Adrenaline (47 page)

This was the end of my life. No way out, no exit. We walked down to a dark room that was a widening in the corridor. I could smell the earthy tang of artesian water.

“Just kill them,” Yasmin said. Her voice shook. We knew what had been done to her, and she didn’t like us being around. We were from her old life, outside the cocoon where Edward had trapped her.

The hallway’s splinter opened up into a narrow room, and the concrete ended at a heavy steel door. We went through the door into a round stone room. At the end of the room was a large hole, nearly seven feet across. In its depths I could hear a rush of water. I remembered seeing
the start of a river on the property map. This must be the underground route of that river.

“Take him to the edge, Yasmin,” Edward said. She eased me along. Edward kept one gun trained on Mila’s throat, the other on me.

“You behaved, so your son lives,” Edward said. “You are a good father.”

“You don’t need to hurt my kid. Ever.” I was going to die for a son I’d never see. Okay. It was what it was. But I wished I’d gotten to hold him, to see his face, look for the clear bits of me and Lucy—yes, even Lucy, the Lucy of my dreams, the honest one—in his face.

Edward’s mouth twitched. “I’m sure he’ll have a good life.”

I had nowhere to run, nowhere to fight, and in my last moment I decided dignity was the only exit.

Let me go
, Lucy had said, and I hadn’t. I couldn’t. It had got me here. “I’m sorry, Mila,” I said. She nodded.

Edward raised the odd, heavy gun that he’d slipped the computer chip into and aimed it at my chest. He was seven feet away. I wondered if I’d die before I hit the water, if I’d drown. I didn’t want to drown. I thought of my father, my mother, the weird life they’d made for me, my brother. I thought of Daniel. I held on to him.

The barrel of his gun centered on my chest.

He fired.

I kept standing and like an idiot I looked down at my chest, where a gaping hole should have been. My T-shirt was unmarred.

Four feet away from me, Yasmin staggered, stunned. Blood welled from her chest.

Couldn’t be. The gun was aimed directly at me.
Impossible. She was four feet to my left, and Edward’s aim hadn’t veered.

Edward laughed. Mila’s mouth dropped open. I caught Yasmin at the edge of the shaft, felt the life pulse out of her as I held her in my arms.

“One man’s science,” he said, “is another man’s magic.”

“What… what?” I managed. She couldn’t be dead. The gun was aimed at
me
.

“I don’t need her anymore.” He raised the gun again.

“While you die in the dark, I am going to kill your baby,” he hissed. “Just because I can.”

He fired two more shots. I held Yasmin, tried to turn us both away but there was nowhere to go. The bullets hammered into her and I fell into blackness. I fell into dark water, Yasmin still in my arms.

I
STAYED UNDER THE WATER
. If I surfaced, he would just shoot me. The cold was a shock. Illuminated by the crooked lights above the stone shaft, the water was gray.

I kicked down, steadying myself against the stone wall, trying not to rise again. If I broke the water’s surface, he would kill me. He had to believe me dead.

My lungs felt like they would explode. I heard a distant scream, perhaps Mila. Or, I wished, Edward. Mila was not the screaming type and I was sure Edward was. A crazy, disjointed thought to keep my lungs from shredding. But no Mila crashed down to join us. Yasmin’s face turned to mine, an inch away, eyes half open in the water. I touched her throat. No pulse. A little wooden dove on her necklace floated between our faces.

The lights went out. In the distance I heard a heavy grinding—the stone door shutting. Total darkness. My lungs seared with the burn of spent oxygen. I eased to the surface, tried to breathe as quietly as I could. I failed. My gasps echoed against the stone.

No shot came. Edward was gone, and I was buried in a horrible, suffocating darkness.

*   *   *

I groped for the side of the stone shaft and explored it with my fingers. But it wasn’t smooth concrete; it had to be a more ancient well with hewn stone that might give me a chance to climb it.

I didn’t think I was badly hurt. I could feel furrows along my wrists, where the skin had parted as the bullets had hit Yasmin as I held her, and my already-wounded shoulder hurt very badly.

First try I made it up about five feet before I fell and slid back into the water’s embrace. I didn’t bother to rest. I clambered back up.

I am going to kill your baby. Just because I can
.

I made it ten feet. At least I thought I had. The pitch dark could be playing a cruel trick on me. Then I ran out of handhold and flailed, found another grip, lost it. Stone hit my chin and opened the flesh. Blood was a seeping warmth down my front.

The cold water revived me. I started to climb again. Fell again. Climbed again, but now I started to recognize the stones by feel. I used the same path and, after a half hour of agony, I felt the smooth lip of the top of the shaft.

I pulled myself up and lay, spent, my ribs afire with pain, the rest of me shivering and cold. I groped for the wall. I found it and searched, found the stone door.

It was bolted, locked into place, and over the lock was a smooth metal plate. It was engaged on the other side. I had no way to pick it, and no light to see by. Yasmin had taken my flashlight when she searched me.

