Ashley Bell Page 13

  “I need a gun,” she declared, and though the words sounded alien to her nature, she knew that she spoke the truth.

  Calida’s pistol lay on the table, but she pulled it closer to her, beyond Bibi’s reach, as if she didn’t rule out the possibility that her client meant to shoot her, the messenger.

  “I don’t need yours. I have one,” Bibi said. “Paxton insisted on it. But I keep it in a box in the closet.”

  When Bibi started to get up from her chair, Calida said sharply, “Sit down. We have to finish this, and quickly.”

  With her right hand, the diviner stirred the loose tiles in the silver bowl. “I bleed for answers. I cannot be denied. Attend me.” The air grew chillier. To Bibi, she said, “The name of the person you’re meant to save. How many letters?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know. You just don’t know you know. How many letters?”

  Bibi guessed, “Ten.”

  After Calida plucked the tiles from the bowl, she placed them side by side in alphabetical order: A, B, E, E, H, L, L, L, S, Y.

  Seeing names in that mess was harder than seeing words, but after a moment, the diviner spelled out SALLY BHEEL. “Know anyone with that name?”

  “No.”

  “It isn’t necessarily someone you know.”

  Calida rearranged the tiles into SHELLY ABLE.

  “This is ridiculous,” Bibi said, but she couldn’t deny the room had gone so cold that her breath and the diviner’s smoked from them.

  As before, Bibi suddenly saw what Calida did not, moved the tiles around, and formed the name ASHLEY BELL. As she slid the last two letters into place, she heard the silver bell with the three tiny clappers that Captain had brought back from Vietnam, and although their ringing was clear and sweet and undeniable, she knew that she heard them only in memory.

  As if Calida were a curious cat and Bibi were a ball of string in need of unraveling to reveal the wild secret at its center, the diviner watched her client intently, waiting for the best moment to snatch up a frayed end and run. “The name is familiar to you.”

  Bibi shook her head. “No.”

  “I can see it is.”

  “No. But I’ll admit it resonates.”

  “Resonates,” the diviner said, wanting something more specific.

  “It’s so euphonic, it makes you want to know the person who goes by it, to see if she’s as pleasant as her name.”

  “She or he. It could be either.”

  “It’s a she,” Bibi said with immediate conviction.

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Bibi frowned. “I don’t know. I just am.”

  “You not only have to find her. You have to save her.”

  As Bibi stared at the name, it had half drawn her into a trance, as though each of the ten letters must be a syllable in a sorcerer’s spell. Now she shivered and looked up at the diviner and said, “Save her from what? Should you ask—and draw more letters?”

  “No. We’re running out of time. We’ve been too long at this.”

  Bibi realized that warmth had returned to the kitchen and that the clocks were working once more, as was her wristwatch. “I need to know why she’s in trouble—or will be. Where she lives. What she looks like. I have a thousand questions.”

  A mewl as thin as a paper cut escaped Calida as she extracted the needle from her flesh. She pressed her bleeding thumb against the bloodstained cotton cloth. “We only get so many answers for free. And then they begin to cost us dearly, word by word. Now peel off a few three-inch strips of that adhesive tape for me.”

  Producing the first strip with the dispenser’s built-in cutter, Bibi said, “Cost us what?”

  Hurriedly winding the gauze around and around her thumb, keeping it tight to stanch the bleeding, Calida said, “Time. Our allotted time. Days, then weeks, then months, our lives melting away fast from the farther end—and then we pay with something worse.”

  “What could be worse than losing part of your life?”

  “Losing the capacity for passion and hope, being left alive but with no emotions other than bitterness and despair.” She held out her thumb so that Bibi could apply the length of tape. “No additional answers we might get would be worth the cost.”

  The roses in the living room smelled sweet again. The flames had stopped leaping violently above the rims of the clear-glass cups. The fluttering reflections of candlelight on the tabletop and the walls no longer reminded her of swarming insects.

  The air of impending violence should have diminished.

  It had not.

