Gone Black (25 page)

Rico nodded, but he was looking at her, his expression horrified. He pointed to Claire's face, and she realized he was looking at the blood covering her face and hair. “It's okay, Rico. It's not my blood. I'm okay, I promise. Rico, listen to me. Can we get to Black out through here?”

The boy nodded again.

Claire's heartbeat went wild with renewed hope. “Okay, okay. Now. Does Jaxy know about these tunnels? Do they know that you hide down here? Can they get inside and find us?”

He shook his head. “They chase me sometimes. But I get here before they can catch me.” His big brown eyes searched her face. “One time they caught me in the kitchen. But I was real, real hungry that time.”

Claire's heart clenched up tight, reacting to what this poor child had been through. “Rico, listen to me. Can you take me to where they're keeping Black? Without us being seen?”

Rico nodded.

“Oh, thank you, Rico, thank you.” She hugged him close. “Rico, you're an angel. You're gonna save our lives.”

At that, Rico grinned, but just a little bit.

“What is this place? Is it a dungeon? Something like that?”

“Daddy said this part was built by the Romans—you know, for their water to go through so it could get dumped down in the sea. They were real smart about building, Daddy said so. They made cisterns, too, to collect freshwater when it rains real hard.”

“How far is Black from here, Rico? Can we get to his room without anybody seeing us?”

He nodded again. “I've been watching him.” He paused and looked down at the floor. “They do real mean things to him, even meaner than what they do to me. But he acts kinda brave and stuff. I almost got him out one time, but they caught him before he could get inside the grate with me. He wasn't as fast as you are.”

Claire shut her eyes and hugged him close. “He's in big trouble, Rico, and we gotta get him out. You'll help me, won't you?” She held him back again and gazed hopefully into his face. “You'll help me save his life, right? Like you saved mine?”

“He's over in the part of the tower that hangs out over the edge of the cliffs. Up above where you were but more out over the water. The Roman troughs run under that room, too. Mama stores stuff down there. Maybe you could use some of her Band-Aids on your hand. Did you know it's bleeding real bad?”

Claire hugged the boy again. But they didn't have much time. Soquet's men had probably already found Max's body or what was left of it. Maybe there wasn't anything left of it. Maybe if they were lucky, they'd think it was Claire's remains. “C'mon, let's go find a place for me to use this phone, and then we'll go get Black. Then we'll get you out of this awful place. Okay? But we gotta hurry. We don't have time to wait.”

The child nodded eagerly, and then he put his hand in her good one and smiled up at her. Claire squeezed his fingers, and he started off quickly down the narrow passage that led off to their right at a slight downward cant. After about five minutes of walking and holding her injured hand up against her stomach, Rico leaned down into the darkness and picked up something. He held it out to her. “I stole your gun back from them last night. That's where I went. I'm real good at stealing stuff. I'll steal some more things, if you tell me what you want me to get.”

For the first second or two, Claire couldn't even believe her ears. Then she grabbed the Glock 19 nine millimeter and checked the magazine in the dusky light. It was still fully loaded with parabellums. “Oh, my God, Rico, how did you get this? Where did you find it?”

“I sneak down into Jaxy's room sometimes, you know, after she goes to sleep. That man you like, the one named Black? He hit her real hard, right in the face, too, and now she's stayin' in bed. I heard Max sayin' that she might have a concussion. She took some pills and stuff to make it stop hurtin', and she didn't even hear me come out through the grate. So I just looked and looked and then I found your gun. She had it in one of her drawers. I was real quiet and stuff. It was locked up, but I found the key inside her jewelry box.” He started nodding his head. “I heard them saying stuff about taking your guns away from you, and I knew you'd need it to kill them with, and stuff.”

“Oh, my God, Rico. I can't believe you got my gun back.”

Rico grinned up at her and seemed very pleased. “That Black man, he hit her so hard that her nose bled and bled and is probably broken real bad, too, and she couldn't hardly even breathe good anymore. I saw it all through the grate. I was glad he hit her hard like that. I hate her. She's real, real mean.” He reached up with both his hands and cradled Claire's face. He looked as if he wanted to comfort her. He was nodding his head now. “I guess you know that she's done some real bad things to him. But he got to hit her back that time. He got her good. I was happy he did. But I'm sorry he got in big trouble after that. They punished him bad. Max did. I know you like him a lot, if you're gonna go get him out, and stuff like that. But he was nice to me, too, when they made me go out in the road and make him stop. He was sorry he almost hit me but he finally got stopped before he ran over me.”

That was the most Claire had ever heard the child say at one time, but he was free now. That made a difference. Claire stared down at his dirty face in the gloom of the tunnel and felt like weeping for the poor little kid who had suffered so much at the hands of monsters. But she didn't. And she wouldn't. Not until she got all three of them safely out of this stinking hell on earth. Black didn't have much time left, not after Soquet realized that it was his son who had been blown apart with one of his own homemade grenade vests. But now she had a knife and a gun, and she planned to use them to kill anybody and everybody who got in her way. “Okay, we gotta hurry, Rico. We gotta get him down here with us before they find a way inside these tunnels. This is our only chance. Okay?”

