PUERTO TRIUNFO, COLOMBIA
CARLOS BELIEVED IN the power of myth. He allowed everyone to think he traveled the world, skipping from one safe house to another, never sleeping in the same room twice. To his underlings, rivals, and enemies, he was the man who could be literally anywhere.
Carlos sincerely doubted he would inspire such fear and respect if they knew most of his world consisted of a couch and a flat-screen TV.
He lived in the same villa outside Cartagena, Colombia, where he had spent much of the past two hundred years. It had been renovated and rebuilt a dozen times, so that now it was a fully modern palace with thirty-six rooms, a helipad, and an Olympic-size pool. Not that Carlos had seen much of it. He lived full-time in his own bedroom on one of the upper floors.
He had once been the skinniest and fastest of the conquistadors, his body like a knife blade honed by his constant fencing practice. Now he weighed close to four hundred pounds. He had been a blurring-swift terror in a fight, able to duel three or more opponents at once. Now he lumbered from the couch to the bathroom to the bed. The Water had kept him alive despite literal decades of gluttony, but it couldn’t keep him thin.
When he was a boy, there was never enough to eat. He was well-off by the standards of the time. He never starved. He never suffered from the famines and shortages the same way that the peasants did. (Sometimes Carlos reflected on how much things changed. “Peasant” used to be a simple statement of fact. Now it was an insult.) But he was always hungry. There was never enough food to be truly full. To be truly sated. He was so skinny because he burned with nervous energy. It made him fast, but it also left him feeling empty much of the time.
To him, the greatest wonder of the new world was how much there was to eat. All it cost was money. It would have shocked and amazed these soft moderns to learn that once there was a time when it didn’t matter how much gold you had if there was a bad harvest. There were limits back then. There were things money could not buy.
Not anymore, though. He could have anything he wanted. Food from literally all over the world, any kind of meat or fish or sweet or cake. All it took was money. And he had plenty of that. People gave it to him in bales that filled shipping containers for the powder he harvested from the coca fields. It still seemed like a sin to him, to waste all that good land on drugs. But not so much of a sin that he turned it back into farmland. After all, nobody would pay him nearly as much for corn.
So, without any restraints on his time or his appetites, he stayed home and ate, while his myth did the hard work of maintaining discipline in his empire, in the world.
That was enough for Carlos. He had seen the world. He’d seen enough of it.
When Simon first told them, “I have a way you can live forever,” Carlos leaped at it, like they all did. It wasn’t until much later that he realized no one ever asks themselves why they would want to live forever. As a young man, with a limited imagination and not much more experience, he thought it would be an endless pursuit of pleasures—a constantly renewed menu of all the little joys that make life worth living. But he found, after the first century of his life ticked over, even pleasures could grow dull.
While some of the others, like Simon, were happy to keep running in place with the endless changes of days and weeks and years, Carlos found it all too tedious. There was just so much trivia. What clothes to wear with the changing fashions. What language to use, as the influence of nations rose and fell. (He’d once spoken French for diplomacy, German for business, and English as little as possible. He was not going to learn Mandarin now, not at his age.) He’d traveled by ship, by train, and by airplane, and endured the thousand little indignities that seemed to survive no matter how advanced the methods of transport.
To live forever, you have to have something to live for, Carlos realized, far too late. Simon lived for his dream of a conquered world. Max lived for Simon. Sebastian lived for the next woman, Peter the next challenge, and each sustained his brother in the low times. Aznar lived to kill.
As for Carlos, all he wanted now was to be comfortable. Aside from a few trusted lieutenants and his servants, no one knew how fat and slow he’d become, distorted and made grotesquely huge by a constant train of food brought to him on serving platters day and night.
Of course, there had been one occasion when one of those trusted lieutenants thought all the flab had made Carlos soft. The man’s name was Emilio, and he arranged for a hit squad to enter the villa and kill the bodyguards he hadn’t been able to bribe.
