Hurricane Fever (17 page)

Not professional security, these were more neo-Nazis.

“We were warned you might try and show up here,” Beauchamp said.

“Get your hands out in the air, slowly,” one of the guards shouted, not happy with the casual chitchat, suspicious that Roo was probably up to something.

“Okay. I’m pulling them out slowly.” Roo stepped forward and held his hands out from his body. He let the grenade pins drop to the floor. “Shoot me, I drop the grenades.”

“Szar
,
”
swore one of the men.

Adrien Beauchamp’s lips tightened. “Would someone explain to me how he walked into
my
lab with grenades in his pocket?”

“It’s impossible, they weren’t there. He was scanned. Closely. Everyone was.”

Beauchamp pointed at one of Roo’s hands. “It’s not impossible, because they’re right there, aren’t they?”

He turned around, but Roo stepped forward. “I wouldn’t leave, Mr. Beauchamp. I still have the grenades.”

The plutocrat slowed and waved at someone farther down the corridor. “I’m not leaving, Mr. Jones. Not yet. Besides, what will you do? Drop them and commit suicide? The fact that you still stand here in front of me indicates you’re not suicidal.”

“There’s always a first time,” Roo said, taking another step forward to keep Beauchamp close at hand. “And I’m angry enough to do something stupid on principle.”

“Maybe,” Beauchamp said. “But while you’re willing to kill yourself, I wonder, will you be willing to kill your friend?”

He pulled a gagged and bound Elvin forward.

“Ah shit,” Roo said, looking at his friend’s broken nose and bruised eyes. Blood ran from his forearms where peeled strips of skin hung. He limped horribly on a leg where the trousers seeped dark fluid. “Elvin, I’m so sorry.”

He’d dragged another soul down into this mess. Another person had paid the price for Roo’s actions. Roo felt his stomach churn, and he bit his lip to remain focused. He felt like he’d stepped into quicksand. This had all gotten way out of hand.

Better to have remained the faceless puppet, gaining evidence, using his favors.

Gunplay didn’t just get you or the assholes shot, he thought. It also gets the bystanders. The innocents. And the blood would remain on his hands forever, no matter the justifications he had.

Elvin staggered and wordlessly sank to his knees in front of Beauchamp.

Beauchamp sighed. “I take a very close interest in people snooping around my business. It’s expensive to have a line into the local security systems, but it comes in handy when things like this happen.”

“Let him go,” Roo said. He twisted his hands, waggling the grenades. “Or tell me what you want from me to let him go. He shouldn’t have to suffer for my mistakes.”

Beauchamp smiled. “Mr. Jones, your first name might be Prudence, but you don’t seem to be letting your given name constrain your actions, which is a shame. Now you’re trying to ruin one of my favorite charity events.”

“What you want?” Roo asked, impatient, struggling to keep the men around him in sight.

“What
do
I want?” Beauchamp asked. “Your island dialect might charm those vapid people upstairs, but I prefer precise grammar. Details matter to me.”

Roo gritted his teeth. “What do you want, Beauchamp? What’s all this about?”

The man waved the question aside. “No, you first, Prudence. I want to know what possessed you to climb down the
outside
of my building. Who’s pulling your strings? Do you still work for the Caribbean Intelligence Group?” Beauchamp pulled a small silvered pistol out from under his suit jacket and pointed it at the back of Elvin’s head.

Roo stared at him. “You really don’t know why I’m here?”

“I’m all ears.” Beauchamp stared at Roo, unblinking.

“One of your pet neo-Nazis tried to kill me. I imagine they were trying to get some information that an old friend of mine left me before he died in Florida from a nasty hemorrhagic fever. One someone designed.”

“You know about that?” Beauchamp asked.

“Only,” Roo continued, “instead of killing me, they shot my nephew dead.”

One of Beauchamp’s guards lit up with fury. “
You
killed the men at the hotel!” he shouted, stepping forward.

“They killed my nephew,” Roo repeated. “The boy was the only family I got.”

Beauchamp waved the man back and looked at Roo with sadness. “So you know loss, Mr. Jones. True loss.”

Roo stared at him. “I know it.”