Rico immediately headed off down the dim passageway, and Claire followed right on his heels. She now had the Glock in her left hand, her own personal, fully loaded weapon, and she was going to use it. They deserved to die, after what they'd done. All of a sudden, Claire felt a helluva lot more confident. Now they had a real chance. She'd kill every single one of them if she had to. She wanted to kill them. Just shoot them down, one at a time, plug them right between the eyes. She was filled with a kind of bloodlust that she'd never felt before and it was alarming in its ferocity. They had brought her here. They had made her want to murder, and she was going to do it.

All the way down through the dark passage, feeling her way along the rough, cold, damp, clammy stone walls, Claire peered out the cracks into deserted rooms, through the hidden peepholes and low air passages leading down to the brass grates. They passed one chamber after another, and it was incredible how intricate it was. The Roman system of underground troughs and cisterns and ducts was massive and interconnected with lots of natural grottoes on either side, some filled with seawater from the crashing waves and others with rainwater seeping through cracks in the ancient walls.

As they moved along, she began to believe that the fortress really was as ancient as Rico had told her. It was a bizarre feeling, moving around behind thick walls and underneath massive stone tunnels and up narrow stone steps. So far, she hadn't seen a single soul in any of the rooms, not anywhere, but it appeared to be a huge place, vast and expansive and rising up like a stone Goliath at the edge of the sea.

After a time, she had no idea where she was or where she was headed. But she did trust the kid. Rico knew the way all right, and he was moving easily and confidently and quickly ahead of her. Every so often, he would turn and look back, make sure she was still there. A couple of times, he had run back and hugged her around her legs as if afraid she wasn't real or might disappear. It was very dark in some of the passages, and the stone was so thick that all outside noises were muffled. But that was good. That meant any sounds of their progress would be hard to hear, too.

As they proceeded down on steeply slanted paths, Claire was amazed by Rico's courage. He had to be deeply traumatized, mentally messed up by all that he had seen and all that had been done to him. Good God, he'd seen his parents murdered. And he'd been alone with these devils for a lot longer than she had. But now he was hopeful, wanting her to save him, leading her to Black. If any of them got out alive, it would be because of him. She just hoped that Soquet's men didn't discover the entrance into the tunnels. Claire followed him for what seemed like an hour, her weapon still tight and ready inside her good hand, her wounded hand absolutely killing her, her ears perked and straining for any sign of a trap or cry of discovery.

“Rico, you okay?” she whispered into the gloom. “How much farther is it? We've come a long way.”

“There's a place open to the sea. So you can use the phone. It's close to that man named Black, too.”

“This tunnel leads outside? Can we get Black out that way?”

Now Claire could barely see the child because the light was so low, but he stopped and nodded his head. “They guard it but I get out that way sometimes.”

At that, Claire felt even better about their chances. “Okay, let's go faster. They've probably found Max by now so they'll be looking for me.”

“Okay.”

“Rico, do you know where they keep their weapons?”

“They took all my daddy's hunting rifles and locked them up in some cabinets in Max's bedroom, but I know where they keep the key.”

“How many men are here?”

He shrugged. “Lots of 'em. I don't know for sure. Two of them stay together when they are guarding somebody.”

“How far are we from the passage that leads outside?” Claire was getting impatient. She had Max's phone out now and ready, and was punching in the numbers, trying to pick up any kind of signal. Finally, the light on the screen did come on and sent out a vague glow in the dim tunnel. She put in Novak's number and nothing happened.

“Still not working. Let's keep going.”

Minutes later, they came out into a large cavern in the cliff where a sunken cistern chiseled into the stone floor was full of freshwater. The pool took up most of the chamber. On the far side was an opening that revealed the sky outside. Sun was pouring in across the cistern, and Claire hurried around the edge of the pool and stopped a few feet from the edge of the cliff. She was standing high over the surging waves, maybe as much as a forty- or fifty-feet drop. She stepped closer and saw that the waves were rolling in and disappearing underneath where they stood. She could hear them somewhere down under there, crashing violently against the hidden base of the cliff. The wind was strong and hot against her face, and it whipped her blood-stiff hair around and stung her nostrils with the smell of salt water and clean sea air. She breathed it in, happy to see the sun and sky again after feeling her way through the dark, cold tunnels for what seemed like an eternity.

Wasting no more time, she checked the phone again. It worked now, so she pulled up their GPS coordinates, frowned at the sight of them, because they seemed off from what she remembered of Black's GPS signal, but she didn't have time to worry about that. She had to get to Black. She punched in Novak's number and listened to it ring.

“Pick up, pick up, damn it, Novak, pick it up!” she ground out through clenched teeth. This was their best hope: that Booker and his team were nearby and could help them get out. But Novak didn't pick up. His automated voice mail came on, and she hissed out the coordinates of her location and told him to get there in a hurry, that she couldn't get Black out without them.

