The Skill Conspiracy Read online

  The first little house we passed gave way to two more. After that was another little cluster of single-story homes, and after a short distance we heard some voices coming from around the corner of a taller two-story place that looked like it was probably a small apartment complex. Turning the corner, we found a very small open-air market, and by very small, I mean it was tiny. One little old lady selling some fruit and produce, and another littler but slightly less old lady selling some clothing.

  “Hola,” the shortest one called to Annie and me almost as soon as we turned the corner. This did not look like a place that attracted a whole lot of customers, so, when the woman saw us, two obvious out-of-towners, her face almost literally lit up at the prospect of making a sale.

  I said, “Hola” back and looked beyond the two diminutive women to see that this probably was what you might call the “downtown” of this little area. There were a handful of small storefronts on this particular street, but none of them had opened yet. It occurred to me that I had no idea what time of day it was, so I snuck a peek at my PCD to see that it was only a couple minutes before 8:00 AM.

  “Blabidy blah blah,” the woman at the clothing cart said, and while I still didn’t understand a damn thing anyone in this country was saying, I somehow knew she was asking, “What are you looking for?” or “What can I sell you?” or something like that.

  Annie grabbed the first button-down long-sleeved shirt she saw on the rack and held it out in front of me so I could slip it on over my T-shirt, while keeping my bloody wrists as inconspicuous as possible. The woman moved with astonishing speed that belied her apparent age in order to approach the two of us and did her “blabidy blah blah” thing, and this time I was pretty sure translated to numbers.

  “Twenty dollars?” Annie threw out, taking a wild stab at a price.

  “Americano?” the woman asked.

  “Yes,” Annie replied.

  “Thirty,” the woman said with a thick Spanish accent.

  “Okay,” Annie replied.

  The woman couldn’t hide her grin. I’m guessing the shirt was probably only selling for five American dollars or less, so this was the sale of the month for her.

  “PCD,” she said, holding hers out and waiting for Annie to swipe her own unit in order to make the money transfer.

  Annie grabbed her PCD, unlocked it with her thumb, and thought-commanded the transfer of thirty dollars, and with only a slight hiccup of nervous hesitation, swiped her unit across the other woman’s.

  Please don’t be Mariana Ortiz, I thought to myself in regards to the little saleswoman. Please don’t know Mariana Ortiz.

  The woman stole a glance at her PCD, pocketed it, and said, “Gracias, Mariana.”

  I literally blew out a sigh of relief.

  Feeling confident that Annie’s stolen identity wasn’t anyone too well known, at least in this particular little spot, we repeated the process at the fruit and produce cart, overpaying for a fresh fruit breakfast.

  “Do you know where we could purchase a car?” Annie asked the woman at the clothing cart. She had at least showed the facility for a few words of English while we were buying our food.

  Instead of responding, the little old lady just grabbed a couple small bags of fruit and said, “Yes? Yes?”

  “No,” Annie replied. “A car.” She made the little motion with her two hands that people make when they pretend to be driving.

  I was about to look up the Spanish word for “car” on my PCD, though I was pretty sure the woman understood but was only interested in selling fruit and produce, not offering up car purchase referrals.

  “Hello, hello,” a man’s voice called out from a little shop just two doors down from where we were standing.

  The door had swung open, revealing a man standing there. If I had to guess, I would say he was maybe in his mid-twenties, wearing a newish-looking pair of jeans and a form-fitting silk, maybe polyester, button-down short-sleeved shirt.

  “You looking to buy a car?” he asked us.

  “What’s with eagle ears over there?” I said sarcastically to Annie. He must have been eavesdropping pretty intently to have heard us from inside his shop some two doors down.

  Annie ignored me and replied, “Yes. We are. We’d been traveling with a couple we met over in Castillogrande, but the two of them got into this huge never-ending fight, and we just asked them to drop us off at the nearest town. We want to continue our trip, though, so we’re just looking for something cheap that can get us from point A to point B.”

  How the hell does she come up with this stuff?

  “I got just what you need,” the man said with a big salesy smile.

  He motioned for us to follow him into his shop, and since I was highly doubtful that he was keeping any sedans or pickup trucks in what looked like the local town hardware store, I did a quick little check of the gun I’d stuffed into my pants. You know, just to make sure it was still there and accessible.

  “Come on in. Come on in,” he said in only lightly accented English as he waved for us to follow him inside.

  I went first and saw a bunch of half-empty shelves stocked with tools, tape, some small bags of gravel, and other odds and ends like that.

  “Out back,” he said, as he walked through the store and opened up a door on the back wall.

  I looked back to check on Annie, and she gave me one of those is-this-cool looks, to which I responded with an, I-guess-so look of my own.

  I walked through the small shop, Annie on my heels, then stepped through the back door, which led us right back outside. The sun was bright, and it took me a moment to register what I was looking at.

  “What do you think?” Eagle Ears asked.

  “This?” I said, looking at a poop-brown rust bucket, the make and model of which I couldn’t have guessed if my life depended on it.

