more gang rapes. He hadn’t wanted to strip her of her individuality, her humanity, as was being done in a coldly methodical way to the other cherries all around her. Culled out of the herd, she had been isolated. She had seen only him. He’d trained her to crawl on her knees to him, to lick his dirty feet clean, to grovel when she wanted food. Oddly enough, it was he who washed her every day, as tenderly as a parent bathes his infant, caressing her as he cleaned every gentle mound and shadowed dell of her body.

When she had completed the first stage of her training, he had begun to hurt her, first in small, subtle ways. Then the bruising began. He seemed to love looking at the bruises even more than causing them, as if she were a canvas and he, the artist, periodically standing back to admire—or, sometimes, adjust—his art. Pain as art, that defined the Arian Xhafa she knew. He had spent hours on end with her, as if she were to be his masterpiece.

And then he had marked her—branded her, more like it. He used a stiletto reserved for the occasion, whose tip he heated in the flame from a bronze brazier surmounted with strange bas-relief sculptures until it glowed cherry red. He had her lie flat on her stomach on the thin pallet he provided for her to sleep on. She wasn’t strapped down or bound in any way; he had trained her too well. Straddling her, he’d applied the glowing tip of the blade. One long wound a night for five nights. Five parallel lines, running red, to prove that she belonged to him.

Very few girls received this privilege, he’d told her. Less than a handful. She was among the elite of his empire, a concubine. She would never be sold; she was his forever.

“Count yourself lucky, Edon,” he had said the night it was over. “You’re one of the few. You’re my special little cherry.”

TWENTY-NINE

“BEHIND US,” Annika’s driver said. “And the exit’s coming up.”

“Right.” Annika smiled. “Let’s go.”

Jack turned around and stared out the blacked-out rear window, but he could see nothing. “Who’s following us?”

“Xhafa’s death squad.”

The car veered into the right lane and, a quarter mile later, took the exit ramp off the highway. The driver turned left, went beneath the highway’s overpass, and a half mile later turned right. Almost immediately, they were in a densely forested area.

“One mile to the bend,” the driver said.

“Slow down,” Annika said. “We don’t want them to lose us.”

Alli shivered. “And you want them to follow us?”

Annika turned to her, her expression wolfish. “How d’you think we’re going to find Xhafa?”

* * *

“WHERE THE hell are they going?” Asu said to no one in particular. “This is dead vacant wilderness.”

“Don’t be dense,” Yassin said. “Where better to have a safehouse?”

Baltasar fitted a tear-gas grenade to the adapter at the end of his rifle. “It doesn’t matter; we’re thirty seconds from taking them.”

Asu was using the car’s headlights to see where they were headed. “There’s a bend in the road coming up,” he announced. “The road dips down and then it’s straight as an arrow.”

“Perfect.” Baltasar popped the hatch over his head. “As soon as it straightens out come up behind the car to within fifteen feet. Keep a steady pace while I deliver the payload. Yassin, you’ll pick them off as they exit the car. The darts will put them to sleep so get all of them, including Annika Dementieva. Then, when they’re down, you can put a bullet in the back of the heads of the other three.”

The car ahead entered the bend in the road. As it dipped into the swale, Asu momentarily lost sight of it. Baltasar stood up so that his head and upper torso were above the vehicle’s roofline. Fitting night goggles over his eyes, he looked out at the landscape ahead. He saw no sign of lights, front or rear, and he adjusted the goggles. Several moments later, he saw the headlights, then the car. Immediately thereafter, Asu accelerated, and the vehicle shot ahead.

Baltasar counted the seconds as Asu closed the gap. He was an excellent driver; Baltasar had absolute confidence in his abilities. Nevertheless, something was bothering him. From his elevated position, he should have been able to pick up the headlights even while the car was at the bottom of the swale.

Now they were on the straightaway. The acceleration leveled out, steadied, and, bracing his elbows against the rooftop, he took aim at the rear window of the car. He counted slowly to three, exhaled, and squeezed the trigger.

The tear-gas grenade smashed through the glass and detonated. Now it was only a matter of waiting until the driver lost consciousness. The car would begin to weave, then veer off the road as the driver lost control. Perhaps it would come to rest in a ditch or sideswipe a tree. In any event, Yassin’s turn would come. It was a beautiful thing, Baltasar thought, when everything proceeded according to plan.

He waited, but the car did not weave. It slowed. Asu put on the brakes and the military vehicle paced the car. Baltasar frowned. He wondered whether the driver, in his semiconscious state, had the presence of mind to step on the brake. But the moments of losing the headlights still bothered him, and he couldn’t rid himself of the nagging notion that something was wrong.

The next moment, the car stopped. Baltasar unscrewed the grenade launcher and changed magazines to regular rounds. All the time he kept his eyes glued to the car.

“Let’s go! What are we waiting for?”

He heard Yassin’s whisper from just inside the hatch. Yassin was right; they should be on the ground now, approaching the car. But something stayed Baltasar’s hand.

He ducked back down and said to Yassin, “Change in plan. Take one of the AK-50s and go over to the car. Asu will cover you with the thirty caliber.”

Asu popped his head out of the open hatch. He flipped the safety off the forward machine gun, then signaled that he was ready.

Yassin climbed out of the hatch and dropped to the ground. He circled the car warily, crouched down, the AK-50 at the ready. It was loaded with heavy, maximum-grain ammunition. Except for the chirrupping of insects, there was absolute silence. No traffic, and whatever wind there had been had died.

Yassin had made half a circuit around the car without seeing any sign of life. Then, a single shot caused him to spin around. Asu lay sprawled across the roof, his head a bloody pulp.

Yassin, instantly calculating the direction of the shot from the way Asu’s body lay, opened fire with the assault rifle while darting behind the protection of the car.

A second shot, coming from directly behind him, pitched him forward. He struck the rear fender of the car, then slid off onto the ground. He did not move. His blood became a black pool around him.

At once, the military vehicle rumbled into life, swinging around to face the spot where the second shot had come from. A thin whine was followed by a long gout of flame that penetrated the first line of pine trees with a blast of searing heat. First, the flames set the carpet of fallen needles alight, but soon enough the trees themselves were engulfed in flame and dense, black, chemical smoke.

* * *

FOR WHAT seemed like several moments after that, nothing happened. Then a figure, black and peeling beneath a hellish coat of flames, rushed from the smoking trees. Halfway to the military vehicle, it jerked upright, as if on a leash. Then it collapsed onto its knees, slowly folding over onto itself, forming at length a pyramid of crisped flesh and cracking bones.

The vehicle came to a halt, the rear battle slits snapped open, and a hail of machine gun fire bit into the trees on the other side of the road. In that moment, Annika ran from cover near the smoldering trees, primed a grenade, and slammed it between the front wheels. She was almost back inside the tree line when the blast blew the near- side wheels off and a hole appeared in the vehicle’s armor plate, into which the stinking smoke from the blast was drawn as if down an open flue.

Seeing this, Jack broke cover, sprinted across the road, and leapt into the back of the vehicle, which was stalled and hotter than an oven. As the top hatch popped open and Baltasar emerged, eyes streaming, Jack grabbed him and hauled him bodily out of the vehicle, throwing him down onto the road, where Annika was

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