The Diaries - 01 (31 page)

As he came out of
the store, his mind was already going over their route out of Germany.
 
After the Metz incident, the mobsters had
obviously covered up what had happened from the authorities.
 
But in this instance—especially after what
Gage did to Jean earlier in the day—he wasn’t so sure that a large-scale search
wasn’t now laid on.
 
Crucial
intelligence, if it were indeed the case, that he would need to successfully
navigate himself and Monika out of the country.

There was one way
to find out, and it hadn’t come back to haunt him from the first time.
 
It would be lunchtime in Fayetteville, and
Hunter told him to call if he needed him again.
 
Gage leaned into the phone booth on the outer edge of the store and
removed the calling card from his wallet.

After going
through the motions with all the digits, Hunter answered.

“Sir?” Gage asked.

“Holy shit, son.
 
What’s your location?”

Gage’s heart jumped.
 
He knew the tone.
 
Something was wrong.
 
Bad wrong. “What’s up, sir?”

Hunter’s voice was
a sharp razor.
 
“Your girl, is she with
you?”

“What?”
 
The pressure in Gage’s head nearly blinded
him as one of his headaches attacked with a vengeance.

“Listen carefully,
son.
 
I’ve been trying like hell to find
you.
 
Yesterday, my asset called me and
said, after he’d done his initial check on you, that he discovered an
undercurrent search going down in Germany and France, and that the telecom
companies were trying like hell to ping you and someone named Monika
Brink.
 
The two requests came in at the
same time, so he assumed she was with you.
 
They were laid on by someone in the DGSE and told to keep quiet, but my
guy is on the inside and was able to hear about it.”

Gage exhaled,
relieved beyond measure that it wasn’t something worse.
 
The phone companies were trying to triangulate
their cell phones.
 
“Okay…okay…we’re green
on that, sir.
 
No signals emanating from
here.”

“Listen closely,
son.
 
I’ve been hoping like hell to talk
to you because six hours ago, Brink’s phone went live and they pegged her
location to the meter.
 
Apparently she
was moving for a bit but her location has now gone static.
 
Is—she—with—you?”

The entire block—the
store, the street, the people walking—were spinning in Gage’s vision as he
gripped the pay phone for support.
 
He
took deep breaths, commanding his brain to focus.
 
It had to be a mistake.
 
“Are you sure, sir?” he managed to stammer.

“My guy is
one-hundred percent.
 
Said they
triangulated her next to the Frankfurt main train station.”

Gage swallowed his
sudden nausea back, jammed the phone into the receiver and sprinted east, his
toes barely touching the wet sidewalk.

 
 
***

Monika had just
finished brushing her teeth after her celebratory beer and another cigarette.
 
Her mind was still racing over her discovery.
 
Tonight they would travel, and tomorrow they
could determine what to do about reaching out to the woman, the now
seventy-something offspring of an abused Jewish servant and Adolf Hitler
himself.
 
Monika had spent the last few
minutes pondering what she’d be like, finally deciding, unless psychosis was
passed on in the genes, that she was probably as normal as anyone else.

Gage would be back
soon.
 
The reality of running away, while
liberating, also contained drawbacks.
 
Monika knew she should take a few moments to scrutinize the facets of
her day-to-day life to make certain there was nothing that couldn’t be left
safely undone.
 
While she thought about
her monthly rent and her job, she held her lips open, staring at her teeth and
deciding to bleach them once they finally reached wherever it was they were
going.
 
Coffee, strong and dark, was just
not what the pearly whites needed.
 
As
soon as they found a new city, she would call and make an appointment with a—

Call
.

Phone!
 

Monika panicked as
she remembered her cell phone.
 
Running
across the room, she retrieved it from her bag, holding down the green button
to power it off.
 
Hand over her mouth,
she dropped it back into the bag.

There had been no
calls to her phone.
 
It was just sitting
there idly.
 
She didn’t know if anyone
could have tracked it that way.

Doubtful
, she thought, trying to
convince herself.
 
Still, Monika stared
at the now dark phone nestled in the folds of her purse.
 
Pushing her worry aside, she moved back into
the bathroom, retrieving a long piece of floss from the dispenser.
 
Just as she began at the back of her top
teeth, she heard the old hotel’s floor creak—outside the door.

Frozen for a few
seconds, she made herself move, leaning outside of the bathroom and listening.
 
For a long moment, she heard nothing, her heart
returning to normal.
 
Gage, and all his
talk about guns, had put her on edge.
 
The floss went back into her teeth and, just as she began to think about
which shade of white would look best, she heard the creak again.

The sound was
definitely
coming from just outside the
door.
 
Someone.
 
Creeping.
 
Coming.

Monika stopped
what she was doing, her mind racing.
 
Again, she heard another noise—a scraping, on the door—at the lock.
 
Monika glanced around the brown hotel
room.
 
The pistol was exactly where she
had left it, nearly covered by the sheet of the bed up around the pillow.
 
Face quivering with fear, she turned back to
the door.
 
It opened, and in a flash a
large man slipped inside, his pistol sweeping the room until he saw her,
training it on her head.
 

The floss
fluttered to the floor from her hands.
 
Monika was wearing only a towel around her waist and one in her
hair.
 
Instinctively she covered her
breasts and, just as she was about to scream, the man cut the sound off—or at
least muffled it—by lurching toward her and jamming a smelly leather glove over
her mouth.