“I lost someone once. My wife. Before I had the labs, I was a vertical-farm pioneer, did you know that?”

“No, I did not.”

“She felt very strongly about trying to help people build infrastructure in the Democratic Republic of Congo. We built infrastructure in one of the northern cities. One of my farms could feed some forty thousand. I did it because she wanted it, and because she was such a beautiful human being, Mr. Jones. She wanted to make the world a better place. I wanted to make it a better place for her. But to live near the border of the Central African Republic and Congo … that was not a pretty place.”

“Kinshasa is a beautiful city,” Roo said.

“She didn’t want to go to Kinshasa, where it was stable. No, it had to be where the need was greatest. And most dangerous. I’d never seen an entire fifteen-story farm torched before. The rebels dynamited it. They said it represented foreign interference. It was a symbol. So they dragged it down. But who cares, it was just material? What came next, that was worse. Because we were there to see it.”

Beauchamp looked at Roo, and he saw the deep pain in Beauchamp’s eyes.

“They tortured her, Mr. Jones. I listened to her scream
for days
. And then they killed her. But me, I was worth too much alive. So I lived. For three months, a captive. And I watched as the people she tried to save starved and died. Over what? A line drawn on a map? A city that was really more of a town? It wasn’t enough that she died, all her work was gutted. They killed her, and they destroyed my entire world.”

“Delroy was my whole world,” Roo said softly.

“So you understand exactly how I felt when I got back to Kinshasa,” Beauchamp said. “And then, I watched the aid agencies swarm the country. You know what they did for all those homeless, starving people?”

Roo shook his head.

“They gave them free food,” Beauchamp said, disgust in his voice. “Pallets and pallets of it.”

“You act like that’s some horrible thing,” Roo said.

“And then I read a book that used an analogy that stuck with me: giving free food to starving people is just throwing fuel on the fire,” Beauchamp stated flatly. “Combine the desire to give them free food so that you don’t have to suffer the guilt of watching them starve, with the social conservative prohibition against also giving out free birth control, and you’ve basically got rabbits. They’re just going eat and fuck and then all you have are
more
starving people.”

“So better to let them starve?” Roo stared at the man.

“Yes,”
Beauchamp hissed. “Better that they starve just once, so that untold following generations don’t live in misery and starvation.”

“So you think you can shove that generation out in front the bus and save the others by doing it?” Roo said.

“Save them. Save other people on the planet. Mr. Jones, you know we barely have the farmland to support the people already on this planet.”

Said the man who built vertical farms, Roo thought. “So all these poor brown people, after they die, what then?”

“When the black plague hit Europe,” Beauchamp said, animated, “it changed everything. Moved whole economies out of feudalism! Because suddenly human labor wasn’t cheap; too many people had died. Midden piles outside cities showed nutrition improved. Because, Mr. Jones, we’re like cockroaches. We just breed, with no acceptance of the consequences. With our planet overburdened, with civilizations looking at each other’s borders, it’s time we stopped throwing fuel on the fire.”

“And you’re going to solve that, with this plague? Reduce the population through sickness?”

Beauchamp cocked his head. “Plague?”

Roo’s eyes narrowed. “The one that killed my friend, Zachariah.”

“Was that his name?” Beauchamp asked levelly. “Well, he took something from me. And I don’t like thieves, Mr. Jones. People don’t get to take things away from me, not without consequences.”

“I feel much the same,” Roo said through gritted teeth.

“I’m glad we’re on the same page.” Beauchamp racked the slide of the pistol with a clack that echoed around them.

Roo stiffened. “Wait…”

Elvin had been on his knees, dazed, for the whole conversation. Fear flickered in his eyes for a second. Then Beauchamp pulled the trigger.

Blood splattered the carpet. That was what Roo focused on: the abstract splatter of it across polished black boots and the bottom of the wall.

Elvin slumped forward awkwardly, a lifeless sack of a human now.

Roo dropped the grenades to the floor.

For a split second the guards stared at him. No one had expected him to do it. Roo stood rooted in place for a split second, not understanding what he’d unconsciously done.

Then everyone ran.

Three guards shoved Beauchamp behind a supporting beam and covered him with their bodies. One of them opened fire at Roo, who was already back out on the balcony and crouching behind the tiny sliver of wall for protection.

