Butterfly Stomp Waltz

Chapter 32

32

Inside the safe house, Rob cracks open a bottle of water, puts it in my hand, and sends me to get cleaned up. I drain the water, and to my surprise I can hardly keep my eyes open long enough to scrub away the blood. I leave the gore-soaked clothes heaped on the bathroom’s tile floor and collapse naked under the sheets of the narrow hard bed.

Eventually, the afternoon sun streaming through the thin aluminum blinds covering the high narrow window tickles my eyelids and teases me awake. I’ve overslept, by far.

My first thought is of Rob handing me the bottle of water. He drugged me. The bastard roofied me.

I’m not as mad as I should be, though. Last night’s revelations still absorb all my anger. When we hit the safe house I’d been awake for twenty-odd hours. So exhausted, any time I spent frittering with Noah’s data would have been wasted.

My head feels weirdly hollow. My tongue tastes bitter with last night’s disaster. My empty stomach mutters and when I work my jaw my parched lips crack.

At least I got all the blood off of me before falling over.

Jacka.

I sit up, letting the coarse bedsheet fall away. It’s warm enough that my sudden motion and the thought of an injured teammate triggers just a touch of sweat.

The plain room holds only this narrow Ikea bed and a fourth-hand pressed wood dresser. A weak breeze squeezes through the finger-wide space in the window, rattling the dusty cheap blinds and sending dirt skittering across the tile floor. The bathroom door hangs open, exposing yesterday’s blood-petrified clothes and the cloud of flies basking in their miasma.

The dresser drawers stick, but the contents are arranged by size—small in the top drawer all the way down to double and triple extra large in the bottom. No underwear—everything’s been chosen to equip the widest possible array of people with the essentials of decency. I find a pair of drawstring red terrycloth shorts that hang loosely over my hips and a T-shirt tall enough to reach them, advertising a Lisbon music festival.

No shoes or sandals. I open my door and follow the sound of voices.

The living room might be best described as rustic, if only because I’m too polite to call it primitive. The rippled plaster walls have seen better decades, but someone meticulously patched the cracks and carefully painted them a flat intense white. Above ocean blue crown molding, the walls curve to flow into the textured ceiling. The tile floor is cool under my bare feet, but the breeze flowing through the shuttered windows tastes warm. The wooden furniture would be antique if it was in better repair.

The long padded couch looks like a veteran of three generations of healthy athletic children. Rob, sprawled across it, looks just as rough. His dark skin has a waxy sheen, his eyes fever bright. Somehow, after last night’s mayhem and hurried departure, he’s wearing crisp linen pants and a white button-up shirt with a thin brown string tie. The matching linen jacket hangs neatly folded over the arm of the couch.

Bradley’s sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the open screen door, in comfortable-looking slacks and a Portugal souvenir T-shirt, upturned feet in tightly laced brilliant white sneakers that would probably reflect enough sunlight to stop global warming. She looks fully rested and ready to go.

“Beaks,” Rob says. “How are you?”

“I’m okay,” I say. “Considering that you slipped me a mickey.”

“I feared it was necessary,” Rob says.

Bradley says, “You were half crazy last night.”

Her words feel like a slap. “I was fine. I didn’t rant or anything.”

“You were about to detonate,” Rob says. “Understandably, of course. A night’s sleep hasn’t improved your situation, but it did improve your ability to make sensible decisions.”

Rob might be right, but I’m not about to admit it. “How’s Jacka?”

“He made it,” Bradley says.

“Thanks to you,” Rob says, pulling himself upright. He’s moving slowly and deliberately. “A physician met us here right after you went to sleep. Without your treatment, Jacka would have bled out on the way here.”

I shrug. “You would have done the same.”

Rob gives a tiny smile. “Dragging poor Dominic back from the estate almost did me in. My personal physician is likely to strain himself yelling at me at my next checkup.”

Bradley says, “You’re exhausted. She’s up, go get some sleep.”

“I’ll stand watch,” I say. “No problem.”

“Momentarily.” Rob massages the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger, letting his eyes drift closed. He moves like every muscle drags a heavy chain behind it. “We should briefly discuss what we learned.”

“You looked at the data,” I say. My heart revs up a gear.

“Once I arranged for Jacka to receive medical care,” Rob says. “And contracted a few local professionals for guard duty.” Knowing Rob, those local professionals could be anything from off-duty police to Mafiosi. “And sent Bradley clothes shopping.”

“I got you a few things,” Bradley says, pointing at a bulging white plastic shopping bag the size of a stack of seat cushions.

I’m picky about my clothes, but whatever she’s found has to be better than the castoffs I scrounged. “Thanks.” If the bag includes underwear I’ll even be grateful. I sink into a rocking chair opposite Rob’s couch. I’m still a little groggy from the ten-hour nap, but anticipation tightens my shoulders.

