Shatterproof (13 page)

“My name is Bart. I am at your service.”

“Is your name really Bart?” Atticus asked.

The man raised an eyebrow. “If you prefer you can call me Basharat Antarah Rawahah Tajamul.”

“Bart works for me,” Dan said.

“Your English is excellent,” Jake said. “Elijah told me it would be.”

Amy stared at him. “Who?”

“Elijah Smith,” Jake explained. “My dad’s travel agent. I texted him and asked if he knew anyone in Timbuktu that could show us around. He said we could trust Mr. Tajamul with our lives.”

Amy gritted her teeth. “You could have mentioned this to me,” she said.

Jake smiled and shrugged, which irritated her even more.

Bart looked at Amy. “My French is even better than my English. My father sent me to private school in Paris and the University of California at Berkeley. He wanted me to better myself. But as you can see . . .” He gestured to his tattered clothes and dented taxi.

“I’m not sure we’ll need your services after all,” Amy said.

Jake frowned. “We’ll at least need a ride into town.”

“How much?” Amy asked Bart.

“Seventy-five thousand CFA,” Bart said.

“And how much is that in dollars?”

“One hundred and fifty.”

“Outrageous,” Amy said, snapping her eyes over at Jake. He looked a little surprised, too, which gave her some satisfaction.

“For two hundred dollars I could be at your disposal for the next twenty-four hours. Or perhaps you already know your way around Timbuktu?”

Amy pulled Dan to the side. She trusted his instincts. “What do you think?” she whispered.

“He seems okay,” Dan answered. “If he was a Vesper he wouldn’t be asking for that much, because he wouldn’t want to lose the job. And we are in a hurry.”

Amy nodded and turned back to Bart.

“All right,” she said. “Half now. Half when we leave.”

Bart gave her a slight bow. “It is a deal.”

Amy counted out the money.

Milos Vanek was at an airport four thousand miles away. Unlike the Timbuktu airport,
Mumbai International was teeming with thousands of people in bright clothes hauling impossibly huge loads of luggage and packages. He wove his way through the throng as he spoke to a colleague at the Mumbai Interpol headquarters.

It appeared that Dan Cahill had been telling the truth. Jonah Wizard had been spotted in Mumbai earlier that day. A video of the famous entertainer dancing with a charmed cobra had gone viral, and now every young person in Mumbai was out with their camera phone looking for him.

Vanek would be looking for him, too.

Nellie had been sobbing for more than an hour straight, her injuries all but forgotten in her grief over Phoenix. The thoughts of what she should have done pummeled her. She should never have stayed behind with Reagan. She should have kept everyone together. The others assured her that it would have made no difference, but she didn’t believe them. He was just a little kid, and he’d trusted her. She wiped the tears away with the back of her hand and took a deep breath. There were other little kids in the truck, and they needed her just as much as he had.

Get it together, Gomez. Focus on those who are still here.

“I can’t believe they shot Martin Holds,” Fiske said.

They had told her and Reagan about the hiker and his sudden murder.

If the Vespers could murder a completely innocent bystander, what do they have in mind for us?

The hostages had been in the back of the panel truck for hours without water, food, or relief. No amount of pounding, kicking, yelling, or pleading would get the guards to open the door. Reagan had suggested they rock the truck until they tipped it over.

“Why?” Natalie snapped. “So they can drag us out and stuff us into another?”

“How about just to annoy them?” Reagan offered.

Nellie managed to smile despite her grief.

“We’re being punished,” Fiske said. “As soon as we are softened up, they’ll put us back into the bunker.”

But Fiske was wrong. The truck started to move, speeding up, slowing down, bouncing them around like rocks in a tin can. Finally, hours later, it shuddered to a halt.

The door swung open.

“Get out!” yelled a massive man with a thick black beard.

Nellie climbed out, covering her eyes against the fading sunlight. By the look of it, they were still in the Black Forest. She hoped they wouldn’t have to hike. Alistair was barely able to stand on his own.

“We need a doctor!” Nellie said.

“If you don’t shut up, you’ll need a mortician,” a guard said. “Now move!” He pointed his rifle at a steep trail leading off into the woods.

There were twice as many guards as there had been at the other location. Some were on four-wheelers, some were on foot. All of them were heavily armed. Nellie took Ted’s hand.

“They’re not wearing balaclavas,” Reagan whispered to Nellie as they started up the trail.

Nellie was worried about that, too. The masks had been intimidating, but the lack of masks was fore-boding. It meant the Vespers no longer cared if they were recognized.

They have no intention of letting us go.

She scanned the area for a way to escape. If one of them got away, maybe they could bring back help.

“We’ll get our chance,” Reagan whispered, as if she were reading Nellie’s mind. “Right now we need to act defeated. Let them think they’ve broken us.”