Carlos had heard the gunshots from below while watching “The Slugger Attack” at 3:00 A.M., snared from Taiwan by his satellite dish. If he’d been watching Die Hard or Lethal Weapon—they were his favorites—he might not have heard a thing. But he had the sound down low because he didn’t understand the language anyway.
He heaved himself from the leather couch as fast as he could. Which was not very fast. His brow popped with sweat at the unaccustomed exertion, and he’d made it only a few steps toward his gun cabinet when the door burst open and the first assassin rushed in.
The hit man’s eyes were wild and he immediately fired a three-round burst from the H&K he carried, hitting Carlos right in the chest.
He probably thought he’d just killed the king, which was why he let out a whoop and raised his arms—including the one with the gun—into the air in triumph.
Only Carlos had not fallen down.
Carlos’s bulk was wrapped around a still-small frame. The bullets had plowed into an ocean of flesh without hitting anything vital. The Water went to work at once, closing off blood vessels and rebuilding damaged tissue.
By the time Carlos got his gun, the bleeding had almost stopped. The assassin gaped the entire time, unable to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Carlos aimed carefully and fired twice with a long-barreled Magnum .44. (He also loved Dirty Harry movies.)
He hit the assassin in his legs, shattering both, knocking the man to the floor.
The would-be killer was slipping rapidly into shock and would have bled to death, but Carlos didn’t allow that to happen. Emilio’s other hired guns made their way up the stairs just in time to see Carlos finish clubbing him to death with his massive fists.
Carlos again heaved himself to his feet and faced the gunmen. They looked down at the fragments of their companion’s skull on the tiled floor.
Then they looked at the wound on Carlos’s chest, which finished sealing itself shut right in front of their eyes.
They screamed like children. Carlos had to admit he was quite pleased and flattered by the sound.
They fired their weapons indiscriminately, pure panic causing them to spray bullets around the room like water from a hose. They managed to hit him only twice more before he lined up his shots and fired, killing them all.
Carlos moved slowly but steadily to the locked safe where he kept the Water. He left bloody fingerprints on the combination dial but got it open without too much trouble. The jug— perfectly sealed to prevent evaporation—sat in a specially cooled chamber behind the heavy door. He cracked it open and took a long swig: more than six months’ supply in a single gulp.
But he could still hear men moving through his home. The slight squeak of a leather sole on the tile of his staircase. The next group would be a bit more careful. Which meant Carlos had work to do.
He went through the house methodically, an H&K in one hand and the jug of Water in the other. In the end, there were twenty-three hired men who died that day. He was shot eleven more times, most of the bullets burying themselves harmlessly in his fat, although one stray ricochet smashed him in the temple, causing a bloom of blood and bone.
He found Emilio in the kitchen, hiding in the walk-in freezer. He also found the bodies of the household staff, who had been killed first, presumably to keep any of them from warning him.
Carlos dragged Emilio out of his hiding spot, then kneeled to face the man, who cowered on the floor, babbling apologies and begging for his life.
Emilio, even while begging, could not take his eyes off the wound on Carlos’s head. The ricochet had penetrated his skull and the sinus cavity beneath it, but went no deeper.
It itched. Carlos dug around inside with a finger. After a moment of probing, he removed the deformed fragment of lead. He examined it, then tossed it away.
The jug was almost empty. Carlos drained the last of it, and the bloody corsage on his forehead began to disappear.
Emilio trembled silently as it was replaced first by a new piece of smooth white skull, then by pristine, unwrinkled flesh. Then he began to wail.
Carlos slapped him once with his fat, open palm, just to shut him up.
He asked only one question: “Do you understand now?”
Emilio nodded so hard Carlos feared his head would snap off.
“Good. I don’t want to have to have this conversation again.” He waved a hand toward the bodies lying all over the Saltillo tiles, the once-pristine furniture. “Now, get rid of this garbage before it stinks up my house.”
Emilio leaped up and ran toward the first body.
Carlos, meanwhile, tottered toward a nearby chair. “But first,” he said, “bring me something to eat.”
