The Espionage Effect(96)
A gasp sounded out as Escobar cleared the airspace over me. His rifle drifted away from him as he clutched at air. I stared hard at him as he plummeted, memorizing every feature of a man truly terrified: the widened shocked eyes, the mouth agape, hands clawing, reaching, searching for salvation that exceeded his grasp.
Muscles in my jaw clenching, I watched with grim satisfaction as an evil man fell to his death. My sister’s terrified expression had haunted me for too many years. Now I had a better memory to replace it.
No part of me cared that it was a statistical improbability that Escobar was the one responsible for Geneva’s kidnapping. All that mattered were the lives that he’d put at risk now.
My gaze held fast as his body slammed onto the pavement below, landed with his limbs unnaturally askew, lifeless, broken.
The wrongdoing carried out so many years ago had been avenged my way.
I scanned upward, and time sped up again as additional guards began to fall. One backward. Another while running for cover behind a white panel-van. One of them grabbed Miguel under the shoulders and started to drag him off, before he too was shot.
Blinking rapidly, my brain caught up with an instant adrenaline rush to the task at hand. Alec had returned to my side, firing off round after round as he neutralized the opposing force.
Remembering the rest of the soldiers who’d supposedly taken sniper positions, I touched a finger to the lenses of my glasses, switching to a thermal view to more carefully search for signs of life along the inert rooftops.
Reddish orange illuminated five hotspots, all spread in a semicircle perimeter within view of the vans. Thankfully all of the college kids had been loaded and were out of harm’s way before the shooting had begun. I hoped they stayed there.
Readjusting the aim of my sniper rifle, I synced the glasses to the weapon, pointed at the target on the far left, and fired. Not skipping a beat, I repeated the process with the next closest target.
“I’ll take out the right side,” Alec offered.
As I took aim at my final target, I stared down the scope of his rifle. How long had it been pointed our way? Was he aiming at Alec or me?
With no time to spare, I fired.
As if all had been completed, my body collapsed.
An instant later, I stared up at a clear blue sky. My limbs fell back, my body seemingly sucked downward. I relaxed into the pull, not wanting to fight gravity. A burning fire lit up my hip, but I didn’t care. The pain felt good—proved I was alive.
“Jesus Christ, Devin.” Alec’s words sounded hollow, like he called out from blocks away down a narrow tunnel. His handsome face filled my vision, dark features drawn tight with concern.
I smiled and reached a leaden arm up to caress his face. “We did it.”
Was that my voice? It sounded tinny to my ears.
Mind detached from the images, sounds, smells…a coppery scent filling my nostrils, I watched absentmindedly as Alec blurred into action.
A metal case opening.
A dark-red syringe being assembled, held aloft, the barrel flicked with his fingernail.
I felt my other arm lift, then a sharp prick at the inside bend of my elbow. “Field Cocktail,” I slurred out, grasping at the memory fragment.
“The good stuff,” he explained.
“Mmm…morphine.”
His low chuckle preceded black dots that fringed into my vision before the world funneled into a total blackout.
A plane engine rumbled. Floorboards vibrated beneath my feet.
The world blurred back into existence…from my groggy consciousness strapped upright in the copilot’s chair of a cockpit. A plane’s cockpit.
“What…” My sandpaper throat locked up.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” Alec murmured, not far away, beside me somewhere.
I swallowed hard as my vision cleared by small degrees. Dozens of round gauges on a matte-black instrument panel sharpened into focus. Two control wheels moved in concert, resembling dual curving joysticks, complete with a black button on the inside stick and black and red buttons on the outer.
Turning my head to the right as far as possible, I stared over my shoulder at blue sky. The white surface of the fuselage glared so bright, I pinched my eyes shut, blinking away intense pain that instantly throbbed at the backs of my eyes.
“You stole a plane,” I croaked out, master of the obvious. “You stole…me.”
A low snort sounded to my left. “Something like that.”
I swallowed twice more past the grittiness in my mouth as I scanned out the windows of the plane. Indigo-blue ocean waves rolled below us, all around us.
My hip ached. I pressed at the source, then winced. “What did you do?”
“Brought you back from the dead.”
“Oh. That all?” A sense of impending gloom made me question my level of gratefulness.
Silence followed.
I couldn’t determine our bearing by the position of the sun. Sluggish brain cells began to engage again as I tried to find coastal landmarks. Nothing but water.
“Which direction are we flying?”
“South.”
Were we flying back to Cancun?
No, further south, intuition instantly replied. To a silver strand of paradise: Maroma Beach. Toward the deadliest man on earth: Escobar. Correction: the deadest man, my sparking brain provided, even though there were no degrees of dead.