Page 68 of V-Day
Chloe halted. She lifted her hands up and turned to face them as they hurried up to her, their rifles lifted. They were both young, maybe her age. They wore hard expressions.
“Who are you and what are you doing here?” demanded the tallest of the two, with a mole below his eye.
“Do you speak English at all?” Chloe asked, with a hopeful note in her voice. “My Spanish just sucks.”
The shorter one glanced at the other. “American?” he asked her.
“Yes!” Chloe said, and blew out her breath. “I got lost! Can you tell me where the hell I am? I landed my boat on the beach, that way—” She jerked her thumb to the east. “I ran out of gas. I saw land so I thought I’d stop and buy some, only there isn’t a living soul anywhere around this joint. You’re the first two people I’ve seen since I landed…this is still Mexico, right?”
The shorter one’s eyes got wider. “You…stopped to buy gas?” he asked, with a thick accent.
“Just shoot her,” the other said in Spanish. “We don’t have time for this.”
“She says she hasn’t seen anyone and she was heading north. Maybe they’re not here after all,” Shorty replied.
Chloe kept her polite smile in place, reminding herself to not react to their rapid exchanges in Spanish.
“They have to be. They wouldn’t move north, would they? There’s nothing up there but radiation.”
Shorty snorted. “Who in their right minds would go south? She must be lost, just like she says.”
“Screw this. We’re wasting time,” Mole said and cocked his rifle and brought it up to point at Chloe.
*
SERRANO SLAMMED THE DOOR TOhis big office, making the partition wobble. Everyone in the outer office looked up.
“I said I wanted to see Ibarra twenty minutes ago!” Serrano yelled. “Why isn’t he here?”
One of the secretaries scrambled to his feet. “I will go find him, General.”
“Why didn’t someone find himten minutes ago?”
The secretary swallowed. “Sarabande did go, sir. He hasn’t returned.”
Serrano stared at him. “And you didn’t feel that was a concern?”
The secretary licked his lips. “Sir, he may have stopped by a washroom, or…taken…a break…” He spoke the last word on a dying whisper.
Serrano looked around the office. “Who else hasn’t come back from a break?”
Everyone looked around the room, surprised.
“Jose, sir,” the secretary replied.
“Carmine,” someone else said.
Serrano sucked in a breath. The red in his face receded. He reached up to unclip the flap on his holster and everyone flinched.
“Not you, imbeciles,” Serrano told them. He hurried out of the administration wing, through the rotunda and down the wide hall which ran between the rooms on the second floor. It was carpeted, lush and lined with pieces of art on plinths and oil paintings hanging on the walls, in between the deep door recesses into the rooms.
God knows why the press used to rave about the elegance of the Palace. The place was a museum, an ancient relic of a colonial past Vistaria needed to shrug off if it was to move into the twenty-first century.
Irritated, Serrano moved down the corridor. The doors were shut, most of them with the new electronic key plates Torrini had installed. He’d had at least one good idea, Serrano admitted. He fished his own pass out of his pocket and moved over to the door to Ibarra’s suite and passed it over the lock plate.
The door chirped and unlocked. Serrano pulled out his gun and moved inside.
Escobedo’s woman, the blonde Serrano had thought was fully occupied in the hospitality suite downstairs, was bent over the desk in front of all the screens. Her chin jerked up and her eyes widened.
