Penthouse Suite
Aquarius Resort
March 30
0430 hours
Before I even knew what I was doing, I punched the grating out of the vent below me, then swung through the hole and launched myself at Dane Brammage.
The first two steps of this process went surprisingly well. The grating fell out easily, and I swung through the hole with an agility I wasn’t even aware I had.
The third part didn’t go nearly as smoothly.
From the look on Dane’s face, I could tell that I had caught him by surprise. My whole plan was to slam into him, knocking him off-balance and keeping him from shooting Paul Lee. After that, I hadn’t really prepared anything. My plan was basically “Hope that Erica comes to my rescue.”
I slammed right into Dane, as intended, but I didn’t knock him off-balance. He was simply too big. Instead, he stayed firmly rooted to his spot while I glanced off him harmlessly and wound up sprawled on the dining table.
I did manage to scare Paul Lee half to death with this maneuver, though. As he was already severely stressed out, my sudden appearance pushed him over the edge. He screamed in terror and collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
Dane looked at me, his face muddied with confusion, as though he was trying to place where he’d seen me before while at the same time trying to grasp where I’d come from. This distraction was what kept him from shooting at Paul Lee, rather than anything I had done to him physically.
Joshua Hallal wasn’t nearly as thrown. “Ripley!” he yelled, quickly piecing together that 1) I wasn’t dead and 2) I’d been spying on him. He sprang from his seat and pointed his own gun toward me.
I was still flat on my back in the middle of the dining table, with nowhere to hide.
Luckily, Erica did come to my rescue. She punched out her own grating and swung through the hole, with even more finesse than I had done. She held on to the edge of the ventilation duct and drove her feet right into Dane’s face.
Even though Erica wasn’t any bigger than me, her attack was much more effective. Dane didn’t fall, but he did get knocked off-balance. He stumbled backward and slammed into Joshua, which might not have been too bad if Dane had been a normal-size person. For Joshua, however, it was like getting hit by a truck. He was bowled off his feet. And the shot he intended for me went wide, ricocheting off a decorative vase and shattering the window.
Joshua landed on the floor in a heap, a murderous glint in his eye. He still had his gun clutched in his hand, and he would have squeezed off another shot at me . . .
Had Erica not nailed Dane with a flying roundhouse kick to the face. The bodyguard’s musculature might have been impressive, but it also made him top-heavy. He had already been struggling to regain his balance from Erica’s first kick; the second now sent him reeling. He tripped over Joshua’s prone body and came crashing down right on top of Joshua himself.
Joshua barely had time to scream before he was flattened beneath Dane’s bulk.
Erica gave me a disdainful glare. Obviously, there was a lot she wanted to say to me, none of it good, but there wasn’t time for that. She raced to the end of the table, hoisted Paul Lee to his feet, and yelled, “Help me get him out of here!”
I rolled off the table and grabbed the other side of Paul’s body. Luckily, the arms dealer was even scrawnier than he looked; he didn’t weigh as much as several sixth graders I knew, and we were easily able to prop him up between us. He was still unconscious, so we had to drag him from the room together.
Behind us, at the other end of the table, Dane was struggling to get back to his feet. However, that wasn’t easy for a man built like a sequoia tree. Joshua Hallal was writhing around beneath him on the floor. “Get off of me, you idiot!” he shouted, although he was muffled beneath Dane’s mass, so it sounded more like “Bed offa knee, new bibbidit!”
Erica and I raced out the door and found ourselves in a gourmet kitchen, filled with an astounding array of appliances and cooking utensils, given that most people who stayed there probably just ordered their meals from room service. “Take Paul,” Erica ordered, then shifted all his weight to me and grabbed every blade out of the knife block.
Ahead of us lay the bedrooms. A door opened, and another bodyguard stormed out. This was the guy who I had seen on the balcony when we’d first arrived at the resort. He was built similarly to Dane, muscles on top of muscles. He had a gun in his hand—but only for a few seconds. Erica flung a carving knife at him that spiked his pajama sleeve to the wall and made him drop his weapon in surprise. She rapidly threw three more knives, pinning his other limbs to the wall, and then whacked him on the head with a waffle iron just for good measure.