  “Does it even run?” I asked, highly doubting that it would.

  “Does it run?” Eagle Ears asked in the mocking tone that only a salesman getting ready to show you his big reveal could ever get away with using. “Does it run?” he said again, this time scoffing at the question.

  He pulled open the driver’s side door, which, of course, protested wildly in the form of a high-pitched creak, plunked down into the driver’s seat of the car, causing the shocks to make similar noises of agony, waved his PCD across the dash in a completely unnecessary show of flamboyance, then pressed a button on the dash, which caused the motor to begin making its attempt at turning over.

  “One second,” he said, holding up one finger as the engine whirred without catching. “Just one second.”

  Sure enough, a moment later, the engine came to life and, miracle of all miracles, the thing didn’t even backfire.

  He hopped out of the car with a triumphant look on his face, exclaiming, “Does it run?”

  “How much?” Annie asked.

  I suppose we could have shopped around a little bit, but—

  “One million dollars American,” Eagle Ears said with a look that seemed to ask, “And isn’t that just the best deal ever?”

  “No. No way!” I exclaimed. I looked at Annie and shook my head wildly. “We already paid—”

  “One thousand,” she said, cutting me off.

  “Deal,” Eagle Ears said.

  “Huh?” I asked.

  What just happened?

  27

  Annie had paid for the car and taken ownership of it on her PCD but told me to get behind the wheel as she walked around to the passenger’s side. We both got in, and I had to take a moment to try to figure out what had just happened.

  “When he threw out his first price of a million dollars, I had a mini panic attack, thinking about what we’d gone through with Kevin, Domingo, and The Runner,” I said to Annie.

  “I could tell,” she replied with a smile.

  Eagle Ears had left the car running for us, so I just put it in Reverse, backed out of the little spot behind the hardware store, and crept out onto the
street.

  “What’s with the million-dollar price anyway?” I asked. “That was crazy.”

  “He was just throwing it out there,” she replied.

  As I put the car into “drive” and started making my way down the street, I had to admit, it certainly did look like a big crap bucket, but once the motor started running, the thing did run nicely.

  “He saw two out-of-place Americans,” Annie continued. “I’m guessing he just wanted to see how rich and how dumb the rich, dumb Americans were. You never know, throw out the price of a million and maybe you get it.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said.

  “Well, I’m no car expert, but I’m thinking he still did pretty good by settling on a thousand dollars.”

  “Well, either that,” I said, “or the reward money he’s getting for turning us in made it so that he didn’t care what price we actually paid him for the car.”

  “Huh?” Annie asked, spinning her head to face forward, finally seeing what I was looking at.

  “Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah!” came a very pissed-off voice from the loudspeaker of one of the three police cars set up in front of us.

  This was getting to be exhausting.

  I stopped the car, and a bullet hole immediately appeared in the windshield between us.

  “Holy shit!” Annie yelled as I told her to get down.

  I should have known better. No way were the Colombian police going to let two people suspected of killing fifteen of their maritime officers and injuring four more of them on land get away easily. As it was now, it didn’t look like they had any interest in even pretending to try to bring us in alive.

  I threw the car into reverse and floored it.

  “Stay down!” I yelled to Annie, as she started to poke her head up after the initial shot.

  After a couple of interminable moments where the tires just spun on the dusty road, refusing to gain any purchase, they finally caught, and we shot backwards so fast that my chest actually bounced off of the steering wheel.

  BANG, BANG, BANG.

  I heard three more shots fire and felt, as much as saw, another hole appear in the windshield.

  “You okay?” I asked Annie in a bit of a panic.

  “Yeah,” came her tentative reply.

  I scrunched down in my seat, only reaching up for a brief moment to adjust the rearview mirror so that I could see behind us from my lower vantage point. As soon as I did, I saw another car shooting out behind us from between two buildings, and it looked like I was going to smash right into it if I didn’t do something.

  “Shit!” I yelled out loud, cutting the wheel as hard as I could, shifting into neutral for just a moment, then slamming it into drive and mashing the pedal to the ground just in time to complete a two-hundred-degree spin going the full twenty past one-eighty, so that we’d just barely pass by the car that was obviously trying to ram us.

  “Thanks, Frank,” I said, looking skyward since I was pretty sure these skills behind the wheel were most definitely his.

  I wasn’t sure if the road we were on right now was actually a road, or just a somewhat wide alley. Much like the rest of the streets in this little town, it looked like it had been paved at one point in time, but that was just a memory by now. I didn’t like being stuck between buildings like we were, since it prevented me from seeing what was around the next corner. Speaking of which . . .

  “Alden!” Annie yelled.

  Another police vehicle had just emerged right in front of us, and there was nothing to do but clip the front end of it and keep on going. My front right bumper connected with their front left quarter panel and sent them spinning off out of our way. Annie had gotten her hands up in front of her and only bounced slightly off of the dash, while I had held onto the wheel as tightly as I could in order to prevent myself from getting another circle-shaped bruise on my torso.

  “Buckle up! Buckle up!” I called to Annie.

