“There is some tension, I guess,” I said. “And plenty of good reasons for it.”
“The main one is that you’re very attracted to her. Admit it—at least to me. You’re hot for Lucy.”
“That’s nonsense, Anna.”
“I don’t mean to argue with you,” she said soothingly. “But how could it hurt to give us a whirl?” Anna changed positions and crossed her legs, the black dress hiking up to reveal a long expanse of absolutely perfect thigh. “This is my purpose in life, Hays. To give pleasure.” She smiled. “Make an honest woman out of me.”
I couldn’t help smiling at that one. “Very cute.”
“Yes, I am.”
Anna glided gently up onto my lap. Her voice took on a silken tone. “I promise you, I’m a lot more fascinating than those simulator toys. I change with your mood, your every wish, your desires. I’ve been told that I’m the best in Europe.”
I didn’t have a problem believing that. Not at all. Anna’s warm body pressing on mine was starting to weaken my defenses.
Almost against my will, my hands began exploring Anna’s new shape, and, along with her breathless gasps of pleasure, they confirmed my guess about her anatomical perfection. Anna was all woman, all over, all the time, all mine—if I wished.
She deftly unbuckled my belt, cupped my vitals, and slid my pants down. Hoo boy!
“I see I finally have your interest—up,” she said. “My, my, Hays. You just might be the best in Europe yourself.”
But sonofabitch if the front door didn’t open just at that second—and in walked, of all people, Lucy.
She folded her arms, eyebrows rising, and leaned back against the wall.
“Well, well, now I know what I’d look like if I were a street whore,” she said.
“It would be an improvement over your current pig-farmer style,” Anna shot back.
Lucy seemed amused rather than angry. “Not bad, roboslut. But playtime’s over. Sir Nigel wants to see your boyfriend. Hays, pull up your trousers!”
Chapter 70
A FEW MINUTES later, thoroughly chastened, I was in a speeding car with Lucy at the wheel. London continued to be a revelation to me, especially the tasteful blending of old and new architectural styles. This was such a refreshing change from monolithic New Lake City with its streamlined, very modern everything.
There was one disturbing similarity with the Elite world that I had known though: toys were all over the place. Both for children and adults.
“Plenty of those creepy little dolls around here. I guess a fad is a fad,” I muttered as Lucy drove us through the outskirts of London. Little Jessicas and Jacobs seemed to be everywhere. One of their tricks was to wave at cars and their passengers. I didn’t wave back.
“Look who’s down on toys all of a sudden,” Lucy said, giving me a sidelong glance and a chuckle. “You were having a pretty good time with one just a few minutes ago.”
“Let’s just look at the scenery, please… Now who, or what, are they?”
A gang of street punks, dressed all in black and carrying long iron crowbars, were hanging out on the corner ahead. When they spotted our official-looking car, they thrust their crowbars into the air, then tapped them menacingly against their palms. Very, very West Side Story.
“Smashers,” Lucy said. “They’re like Betas, except they specialize in destroying anything civilized: monuments, art, books, schools, museums, churches—of course—even cemeteries. The Elites pay them to do it, supply them with addictive drugs like wyre. That’s another fad sweeping the world.”
I nodded grimly. What she was saying would fit with the overall Elite plan—to degrade and demoralize humans in any way possible.
It was clear that they were succeeding too. While downtown London was well policed, parts of these outskirts looked shockingly like the human slums in New Lake City. We were the only moving vehicle in sight. The neighborhood people watched us with dull, wary faces.
The difference was that, back home, the ugliness stemmed from neglect and poverty. Here, as Lucy said, things of beauty were specifically targeted. The stained-glass windows of graceful old churches were bashed to splinters, stone walls were ruined by painted scrawls, park greens were ripped up by car tires, statues lay toppled, fountains and ponds were open sewers for waste and poisons.
The Smashers were always busy, earning their pay, having their fun.