Next to me, Paul Lee regained consciousness. “Am I still alive?” he asked blearily, and we hurried through the kitchen.
“Yes,” I told him.
“Oh good,” he said. “I’m not, er . . . a fan of being dead.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
Ahead of us, several more bedrooms, which probably all held enemy agents, lay between us and our escape route. So I took evasive action. A sliding door led out onto the wide patio that surrounded the penthouse. I shoved it open and dragged Paul through it.
Back inside, another bodyguard had emerged from a bedroom, but Erica quickly took him out with a well-aimed panini press.
A series of thumps and muffled yelps of pain from the dining room indicated that Dane was still trying to get back on his feet, to the great dismay of Joshua Hallal beneath him.
Out on the porch, the warm, humid air was a relief after the heavily air-conditioned penthouse. There was a profusion of potted plants arrayed around a private rooftop pool, Jacuzzi, and sundeck, as well as Ashley Sparks’s gymnastics equipment.
A fourth bodyguard came thrashing through the jungle of potted plants. This was the guy who’d been asleep on the balcony as we’d drifted over his head. He had been roused by the commotion and now looked groggy, embarrassed, and angry. He burst between two ficus trees behind us, preparing to open fire—
When Erica sailed through the sliding door and body-slammed him. The bodyguard tumbled into a large, exceptionally thorny cactus and howled in pain. He immediately forgot all about us and flailed about, trying to pry the prong-laden cactus sections from his body.
“Egad,” Paul Lee said. “That was, er . . . quite something.”
Erica took the gear bag she’d been hauling around off her shoulder and threw it to me. “Get harnessed up!” she ordered.
“Aren’t you coming?” I asked, with a lot more worry in my voice than I’d intended.
“I have something to deal with first.”
“What?”
A penthouse window shattered as a small, incredibly muscular body dove through it. The body curled into a ball in midair, flipped over twice, and stuck the landing.
“Her,” Erica answered.
Ashley Sparks was awake and ready for action. She stood between Erica and me, wearing spangled pajamas and a look of abject hatred.
“I should have known you jidiots wouldn’t have enough sense to stay dead,” Ashley sneered. Ashley had a thing for combining two words into one. “Jidiot” was “jerk” plus “idiot,” a favorite of hers—or at least one that she used for me an awful lot.
Ashley had her own personal fighting technique, an impressive combination of martial arts and gymnastics that rivaled even Erica’s prodigious skills. I knew I wouldn’t stand a chance against her, so I kept running, doing my best to pull Paul Lee along with me.
Erica attacked before Ashley could follow us. Ashley tucked into a defensive posture, deflecting Erica’s flying kick, and the two of them launched themselves into a fight that probably would have been extremely impressive if I’d had the time to stop and watch it. I didn’t, though.
As Paul Lee gained more and more consciousness, he was becoming harder and harder to move. His naturally skittish personality was returning, and he was now dragging his feet and flailing his arms. “Oh my,” he said. “What is . . . Are we . . . Who are . . . ?”
“I’m rescuing you,” I said, fearing that if I waited for him to actually finish a thought, I might die of old age.
“How?”
“I’m still working on that.” We stumbled past the end of the penthouse suite and arrived at the far end of the balcony. The fishing line that Erica had fired earlier stretched over the edge and angled downward, so thin it was almost invisible.
To the east, daylight was peeking over the horizon, providing just enough illumination for Paul and me to see exactly how big the drop over the balcony railing was. Ten stories, straight down into a large, wide concrete expanse.
I opened the gear bag and found a tangle of zip-line harnesses inside. I pulled one out and thrust it into Paul’s chest. “Get this on.”
“Oh no,” he gasped, realizing what I intended to do. “You can’t . . . I mean . . . we won’t . . .”
“It’s either this or staying behind,” I said, quickly slipping into my harness. Zip-lines had proven surprisingly useful in the spy game, and I could practically suit up for one in my sleep. “Your odds for survival are a lot better with me, though.”
“But . . . ,” Paul protested. “I . . . well . . . the thing is . . . Aaaaahhhh!”
