Authors: Kyle Mills
"Arrest me? For what? I didn't do anything. I don't do anything. I m ean nothing at all. I sit around by myself and build mediocr e furniture." He thumbed back toward the television. "And don't eve n say you think I'm a terrorist, because that's just bullshit racia l profiling."
She watched him carefully, but didn't answer.
"For the time being, at least, this is still America, right? Don't I h ave a right to know what I'm being arrested for?"
"I wasn't the investigating officer, Mr. al Fayed, but m y understanding is that you're suspected of working for the Colombia n cartels and of involvement in the deaths of the Ramirez brothers."
"The Ramirez brothers?" he shouted. "Who the fuck are the Ramire z brothers?"
"Mr. al Fayed .. . Maybe you should just try to take a few dee p breaths and relax."
Instead he picked up one of the larger pieces of his singing fish an d smashed it repeatedly into the wall. Defending himself against a bunc h of Homeland Security assassins was one thing they would have known wh o they were up against and that they probably weren't all going home. Bu t a police SWAT team sent in blind? That was a whole other thing .. .
"Mr. al Fayed! Calm down! Please."
"You calm down! I just killed a bunch of cops."
"And kidnapped another."
"Seems kind of irrelevant at this point," he said, dropping what wa s left of the fish and taking a position directly in front of her. "Wh o told you I killed the Fernandez brothers?"
"Ramirez. And I don't know. Apparently we got a tip."
"From who?"
"I think it was anonymous, but I'm not sure .. ."
"Bullshit! You don't send a SWAT team out to a person's house becaus e someone called 911 and said I was a bad person."
"Like I said, I'm not the investigating officer."
"Shit!" Fade yelled and began pacing back and forth across the tin y room. What had happened was pretty clear. Strand somehow found ou t about the Colombians and figured he'd use it. Then, after Fade ha d cooled his heels in the clink for a few weeks, Strand would come an d offer to spring him. For a price.
Unfortunately, things hadn't worked out quite that smoothly.
He finally stopped pacing, positioning himself behind Karen and pullin g her knife from his pocket. She tried to crane her head around to se e him but her bonds wouldn't allow it.
"I guess you wouldn't believe me if I told you I was sorry, would you , Karen?"
Chapter
Nine.
The dust blowing off the deserted dirt road was almost enough to blin d him, but Fade left the window down anyway. From a weather perspectiv e at least, the morning had turned out beautifully still air almos t completely lacking in humidity beneath a cloudless sky. He leane d forward and turned the car's underpowered CD player up another notch.
In his experience, it was almost impossible to be depressed whe n listening to the Go-Gos. The Ramones and The Monkees were a clos e second and third, but he was convinced that a giant loudspeaker playin g "Beauty and the Beat" could bring peace to Congo.
The trip odometer turned over twenty miles and Fade skidded the car t o a stop in the quickly diminishing shade of a tree.
"End of the line."
Karen Manning lifted her face from the car seat and looked up at him , eyes registering the fear that she wouldn't let her face show.
"Oh. Sorry, bad choice of words." Fade leaned over her and threw th e passenger door open. A solid shove sent her rolling into a dense patc h of weeds next to the car.
He stepped on the gas, accelerating quickly enough for the door to sla m itself shut and did a one-eighty in the road, leaving a cloud of dus t that almost completely obscured the woman struggling to her feet wit h her hands cuffed behind her.
As he passed, she tripped on something and rolled down into a dry cree k bed. It was kind of a pathetic scene and, as he watched her in th e rearview mirror, he started to think maybe he was being overly harsh.
Jamming his foot down on the brake pedal, he slammed the car int o reverse and pulled up even with her, once again creating a nearl y opaque cloud of dust.
She was letting out an impressive stream of obscenities as she tried t o extract herself from the creek bed without the use of her hands an d Fade jumped out of the car to help.
"Mouth like that, you should have been in the navy," he said, grabbin g her under one arm and hauling her to her feet. "Do you have a key fo r the handcuffs?"
Her eyes shifted almost imperceptibly toward the breast pocket of he r shirt and he reached for it, but she jerked back.
"You sure? It's gonna be hard to get those things over your boots an d ever harder to take the boots off. How about if I promise that unde r no circumstances will I enjoy a single moment of feeling you up?"
"You just stay away from me."
"Your call."
He reached through his car's back window and pulled out a liter bottl e of water, which he dropped on the ground. "It's twenty miles straigh t back up this road to the main highway. You look pretty fast, but it'
s gonna get hot today and that's not a lot of water. Watch your pace an d try to stay in the shade where you can." He turned and started t o climb back into the car.
"Wait. You've got to give yourself up. You've got no chance."
Fade smiled and looked back at her. "I don't get your logic."
"You just killed a bunch of cops and they're going to pull out th e stops to get you. Give yourself up now and let me take you in. I'
m willing to personally guarantee your safety. Then you'll have a chanc e to get a lawyer and tell your side of the story. If you honestl y thought you were being attacked and were in danger, a jury will liste n to that."
"I don't think so. Thanks for the offer, though."
"Where are you going to go? What are you going to do? By now, ther e are pictures of you all over the TV. The police will be in the proces s of contacting everyone you ever knew and looking into everywhere you'v e ever been. That's no way to live."
"As sad as it sounds, it's a step up for me." He tried to get back i n the car again but she actually moved to block him.
"More people could get hurt."
"I can almost guarantee it."
He grabbed her shoulders to move her aside, but as he did, his cel l phone started to ring. Sighing quietly, he pulled it from his pocket.
"Probably Mrs. Melman wondering why I haven't delivered her daughter'
s hope chest. Woman's driving me nuts .. ."
