Freedom Incorporated (45 page)

Dan was mute.

“
After four
hours struggling in the dark I think she’ll welcome Adrian’s touch.
Mind you, he’s not as tender as I am. He might hurt her. I
sometimes hear his wenches scream because he’s fond of biting their
breasts. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy, but he’s an animal
in the sack.” Esteban’s monologue trampled the most fragile parts
of Dan’s psyche. “After he’s finished drilling whatever parts of
her anatomy he feels like, we’ll be fishing for the superglue
again. But this time… well you probably know what we’ll glue next,
don’t you?”

A quiver of anger seeped
from his lips and he forged a promise that he intended to keep:
“You’re a dead man.”

“
Ah, I beg to
differ.” Esteban enjoyed the freedom afforded by his specially
modified mobile phone, one that hugged a channel Echelon couldn’t
scan. He could say whatever he wanted without repercussion. “I’m
very much alive. It’s a beautiful day today, don’t you agree?” He
took the time to lick Jen’s right earlobe and held the receiver up
to her mouth. “Be a dear and say hello, will you?”

“
Dan?” Jen was
trembling with the effort of keeping tears from her eyes. She
didn’t want to give Esteban the satisfaction.

His eyes shot
wide with another shock of helplessness.
What can I say?
It was the most
excruciating word he’d ever uttered, “Jen?”

“
Dan, it’s
me-”

Esteban stole the
receiver back and planted an unwelcome kiss on Jen’s cheek. “That’s
enough for now.” He smiled maliciously. “That’s right, Daniel, her
mouth. We’ll lay a thin track of our special glue along her lips
and seal them shut.”

Dan remembered the state
of his wife’s body when he’d identified her in the morgue. He
remembered how blue she’d looked and remembered the signs of stress
along her eyelids where she’d tried to tear them open.

“
We’ll give
her four hours to think about that too. Unfortunately, it doesn’t
stop the sobbing. Or at least that bitch you called a wife made an
awful noise. It does stop the begging though, so that’s something.
But that’s all in the past, right? Onward and upward.” He appraised
Jen with an admiring look. “Jen looks like a better screw than your
wife anyway.”

Dan crawled
further from Samantha and Cookie, who
were
watching with anxious
expressions. “If you touch her, I swear…”

“
What?” Anger
replaced Esteban’s pleasure. “What’re you gonna do about it, tough
guy?”

“
I’ll kill
you.” It was the simple truth. This one man had done more damage to
everything Dan held dear than the rest of the ugliness in the world
combined.
No matter how long it takes, I
will kill you.

Esteban
laughed into the phone. “You go right ahead and try. In fact, I’d
be bitterly disappointed if you didn’t try. But it won’t be before
Junior gets his turn with your new friend.” He audibly mocked a
wince. “And he’s the
really
rough one. That’s why he has to go last. Do you
remember all that bruising around your wife’s genitalis? That was
Junior, and he’s grown worse since then. I almost pity Jennifer for
what he’ll end up doing to her.”

Pity?
Dan sourly doubted that Esteban
was capable of such an emotion.

“
After
Junior’s had his jollies there won’t be much left.” Esteban
revelled in the resignation he accurately read in Jen’s eyes.
“We’ll glue her nostrils shut, which will leave her with two
choices. She can either suffocate or tear her own lips to draw
breath.” Another mock wince came through the phone to punish Dan’s
waiting ear. “You read the autopsy report on your wife, so you know
what she chose. I wonder what Jennifer will do?”

“
You’re an
animal,” Dan whispered, a primal rage consuming what was left of
his sanity – just as Esteban had hoped.

Esteban thought about
that for a moment. “Yes, I am. And proud of it. You know, your wife
used her bloodied lips to plea for her life again so we had to
leave her writhing in agony for another four hours.” He sighed.
“She really was a mess, and the thrashing Junior gave her nearly
tore her hands off. It turns my stomach to think about it, truly it
does.” But the merry tone of his voice betrayed the lie. “Anyway,
if Jennifer’s anywhere near as determined as your wife, we’ll have
to spend the final four hours getting drunk. After all, we’ll need
full bladders.”

Dan’s world was swirling
from forces more powerful than the chemicals he’d inhaled. He felt
the final strings of his sanity fraying at the edges.

“
You know
what’s next, don’t you? You probably pieced it together from the
pitiful amount of forensic evidence the Australian detectives
slipped you. We’ll clamp her head in a vice, glue her messy lips
around a funnel, and take turns pissing in it until she drowns on
our beer reeking urine.”

Snap.
Dan screamed into the phone, an
unintelligible mass of raw energy that, despite the drone of the
engine, everyone in the land rover could hear buzzing through
Esteban’s mobile. “Your life is forfeit!”

Esteban laughed, enraging
Dan further.

“
Come and get
me.” With a final sneer, he hung up, leaving Dan on his hands and
knees listening to the beeping tones of the termination
signal.

Dan tightened his grip on
the phone until the plastic cracked and he smashed it against the
carpet, bending the areal. In a fit of rage he pounded it again and
again until the case split and bits of shattered PCB cartwheeled
across the floor.

“
What is it?”
Samantha retreated into Cookie’s arms, frightened by
Dan’s
violent
outburst.

Dan didn’t
reply. He couldn’t reply. His mind had collapsed and was tormenting
him with visions of his tortured wife’s body as she lay on the
coroner’s table.
Why?
He bit hard on his lips to stop the scream that was about to
boil from his lungs.
Fucking
why?
It didn’t make sense. Dark emotions
swamp
ed
him. Anger
seethed through every cell in his body and projected a singular
desire for revenge, to take an axe and smash it into those who had
snatched his beloved wife. He wanted to maim, to kill and to
destroy. He gathered every ounce of energy he had and bent it
toward Esteban’s death. The result was a poisoned core, so damaged
that he doubted he was capable of feeling
anything but hatred
. It generated a
bloodlust unquenchable by anything except Esteban’s
entrails.