His scream of terror came as a human form suddenly materialized from almost out of nowhere. Warren Reeves had emerged onto the patio. Or maybe he had been on the patio all along. With Warren, it was always hard to tell. His pajamas had blended perfectly with the brown stucco walls of the penthouse, allowing him to get the jump on us.
“Ripley!” he shouted. “You’re not going to thwart us this— Aaaaahhhh!”
His scream wasn’t one of terror so much as surprise and pain. In his haste to attack, he hadn’t noticed the fishing line stretched across his path. It caught him in the face and clotheslined him, knocking him flat on his back. His gun flew from his hand and sailed over the balcony railing, leaving him sprawled and helpless on the floor at my feet. His attitude instantly shifted from aggressive to cowardly. “Don’t hurt me!” he mewled.
Fighting had never been my strongest talent at spy school. In fact, I had been one of the worst in my class. But Warren had still been worse than me, inevitably getting the lowest grade. In Introduction to Self-Preservation, I had often tried to be paired with him so that I could make myself look a tiny bit better. Now I simply pulled out another zip-line harness and swaddled Warren with it, binding him like a tuna snagged in a fishing net.
Meanwhile, Paul Lee continued blathering beside me. “I can’t do . . . uh, this. . . . It’s . . . I mean, the splatting . . . I just . . . um . . .”
“Oh for crying out loud.” I grabbed the harness from him, whipped it around his shoulders, and clipped the carabiner over the line. It wasn’t anywhere close to the proper way to put the harness on, but I figured it would still work in the short term.
“What are you . . . ,” Paul yammered. “How dare . . . er . . .”
A shot rang out, and a sliding glass door near us instantly collapsed into shards. Dane Brammage was on his feet again and charging down the hall toward us, a gun clutched in his hand. For a man the size of a rhino, he moved with surprising speed.
There was no more time to listen to Paul Lee dither. I shoved him over the railing. The carabiner held tight, his harness cinched around him, and he skimmed down the fishing line, screaming the whole way.
I quickly locked my own carabiner over the line and leapt after him.
There was a sickening drop for a second as the line bowed under my weight. But then it yanked taut, and suddenly, I was racing down through the morning air behind Paul Lee.
As the day brightened around us, I could now see where we were heading. The line was at least a hundred yards long, and the spear at the end was embedded in the wall at the very top of the fake pyramid where the waterslides ran.
Although I was moving quickly, it still didn’t seem fast enough. The ground was disturbingly far below me, and there were lots of people who wanted me dead close by. I craned my neck around to look behind me, then immediately wished I hadn’t.
Dane Brammage was at the railing, aiming his gun my way.
And then he wasn’t. Something large clobbered him on the head. It looked vaguely like a potted geranium, but I couldn’t quite tell from my vantage point. Dane dropped out of sight, and then Erica sprang over him, hooked her own harness to the fishing line, and dove off the balcony.
The line jounced unnervingly as Erica’s weight hit it, but in front of me, Paul Lee was almost at the end, which meant I was almost down myself.
However, I now had to pass over the worst part: the shark tank. The enormous aquarium was several stories tall, wrapping around the fake pyramid, and to my dismay, it was open at the top, revealing dozens of large, torpedo-shaped bodies slicing through the water beneath me. Should the line have snapped then, I would have been breakfast.
Thankfully, it held. Ahead of me, Paul Lee reached the end of the line. Unfortunately, the man made no attempt to brace himself for the finish and simply smacked into the wall with a resounding thud. “Ouch!” he cried. “I mean . . . ow . . . er . . . oof.”
He also didn’t think to unclip himself so he could get out of the way before I arrived. I did my best to prepare myself, but I’d been expecting to hit a wall, not an arms dealer. I slammed right into him, producing yet another round of pained expressions.
I unclipped my carabiner and then Paul Lee’s. He immediately collapsed into a pile on the ground. “That was . . . I mean . . . ugh . . . I didn’t care for . . .”
“We’re still not safe,” I informed him.
As if to drive this point home, a few bullets pocked the temple wall close by. Dane Brammage was back on his feet on the balcony and had opened fire again. He was trying to hit Erica, but she was moving too fast for him to get a proper bead on. Eventually, Dane’s gun clicked empty, and, in frustration, he must have decided to simply take out Erica the old-fashioned way: by pummeling her. He unwrapped the harness I had bound Warren with, looped it over the fishing line, held on tight with both hands, and jumped.