The punks on the corner were starting to yell at us now, a monotone, three-syllable chant. “Sticks and stones! Break your bones! Sticks and stones! Break your bones! Sticks and stones!” Let me guess—“Break your bones”?
“They like to work people over with those crowbars—then hang them on hooks to die,” Lucy said. “Their idea of a good time.”
Suddenly, a bottle came flying toward the car provided to us.
My impulse was to jump out and feed it back to the scum who’d thrown it. I was armed now—the MI7 had given me a couple of compact pistols. But I reminded myself that Sir Nigel was waiting and we had to keep moving.
In the next instant, a second bottle exploded into a fireball, rocking the car from its wheelbase. A sheet of flame shot up beside my face. I could feel the heat through the closed window.
Another crude petrol bomb blew up ahead of us—then another. I swiveled around to look behind and make sure we were safe. We weren’t. The gang of Smashers was racing toward us, howling like werewolves and waving their trusty crowbars. More of them were pouring out of nearby buildings.
We’d fallen into an ambush, hadn’t we? There was no way we could make it through the alley ahead without the car being disabled—which would leave us on foot and at the mercy of this raging, hot-blooded mob.
“One eighty!” Lucy yelled in warning.
She stomped hard on the brakes and yanked the wheel around to bring us into a screeching spin. I clawed one of my pistols free of its shoulder holster and lowered the window. I aimed into the teeth of the nearest charging punk. “Get back, get away!” I yelled. He didn’t. He swung his crowbar at me instead.
I fired and his face dissolved, fragments of flesh and bone exploding like one of their petrol bombs.
I kept shooting as our wildly fishtailing car slammed into more of the screeching attackers.
“Watch out!” Lucy gasped, dodging as an iron bar bashed through the windshield. One of the Smashers had somehow gotten on the roof.
I threw open the car door, leaned out, and touched off a point-blank round that blew away the hitchhiker.
There must have been fifty more Smashers though, the nearest ones using their crowbars like grappling hooks to smash through windows and pull themselves up onto the car.
“Sticks and stones! Break your bones!” they screamed. As they swarmed onto the car like ants on a cricket corpse, rocking it to turn it over, Lucy pulled us out of the screeching U-turn and rammed the accelerator to the floor. The car lunged forward, with me still hanging out the door and snapping kicks at several snarling Smasher faces.
A second later, the car lurched free of the howling mob and streaked away from their fiery trap, reaching one hundred miles per hour by the end of the block.
I jerked loose a crowbar that was jammed in a window and raised it in front of the two Smashers who were still hanging on like leeches.
“You have one thing right,” I yelled. “Breaking bones is fun!”
They let go and tumbled away into the London fog.
Chapter 71
“I AM AFRAID that the invasion by the Elites, the premeditated annihilation, is almost upon us,” Sir Nigel said. “I’ve decided you two must continue your operations elsewhere. I’m sending you to a location in France. An emergency meeting is in progress there now. Nothing could be more important. Perhaps nothing in our history has ever been more important.”
The poor, maimed man was lying in a military hospital bed, and his speech was slow and labored, but still full of passion. During the Tower of London attack, Sir Nigel had been struck in the face and ch
est by laser fire. I had seen this kind of wound before. I knew he would die from it.
Lucy touched his arm lightly, her face tense with concern. “I’m so sorry for your pain, sir. It’s my fault. I brought Hays Baker to London.”
“Nonsense!” Nigel raised his voice with visible effort. “It’s essential that he’s here with us. Hays Baker may be our only chance to survive this terrible ordeal. He and Lizbeth Baker. Seven-four Day was just a warm-up round for this abomination. This is the fault of that monster President Hughes Jacklin.”
“When do we leave?” I said.
“That’s the spirit. There’s a stealth jet waiting for you now. You’ll parachute into France. When you get to the world summit meeting, pay special attention to the memory-purge sessions. Remember—memory purge!”
“Have there been any breakthroughs?” Lucy asked anxiously. “Sir Nigel?”
