driver's seat for the extra ammunition she had left there. Gone.
'Trouble in paradise,' Ben said, bracing himself on the trunk. 'This damage seems too total and meticulously done to be senseless vandalism.'
'I was thinking the same thing,' Natalie replied, checking her watch. 'Ben, I can make it down to the hospital, but I don't think you can.'
'I don't know. I think — '
'Please. You look as if you're about to fall over. Either wait here with the water or try and make it into town. I told you about Father Francisco. You can find him there. Tell him what's happening, and what happened to you. He'll take care of you. I'm sure of it. Maybe he'll even have access to a car to drive you down to the hospital.'
'But — '
'Ben, please. Luis is risking everything to help us. I need to get down there. It's mostly downhill, and I can take the road. I'm a runner. I can do this.'
'O-okay.'
'Keep the water, I won't need it.'
'Don't you forget to come and get me,' he said.
'Okay, I'll add it to my to-do list: Get Ben. See you soon, my friend. Promise. Give my best to Father Francisco.'
She kissed him on the cheek, whirled, and for the first time since the fire in Dorchester, Massachusetts, five thousand miles and several lifetimes away, she ran.
In her biggest challenges on the track, Natalie never pushed her body any harder than over the next twenty minutes. She was running on a single, damaged lung, carrying a backpack containing Vargas's heavy pistol, duct tape, rope, and a Swiss Army knife. The downhill slope put a heavy strain on her ankles and knees as well as on her balance. The more winded she got, the more out of control her balance became. Twice she stumbled, once she fell, scraping skin off her palms. Her chest was on fire. At no time could she get in enough air. She slowed, then slowed some more. Still, she drove herself. Finally, unable to get a decent breath, she stopped, clinging to a tree trunk, gasping. Thirty seconds and she was off again, lurching down the steep grade like a drunk.
After one more brief stop, fighting for air and trying to ignore the explosive pounding of her heart, Natalie found herself on level ground. A long, right bend in the road, and she was in front of the same hospital entrance where, just a day before, Ben had been shoved out to meet what seemed a certain death. Hands on knees, she allowed her breathing to deepen until finally, one sweet breath fought its way to the depths of her lung.
Glancing around, she withdrew the gun from her backpack and began, warily, to circle the residence quarters, retracing roughly the route she had used to escape after her last visit. She stayed in the trees and gave the far end of the wing a wide berth.
As she neared the broad patio and the swimming pool, she could tell almost instantly that Luis had succeeded in at least one phase of his mission. Three men were around the pool, all of them in swimsuits, all of them giggling. On the tables near them were bowls of some sort of stew.
'…So then she brings the tray out, filled with like a ham and pork sampler, trips, and flips the whole frigging thing onto the rabbi's lap.'
The teller of the tale, a redhead in his late twenties, burst into uncontrollable laughter at his own humor, sloshing his drink onto his lap and making no attempt to blot it up.
The flight crew, Natalie quickly deduced.
One of the men — more mature-looking than the other two, and probably the captain — was on his hands and knees, violently vomiting into a low bush, while simultaneously continuing to laugh.
'I don't feel so good,' the third man kept saying over and over again. 'I don't feel so good…'
There was no way Natalie could make it to the storage shed and the passage to the hospital without being seen by the trio. She lowered her backpack to the ground, then leveled her long-barreled revolver at the redhead.
'Okay, on your bellies,' she snapped. 'All of you.'
The men, including the captain, glanced up at her, pointed, and howled. Natalie gave brief consideration to simply shooting each one of them in the leg, but knew she wasn't capable of it unless there were no other options. Instead, she moved quickly to the redhead and whipped him across the back of the head with the muzzle, instantly opening an inch-and-a-half gash. The man cried out as he fell, facedown, onto the concrete, but then he began laughing again, mumbling, 'Jeez, why'd you do that?'
Natalie stared from one of the men to the others, wondering what her next move should be. Did they have weapons in their rooms? How long could she count on Tokima's preparation lasting? There was no way Luis could control the amount of drug they each ingested. Were they all going to die from it?
While she stood contemplating, the man who wasn't feeling well rolled from his chaise and retched into the pool. Natalie had decided it was safe to leave them where they were when a woman wearing olive military fatigues burst from the shed, her semiautomatic machine gun ready. She was five feet at the most, with a pleasant, russet face and broad hips. Quickly, she took in the scene.
'You are Natalie?' she asked in coarse Portuguese.
'Rosa?'
Luis's girlfriend smiled and nodded.
'We must tie them up,' she said, gesturing toward the rope and tape. 'Luis says everyone gets tied up.'
The two of them, with no fear of resistance from the men, quickly bound their ankles and taped their wrists behind their backs. The patio and pool were now awash with whatever had been inside their stomachs.
The women wiped their hands on elegant beach towels, and hurried to the shed and down into the tunnel. In the dining room they found the kitchen help in one corner, bound and gagged in a way similar to the flight crew. Trussed up not far from the Brazilians, her glare threatening to burn a hole in Natalie's chest, was a narrow waisted white woman with short, dirty blond hair and a barbed-wire tattoo around her arm. Natalie gestured toward her, silently asking who she was, but Rosa could only shrug.
it could be worse, Natalie wanted to say to the furious woman. You could have eaten lunch.
'Do you know where Luis is?' Natalie asked as they moved cautiously, guns drawn, from the dining room and past the lounge where she had hidden behind the couch so close to Santoro and Barbosa.
'He has been here,' Rosa whispered, risking a peek around the doorway of the first recovery room and then gesturing inside.
Natalie flattened against the wall across from Rosa and looked inside the room. There on the floor, wide-eyed and trussed up in a manner that would have challenged Houdini, were a husky man and a silver-haired woman in scrubs. They were in obvious distress, due in large measure to the vomiting they were doing through their noses and around the duct tape pasted across their mouths. On the hospital bed beside them, blissfully unconscious and breathing with the help of a state-of-the-art ventilator, was a pretty, red-haired woman — Sandy.
'I think we should leave her be like this for now,' Natalie said. 'Do you agree?'
Rosa nodded and started down the hallway. Natalie, anxious to get clear of the fetid air in the room, made some minor adjustments on the ventilator, and followed. Three from the kitchen, three from the plane, the woman who was probably Vincent's girlfriend, and the two medical people — nine accounted for, but none of them a major source of danger. Those people were still out there someplace. Natalie caught up with Rosa by the main entrance. The corridor leading down to Dr. Donald Cho's macabre treatment room was empty. The fact that the master of virtual reality and psychopharmacology had not been brought in for this case spoke frighteningly of Sandy's fate. There would be no need for a DVD brainwashing her into believing a bogus reason for her surgery.
Rosa stood beside the heavy glass double doors, put a finger to her lips, and motioned outside. There, facedown on the ground, was a red-skinned man in fatigues similar to Rosa's. There was no blood about, and no obvious wound, but if he wasn't dead, he was doing a praiseworthy imitation.
'Salazar Bevelaqua,' Rosa whispered. 'He beats his wife. Luis never liked him.'
'You don't have to remind me to stay on Luis's good side,' Natalie replied.
The odds were growing shorter. As near as Natalie could count, it was Rosa and she, plus Luis and one ally of his. Four. Against them were Santoro, Barbosa, and two remaining security men from the plane. Suddenly, the still afternoon air was pierced by volleys of gunfire. A man screamed out in pain. Then, just as abruptly as it had begun, the gun battle ended. From off to the right, they heard moaning, and a man swearing over and over again in English.
