They were standing there, the tattooed soldiers from the village. With young Carlos beside them, his own fresh tattoo oozing blood, the look on his face like the others, like a wild animal incapable of mercy or fear.
She didn’t have time to speak. She saw the rifle from the corner of her eyes, and a moment later everything exploded as she sank into blackness, the walls coming up around her, and she knew she was dying.
Finn MacGowan stretched his legs in front of him, keeping a lazy smile on his face. They’d stopped putting him in leg shackles, though the chains around his wrists had worn calluses against the bones. He picked up the bottle of home-made beer, carefully, and brought it to his mouth, letting the chains clank against the dark bottle. They’d started giving him beer and mountain brandy a year and a half ago, probably because they hoped it would keep him from trying to escape.
It hadn’t, but they’d been watching him too closely for him to make a third attempt at getting away. The time would come – he just needed to wait for it.
He’d been held for more than three years, dragged from one remote camp to another. He’d seen more than half a dozen other people come and go, South American millionaires, British petroleum experts, French nuns and priests, American and German businessmen. Some were ransomed, some were executed, none of them managed to escape. The closest had been the American mercenaries two years ago. He’d made the break with them, but the Guiding Light had caught up with them before they reached the foothills.
They’d killed the other two and dragged his sorry ass back up into the mountains, and he still couldn’t figure out why. In three years they’d never asked for ransom, but then, who the hell could they have asked? It’s not like they knew anything about the Committee, and the Ice Queen, Isobel Lambert, wasn’t about to spend money extricating an operative who never should have gotten caught in the first place.
And that was assuming Madame Lambert was even still alive. It was hard to believe – she never would have left him there to rot for close to three years, she would have sent operatives to break him out. Her second-in-command, Peter Madsen, was another matter. There’d never been any love lost between them, and Madsen wouldn’t have given a crap. And if, as MacGowan suspected, it had been up to Madsen, he was going to see the sodding bastard paid for it. He’d find out the truth once he got out of here.
And the third time was the charm.
There were five other hostages in their current camp high in the Andes: a German engineer, the spoiled movie star’s son from California, two Guatemalan businessmen and the old nun. He couldn’t take them all when he left. The nun was too old to make it down the mountain; she was barely surviving the high altitudes. The Guatemalan businessmen were on their way to having their ransom paid, so there was no reason for them to risk it. Hans Froelich, the engineer, had offered him a tidy fortune to take him out of there, and Dylan Hamilton would be worth millions to his grieving family in California. Unless they were smart enough to celebrate his disappearance. Dylan was a major pain in the ass, and if he didn’t have the potential to be an asset, MacGowan would have killed him just because he was so damned irritating. But he was pragmatic enough to consider taking them with him, just in case.
He took another drink of the warm beer. He wasn’t sure whether it tasted more like piss or skunk, and he didn’t particularly care. Two more days and they were out of there, and if the Guiding Light decided to kill the hostages who remained, then so be it. He’d learned long ago that he couldn’t save everyone. He could only save himself.
They’d been in their current camp for three months now, and they’d be moving them soon. MacGowan couldn’t afford to put it off much longer. They weren’t watching him closely, and he’d done a damned good job of looking whipped. They had no idea.
The one who called himself Izzy came and sat down beside him, grinning up at MacGowan. “Poker? I can beat you this time.”
Since Izzy was half stoned on the crap he took, MacGowan doubted it, but he gave him a lazy grin anyway. “You can try,” he replied in the same Spanish dialect. “You need to put your money where your mouth is.”
Not that money would do him any good, and Izzy and the rest had very little to barter with. American cigarettes, cans of Coke, the occasional bottle of real beer were about it. But what they could barter was small bits of freedom. He’d lost the leg shackles thanks to three queens a few months ago, and a full house had given him private bathroom breaks. He didn’t particularly care whether he was taking a dump in front of an interested crowd, but it gave him a precious few moments of being unobserved and he was going to need that when he took off.
Today he had every intention of getting rid of the handcuffs, and he wasn’t going to rely on the luck of the draw to do it. The followers of the Guiding Light were young, stupid, and addicted to bazuco, or bazooka, the crap left behind when you made cocaine. It was child’s play to cheat, to take their money. The only problem was the bazooka made them trigger happy and wide-awake, and this time he couldn’t afford any screw-ups. They wouldn’t let him survive another escape attempt, particularly if he took people with him.
He still couldn’t figure out why they hadn’t put a bullet in his brain years ago. They dragged him from place to place when he had no intrinsic value, and these men were very focused on money. The revolution had left the building years ago – kidnapping was about cold hard cash and the Guiding Light was nothing more than gangsters in camo.
Porco, Izzy’s friend, and two others squatted down by the fire as Izzy dealt the cards. MacGowan had gotten good at reading the signs, and there was an edginess to all of them that signaled a coming change. He was going to have to move fast.
By the third hand Porco was unfastening his handcuffs, the fire had burned down low and the chilly night air was seeping in around them, but no one seemed to notice. “What’s up?” MacGowan asked casually as he dealt the next hand. “You guys seem on edge.”
“They’re bringing someone new,” Porco said, never the brightest. “We’ll have to break camp tomorrow morning so they can’t trace her.”
“Shut up!” Izzy snapped, grabbing his cards from the pack
ed dirt that served as a table. “He doesn’t need to know anything.”
“What’s he gonna do?” Porco said defensively. “He knows there’s no way he can escape – he tried it twice already.”
MacGowan picked up his own hand. Nada. He let a small, satisfied smirk play at the corners of his mouth. Bluffing with a bunch of stoned teenagers was always a challenge – if he overplayed it they’d get suspicious, if he underplayed it they wouldn’t notice. “I like it here,” he said, putting the cards face down in front of him with the demeanor of a man well-pleased with life, or at least with his poker hand.
“Then you’re loco,” Izzy said. “You sleep on the dirt, there’s no pussy, it’s cold and rainy. Englishmen like their comforts.”
“I’m not English,” he said pleasantly, steel beneath. “I’m Irish. From Northern Ireland.”
“What’s the difference?” Porco asked, blinking as he tried to focus on his hand.
“Trust me, there’s a big one,” MacGowan said in an easy voice. “I’ll explain to you a bit of our history this winter. Assuming you’ll continue to keep me alive that long.” Of course, he wasn’t going to be anywhere around in the coming winter, but they wouldn’t know that.
“You’ll be alive,” Izzy said. “We’re supposed to keep you that way if we can. We had orders when we took you.”
Which didn’t make sense. If Madsen was responsible he never would have bothered with the expense of keeping him on ice. So why the hell was he still here, and still alive?
He simply nodded, dealing new cards to those who asked for them, standing pat on his miserable pair of twos. He could hear them coming from a distance, but his poker buddies were too caught up in the game to notice. He drained his beer, then looked up with all the innocence of a hungry puma. “You want to call?”