Samantha wasn’t the only
one to recoil from Dan’s transformation. Cookie saw the void in
Dan’s eyes and wondered what it was. It wasn’t anger, nor was it
any feeling he’d had the luxury to catalogue. The closest match was
pure, untainted death, living in the mind of a man. He flinched,
wondering whether Dan would still recognise they weren’t the
enemy.

“
Who was
that?” Cookie’s voice cracked with a concoction of fatigue and
fear.

Dan viciously snarled his
reply, a guttural bark that could’ve come from the throat of a
wolf. “He killed my wife.”

That stunned Cookie into
silence and brought compassion flooding to Samantha’s fearful
eyes.

“
And he’s
going to kill Jen too,” Dan said, nearly chocking on the
words.

“
Is there
anything we can do?”

Dan laughed,
cursing himself for his stupidity.
Why did
I let her go outside? I knew it was dangerous and I let her go
anyway.
At that moment, an unwelcome emotion
surfaced from his past. He hated himself. He loathed what he was
and what he’d done.
S
omeone had once told him
that
people were
judged by their
actions in life, not by how much money they made. If that were the
case, and if there were an afterlife, then he’d never see Katherine
again because he’d rot in hell. He wished he had the power to turn
back the clock and hated
that
he couldn’t. He’d begged to revisit his past in
the weeks after Katherine’s murder, but no God had responded to his
pleas. His reflection in the mirror revolted him and, eleven months
ago, he’d smashed every mirror in the house, bloodying his knuckles
and wallowing in the pain from the shards.
I deserve pain.
He preferred physical
agony to the emotional
variety
; he’d already taken a gutful
of that.

How could I
be so fucking careless?
It was just as bad
as if he’d killed Jen with his own hands.
There’s no excuse for negligence.

But, cruelly, it gave him
purpose. He had something to work toward. He doubted he’d be in
time to save Jen from her hideous fate, but he’d make certain that
Esteban and his thugs would never harm another woman.

“
Dan?”

He was shaking
on the floor, convulsing with self-loathing. Samantha’s voice
chiselled through to a part of his mind still capable of rational
thought. His first priority had to be to the survivors, they needed
him now more than ever.
Come on
Danny-body, snap out of it.
But
i
t was not something he’d ever be able to
‘snap’ out of. It would haunt him until he lay restlessly in his
grave.
But purpose
sharpened his survival instincts and focussed his
determination into a fist of cold steel in the pit of his
stomach.

He struggled to stand on
wobbly legs and pressed the back of his wrist to his forehead to
stem the pounding in his brain. “We have to leave.”

“
Whoa, hang on
a second man.” Cookie took a pace forward, ready to catch him if he
collapsed again. “Tell us what’s going on.”

Dan wasn’t in the mood to
recount tales of his foolishness, but they deserved to know what
they were facing. “Eleven months ago my wife was murdered, I never
found out who did it.” The memory still tore at his chest. “The man
who captured Jen just confessed to it, and he said he’ll do the
same to her.”

“
Why?”
Samantha was fighting tears of anguish.

“
You heard how
Jen’s grandfather was assassinated, right?” He waited for them to
nod. “He was the one who did it and I was the detective who hauled
him back to Australia to face charges.” Dan sighed with sorrow. “I
wish I hadn’t. Political pressure got him off the hook, and now
he’s pissed.”

“
You mean this
is a vendetta?” Samantha
asked,
mortifie
d
.

Dan nodded. “I suspect
so, yes.”

“
But… Why
now?” Cookie thought he knew the answer but he wanted to see
whether Dan shared his suspicion.

“
I don’t know.
As far as I knew, he hadn’t worked for UniForce since assassinating
Mike Cameron. It was a public scandal so they sidelined him. Or so
I thought.”

“
What’s his
name?”

“
Valdez.
Esteban Garcia Valdez,” Dan replied.

Cookie nodded vigorously.
“Yeah, that’s right. I thought the name was familiar.” He slapped a
palm to his forehead. “Damn it!”

“
What?”

“
Ah, you’re
not
gonna
like
this.” Cookie briefly pushed his lips sideways before continuing.
“I found repeated references to him on their network. He’s their
assassination co-ordinator. They revoked his field status in ’59
but he’s been part of UniForce’s management team ever since. He
assumed the co-ordinator’s position last year when, I might add,
the previous co-ordinator died under suspicious
circumstances.”

So,
he thought
bitterly.
It was UniForce all
along.
It drove the final stake into his
heart – he’d begun work for his wife’s killers a few months after
lovingly laying her to rest.
How could I
be so blind?
“It’s unusual for an assassin
to be that… direct, that candid,” Dan said, wondering how Esteban
had received permission to play out his fantasy.

“
I think I can
explain that,” Cookie said with an apologetic cough. “The Raven
killed their CEO and they declared a state of company emergency. I
think he can do pretty much what he wants.”

I told you
so.
Dan knew they were thinking it.
Hell, I deserve it.
It
saddened him.
One more mistake to add to
my damning list.
“At least we know where to
start looking for her.” He wasn’t yet ready to give up.
Not yet.
He wasn’t going
to give up until they’d recovered Jen’s corpse. He remembered where
they’d found Katherine, in some musty, anonymous woods. One night
and already the animals had gnawed her bones, defiling her naked
and bloodied body. Her murder was bad enough, but Esteban hadn’t
even granted her the decency of protecting her body from hungry
animals or prying eyes. The insects had feasted too. He stopped the
memories before he recalled her infested flesh.