Angelique Rising (36 page)

             
"No, no, she'll be all right," Malcolm said with cynical unconcern. "I haven't seen you since I went to France, Angelique, I want to
catch up with you
.
"
He laughed a course spiteful laugh eyeing her avariciously.
How smartly put together she is, like she's proclaiming an edict: You'll-never-have-me-you-fornicating-pig. Well fuck! Her!

             
"What do you want to know?" she retorted acidly, feeling rather brave under the circumstances.

             
"I hear you're recording an album. I hope it goes well for you
financially
,
"
he said seated on the couch sipping his drink --she knew he was referring to the fortune she'd stolen from him.

             
"Thank you," she said drily, "I have utterly insidious plans for the money."

             
His smile momentarily disappeared as he tried to feign disinterest.

             
"One should always keep one's options open, Angelique," he said subtly but in the most dangerous way.

             
"I'm worried about Tinka," she rose showing no trace of worry but using her smoothest smile. "I'll check on her." She turned her back on Malcolm with deliberate exaggeration and sauntered from the room.

             
Relaxed and shrewd, Wyatt beamed. "Some special cognac," he said bestowing the glass upon Malcolm almost in a kind of low communion. Malcolm caught the careless inflection but it only emboldened him.

             
"You are very lenient with your wife, Wyatt," Malcolm chastened in obvious disapproval, "I thought I taught you more than that."

             
"You have skills I will never master, Uncle. Have some of this cheese, it's a bit salty but I served it to Angelique just before our wedding so I am fond of it."

             
"Ah, the wedding you needed to get her drunk for."

             
"Yes, inebriation can be a useful tool."

             
"It's a fine cognac --at least I taught you one thing-- but it's leaving an unexpected parching in my throat, Wyatt," Malcolm said draining his glass a bit irked, "perhaps some water."

             
"A great deal of thought went into that cognac."

             
"Thought?"

             
"Oh yes," Wyatt responded, his eyes carefully searching Malcolm then turning to a window being hammered by the gray winter rain. "A brooding darkling night --fitting that it should be your last one with us."

             
"What? Last one?" Malcolm suddenly felt a vastness of hate around him and his heart started pounding.

             
"She's mine. And you took her. You
touched
her," he said in a deadly serious voice, his syntax careful, he wanted his uncle to remember this moment, even with his thickening mind.

             
Wyatt's words tore through Malcolm like a roll of thunder tearing through the night as he felt his stomach filling with molten fire.

             
"She
told
you?"

             
"We picked her up by the side of the road that morning."

             
"We?"

             
"Johnson and me. Speak of the devil."

             
Johnson was in the doorway.

             
"The driver is secure," Johnson said. "And Miss Tinka is in the back bedroom with Mrs. Cochran attending her."

             
The world was becoming oblique for Malcolm, odd and fading.

             
"WHAT...WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"
A mist was starting to cover him.

             
"Protecting," Wyatt answered as Uncle Mal pitched down face forward onto the carpet. "You son of a bitch pervert."

*****

              It was Johnson who drove Malcolm's car off the bridge into the river, then hopping into Wyatt's car following him. Both Donald and Malcolm were unconscious in the back seat.

             
They arrived at the airport making sure no one was in the hanger as they loaded both men into the small back cabin of the jet specially prepared, locking the door behind them, waiting for the flight crew to arrive.

             
"We'll see you in a few days," Wyatt said.

             
"Yes sir. Well, I suppose I'd better go put their diapers on," Johnson answered with a problematical sigh. "It's a long flight."

             
Parts of Johnson's job were profoundly unglamorous.

*****

              The news of Malcolm Cochran's disappearance came to light the very next morning when his car came to light upside down on a sandbar further down the river. Tinka was recovering at Wyatt and Angelique's house and it was Angelique who had to somberly lean over her, waking her.

             
"There's been an accident, I have some very bad news for you--"

             
And an investigation of sorts began, focused around the Performance Center "failure" who had apparently threatened Malcolm's life. Trouble was, though the police looked, they just couldn't find anyone and the security Malcolm had hired confessed that he'd never given them the slightest description or reason to believe there actually
was
a threat. The police soon came to the conclusion, helped by Wyatt explaining what a paranoid man Malcolm had been, that the threat had been all in Malcolm's mind.

             
"Donald was a terrible driver," Wyatt said to them, "I was always telling Uncle Mal to dismiss him. He just wouldn't listen."

             
One week after the disappearance Tinka held a memorial service and it was straight from that Angelique and Wyatt drove to the airport boarding Wyatt's privately leased jet and flew to Kyrgyzstan.

             
It was a long flight to the eastern end of Issyk Kul province and even longer trip along a road marbled with drifting sand stretching across a great emptiness away to a hazy darkened horizon. Finally their caravan of SUV's full of men with AK-47's began climbing jagged mountains dominating and forbidding in the impending twilight, toward the citadel.

             
"This stronghold has been here since antiquity," Johnson said to Angelique. "It is impenetrable. In the war we used it to hold... enemies. Quite effectively. I've had the subterranean section altered for our use."