The grenades exploded. The doors shattered, glass raining down on the balcony.

Roo grabbed the end of the paracord bracelet he’d tied to the balcony and looped it around his ankles. He took a deep breath and chucked the third grenade in through the doors.

“Gránát!”

Roo leaped over the rail. The pop of small arms filled the air. Something smacked into his shoulder as he tumbled through the air.

The grenade made a crumping sound overhead. A sparkling cloud of glass and debris blew out into the air above Roo.

He reached the end of the paracord with a horrible smack. There was some give, built into it by the weave and because it had been designed for parachutes, but the arrest was still brutal at this length. He’d tried to jump off to the side to create a pendulum-like arc to absorb some of the impact as well, but now that meant Roo swung in an arc and struck a window hard enough to knock the air out of him. His right ankle had snapped, he realized. He could feel bone grinding on bone. Roo would have screamed, but he couldn’t get air. He just croaked, hanging upside down as glass rained down past him, slicing at his clothes.

Someone leaned over the balcony and cut the rope.

The ground was fifteen feet below.

Roo managed to twist, like a cat, and land on his one good foot with a roll so bad he almost wanted to apologize. The stabbing pain up his femur hinted at another fracture, maybe even a break. Glass and debris punctured his hands and dug into his sides. Roo lay on the sidewalk, unable to think or move.

Pain hit him like waves furiously slamming into a reef. They covered him with a frothy stabbing as breakers of dizziness foamed and climbed over him to dash themselves against some inner point that struggled to remain firm.

There was a lot of blood on the ground around him, Roo thought.

And then that inner rock gave up and let itself get washed away.

19

Roo opened his eyes a few minutes later and fuzzily regarded the tilted lobby of Beauchamp Labs. He’d crawled away from the building at some point, he realized, looking back at the trail he’d made through the debris.

Through the floor-to-ceiling glass Roo could see two men in shredded black suits get out of the elevators. They motioned at the security guards near the metal detectors and pointed outside.

Roo pulled his pistol free of his inner jacket pocket and struggled to sit up, but it felt like all of Aves Island had suddenly been cut free of the coral it sat on. Everything rocked and moved around him.

He took a deep breath and aimed at the lobby doors.

This was it. His last stand. Sitting on the grass near the road in front of the lobby of the building.

When the men pushed the doors open Roo emptied the clip at them. The windows shattered. The guards scattered, seeking cover.

The high-pitched whine of an electric bike filled the air. Tires scrubbed on the street and Roo looked behind him just as Kit pulled to a stop, the back of the bike kicked slightly up into the air as she slammed the front brakes too hard.

“Where did you get that?” he asked, stupidly, loading another clip into his pistol and shooting back at the lobby to keep them covered.

“Stole it. Get on,” she shouted. Bullets slapped the asphalt nearby. Too close. But Kit didn’t flinch. “Let’s go!”

Roo tried to stand. His ankle collapsed, bone puncturing through the skin. He wobbled, fell forward, and Kit caught him. He wrapped his arms around her waist as she gunned the motor, leaving a long track of rubber down the road. The popping sound of gunfire faded behind them.

“Left here,” Roo murmured. The world tracked past him in jerky fits of images. His brain was struggling to handle the inputs as they moved out of the island’s central core. He directed her toward the edge of Aves, closer to the water. Where canals ran between the skyscrapers on stilts in addition to the roads and bridges. “Right. Right again. The dinghy dock, right there.”

“They’re following us. I need to lose them.” A pair of lights stabbed the turns behind them.

“No. Just get us to that dock.” Roo could feel himself fading again, and jerked himself back awake.

“Roo, that’s not where the
Spitfire
is.”

“I know. We’re not going back to the docks.” He didn’t want to lead them back to the boat, but to something else he had waiting.

They’d stopped.

“We’re here. Come on,” Kit said. She grabbed his shoulder.

“No,” Roo protested. “I’m too heavy.”

He tried to stand but she shoved him back. “
Merde
. You’re not
that
heavy. And you can’t stand.” She slipped under his arm, ducked, and flipped him onto her back. A classic fireman’s carry.