He was twenty minutes out. But Cal had already arrived.
The entrance to the building was on Calle Aosta, right around the corner. He crouched and held the cell out past the corner wall, in video mode, positioning the screen so he had a good view of the entrance of the building.
And … fuck. A sentry. A fucking armed sentry. The man was dressed in black, unnaturally thick around the torso with body armor and had a shoulder holster, with a pistol in his hand. They must be very sure of themselves to walk around armed in Venice. Probably they had worn jackets while walking the crowded streets.
Or maybe the drunken revelers just assumed they were in costume. Modern-day ninja warriors. Not the usual Carnevale costumes, but then he’d been told that the usual fancy 17th-century costumes were being replaced by cosplay costumes, with lots of Batmen and Wonder Women.
Well, though dressed in a traditional tux, Cal had a hammer and he was now fucking Thor.
He studied the geometry of the situation. The walls, the position of the sentry, the distance to the doorway. He could do this.
He waited until the sentry was in the exact right position, back to him, looking north. Cal rose from his crouch, mallet in hand and threw it overhand as hard as he could right at the back of the fucker’s head.
It seemed to float in slow motion, handle over hammerhead, calculated perfectly to smash into the back of the sentry’s head at top speed.
The sentry dropped like a stone without a sound.
Good.
Cal rushed over to him, retrieved the mallet, picked up the guy’s pistol, checked the magazine, checked that there was a round in the chamber and kicked the sentry out of the way without a second glance.
From inside the building came a woman’s scream of pain.
Anya.
Someone was hurting Anya.
He slid into the doorway silent as a ghost. He felt like a ninja — invincible and invisible. And even if they saw him, it didn’t make any difference because they were going down.
The building was empty. Some kind of warehouse that was rarely used. Empty crates were stacked up against a wall and the stench of mold was overwhelming. He slid against the walls, a black shadow in darkness. Another man stood guard against an internal doorway. The room beyond was dark but a bright light came from the room beyond that one. He heard a man’s voice talking, a low woman’s voice answering.
Then her scream of pain.
Cal stopped for a moment and breathed down his rage. A man, hurting Anya. He was going to pay, oh God was he going to pay. But Cal had to make his way to the back room slowly because the man tormenting her was close to Anya, could hurt her badly.
No guns. It reinforced his bias against weaponry. In this building, even a silenced weapon would be heard. No. This had to be done the old fashioned way.
Cal slid around the walls until he was to the side of the sentry but not close enough to touch. Any closer and he’d be sensed. An ancient Druse in Beirut who’d been at war all his life had once explained that humans have an unnamed sense that allows them to feel the presence of other humans before they can see them.
Cal waited until the sentry looked toward the distant room. The light from the room would impair his night vision. When the man turned his back, Cal struck.
His movements were smooth and fast. He slid the iron bar from his cummerbund and slammed it into the back of the man’s head. The only sounds were the slight whoosh of the iron bar through the air and the slight squelch as it struck the man. Nothing that could be heard from even a foot away.
The man was on the floor, a pool of blood slowly staining the floor beneath his head. Cal slid the iron rod back under his cummerbund, grabbed the man’s feet and dragged him further from the doorway so he couldn’t be seen from inside the room where Anya was.
He slid around the door, being very quiet but he needn’t have bothered. No one was paying attention to anything. They were paying attention to Anya.
Oh god, there she was. Trapped in a chair, feet taped together. She was paper white, face drawn, tear tracks still wet on her cheeks.
A spotlight had been brought in, beaming right in her eyes. She was effectively blinded.
“You will tell us the password to your phone, Dr Voronova. You will break eventually.” There he was. Anya’s torturer, holding what looked like a high-tech rod.
Anya lifted her head, those light blue eyes dimmed. There was no defiance in her voice or in her body language. This was a broken woman. But still, she answered. “No.”
To Cal’s horror, the man lifted his arm and reached out to touch Anya with the end of that long steel rod. Cal had just bashed in the head of someone with a rod. No one was going to do that to Anya. His muscles bunched to leap forward when he noticed that the man wasn’t bringing his arm back for a blow. On the contrary, he was reaching out slowly, giving her time to react.
It wouldn’t be a killing blow.
Thank God Cal had hesitated because he saw now what he hadn’t noticed before, all his attention focused on Anya.
There were two other men in the room. Very fit men with guns. Both men were carrying QSZ-92 pistols, which were standard issue in the Chinese police force. They carried a Parabellum round that would shred Anya to pieces. The rounds left the barrel at a minimum velocity of 230 meters per second. The pistol was not accurate beyond fifty meters but it didn’t have to be. Both men were only a few meters away from Anya. And him.
Cal had to factor himself in. He’d gladly sacrifice himself to save Anya but the chances were good that he’d get one guy before being gunned down by the other and then Anya would be at the mercy of two angry men with automatic weapons.
He had to study this carefully.
All of that nearly went out the window when Anya’s tormentor touched Anya with his rod and she stiffened, head arched, eyes rolled back in her head, shaking all over. Though her lips were pressed together, a moan escaped her that escalated into a scream.