  I had a feeling that wouldn’t be our only instance of bumper cars.

  “What about you?” she asked, as she sat up just far enough to reach back and grab her shoulder buckle.

  “I’m a little busy,” I said with all earnestness.

  I could see some taller buildings off in the distance and knew our only shot of shaking this many tails was getting to a much more crowded area. I had no idea how many blocks this dusty little town consisted of, but the more time I spent traveling its tight grid, the more likely they were going to be able to box us in.

  “Hold on,” I said, while preparing to cut the wheel hard in a direction that would take us right off the road and onto some open grass space alongside us.

  BANG, BANG, BANG, BANG.

  Gunfire erupted from behind us as I departed from the road and started aiming across the open field. The car was making some pretty funky noises at this point, and I had no idea if that was a result of our little collision, some shots that had connected, or maybe just from the fact that it looked like the car was about to fall apart sitting still, let alone being raced across a bumpy field.

  “I’m trying to get us to that city up there,” I said in answer to a look Annie gave me. “I don’t exactly have a plan, but I know we need more options than what this town has for us.”

  A quick check of the rearview showed me that three cars were following us directly across the field. Two more cars were racing along the street I’d departed from in order to access this field, and I could just barely make out two more vehicles much farther away, traveling at routes perpendicular to the one I’d just pulled off of. So long as we could keep this speed up, and so long as the car didn’t shake itself to pieces before the end of this field, it looked like we’d just be able to beat all of our pursuers in a race to a main road I could see up ahead.

  “What if they call ahead?” Annie asked.

  “I’m sure they will, if they haven’t already,” I replied. “But there’s nowhere else to go.”

  The city was going to be our only play right now. There were too many cars behind us, and forward was the only direction we could go.

  As we bounced along the field, the vibrations in the car were literally making my teeth clack, and it was because of this that I hadn’t pinned the pedal yet. I really wasn’t sure if the car could take it. If Annie was right, though, and help would be coming from that city to cut us off, the condition of our car really didn’t matter. I floored it.

  The main road that led to the city was now in sight. I couldn’t tell a ditch in the field from a patch of dead grass, so I was basically just praying that we could make it there in one piece. With a bump and a rattle that actually made me bite my tongue, we hopped the little border between the dirt and grass of the field, which spun us up and onto the road.

  A quick check of the rearview showed that there was still plenty of distance between us and any of the cars behind us, but still, I kept it floored. There were a couple small buildings approaching on either side of the street, but the real city didn’t look like it started for at least another half mile or so. I checked the speedometer and was shocked to see that this pile of crap was doing one seventy-seven.

  “Wait a minute,” I said out loud, then realized the readout was in kilometers per hour. I didn’t have time to do math—I just needed to go fast.

  It was the longest half mile of my entire life. There were at least seven cars behind us now. That would have been more than enough to hem us in back in the little town, but we’d acted fast, gotten lucky, and gotten out of there, but just barely.

  With one eye, I was watching those seven cars slowly gain on us. Whatever a hundred seventy-seven kilometers per hour was, they were going faster. Worse than that, I was starting to get this horrible feeling that a bunch of cars were going to emerge from that city in front of us just as soon as we got there.

  Incredibly, I was wrong. I could hear some sirens from up ahead, but as I shot past the first huge building and onto a cleanly paved road, I didn’t see anyone blocking our path just
yet.

  Traffic was non-existent at this far end of the city, and the buildings were whizzing by almost too fast for me to make any sense out of them. All of a sudden, something caught my eye, and I yelled, “Hold on!”

  I slammed on the brake, cut the wheel, and angled our vehicle toward the entrance of a parking garage that I’d come this close to not noticing. I angled the car toward a ramp leading up and into the garage but noticed too late that I was about to enter through the exit.

  All I saw in front of us was a huge mass of black-and-silver metal.

  “Shi—”

  28

  All I could see was white, and I hurt absolutely everywhere.

  “Blah blah blah blah blah blah!”

  Someone was yelling. Oh shit. They caught us.

  “Alden. Alden?” That was Annie. “Are you okay?”

  I got my bearings just enough to realize that everything looked white because my face was buried in some old-school air bag.

  “Ow,” was all I could say.

  I looked over to see Annie fumbling with her belt buckle and alternately trying to push an airbag out of her own face.

  “Blah blah blah!” That yelling again.

  I somehow managed to release my door and attempted to step out of the car but actually fell out of the door right onto my back.

  “Hey!” a voice yelled.

  It was some guy in a really nice gray suit, and he looked pissed.

  “Blah blah blah blah!” he yelled at me.

  I was lying there looking up at him, when I realized that something really uncomfortable was jamming into my lower back. I rolled partway onto my side and reached in that direction to grab it.

  “Mierda!” the man said with a start as I brought the object around in front of me.

  Oh. Right. It was that gun I’d taken from those police I’d had to escape from.

  He put both of his hands up, palms out at about face level, and took two steps back. I somehow managed to get up to my feet and do a quick survey of the situation.

  “Annie?” I called out, keeping the gun pointed at the man.