Flashpoint
“Funny that the Pierce family is suddenly so interested in my well-being,” said Amy bitingly.
“Because I’ve been having some bad reactions,” Cara went on. “And I know my dad is hiding his own symptoms. The antidote will fix all that, right?”
Amy cast a murderous look around the Humvee, commanding everyone’s silence.
“Okay, I get it,” Cara sighed. “No more questions.”
Dan spoke up. “I’ve got one for you. What does Pierce want the antidote for? He wouldn’t take it even if he had it. His whole plan is the opposite — using the serum to make him and his people unstoppable.”
“He thinks he can use it to develop a kind of super-serum,” she explained, “with all the benefits, but none of the side effects. Also, he wants to keep the antidote away from you. You could use it to turn his supermen back into ordinary people, himself included. That’s why we need each other. You’ve got the antidote, and I’ve got the inside access. We can do this, but only together.”
“There’s a problem,” Dan confessed. “Well, actually, there are about twenty problems, but the biggest is we don’t have the antidote. We’re still short one ingredient.”
“The venom of the Tonle Sap water snake,” Cara concluded.
The exhilaration of their incredible escape withered as the true result of the mission began to sink in. No snake. No antidote.
For Amy, the failure was stingingly personal. Another precious day had been squandered out of the meager handful she had left. And they were no closer to either prolonging her life or thwarting Pierce. It was a total lose-lose.
Ian held up a mud-encrusted Gucci loafer. “Ruined,” he said tragically. “The nubuck leather will never be the same again. Who knows what the local shops will offer as replacements. Flip-flops, no doubt.”
He tried to jam a wet foot into one of the loafers, but withdrew it with a look of distaste. “There’s something slimy in there.” He held up the shoe and peered inside. A sleek dark head emerged, dark eyes encircling telltale pale pupils. A white mouth opened impossibly wide, revealing a forked tongue and tiny fangs. The head lunged at him suddenly; one of the fangs scratched his nose.
“Ow!” He dropped the shoe, and the hitchhiker darted out.
It was a small Tonle Sap water snake.
With the final ingredient swimming circles in a water jug in the back of the Humvee, the next order of business was what to do about Cara Pierce. Dan and Ian trusted her, and the others were inclined to take their side. Amy was the lone holdout. And just as the serum had enhanced her physical performance, it had boosted her stubbornness as well.
In the end, she agreed that Cara would come back to their guesthouse to discuss possible cooperation, but only if Amy’s conditions were met: (1) She would surrender her phone, and the GPS chip would be removed and destroyed. (2) She would be blindfolded until they were indoors so she could not betray their location. And (3) she would be handcuffed and restrained while she was with them.
“Oh, come on, Amy!” Dan exploded. “No way she’s going to agree to that!”
“I agree to all of it,” Cara said readily. “Amy’s just being careful. I don’t blame her a bit. If I were in her shoes, I’d be the same way.”
As it turned out, handcuffs were not readily available in the stores of Siem Reap. But Amy was able to improvise with a dog leash. She made a great show of cinching Cara’s hands behind her back and then fastening her to an iron pipe.
“Come on, Amy, that’s too tight,” Ian complained. “She’s betraying her whole family to help us. I know better than anyone how hard that can be. And how do we repay her? With medieval torture.”
“I’m fine,” Cara assured him. “But you might want to do something about your nose. It looks a little irritated where the snake got you.”
Ian ran to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. It was true. The site of the scratch was an angry red. And was that swelling? “I’ve been bitten by a poisonous snake!”
“You said it was only slightly poisonous,” Dan reminded him.
“Oh, that’s a tremendous comfort!” Ian snapped back. “When the venom reaches my brain stem, you are slightly disinvited to my funeral.”
“It only nicked you,” Hamilton added.
“Good thing I’m surrounded by medical experts!” Ian spat sarcastically. He ran over to Pony’s laptop for snakebite research.
