The stars are just visible through the high window at this angle. That’s when I wonder if I can reach it. If I jump, I might be able to hold on and pull myself up.
A laugh escapes me at the thought. I’m not exactly the fittest or strongest female I know…but I still find myself listening a little harder for the nearest guard. When I don’t see one, I quickly get to my feet, upend the thankfully empty bucket and place it by the wall beneath the small rectangle of window.
My fingertips just brush the edge, so I lift onto my tip toes and claw my fingers around the flat stone edge, looking for purchase. Once I have the steadiest grip I know I’ll ever manage, I tighten my hands and begin to scuffle my feet up the wall. The first time, I immediately lose my grip and drop back down, scraping my stomach and tipping the bucket over in the process.
I listen carefully for any signs that I’ve been heard, but there’s nothing, thank God.
I try again, taking a heaving breath before managing a little leap off the bucket and scrabbling up the wall. This time I get a view of what’s beyond the window. Rows and rows of plants.
Vines?
I push my hand forward, reaching for anything to help pull me a little further through the tight gap, but there’s nothing.
That’s when I realise I’m touching a path that must surround the building. Which means the cell I’m in is partially underground.
An old wine cellar.
It’s a vineyard.
My arms finally give up and I slide back into the cell, crashing to the floor. The air is knocked out of me and I struggle for a minute to get my breath back.
But now I know I’m on a vineyard in Italy, near the sea.
That’s more than I knew before.
Yakob
I find her window on the second night.
It takes two full rotations of watching, two nights of lying in the scrub with the night shrouding me from view, before I isolate it. A narrow gap in the east wall, no glass, cut into the stone above what must have been a wine cellar and is now, if the guard patterns tell me anything, something else. A room men don't linger near. A room nobody jokes about on their cigarette breaks.
That absence of comment is its own kind of confirmation. Guards talk about everything. They talk about food, football, women, the heat.
Then I see it, pale fingers reaching through. A mess of wild hair. Two eyes scanning quickly before disappearing again. A few minutes later I see the same again. Fingers, hair, eyes. This time she pulls herself up a little more, her hands scrabbling about looking for purchase while her eyes scan wildly for information or a way out.
I watch until dawn before I let myself believe what I saw. Then I go back to the abandoned house and I start building the extraction plan, piece by piece, discarding anything that depends on luck.
The weapons come first. I lay them out on the bed in the order I'll need them. The knife will go on my belt where it always goes,close enough to reach without thinking. The suppressed pistol will go into the holster under my left arm. A second, smaller blade will go into my boot. I check the action on each one, strip and clean what doesn't need cleaning, because my hands need something to do while my mind works the rest of the problem.
I map two routes in and three routes out.
Route one follows the vineyard rows, using the gap in the camera coverage along the east wall. It's the cleanest approach, the one I'd use if this were any other job. Route two comes up through the dry riverbed and over the south fence, longer, slower, but it puts me closer to a vehicle if the vineyard route gets cut off. Route three I keep in reserve, a straight run through the north gate that only works if everything else has already failed and stealth matters more than speed. I hope I don’t need route three. Hope is not a plan, but even I allow myself a little occasionally.
I imagine the exits from her cell without ever having seen the inside of it. The hallway beyond the bars, the stairwell that has to lead somewhere, the kitchen door that gets propped open at noon and never fully locked again until the night shift remembers. Every villa this old has a servants' passage nobody uses anymore, a relic from when families like the Ramunnos needed a way to move people through a house without being seen doing it. I find the outline of it on the satellite images, a seam in the roofline that doesn't match the rest of the structure. I mark it. It might be nothing. It might be everything.
I sleep for a couple of hours and run the operation front to back four times, checking every joint the way an engineer checks a bridge before he lets traffic cross it. The sky outside goes from soft evening lilac to the deep blue that comes right before nightfall.
I sit on the edge of the cot, weapons cleaned and staged, routes memorized, and I let myself think about her for exactly as long as it takes to eat a protein bar from my pack and drink a bottle of water.
I think about the photograph while I pack my bag.
I wonder if she's cold now. I wonder if the room with the tiny window gets any heat at all, or if she's been shivering on stone for four nights while I lay in the brush two kilometers away, watching, doing everything except the one thing that would actually warm her.
It’s the job, I remind myself. I can’t just rush in and get her without one or both of us getting hurt or killed.
I’m not a hero in whatever story her family is telling themselves on that estate back home, with its bicycle on the front path and its rain boots by the door. I'm a tool with a specific function. I go in, I extract the asset, I remove anyone who represents an ongoing threat to that asset, and I leave. That's it. That's the whole of it, and it's never once needed to be more than that.
Twenty years, and it's never needed to be more than that.