Emilio looked relieved and then confused. “Sir?”
“You’re the cook now. And you’d better be good. I’m starving.”
Today, if anyone ever so much as grumbled about Carlos’s leadership, there was always Emilio, the cook, standing there in the kitchen, willing to tell anyone who’d listen about the demon hidden behind all that fat. Emilio held him in almost religious awe now. The thought of another betrayal was too frightening, too impossible, for him to ever seriously consider again. Because how do you kill a man who won’t stay dead? How do you ever escape the wrath of a man like that?
The answer: you can’t. Because he is not really a man at all.
For everyone outside of Carlos’s immediate circle, there was the power of myth. And for everyone inside it, there was the truth, which was far more powerful.
No one had tried to knock Carlos from his throne since.
CARLOS YAWNED AND STRETCHED and scratched. He pressed the remote, which rang a buzzer in the kitchen, signaling that he wanted more food.
No response. No one came hurrying up the stairs to take his order.
He pressed another button on the remote, which turned on his intercom. He called for his guards.
Again, no response.
Now he was forced to move. He was not afraid at this point, only irritated. He hated to interrupt the Gilligan’s Island marathon to have to kill a bunch of people.
He lumbered down the stairs, his .44 in one hand and an Uzi in the other. They looked like toys in his big paws.
On the first landing, he found his guards, lying there with their throats cut. He stepped in their blood and kept going down.
On the main floor, he found the front door wide open. He was not so foolish as to call for the guards on the perimeter of the house now. He knew they were already dead.
He heard something from the kitchen.
Tracking sticky red footprints, he walked in that direction, the guns held in front of him.
He did not have the agility to leap and roll gracefully into the room. He just kept walking, depending on his bulk to survive the first few bullets as he had in the past.
Carlos prepared to sweep the room with both guns, emptying the chambers at the first sign of movement.
Instead, he froze.
Shako sat at the kitchen counter, holding a combat shotgun with a barrel that looked as wide as a coffee cup. She held it aimed at his head.
There were some wounds that even the Water would not bring you back from, and having your head removed by the slug from a Street Sweeper riot gun was one of them.
Carlos lowered his guns but did not drop them.
He saw the other two men with Shako. The first was his cook, Emilio, who was trembling, tears running down his face, as he stirred eggs in a bowl furiously.
The other, a young man, sat at another stool with an omelet fresh from the skillet on a plate in front of him. Carlos could still see the steam rising from it.
It took Carlos a moment to recognize the man from his pictures. It was David Robinton.
“Hungry?” Shako asked. “Emilio wanted to send you something when you rang, but we convinced him the walk down the stairs would do you some good.”
She spoke in Spanish. If Robinton understood, he didn’t show it. Carlos replied to her in the same tongue.
“Shako,” he said, by way of greeting. “You look the same.”
“You don’t.”
He ignored that. In English, he said, “Dr. Robinton. You should really try the omelet. Emilio makes them with peppers and cilantro grown right outside in the garden.”
The scientist didn’t respond to that any more than he did the Spanish. He showed no interest in his food. Carlos suspected the guns killed his interest in breakfast and conversation.
He switched back to Spanish. “Are you here to kill me, Shako?”
She looked disappointed. “I’ve known where to find you for years, Carlos. It’s not like you move around much.”
“True. So why are you here?”
“We have a proposition for you. How would you like to live forever?”
“I’ve heard that before.”
“Simon’s supply of the Water is almost gone. We are offering you the only alternative.”
“There’s always your supply.”
“Mine is almost gone as well. But fortunately Simon found the one man who could create a replacement. Simon lost him. I have him now.”
Carlos looked at David carefully. He did not appear to notice the proprietary way Shako spoke about him. “And he’s willing to do what you say?”
Shako smiled. “What do you think? Stay with Simon, and he can offer you only death. If you want to go on eating your way through the years, you’ll join us.”
“And what do you require of me?”
