Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Read online

  “I know these last few months…” Val looked away. “You deserve to be happy, Lund.”

  “So do you, Val.”

  Raising her chin, Val squinted out the window. “Is that your girlfriend up there?”

  Lund looked in the distance to the power lines, and saw two brightly colored hot-air balloons draped across them. One was tangled in the tower; the other’s basket seemed to be hung up on the line itself. Atop the basket were three figures, one of them standing up.

  “That’s Chandler,” Lund whispered.

  He floored the gas pedal.

  Chandler

  “Gravity wants to fuck you,” the Instructor said. “Play hard to get.”

  As Hammett climbed the tower near the top of our almost-deflated balloon, I crawled to the end of the basket and reached for the skirt. Gathering nylon in both fists, I tugged.

  The envelope was heavy, and it didn’t budge. I pulled again, Tequila adding his strength to the effort, but we still couldn’t move it. Sighting down to the end of it, I saw why. The parachute valve at the top of the balloon was snagged on the ceramic insulator attached to Hammett’s tower.

  I knew what I had to do, much as I didn’t want to do it. Imagining my veins filled with ice water, I stood up and prepared to face my sister.

  “I’m going to free the balloon envelope,” I said. “It’ll fall, and should drop low enough so you can climb down it, to the ground. Don’t touch the balloon and the ground at the same time.”

  Tequila stood up. “I can do it.”

  “This isn’t your fight.”

  “I’m a gymnast.”

  “You practiced the balance beam? I didn’t know that was a male event.”

  He touched my shoulder. “Chandler…”

  “I got this. I need you to get Fleming to safety.”

  His hard look softened, and he nodded. I felt a hand tug at my calf and stared down at my sister. She reached up to me, extending a fillet knife.

  “Kill the bitch,” Fleming said. Her face displayed complete confidence in me.

  I wished I shared her conviction.

  I took the knife and tucked it into my back pocket. Then I tentatively touched the wire, feeling a strong and somewhat painful spark, knowing it was only induction and it wouldn’t kill me.

  But it wasn’t pleasant. Not in the least. I’ve never stuck my hand into a beehive, but the buzzing, and stinging, was probably close to what it felt resting a bare palm on a high-tension wire. I placed one foot onto it, then the other, and slowly stood up, feeling the heat through the soles of my shoes. The hair on my neck, and over my temples, began to stick out. A slight, cool breeze blew in from the south, and I sucked some in through my clenched teeth.

  My sense of balance was pretty good, as long as I didn’t let heights mess with my head. But no matter how many times I found myself high up, I still couldn’t get used to it. Looking at the basket beneath my feet was fine. But then I took a few steps and the basket was gone, leaving me on a wire with nothing but ninety feet of air between me and the ground.

  The trick with being high up is desensitization. When you spend a lot of time at great heights, you can become acclimated to the point it no longer bothers you.

  I’ve never gotten to that level. I respect heights like I respect electricity, water, guns, explosives, fire, vehicles, and the many other ways a human being can get killed. But I’ve never reached the point, either in training or in the field, where I fully got used to it.

  So when I looked down—the unfortunate side effect of watching my footing on the wire—I saw how high I was, and my stomach wanted to jump up my throat and slap me for my bad judgment. But I kept my balance, and walked two steps in open air until I reached the skirt of the balloon. I crouched slowly—in the heyday of the Playboy Club they called it a bunny dip—and with great care I gathered up a handful of nylon fabric and let it fall off the side of the wire. Then I moved, step by step, tugging the nylon off the wire and letting it drop. It was excruciating work. My muscles cramped up. I was constantly adjusting my balance. If the wind kicked up any harder, it would blow me right off the wire. But slowly, surely, the balloon fell free, and then its weight took over and the bulk of the envelope slid off the wire until it hung in a big U, one end attached to the basket, the top still attached to the insulator.

  Chancing a look ahead, I saw that Hammett had reached the top of the tower, and she had a hand on the insulator coils, right where my balloon was snagged. We were about ten meters from each other.

  “Be a dear and free that for me,” I yelled.

  She didn’t follow my request. Instead, she drew her gun.

  I considered my options. To my left was another wire, attached to the one I was on by large aluminum separators, about a meter away. But jumping to that wire meant I’d lose my connection with it while in the air, and arcing would zap the shit out of me. I needed to keep at least one limb on the wire at all times.