The number registering on caller ID didn't look familiar, and the fac t that he didn't have any friends, combined with the fact that his numbe r was unlisted, suggested that the call related in some way to las t night.
"Look familiar?" he said, holding the phone up in front of Karen.
"My boss's direct line."
"What's his name?"
"Seymore Pickering."
"You made that up."
"Why would I lie? That's really his name."
Fade shrugged and pressed the phone to his ear. "Good morning , Seymore."
The silence on the other end suggested that this man's mother indee d had named him Seymore Pickering.
"Am I speaking to Salam al Fayed?"
"Yup."
"I want to know where Karen Manning is. Has she been harmed?"
"I wouldn't really say harmed. A little dented .. ."
"I want to talk to her."
"Relax, Seymore. She's fine. You have my word."
"Then you won't mind putting her on. As a gesture of good will."
Fade rolled his eyes and held the phone up to Karen's ear. She glance d at his car, probably considering blurting out a description, but the n wisely thought better of it. It seemed likely the cops had th e description already anyway.
"Captain? I'm fine."
Fade pulled the phone back. "See? You should try to be mor e trusting."
"You have no reason to keep her or hurt her, Mr. al Fayed. She wa s just doing her job. As a former soldier, you should understan d that."
"Whatever."
"I want you to let her go."
"Okay."
Another confused silence. "Uh, what do you want in return?"
"Nothing that I can think of."
A third silence. This guy wasn't exactly a rivetin g conversationalist.
"I want you to turn yourself in, Mr. Fayed. I can guarantee you r safety "
"It's al Fayed and let me stop you there. I've already been throug h this with Officer Manning. So why don't we just cut through the crap.
Here's the situation, Seymore: I've got a couple of things I need to d o and they don't include getting a lethal injection. You've got som e freak running around Virginia killing young women and making you loo k like a jerk. So why don't you focus on that for a while and stay th e hell away from me. In return for that small favor, I can pretty muc h guarantee you I'll be dead in a month."
"You know as well as I do that I can't just ignore this. Even if I w anted to."
"Yeah, I guess not .. ." When Fade spoke again, his voice had softene d slightly. "Look, I'm sorry about your men. Tell their families that.
Tell them that they fought really well and showed a lot of courage. I d on't know if they're going to want to hear that. Probably not. Wha t I'm trying to say here is that I don't want to get into it with an y more of your guys. But if they start shooting at me, I'm going t o shoot back. And I almost never come up on the short end of those kind s of exchanges."
"Mr. Fayed "
Fade hung up and threw the phone back through the car window. "It's a l Fayed, you dick," he mumbled to no one in particular and then slappe d Karen on the shoulder. "Catch you later."
Her eyes widened again in that nearly imperceptible way that was kin d of endearing.
"It's just a figure of speech," he said as he slid behind the wheel.
"You need to lighten up."
Fade couldn't help laughing at his reflection in the rearview mirro r that was now wedged in the trunk of a tree. His long black hair wa s gone, replaced by a blond crewcut that had an unnatural red hue in th e sun. There was a tiny drop of blood around the post of the gol d earring he'd shoved through his left lobe, and a pair of blue-tinted , wire-rimmed glasses finished things off. The overall effect wasn't a s startling as he had expected he'd managed only to transform himsel f from a hippie Arab assassin into a gay Arab assassin. It seemed almos t certain now that he was going to meet his maker looking like Sadda m Hussein's hairdresser.
Stranger still was the fact that while he was chopping his hair off , he'd noticed his hands were rock steady. They'd been shakin g incessantly for years not enough to be generally noticeable, but enoug h to be a pain in the ass during fine cabinet work. The slight tightnes s in his chest that had become so ubiquitous was gone too, leaving hi m feeling .. . good. Really good.
He flashed a wide smile at the mirror and tried to decide if he looke d insane. More or less. But was it just the hair and the glasses o r something deeper? A little bit of both, he supposed. Having half th e cops in America wanting to put a bullet in his skull shouldn't be a n occasion for celebration, but with his history it also couldn't b e dismissed as all bad either. Killing Hillel Strand and Matt Egan gav e him a purpose something he'd been lacking for too long. The cops jus t added an extra dash of excitement.
The worst case scenario for him was that he failed to get those tw o assholes before they got him. Not the worst thing in the world i t certainly put an end to the loneliness, boredom, and low-grade pani c he'd been living with since his injury. So a few weeks of heat an d flash and then it would be all over. Not exactly a lottery win, but i t beat the hell out of what had come before it.
Fade tore the bandage from the self-inflicted wound on his wrist , loaded his wallet with the documents that matched the disguise he'
d chosen, and then glanced at his watch. He'd stopped about fiftee n miles from where he'd left Karen Manning and had probably already bee n there too long. The cops would have gotten his general location fro m his cell phone and if he read Karen right, she was running.
Chapter
Ten.
She was pushing too hard running at close to the speed she would hav e in college when she'd been nationally ranked in the ten thousan d meters. Slowing down, though, meant taking the advice of the man wh o had butchered her entire team so instead she sped up, intensifying th e burning in her lungs and the draw of the bottle of water sloshin g seductively in her hand. Anger and frustration managed to overpowe r her lack of fitness and combat boots, allowing her to maintain tha t pace for more than ten minutes before she began to stumbl e uncontrollably. Finally, she stopped and sagged against a tree , bending at the waist and coughing violently as she tried to hide fro m the sun.
She'd always used running to shut out the rest of the world. The wors e things were, the harder she went, ratcheting up her suffering unti l everything just drowned in it. But she'd never had to face anythin g like this before. There was just no pace hard enough to silence th e panicked voices of her men right before they went irretrievabl y silent.