Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 25

25

“Crap,” Jacka says, backing away from the unoccupied water closet. Even through the haze and stink of my flash-bang grenade, the toilet looks fancy enough to wipe your butt for you. Just like everything else in Noah’s private bedroom s***h s*x tower.

Rob takes in the decadent bedroom with a single glance. “Safe room?” We’re all within a few feet of each other, but he still relies on the throat mike. Even if Noah bugged his bed, the eavesdroppers will have trouble understanding our barely vocalized words. Someone aiming a distance mike at the armored glass walls won’t have a chance.

“I’d guess basement,” Jacka says.

Makes sense. The basement would bear a lot of load. Put in a double layer of brick wall, or pour concrete all around. Add a bombproof vault door, and you’d need a tank to blast your way in. We don’t have a tank, not even in Bradley’s heavy bag. But I’m so frustrated right now, so ready to rip Noah’s throat out with my teeth if I have to, that I feel ready to tear into a subterranean bunker with my bare hands.

Instead, I make myself think. The basement vault makes sense. I’m sure this house has one.

But it’s awfully inconvenient if you’re in the bedroom.

“Hold,” I say.

Jacka looks at me.

Rob studies the stairwell, bulky .45 held ready to puncture anyone coming up.

I’d only seen the living room beneath us in infrared. You lose a lot of detail that way.

But gross spatial relations don’t need detail. My brain churns.

“The floor,” I say. “It’s too thick. The living room ceiling doesn’t come up near this high.”

Jacka looks down.

I can see Rob grin even through his respirator mask and goggles. “You’re right.”

There’s another safe room.

And it’s right under our feet.

We’ll never find the proper entrance. Fortunately, we don’t care if that shower loses its crystal-clear glass walls.

Jacka whips a paper-wrapped plastic brick the size of a Danish pastry out of his pack and starts pulling it apart like clay.

Rob says, “Be advised, we’re making a hole in the bedroom floor.”

“Ack,” Bradley says in my ear.

Jacka takes less than thirty seconds to roll a long tube of plastic explosive, like a child molding snakes, then guides it into a yard-wide circle at the foot of the ridiculously oversized bed. The ashy smoke from the flash-bang is dissipating, sucked away by Noah’s high-quality air conditioner, but the explosive’s bitter almond smell claims its place. There are all sorts of plastic explosives, but a surprising number of them smell like cyanide tastes.

Once the greasy ring is complete, Jacka looks at me. “In the stairwell. Fifteen seconds.”

I turn to the stairs. Rob’s already going down, gun held before him, to put some shelter between us and the impending blast. My head is even with the floor when Jacka shoves a little electric detonator into the plastic and hurtles towards us.

I have my hands over my ears and my back firmly against the window wall when Thor hammers Noah’s bedchamber. The goggles protect my eyes and the mask my breath, but there’s this huge sense of pressure as the explosive rearranges the very air around us. The stairs and walls shake and the fillings in my molars rattle, and this fluffy cotton wall of smoke starts flowing down the stairs at us.

A loud crack, then this massive pop of glass breaking on a mammoth scale.

My ears pop with it.

The wall of smoke tatters and shreds, sucked away.

“How much did you use?” I ask.

“Enough to get through a reinforced floor,” Jacka says.

The blast might have killed Noah. But if he’d holed up in a safe room, what did he expect?

I had a sudden mental flash of Noah, stabbed in the gut by flying shards of exploding floor, writhing in agony as blood poured from his exposed intestines. The thought fills me with savage glee, but I push it away. I don’t want Noah dead or even mortally injured.

The dead feel no pain.

Rob says, “Go.”

We storm up.

The windows up here are crazed and cracked. One of the big panels burst outward, and hangs by one side and the bottom to let the outside air in. Nobody’s ever going to use that bed again, or the shattered shower. The fancy little gilt nightstand was knocked into the glass and splintered into kindling. Half of the indirect ceiling lights are out, while most of the others flicker irregularly.

Most important, Jacka’s charge blew a five-foot-wide circle out of the floor.

More flickering lights shine up out of that pit.

And someone’s shouting down there.

A woman’s voice.

I’m familiar with half a dozen languages, and can scrape by in a few more, but my cantina-Spanish-plus-a-few-words Portuguese isn’t nearly enough to keep up with this half-screamed barrage. I don’t need to know the language to realize she’s terrified and angry all at once.

“Come out,” I say loudly.

In the corner of the bedroom, a mirrored ceiling panel plummets to the scorched and smoking carpet and smashes into a billion shards with a spine-clenching crash.

A torrent of Portuguese comes from the floor.

Jacka answers with his own barrage of Portuguese. I can pluck a few words from what he says, but he’s talking way too quickly for me to understand.

The woman answers.

“She says she’s alone,” Jacka mutters through my earpiece.

