Abe hits the side of Wallace’s head with the butt of his gun. Wallace grunts in pain and stumbles back, and another masked man, this one wearing Richard Nixon, drags him from the frame.
“As you can see…” Abe sighs dramatically. “I’m still training Dr. Murrow how to behave, but I have another hostage. He knows the deal.”
He tips his head toward the camera, and Nixon returns, marching a hunched figure with a black bag covering his head into the frame.
“This is Paco,” Abe says, ripping the bag from the man’s head. “Paco, say hello to the nice people back home.”
Time has chiseled deep grooves alongside the man’s mouth and into his forehead. His swarthy skin sags around his jaw, and his once-dark hair is more salt than pepper. In his eyes, when he glances up at the camera, there’s fear and a solemn resignation.
“I said,” Abe emphasizes, “say hello to the people back home, Paco.”
There is fear and a solemn resignation in Paco’s eyes when he glances up at the camera, but he remains silent.
Abe leans down and loud-whispers, “You’re making me look bad, buddy.”
“Hello,” Paco says, the English sounding forced and foreign on his lips.
“Paco here,” Abe says, “is what I like to call disposable. Wrong time, wrong place. I don’t need him. I only need Dr. Murrow, but fret not! Paco does serve a purpose.”
Abe pulls a .357 magnum from the waistband of his camouflage pants and presses it to Paco’s temple. The older man immediately starts whimpering, eyes closed. He lifts his plastic-cuffed wrists and presses his palms together in prayer. I catch the odd “dios” and “ave maría” strung into a rosary of fear and pleading.
Abe’s voice goes wooden, his eyes like marble. “Paco’s going to demonstrate that I mean business.”
He pulls the trigger without further warning, the bullet firing into Paco’s temple in a spray of blood and violence. Paco drops like a domino, setting a billion things inside me into motion.
“Jesus!” Kimba drops the iPad onto my desk like the blood and gray matter could have splashed on her clothes. It lands facedown, and I steady my hands to turn it back over so we can keep watching.
“See?” Abe’s pleasant tone is back, his mask stained with Paco’s blood. “Business. I don’t do idle threats, Mr. Vale.”
“Who’s Mr. Vale?” Kimba asks, her voice and hands trembling.
“CEO of CamTech,” Jin Lei answers from the door. “He’s on the line.”
I don’t reply but hold up a staying finger to Jin Lei so I can watch the rest of this lunatic’s macabre show.
“You’re already responsible for the death of one innocent person,” Abe says and turns to Nixon. “Bring her in.”
Kimba and I stare at one another in a silence so tense, the muscles in my neck and back scream, braced for what will happen next.
The man in the Nixon mask guides a woman forward wearing a T-shirt, jeans, and a black bag over her head. Abe pulls her to stand directly in front of him.
“Now this second hostage, though as disposable and useless to me as good old Paco…” He pauses and crosses himself with the gun. “Rest in peace, Paco.”
He chuckles maniacally.
“Where was I? Oh, yes. My other hostage. She’s probably worth more to some of you than dear Paco. I hear she’s a pretty big deal back home. Allow me to introduce the next person who dies if I don’t get my vaccine in forty-eight hours.”
He rips the bag from the woman’s head, and a river of inky hair tumbles around her shoulders. Abe presses his gun to her temple, and everything slows down. The world comes to a complete stop, and the only thing still in motion is the blood galloping through my veins like wild horses, like mustangs. Even with the riot of my emotions, an icy preternatural calm falls over me. In this moment, I know two things like I know my own name.
The first is that I can no longer call what I feel for Lennix obsession, mere attraction, or anything less than what it is. I’m absolutely, irrevocably in love with her. I know this because it feels as though Abe is holding that gun to my head. I know that if her life is over, in every way that counts, so is mine. We are inextricably joined at the heart, even separated by thousands of miles. I wish I’d been clear-eyed enough, brave enough to tell her before she left. I wish standing there in the grip of this lunatic, she already had the assurance of those words—the certainty that I love her this deeply and will not stop fighting, searching until she’s safe. Until she’s home.
The second thing I know with absolute certainty is that I will kill this masked man myself. Personally.
The only sound I hear is my heart beating a lethal rhythm.
Die. Die. Die. Die.
Black and purple bruises ring Lennix’s throat like someone has tried to choke her. She glances at the dead man on the floor and gasps, closing her eyes for just a moment.
“Look into the camera, pretty lady,” Abe says, his voice pleasant yet as hard and cold and unhinged as an ice floe. “Now tell them your name.”
When she doesn’t speak, he bunches her hair in his fist and jerks, forcing her to look into the camera. In one glance, those eyes transport me back to Antarctica, a horizon foretelling storms ahead. Lennix’s water-sky eyes, her warring eyes, tell me she’s not done yet.
He presses the gun’s barrel deeper into her temple until she winces. She draws a deep breath and raises her hands, bound at the wrists by plastic cuffs, to push stray stands of hair from her face. The compass bracelet I gave her glints in the light.
It’s because we found our way back to each other.
My words from the night I gave her the bracelet haunt me. Did we find each other again only to have our second chance ripped away? I should have told her then that I loved her. I should have smothered her with it—should have kept her with me and ordered her not to go. That would not have gone over well, but my gut sensed danger. Even when Wallace assured me it was safe. Even though she’s done several trips and nothing’s gone wrong, I should have stopped her.
I failed.
“I said, tell them your name.” Abe grounds the harsh words up and spits them into her ear.
Lennix’s chin tilts in that defiant way I’ve seen since the day we met, and I silently beg her to comply, to cooperate until I can get there. Until I can find her and kill this son of a bitch for her.
“My name is Lennix Moon Hunter.”
“And she—” Abe starts.
“Lennix Moon Hunter, Yavapai-Apache Nation,” she says, her voice fierce, her eyes lit for battle. “The last warriors to surrender. And I am the girl who chases stars.”
She turns her head to meet bright-blue eyes through the slits of the mask, every line of her body a declaration of war. My heart constricts with fear for her. She’s vulnerable in every way possible. He could shoot her right now. He could rape her. He could cut off her head. He could take her away from me forever, and if she’s not frightened, I’m terrified enough for both of us.
A long moment stretches between them, and it’s not clear who is conquered and who is the conqueror, but I know who holds the gun.
“You have forty-eight hours,” Abe repeats, holding her eyes a second longer before looking directly into the camera for his final words. “And then she dies.”