  I considered turning back, but we’d still be stuck on the wire, and Hammett would come for us. So would whichever secret branch of the military ran the black site. Even if I dealt with Hammett, we still needed to get off this wire before we were all conveniently disappeared by my loveable duplicitous government.

  I stayed in a crouch, keeping myself a small target, waiting for Hammett’s move, and I realized she wasn’t aiming at me. She was using her gun to draw a spark from the wire ahead of the insulator, bonding on like I’d done with the propane burner.

  But her gun wasn’t very long, and when the spark zapped her, it was a doozy. Hammett cried out, her gun falling to the ground, but the bitch managed to get her hand onto the wire without falling off.

  “I bet that hurt,” I yelled.

  Hammett began to laugh. Instead of it being a sisterly bonding moment, her insane cackle seriously creeped me out. In between guffaws she said, “I’m going to show you hurt.”

  I stood up, the breeze whipping through my short hair, and clenched my hands into fists.

  “Bring it,” I said.

  Hammett and I had both been trained by the Instructor, so her balancing skills were on par with mine. We closed the distance between us quickly, but before we were near enough to engage, she stood on one foot and pulled something from her ankle sheath.

  A straight razor. I hadn’t known Hammett for long, but this weapon seemed particularly appropriate for her. Razors were a psycho’s best friend.

  I reached into my pocket, pulling out the fillet knife Fleming had given me.

  “OK,” I said. “Let’s do this.”

  And we began the most dangerous high-wire routine in the history of mankind.

  Hammett

  “When facing an equally skilled opponent,” the Instructor said, “cheat.”

  Feeling the surge of the high voltage flowing from the wire through her shoes and making her arm hair stick out, the hyperawareness from the thrill of balancing on a thin line at such a great height, the solid excitement of the pearl razor handle in her fingers and the jointed steel tang under her thumb, and the sight of Chandler approaching with a fillet knife, Hammett couldn’t help but smile.

  She felt wonderfully alive. A curious reaction, considered death was all around her.

  Years ago, Hammett had latched on to Hydra training like a starving calf latched on to a teat. It had been a lifeline. An outsider would have viewed Hammett’s upbringing as normal, bordering on quaint. Suburban nuclear family, middle-class down to the white picket fence, with smiling adoptive parents who were always hugging little Betsy in pictures.

  But the smiling was just a front. A mask of normalcy hiding the monster. And she still didn’t like to think about the monster.

  By the time of her stepparents’ deaths, Betsy had fully embraced what psychiatrists call “thrill-seeking behavior.” But it was always without purpose. Betsy wanted an outlet for her aggression, but lack of direction meant her energies were wasted satisfying base urges.

  Hydra allowed her to do thin
gs she never even dreamed of. She got paid for her self-destructive indulgences. And now, balancing on a high-tension wire thirty meters above the ground, about to engage in a knife fight with her identical sister, Hammett couldn’t think of anywhere she’d rather be.

  Chandler had adopted a fencing stance, front foot with the toe pointed forward, back foot perpendicular. When she advanced, it was front foot, back foot, front foot, back foot, never crossing one over the other. It was woefully predictable; fencing duelists maintained the same axis line, suitable for wire walking.

  Hammett, however, had other ideas.

  She ran forward, taking fast, tiny steps on her toes, rushing at Chandler as if they were on solid ground. Chandler hunched down, leaning back on her rear foot, raising her knife in one hand, throwing up an arm block with the other.

  Hammett came to a quick stop just out of slashing distance, and then twisted her hips, kicking at Chandler’s knife with a football punt. Chandler pulled back, her blade slashing harmlessly across the bottom of Hammett’s shoe. Hammett retained her balance on one leg, pivoted, and brought the same foot across Chandler’s face, connecting solidly with the side of her sister’s head.

  Chandler extended her arms at her sides, an obvious effort to keep from falling. That left her wide open to attack.

  Hammett’s foot found the wire, and she leaned forward, slashing with the razor. Chandler managed to block with the fillet knife, and there was a clink of metal on metal. Though Hammett liked the theatricality of a straight razor—it scared the piss out of many a target when she opened it up—it was best suited for close-up work on an unarmed opponent. Against a knife, a razor came up lacking. Which Hammett learned all too well when Chandler followed up the parry with a poke at Hammett’s chest, the knife tip penetrating her left breast.

  Hammett recoiled, and Chandler seized the advantage, using her fencing moves to force Hammett backward, fast enough to make Hammett focus on staying on the wire and abandon attacking.