“I know that our finest scientists are working on it—feverishly. Your recent contribution was a great help,” he said to Lucy.
I glanced at her. “What contribution was that?”
“Elite brains,” Lucy said, as calmly as she’d say a box of chocolates. “You remember those headless Toyz Corporation executives in Baronville?”
I’d hardly thought about that in the turmoil of the past days, but Lucy’s words brought back shocking images of the executives.
“This is a war,” Sir Nigel reminded me. “We are trying to stop a holocaust that could actually eliminate the human race. You must go to France, first. Then move on across Europe—Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Norway. Then on to Asia—if there’s time. Sound the warning loud and clear.”
He offered his hand. I clasped it gently, and Lucy leaned over to kiss his cheek. We suspected that this might be the last time she and I would ever see Sir Nigel Cruikshank.
“Bonne chance,” he whispered as we left.
Chapter 72
THE MILITARY STEALTH jet shot across the English Channel like a dark arrow cutting through the heart of the night. Lucy and I sat at the plane’s rear, both of us silent, brooding. We had plenty to think about, trying to prepare ourselves for whatever might be coming next: probably a world war.
“I have to make an important stop along the way,” Lucy said, standing up abruptly. “Sorry I didn’t tell you before, Hays.”
I nodded, though not completely following her. “Where are we stopping?” I asked.
Then I saw that she was readying a parachute—and that the red jump light was starting to flash.
“I thought we were going to the southeast of France,” I said. Even at the jet’s terrific speed, we couldn’t have made it there already.
“You are. I have some other business to take care of first. I’ll catch up with you as soon as I can. Godspeed. If there could possibly be a God. What was that old song—‘God Bless This Mess’? I always liked that sentiment. Good-bye, Hays.”
I stared at her in complete disbelief. “Wait a minute—you’re just leaving me?”
“There’s no time to explain a couple hundred years of European history to you. But don’t worry, Hays. You’ll be met at your drop zone.”
“Met by who?”
“The éminence grise of Interpol.”
“The what? The who?”
“The person behind the scenes who’s the real power here in Europe. Hays…” She looked at me earnestly, and I thought she was about to tell me something important, or maybe even personal. For some odd reason, I wanted her to. But she only said, “I wish it didn’t have to be like this. But it does. As Sir Nigel said, we’re in a war. A war of the worlds. This is the Big One.”
Lucy waved as she stepped into the jet’s parachute airlock and the door slid closed. Ten seconds later, no more than that, it reopened with the chamber empty.
Strangely, I felt incredibly alone with her gone. Maybe I had begun to think of Lucy as my only link between two hugely different worlds, Elite and human. Or maybe I just enjoyed her company. She seemed to know about everything, and she could make me laugh, even at times when I shouldn’t.
But I didn’t have long to ponder Lucy and myself before my own jump light started flashing. I immediately sealed myself into the airlock. Seconds later, I tumbled out into the cold, dark sky and was batted around like a feather by the jet’s furious turbulence.
The whipping air got less fierce as I raced farther in my plunge toward earth. At an altitude of approximately three thousand feet, I popped open the chute. There was the satisfying shock of the harness seeming to yank my body upward.
Now I had some control, and I was able to study the landscape below.
Far to the south, I could see the long, glittering curve of the Côte d’Azur and the black emptiness of the Mediterranean Sea. Eastward lay the majestic Alps—huge, craggy, and mysterious shadows in the moonlight.
And directly underneath me—an impossibly small circle of flares marked my target.
I started furiously working the parachute cords to make sure that I landed close by. I was completely trusting Lucy now—and the humans of course. That was still unsettling to me—trusting them. But what other choice did I have?
My acute night vision didn’t pick up any signs of hidden enemies. Just a single vehicle waiting midway inside the circle of flares. It sure wasn’t a military transport.
It was a limo.
And the éminence grise? Where was he? Inside this fancy car?
