Arctic Rising (21 page)

Anika looked around the room, but Gabriel shook his head and pulled a handgun out from a shoulder holster. “Don’t try to run, Anika. I would have to shoot you. Which is not what I want. Understand me?”

“Yes.” Anika glared at Vy, who didn’t seem affected by this at all. “Who are you?”

Vy looked down. “Gabriel won’t hurt you. He just needs to take you somewhere where you won’t get hurt.”

“He is a liar, I would not trust a word of his,” Anika said. “We know for a fact he no longer works for the Canadians. He’s not an official of any sort.”

Vy raised an eyebrow, but did not look all that surprised. “Working more than one side, Gabriel?”

Gabriel squinted. “Don’t try to muddle your way into all this. Let’s just get this done.”

Vy raised her hand. “Now, please…” she said, almost in a bored tone of voice.

The two bouncers, hairy chests and zipped masks and all, stepped inside from their posts outside. They had disabled the two men who were watching them. And they were now carrying very large assault rifles. “Hands up gentlemen.”

Hands, however, did not go up. The men in suits split, the ones on the edges of the group diving for cover and pulling guns out from under their jackets. Not for even a second did they consider disarming.

The two club guards opened fire after a second of hesitation, surprised at the reaction.

The three nearest suits fired at the same instant as the guards. Blood exploded out the backs of the gray material with the loud crack of the rifles, and at the same time, the pop of handguns dropped the two guards. Blood sprayed from their bare chests as they stumbled back against the doors and fell.

Vy and Gabriel hit the floor.

One of the suits worked his way around behind a booth, gun out, to make sure Anika wouldn’t run. She turned and glared at him. He kept his distance, though, cautious.

In the silence that had settled over the dance floor, the very distinct sound of a shotgun round being chambered echoed.

Gabriel, now getting to his knees, frowned.

None of his men carried shotguns.

Tempo, the blonde, shoved the kitchen doors open, forcing one of the suits out in front of her at the end of the shotgun. Behind her came Alicia, armed with a submachine gun.

She turned right, focusing on another suit standing beside the door. Anika noticed that she had a half-crouch walk and the submachine gun pulled tightly to her shoulder.

These performers had been trained to handle their respective weapons.

“Throw down your fucking weapons,” Alicia shouted. “There are more of us, we’re well fucking armed.”

The two men held their weapons out, handle-first, and started to get to the floor.

But the three men using the booths for cover opened fire.

Tempo jerked, hit, and the shotgun went off. Point blank. Blood and flesh sprayed across the floor. The second round of the shotgun hit the ceiling as she fell.

Shards of glass from the mirrored tile shattered and fell, and Alicia fired a burst into the man by her and dove at Gabriel, who held Vy down with a gun to her head.

Smooth hands grabbed Anika and shoved a gun against her temple. “We’re just going to sit here for a moment, and if you move, you’ll die,” her captor said.

Anika was not going to sit passively. She elbowed the man behind her and grabbed his gun hand, shoving it up into the air.

Right by her head, the shot sounded impossibly loud, instead of the pops she’d heard when they first started firing.

Bits of ceiling fell down and shattered on the floor around them.

Anika managed to twist her other arm up, and now held on to the man’s gun hand desperately with both hands.

He grabbed her head with his free hand and smacked it into the booth’s table. Her vision narrowed, but she hung on to the gun. Her sore muscles and bruised ribs protested as they scrabbled around the cushions of the booth. The gun fired twice again into the air.

He managed to get her up against the back of the booth and shoved his forearm underneath her throat to choke her.

Then a loud smack staggered him. He let go of her and slumped over.

Kerrie stood over him with a baseball bat, blood smearing the end of it. She grabbed the gun.

Anika shoved the man off her, and he slid down under the booth’s table.

She took a deep breath and looked around. Alicia sat on the floor, submachine gun hanging by a strap on her shoulder, crying as she held Tempo on her lap.

A couple of the suits crawled in their own pools of blood, lost in a haze of personal pain, trying to get … somewhere.

Two of the performers sat on chairs holding dish towels to wounds.

And Vy had Gabriel standing up, holding his own gun to his head. Her hand shook slightly as she also scanned the room, and then spotted Anika.

