Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(40)
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 maintain 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.