I use my own mike, even though I want to shout. “Where is Noah?”

Jacka raises his voice to ask.

The woman snarls a defiant response.

Jacka raises his machine pistol and puts a short burst, maybe three or four flechettes, into the hole at an angle.

She shrieks.

Jacka answers, his voice calm and cold. While I can’t order dinner in Lisbon, I do know the Portuguese for grenade.

And I don’t need to know Portuguese to know that fear breaks her. I hear a clatter and a thud from below the floor, and two delicate, empty hands with fingernails painted sparkly red thrust themselves out of the hole.

“Sair!” Jacka snaps.

Her hands fumble at the edge of the hole. Wood snaps beneath her touch, and she gasps. Then she finds a more solid place to grab and she hauls herself up.

She’s exactly as beautiful as I would expect of any woman in a rich man’s bedroom. Mediterranean features, dark hair. I’ll give up a kidney if she’s twenty yet. The satin Doctor Who pajamas and matching slippers are a surprise, though.

“Você fala Inglês,” Jacka says. Do you speak English. It’s not a question.

“Sim,” she says. She stares at Jacka’s machine pistol with the kind of huge brown eyes that men pay serious money for. “Yes, a little.”

“Where is Jack Noah?” I say.

“Leave today afternoon,” she says. “Business.”

Maybe she’s lying.

But my gut tells me she’s not. Noah isn’t stupid. He left gunmen in armor in the pool room bathroom. I felt sure he didn’t have those men there every night.

Noah had expected us, or someone like us. And left us a surprise.

I felt pretty certain I knew who had arranged for the sniper deaths of Pillock and Daft as they came to join us.

“Anyone else in the safe room?” Rob says. His eyes are fixed on the stairwell again, .45 ready to fire.

“No,” she says.

“Beaks,” Rob says. “Check.”

I move carefully to the hole. The surviving but abused floor groans underfoot, and I’m ready to leap back at any moment. The safe room underneath is maybe six feet deep—too short for me to stand in, but roomy enough for most.

It’s a big, open space the size of the bedroom. There’s canned food and bagged food. A land line phone. First aid kit mounted on a wall right next to two horrifically lethal military machine pistols. Pads and mattresses on the floor. A tiny water closet right beneath the bedroom’s, with a plain white toilet you might find at Home Depot. A floor hatch and fifteen feet of rolled-up ladder.

There’s a little suitcase by the floor hatch, full of expensive lingerie and an evening dress with thousand-dollar heels and a scattering of jewelry. A couple changes of high-end street clothing. Not even a pistol.

But no Noah.

I drag the suitcase over to the hole and hop back up. “Clear.” Despite the soft muttering needed for the throat mike, I’m sure my disappointment comes through.

“Secondary objective,” Rob says.

I storm right up to the woman. She takes a hesitant step backwards, but before she can retreat I’m looming over her. I don’t touch her, but the pressure of my presence makes her lean backwards. Fear scrawls itself across her face.

“Listen,” I say, letting my anger into my voice. “Noah knew we were coming. He ran away. He left you for us. He left you. To. Die.”

She shakes her head.

“These men,” I say. “These rich men. They take you, they throw you away. He gave you money, didn’t he?”

“Sem dinheiro,” she stammers. “No, no money.”

“Gifts, then. Jewelry—jóias.”

“Presentes, yes.” She’s trembling.

“In the suitcase down there? Bagagem? Take your gifts. Sell them. Go to school. You want a man? Find one who will treat you like an equal.”

My anger switches. Suddenly it’s not just Noah I’m angry with. It’s Doctor Kamp, my advisor all those years ago, when I wasn’t much older than this girl. It’s that younger me as well, who’d been taken in just as thoroughly. “Never let anyone use you again.” I’m not shouting, but my words bear all the heat of a fascist leader screaming about tomorrow’s glorious victory.

I want to add if I see you leeching off another rich asshole I’ll kill you myself—but that’s too much. This girl’s already terrified. If her breathing gets any shorter, if she shakes any harder, she’s going to pass out.

From this point out, she has to save herself.

I stomp back to the hole, reach down, and haul her suitcase out. “This is yours?”

She gives a rapid, desperate nod.

“Take it,” I say. “You’re coming down with us. Then you run out the pool room door. Don’t stop running until dawn. You got it?”

She never stops that frantic nodding.

Rob says, “You go in front. Carry the suitcase. Both hands.” Jacka repeats the instructions in Portuguese. She scoops up the suitcase in both arms and hugs it to her chest.

“No sudden moves,” Rob warns the girl. “Or I shoot.”

That she understands without translation.

Going down the stairs, I scoop up the thug’s severed arm. It’s clammy and sticky and nasty, but I stick the thumb under my armpit to try to heat it again. We have more doors to get through.