The chair rocks too easily. I tense my legs a little to push it back and hold it still.

Rob opens his eyes and folds his hands in his lap. “Noah has property all over the world. He’s heavily invested in biomedical research. Companies he owns appear to have created a variety of medical treatments.”

I clench my jaw against impatience. Noah, yeah, I want to crush him, but what I really care about is Deke. How could he have turned on me? On our team? How could he have just walked away from me without a word?

But Rob knows what I need. He’s going to explain what he discovered. I need to let him have the floor.

“It appears,” Rob says, “that Noah’s companies are fed research directions from his plantation in Myanmar, near the Chinese border. He has an extensive, cutting-edge research facility there. One that operates under less than ethical standards.”

I say, “What exactly do you mean, ‘less than ethical?’”

Bradley’s studying her knuckles. She’s heard this before. Who knows what they talked about as I slept? What plans they made?

“In the civilized world, medical processes are tested first on computers,” Rob says. “The ones that look promising receive testing on a series of animals. The most promising of those processes then proceed to human trials. Noah has accelerated progress by abandoning animal trials and proceeding directly to human experiments. When his people find something, they send carefully sanitized data and suggestions to his more ethical businesses.”

“Hang on,” I say. “Yeah, that’s horrible, but—it can’t work that way. You’d go through lots of people.”

“People are cheap,” Bradley says. She’s still studying her knuckles, like she doesn’t want to pay attention to the words coming out of her mouth. “If you don’t care where they come from or how they live, or how they’re going to live after you’re done with them. People are damn cheap.”

“Especially when you can import them from China,” Rob says.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay.” Noah’s Myanmar site is horrible. “We need to take Noah down.” My heart doesn’t have space for that horror. “But…”

I can’t make myself ask. My neck and head tremble. Tiny muscle spasms quiver up and down my back. The rocking chair tilts a little further back as my legs tighten.

“Deke is a guest at Noah’s Myanmar compound,” Rob says quietly. “He has a private cottage on the grounds.”

My tongue feels thick and heavy. “Under guard?” Is—is there any chance that Deke is Noah’s prisoner?

“Reports show regular deliveries to Deke’s cottage,” Rob says. “The meals are not prisoner fare. The wine isn’t exemplary, but probably excellent for that part of the world. And yes, the compound has proper cells, in an extensive series of underground caves.” Rob’s voice picks up a thread of tightly restrained anger. “It’s clear that most of the people in that facility don’t want to be there.”

My conflicting impulses clash. Noah’s exactly the sort of rich exploitative jackass I love to burn. Using unwilling human beings as first-line research subjects is an appalling new low even among the people I target. There’s a thread in me that wants to smash open that compound and free the people inside. To pillage every penny, every treasure, every bit of loot Noah’s ever valued, and split it between his victims. It wouldn’t nearly be enough, but when accompanied by Noah’s severed head impaled on a pike, it would have to do.

But Deke’s in there.

And I don’t want Deke. I need him. I need to grab him by his shirt and scream at him. I need to know how he could turn on me. If I don’t learn that, if I don’t understand how the man I love—loved—so deeply and completely could betray me like that, I’ll never trust another human being again.

They say to turn the other cheek.

But I was going to throw the other fist instead. And a kick. And probably half a pallet of plastic explosive.

My hands are clenching the hard edges of the rocking chair’s wooden armrests, gouging lines into my palms. I unclamp my fingers and peel my hands off the pitted varnished wood. I wiggle my fingers to get some circulation back and fold my hands in my lap.

Bradley isn’t studying her own hands any more. She’s eyeing me nervously.

Rob’s sitting straight on the couch, but his posture has just a little bit of exhausted sag. The only thing keeping him awake is willpower.

I know what I’m going to do. But I make myself slow down. Without Rob and Bradley, without Jacka, I couldn’t have learned about Deke. I’m going to approach this like a grownup.

“You know I’m going after Deke,” I say.

Rob nods. “And we’re going after Noah’s compound.”

“We have to,” Bradley says. “It’s not like we have a choice.”

“You could fade,” I say.

Bradley shakes her head.

Rob says, “My sources inform me that another half-dozen freelance specialists have been murdered in the last twelve hours. It’s impossible to say that Noah arranged them. But the deaths are consistent with the information Deke provided Noah.”

“And if the bastard’s killing any specialist he can find,” Bradley says, “he’s sure not going to let the people who blew up his favorite mansion skate.”

So: it’s Noah, or us.

Deke, or me.

I can live with that.

I’m going to have to. No matter how much it hurts.