What Monika saw
next confirmed her worst fears.
 
Through
the door lurched the soaked man she remembered from her cousin’s shop.
 
He was large and lumbering and hideous.
 
She remembered the beady eyes and the
baseless expression, much like one might see in a great white shark.
 
Emotionless eyes.
 
Killer’s eyes.
 
Monika struggled to get free, but the man
holding her was too strong.
 
He moved
behind her, pressing the gun into her neck, knocking the towel from her
hair.
 
His grating voice shushed into her
ear, rancid garlic breath.
 
His gloved
hand remained clamped over her mouth until she stopped trying to scream.
 
He spoke French, asking where her man was.

She shook her
head.

The other man, the
one from Metz, stepped before her.
 
“Look,” he said to the man holding her.
 
From the dresser he picked up the diary, opening it, staring at the
words as blankly as if they were composed of an undiscovered language.

Monika’s notes
were folded over, in the center of the book.
 
He didn’t see them.

The man flipped
the pages, shrugging.
 
“How the fuck is
this valuable?”

“Just put it in
your bag and shut up,” the one with the
mildewy
glove
over her mouth growled.
 
He placed his
mouth to Monika’s ear again.

“Where is Gage
Hartline?” he rasped in German.

Monika again shook
her head.

“You don’t want to
answer?” he asked.

Monika was
strangely unafraid, feeling an unknown rage coursing through her.
 
The man’s fingers opened slightly so she could
speak.
 
Calmly, defiantly, she whispered
a German insult.
“
Fickst
dich
,
Schwein
.”

The big one
grinned at the insult, his sunflower-like teeth making him even more
ghastly.
 
“As much as I’d like to do her,
Marcel said to leave her alone.”

Monika, fluent,
understood their French perfectly.

“Yeah?” the one
who held her asked.
 
“Fuck Marcel.”

Now the one with
the scar eyed her like he might stare at a prime steak, taking in both breasts
before coming back to her face, which he studied.
 
“You serious?”

He readjusted his
grip, moving the pistol to the back of her neck and holding her wrists behind
her back with his free hand.
 
“Like I
said, fuck Marcel.
 
I’m not driving
halfway across Europe for nothing.”
 

The one with the
stitches chuckled and began to unbuckle his pants, removing his trousers and
his shoes.
 
She saw him pull his arm
back.
 
The punch from his massive hand
didn’t knock her out, but it did bewilder her enough that she almost didn’t see
the pistol wedge itself between the top of the headboard and the mattress when
the heavier man jerked the sheet from the bed.
 
He didn’t see the pistol because he was too busy ripping the light brown
sheet into a thick strip of cloth, which he tied very tightly around her head
and mouth.
 
Then he turned to the man
that was holding her.

“Me first, because
of my head.
 
You watch the door.”
 
As she tried to understand their argument, the
blood from her broken nose began to soak through the gag, filling her mouth
with the copper-tasting liquid and making her feel faint. Monika’s head was
spinning when she realized with horror that she was about to be raped by both
men.
 
The one who punched her must have
won the argument because he jerked the towel from her waist and pushed her onto
the bed.
 
She struggled to get away as he
stroked her leg, his stubby penis pointing skyward.
 
Monika glanced at the other man, leaning
against the door with a flushed face as he watched his partner fighting to have
his way with her.

The pistol…

She reached with
her hand, temporarily allowing the man on top of her to at least get partially
into position.
 
As she felt his
disgusting organ touching her, she moved her hand laterally in the space
between the mattress and the headboard, trying to feel the weapon but not
finding it.

Monika squeezed
her eyes shut, smelling the man’s sour odor as he pressed against her, unable
to begin the act.
 
She moved her hand to
his chest, pushing him backward slightly.
 
He froze, seemingly unsure of what she was doing.
 
She shifted her body slightly, toward the
headboard.
 
Then, disgusting her to her
very core, she tried to appear at least somewhat complicit.
 
As she opened her legs just a bit, she worked
the far end of the headboard, coming back until—she felt something.

Got it!

She slid the
pistol from its hiding place, getting it positioned in her hand under a pillow
where neither man could see. The smaller man was now peeking out the door.
 
As the large man still thrust unsuccessfully
on top of her, Monika wasn’t thinking clearly and she aimed the pistol at the
one by the door.
 
At the very last moment
she changed her mind. She needed to kill her rapist first and, as she adjusted
her aim, she was shocked when she unleashed a bullet with what she thought was
very little pressure on the trigger. The blast from the .357 sounded like a
cannon in the small room.

The bullet struck
the brown plaster wall just to the left of the door, sending a puff of white
dust into the air before lodging itself into the wooden support hidden nine
inches behind the wall.
 
Monika’s
elevation had been perfect.
 
Had she aimed
three feet to the right, Luc Florence would have taken a lead slug in the chest
and no doubt died a painful death.
 
But
such is the case when lack of experience plays a role in critical situations,
and Luc, being an experienced combatant, reacted predictably.
 

Bruno yelled,
rolling off of Monika, turning her body in the process.
 
She was moving the pistol to him as he fell
onto the floor, but she was too late.
 
Luc
unleashed two rounds from his silenced nine-millimeter, hitting Monika Brink,
fatally, in the upper chest and the throat, the force of the two slugs even
dislodging the blood-soaked gag that had covered her mouth.