             
"How are they getting on?" Angelique asked.

             
"Anxiously awaiting today."

             
"You're sure you want to do this?" Wyatt turned, his voice filled with concern.

             
"This ordeal must end," a soft, disembodied female voice responded from under her burka.

             
Wyatt nodded.

             
"I bet I look like a ghost in this thing," Angelique said waving her arms around underneath her burka, the cloak, totally covering her body.

             
"It's the best way, Ma'am," Johnson said apologetically. Angelique looked like Angelique and he didn't want any problems with the fighters or guards. Men were after all, men.

             
They rode the rest of the way in silence, waved past checkpoints, climbing higher and higher in the hostile terrain until at last they passed over a narrow stone bridge spanning a gorge and they were there. A great metal door was opened for them, and two more after that, and their caravan drove single file onto a brown dirt courtyard of an ancient, moldy, castle-like fortification. Angelique stepped out of the car shuddering, the air seemed to have lost its warmth under the dismal pall that hung over the dejected place.

             
"This way," Johnson said leading them into the bastion, past the stares of grizzled bearded men. They walked downward, down staircase after staircase, and the further down they went in the damp fortress, the more Angelique thought the place stank of death. Twice she tripped over her burka (totally uncharacteristic for her) and went sailing into Wyatt's back. At last they reached a metal door that looked new. Johnson nodded to two men seated in front of it who nodded back wordlessly. He tapped a code into an electrical panel on the wall and a noise of clicking, whirring and grinding came from the door as it opened.

             
I heard that sound so often, the horror of that sound.

             
They walked through into a stone hallway and the metal door closed behind them.

             
"You don't need burkas in here," Johnson said as he approached a door at the far end. "Ready?"

             
Johnson tapped another wall-mounted electrical panel and the door opened. They all walked through.

             
It was two rooms, each large enough to be a bedroom, indeed each room, connected by a doorless entry, had a bed. There was another doorless room and peering inside Angelique glimpsed a tiny archaic bathroom.

             
Malcolm and Donald were seated at a table but stood eagerly as they entered.

             
"Wyatt!" Malcolm seethed, "I am your
flesh and blood!
How can you do this?"

             
"Pretty easy, Uncle Mal."

             
"For
her?
What has she said to you? She
wanted
it, Wyatt, she came willingly!"

             
For some reason a picture of Malcolm swearing on the Bible to Gramps that he'd never met Tinka's mother in his life popped into Wyatt's head.

             
"I've watched the videos, Uncle Mal. I've seen how willing your victims were. You'll be glad to know I have used some of your funds to pay anonymous lump-sum payments to all I could find along with a copy of your obituary. The rest of your money will be used to finance your accommodations here. I thought I would give you this opportunity to ask for forgiveness if you are so inclined. It will not alter your sentence but maybe it will go a bit to cleansing your soul."

             
"Mr. Cochran," Donald quailed, "he
made
me--"

             
"Shut up!" Malcolm yelled, cutting across Donald's desperate narrative.

             
"You don't have to do what he tells you to," Lexa directed her words at Donald, quietly and with absolute finality leveling Malcolm Cochran. "He has no authority over you anymore." Lexa pointed to the chain around Donald's ankle. "Yours you know will stretch into the other room. His will not. He can not get away from you. And he will be your sole companion for a long time."

             
"Which leads me to suspect," Johnson said to Malcolm, "that you will come to learn more about the act of rape than you ever imagined."

             
"Heh, maybe you'll get to
like
our team," Anthony said gaily. "In a decade or so."

             
"Are we done, Ladies?" Wyatt asked looking at Lexa and Angelique, again marveling at the ruthless sweet viciousness of feminine revenge.

             
"WHAT ABOUT
TINKA?"
Malcolm exploded to Wyatt. "SHE'S MY DAUGHTER! HOW CAN YOU DO THIS TO--"

             
"Tinka, I suspect, will be far safer without you, Uncle Mal. And with you gone maybe she'll finally have the courage to go look for her mother, get back what you took from her. At any rate you've left enough that she's an heiress now and I will always look after her as well. Shall we go?"

             
"Up to Lexa," Angelique said. "I'm only here for her."

             
"I DIDN'T KILL YOU!" Malcolm shrieked at Lexa as their eyes met for the last time.

             
"No, you didn't," Lexa said with an odd expression on her face that gradually changed into a shadow of a smile, the first one seen on Lexa in a long time. "I'm beginning to realize that."

             
"YOU CAN'T DO THIS! NOT FOR
THEM!"
Malcolm screeched at Wyatt.

             
"It's not vengeance, Uncle Mal. Well, maybe some. But to me your actions are unexplainable and therefore unpredictable. The world is safer with you here. But as for you, Donald, these are good women and I suspect the day will come when they take pity on you and tell me to release you which I'll do, as long as you haven't murdered anyone." He looked darkly at Malcolm. "Though you might want to watch your own back around your former employer here. I suggest for actual
sleeping
you do that in the other room."