Jake’s priorities were definitely elsewhere. “I know I’m not a Cahill, but this seems like a no-brainer to me. We have all the ingredients. We should make the antidote and give it to Amy before she gets any worse.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Amy told him, finally taking the time to kick off her muddy sneakers and collapse onto one of the rush mats. “We can’t just mix it up in a bucket and boil it over an open fire. It has to be done in a lab, with a real chemist.”
“Sammy Mourad,” Cara put in.
Amy all but pounced on her. “What do you know about Sammy?”
“I know my father has him at his Delaware facility. I assume you’ve got Cahill assets already working on getting him out.”
A fierce look. “Nice try.” No one had been able to reach Nellie for a few days. Amy was beginning to suspect something had gone wrong, but she certainly wasn’t going to express that to Cara.
“Here it is!” Ian exclaimed from the depths of Pony’s laptop. “‘How to treat the bite of Enhydris longicauda, the Tonle Sap water snake.’” He read avidly. “Harmless? Easy for them to say! It’s not their nose!”
The door burst open, and Dan and Atticus marched in. Atticus waved a glass jar in triumph. “We got bugs!”
“What for?” Hamilton asked, mystified.
“Snake food,” Dan explained enthusiastically. “You don’t want him to die before we can get his venom.”
“We’ve got beetles, roaches, and ants,” Atticus added proudly. He frowned at the glass jar. “Uh-oh. I think the beetles and roaches ate some of the ants.” He and Dan rushed over to the jug that was serving as their snake habitat, and began dropping wriggling insects into the water.
“Look!” breathed Atticus. “He’s hungry!”
Jake shook his head, half-amused, half-disgusted. “He’s a college student at age eleven, his IQ is off the charts, and what makes him happy? Feeding cockroaches to a snake.”
Next in the door was Jonah, his expression grim. “Bad news, yo. The jet can’t get here till tomorrow.”
“Why not?” Amy demanded. “It’s only in Phnom Penh.”
The pop star hung his head. “Uh-uh. Newfoundland.”
“What’s it doing there?” Jake demanded.
“Saving whales. Or seals. You know those Hollywood types. They love that Greenpeace stuff.”
“Yeah, but why are they flying in your plane?” Dan asked, mystified.
Jonah looked embarrassed. “Now that I’m not touring anymore, I figured I could make a few bucks by renting out the G6 when I don’t need it.”
“But you do need it!” Jake almost wailed. “You’ve never needed it so badly in your life!”
Jonah shrugged miserably. “Tomorrow. Best they can do. They’ll be in Siem Reap by noon.”
A babble of protest went up in the guesthouse.
Amy put a stop to it. “We’re Cahills. If we can’t change it, we deal with it. It’s only another day.”
Her red-rimmed eyes met Jake’s. The question hung unspoken in the air between them.
How many days did Amy have left?
Chapter 16
Cara Pierce wasn’t sleeping very well, which was not at all surprising. When your wrists were bound behind you, and your shoulders were coming out of their sockets, and an iron pipe was pressed against the center of your back, it made it pretty hard to relax.
She wasn’t sure she deserved much better. Traitor. She’d turned her back on
her own flesh and blood, and thrown her chips in with her father’s worst enemies. A dictionary definition of treason.
But it’s the right thing to do, she reminded herself.
She’d monitored her father’s activities, both as his daughter and as her cyber alter ego, April May. J. Rutherford Pierce had gone over to the dark side, to use Star Wars parlance. Somewhere along the line, construction had become destruction, and ambition had turned poisonous.
One memory continued to haunt her. The palatial mansion on Pierce Landing had been brand-new, so Cara must have been eleven or twelve. Dad was at his desk, poring over schematic drawings, the paper crackling as he turned the large pages. Designs of new printing presses, he told her, for his many newspapers and magazines.
There was something in his eyes when he said that — like he was lying, but it didn’t matter. It was all a big game, his game.
