I had never seen any of those men, but Mary seemed to know the red-faced one.
“Well, well, well, look who’s here,” said Red-Faced, smirking. “Mary Payne in person. Well, well, well.”
Mary stared at him but didn’t speak. He nodded to the others, and they pushed us at gun point into the living room, where they made us sit on the floor and then tied our hands behind our backs using the cords they ripped from the curtains. They made it tight, and it hurt. Tom had unloaded Vlad unto the couch, but they pushed him down to the floor. They hadn’t bothered tying him up, and he lay there, motionless. Interestingly, they didn’t inquire after Ugly or Uglier.
From time to time, Red-Faced went to the window, pushed the curtain aside, and gazed out. They didn’t speak to us or to one another. At last, Mary spoke.
“Victor!” she called, and Red-Face turned away from the window and said “What?”
“What do you want? Why are you here?”
“You know better than to ask questions,” said Victor.
“I didn’t know that you were involved in this. What are you going to do with us?”
“It’s not for me to decide. When the boss comes, we’ll know. But honestly, I wouldn’t make long-term plans, if I were you,” he said, again with an ugly smirk that sent a shiver along my spine. Then, he returned to his window watching.
I closed my eyes and probed Mary’s mind. She knew this Victor, but hadn’t expected him to be there. He belonged to a private organization that was obviously working for a third party, who had an interest in Vlad. Apparently Vlad was hot merchandize, and not on account of his looks. The thought that Mary was having on all this were too complex, and frankly not sufficiently interesting for me to follow. What I really needed to find out was how real the danger to us was. According to Mary, we were done for. Victor was a killer, and the images that ran in her head went from us slaughtered one by one with a blunt knife, to a liquidation mob style, with a bullet in our heads. Not a pretty picture either way.
Tom stirred and gazed in my direction. “You should do what you did to me,” he murmured conspiratorially.
“Quiet! No talking!” Victor barked.
I knew what he meant, and he was right. It wasn’t going to be easy, but I was our only hope to survive. If Mary was right, we probably didn’t have much time. I closed my eyes and got into the head of the slim guy. I don’t know why he came more naturally to me than trying with Victor. His mind was sort of blank and uninteresting. He was following a beetle that walked slowly along the window sill, and it appeared to absorb all his attention. A perfect subject for me, but I had to get it right the first time because there would not be a second chance. I took control of his body—I was still amazed at the ease with which I could do it, but that wasn’t the right time for introspection. I gazed down at the machine gun he was holding in his hands, and, judging by the little red dot near the safety catch, it was ready to fire. I made him walk slowly toward us, and then he turned toward his partners. The terror in the mind of the slim guy was the worst thing that I had ever experienced, but I didn’t have the time to dwell on it. I lifted the gun so it pointed in the direction of the other two.
“Hey, idiot! Be careful with that gun, it’s loaded!” Victor yelled.
I must confess that doing what I did was the most difficult thing that I had to do in my life, at least until then. Up to that moment, I wasn’t sure that I would be able to pull the trigger and didn’t know what I would do if I couldn’t bring myself to pull it. I had trained with guns in basic training, but then I had aimed at “cardboard dudes”. These here were real people and, to keep going, I had to remind myself how bad they were, and that unless I did it, we would end up like those images in Mary’s mind.
The slim guy tried to resist but didn’t stand a chance. Slowly, making sure that the gun was still pointed in the right direction, I made him pull the trigger, letting out a burst of bullets and at the same time making a sweeping motion from left to right. It hit Victor and the other one several times, and they dropped to the floor, an expression of disbelief on their faces.
I made the slim guy throw the gun to the floor and then approach Tom.
“I’ll make him untie you,” I said without opening my eyes.
“Great job!” Mary exclaimed. “I need to learn how you do that.”
I had to give it to her: if she was unfazed by what she had just witnessed, she had to be something special. Everybody else would have freaked out on the spot.
“It was you, right? You made it happen …” she asked.
I made a dismissive motion with my head and didn’t answer. I needed to concentrate. Through the slim guy’s eyes, I saw the knots that held Tom’s hands together and forced him to fumble with them until they finally came lose, and Tom was able to finish untying himself. He got to his feet, retrieved Victor’s gun, which had landed behind the couch when the bullets hitting his body had jerked it out of his hands. Tom stood there, facing the slim guy, with his finger on the trigger, looking undecided, as if he was waiting for something to happen. I worried that Tom might shoot him while I was still controlling his body. I didn’t know what would happen to me, and perhaps I wouldn’t be able to get out in time. I also didn’t want to find out how it feels to die, or whether the physical effect would transfer to my body, as had happened with Liv’s knee, and then I might die too.
Keeping control of somebody else and speaking through my own mouth at the same time is incredibly difficult, so I just spurted, “I’m gonna let go of him,” and then I did. “I’m out,” I said, and without hesitation Tom leveled the gun and shot him in the chest. The slim guy dropped to the floor, and Tom rushed to untie me and then Mary. She got up, took a sweeping look around the room, which now looked like a slaughterhouse, and then remained in silence for a few seconds.
“Guys,” she said, “I don’t know who you are, but I want you on my side. You’ll have quite some explaining to do, to make me understand, when we have a moment to breathe, but for the time being, let’s get the hell out of here.”
“Good idea,” I agreed. “How’s Vlad? He wasn’t hit, I think.”
“No, he’s okay,” said Tom, and, without any apparent effort, he lifted him up again over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes.
“Don’t you want to wait and see who their boss is?” I asked. “And why do you figure they never worried about the two Uglies in the basement? And what will happen when someone reports to the authorities what happened here?”
Mary stopped massaging her wrists, which she had been doing until then, and pouted her lips.
“One question at a time, okay? First of all, I know who Victor’s boss is. He’s a mercenary who used to work for a certain agency, not one of the good guys, and I want no part of him. So no, we shouldn’t wait for him. You are better off not knowing more about him and about those pieces of meat that we left on the floor. The ones in the basement come from Vlad’s side and the others are independent. Different parties.”
Mary was holding her purse while speaking, and that reminded me of something.
“Wait a second. What would a small, green cylinder with a screw-on cap be?” I asked.
“Why are you asking?”
“There is one in your purse. Look inside.”
Mary fished in the purse, and her hand came out holding the green cylinder.
“How on earth did this get in here?” she cried, clearly surprised.
“Your secretary, Jason, gave it to you … or at least he thought he was giving it to you. Long story.”
“Jason is priceless. This solves my dilemma about what to do with those two. The gas inside this cylinder is a neat little thing based on an amnesia-inducing drug. If you are exposed to it, gone are your memories of the last 24 hours or so. All you have to do is unscrew the cap and get away in ten seconds before it discharges the gas, and bang!
“This is rich. When the police eventually gets here, they’ll find three goons who appear to have had a fight and killed one another, and two clueless foreigners bound and gagged in the basement. They’ll have a nice puzzle on their hands,” she said, now smiling with satisfaction. “Give me the key to the basement, and I’ll do that in a minute.”
She left, and we waited, with me trying not to look at the dead goons until she returned. “Done,” she said, and without further discussion we walked out.