“Drop the guns,” she said, “and we’ll talk.”
A genuine smile crossed Carlos’s face for the first time in decades. He felt something he thought long dead inside him: curiosity. At the very least, this should be worth missing Gilligan.
He dropped the guns.
DAVID WAS SURPRISED TO find that a drug lab actually made a fairly decent genetics research facility.
Carlos’s employees, like all of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, were always on the lookout for the Next Big Thing. Once the cartels discovered that the addition or subtraction of a few molecules could result in a formerly illegal drug instantly becoming an entirely new—and legal—substance, they began investing in high-tech equipment.
Carlos had accepted Shako’s offer quickly, and immediately began treating them both as valued guests. He gave them huge, airy rooms and servants to see to their every need.
Still, it was not exactly elegant. Aside from Carlos’s screening room—where the fat man spent most of his time—the furniture and fixtures, while expensive, all looked as if they were purchased in bulk, then left to rot. The couches were white leather, scarred with cigarette burns and stains. Turning on a lamp or a faucet or flushing a toilet was a 50/50 proposition at best.
But Carlos was never less than a gracious host. They ate with him every night in a dining room that could have seated twenty, and were served gourmet meals by Emilio, who walked like he was constantly expecting a blow to the head.
“It doesn’t really seem like he wants to kill you,” David said to Shako once.
She gave him an icy smile. “He wants to live more than he wants to see me die,” she said. “That’s why you’re here.”
The deal was simple: in exchange for his loyalty and support, Carlos would get David’s cure. David would be given everything he needed to make it, and they would be protected from the other members of the Council by Carlos’s army of drug warriors.
As a result, David had several assistants, high-powered microscopes and lab equipment, and a clean room that was better than many of the ones he’d worked in while in grad school.
His guide around the lab was Rajiv, a cheerfully amoral young man with a bachelor’s in pharmacology and a master’s in molecular microbiology (vocational) from the University of Mumbai. Any equipment the lab didn’t already have, Rajiv promised he could have shipped and installed within forty-eight hours.
He was as good as his word. Within a week, the process of re-creating the hydrogels was well under way. David had only to watch and step in at a few crucial places. Otherwise, it was all working even better than the first batch.
His work was easier, but that came with a downside: he also had more time to think.
Shako.
He sometimes wondered how much of her story was true, and how much had been crafted specifically for him.
Carlos liked to talk. And while not exactly friendly, the big man seemed to like having an audience for his stories.
Shako could not stand to be in the same room with him, so she would leave as soon as possible. But David listened, and with a few questions, prodded Carlos into talking about his shared history with Shako.
Much of what she’d told him was supported by Carlos. But even so, it was disturbing. The force of will, the hatred, necessary to sustain a centuries-long campaign against these men was terrifying to David. Logically, he knew that his own moments with her were insignificant by comparison.
The more David thought about it, the colder it left him. When he approached it like one of the problems in the lab, the answer kept coming up the same. He was a means to an end for Shako, and nothing more.
She had been using him, after all. For something far larger than he could have ever imagined. But using him nonetheless.
He wondered if he could live with that. He’d been dragged into this war against his will, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to fight it. He wondered what would happen if he said no to any one of Shako’s requests, if he tried to walk away and go home now.
Again, he reached an answer he didn’t like.
At the moment, he seemed to have no choice. And, stupid as it might have seemed, he still wanted her. He wanted to believe she loved him, and that it made everything else small by comparison.
That all changed when the messenger arrived.
THE MAN WAS ESCORTED into the foyer by several of Carlos’s guards. He was well dressed, polite, and unarmed.
“You know him?” Shako asked. She and David had been summoned by Carlos to see the messenger as well.
Carlos nodded. “He’s been here before. Simon sent him.”
A rapid-fire conversation in Spanish between Carlos and the messenger followed. The messenger opened a bag—very slowly—and withdrew a flat black rectangle. It took David a moment to recognize it. It was a videotape.
