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Lord knows I am no von Clausewitz. But I sure as shit knew better than that. Why is it so stupid? Think about it for a second. Stone’s guys are outside, on the ocean, trying to take a hostile rock armed with every defensive weapon a top-dog arms dealer can think of. And the force they’re attacking is where? Underground. Inside that rock. Where it is always fucking dark! So in the dark, they’re going up against guys fucking used to the dark, top-notch pros who are on their home turf. Bailey Stone’s guys, on the other hand, have never been here, don’t really know what it looks like or where things are—things like weapons systems, for instance—and they attack in the dark.
Get the picture? Sure you do. Because you’re not in the dark in hostile, unfamiliar territory, like Bailey Stone.
I mean, seriously, why? All they had to do was pop Étienne, grab his boat, enter the code from the flash drive I gave them to turn off the security perimeter—come on. How hard do you have to make it? I love a challenge myself, but this? Even if they had surprise, which they thought they did, there were enough obstacles. So they made one more big one?
And Boniface knew they were coming. Maybe not when—I mean, he was probably just as surprised that they came at night. But then, Boniface was not stupid. He wouldn’t guess that somebody who got big enough to challenge him was dumb enough to attack at night, because he wouldn’t do it. But when it came? What the hell, batter up. Boniface was ready, and he was at home. He had all the advantages already. And Bailey Stone gave him the last big one by attacking in the dark.
It can’t have been pretty. The sound of it was awful, and not just because it made my poor damaged head hurt even more. Shooting and explosions, followed by a whole lot of screaming. But you know what’s worse than screams of pain? When the wounded suddenly stop screaming, and you know enough about the people involved to know why. Here’s a hint: They didn’t stop screaming because Boniface’s mercs gave them a nice shot of morphine for the pain.
And when it was over, just in case I still had one tiny, practically invisible little flicker of hope, I heard a couple of guys go by, laughing and talking. I listened hard, praying I might hear a Southern accent. That would mean Stone had won, I was saved, I could get Monique out of here—
When everything is at its darkest and you catch yourself hoping—don’t. Seriously, just don’t. Bad idea, always. It just makes things darker when whatever stupid miracle you were hoping for doesn’t happen. Because it doesn’t. It never does. And it didn’t this time.
The voices I heard were speaking French. Boniface’s guys. Stone got his ass handed to him. Duh.
Riley’s Seventeenth Law: Miracles don’t happen.
Just to make sure I didn’t miss this important and obvious law of nature, a face appeared in the little barred window set in my cell door. I looked up and saw the face and I did not find it comforting that somebody was checking up on me. Because the face belonged to Bernadette. She was looking at me with the nightmare side of her face, and I was pretty sure that was on purpose. She pushed it right up against the bars, and she started to whisper at me in French. Nothing much; just tender little endearments, words like you might say to your lover when you have a hot evening planned.
They always say that French is the language of love, or at least of sex. And to be perfectly fair, the things Bernadette whispered at me really did sound sexy. I mean, if you just heard the words and didn’t see the face. Maybe you could even stretch it a little and say yeah, she really was talking about sex.
Except I always thought of sex as involving pleasure, and what she was actually
saying was about as far from pleasure as I could imagine. At least for me; the look on that half-melted face told me she was going to have one major orgasm after another when she got around to me.
It went on for a couple of minutes. I mean, she was enjoying the hell out of it. It was her foreplay, I guess. I couldn’t do anything but sit and listen and wish I didn’t speak French. But finally, she left, and I could go back to being completely overwhelmed by misery, pain, and terror—which, to be honest, was kind of a relief after Bernadette.
It was over. All of it. It had been a pretty good run, but I was at the finish line. We all have to go sometime, but it seemed way too bad that it was so soon. And even worse that I had to drag Monique down with me. I mean, who knows? Maybe we would’ve finally gotten something together. It didn’t have to be permanent. Who needs kids, house in the suburbs, PTA meetings, all that shit? I had just been hoping for somebody to hold on to now and then.
