So now he would either live or die, he thought. If the guards did not respond, the smoke would suffocate him. His heart began to pound like a piston in a freightliner. His temples throbbed and he squelched the fleeting temptation to run over to the mattress and extinguish the deadly flame.
Within seconds the room billowed with thick smoke. The guard’s alarm came then, when the gray clouds seeped past the door. It took them another full minute to decide on a course of action, most of it spent calling to him for a response. When none came, a muffled voice argued that the prisoner must be dead and they would be too if Ramón thought they had allowed it.
The keys scraped against the metal lock and the door swung open, but Casius remained crouched behind, his lungs now bursting in his chest. The guards called into the smoke for a full thirty seconds before deciding to enter.
Casius sprang then, with every remaining ounce of strength. He crashed into the door, slamming the first guard against the doorframe and shoved his palm up under the man’s jaw, snapping his head back into the wall. The guard crumpled to the ground. Casius snatched his rifle from his limp hands, slid behind the wall, and gasped for breath. Smoke filled his lungs with the draw, but he bit against a cough.
Gunfire thundered in the hall. Holes punched through the wall above him. Casius shoved the AK-47 around the corner and shot off six scattered rounds. The gunfire ceased. Casius slid into the doorway on one knee, lifted the rifle to his shoulder, and put a bullet through the other guard’s forehead, smashing him to the ground with a single shot.
Adrenaline throbbed through his veins. He coughed hard now, bent over, ridding his lungs of the smoke. He scanned the hall, saw there were four other doors, and then ran for the steel elevator at the end.
It took him five seconds to understand that the car would go nowhere without a key. The other doors then—and quickly. An alarm had been raised.
Casius ran to the first door, found it locked, and fired a slug through its lock. He kicked it in, hit a light switch, and stepped into the room under stuttering fluorescent tubes. The room lay bare except for a single table and three chairs. Charts lined the walls. There was no exit from here.
Blueprints, darkening purple with age, were taped to the wall on his left. The architectural drawing nearest him showed a cross section of the black cliffs. And nestled in the hill between the plantation and the cliffs, a cross section of a three-story structure. This structure. Casius shifted his eyes to another blueprint, next to the first. This one showed an expanded view of the underground construction, complete with an elevator at one end.
No less than twenty drawings lined the walls, detailing the complex. Long blue lines shaped a passage that ran through the mountain. Red-dotted rectangles showed the tunnel’s purpose. Cocaine was refined in a large plant on the second floor and then loaded into logs that were shot through the mountain into the Orinoco River and carried out to sea.
Casius left the room and closed the door.
The next door opened easily with a turn of its knob and revealed a utility closet. He snatched a machete from the corner and ran back to the elevator. Surprisingly, the red indicator still had not lit, which caused him pause. Either they hadn’t bothered to install any alarms in the lower level—figuring that any threats would come from above—or they waited for him, knowing that the elevator was the only way out.
But they were wrong.
With the
clank
of steel against steel, Casius shoved the blade between the doors and leaned into the machete. The doors resisted for a moment and then yielded. He surveyed an empty shaft that fell to another basement level and rose to the bottom of the car, one story above.
He had to find the woman. Sherry. It was ironic—he had stalked a terrorist like Abdullah for years and he had planned for the fall of the CIA nearly as long. And yet here was a woman and he knew he had to save her. She was somehow different.
Or was she?
The black fog lapped at his mind.
He grunted and dropped down to the bottom of the shaft. He pried open the dormant elevator door and entered a dark, damp hallway formed in concrete, empty except for a single doorway on the left. Like a root cellar, although in the jungle there was no need for a root cellar.
A faint cry echoed above him, far away. An alarm! His heart bolted and he leapt into the hallway.
A picture of Sherry filled his mind—her gentle features, her bright eyes, her curved lips. She was the antithesis of everything he had lived for. He was driven by death, she by . . . what? Love?
The door was concrete and he found it bolted. But no lock. He jerked the bolt out and shoved the slab. It grated open to a pitch-black room.
His breathing echoed back at him from the emptiness.
