hear over the pain screaming from the hinge of her jaws straight to her ears. He immobilized her head and forced her face directly in front of his ravaged eye socket.

“Watch.” She couldn’t hear over the wind and engine roar filling the small cabin, but she read the shape of the word on his lips.

What happened was like a slow-motion video of a flower growing. First a tiny bud of red threadlike veins and quivering gel formed, then it grew until a larger bud pulsed in the cavity where he’d once had an eye.

Stig hadn’t been joking. All those comments, his story about being immortal, the quips about healing, the gunshot, the broken neck—all of it had been true. The knowledge hit her hard in her stomach, another blow in a day of agony.

Her captor brought his pair of matching blue eyes within inches of her face. She smelled blood and sour breath, old and stale, even though his skin looked young. At this distance she could hear every word he said.

“You don’t know what we are, do you?” When he laughed, the dried blood on his cheek cracked in fine lines like a sunbaked puddle. “Stig used you and fucked you but he didn’t trust you enough to tell you who we are.”

Stig had told her.
She’d
failed, not him. She’d been too cynical to trust the evidence of her own eyes or to believe what he’d tried to share.

They flew another twenty minutes with the door open and the cold gnawing her to the bone. She guessed they were flying almost due north, maybe a little bit west, because for a while there had been a hint of orange at the edge of the sea to her left. Now that line of orange was gone. No stars above through the clouds, no lights below on the water, total dark.

Her watch said another twenty minutes had passed when she saw the speck of light on the horizon. The pit of her stomach told her that was their destination, and it wasn’t land. It wasn’t anywhere that she could signal out a window or run away, because on all sides the unending black of the sea merged into the black of the sky.

The light multiplied into a cluster of small lights, but she couldn’t tell whether they were heading for a ship or an island. Then, as if a switch had flipped, the few lights became many. A giant white letter H in a circle showed below the open door. Not H for help. H for helipad. There was enough illumination to show her the steel trusses of two cranes and the stacked squat tower of prefabricated building modules crouching at one end of the tablelike structure, looking so unbalanced that she wondered if the entire setup would flip into the water.

The helicopter settled over its target, an offshore oil platform. No one would find her. No one, not even Stig, would be able to rescue her. The metal walls and floor shuddered as wind buffeted the hovering coffin, but finally they landed.

Leif pulled her out by her bound wrists. She stumbled to the concrete deck, wanting to avoid falling into him but unable to center her feet under her body with her hands immobilized and stretched in front of her body.

He yanked on her arms, then released to let the forward momentum carry her straight into his chest as if he’d intended it. His hands caught her, one grabbing her breast and the other on her shoulder.

She reacted instinctively the way Manny had drilled into her since he was a tough thirteen-year-old, taller than his big sister and trying to be the man of their two-person family. She thunked the hard part of her head into his chest, and then slammed her knee upward as fast as she could.
One-two, buckle my shoe.

Her brother’s tricks worked for an instant. Leif grunted and let go.

She pivoted to run, but then her head jerked back so hard her feet almost skidded out on the wet concrete. She chuffed a painful breath out her open mouth, only pride keeping her from squealing once for each hair she knew she was losing.

“You’re a fast bitch. Are you this quick in bed, hmm?” His voice was so close to her ear she thought she might be ill, but she swallowed the acid. No weakness, and throwing up would show weakness. “Stig will want you returned in one piece, won’t he?”

Leif rotated her by using his grip on her hair. As soon as she made it out of here, she was cutting it. Too damn many men had used her hair to control her. She was done with it.

“Sir?” The pilot had a clipboard in a plastic cover in his hand. The white floodlights and streaming rain made all three of them look like stills from a black-and-white movie. What part was he, the extra? His mouth was partially open as if he wanted to ask a question but wasn’t sure. His gaze went from her hands to Leif’s grip in her hair.

She put all the pleading she could muster into her half-open mouth and big eyes.

The pilot must know one less passenger arrived here than departed Antwerp, that one of the men had fallen out in a struggle and that she’d been kidnapped. “Sir, may I ask—”

“I don’t pay you to ask questions.” Her captor snarled, and in the distraction his hand loosened and she stumbled back, temporarily out of his reach. A few more steps, maybe she could turn and run. Over the side might be better than staying.

Who was she kidding? Her hands were tied. She’d last thirty seconds in the storm waves.

“I don’t know why I pay you.” Then her captor had his gun in his hand.

“No! Don’t!” she cried.

He ignored her. “You ask more questions than people on my payroll should.”

One boom, then the pilot’s clipboard fell to the gray concrete deck. He tried to look at his chest and lift his arms at the same time, but his torso jerked and twitched and he couldn’t seem to connect the motions. He stumbled backward until the side of the helicopter stopped him. Rain had soaked his dark-colored windbreaker, so the only change she could see on his chest was a small tear in his jacket. But his face slackened in a way that told her his body and his mind were pulling apart before he slid to the ground wordlessly.

Leif turned to her. His grip was like a set of pincers, painful and sharp, and his weapon dangled low at his side in his other hand. “Are you happy that I shot him?”