The Armada Legacy (36 page)

Ben slipped Brooke’s photo back in his wallet with a shaking hand. Now he knew for sure. He’d found her, but he’d been too late. Forty-eight hours too late.

Instantly he started blaming himself. Thinking of how he’d wasted time over Cabeza in Montefrio, how he’d needlessly delayed in Chachapoyas, how he could have saved time by waiting for the storm to end and taking the floatplane from the Potro boat station.

‘Where did she go?’ Nico asked the servants. ‘Where’d your boss go after her?’

Shrugs, blank expressions. ‘Out there,’ said one of the cooks, waving at the dark window.

Nico looked at Ben. ‘How in hell could she have escaped? These guys are more tooled up than the Peruvian army.’

‘I found a smashed perfume bottle in the room where they were keeping her. That stuff’s highly flammable.’

‘You mean she set the place alight
herself?
’

‘That would be just like her.’

‘Holy shit.’ Nico shook his head. ‘Hate to say it, man, but if she’s out there all alone in that jungle, she doesn’t stand a chance.’

‘She wouldn’t have escaped without some kind of plan in mind,’ Ben said, thinking hard.

‘Need to be one hell of a smart plan if she wants to get away from Ramon Serrato and his whole hunting party. It’s been forty-eight hours. If he finds her, man, you know what he’s gonna do. She’s worse than dead.’

Ben felt his resolve tighten like a fist. ‘Not if I find her first,’ he said.

Chapter Forty-Seven

Forty-eight hours earlier

‘Put on,’ Hatchet Face said again, holding up the negligee. ‘Señor Serrato not wait long. He get
mucho enfadado
.’ She shook her head in warning.

Brooke stared at the flimsy garment and at the suspenders and stockings the woman had brought her to wear. She closed her eyes. Heaved a deep, shaky sigh.
This is it
, she thought.
This is the moment
.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll put them on.’

Hatchet Face seemed strangely contented as she returned into the living area to wait as Brooke changed. Brooke shut the bedroom door. Took a couple more deep breaths and then moved quickly. She slipped a CD into the stereo system and turned the volume up high. To the strains of Brahms she tore the drapes of mosquito netting from the bed and grabbed the training shoes from underneath, as well as the bag containing the comfortable clothes Consuela had provided for her. She emptied out the clothing, stripped off her white cotton dress and pulled on the tracksuit bottoms and T-shirt, then quickly laced up the shoes.

Hatchet Face rapped on the door. ‘You hurry,’ came her stern voice from outside.

‘Don’t come in,’ Brooke yelled. ‘I’ll be there in a minute, okay?’

She ran into the bathroom. Snatched two towels from the rail and dampened one of them with water. She stuffed the dry one into the clothes bag, along with a tub of talcum powder, the mineral water bottle that she’d refilled from the tap and the packet of cold meats left over from dinner that she’d hidden in the shower cubicle. She grabbed a tall can of hairspray and jammed it into her pocket, then picked up all the perfume bottles and carried them into the bedroom with the damp towel over her shoulder.

Brooke had been aware from the start that if she wanted to escape from this place she wouldn’t get very far without money, and she didn’t have a penny. But Serrato’s jewels were worth countless thousands. If she could trade them for a ride or a night’s shelter, even a phone call to the outside world for help, that’d be good enough for her. Chucking all of the perfume bottles on the bed she grabbed the jewellery from the bedside table. She slipped the bracelet over her wrist and put on the heavy necklace underneath her T-shirt.

She was as ready as she’d ever be. She was breathing hard with tension. What would Ben have said in a moment like this?

‘Fuck it,’ she muttered. Then she picked up one of the Chanel bottles and dashed it as hard as she could against the solid wooden bedpost. It shattered, broken glass and perfume showering everywhere. She grabbed another, and another, smashing them into pieces.

Suddenly the whole room was filled with the choking reek of perfume. The carpet was saturated with the stuff. Any second now, Hatchet Face would be sure to smell it and come storming in to see what was happening. Seconds counted.

Brooke retrieved the stolen cigarette lighter from its hiding place under the mattress. She snatched up the negligee. ‘Here’s what I think of your pervy outfit, Ramon,’ she said as she offered the flame up to the material. It caught light instantly. She threw the burning garment down onto the perfume-saturated carpet.