His added bulk was enough to nearly rip the spear from the wall. It wobbled ominously, but held. Dane’s weight also made him move down the line much faster than any of us had, though. He quickly bore down on Erica like a freight train.
As Erica got closer, I saw that she hadn’t come through her battle with Ashley unscathed. She had welts and slashes on her arms and legs, and there was a smear of what might have been either blood or red glitter on her forehead. “Clear the way!” she shouted.
Paul Lee didn’t listen. He kept staring at her dumbly, still completely useless. I had to hook my hands under his armpits and yank him out of the way as Erica came hurtling in. She bent her legs for impact, jounced off the wall, unclipped her carabiner, and dropped to the ground, all within a second.
Dane Brammage was only ten seconds away.
Two other bodyguards arrived at the balcony. They had somewhat recovered from Erica’s attacks—one still had a piece of cactus jabbed in his scalp at a jaunty angle, while the other’s face was imprinted with a distinct waffle pattern—and they were desperate for revenge, guns clenched in their hands.
Erica pulled the fish-gutting knife from her utility belt. It glinted in the first rays of the sun.
Dane’s face furrowed in concern. It occurred to him that, in his haste to pursue Erica, he had made a terrible mistake.
Erica lifted the blade over her head and slashed through the fishing line.
It snapped and recoiled, whipping back toward the penthouse balcony with such force that it took out the two bodyguards. Meanwhile, Dane Brammage suddenly found himself hanging on to nothing but air. His momentum kept him sailing toward us—but he didn’t quite make it onto the ledge and plummeted into the shark tank below. He cannonballed so hard that a plume of water thirty feet high exploded out—along with one very startled young mako shark—drenching Erica, Paul Lee, and me. Down in the tank, the water churned, though whether this was the sharks attacking Dane or Dane attacking the sharks, I couldn’t tell. We didn’t have time to stick around to find out.
The two bodyguards had recovered—and the third one, who sported a large welt courtesy of the panini press, had joined them. They opened fire on us again.
There was only one way to go. I flung Paul Lee onto Montezuma’s Revenge before he could protest, then dove on after him. Erica came right behind us.
We rocketed down the flume, careening through the shark tank, which was roiling with activity. I thought I caught a glimpse of Dane punching a tiger shark in the face, but we were soon well past it, spinning through the corkscrew loops. Paul Lee screamed the whole way, until the floor suddenly seemed to drop out from under us and we plunged down into the pool of water at the bottom. All in all, as ways to escape professional killers went, it was rather fun.
Erica and I emerged from the water, dragging a spluttering Paul Lee between us, only to find two pool-maintenance workers staring at us in surprise.
“Um,” one said. “The rides aren’t open yet.”
“Sorry,” I said. “We just couldn’t help ourselves.”
Thankfully, the flume was designed so that the exit pool was on the opposite side of the fake temple from the penthouse, preventing the bodyguards from shooting at us anymore. We sloshed out of the pool and raced through the water park, once again dragging Paul Lee between us. The man was stubbornly refusing to be any help at all. By now, I was wearing out. My initial adrenaline rush had subsided, I had a stitch in my side, and my waterlogged shoes squelched with every step I took. But still, Erica and I pressed on, going as fast as we could, wanting to put as much room between us and SPYDER as we could.
This was the first time Erica and I had had a spare moment to talk since the dining room, and she promptly laid into me. “What the heck were you thinking?” she shouted as we ran past the wave pool. “This whole mission is toast!”
“We couldn’t just let him die!” I argued.
“Of course we could! He would have done the same to you!”
“Maybe not.”
“There’s no maybe here. The man is a scumbag. One less scumbag in the world would have been a good thing. And you just had to save him!”
A few different responses popped into my head. It seemed to me that saving anyone’s life, even a bad person’s, should have been the right thing to do. And maybe there was even something positive about rescuing Paul Lee: Perhaps the man could be of use to us, which would justify the risks we had taken. But I was too cowed and winded to make any serious arguments at the moment. All I could manage was “I’m sorry.”
