Chrissie had been placed back on her knees with her hands behind her, elevated to the point of pain. Her breaths came hard and fast. She tried to catch her breath and block the episode from her mind. But her mind refused to cooperate, replaying the thwarted assault.
Minutes ago, she’d heard footfalls on the steps. The heavy door slammed closed with a wooden thunk spiced by the clank of metal. She tensed, cocking her head, listening.
Someone else in the room with her had been forced to eat and then ushered out. They had spoken in a whisper. I have to go to the bathroom!
She wasn’t alone! Was it Jason?
She couldn’t tell. The words were soft, barely audible. She had only a second to contemplate these questions. The guard’s presence, the filthy, manly musk, filled the air around her.
“Who’s there?” she asked.
“Je m’appelle Charlie,” the gruff voice replied. My name is Charlie. The low-pitched words were slow and inviting, filled with lustful insinuation.
“Do you need to use ze bathroom?”
“Yes.”
The chains holding her slackened. A rough pair of hands lifted her to her feet. The man stood in front of her, very close. His chest touched the tip of her breasts. Chrissie breathed his alcohol- and tobacco-saturated breath. A cold shudder passed through her. She stopped breathing to avoid sucking the unpleasant stench into her lungs.
Finally, she exhaled. “If you don’t let me pee, it’s going to get very messy in here.”
The man stopped. Chrissie sensed her captor ogling her.
The guard walked her deeper inside the building. Her foot hit something. She stumbled. The guard lifted her roughly to her feet. They turned a corner. Chrissie’s arm hit a doorway. They had entered another room. A vinegary odor hung in the air. Inside, Charlie stopped her with a hand on her chest.
“Turn around,” he commanded.
Chrissie obeyed, fearing what would happen next. The guard’s hand reached for her jeans, unsnapping them. Ripping them to her ankles, exposing a thin pair of panties, the guard slid them past her thighs, making sure his rough hands caressed her skin.
Chrissie heard him lift something and place it on the floor with a wooden thud. A deeper acidic, vinegary stench mixed with the ripe, disgusting fetor of excrement, filling her nostrils. Chrissie wanted to vomit.
Charlie then placed a hand under each of her armpits and hoisted her into the air with amazing ease. He pushed her backward. Chrissie’s naked butt landed on something hard, round, and hollow.
“An old rusted wine barrel. Do your business. And be quick about it!”
She thought about asking for some privacy but knew it would be futile. Chrissie peed in the barrel. When she was done, Charlie pulled up her panties and jeans, fondling her as much as possible.
He dragged her back to her holding station, one of Charlie’s arms reaching behind her. The hand squeezed a fistful of her hair, yanking her head backward, elevating her chin. Chrissie yelped.
His other hand touched her near her waist under her shirt, moving higher. The skin of the fingers and palm, rough and calloused, scraped her sweaty skin. As the hand inched higher, nearing her breasts, Chrissie’s ire swelled.
Charlie moved his face into the crook of her neck. The stubble on his cheek cut her below the ear. Chrissie held her breath again.
“Mon petit,” he whispered, “vous êtes très troublant. Ton beau est un homme fortune!” You are very, very sexy, my sweet. Your boyfriend is a lucky man!
The hand inched higher, cupping her breast through the bra. As he began to push his fingers inside the fabric and touch her nipple, Chrissie boiled over. She jerked her knee, hard and fast, into his groin. The guard’s lungs expelled air into her face. He released his grip and collapsed in a heap at her feet. He lay there groaning. Still blindfolded, Chrissie envisioned him curled into a ball with his hands cupped over his manhood.
“Garce,” he whispered. Bitch.
Chrissie prepared herself for what was to follow.
“Bring it on, Frenchie,” she said, kicking at him. Her foot connected with soft flesh, landing hard in his gut. “If you want have your way with me, you’re going to earn it.”
His hand reached out and grabbed her ankle. That was when the heavy door crashed open. The attack had been interrupted.
