He flicked open her pupils, saw they were pinpricks and hastily unstrapped her legs before moving around the platform to untie her hands. He was just about to turn her over when Lauren sprang.
She swept up a handful of the needles Sun had left next to her and rammed them deep into Ruiz’s left eye. Before the scream could form in his throat, she was up, clamping one hand over his mouth and using the heal of her other to drive the tiny spikes deep into his skull. The Panamanian butcher was dead before he hit the concrete floor. “Buenas noches, bastardo.”
Lauren ignored the blood dribbling from the tiny puncture in her leg when she got to her feet. She swayed against a wave of blackness. She had to sit back down for a few minutes to regain her equilibrium. Her temples throbbed. Once she was sure she wouldn’t collapse, she crushed her distaste and stripped Ruiz out of his uniform. The clothes weren’t that oversized on her, with the exception of his jungle boots, which she stuffed with handkerchiefs the pig had kept in his pocket. She cinched his gun belt and secured it around her waist, checking that the old Colt .45 Ruiz carried was loaded and had a round in the chamber.
She took a couple more steadying breaths. Her head was pounding now and no amount of massaging would ease the ache. She was sure she’d get a black eye out of the ordeal and considered it more than a fair trade for what she could have faced.
Opening the cell door a crack, Lauren looked out across the grounds of what she realized was a luxury estate. She smelled the salt of the ocean and heard it crashing someplace in the distance. Apart from the swaying of some palm trees she could see no movement anywhere in the sprawling compound. Near the front of the large house she saw a pair of sedans, but what drew her attention was the garage midway between the garden shed prison and the modern home. One of its doors was open and the front of an SUV peeked out.
With no cover protecting her approach, Lauren began running for the garage as fast as she could. Her feet flopped painfully in the boots while Ruiz’s gamy body odor wafted from the uniform.
She hadn’t yet covered half of the one hundred yards when Mr. Sun walked out of the big house and paused under the porte-cochere. He peered at her as if the distance was too great for his old eyes. The range was much too far for a pistol shot so Lauren smothered the urge to shoot at him. Sun called to someone in the house. The sergeant who seemed distressed by the acupuncturist’s tactics appeared. The distance wasn’t too far for his eyes and he drew his sidearm.
Lauren threw herself to the ground, rolling across the stiff grass as a pair of shots split the air above her. She spun back to her feet and continued charging. The sergeant held his aim for a second—why, Lauren would never know—but it gave her the time she needed to dive again and throw off his aim once more.
Maybe he was letting her go, or at least giving her a chance, in order to make up for his own feelings of distaste about the torturer. Whatever the reason, Lauren reached the corner of the garage before he could fire again. The other Chinese troops running from the house couldn’t target her either. She blew off the garage’s side-door lock with the Colt. The SUV was a green Ford Explorer and, blessing of blessings, Liu trusted his security staff enough to leave the keys in the ignition.
She had the engine running before the first of the Chinese led by the sergeant were a quarter of the way to the garage. The troops carried type-87 assault rifles. The automatic weapons crackled the instant she pulled from the garage. Glass exploded around her and no matter how low she ducked in the seat she felt she presented a huge target. Flooring the big truck so the V-8 growled, she tore across the lawn away from the advancing soldiers, the 4x4 giving excellent traction despite the dew covering the grass.
More rounds hit the back of the truck, shattering the rear windshield, but each second increased the range and decreased the accuracy. Lauren dared sit straighter. She twisted the wheel to get back on the driveway and floored the gas.
She had no idea what kind of force Liu had at the end of the meandering drive, but she was sure they’d been alerted by radio that she was coming. She was also sure that in a few minutes guards would give chase in the sedans.
With the speedometer reading eighty miles per hour, she drove with single-minded purpose, keeping her focus on what was coming up, not what was already behind.
Every few seconds she had to wipe her sweaty hands on the front of her uniform. She saw the car phone clipped to the center console when she reached down to engage the air conditioner. Now wasn’t the time, but having the phone gave her spirits an added lift. She had to tell Mercer that Liu planned to destroy the canal the next day using a ship called Gemini.
After ten miles, she spotted the end of the driveway. A guardhouse constructed of wood sat at the juncture of a main highway and Liu’s access road. A chain-link fence topped with razor wire stretched parallel to the highway and a heavy gate had been closed across the drive. The trio of guards had also maneuvered a pair of matching SUVs to bolster the gate.
Lauren hesitated for a second then mashed the accelerator again. As she approached the gate she fired off her Colt’s magazine, keeping the guards down for the seconds she needed. Ten yards from the barricade, she eased off the gas and gently turned the wheel, mindful that the sport utility wasn’t known to be nimble.
She ducked an instant before the front of the truck smashed into the guardhouse. Wood and cheap furniture exploded around the hurtling vehicle like they had been tossed aside by an enraged bull. The truck barely slowed and continued through the far wall with so much momentum that Lauren had to slam the brakes to make the turn onto the highway. The black marks in the asphalt indicated that the traffic entering or leaving Liu’s compound came from the right, leaving Lauren to believe that was the way to Panama City. A minute later she saw her assumption was correct. A road sign said she was thirty miles from the capital. As soon as she reached a long straightaway she pressed the button on the steering wheel that activated the car phone’s voice-recognition program and she asked it to dial her cell phone number.
She couldn’t wait to hear Mercer’s voice.
The difficulty in snatching Maria Barber began with her anger at being woken for a second time when Mercer and Bruneseau hammered on her fourth-floor apartment door.
Lieutenant Foch and two Legionnaires waited in a van outside the nondescript apartment house.
She came to the door after five minutes of pounding. She was yelling at them in Spanish even before swinging open the door. She wore a tattered housecoat, her hair was awry, and her breath was sour with stale alcohol. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Whatever beauty she’d once possessed was being washed away by the booze.
Seeing her, Mercer felt a hot stab of anger surge through his body. Maria was partially responsible for Lauren’s death and had callously told Liu about her husband’s discovery, knowing that Gary and everyone else living with him on the banks of the River of Ruin would be murdered. That a quirk of geology had killed them first didn’t absolve her in his mind.
She continued her tirade, not bothering to identify who had disturbed her. Mercer stood rooted, his lips compressed in a white line and his eyes narrowed to angry slits. He let her go on for a few more seconds then slapped her across the face. The blow was just enough to stun her into silence.