Wildfire

  “Fuck it,” she said out loud, and stood up. If anyone was still on the island, she could immediately cling to something and announce there’d been a miracle, and she was regaining her strength. At that point she didn’t give a rat’s ass.

  She went straight for the huge refrigerator, poking her face inside to peer into the darkness. She found a wedge of cheese, half a chicken, butter, and several underripe mangoes. She dumped them on the wide kitchen island, managed to locate some of Elena’s homemade bread, and made herself the best sandwich in the history of sandwich making. And then she made another.

  Heading back to the fridge, she grabbed a Corona, popped off the cap, and took her feast into the living room, setting it on the low-slung coffee table that still held a copy of Time magazine from three years ago with Archer on the cover. For the first time in her memory she seemed to be completely alone on Isla Mordita, though seemed was the operative word. In the shadowy darkness she was relatively safe, as long as the power was off. At one point Archer had equipped the cameras with battery power, but storms kept shorting them out, much to his frustration, and he’d settled on old-fashioned personal surveillance when technology failed him. Problem was, there didn’t seem to be any humans left on the island except for her.

  She stretched out on the overstuffed sofa, devouring her sandwiches and savoring the beer. When Archer left he was usually gone for at least a week—that would give her more than enough time to leave the place. She couldn’t go anywhere in this storm, not unless she wanted to end up on the bottom of the ocean floor, but she could plan, and the moment the weather calmed, she could take off in Marco’s little skiff.

  Leaving Archer to Mal’s tender mercies. She should be grateful—she’d learned last night that killing someone was a lot harder than she’d thought, no matter what she’d gone through. She wasn’t letting Archer get away with the years of torment, the horrendous things he’d done, the horrifying things he’d still do. Malcolm would take care of it, and she’d never have to see either of them again.

  Only problem was she wasn’t sure she could just turn her back on everything. She wasn’t sure she could ever feel whole again until she faced her tormentor, the stupid man who’d fooled her so badly when she’d been young and vulnerable. She’d earned the right to kill him—she wanted to kill him. She just had to accept what it would cost her soul.

  She’d learned one other thing during her Committee training, and that was to trust her instincts. After her monumental mistake with Archer she hadn’t trusted anything, but she knew that Mal hadn’t gone for good. He was coming back. She wasn’t sure whether that ache inside her was hope or despair.

  She’d had plenty of time to learn how to fill the empty hours, and she was perfectly content to curl up on the sofa, nursing her beer and watching the storm lash the island. It suited her mood—her emotions were storming around inside her, her defenses were bending like trees in the wind, and the intermittent cracks of lightning were like a slap, reminding her she was an idiot.

  If she’d had any electrical power, she would have been tempted to blast Archer’s custom stereo and dance around the empty house in her underwear. As it was, she simply enjoyed the freedom to take the stairs two at a time when she went up to take a shower and bring the damned wheelchair back down, and contented herself with singing loudly to scare away the ghosts.

  She stood naked in her room for the first time in two years, staring into her closet. All those enveloping dresses depressed her—just for a short time she didn’t want to be swathed in fabric, mummified in her charade. She would have thought they’d tossed out everything from before the shooting, but there was a box on the top closet shelf, and when she pulled it out she found a pair of khaki shorts, clean and pressed. She stared at them for a long moment, then turned them over. The stain on the waistband had been impossible to get out, though she didn’t know if anyone had tried. Of course Archer had made certain these were kept—the clothes she was wearing when she’d been shot and supposedly crippled. The shirt was there too.

  It had been one of those unending sunny days, a stark contrast to her mood at the time. For two months she had known just how wrong she had been about Archer, and she had yet to figure out what she could do about it. She couldn’t finish her mission and kill him—she had no access to any weapons, and the thought of breaking his neck made her ill. He couldn’t suspect anything—he still had sex with her every night, though his recent gentleness felt absolutely creepy. At least she’d had enough training to be able to put up a good show, and she was excellent at faking orgasms. Make enough noise, squeeze your vaginal walls, and any man would be convinced.

  They were going on a picnic at the old sugar mill that day, something that filled Sophie with trepidation. The last time they’d been up there she’d still been hoping for the best with Archer, even though she’d begun having doubts within a week of their wedding, and their al fresco sex had been inventive and stimulating. That morning she’d wanted to vomit at the memories.

  She’d ending up wearing one of Archer’s oversized, custom-tailored Oxford shirts, rolling the sleeves up, the hem almost reaching the bottom of her shorts. She planned on telling him she had her period—Archer was fastidious about such things, and he probably wouldn’t even touch her hand if he could get away with it.

  It hadn’t gotten that far. She still remembered it clearly—if felt as if someone had driven a fist into her back, throwing her forward onto the ground, and a second later there’d been an explosion of sound. She hadn’t moved, hadn’t been able to move, but she could see Archer on the ground as well, covered by Joe’s protective body, as bullets flew overhead. Archer was smiling.