The fucker was tasing her! No, not tasing. There were no spikes with wires. Some kind of … of cattle prod designed for humans. Used on Anya!
Cal clutched the door jamb to keep from flinging himself into the room. But risky as it was, he couldn’t stand here and let Anya be tortured, simply couldn’t.
He tapped the construction rod twice on the stone floor and pulled behind the wall just in time as the man with the prod turned.
A command in what sounded like Chinese and then the sound of boot heels. Fuckers were so sure of themselves they didn’t even attempt stealth. They had a helpless woman at their mercy. They felt like big men.
One of the guards walked across the threshold into the dark room where Cal waited.
Take this! Cal thought viciously, as he slammed the callused and hardened edge of his hand into the man’s throat with all the fury in his body. The man went down without a sound. He was incapable of sound because Cal has smashed his voicebox together with his windpipe. Cal eased him to the ground silently.
Three down, two to go.
The tormentor issued a sharp command. Probably calling his guards. Not panicked but aware there was an enemy in the house.
You have no idea, Cal thought.
From inside the room he heard an electronic beep then a voice. “Send backup. We have an intruder.” He’d called for help.
Cal didn’t care. He could have called for the fucking Chinese Army, these guys were going down.
Anya screamed.
“Come out!” the guy called. “Come out or I’ll bring a world of hurt down on her.” Anya moaned, breathing heavily as the guy pulled away the rod from her arm.
Cal was good at spatial orientation. He knew where everyone in the room was. He was an engineer, but it was also a gift he’d always had. It made him good at sports and it made him an excellent martial artist.
And he had a killer aim.
“Come —” the man began but Cal’s mallet was already making his way to the fucker’s head. Before it hit, he sprang into action, leading w
ith the chisel, punching into the second fuckhead’s chest and then pivoting and slamming his foot into his knee, shattering it. The man went down with a scream, dropping his weapon.
Cal kicked away the gun and ran to Anya. Her eyes widened. “Cal!” She pointed a shaking hand to the ground.
The guy whose knee he’d shattered was pulling a knife from a sheath. Well … good. Cal needed that knife. He stepped on the guy’s hand hard enough to hear the wrist bones break, bent to pick the knife up and moved in one smooth motion to slice the tape around Anya’s ankles.
She pointed again at the fucker who just wouldn’t stay down and was scrambling for his gun with his one good hand.
“Use that,” Anya said, pointing to the rod that had fallen from the other guy’s hand.
“I like the way you think, darling.” Cal picked it up and studied it for one second. Simple mechanism. One button. Didn’t need an engineering degree to operate. He jammed the rod against the man’s ribs, hard, and pressed the button.
The man’s back arched, one good leg skittering on the floor, eyes wide open in pain, a deep moan coming from his throat.
Cal kept it going far beyond what was necessary to keep the man down.
These fuckers had tortured Anya with that. He didn’t care whether they lived or died.
When the man passed out, Cal lifted the rod, slamming it into the stone wall until the wiring came away then threw it into a corner of the room and crouched in front of Anya, the men already forgotten.
He watched her face carefully, prying the phone she held — his phone — from her hand. She was so goddamned pale. “Can you walk, honey?” he asked, putting his hand gently on her knee.
Anya’s mouth turned down. “I don’t know. Only one way to find out.” She braced herself on the arms of the chair and pushed. Tried to stand, shakily. She’d have fallen if Cal hadn’t caught her. He plastered a bland expression on his face because if he showed the rage he felt inside he’d have scared her.
He caught her up in his arms, his wonderful princess. He’d lost about ten years off his life in this past half hour. He was never going to let her out of his sight, ever ever again.
She tried on a smile for him. “Let’s blow this joint, Cal. Food’s bad and the music’s worse.”
His heart clenched. She must have felt what was roiling around inside him, rage and worry. She was trying to make light of having been tortured because it might upset him.
And, um, yeah. It fucking did.
He kicked one of the monsters out of his way, didn’t even look down. “You got it, baby,” he said and they walked out of the ancient, abandoned building together.
By the time they crossed a second bridge, Anya felt stronger. She knew herself and knew her body. It had taken a lot of punishment, but deep down, at some cellular level, she knew she’d recover.
Yet even when she was sure she could stand on her feet, she hesitated just a moment longer. It felt so delicious to be carried by Cal. It had been years and years — ten of them in fact, all of them hard — since she’d been able to count on anyone’s strength other than her own.
They’d been such a team when they were together. Cal had carried a heavy academic workload besides his teaching duties. He was strong and a hard worker, but sometimes he would come home exhausted. She’d cook a nice meal, buy a bottle of wine and over the course of the meal, some color would come back into his tired face.
When she was tired, he’d rub her feet for her.
They both had known, instinctively, when they really needed each other.
Someone had been cooking meals for him, but no one had rubbed her feet since Cal.
There was a far-off background noise of revelry and thousands of feet but the noise fell away as they turned into a deserted calle. Cal showed no signs of being tired from carrying her, but they were far from safe. “Put me down, Cal,” she murmured, raising her head from his shoulder.
He stopped, those compelling, light brown eyes staring into hers. “You sure?”