“Sherry?”
Nothing.
Casius spun around. He had to get out before the place swarmed with Abdullah’s men. He’d taken a step back toward the elevator shaft when he heard a groan behind him.
“Hel . . . hello?”
Casius whirled around. A strange rush surged through his veins.
“Sherry?” His heart was hammering and it wasn’t from fear.
“Casius?”
SHERRY SAW the silhouette standing in the open doorway like a gunslinger and she wondered what Shannon was doing in her dream. Shannon was dead, of course. Or maybe it was her captor, the terrorist with the bomb, if the vision of the mushroom was right. Abdullah. He’d visited her a few hours ago—now he’d come back.
She felt sluggish and she knew that she was waking. The figure turned to leave and it struck her that maybe this
was
someone real.
“Hello?”
The figure spun. Was it Casius? Had Casius come to save her? She climbed out of her dead sleep.
“Sherry?”
It
was
Casius!
“Casius?”
She pushed herself up and Casius swept in. He dropped to one knee and placed an arm under her back. He lifted her up like a rag doll and ducked out of the cell.
He smelled like sweat, which was no surprise—he was wet with it. His face was still green from the paint.
“Where’s the priest?” he asked quietly.
He was still holding her. “I don’t know. What happened?”
It must have occurred to him that he was holding her because he dropped his left arm and let her stand on her own.
“Come on. We don’t have much time.”
Casius ran for a set of steel doors at the end of the hall and pressed his ear against them. It was an elevator, resting closed.
He stepped back and lifted the machete. “It’s clear. Stand back,” he said in a hushed voice.
The assassin jammed the blade into the crack and pried the doors open. A cable ran up the dark elevator shaft. He wedged the machete kitty-corner in the doors and stepped into the shaft. Without speaking to her, he hauled himself up the cable, right past the doors where Sherry peered in with wide eyes.
“Where are you going?” she asked. Sherry looked up and saw the bottom of the car twenty feet higher. Casius was now parallel to a large opening on the opposite side of the shaft, ten feet up. He swung into the causeway without answering her, but she had her answer already. He dropped to his belly and reached down the shaft for her.
She edged forward and, clasping the pried elevator door with her left hand, she stretched her right hand up for his arm, wondering if she had the strength to hang on.
But he seized her wrist like an iron claw and the question fell away. She gripped nothing but thin air. He literally snatched her from her feet and hauled her up to the opening. She threw her leg over the lip and rolled into him.
He repeated the process, taking them another floor higher, just below the elevator itself. And then they were standing and scanning the tunnel they had entered.
A long line of lights hung from an earthen ceiling stretching both ways several hundred feet, maybe longer. To their right the tunnel ended in a glowing light; to their left the tunnel dimmed to darkness. An idle conveyor belt ran waist high the length of the passage.
A shout suddenly echoed down the tunnel and the sound of boots thudding onto packed earth reverberated past them. Casius grabbed her wrist and pulled her into a stumbling run toward the dark end of the tunnel. She pulled her hand free and tore after him, pumping her fists in panic.
“The priest!” she panted.
“Just run!” he said.
Cries of alarm suddenly filled the air. A shot crashed around her ears. Casius slid to a stop and Sherry almost ran through him. She threw her arms up and felt her palms collide with his wet back. Her hands slipped to either side and she smacked into his wet flesh. But neither seemed to notice.
They had reached a steel platform, she saw, and Casius had managed to unlatch its gate. He leapt over the threshold and yanked her through. When he punched something on the wall, the whole contraption trembled to life and began to rise. They were on a freight elevator of some kind. Flashes of fire erupted down the tunnel, chased by shouts of anger. Sherry instinctively crouched.
Then they were past the earth ceiling and rising through a vertical shaft lit by a string of bulbs along one wall.
Casius was madly searching the floor with wide eyes. Something about his jerking movements sent a chill down Sherry’s spine. He was afraid, she thought. And not just afraid of the guns below. He knew something she did not, and it was sending him scampering about in fits.