  She pulled the pale blue shirt out of the box and held it up. The bullet hole was surprisingly small in the back of the shirt, and the blood had washed out of it, probably to Archer’s disappointment. “Fuck it,” she said out loud. She still had no choice apart from her uncomfortable, lacy underwear, but she didn’t need a bra, and she pulled on the shorts and the shirt, rolling up the sleeves and tying the long tails around her waist so that the hole was lost in the bunched fabric. It should have felt morbid, but instead it made her defiant. She was just about to head back downstairs in the gathering dusk when she noticed something on her dressing table.

  It was the Beretta. Big help, she thought cynically, until she saw the firing pin lying beside it. So the asshole was feeling regrets, was he? She wasn’t in the mood to forgive anyone.

  She scooped it up—she’d need more light to break it down and reinsert the pin, and this time she could make sure the thing worked. When had he come into her room? He definitely wasn’t on the island right now—no one was—so he must have done it before Archer took him off. Sometime between having sex on the floor of the balcony and dawn he’d come into her room and left her the gun. Had he looked down at her while she slept? And why the hell hadn’t she woken up—her reflexes were excellent and she slept lightly. She was always alert when someone even neared her room.

  Some deluded part of her conscience must have felt he was no threat to her, or she never would have slept on, even if she’d been awake for days. It was appearing as if she was still the idiot she’d been so long ago, falling in . . . trusting the wrong man.

  Once downstairs she broke the gun down, cleaned it, and reassembled and loaded it. It looked right, felt right, but she couldn’t be certain until she tested it. She glanced around her, then saw the Time magazine with Archer’s charming smile shining in the dim light.

  Scooping it up, she headed for one of the side doors. There were waves in the pool, but at least someone had stowed the outdoor furniture. The wind was high, but not bad enough that she had trouble standing. She stepped out into the warm rain, moved to one of the sculptured bushes some two hundred yards away, and propped the magazine in the shaking branches. This would be a true test of her previously excellent marksmanship. If she could hit a moving target from that distance, she’d count herself lucky. Any corner of the
magazine would do.

  In the murky distance she could just make out Archer’s smug eyes from the black and white cover, and she trained the gun directly between them and pulled the trigger.

  The magazine exploded in a flurry of wet paper, and she ran down to get it, her feet light on the soaked grass. She had to chase it for a moment as it was tossed in the wind, but when she reached it she saw the bullet hole, and it took her only a moment to find the cover. Two inches off—in the middle of his forehead, not between the eyes. It would do. She ripped the cover off, letting the wind take the rest of the ruined magazine, folded it, and slipped it in her pocket. It would be her talisman.

  She found candles and matches before the night closed in, then opened one of Archer’s most treasured bottles of red wine and let it breathe. The flashlights and battery-powered lanterns were all in working condition, which made sense with the unreliable power, and she turned one on and set it on the coffee table. It had been so long since she hadn’t been watched that she was happy enough just to stretch out on the sofa and drink. She probably had a few days to decide what to do. For now, she was simply going to lie there and finish the best wine she’d ever tasted and regard her wineglass as half-full.

  The night was filled with noise. There were hurricane shutters on the building, but no one had bothered to close them before they left, and half of them had come loose and were banging against the house in the stiff breeze. The thunder and lightning were intermittent, coming just when she’d decided it had finished for the night, and occasionally she heard a great cracking noise as a tree broke beneath the force of the wind. It was too dark to see anything—she could hear the roar of the waves, but she had no idea whether the water was coming closer or not. She didn’t care. If it came into the house and reached the sofa, she’d still be able to climb to the second floor, and that would be safe enough.

  The crash of broken glass awoke her, and she struggled to sit up on the overstuffed sofa. The lamp had burned out and the cavernous downstairs was filled with an eerie darkness. After all that noise there was silence, an ominous sense of waiting. The constant wind had stopped for the moment, though she could still hear the angry surf in the distance. Or maybe it was closer than she thought, the rising tide edging toward the house and the first floor.

  After a couple of failed attempts she managed to push herself up in the smothering sofa, and then she froze. She was no longer alone on the island.

  She stayed exactly where she was. There was only one person in the world who knew she could walk, and there was no guarantee it was that man. She could hear shuffling footsteps, and for a moment the image of zombies came to mind, and she wanted to laugh. In this mess she’d made of her life, zombies would be the least of her worries.

  She saw his silhouette from her spot on the couch, and she held very still. It was definitely someone she’d never seen before, not one of the usual inhabitants of the island. Presumably male, he was short, squat, and out of breath. That didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous—when Archer left the island he might have made arrangements for a professional to finish the job on her that Emilio had flubbed.

  And then he spoke, his voice high-pitched and slightly fretful. “Hello? Anyone home? Don’t tell me I almost died getting here for no reason.”

  Sophie lit a match, setting it to one of the collection of candles on the coffee table, knowing the flare of light would illuminate her. “Who are you?” she called out.

  He moved toward her, but she kept lighting candles against the darkness, so that by the time he came around the sofa she could see him fairly well. He was balding, with a fringe of white hair surrounding his skull, late middle-aged and looking irritated. He was wearing a white suit that must have once been immaculate but now looked as if it had been tossed around in the ocean, and what were once spotless white tennis shoes were now covered with mud. Clearly he was a man who was fussy about his clothing, which meant at the very least he was vain. She could work with that.