The fire leaped up instantly and aggressively with a breathy
whumph
. Suddenly everything was ablaze – the floor, the bedclothes, the four-poster’s drapes, its canopy. Even sooner than Brooke had expected there was a wall of fire licking its way hungrily to the ceiling and spreading outwards to engulf the whole room. Smoke alarms began to screech.

Brooke leaped back from the fierce heat, grabbed the bulging clothes bag and sprinted for the bathroom door shouting ‘
Fuego! Fuego!
’

The door flew open. Hatchet Face gaped in bewildered horror at the flames and opened her mouth to yell something. Before she could get the words out, Brooke had thrown all her strength and momentum into a punch that sent the woman crashing down on her back. Hatchet Face looked pretty strong and tough, and Brooke had no desire to get into a blow-for-blow fight with her, not even after the few lessons in unarmed combat she’d had with Jeff Dekker at Le Val. A swift kick to the head knocked her out cold.

‘Bitch,’ Brooke muttered, then ran into the living area.

Within instants there were two, three, four guards storming into the room. By then, Brooke had already dived out of sight and was hiding behind the sofa nearest the door, clamping her damp towel over her nose and mouth as the smoke began to gather thickly. Alarms were going off all down the corridor now. The men balked at the intensity of the spreading inferno. One of them was carrying a tall extinguisher and aimed the nozzle at the flames. He had to retreat quickly as a surge in the blaze threatened to swallow him.

In the panic of the moment nobody seemed to have thought about Brooke or spotted where she was crouching. She knew she couldn’t stay there long. The heat from the blaze was becoming unbearable. Worse, any second now Serrato would come running down here in person. She had no intention of being around when he turned up.

The men were too busy spraying extinguishers at the flames to notice her slip out of the burning room. She held her breath as she darted away down the corridor, turning off every light switch she came to in the hope that semi-darkness could cover her escape. She ducked into a room as several guards came sprinting by, one of them yelling into a radio over the screech of the fire alarms.

Then it was a clear run to the stairs. Nobody had seen her. The layout of the house was so familiar now that she knew almost exactly how many paces it was to the entrance – and that number was diminishing fast as she ran.
Keep moving. Keep moving. You’re going to make it.

Fresh, cool air on her face as she bolted through the main doorway, under the arch and out into the cream-coloured portico that ran alongside the house. Free!

But she still had a long way to go. She kept to the shadows. Running men passed her, too intent on the emergency to look around them. She moved away from the house, leaving behind the din of alarms and yelling voices. The stink of burning was strong in the air. Smoke was pouring from her barred windows, as well as from the windows above and either side – but unless it was so out of control that it destroyed the whole building, the extinguishers would soon tame it. She couldn’t count on her diversion working for long.

Running low, she passed the walled yard where Consuela and her daughter had been executed. Up ahead was the high side of the vehicle hangar. It seemed unattended as she approached – then suddenly a guard stepped out of nowhere and confronted her with a look of surprise that quickly turned to one of suspicion.

‘You wouldn’t turn me in, would you?’ Brooke said to him with a coy smile. ‘Look what you’ll get if you keep your mouth shut.’ She tugged the precious necklace out from the collar of her T-shirt and held it out for him to see. He stared at it, mesmerised, a glow of idiot greed dawning across his face.

‘On second thoughts, you’re not worth it,’ she said. She drew the can of hairspray from her pocket and gave him a good sustained burst of it right in the eyes.

He screamed and clapped his hands over his face, dropping his rifle. Brooke rammed a knee into his groin, grabbed him by the ears as he doubled over and wrenched him headfirst into the side wall of the hangar. She dragged his unconscious bulk into the shadows and picked up his fallen rifle. It didn’t look much different from the semi-automatic weapon she’d become familiar with on the firing range at Le Val. She racked the bolt and ran towards the rows of vehicles.

Guile wasn’t going to get her through those front gates, but something robust and heavy moving at speed might do the trick. She jumped up into the cab of the nearest four-wheel drive truck. The keys were in the ignition. She dumped the rifle on the passenger seat, fired up the engine and lights and hit the gas.