His eyelids began to close. Images began to swim through a half curtain. Darkness closed in. Deprived of oxygen, Jason’s mind flashed a runaway, out-of-sequence slide show of the mistakes in his life …
Chrissie’s tear-stained face on the park bench when he left her …
The sight of Jenny walking away, two suitcases in hand the day they’d decided to get divorced …
Thomas Pettigrew’s face as he told him Jason had made a fatal drug error …
Chrissie being tackled by the intruder in his house …
Chrissie lying unconscious on his living room floor …
The body of one of the attacker’s lying in a crimson halo on the living room floor …
The gun lying near him …
Delilah Hussein’s face talking to him about a great opportunity …
Jason’s mind froze on the image of a gun lying on the floor of his house after Chrissie was attacked.
The gun!
Jason tugged at the hands constricting his throat, albeit with less force. He managed to turn his drooping eyes to the weapon on the dark wood a few feet to his right. The .357 Magnum!
Grab it!
Doing so meant releasing his grip on Luther’s hands. It meant letting go of the source of his impending death. He would have to go against every human survival instinct.
A few seconds more and it would be too late, he would lose consciousness, then die …
It was his last … and only option.
Jason released his grip, whipping his hand out. Luther, thinking Jason was trying to hit him, turned his head allowing Jason to miss. Luther’s weight shifted. A gust of delicious air inflated Jason’s lungs.
Realizing it wasn’t a blow, Luther closed his fingers around Jason’s larynx once more.
Jason’s fingers slapped the hard black metal of the gun. He tapped his hand against the floorboards, trying to grasp it. The weapon spun but landed in his palm.
As his oxygen reserves became depleted again, the pressure in his head and neck once more became almost unbearable. Holding it by the barrel, Jason walked his hand down the gun’s shaft, finally clutching the stock. His index finger found the trigger housing.
Then the trigger …
Luther’s eyes darted left, seeing Jason bringing the gun to bear. He removed one hand from Jason’s neck. Jason gasped in another torrent of oxygen. Luther lunged for the weapon but only managed to clutch Jason’s forearm.
Jason wrapped his free arm around Luther’s neck, pulling him away from the weapon. Luther managed to keep Jason’s arm straight, not allowing him to bring the weapon around. Jason could only flex his wrist with the gun in it as he wrapped his opposite arm around Luther’s neck, wrenching it tight.
They struggled again. Luther lay atop him, stretching for the hand and Jason’s weapon. Jason wrenched him back onto his chest. Luther possessed the advantage. As he wrestled with Luther, Jason’s eyes took in the ceiling.
And he saw a way to put an end to this battle.
What the hell is taking so long?
Peter slammed a heavy fist on Jason’s counter.
He had called one of his employees, Tim, from the gun shop over an hour ago. Desperate and despite being a stranger, he’d tried the neighbors. The elderly woman across the street did not answer his repeated bell ringing. The houses down the street had no cars in the driveways. Everyone was at work. If anyone was at home, they weren’t answering the door.
He cursed for what seemed like the hundredth time.
I should have known Jason would try something. You were duped, marine!
Peter studied his phone, willing it to ring.
After several calls, Peter managed to get a message through to Detective John Palmer of the Newport News Police Department. But he had yet to return his call. Palmer had been involved in the mess two years ago.
Peter had leveled with the cop in his message. Jason was in trouble with the people who’d planned the assassination attempts. If he were Palmer, he would stay miles away from anything to do with this. Peter hoped Palmer was not that smart.
A horn tooted. Peter ran to the driveway and climbed into Tim Baker’s used Ford Escort.
“What the hell took you so long?”
“Traffic on the JRB. Where to?”
“Police headquarters in Newport News,” Peter demanded. For some strange reason, the former marine felt like he was forgetting something. He closed the door, leaving the first cell phone resting on the torn piece of paper on which Jason had scrawled the password.
Jason squeezed the trigger. A round thumped into the ceiling. A shower of powdery bits sprinkled the two men. The hole was a foot to the right of the chandelier mount. Once more, Jason tugged Luther back on top of him, wrapping his legs around the tattooed criminal, trying to hold him still. Luther clutched at the skin of Jason’s arm, reaching for the Magnum.
Jason readjusted his aim and fired again. The round moved closer to the fixture and again rained dust and chucks of plaster. The third round sparked the taut chain holding the multitude of glass blades. A link gave way, splitting it. The oval piece of metal began to pull apart. The entire chandelier cocked to the right. The heavy blades of glass swayed to and fro, clinking in a portentous symphony of sound.
A millisecond later, the entire consortium of crystal cut loose.