We hustled past the wave pool and found ourselves back at the activity shack. Mike had returned the boat to the pier and had the engine idling. He gave us a wary look and shouted over the motor, “Did something go wrong?”
“No,” Erica shouted back. “Everything went wrong.”
A bullet ricocheted off a coconut tree ahead of us.
In the sky above us, the very parasail we had used to get to the penthouse was now drifting downward. Ashley Sparks and Joshua Hallal were harnessed into it, Ashley in front and Joshua behind. Apparently, they had BASE jumped from the roof. Joshua had a gun in his real hand, while steering with his robotic one.
If any of us had possessed a gun, they would have been easy targets. But we were unarmed. A machete was stuck in a stump close by, where some employee had been using it to husk coconuts, but a machete wasn’t much use against a gun. We had no choice but to take cover. On the wide expanse of beach, our only option was a rack of scuba tanks, laid out for an early-morning dive. Erica and I dove behind it while Paul Lee thumped face-first into the sand beside us and whimpered.
Joshua fired again. The bullet pinged off the metal tank by my head.
From the air, Ashley taunted, “Nice try, schmoozers!” which I figured was a combo of “schmucks” and “losers.” “But there’s nowhere to run! You’re screwed!”
Indeed, it seemed that we were. Joshua and Ashley would soon be in a position where they had a direct shot at us. Or, if Joshua simply hit one of the scuba tanks just right, it could explode and tear us all to shreds, since the air inside was under intense pressure. . . .
Which suddenly gave me an idea.
Before I could even think twice about it, I leapt from my hiding spot and raced the few steps toward the stump with the machete. Geysers of sand erupted as bullets hit the ground around me. I snatched the knife from the stump and doubled back, quickly calculating the angle of the tanks in the rack and the drift of the parasail.
Then, at just the right moment, I brought the blade down on the pressure valve of a tank.
The valve snapped off cleanly, and the air inside erupted through the hole. The tank took off like a rocket, blasting off from the rack and barreling right toward the parasail.
Ashley reacted a little faster than Joshua, unsnapping the straps that held her. She dropped from the chute just as the tank sailed right over her head . . .
And hit Joshua dead-on. It slammed into him with such force that it tore him right out of the parasail and carried him another several yards. He crashed down into a swimming pool and sank to the bottom.
Ashley dropped twenty feet to the ground and stuck the landing in the soft sand beneath a coconut tree. She watched what happened to Joshua, then wheeled on us with a murderous gleam in her eye. “You jidiots are going to pay for that!” she screamed.
Erica grabbed the machete from me and whipped it at Ashley. To my surprise, it sailed several feet over Ashley’s head, not coming anywhere near her, and thunked harmlessly into a lawn chair in the distance.
Ashley seemed equally surprised that Erica had missed her, and quickly found the most antagonistic response possible. “Ha!” she laughed. “Nice throw, loser! You missed me by a mile!”
“I wasn’t aiming at you,” Erica said coldly.
At which point, the clump of coconuts that she had been aiming at dropped out of the tree, their stems cleanly severed, and whacked Ashley on the head.
“Youch,” Ashley said—a combo of “yeow” and “ouch”—then passed out in the sand.
I turned to Erica, feeling rather pleased with myself. “That worked out pretty well.”
Erica glowered back. “Nothing about this mission has worked out remotely well at all, thanks to you. We still don’t know what SPYDER is up to, our element of surprise is gone, they’re on the hunt for us, and now we’re stuck with this blithering idiot.” She pointed accusingly at Paul Lee.
He lifted his head from the sand and said, “Well now . . . I, uh . . . you see . . .”
“Shut up,” Erica told him, then grabbed the collar of his shirt and yanked him to his feet. “Come on. We need to get to safety, fast.” She looked to Mike and nodded.
He saluted her, threw the motorboat into gear—and then inexplicably leapt onto the pier, allowing the boat to speed away across the ocean without any of us in it.
I gawked at this, then turned to Erica, so astonished that I practically became Paul Lee for a moment. “Wait . . . we’re not . . . um . . . uh . . . we’re not taking the boat?”
“I’d have thought that was obvious,” Erica said.
“Then where are we going to hide?” I asked.
“The last place they’ll ever think to look,” Erica replied.