The Innocent: A Vanessa Michael Munroe Novel (25 page)

“Have you ever considered that it’s not always wrong to kill?” he said. “Maybe some people need to be killed, maybe by taking them out you break the cycle of pain and suffering.”

She looked toward him and said, “I get a fucking euphoric rush when I kill, Miles! What makes me any different from Bundy and Gacy and Dahmer or, for that matter, Pieter Willem?”

Bradford was silent for a moment, as if he found it necessary to choose his words carefully, and Munroe knew that he was tiptoeing around the issue of Pieter Willem, her first kill, the mercenary psychopath who had made her what she was and whom she’d murdered in a mixture of terror and cold-blooded calculation.

“That you care,” he said. “That’s what makes you different. You’re not Willem, you’ll never be Willem, no matter how hard he worked to form you after himself. You can spend the rest of your life running from his ghost, afraid of becoming what you hated most in
him, tormented by what you’re capable of, or you can see your skills for what they are and use them without destroying yourself from the inside out.”

“You’re advocating vigilante justice,” she said. Not a question or an accusation, merely a statement.

“Maybe I am,” he said. “I’ve seen enough evil in this world to know that sometimes taking justice into your own hands is the only way. Just because killing comes easily to you doesn’t make you evil, just because instinct kicks in doesn’t mean you are a serial killer. You are a soldier at war. And in war, you do what you’ve got to do.” He paused, and then softly, he said, “You have a gift, Michael, and you have a heart, let them serve you.”

Silence filled the room, and after a trice, she met his eyes. In them was a well of understanding and acceptance so deep it felt as if she could fall into it and drown happy. Leaned in, breath to breath and eye to eye, they remained frozen in the moment until the trance was broken by a bleep on the desk.

Without moving, Bradford said, “It’s probably Logan.”

“Were you waiting on something?” she asked.

“After last night, he’s checking in with me twice a day,” he said.

From the bed, Munroe reached to the floor and picked up the clothes she’d shed before climbing in. “I need to find Gideon and get him sorted out before he wrecks everything,” she said, “and the timing absolutely sucks. I’ve got to get back to the Ranch—losing a day is going to cost.”

“Maybe not by much,” Bradford said. He stood and leaned over the computer, keyed in several commands, and then as the screen changed, he turned the map in her direction. In answer to her puzzled expression he grinned. “Courtesy of Logan,” he said. “It’s in the sole of Gideon’s shoe.”

“Sneaky, sneaky,” she said, and he shrugged in innocence.

“That will indeed shave a considerable bite off the time cost.”

“I’ve still got stuff coming in from the Havens as well,” he said. “Now that we know where Hannah is, do you want to kill the cameras?”

“Are you still going through the footage?” she said.

“Yeah, it’s all routine stuff. But then, I’m not really sure what I’m looking for. And I don’t understand much of the audio.”

“Has David Law shown up anywhere?”

“Not that I can tell.”

“Let it pool,” she said. “We may not need it, but until we’ve got Hannah out of there, I want as much data coming in as possible. I expect to get another three cameras live tonight, maybe more. Do we have the storage space for it all?”

“Yeah, we’re good,” he said.

She stood and headed toward the bathroom, turned on the hot water, and then returned to the bedroom and checked the clock. Time was moving fast.

“I can handle Gideon if you want,” Bradford said.

“I’ve no doubt that you could,” she said. “I wish I could take you up on it, but this one I have to handle myself.”

W
ith Bradford’s guidance, it took less than a half hour to track Gideon down. Munroe trailed him until he stopped for lunch at a park-side café. He took an outside table in the sun, in the warmest weather they’d had since their arrival. She waited only until he was seated and then approached from behind, tapped him on the opposite shoulder, and as his head turned away from her, slid into the chair next to him.

“Hey,” she said.

Gideon flinched, reacting to her presence like a finger to a bee sting.

Prepared for this, she spoke quickly. “I have a story to tell you,” she said. “All I ask is that you sit and listen, and after you’ve heard it, then you decide if I’m the bad guy here, or if maybe, just maybe, I can help you get what you want.”