Luther’s head was turned, his attention trained on the gun with no regard for where the rounds ended up. Jason watched as the chandelier descended, growing enormous in his field of vision.
At the last possible moment, he released his grip on William Luther. He slid out from under the man and rolled away a fraction of a second before the massive object crashed onto Luther’s head and torso.
“Lui envoyer un autre message,” Hussein demanded. Send him another message.
“This is dangerous, Madame,” Oliver pleaded. “Reprisal is transmitting from its position over the ocean. The transmission could be visible if anyone is watching.”
“Send him an uncoded message. It will be faster! Now!”
Oliver typed in the uncoded message:
Report on Rodgers needed! Reply immediately!
Hussein fidgeted, desperate for an update on what was going on with Rodgers. He was supposed to be meeting and killing the tattooed killer. The drone, in flight, at transmitting altitude, burst Hussein’s urgent pleas for information. The aerial communications UAV would also be able to receive and forward transmissions to Hussein’s compound. But they were receiving no traffic. Over the last ten minutes, Hussein had ordered several electronic missives to be sent.
Oliver picked up the secure cell phone and punched in a text to The Watcher.
“That was the fourth text I’ve sent him,” Oliver replied. “He’s not responding.”
“Batard!” she spat. “I need to know what is going on.”
“The drone is airborne and circling. It will take a moment for the message to be relayed. We are running out of time,” Oliver replied. “The drone’s batteries need to be replaced. There is barely enough energy to get them back to the compound. I can send another message, but if the drone circles too long. It may not make it back.”
Hussein swore. “Bring it back. But I want it sent back out immediately.”
The twenty-something communications technician sitting at his monitor inside the National Security Agency’s remote monitoring station on the North Carolina barrier islands at Topsail Beach peered at his computer screen. The software running on his terminal monitored all electronic communications sent via the airwaves or bounced off satellites. In the last two weeks, the computer had been programmed to search for a list of thirty keywords related to The Simoon, Jason Rodgers, Hygeia, Delilah Hussein, or The Watcher.
The wavy line on the screen jumped in a crazy dance, bleeping an audio alert in the young technician’s headphones. He clicked on the icon denoting the communications. The word Rodgers flashed in red.
Immediately, he began a trace on the source of the transmission.
“Show me your hands!”
A sinking feeling clutched Jason. The gold shield hooked to the cop’s belt and the weapon aimed at him told Jason his quest to find Michael and Chrissie was over. Prostrate on the floor, Jason lifted his eyes and raised his hands off the floor, showing his palms. He would soon be processed by the criminal justice system … again.
The officer approached, sweeping his weapon between the two men.
“Is there anyone else in the house?”
“No,” Jason replied.
The cop wagged the gun. “Slide over there against the wall under the window. Stay on your belly and keep your hands flat on the floor! Do it now!”
Jason pushed himself across the floor as the officer approached. The cop knelt beside the motionless William Luther.
“Holy Shit!” the cop whispered, swallowing hard. “He’s done.”
The detective stepped to Luther’s handgun, lying nearby, and kicked it away. He produced a small radio and called for backup and an ambulance.
He winced at the motionless body. A pool of crimson expanded across the floor.
Jason managed a glimpse.
The chandelier possessed at least fifty bladed pieces of glass that dangled from six brass S-arms spoking out from a center column. From each S-arm, a multitude of weighted, crystal prisms hung, varying in length from an inch to at least eight or nine inches. The whole ensemble must have weighed fifty pounds.
It had landed on Luther’s face. Jason could make out at least three prisms that had pierced Luther’s head and face. A fourth had penetrated his jugular. Blood no longer spurted from the neck wound. The man who had attempted to kill him in the Williamsburg Regional Jail was gone.
Jason shifted his focus from the body. His eyes scanned the floor between the dining room and the living area. The keychain rested on the floor, nestled beside the crumpled throw rug.
“Do you mind if I get my keys?” he asked.
“Shut up,” the cop demanded.
“I really need those keys.”
“I said be quiet.”
The cop was at Jason’s side now. He twisted his right arm behind his back. He repeated the process with the left. The grinding of handcuffs locking over his wrists punctuated the movement.
“Here we go again,” Jason sighed.
His eyes stayed glued on the keychain and the three keys clipped to it.
“So you’ve done this before,” the detective snapped.