The messenger was allowed to leave. Carlos took the tape up to his room. Shako and David went with him.
The tape went into an antique VCR. The sound of it whirring to life brought back deep memories from David’s childhood, when he would watch rented movies with his sister to pass the time.
“Who still uses videotape?” he asked.
“Quiet,” Shako and Carlos both hissed in response.
At first there was only a black screen and the sound of something bumping up against the camera’s microphone.
Then images began to appear. A peaceful main street of a small town. From the trees, David knew it was Florida. Video of children in a park, running and playing. Old people in lawn chairs outside their home. Cars in the parking lot of the local supermarket. A school. A small hospital. The shaky handheld footage would stop and start as the camera was turned on and off between shots.
Finally, a lingering view of the local post office. The sign out front read CYPRESS GROVE.
Carlos laughed once.
Shako didn’t say anything, but David saw her jaw clench slightly.
Then a man appeared on the screen. David didn’t recognize him, but Shako and Carlos both did.
“Aznar,” Carlos said.
“Hush,” Shako ordered him.
“Shako,” the man called Aznar said. “I suppose this will find you with Carlos. If you haven’t already killed him. And Carlos, if she hasn’t already killed you, you’ll wish she did. That’s all I have to say to you, you piece of shit.”
Carlos laughed again.
The tape went on. “Shako, this has all gone on too long. The world is growing too small. I wanted to let you know that things have changed. Simon is no longer in charge. We are no longer willing to tolerate your existence as he did. We are done suffering you. So this is the only offer I am going to make. Come back to the United States, bring Robinton with you, and I will make your end quick and painless. If not, I will murder every single person in this little backwater town. You know I can do it. I am here already. So make up your mind, Shako. Or lose another village.”
The screen went blue. The tape was over.
“What the hell was that about?” David asked.
“Cypress Grove,” Shako said. “It’s a small town. Mostly Seminole. Not far from where all this began.”
“Simon has lost the throne,” Carlos said.
“They’re desperate. They never would have accepted Aznar’s return if Simon still had any hold on them. Their supplies must be lower than I thought. They’re panicking. Typical cowardice from your kind.”
“No offense taken,” Carlos said.
Shako ignored him.
“So, that was Aznar,” David said. “You told me about him. He’ll really kill them all?”
She shrugged. “He’ll try. He’s done worse.”
David thought he was beyond surprise by now. He was wrong. “He would try to kill a whole town? Actually murder every person in it?”
“Oh, I’m sure he’ll have help,” Carlos said. “But yes, it’s quite feasible. You have an isolated population, only one or two entrance roads, jam the radio waves, cut phone lines, and take out the local police first. Then you go house to house, sweep out the residents . . .”
“That’s enough, thank you,” Shako said.
“He asked. I’m just telling him how it’s done.”
“We have to go back,” David said.
She gave him a cold look. “You think I should surrender myself to them?”
“Or stop them. Those people—”
“—can take care of themselves,” Shako said. “I will not come running when Aznar snaps his fingers.”
David was suddenly incensed. “They didn’t ask for this. Those are innocent people. If there’s any chance our going back can save them, then we should go back.”
“Do you think I’m only protecting myself? He’ll kill you. Not as quickly as he’d kill me, but he’d get around to it, once you were no longer of use,” Shako said.
“We’ll think of something. We’ll find a way to beat him.”
“We?” Shako smiled. “There is no ‘we’ here, David. This is not up to you. I have one advantage over them, and that is the fact that you are not with them. I will not give that up. If they want to survive, they have to come here and get you, and I’ll kill them when they arrive. Or they will die when the Water runs out and they turn to dust. Either way, they will not continue to hide like roaches in the cracks of history.”
“Again, no offense taken,” Carlos said.
She ignored him again. “Either way, they will die. That’s all that matters.”
After all he’d heard about Simon and Shako’s five-hundred-year war, David tried not to be shocked by the callousness of it. He failed.
“And to hell with anyone who gets caught in the middle?”