“You have no idea what I want,” he said. His tone was spiteful, but his shoulders relaxed and his hands lost some of their tension.

“Let me talk, and then you be the judge.”

Gideon made no reply. He would listen, couldn’t help but listen, because even if he’d never admit it, he wanted to know what she knew.

Munroe shifted forward, and with her eyes searching and her face not far from his, said, “Once upon a time there was a little girl whose
mother and father were so intent on serving the Lord, they forgot to be parents to their unexpected daughter.”

Munroe paused a beat. “For the sake of simplicity, let’s say that the girl was me, and that since my parents were so busy doing whatever they did, they sent me away, putting me on my own at the age of thirteen.

“They thought I was going to school and living with close friends in a nearby big city,” she said, “and I did for a while, but they didn’t check, and what did they care? I was fourteen when I walked away. I found full-time work as an interpreter for the friendly local gunrunner, and he moved me to his house. Those were good times, running the bush in Central Africa. Backward as it sounds, I was happy. There was challenge, and focus, and a lot of laughter when the jobs were done.

“He was my friend,” she said. “He was eleven years older than I was, and yet somehow we got each other. It was a symbiotic relationship—he needed me, I needed him, and I thought I’d found a home. That is, until a year and a half later, when a pair of mercs joined our team, and life became a garish nightmare.”

Munroe waited for Gideon’s reaction. Subconsciously mirroring, he leaned in to listen, and with this confirmation from his body language, she continued.

“One of the mercs was a little wiry guy from South Africa,” she said. “Charming. Smooth. Personable. Smart, but evil. On the sly he was abhorrently ruthless, the kind of guy who secretly tortured puppies as a child.

“He singled me out for his sadism, and every day, no matter what else happened, there was one thing I could be guaranteed to experience—me, flat on my back with his knife to my throat while he raped me. He taught me to fight,” she said. “It was more of a challenge for him that way, you see? First it was weaponless, and then as I got faster, smarter, dirtier, he brought in the knives. It was always hand to hand. Up close. Personal. He fought for the thrill, I fought to kill him. And the better I got, the harder he came at me. The sex was the icing on the cake for him, what got him off was making me bleed.

“He threatened to kill my family if I tried to get away,” she said, “and although I wasn’t close to them, they didn’t deserve what he would do—not for something that had nothing to do with them—so I was trapped in his presence with no one to protect me, and the only thing I could do was learn fast, learn well, and fight back. I want to show you something.”

Munroe stood, and fully aware of those around, lifted her shirt high enough for her torso to show, high enough for Gideon to catch a glimpse of the slivers that crossed her body.

His eyes betrayed the shock.

“His mementos,” she said, and then slyly, “there are more, but there’s no point in stripping down here and showing them off.”

Having made her point, she returned to her seat. “For two years, there was no safe place,” she said. “When we were camped or back at base, and I kept to the jungle, he would track me. I would stay around others, he would wait. He almost killed me on a few occasions, but in my mind, I died five hundred nights.”

“How did it end?” Gideon asked.

“I killed him,” she said. “In his moment of weakness I followed him into the jungle. I took him down with a tranquilizer gun, and when his eyes lulled in their sockets, I stood over him and slit his throat. I was seventeen.”

Munroe’s speech had trailed into monotone, and she waited for the words to sink in.

Gideon stretched back and let out a low whistle. “Wow,” he said.

He was silent for a long while, and although Munroe could only guess at what was going on inside his head, it would have been clear to anyone who looked at him that Gideon was struggling with something.

Finally, his eyes cut back to hers. “That’s completely fucked up,” he said. She ignored his words for the tone, which carried in it the seeds of change that she’d been working toward. The door had been opened, she’d proven that she was capable of giving him what he wanted, and this was the groundwork for getting what she wanted in turn.

“Is that what got you into this line of work?” he asked.

“Partly,” she replied. “I came to the States after that. Put myself through school, got a degree, tried the corporate route and failed miserably at it. Lots of people wish their bosses dead, but do you have any idea how difficult it is to stay on a normal job when you’ve got the skills and mind-set to kill your evil supervisor and get away with it?” She paused and, with a smirk and an exaggerated roll of her eyes, said, “I don’t do normal very well.”