She looked relieved.

29

The club was locked down and quiet for the day, the neon signs over the doors turned off. Gabriel had been tied up to a pipe in a storeroom in the kitchen.

Vy spent most of the hour after the gunfight on her phone. Within minutes she’d called in a dark-haired Italian doctor, who’d been escorted quickly through the door—which was barred shut again.

He confirmed Tempo was dead, stabilized one of the suits, then confirmed the rest of them dead. Both bouncers were dead. Several of the performers had cuts from glass and debris.

A silent cleanup began, everyone pitching in to sweep up glass and mop up blood. Someone started crying halfway through.

No one would look at Anika. And she could hardly bring herself to look up from the area she’d decided to clean up either.

So much blood.

*   *   *

Vy touched her shoulder. “Anika?”

Anika was sitting on the carpet just outside the elevator on the lower floor, her back against the wall. She’d meant to get back to the room for a time-out, to try and process everything, but she’d only made it a few steps out of the elevator before needing to sit. She looked up. “Hi, Vy.”

“How are you doing?” Vy cocked her head as she reached out a hand. “The new hair is different. I almost didn’t recognize you when we came in.”

“I thought you had handed me over to Gabriel back there.” Anika pulled herself up. “He captured us. He sank Roo’s boat.”

“I know. I couldn’t send a message ahead. He boarded the boat we were taking here. Took us by surprise. Chernov’s dead.”

“Chernov?”

Vy looked over, her body language heavy and tired. “My bodyguard, assistant, you met him back at the club?”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m sorry,” Vy said. “I should have taken this all more seriously than I did.”

“It’s okay. They have me staying in your room.…”

“That was a mistake,” Vy said gently. “They should have given you your own room.”

Anika swallowed. “Tempo, and the others. Why did they do that for me?”

“Fight back?” Vy put a hand on her shoulder. “They’re tough people in a tough place. They don’t take well to being pushed around. It wasn’t for you, it’s how we all handle security. They all know crowd control. Most of them take personal defense classes, most of them practice target shooting. Some of them … have had rough experiences. We all have. I know you have, too.”

“This is a lot of bad shit, Vy.”

Vy pulled her closer into a tight hug. “Don’t worry about where things stand, okay? We need to go talk to Roo, right now, and figure out what we’re all going to do next.”

“Why are you helping me?” Anika whispered into her shoulder.

“You’re not the only person who knew Tom. You two came in to The Greenhouse a couple times, when he was showing you around. Tom and I went back a ways. I asked him about you the second time you two came in. I saw you flirting with one of the bartenders.”

“Tom knew little about me then,” Anika said.

“He knew enough. You were quiet, kept your head down. Worked hard. Family was important to you. And Tom swore you had his back, no matter what. I don’t give friendship easily, but after hearing him and other people from your base talk, I liked you. Tom trusted you completely. Even with his life.”

“And look where that got him,” Anika said. She kept holding on, though. The hug was real. It was contact. It felt better than a down bed and a hot shower and a pillow and oxycodone all rolled into one.

“What would you think about yourself if you knew you had let a nuclear device through your hands?” Vy asked. Anika let go, and Vy looked at her and nodded. “I thought so. Tom was a friend. You’re a friend. I’m helping. We’ve got this whole ‘different worlds’ thing going, but right now, you should stop asking why. Unless you want to hang all this up and go back.”

“I’m not going back,” Anika said.

“Me either.” Vy took her arm. “Someone has a motherfucking nuclear device. And chances are, they’re going to use it. If we can figure out how to stop them, we should. Basic fucking morality, right? Now let’s go talk to our pet secret agent.”

“Roo?”

“Yes. The other secret agent is hardly a pet. We’ll deal with him soon.”

*   *   *

“We have here,” Roo said, turning his laptop to face them, “a chance to make some serious serious money off Gabriel. Or, get us all some real favors.”

“I have money,” Vy said.

“Favors it is then, girl.” He swiveled the laptop back around and started typing furiously. “Everyone’s combing for information about that nuclear weapon. We have a solid lead. Anything we can get out of this-here mysterious Mr. Gabriel, that’ll be worth a lot. And it’s for sure he knows something. So the question: how do we make that man talk?”