“They can take care of themselves. I told you that once. Now we are done discussing this,” she said, and left the room.
Carlos turned to David from his chair. “Want to watch some TV? There’s always a game on somewhere.”
David didn’t respond. Until that moment, he hadn’t seen it. He hadn’t wanted to see it. From a five-hundred-year-old perspective, Shako and Simon barely even registered normal people anymore. Like ants under their feet.
“Come on, boy, don’t pout,” Carlos said. “It’s not like you’re going to run off and save those people all by yourself.”
“No,” David admitted. “Not by myself. You’re going to help me.”
It was time to start making his own decisions again. It was time to remind Shako and Simon both what it meant to be human.
BY THAT NIGHT, EVERYTHING was ready.
David went to Shako’s room. They had been sleeping apart for days now. David thought it helped him keep a clearer head.
She stood at the window, looking for something. She didn’t turn around when he entered, but she knew he was there.
“What?” she asked. “You’ve come to forgive me?”
“No,” David said.
When she turned, she saw that David wore a light summer suit—one of the many gifts from Carlos they’d both been given—and a briefcase locked to his wrist by handcuffs.
“That’s an interesting ensemble,” she said. “Taking a trip?”
“Hopefully we both are. I came to ask you for something.”
She waited.
“I want you to come with me. Help me save those people in Cypress Grove. We go there, get the police, the National Guard, whatever it takes. Protect them from Aznar.”
She simply said, “No.”
“You’re really willing to let innocent people die for your vendetta?”
“Everyone is willing to sacrifice others for their goals, David. Even you.”
“I would never—”
“Elizabeth. That little girl. She trusted you.”
David was caught up short.
“I saved her.”
“You could have killed her.”
“But I didn’t.”
“You were willing to take the risk. And you put her life at risk again. Did you ever bother to check on her again after you used her as an experiment?”
“I— There was a lot going on. With you. With work. I knew she was taken care of at the hospital.”
“You made her a target. The Council does not want anyone to know their secrets. Even little girls.”
David went pale. “Oh my God. Did they—?”
“No,” Shako said. “But only because I was there to stop them. So spare me your moralizing, please. You used her and you nearly killed her. Twice.”
David put a hand on a nearby chair to steady himself. He sucked down a deep breath.
“You’re right,” he said. “I fucked up. All the more reason I should do the right thing now. And so should you.”
She laughed. “Go away, David,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He looked sad. Then he stood up straighter. “Here’s what I know,” he said. “I know that I will not let anyone else die for this. Not if I can help it.”
David put the briefcase down on a table, then popped it open. Inside, cradled in impact foam, were a half dozen miniature jet injectors, smaller versions of the kind used for mass vaccinations. They were loaded with plastic vials, filled with clear liquid.
“I’ve made six doses of the hydrogels. They’re all in here. I’ve promised them to Carlos.”
Shako was instantly on edge. She shifted her weight, moved forward onto the balls of her feet. Ready to fight.
“But only if he takes me back to stop Aznar.”
She put one foot forward, light as a ballerina. “I can’t allow that,” she said. “You are too valuable. Aznar cannot get his hands on you. He will break you, David. He would torture you until you gave him anything he wanted. I cannot risk that. Do you understand what I am saying? I will not let you go to him.”
“Why did you save me, Shako?”
That stopped her. “What?”
“You could have let me die in Florida. I had a bullet hole in me. All you had to do was wait a minute. Then you could have gone after Simon. You could have gotten them all, probably. You’d be that much closer to that vengeance you’ve wanted for so long. So why didn’t you?”
Shako didn’t reply.
“Here’s what I think. I think you’re not inhuman, as much as you’d like to be. I think the others have become less than they were, but you’ve become more. I think you still believe in something more than what it takes to keep life going and what it takes to end it. I’m a scientist. I couldn’t name whatever that thing is. It doesn’t show up on any test. But I believe in it just the same. I have to, because that’s the thing I’ve been trying to preserve. Not just the mechanical pieces of the body. But the thing inside. The thing that tells us why we live. I hope there’s a part of you that feels the same way.”