I am in my grave
.

The thought nearly paralyzed me. Someone would
come. But how long? How many days? Maybe never? Did anyone else know this complex even existed?

I am going to kill your baby. Just because I can
. And the kids on the computer. They were part of Edward’s sick plot.

I slid to the edge of the shaft. I could hear running water. The river would have to surface at some point. But I couldn’t know what turns or twists the stream might take.

How many minutes can you hold your breath? How long?

“Long enough,” I said to the empty blackness. “Long enough.”

I put my legs back over the shaft. It was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I didn’t want to drop back down into the awful inky darkness. It had taken so long to climb up. I could just wait. Sit and wait and hope that someone found me.

I thought of Daniel.

He needs me
.

It was a strange thing to be needed. I hadn’t known it in a long while. The need that Lucy had for me was false, a need curled in the grass like a coiled snake. My parents didn’t need me after Danny died. They hated me for living. Daniel, though, he needed me, and he didn’t even know it.

With that, I dropped into the black.

I
DOVE DOWN
. Yasmin’s body was gone. I could feel the tug of the moving current beneath the relative quiet of the shaft.

She’d sunk and she’d been swept away.

I filled my body with oxygen, heaving in slow, deep, saturating breaths. I pushed my fear of the water deep back into my brain.

Then I went down. The dark water was cold and clutching. It felt like death grasping at me. I stayed close to the roof of the cave that met the end of the shaft; it was smooth stone, worn by the ceaseless knife of the water. The current shoved me forward. I brushed hard against the rocks that scraped my back and my head. Agony lanced my ribs.

Ten seconds in the deep.

No pain. No fear. I pressed on. Trying not to panic, trying to stay streamlined like a torpedo to move me along faster. The blackness was complete, like nothing I had ever experienced. I kicked, kept my hands out in front of me to try to protect myself from any hidden obstruction in the pitch black, told myself I had all the time in the world.

Fifty seconds. So I guessed. My lungs began to burn.
Panic tugged at the edges of my mind. A little tug and then tearing.

I saw a blossom of dim light to my left and hurled myself toward it. The light grew brighter. I kicked, I swam, trying to cut through the current to the unexpected glow. I saw a stone circle, dimly outlined from the light above, just like the shaft I’d fled. I kicked upward, fighting the urge to let the stale air—precious gold—out of my lungs. The shaft here was narrower. I went up.

And exploded into air.

I took long, huffing breaths. A grate lay two feet above my head, brown with rust. I breathed like I’d never breathed before. I tried to push open the grate. It was locked into place, with heavy iron bolts. I couldn’t get up the shaft to the rest of the complex.

But the sound of the water was loud, and this must have been the rush of current I’d heard heading from the stables into the complex. I tried to pull the grate from the stone, and I realized I was getting nowhere and losing precious strength.

I wanted to remain in this pocket of light and air, but I couldn’t. My kid needed me. Mila needed me. Had Edward killed her? I thought not; he wanted to know who she worked for.

I had to go back into the darkness.

I took the long, low, heavy breaths, looking up through the stone shaft like a baby glimpsing a distant world at the end of the birth canal. I filled my body with air and kicked back into the blackness.

The cold river swept me away. I could feel a sudden shift downward in the angle of the ceiling. Going down, further from the ground, from the surface and the sacred air. Don’t panic. Whatever you do, do not panic.

I fought the urge to turn back to the last shaft. Then I felt the stone not only above me but below me. The tunnel had narrowed into a grave. I tried to turn back, panicking now, the bubbles exploding from me in a rush, and the water swept me forward between the stone jaws.

Narrow, black stone scraping both sides of me. My mother, my father. My brother, staring into a camera, silently pleading for his life. I would be with Danny again. My child. Lucy. I didn’t want my last thought to be of Lucy. I thought of my brother, imagined I felt his strong hand taking mine.

Then no stone pressed against me. Above me, no rock. Light, a thousand miles above me. I kicked. Weakly. My muscles trying their last. Then my head burst above the water into the sweetness. I gasped, wheezed, turned into the water and vomited. I was in the river, bright with sunlight, alive.

I heard a buzz. A plane. I remembered the private runway on the map. And lying in the cold, gray wash of the river I looked up and saw Zaid’s Learjet.

Edward was gone.

I
LAY ON THE BANK
until I found strength enough to get to my feet. I walked to the stables. The guards were gone, either to the hospital or to the main house, I guessed. I headed back into the complex.

I checked all the computers; all the hard drives were gone, all the backup drives, the strange drives for the chips. The chips were gone as well.

I checked my shoe. The chip I’d taken was still there.

Edward had put a chip in the gun before he’d shot Yasmin. So the chips somehow worked with the guns. The bizarre gun that shot Yasmin when it was directly aimed at me. The gun that shared a strange metal grid with the bomb that had killed the Money Czar back in Amsterdam.