  While the diviner hastily used three more strips of tape to encase the gauze, Bibi came further to her senses, much as the once-cold room had returned to warmth. “I can’t do this.”

  Glancing at the clock, displeased by the time, Calida said, “Can’t do what?”

  “Save a life. Whoever she is. Wherever she is. It’s crazy on the face of it.”

  “Of course you can do it, the kind of girl you are. Besides, you have no choice now.”

  “I might end up doing more harm than good. I’m planning to marry a hero, but I’m not one myself. I mean, I don’t think I’m a coward, but I don’t have the skills.”

  Pouring the Scrabble tiles from the bowl into the flannel sack, returning the sack and the bowl to the ostrich-skin suitcase, Calida said, “You asked why you were spared from cancer. You were told. If you’re not prepared to do it now, there’s a terrible price to pay.”

  “More harm than good,” Bibi repeated. “It could end up with this Bell woman dead—and me, too.”

  Getting to her feet, closing the suitcase, Calida said, “You’ve already been on a date with Death and survived. If he shows up again, kiss him and tell him he has to wait. Make it a good kiss. Put some tongue in it. Now grab your gun, girlfriend, and let’s get the hell out of here.”

  “What? No.” Bibi yawned and stretched. “I’m exhausted. I’m going to bed.”

  Calida regarded her as if she had just announced that she would lie down in a cauldron of boiling oil. “If you stay here ten more minutes, you’re dead. Maybe five.”

  “But this is my apartment.”

  “Not anymore. Not after what we just did here, which drew their attention. Now the apartment is theirs. And no lock will keep them out.”

  Assuming that Abdullah al-Ghazali and his associates were heavily armed and ready to die a martyr’s death, it would be suicide to blow down the door and fight the seven of them room by room. And seven would be the number, because the women would not be bystanders. If intel had their identities right, these two mothers—mothers in more than one sense of the word—had with enthusiasm provided four of their young children for service as human bombs. This spec op was the science-fiction-movie equivalent of a bug hunt, for which the sole hope of success would be the ruthless application of maximum force.

  The Carl Gustav M4 recoilless rifle weighed fifteen pounds, four less than the M3, and had an overall length of thirty-seven inches. The ammunition was heavy, but considering the nature of all possible targets in the ghost town, none of which could be defined as a true bunker, merely aboveground buildings often of dubious construction, they had chosen to bring only four rounds. To compensate for this extra weight, which would complicate an overland trek, they carried less ammo for their rifles and pared their gear down where possible.

  Two men were required to operate the weapon, one to fire it and the other to load. Paxton would fire, and Danny would load; and they agreed to launch not from the doorway of the abandoned house but from a long-ago-shattered front window. Some guys called the Carl Gustav the Carl Johnson, a surname used as slang for the male sex organ, and others called it the Goose, but whatever its name, the launcher was more effective than Thor’s hammer, with a range of more than 1,300 meters. Abdullah’s current residence stood little more than twenty feet away; a blowback of debris would be significant. Firing over the windowsill from a kneeling position, they could duck their heads
after launch and hope that most of the trash flung in their direction would rattle harmlessly off the walls that surrounded the window opening.

  After they both put on double ear protection, Danny arranged the four rounds on the floor, under the window. Kneeling, Pax shouldered the Gustav. Danny opened the Venturi lock, a handle that moved the hinged breech to one side for loading, and inserted the first round.

  The roof of the two-story building across the street from the rear of Abdullah’s rathole provided a high mud-brick parapet with cutouts fitted with widely spaced iron bars, an ideal setup for a sniper. Perry and Gibb lay at different crenellations, watching the back of the house and the street.

  In the quiet of the morning, the empty buckets, swinging from their handles, squeaked as the murderer returned from the community latrine. He let himself through the rear gate and crossed the yard, a rectangle of cracked and littered concrete. Someone had been watching for him. The door opened. He went inside.

  Perry called the one number programmed into his satellite phone, and when the connection was made, he said, “Everyone’s safe at home.”