She grabbed the rail and watched him, too stunned to ask what he was doing. He rounded the floor twice and evidently found nothing, because he ended with wide eyes raised to her.
He glanced above and she followed his gaze. A dark hole yawned ten feet higher. And above it—dirt. The end.
“Take your shirt off !” he snapped frantically.
“Wha . . . ! Take my what?”
“Quick! If you want to live through this, take your shirt off. Now!”
Sherry clawed at the T-shirt and pulled it over her head. She wore only a sports bra. Casius snatched the shirt before it had cleared her head and pulled it over his own. He’d lost his mind, she thought.
“You’re gonna have to trust me. Okay?” Her shirt barely stretched over his chest, and one shoulder ripped at its seam. He had lost his mind.
“We’re going for a ride. You just let go and let me carry you. Understand?”
She didn’t answer. What could he possibly . . . ?
“You understand?” His face was white.
“Yes.”
And then the gears ground to a halt and the floor began to tilt toward a hole waiting like an open mouth. It was a steel tube maybe three feet in diameter, disappearing into blackness.
Casius swung an arm around her waist and threw himself to the floor, pulling her with him so that she lay on top of him, faceup. Their heads were pointed into the gaping steel tube. He was taking her into the shaft, headfirst!
Sherry closed her eyes and began to whimper then. “Please, please, please, God.” The smacking of steel colliding with steel suddenly crashed in her ears. Bullets! Like heavy hail on a tin roof. The men below were firing their guns up the elevator shaft and their bullets were slamming into the steel floor. She clenched her eyes and began to scream.
And then they were falling.
It was why he’d searched the floor frantically, she realized. It was why he insisted on taking her shirt when he’d found nothing else. Because his back was sliding against steel. She didn’t know how long this ride would last or where it would take them, but she imagined that her thin cotton shirt was already giving way. His skin would be next.
Like breakaway tobogganers, they gained speed. Sherry pried her eyes open and lifted her head. Far away now, the dwindling entrance glowed between her jerking feet. Below her, the man suddenly tensed and squeezed her like a vise. His arms were wrapped around her midsection, coiled like a boa constrictor.
He grunted and she knew the T-shirt had given way. His forearms wound tight, forcing the air from her lungs. She grabbed at them in panic—but to no avail. And then he was screaming and white-hot terror streaked up her spine. She opened her mouth, wanting to join him. But she had no wind for a scream.
He went suddenly limp; his scream fell to a soft groan and she knew he’d lost consciousness. She sucked a lungful of air and then another. Casius’s arms bounced limp. She imagined a long smear of blood trailing them. Oh, God, please!
And then the mountain spit them out, like discarded sewage. Sherry heard the rushing water below them and it occurred to her that they were headed for a river. And under her, Casius was unconscious. She instinctively reached for the sky with both arms. Her scream echoed off the towering canyon walls above.
Cold water engulfed her and sucked the breath from her lungs as if it were a vacuum. Sound fell to murmuring gurgles and she clenched her eyes tight.
Oh, God, help me. I’m going to die!
She instinctively clutched the assassin’s arm.
He came to life then, shocked by the water, disoriented and flailing like a drowning man. Sherry opened her eyes and struck for the lighter shade of brown, hoping she would find the surface there. She tugged at his arm once and then released him, hoping he would find his own way. Her lungs were caving in.
She nearly inhaled water before her head cleared the surface. But she held on and gasped desperately before her bottom teeth broke water. Casius shot through the surface next to her and she felt a rush of relief wash over her.
Sherry looked about, still pulling hard at the air. They were in a fast-flowing river, deep and smooth where they were, and crashing over rocks on the far side. She felt a hand grip her shoulder and propel her toward the nearest bank. They landed on a sand bar two hundred meters downriver, like two grounded porpoises, belly down, heaving on the shore. Sherry flopped her head to one side, and she saw Casius with his face in the mud. His shoulder blades oozed red through her T-shirt and her heart rose to her throat.
She tried to go to him, but a black cloud settled over her eyes.
God please,
she thought.
Please
. Then the black cloud swallowed her.