The truck went skidding out of the building with a roar. Brooke floored the pedal and went speeding right through the heart of the compound. Running groups of men scattered in her headlights. Her escape suddenly wasn’t such a secret any more.

Brooke saw the tall iron gates approach in her lights and braced herself for the collision. As she roared towards them at full throttle, four guards emerged from the gatehouse, took one look at the truck and aimed their rifles. Shots punctured the night air. The windscreen shattered. Brooke grabbed the rifle from the passenger seat and poked the barrel one-handed through the broken glass as she drove. A squeeze of the trigger; a massive eruption of noise as the thing let loose half its magazine. Bullets sparked off the iron gates. The guards dived for cover and scurried away just in time to avoid being pulverised by the truck’s impact.

The truck crashed into the gates. The huge impact threw Brooke forward against the wheel. Bits of masonry and steel bars and pieces of truck flew everywhere. The windscreen disappeared completely. She was dead.

But she wasn’t dead, she was through! The truck surged onwards, rolling over wreckage and debris in a massive cloud of dust. Suddenly she could see the road ahead in the yellow glow of her remaining headlight. Whooping with glee, she floored the throttle again and sawed at the wheel as the bouncing, careering truck sped away from the compound.

Back at the house, Ramon Serrato came tearing down from the top floor to find his men in chaos. He grabbed a fire extinguisher from the nearest one and ran wildly into Brooke’s room, spraying foam in all directions at the flames.

‘Where is she?’ he shouted, his face blackened with smoke, eyes streaming. ‘Where is she?’ Nobody seemed to know. Blank looks all round, even from Vertíz and Bracca.

Over the din of the alarms came the rattle of rifle fire from across the compound. Serrato beat back the last of the flames licking around one of the living area windows, hurled the empty fire extinguisher to the floor and peered out into the night to see the truck’s red taillights disappearing down the road towards the jungle.

Chapter Forty-Eight

In her haste to get away, Brooke hadn’t checked the fuel level in the truck. As she headed down the road as fast as the heavy vehicle would take her, wind howling through the smashed windscreen, she cast a worried eye on the diesel gauge. It was less than a quarter full. How far could she get on that?

But her worst problem wasn’t running out of diesel. It was not being able to see where the hell she was going. The collision with the gates had torn away her nearside headlight and reduced the other to a candle-glow pointing cock-eyed at the verge. The bonnet was now a twisted piece of scrap that obscured her already compromised visibility with every bounce of the suspension on the badly rutted surface. The road snaked into the trees, leading Christ knew where. All she could do was keep it going as fast as possible and pray that the next violent crash over a pothole wouldn’t tear her wheels off.

She let out a cry as the tyres lost traction on a bend and the truck nearly went crunching into a giant tree. Somehow she managed to get it back under control. Slowing down was the only sane option, but she didn’t dare slacken the pressure on the accelerator. Tree trunks flashed by her side windows; overhanging branches slapped the twisted bodywork. Brooke just kept driving on and on. This road had to lead somewhere. Somewhere with people, telephones, police …

Then suddenly, far sooner than she’d expected, there they were: the lights she’d been dreading to see in the rear-view mirror, growing quickly larger and more dazzling. Four; six; ten of them, or even more: a whole convoy of vehicles in chase. In their faster Jeeps, with their knowledge of the road, they would soon catch up with her.

If Serrato got hold of her now …

Brooke’s fears dissolved into panic as the road ahead suddenly went totally dark. Her remaining headlight had stopped working.

She stamped on the brakes. The wheels locked up and the truck tilted sideways in a heartstopping series of violent bumps as it veered off the road. A ripping, shearing impact tore the steering wheel out of her hands. She felt the nose of the truck dip alarmingly downwards. Something hit the underside with a terrible crash. She was thrown forwards against the dashboard. Even blind, she could tell that she was falling. Falling, trapped inside a three-ton metal cage.

The nightmare descent seemed to go on forever. Impact after impact shook the truck like a bean can and dashed her this way and that inside. Down and down, until it seemed to her as if she’d fallen through to the centre of the Earth.

Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the truck’s careering path down the slope was halted in an explosion of water that sent a wave crashing though the destroyed screen to fill the whole cab.