She still didn’t say anything.
“Idiotic, I know,” David said quietly.
“Yes,” Shako finally said. “Yes, it is. But only because you’re right. I didn’t want anything between us, David. Not anything real. I have trained it out of myself. Or at least that’s what I thought. But when you were dying, I found some spark of something that was supposed to be dead.”
For a moment, David’s face lit up with hope.
“And I was wrong. It is an illusion. It’s meant to keep us alive and procreating, nothing more. We chase after each other in search of some animal comfort, and we dress it up in words. It’s a powerful lie, but it’s still a lie. I believed it for a moment. I admit it. I could not bear the thought of a world without you in it. I’ve lost many, many people over the years. I thought I couldn’t bear to lose another. I was wrong. I should not have saved you. And I would not make the same mistake again. As much as I’d like to pretend otherwise, David, there’s nothing outside of survival and death. I can live without you. I can live without anyone. That’s the truth. So please do not test me on this. It won’t end well for you. But it will end.”
David looked as if something had broken inside him. He closed his eyes briefly. Then he stood taller.
“I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear that,” he said. “All right. Come on in.”
The door behind David opened. Carlos’s men, all experienced killers, filed in quickly, each carrying an Uzi. A little retro for most modern drug dealers, who preferred the H&K or military surplus AK-47s now, but still brutally effective at unleashing a swarm of bullets in close quarters.
Carlos entered after them, his Dirty Harry .44 stuck in his enormous waistband.
Shako could either leap at David or try to escape.
She pivoted, ran, and tried to hurl herself through the window.
The glass did not break. Instead, she hit hard and bounced off, back into the room.
It might have been funny if David hadn’t seen the shock on her face, compounding the betrayal.
“Bulletproof glass,” Carlos explained. “You’re not leaving that easily.”
Carlos’s men approached her carefully, guns up. Shako crouched, ready to attack in any direction.
They never got close enough to let that happen. At eight feet away, they formed a circle. They dropped their guns and lifted Tasers and fired in one smooth motion—the darts and cords lancing out and snagging in her skin, hitting her with hundreds of thousands of volts at once.
She went down on her knees, shaking uncontrollably. But she was still conscious.
“Hit her again,” Carlos ordered.
“You said you wouldn’t hurt her,” David reminded him.
“At this point, I want to make certain she doesn’t hurt me. Or you,” Carlos replied. “Again.”
They loaded Shako with more electricity. She flopped like a fish.
“Once more, just to be sure,” Carlos said.
“No!” David yelled, but they didn’t listen. This time, Shako barely moved. David thought he smelled a greasy odor like grilled meat.
“All right,” Carlos said, satisfied. “Tie her up and get her to the plane.”
David wheeled on him. “This is not what we discussed.”
Carlos removed his gun from his pants but didn’t point it at David. Not yet. “Do you trust her to stay here while we go back to the States? Of course you do, you’re an idiot. But I know her. She would be after us as soon as she could. She might even arrive before us, knowing her. I won’t have that. She comes along.”
David grimaced. He had little choice here, now that the ride had started and everyone was locked into their seats.
“All right,” he said. “But any harm comes to her and you lose any chance of more than what I’ve got in this case.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Carlos said, waving the gun around. “Now. Can we please go to the plane?”
THEY FLEW IN A private jet again, but this time Shako rode in the cargo hold.
It was pressurized, so it didn’t kill her, but the temperature soon dropped below zero. By the time they landed, she’d be lucky to stand, let alone fight.
She tried to conserve what warmth she could, and cursed David in her mind.
He didn’t understand. Of course he didn’t understand. She didn’t explain. And then, when she tried, he heard exactly the wrong message.
Some genius. Always trying to avoid the inevitable. Always trying to save people.
She huddled and curled into herself on the cold steel floor.
Instead, he’d probably just killed them all.