Claire hung up, called again and got his voice mail once more. She left another message and then she texted her GPS location to his phone, just in case the voice mail didn't activate. Then she tried Booker's and Holliday's numbers. Neither of them answered and her hopes fell. What if they were all dead? What if they had been discovered and killed before they could attempt their rescue? Maybe that's why they hadn't shown up. Oh, God, they weren't gonna make it out without them.

Awful waves of dread rammed through her then, so she inhaled some more of the warm sea breeze sweeping in off the sea. Deep, bracing breaths, while she tried her best to calm down. Then she turned and knelt down and drank deeply of the freshwater and felt a little revived. She splashed cold water on her face and head with her good hand and scrubbed the gore off her face and neck and out of her hair as best she could. After that, she stood up, ready to go again.

Okay, first off, she had to leave the phone on, in case they got the message and tried to call back. More importantly, she had to get to Black, get him inside the tunnels where he would be safe. She checked the Glock again, checked the mag, made sure the knife was in the scabbard at her waist. She put the phone back in her bra on vibrate and hoped she'd keep getting a signal. She turned to the brave little boy who now held her life in his hands.

“Okay, c'mon, Rico, time to go get Black out of that room.”

They made it back to the safe house without a problem, and Novak was pretty sure nobody was in pursuit. John Booker had regained consciousness. He was cognizant of what had gone down but was still woozy and light-headed. His speech was slurred, and he was in no way ready to fight anybody, not yet. Holliday had cleaned out his leg wound with Betadine the best he could, then wrapped it up tightly with gauze, and tossed back some painkillers with a bottle of whiskey that Black kept at the safe house.

After a couple of hours of rest, Holliday would be back on his feet, but he would still be in a lot of pain and have a limp. Right now, he appeared on edge, nervous, and angry, but he wanted to move out. Sooner, rather than later. His face was set with utter purpose. Booker was slowly getting there, too. The shrapnel wounds he'd suffered were mostly superficial, thanks to the Kevlar vest and helmet. Both were battling severe headaches from being so close to the explosive device and that wasn't going away any time soon. The fact that they'd both hit the floor facedown had probably saved their lives—that and their assault gear.

Surprisingly, other than the same intense thudding, relentless headache, Novak was unharmed for the most part. He had minor shrapnel wounds and a sore back but nothing serious. Once they were safely inside the farmhouse, he pulled out his phone, ready to bring in help from Paris. He wanted to know where the Grenadier had last been surveilled by French police, and he knew he had to find out the man's location fast. They had to get a bead on all of Soquet's known properties and places that he was known to frequent. He switched on the phone and immediately found the one missed message alert. The call had come from Max Soquet. What the hell? He swiped it on at once, fearing the worst. “Got a call from Soquet's kid. The boy, Max. They must wanna make a trade.”

The other two men jumped up and gathered around him, and Novak put the phone on speaker. Whether an offer to trade or not, this was not a good sign. At all. If they knew about Novak, who was not even part of Black's covert team, if they knew his personal number, Claire had been forced to tell them in ways he didn't want to think about. If that were so, all of them were in big trouble. No trade or deal Soquet wanted to make would be to Claire and Black's advantage. But when the panicked voice came on, they all realized at once that it wasn't Max Soquet who had called him. It was Claire Morgan, and she sounded scared, desperate, and uncharacteristically frantic in a way that none of them had ever heard from her before.

Claire was giving specific GPS coordinates, over and over, and then she started to cut out. “We're here, come quick . . . I'm . . . hiding. They got Black . . . drugged . . . Max's dead . . . hurry, hurry.” And then the phone died and her voice was gone.

Novak immediately tried to call her back, and John Booker was already typing the GPS coordinates into his laptop. The call didn't go through so they all waited for the map to pop up on the monitor. When it did, Booker stared at the screen and then looked at them, his face shocked. “Oh, my God, they're not in France. They're in Sicily.”

“Where in Sicily?” Novak said quickly.

“Looks like a small island, maybe, just off the coast, west of Marsala. It's close to some bigger islands. Looks tiny so it could be privately owned. There's no name given on this map.”

“How far is that from here?” asked Jack.

Novak stood up quickly. “That's the Aeolian Islands. I've been there a couple of times. Probably somewhere around the island of Milazzo, or Lipari, maybe. Pinpoint the GPS on that phone and we can get there by plane in an hour, hour and a half tops.”

After that, nothing else was said. They scrambled to collect their gear and headed back to the plane. The whole time Novak berated himself for the way they'd been played, the way they had walked right into Marcel Soquet's bloody, terrorist hands. And he was worried now, really worried, because he didn't think they had a snowball's chance in hell to get Claire and Black out alive. It would take almost two hours before they could land on an airport in the Marsala area, figure out which island they sought, and get out there on a boat.

Until then, Claire would have to survive and get Black out on her own. Somehow she'd have to keep both of them alive and uninjured. And that was asking a lot. On the other hand, he knew Claire Morgan pretty well by now. She was a fighter, no question about it. She'd proven it more than once. If she could just hold on for a few more hours, they all might just get lucky. He hoped to God that would be the outcome of their stupid and gargantuan mistake, but he sure as hell couldn't count on it.