LEO STEERED THE SPEEDBOAT in tight to the concrete pilings, ten feet under the docks. The outboard under its rubber cowl burbled gently as it pushed us forward through the darkness at a half knot. The cloud cover was so low I could have spiked it like a volleyball.
We’d agreed that the open dock was the best insertion point for the heavily fenced BerPac yard. I stood up on the starboard bow. When we were ten yards shy I held up a hand. Leo eased off on the throttle. Before the boat could drift I jumped high and grabbed the support beam with gloved fingers.
Under me I heard the outboard’s growl deepen as Leo nudged it into reverse. I began to make my way in the opposite direction, toward BerPac. Left hand, right hand, left hand. Like the obstacle course at Benning, only with more splinters and the possibility of getting shot at the end.
The fence between the yard next door and BerPac extended out from the concrete dock over the water. I had to hook the toe of my boot through the chain-link, and reach to get my fingers on it. Very slowly. The metal rattled softly with my weight, and the fence pipes creaked. At least there was no razor wire. I climbed around the fence edge, biceps stretched to the limit with the strain of moving like a sloth.
On the other side now. I got hold of the concrete lip of BerPac’s dock, took a big inhale, and hauled myself up, behind the stunted pyramid of the articulated crane’s base. I lay on the concrete and looked around.
Nothing and no one on the dock. No cameras on this side. No motion sensors on the exterior lights. Just three lamps along the building wall and a whole lot of lovely shadows. I hunched low in one of the pools of black.
The boat was tied back in its place, down at the bottom of the dock ladder. Through the dim, I could see something at the rear of its cockpit that hadn’t been there before. A long rectangular crate, six feet by three by three, like a casket for an especially fat corpse. Too small to hold the Tovex cases, unless they had unpacked and repacked all of the water gel tubes into the crate. I didn’t have the tools or the time to open it and find out.
And I had a different priority now. Where was she?
Light shone weakly from two windows in the building. One upstairs, one down. The windows were placed high, intended to maximize sunlight more than allow any view of the outdoors. Nothing moved inside to interrupt the light.
I took the Glock from my jacket pocket and ran along the chain-link to the corner of the building. The room revealed itself through the window degree by degree as I edged closer. It was an office area with messy desks and filing cabinets and no people at all. The opposite door was open to the far room.
I could see the side of a chair through the door. And a woman’s leg, a long calf in gray pants and short black pumps
There was a second window farther along the near side of the building, light beaming out onto the fence. I went around the corner toward it. A stubby length of dowel rod propped the window open an inch. I waited. No sound came from inside.
I peered through the glass panes. Elana lay slumped in the chair, her back to me, with only a patch of dyed black hair visible. The chair was tall and upholstered in brown leather, out of place in the empty, crude space of what looked like BerPac’s garage. Elana’s head lolled to the side. I watched her for a few heartbeats. She might have been breathing. But her hand hung slackly from one wooden arm of the chair, and her legs were splayed without grace. A painful sprawl. She would wake bruised and sprained in half a dozen places. If she woke at all.
Drugged. Or so exhausted she might as well be.
A rustle-thump of movement. Upstairs. Were all of the men up there?
I waited. No one came into the room.
Could I get her out? There was the door to the office area I’d seen. The big garage door to the front was closed and locked. One more open passage out into what looked like a hallway, where the stairs must be. I tested the window. It swung easily on its hinges with only a tiny tick of sound.
I hoisted myself up and gently set a boot on the windowsill. Listened again. I sat on the sill and dropped into the room.
Elana had not stirred. There was another brush-step of sound from the floor above. Then only the lengthy, even wave-beat of Elana’s breath.
In three steps I was beside the chair. Her face was so relaxed that her jaw hung loose, with her wide bottom lip half an inch off center. I checked her eyes. Her pupils were a fraction too wide to be normal. I could sling her over my shoulder and go out the back to the dock. Signal Leo, or swim with her limp body to the opposite shore, if I had to.
Motion behind me, reflected in her unseeing jade iris.
I spun, raising the Glock. Made it halfway before the Taser barbs hit me.
Every muscle from my scalp to my toes seized in anguish. It was like being simultaneously crushed in a vise and torn apart by horses. My lungs were desperate to scream but unable. My last clear vision was of the hard case’s brutal face, twisted in triumph, in the hallway door. In the next instant I was slammed to the cement floor so hard that the world went very far away.
The worst effects of a heavy electrical shock wear off quickly, if you survive. I was just rounding the moon and coming back to Earth when I heard Reuben K’s merry laugh.
“Hit him again,” he said.
And I was long, long gone on a rocket of agony.