She never questioned him, not because she had no questions, but because she didn’t dare. She saw the way other grown-ups treated her father — with respect. With fear. It wasn’t that J. Rutherford Pierce couldn’t lie; it was more like when he did it, it didn’t count as lying, because he owned the truth.
Fast-forward to last year, when Cara saw those “printing presses” again — this time in her advanced-placement physics textbook. She was so brainwashed that she actually raised her hand and said the words aloud in the classroom: “Printing presses.”
The chorus of laughter from her fellow students still resounded in her ears.
The teacher frowned at her. “Read the caption, Miss Pierce.”
Ears burning, Cara examined the page.
Those drawings had never had anything to do with newspapers or printing. They were engineering diagrams for the trigger of a nuclear bomb.
What’s the real treason? Turning your back on your father, or on the whole world?
The others were sleeping, albeit fitfully. Small wonder after the day they’d put in. The rush mats kicked up a lot of noise as they tossed and turned. Ian was snoring, probably due to the swelling of his snake-bit nose. He was adorable with that schnoz. She hoped not too much of the snake’s venom had been wasted. There were plans for it. Big plans.
The most restless of the sleepers was Amy. From the moment she’d closed her eyes, she had been tossing and whimpering through what must have been a series of hideous nightmares. Cara had a pretty good idea of what that was like. She’d been experiencing it, too, although not as intensely as what Amy appeared to be suffering. She was thrashing, hyperventilating, shivering. At one point, she sat bolt upright, bathed in sweat, and spoke words that made no sense.
In spite of everything, Cara could not help but pity her. Clearly, her serum dose had been much more powerful than anything Cara had taken, even when she’d been swapping protein shakes with Galt.
She leaned as close to Amy as she could, and tried to sound reassuring. “You’re okay. It’s only a dream.”
Amy quieted down and went back to sleep.
It was a little disconcerting, but Cara reassured herself that Amy had never actually awoken. With an ease that would have astonished the Cahills, she squeezed her wrists into an impossible shape and slipped out of the leash. She got to her feet, stretched once, and surveyed the sleepers. The coast was clear.
She tiptoed through the mats and picked up the jug that held the Tonle Sap water snake. Like a phantom, she was out of the room and gone without a sound.
Jake had always been an early riser. Growing up the son of a renowned archaeologist, he had spent much of his childhood up at first light to rush off with his father to some new discovery or dig. So it was not surprising that he was the first one awake the next day.
Every morning was the same lately. Jake would enjoy three or four seconds of blissful ignorance, and then he would remember: Amy was dying. It was like getting the same devastating news again on a regular basis. Next came the calculation. How long since she’d taken the serum? How much time did she have left? It had been five days since she’d downed the contents of that fateful bottle. She might have as little as forty-eight hours left.
But now there was a new wrinkle. They had the final ingredient. The antidote was no longer a matter of “if,” but “when.” It was a race against the clock, but she would make it. She had to. And then — maybe — they’d be able to pick up where they’d left off.
With a yawn, he looked over in her direction. His heart very nearly jumped through his rib cage, clean out of his chest. The problem wasn’t Amy. She was still fast asleep on her mat. But beside her, the leash hung loose from the black iron pipe.
Cara Pierce was gone.
His neck snapped around, his eyes searching for the water-jug snake habitat.
It wasn’t there.
“Everybody up!” He tried to bellow, but it came out more like a gasp. “Wake up! Up!”
In an instant, they were all up on their feet, bleary-eyed but alert. It was a testament to the knife-edge they’d been living on.
“Cara escaped, and she stole the snake!”
The effect was like yelling Fire! in a crowded room. There was a mad scramble and, in seconds, everyone was dressed and ready to go. But what the course of action should be was unclear.
“We’ll find her!” Dan raged. “We’ll tear the town apart, plank by plank!”
Ian’s features radiated an intense heat that had nothing to do with the Cambodian climate. “I vouched for her! I convinced you all to trust her! A Lucian should know better,” he said bitterly.