I glided to earth as silently and invisibly as a ghost, landing in a forest with the crisp scent of pines filling my nostrils and the ground beneath my feet softened by their duff. For a full minute, I stayed crouched there, listening and watching the long, shiny, silver vehicle.
There were no sounds other than the wind through the tree branches and the timid rustlings of a few small animals on their nightly quest for supper.
I eased down onto my belly and started moving toward the flares—and the mysterious car parked out in the middle of nowhere.
Chapter 73
WHAT IS THIS all about? Another absolutely insane adventure? More deep secrets? And why isn’t Lucy here with me for these vital meetings?
The limo’s side door was open, revealing a dimly lit interior that looked, well, like a luxury hotel room—complete with a spa bathtub, which just so happened to be bubbling cheerfully.
Someone was splashing around in it.
A female someone with long, dark hair pinned up neatly behind her head and a few damp strands trailing down her neck. One of her hands was just now soaping her creamy skin. I couldn’t quite see the face yet.
I spent the next few seconds convincing myself that I was really seeing what I thought I was.
“I see you too,” the woman said.
She turned my way and I saw that her face had an exotic, aristocratic beauty, with a fine, arched nose and almond-shaped eyes.
“Welcome to France, Hays,” she said. Her voice was husky and accented; she pronounced Hays as Hezz. “My name is Chantal Dugare.”
“I thought… I was supposed to meet the emmy-nonce greese of Interpol,” I said.
“That would be me.”
I stayed where I was. Surprised, a little confused, maybe intimidated as well.
“No need to be nervous,” she said soothingly. “You are our honored guest. There are resistance soldiers nearby—to protect us if need be. To protect me, certainly. Please, come inside the car. Shut the door.”
I exhaled, stood up, and walked to the limo. What the hell—if I was heading into a fatal trap, at least it was an extremely attractive one. A honey trap. Wasn’t that what they used to be called?
The door slid closed behind me, and then the car’s automatic pilot started us moving through the countryside, accelerating to a rapid but smooth speed.
“Beautiful night for a ride,” I said.
“It is, isn’t it? Champagne?” Chantal Dugare replied, waving toward a silver ice bucket on a stand.
“Not just now, thanks. Do you always bathe in your
car?” I asked next, sitting warily on a velvet couch beside the sloshing tub.
“Quite often, yes, I do. It relaxes me, helps me think through difficult problems. And I’m very busy, so it saves time.”
“It doesn’t bother you to have an audience?”
“Where’s the harm in it? It’s an old custom of the French aristocracy actually. Louis the Fourteenth?” Then, with a little laugh, she added, “Besides, I wanted you to know—I’m not hiding anything.”
If Chantal Dugare was, it was very well hidden. The froth of the spa water blurred her body, but I could see its outlines. Very nice, those outlines of hers.
“But something puzzles me,” she said. “I expected your partner to be with you. Lucy?”
“She’s not exactly my partner,” I said, hedging. And she’s not exactly my sister, either.
“But you’ve been with her lately, non? When did you two part company?”
“Actually, she bailed out of the plane just before I got here. I have no idea why. I have no idea where she is now. I do know this: she has a mind of her own.”
Chantal nodded. “How strange.” Then she eased forward in the tub, still submerged to the rounded tops of her breasts. She crossed her forearms on the rim closest to me, resting her chin on her slender wrists.
“Tell me,” she said, her big, brown eyes fixed on mine. “Do you trust Lucy?”
Was this a trap—or just French seduction? If I admitted doubts about Lucy, I was betraying her. If I lied to cover for her, I was betraying the human cause. Either answer and my loyalty could be suspect.
“I’d be crazy to trust anybody at this point,” I said. “Including myself.”
She sighed, shaking her head in exasperation. “You talk like a schoolboy who thinks he’s quite smart. How very American of you.”
“I think of myself as a hybrid—don’t you think that’s right?”
She sighed again. “I think—you are quite handsome, Hays. I wish we had a little more time to be together.”
“I see, and was all this a test?” I asked.