Vy cleared her throat. Her voice was suddenly chilly. “It’s been a long time since I’ve had to do anything like that, Prudence.”

“Then maybe he tells us everything he knows because he a nice guy, right?” Roo folded his arms.

Vy looked downward. “If we have to.”

Anika had been following the exchange. She was pretty sure they were talking about torture. She didn’t like where this was going and stepped in. “Did he come with luggage, or a briefcase?”

Roo looked at her. “Yeah, a briefcase.”

“Then maybe it won’t come to whatever it is you’re thinking,” she said, while wondering, once again, who Vy really was. What had she been through that she’d been forced to do something like that?

*   *   *

Upstairs in the kitchen, Anika cracked the familiar briefcase open. Vy and Roo moved Gabriel to a chair and tied him to it while Anika looked at the cluster of leads, trying to remember what attached to what.

Chest leads, both sides of the ribs, ankles. Cap on the hair.

She turned the machine on, looking at the various screens slowly drawing the brain map. She’d been distracted and scared when it had been used on her. But she’d paid enough attention.

“Would you like to skip all this and just tell us what you know about the nuclear device?” Anika asked their captive.

Gabriel looked at her, lips pressed firmly together, betraying no emotion at all. The lead wires trailed down the front of his body to the machine, rustling slightly on his shirt as he moved.

“Okay,” Anika said. She had a feeling that would be his response. “Is your name really Gabriel?”

She saw Roo smile briefly out of the corner of her eye.

Gabriel cleared his throat and spoke softly, as if each word were something he was compelled to say. “Anika, this will not be that easy. I am not going to say yes or no to anything you ask me. At all. Do you understand?”

“Gabriel…” Anika said.

“I have my convictions,” he said. “Do you have yours?”

“Damn it, Gabriel, there’s a nuclear weapon free out here.”

He leaned forward, straining against the rope binding him to the chair. “It’s not going to be simple, Anika. Or easy.” He looked around at Vy and Roo. “They understand.”

Anika leaned back and looked over at Roo, who shook his head. Anika looked over at Vy. “Vy?”

Vy had a hand in her pocket. “Fuck it,” she said.

Then she drew out a pair of brass knuckles and threw a punch against the side of Gabriel’s head. Skin split, blood flew, and Gabriel rocked back in the chair.

30

Roo dragged Anika out of the kitchen. He was, as she remembered, surprisingly strong. She tried to twist free, and he moved with her, fluidly, easily, and redirected her movement so that she spun all the way back around and kept walking out with him.

“This is
not
good,” Anika shouted. There were a handful of performers outside still. They all looked up. “We shouldn’t be doing this. Not Vy.”

Inside the kitchen, a loud smack dribbled out through the doors. Anika flinched.

“There was a girl, once, running weed up and down the Alaska corridor. She made good money, right?” Roo said, holding Anika back by the shoulders. “But one day, off the Bering Coast, she was picked up by Russian Coast Guard. And she disappeared into the prison systems. You understand?”

“Yes.”

“I got her out a year later,” Roo said. “By then … she’d learned some things. Like when she started out in Baffin, a short, blond woman dealer would have to be tougher, more brutal, than a man, or people wouldn’t listen closely. It took a while for things to settle.”

“No.” Anika tried to push past Roo, but he held her. “Roo!” She shouted that loud enough everyone openly stared.

“Anika, let her do it.”

Anika held her hands up. “No. We won’t leave her to do it alone. So let me go, and quit trying to be protective. You are my friend, let go of me.”

Roo did, and Anika marched back into the kitchen. She ran into Vy with her shoulder, shoving her aside, and looked down at Gabriel.

He looked up, face bruised and bloodied. A tear rolled off his cheek. “It’s okay, Anika.” Blood dripped from his lips. “It’s okay. It’s repayment. I deserve this. We all know it. I’ve done worse. You’ve seen some of the things I’ve done. I’ve cost enough lives, I knew this would come some day. But I cannot give you what you want. And I’m sorry.”

She thought about the sadness in him. And the disgust and regret in his voice when he’d talked to her about torture back on the Canadian Patrol Boat.