He asked seriously and she took the question seriously, doing an internal scan, head to toe and back. “Yes,” she said decisively. “I’m sure.”
He didn’t question her, simply put her gently on her feet, keeping a big hand on her upper arm. If Cal was holding her, she could keep upright forever.
“I think we should —” Cal interrupted himself, cocking a head. He’d always had superb hearing. She heard it a full second later. A man talking, a one-sided conversation, in Chinese.
He glanced at her and she nodded. The man was looking for them, reporting in that contact hadn’t been made yet.
Cal didn’t need a translation. He pushed her gently against the brick wall and crouched. He was intending to attack before they were found. But then there was the sound of another set of boots on the cobblestoned street. She and Cal couldn’t know whether more were around the corner. And they were probably armed. Cal was good but all it would take was an armed third guy to come while Cal was battling another two and Cal would go down with a bullet to the head. No martial artist can combat a bullet, no matter how good he is.
But there he was, center mass low to the ground, big hands flexing, ready to try to take them down.
They were in a cobblestoned lane with a vaulted roof. Not a street but a passageway, one of thousands criss-crossing the city. She narrowed her eyes as she looked behind her.
This passageway happened to be one she knew. A year ago, in Venice for negotiations, she’d broken her favorite umbrella, one her father had given her a long time ago. It had been a difficult period, she’d been working fourteen-hour days trying to get hostile delegates to sit down at the negotiating table to iron out final details and seemingly the only thing they could agree on was hostility towards Peace and Jobs and hatred of her, personally.
And in the middle of negotiations that felt like swallowing shards of glass, her beloved umbrella that reproduced the dome of the Florence cathedral broke.
She’d been devastated. One of the secretaries, who’d become a close friend, had taken her to the last umbrella repairman in Venice, maybe the world, in this very lane. To her delight, he’d repaired the umbrella.
And the door to the umbrella repair shop was recessed.
She grabbed Cal’s hand. “Come with me.”
Everything hurt when she moved but she took them as quickly as she could halfway down the lane and — yes! — there it was. She’d remembered correctly.
The voices were louder and they tucked themselves into the recessed entrance just in time. There were at least three men, speaking low. But the walls were like echo chambers and the voices carried.
They were Chinese and were hunting them.
“Look carefully in each side street,” one of them said. Light bounced off the walls of the alleyway as they used powerful flashlights. If they hadn’t been in the recessed doorway they’d have been caught.
“Check her phone,” another one said and Anya froze. Her phone!
Cal felt her jolt and turned to her frowning. What’s wrong?
She held her hand up to her ear, thumb and pinkie finger out, in the universal gesture for phone, and shook her head. I left it behind.
As always, they understood each other perfectly. He pulled one phone with the Roj case on the back out of his right hand pocket. She frowned and pointed to herself. That’s mine.
He nodded, pointed his thumb at her. It’s yours.
He pried off the case, opened the phone with a tiny screwdriver he produced from somewhere, removed the battery. Stuck his thumb down in a universal gesture. It’s dead now.
She looked at him with an interrogatory scowl. They can’t follow the phone?
He shook his head. Absolutely not. Held up another phone, his. Stuck his thumb up. This is my phone. They can’t follow it.
Oh God, how she’d missed this. This instant understanding of each other. She could kiss him.
And she did.
They were already almost hugging.
She lifted up and placed her mouth on his in a fleeting kiss which she stopped immediately. It was like a placeholder kiss. More to come.
Cal held his phone with one hand, his other arm around her. He speed dialed with his thumb and immediately said, “It’s me. Got my phone back.” The person at the other end must have been waiting for the call. “Sitrep,” he said quietly, then listened. After a moment, he thumbed the call closed.
“Help is stuck in traffic, sorry.”
Well she wouldn’t know where to find help. But he did.
Without thinking, Anya turned in Cal’s arm, closed her arms around his neck and kissed him again.
And kissed him. This time it wasn’t a placeholder kiss.
He was startled for just a second. She could taste his surprise, feel that instant of hesitation. Then it was gone and he was kissing her back, and they were kissing as if they’d die otherwise. Mouth to mouth, chest to breast, groin to groin. He was hard, grinding against her and her legs opened naturally so she could feel him right … there. Oh God, red-hot lightning shot through her as she lifted herself up so she could rub against him better.
Her open sex rubbed against the satiny lining of her dress.
She felt it the instant he realized what she realized. She wasn’t wearing panties and there was absolutely nothing between her vagina and Cal’s penis but some material to be lifted and unzipped. She could feel the heat of him rubbing against her and pressed against him even harder.
He backed her against the wall and she could feel crumbling bits of brick dust showering her, floating to the ground. His weight against her felt so good, as hard as the brick wall behind her. He kissed her and kissed her and kissed her, one hand holding her head, the other dropping to her silk dress, with hardly any beads left on it.
He was pulling the skirt up when they heard the voices.
Two bass voices.
Where the fuck did they go?
Dunno. Call the others.
In English. American English.
She looked startled at Cal. They had Americans after them? Why?
Then: Alert Morris. We need more manpower. The sounds of bootsteps, walking quickly down the calle.