Maybe I could’ve found some miracle new treatment for Mom, too. Something that would make her sit up, blink, and say, “Well now, what on earth?” That would’ve been nice.
And maybe one last big score. I had my eye on a couple of very cool things that would look really good on my score sheet.
But fuck it, that was all over, everything. All dead, because I was. Or I would be pretty soon. I mean, not that soon, apparently. There was the formality of a couple of weeks of unbelievable agony first. After that, though; boom. Lights out. Everything all gone forever and ever. That was all of it, all that was left. Bye, Riley. Exit stage down and out. This time, there was no way.
And then I heard shots.
41
Frank Delgado was tired.
He was tired of the weather; it was supposed to be summer here, but the wind that seemed to blow over them constantly had a sharp edge to it that reminded him of Chicago. Storms came up out of nowhere, and although their violence was familiar to Delgado, who had grown up in South Florida, these storms also seemed to have that same cold edge to them, and that made them feel wrong.
He was also tired of the unchanging blankness of their surroundings at this most remote outpost. There was nothing but rock, a couple of buildings—including a hangar—and the unending roll of the waves. It was all French blankness, too, which made it seem even more alien, more like the landscape of a different planet.
And connected to that, he was tired of hearing French spoken. That seemed petty and un-woke even to him, but it was true. As someone who grew up hearing Spanish spoken at home, he found French a special torment. He could almost recognize some of the words—merde was mierda, for example. But how was eau any relation at all to agua? And even with words that were close, the pronunciation was off just enough to tease him without actually delivering meaning.
Frank Delgado was just as tired of the members of his own task force. He’d been cooped up with them for three weeks. He was not, at the best of times, a social man. In this situation, crammed together with the others, trying to stay out of sight as much as possible, his minimal social skills were pushed beyond their limits; all the standard jokes had become tired, annoying; and all the daily routines of eating, sleeping, and so on were so tiresome and repetitive they made his teeth hurt. Living in close quarters with these people, and with the French team, on a knife-edge of tension, waiting endlessly for something with no way of knowing when, or even if, it was coming—it had all become an exhausting chore just to get by every day.
But most of all, Frank Delgado was physically tired, for the simple reason that he was not sleeping more than two or three hours a night, because he did not want to miss it when the signal came. It had been his confidential informant who said the perimeter defense on Île des Choux would go down. If it did not—if this whole trip was no more than a colossal waste of time and money for two different governments—it was all on him. As time stretched on and nothing happened, the weight of that responsibility became crushing. This, too, added another level of exhaustion.
So Delgado waited and watched, with fading hope, sometimes dozing in the metal chair. And because he was so tired, on so many levels, he almost missed it when it finally came.
It was night. Delgado had dozed briefly once or twice and had lost track of the time, but it was dark outside and had been for a while. He was in his usual place, in a corner of the hangar that had been walled off into a small room. There was always some activity there, because the room held all the team’s electronic monitoring equipment. Several technicians from both teams sat there 24/7, watching the monitors to sound the signal when the defensive perimeter of Île des Choux went down.
They also watched the radar screen for any signs of traffic in the vicinity. They had been told that Bailey Stone was coming, but there was no way to know when. There had been a couple of false alarms—a cargo ship once, and then a tanker—but it was not a well-traveled area. Boredom was a problem, fatigue from being on high alert and from watching for something that would not come.
Delgado tried to keep his confidence alive. Sooner or later, he had to believe that Stone’s strike force would hit Boniface. As the days turned into weeks, he was less sure, but he stayed here in the nerve center, sitting in a battered metal chair. He was not on duty, not watching the screens and dials. He was, rather, slumped over at the back of the room. It had become his post, the place where he waited and watched. And he was falling asleep. He had just decided to get up and stretch his legs when one of the French techs jerked forward and held up a hand. Before Delgado could really register what that meant, the Frenchman tore off his headset and said, “Le périmètre est ouvert!”