“I am broken,” Nellie said. The bites on her leg and face throbbed.

“Wounded, not broken,” Ted said.

“Maybe,” Nellie said, “but I’m not so sure about Alistair.”

He could barely walk, and hadn’t said a word in over an hour. He’d fallen on a sharp rock when he lunged to catch Phoenix, taking a deep puncture to his bad knee. But Phoenix’s fall had hurt him much worse than the leg injury.

They trudged on for about a half a mile, until Nellie got fed up.

“That’s it!” she said, sitting down in the middle of the trail.

“Get up,” the guard with the black beard said.

She shook her head. “Nope.” He pointed his rifle at her, but Nellie stared back at him.

“You think I won’t?” he responded.

“I don’t care.” She crossed her arms and continued her defiant stare.

“Look,” the guard said, faltering. “It’s not that much farther.”

“One of us can barely walk. One of us is blind.” Nellie said. “Put them on the four-wheelers and I’ll get up.”

“Forget it.”

“Fine.” Nellie pointed at her forehead. “Squeeze the trigger.”

The guard slowly raised his rifle, but Nellie met his gaze straight on. She didn’t even blink.

The guard swore, lowered his rifle, and walked back down the trail. A couple minutes later, he came back on a four-wheeler, a second one rumbling up behind him. He pointed at Ted and Alistair. “You two climb on back. If you try anything funny I
will
shoot her.” He looked at Nellie. “Anything else?”

“Water,” Nellie said promptly.

“You’re pushing your luck.”

“If I’m given a choice between dying of thirst or a bullet, I’ll take the bullet.”

Black Beard glared at her for a second, then reached around into a side pack for six bottles of water. He got off the four-wheeler and then tossed the bottles to them one at a time, saving Ted for last. He smiled, and tossed Ted’s bottle rather hard.

Ted caught it with one hand. “Thanks.”

“I thought you were blind,” the astonished guard said.

“Just my eyes. My ears work fine. I heard it coming.”

“Freak,” the guard muttered.

An hour later they reached the end of the trail. Stretching through the woods for as far as they could see in both directions was a twelve-foot-high electrified fence topped by razor wire.

“What is this place?” Fiske asked.

The guards waved them through a steel gate without answering. On the other side of the fence was a gigantic compound. In the center of it was a white geodesic dome.

“Describe it for me,” Ted said.

“We’re in a clearing on top of a mountain,” Fiske said.

“Roughly the size of four football fields,” Reagan added.

“There’s a white dome in the middle,” Natalie said. “It looks kind of like a high-end igloo.”

“It would be almost impossible to get all this up here without a road,” Alistair said.

The group turned toward him in surprise. It was the first complete sentence he had uttered in hours.

At that moment, an airship carrying a cargo net with an immense load of crates appeared over the tops of the trees.

Nellie pointed at the sky. “Airship,” she said.

“Get moving!” a guard shouted.

They pushed and prodded the hostages through the dome entrance.

There were dozens of men and women inside, each one hard at work moving equipment around on forklifts, consulting digital pads, or talking on flashing Bluetooths. Alistair looked around in awe. “They’re building something. It’s . . .” He paused. “What
is
this?”

But the guards didn’t give them time for a closer look. They hustled the hostages toward an elevator.

“Get in.”

The group shuffled inside.

“Photo op,” one of the guards said. He videotaped them for a few seconds, then nodded. The door slid closed and they shot up several floors.

They expected another set of guards to be waiting for them. Instead, the doors opened directly into a twenty-by-twenty-foot room. Directly in front of them was a floor-to-ceiling mirror. They watched themselves step out of the elevator.

“I assume that’s a two-way mirror,” Fiske said.

Along the left and right walls were eight cots bolted to the wall, end to end, four to a side. In the right-hand corner was a stainless steel sink and toilet.

Nellie walked closer to the mirror. One side of her face had puffed up so the skin was as tight as a balloon. She traced the ring of angry red bite marks from her hairline to halfway across her cheek.

“There’s food.” Alistair said. “Bottled water.” He was pulling out boxes from under the cots. The others rushed over to help.

“M-R-E’s?” Reagan read out the initials.

“Meals Ready to Eat. United States military meals.”

“Martin Holds said we were in the Black Forest,” Fiske said.

Everyone looked at each other in confusion.

Reagan was the first to pull open her meal. The others followed, tearing open the packets. Ted was the only one who didn’t move.

“Here,” Natalie said. “I’ll open an MRE for you.”

“Thanks,” Ted said. “But it’s not that. Maybe we should . . . I don’t know. Maybe we should have a moment of silence for Phoenix?”

Everyone stopped eating.

“That’s an excellent idea,” Fiske said.

They closed their eyes and bowed their heads.