  “Who are you?” she said again.

  “Dr. Benjamin Chekowsky,” he said in an affronted voice, clearly believing she should have known who he was. “And who, may I ask, are you, and where the hell is Archer MacDonald?”

  In fact, she knew exactly who Dr. Benjamin Chekowsky was, even if she’d never seen him before. Archer’s pet scientist, he was the man responsible for the biological weapon that had been Archer’s obsession for the past few years.

  He didn’t look like a man who spent his time and his considerable intellect trying to devise ways to kill as many people as he could in as short a time as possible. In fact, he looked a little like a cross between Alfred Hitchcock and Truman Capote, a thought that should have amused her, but there was nothing funny about Dr. Death.

  “You’re the man who designed Pixiedust,” she said slowly.

  “Don’t call it that stupid name,” he snapped. “I’ve told Archer it needs to be treated with proper respect.”

  “What do you call it?” she asked, thinking perhaps “genocide” and “mass murder” while she kept her face still. Not that he could see her that clearly in the candlelight, but it wouldn’t do to underestimate this little man.

  “It’s RU48 at this point,” he said in a voice that sounded like he should have added “you idiot” at the end. “I’m thinking the Chekowsky Solution might be a more dignified name for it.”

  She stared at him, momentarily speechless. This was all she needed—another demented egomaniac. “So your name will go down in history?” she said. “That is, if there is any history after you set that stuff off.”

  He puffed up a little bit, like an outraged pigeon. “What’s Archer doing with a naïve little bleeding heart like you? You’re not pretty enough to be one of his bimbos.”

  “He married me.”

  Chekowsky’s beady little eyes immediately went to her motionless legs, and Sophie silently cursed. He knew about her, and she was really loath to give up walking. “I’ve heard about you,” he said slowly.

  She gave him a flinty smile. “I expect you have. I’m afraid that there’s absolutely no one else on the island. How did you manage to get here in this storm?”

  “Wasn’t easy,” he said, giving nothing away, and Sophie’s annoyance built.

  “Are you alone?” she asked. That seemed highly unlikely—Chekowsky didn’t look like the kind of man to brave the elements or thrive on adversity. In fact, he looked a little like a fat, drowned rat. A white one.

  “I’m the only one who made it.” He glanced around him. “I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat? I’ve been through quite an ordeal.”

  Oh, her heart was breaking for him. He’d probably drowned the sailors who’d brought him this far. “There’s plenty of food in the kitchen, though I’m afraid all the servants have left the island. You’ll have to get your own. Obviously I’m in no shape to help you.” She added that just to rule out all possibility of him thinking she could walk.

  “Obviously,” he said in a dismissive voice. Her annoyance spilled over into a cool, quiet rage. “Where’s the kitchen?” he asked.

  She gestured, and he turned and disappeared, without asking the poor crippled woman if he could get her anything. She sat very still, contemplating dark deeds. And then she called out, “Bring yourself a wineglass. I’ve opened one of Archer’s best bottles of cabernet.” She gave her legs one last, luxuriant stretch before tucking them up on the sofa, then leaned forward to pour herself a final glass of wine. By the time he returned, his plate piled high and one of Archer’s best Waterford crystal wineglasses in his hand, she was lazily sipping at her own glass, watching him over the rim.

  Chekowsky heaved his bulk into one of the chairs opposite and reached for the wine bottle. “I don’t usually indulge,” he said with a belated attempt at affability, “but this is a special occasion.” He filled the wineglass to the top, leaving no room for the bouquet, and took a hefty gulp. Archer would have been horrified, Sophie thought happily.

  ?
??Is it?” she said, taking another sip. “What are we celebrating?”

  Chekowsky hesitated, but she could sense that his need to brag exceeded his natural caution. “I’ve finally perfected the Chekowsky Solution. That’s what I was coming to tell your husband. I told him to be patient,” he added with the trace of a whine. “He should have called me to tell me he was coming—it would have kept me from risking my life like this.”

  “I think his trip was spur of the moment. But my husband told me RU48”—she decided not to call it by the silly name of Pixiedust or the egocentric Chekowsky Solution—“was already developed.” In fact, he hadn’t said anything about it, but she was adept at listening to even the slightest bit of information, and RU48 had already been tested several times in the Middle East and Ukraine.

  Chekowsky drained his wine in the second gulp, then poured himself another too-full glass before diving into his food. “Anyone can make a biological weapon,” he said in dismissive tones as crumbs littered his crushed white suit. “It requires a singular genius to devise one that can be used for extortion and civil unrest.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Oh, really? And how is that? I can imagine its uses for civil unrest—you simply wipe out those who disagree with you. But how can you extort money . . . ?”

  He sighed, washing down a huge mouthful of food. She couldn’t believe anyone that short could put away so much food, but he was making an impressive effort. “It’s the vaccine, you see,” he said in a condescending tone. “And the antidote.”

  She stared at him. “I would think a biological weapon with a vaccine and an antidote would be less valuable, not more.”

  “One would think that,” he agreed, pouring the very last of the wine into his glass. He paused a moment, remembering his nonexistent manners. “Did you want any more of this?”