Gideon let out an involuntary laugh and then, in seriousness, said, “Logan says you’re getting close. He seems pretty hopeful.”

“Yeah, I am,” she said.

“Are you going inside?”

“That’s the plan.”

“I wonder if much has changed,” he said. “They say it has, and that’s great for the younger ones if it’s true, but that doesn’t do much for me, does it?”

“No,” she said. “I imagine it doesn’t do much for you at all,” and between them, there was a moment of understanding.

Munroe shifted toward him, hands folded, elbows on the table. Gideon’s size and short fuse made it easy to dismiss him as a hulking brute, but bully strength wasn’t what got a guy from where Gideon had started to where he was now, heading up a large IT department. His well ran deep, and Munroe needed him to talk himself completely empty, because until he’d thoroughly vented, not one word she’d said would make a damn bit of difference.

So she sat, quiet and waiting.

Gideon stretched out, legs forward, one arm looped over the back of the chair, and he looked toward her in a long and drawn-out silence.

“All most people know is what they see on TV,” he said finally. “And for the most part, TV news stories are nothing other than sensationalism and pandering. Have you ever seen a segment done on The Chosen?”

Munroe shook her head.

“Probably better that way,” he said. “Every last one of them takes our pain and makes a mockery of it for the sake of ratings. You’d think
after getting burned once or twice, me and my friends would figure out that nobody really gives a damn, huh? Every time we think we find a reporter who might actually care, who is willing to tell our story as it truly is, they stab us in the back and turn it into more of the same lurid entertainment. That’s all we are to them, you know? A juicy paycheck. They get paid and we get screwed. Again.

“Don’t get me wrong,” he said. “There was sexual abuse. Lots of it. But that was just one of so many dishes served on the smorgasbord of my childhood. Just one. Nobody reports about the extreme discipline, or being separated from our families, or education deprivation, or the lack of medical care, or the unquestioning obedience, or that we’re thrust out into the world to fend for ourselves after being kept from the world our entire lives. That’s not entertaining enough, so it’s just, ‘Sex, blah, blah, blah. Blah, blah, blah, sex,’ and in the end, we just look like freaks—damaged goods that people can tsk-tsk over before they move on to the rest of the evening’s titillation. Do you have any idea how that translates for me into everyday life?”

He leaned forward and pointed a finger in her direction. “Not only am I forced to pay for the mistakes of my parents,” he said, “not only do I struggle to recapture and put to use the human potential stolen from me, but I have to carry through it in secrecy, as if there was some shame in my past, as if somehow I’m responsible for what was done to me, because nobody, not law enforcement, not academia, and certainly not your all-American Joe, can wrap their heads around what actually happened. Do you have any idea what the typical response is whenever I do give someone a glimpse of my life?”

Gideon paused, as if he waited for her to answer, and Munroe hesitated. Yes, she did know. She knew, because it was the same response she would get if she chose to let down her own guard—hell, it was practically the same response Miles had given the night she had told him the unadulterated truth of her past.

She shook her head again.

“Standard response,” he said. “I swear to God. First thing out of their mouths, is, ‘Wow, it’s shocking you’re so normal.’ What the fuck?
Do I
have
to be damaged for my past to make sense? And what the hell is ‘normal’ anyway, and does white-bread America have dibs on it?” Gideon stopped talking, crossed his arms, and the look on his face said that he regretted saying as much as he had.

Munroe mirrored his silence, hoping that he would continue without the need for her to poke and prod, but when he leaned back with an air of finality and she knew he would go no further without provocation, she said, “Can’t you just let it go? Move on?”

His face darkened, his eyes glared in response, and he was silent a long time while his jaw worked over a toothpick.

She’d used the same line that The Prophet and his Representatives had been using for years.
Even if these things did happen, there’s no point in being bitter. You should forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones
. Kind of galling, considering the insistence upon forgiveness was being made by the people who’d done the hurting and done nothing to make up for it, but then, that was the standard, blame-the-victim, abuser mentality, and to be expected.