“It’s my fault,” Amy lamented. “I should have stuck with my first instincts.”
They went on in this way, beating themselves up, and issuing dark threats of revenge. They were so wrapped up in their distress that they barely noticed when the door opened and in walked Cara Pierce.
“Morning, you guys. What’s all the excitement?”
The group watched in mute amazement as she set down a rectangular glass aquarium with a carrying handle. Inside swam their Tonle Sap water snake, spry and healthy. Cara then returned to her spot, wriggled her hands deftly back into the leash, and sat down on the floor, leaning against the iron pipe.
She looked up with an innocent smile. “You didn’t think you could keep me locked up, did you?”
“Where were you?” Amy demanded.
“At the pet store. We need a decent habitat for the snake if we intend to take it halfway around the world. Then I dropped in on my brother to make sure he doesn’t put out an all-points bulletin for me.”
“Did you tell him where we are?” Dan probed.
Cara showed a flash of exasperation. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said? I don’t want my dad to win! I want you to win! I want us to win!”
Jake was still shaken and angry. “And you think you’re going to earn our trust by sneaking out?”
“No. By coming back.”
Amy reached behind her and undid the leash. “You’ve made your point. So you say you can help us. How?”
Cara gathered them close. “You’re in a position to start making the antidote. But the trick is going to be finding a way to deliver it to my dad and all his enhanced people at the same time.”
Amy nodded. “Keep talking.”
Cara smiled. “Let me tell you a story about a clambake. . . .”
Chapter 17
Sammy poked his head in through the swinging door and spied Nellie scrubbing the spotless kitchen. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t even look up. “I like to leave my workspace in perfect condition.”
Frowning, he tossed a glance over his shoulder at the guard who was waiting in the hallway.
He approached her and whispered a single word in her ear: “Why?”
“I take pride in my kitchen,” she said through clenched teeth.
“No one’s going to see it,”
he insisted in a low voice. “There’s enough nitro to blow up a medium-size aircraft carrier. No one will know how clean it was before it was vaporized.”
“I’ll know,” she said, and kept on polishing.
Sammy grew stern. “We need to get to the lab. This is the biggest night of our lives. And unless everything goes perfectly, it’ll be the last one, too.”
She did not meet his eyes. “Don’t you see that, if I don’t keep myself occupied, I’ll wimp out before we can put the plan into action?”
“You’re not going to wimp out,” Sammy said firmly. “You’re the strongest person I know. Now, let’s get to the lab. We have less than half an hour before lockdown.”
It was their nightly routine, well known by their captors. Nellie would finish in the kitchen, and then go to help Sammy tidy up the lab at the end of the day. Shortly thereafter, guards would take them to their separate cells, several levels below, and lock them inside.
Except that nothing would be routine about tonight.
As they navigated the corridors, they received friendly greetings from several staff members. It was amazing how a few really awesome desserts could turn captors and captives into colleagues and companions. Even the guard trailed behind them at a respectful distance, his weapon holstered. And when they entered the lab, he hung back in the corridor.
“I just hope everybody makes it out in time,” Nellie whispered to Sammy. “Just because they work for someone evil doesn’t make them evil, too.”
“Forget them,” Sammy countered. “I hope we make it out. Because once we start the chain reaction, this operation doesn’t have a pause button.” He peered into her eyes, and she remembered how hot she’d found him the first time they’d met — back when hot had another meaning besides a thousand pounds of nitro waiting to go off. “Nellie, I have to say this now, because I might not ever get another chance. It’s been horrible being a prisoner here. But I wouldn’t trade a minute of it, because it’s where I got to know you.”
Nellie planted a tiny kiss on the end of his perfect nose. “To be continued,” she promised, wishing this could be more of a romantic moment. But there was too much ahead of them, too much that could go wrong. And no matter how she sliced and diced the possibilities in her mind, an alarmingly high proportion of them left Sammy and Nellie lying dead at the bottom of a pile of rubble. “Now, let’s do this.”