  Given the short range to target, Pax didn’t need either the 3x optical sight or the fitted-iron sights. The impact explosion at once rocked the morning, while blowback junk rattled-pocked-pinged against the front wall of their house and whistled through the window over their heads simultaneously, or so it seemed, with the blast. There were the smells of concrete dust and hot gases from the Gustav, and Danny sneezed as he opened the Venturi lock to load the second round.

  A Carl Gustav round could slam through steel-reinforced concrete as if through cheese, and the overpressure from the explosion tended to screw up most of a building’s interior. From their roof position across the street, Perry and Gibb were not able to see what happened to the front of the house, but the entire structure quaked and swayed and deformed, and two exterior shutters on the back windows blew off, clanging across the concrete yard, as spikes of window glass bounced and splintered on the pavement.

  At most twenty seconds after the building was slammed, the back door flew open, and two men staggered out, disoriented and no doubt half deaf. The night-soil manager drew the pistol from his drop-leg holster, and the new guy carried a fully automatic carbine with an extended magazine, maybe an Uzi. Gibb needed one shot to take out the would-be Scarface, a second to ensure the kill, and Perry dropped the other terrorist, sparing him from further latrine duty.

  Following the second round from the Gustav, the house resembled a set from a Transformers movie after a robot had stomped through it. Pax was prepared to use the remaining two rounds, and Danny loaded one. But the building swayed as though constructed of pudding and crashed in upon itself, clouds of dust billowing into the street.

  They tore off their ear protection, snatched up the MK12s, ventured outside as the air slowly cleared. Approaching the target house, they were cautious, though the chance of anyone within having survived seemed nil. Perry and Gibb came in from the street to the east, which was when Pax learned that two had been sniped, leaving five under the rubble.

  Time now to call in the carrier-based helo to extract the team, though the task remaining would not be easy. The point was to prove you could not kill 317 Americans and live long enough to brag about it to your grandchildren. They needed to find al-Ghazali, photograph his face or what remained of it, and take a tissue sample for DNA. Otherwise, some anonymous Internet-savvy bonehead would fake proof that he was al-Ghazali, and 31 percent of Americans would believe him.

  Pax started to call for the helo when Bibi’s face bloomed so vividly in his mind’s eye that the ruins of the ghost town ceased to exist for a moment. If previously he’d suspected she was in trouble, he knew it now. This was battleground intuition on steroids—and more than intuition. He had to wrap the op, ditch this cesspool country, and call Bibi as soon as the blackout rule no longer applied, when they were at sea, aboard the aircraft carrier.

  Calida Butterfly was a whirlpool, a vortex of dark energy that could not be resisted, so that Bibi was caught up in the woman’s fear, felt it swirling through her. So convincing was the diviner’s anxiety, so distraught the series of expressions that tortured her face, it proved impossible quite to believe that she could be a fraud with criminal intent. And there had been too many bizarre occurrences to dismiss her as a delusional paranoid. Something extraordinary was happening, about to happen, approaching fast, and the prudent course seemed to be to get out of its way before it arrived.

  In the bedroom closet, as Bibi opened the shoebox and retrieved the holster with the Sig Sauer P226, Calida said, “I’ll leave my massage table. It’ll slow me down. I’ll get it later, next week, whenever. Can you hurry, kid? Come on, come on!”

  Bibi shrugged into the shoulder rig, adjusted it, pulled a blazer off a hanger, and slipped into it. The pistol already held a full magazine. She glanced at herself in the closet-door mirror. The gun didn’t show under the coat. Her reflection did not quite resemble the one to which she was accustomed: hair kind of wild, windblown on a night without wind; strangeness swimming in the dark pools of her eyes; hard edges in her face that she hadn’t seen before. She thought she looked like a desperado. Or a perfect idiot.

  In the living room, as Calida snatched up her suitcase, Bibi grabbed her purse and laptop. “Damn it, why did Mom and Dad sic you on me?”

  “Not their fault. They couldn’t know. Nothing like this ever happened when I did them.”

  “Nothing like what?”

  “The disgusting rotten smell, the cold from nowhere, the weird candle crap, the clocks. The wrong people coming.”

  Following the woman to the front door, Bibi said, “I figured stuff like that always happened.”

  “Never happened to me before.”

  “Never?” Bibi pulled shut the door. She fumbled with the key to engage the deadbolt. “But you’re the diviner, the big kahuna.”

  Hastening along the balcony toward the stairs, Calida said, “It happened to my mother sometimes. She warned me about it, but maybe I didn’t take her seriously enough.”

  “Wait up.” Bibi hurried after the blonde. “Didn’t take her seriously? Really? I mean, really? Your mother, who was tortured and dismembered?”

  “No need for the snarky tone, kid. Sometimes you can be pretty damn insensitive.”

  The long-legged Scrabblemancer bounded down the stairs two at a time, her footfalls hammering reverberant groans from the ironwork. In vanilla-white slacks and top, flamboyant sash and scarf, multiple hoop earrings, and a glittering trove of finger rings, she might have been a glamorous fugitive from a 1950s movie comedy about a Las Vegas showgirl on the run from the Mob.

  Nimble and agile, Bibi plummeted after her, risking a bad fall, but proving, if there had been any doubt, the symptoms of gliomatosis cerebri were gone without a trace. “Hey, you know, sometimes you can be damn frustrating.”

  “Better than snarky.”

  “I wasn’t snarky.”

  “Ear of the beholder,” Calida said as she came off the last flight of stairs and made her way between the row of sun loungers and the glimmering pool, where the trout-swift young man had earlier been swimming laps.

  Sprinting to close the gap between them, Bibi reached with her left hand and snared the expensive-looking gold-star-on-blue-field silk scarf that trailed behind Calida, hoping to use it to ransom a few answers from the panicked diviner. The exquisite scarf was not merely wrapped around the woman’s throat, however, but was instead loosely knotted, which called before the court the laws of physics, in particular those that dealt with motion, action, and reaction. With a choking sound, Calida Butterfly abruptly ceased forward motion and dropped her ostrich-skin suitcase to clutch at the strangling silk, simultaneously staggering backward two steps and colliding with Bibi, whose forward speed was at that instant decisively checked. For a moment they wheeled around each other like the gimbal mountings of a gyroscope, but though one of the functions of a gyroscope was to m
aintain equilibrium, they were not able to maintain theirs. They teetered together on the pool coping, a mere degree of tilt away from a wet plunge. When Bibi thought to let go of the scarf, the forces of Nature, which had been cunningly engineered to make amusing fools of human beings in most circumstances, at once rebalanced themselves, thereby casting both women off balance. Calida fell to her knees on the pavement, while Bibi tottered backward and dropped hard into a sitting position on one of the sun loungers.

  The Amazon diviner had progressed from fear and anger to terror and rage. She acted on the latter as she thrust to her feet, cursing Bibi and the Thorpe children that she hadn’t yet produced. “Get away from me, stay away from me, you insane crazy bitch.”

  As Calida turned toward her dropped suitcase, Bibi said, “Crazy bitch? Me? Me? Meeeee? I was just having the best day of my life, that’s all, free of cancer, then you show up and…”

  But she abandoned that line of response. She loathed the whine in her voice, did not want to paint herself as a victim. Valiant girls did not whine. They never played the victim even if there were benefits to be had from inhabiting that role, which there were, huge benefits, which was why everyone wanted to be a victim these days.

  Half of Calida’s custom-crafted two-sided suitcase had fallen open when she dropped it, spilling the silver bowl and some of the other items that she used for divination. She stooped to repack with urgency.

  Bibi rose from the lounge chair. “Look, maybe I am crazy, running from my apartment because you say someone’s coming—someone or something—I don’t even know who or what or why, crazy for buying in to this Ashley Bell thing, but here I am. So tell me how to find her. Tell me who these wrong people are.”

  Turning to face her, suitcase in hand, Calida said bleakly, “Oh, you’ll know them.”