  After backpedaling eight or nine steps, Hammett was confronted with the startling realization that she might actually lose, and in this case losing was fatal. She had wanted to beat Chandler in a fair fight, but there really was no such thing as unfair in a fight to the death, so she dug a hand into her back pocket and removed the carefully folded piece of paper that she always carried with her; an origami envelope, filled with a mixture of regular table salt and pepper.

  Bending the envelope in half behind her back in a much-practiced move, most of the contents spilled into Hammett’s palm, and with the wind behind her she threw the salt and pepper into Chandler’s eyes during her next lunge.

  The effect was immediate, and devastating.

  Chandler staggered, immediately raising her free hand to her eyes to clear them of irritants. Then her rear foot slipped, and she toppled off the wire.

  Chandler

  “When an opponent cheats,” the Instructor said, “cheat back.”

  I had no idea what Hammett had thrown into my face, but it stung my eyes and temporarily blinded me. And then I was falling.

  As my back foot stepped into open air and my body followed, I crooked my left elbow and snagged the wire on my way down. For a crazy moment I swung, and I clamped my teeth around the knife handle and barehanded the wire, pins and needles jumping through my palms. I shook my head like a dog, blinking away tears, and blurrily saw the parallel companion wire a meter ahead of me.

  Above me, I sensed Hammett moving in, no doubt anxious to slash my fingers off. Without waiting for that to happen, I jackknifed my lower body like a trapeze artist, and swung toward the other power line.

  My heels caught the edge, and I used momentum, muscle, and good old-fashioned fear to get my knees onto the wire. Then I let go with my hands, and I was hanging upside down.

  That’s when the fear really kicked in.

  I gave in to it for a moment, letting my body respond to the raw, animal panic in all the usual ways. Dry mouth, sweaty palms, hammering heart, hyperventilation, adrenaline surge, inability to focus. It seemed like minutes, but couldn’t have lasted longer than a few seconds before I regained control and let my training take over.

  I plucked the knife from my mouth, coughed, and spat into my free palm, using the saliva to wipe my stinging eyes. From smell and taste I guessed Hammett had used salt and pepper, rather than something potentially more lethal, such as lye or powdered glass. This was good. It meant my blurriness was temporary, so I could scratch “permanent blindness” off my list of immediate fears.

  “What are you doing over there, Sis?”

  Hammett’s voice activated my startle reflex, but I forced myself to betray nothing but calm.

  “Just hanging out,” I said through clenched teeth. “You should come over.”

  And that’s what the bitch did. In a single graceful move, Hammett tucked down, flipped, and then was dangling by her hands on the wire, directly across from me. I blinked away tears and watched Hammett smile, her teeth locked around the straight razor handle.

  I put my knife back into my mouth, reached up, and unhooked my knees. Then I changed my grip on the power line and faced her just as her feet were rushing at my chest.

  I twisted, bringing up a leg, catching her bent knee with mine. She kicked out with her free leg, and I locked that one up as well, trying us into a knot as we hung there.

  I continued to rapidly blink, tears and spit getting blown off my cheeks by the wind. Hammett tried to tug me toward her, lifting herself up so I had to bear her weight, but sore as my hands were, I wasn’t about to be pulled off that wire.

  Then my sister did something I didn’t expect. She took one hand off the line and removed the razor from her mouth. I immediately did the same with my knife.

  “If you cut me with my legs still wrapped around yours,” I said in forced tones, “we’ll both fall.”

  “I was thinking I just cut an artery, you bleed out.”

  “I can do the same to you.”

  Hammett’s eyes flashed. “Prisoner’s dilemma.”

  Though we weren’t together at Hydra, I assumed Hammett and I had the same training. The prisoner’s dilemma was a classic example of game theory. Two people are arrested. If neither rats out the other, they each get short prison sentences—the best possible scenario. But if one rats out the other, the other goes to jail for a long time, and the rat goes free. If both rat, they both get long sentences. While it is in the collective interest to keep silent, self-preservation kicks in, always resulting in a double betrayal. I played the game with the Instructor many times, his way of proving that you can never trust anybody.

  “You know how this ends,” I said, adjusting my grip. “We both die.”

  Hammett’s eyes narrowed. “Human nature sucks.” She raised the razor.

  “Don’t do this, Hammett. You can’t win.”

  My sister smiled. “But I can try.”

  She slashed down with the razor, and I thrust the fillet knife forward, blocking her blow. Our steel locked together, I turned my wrist downward, poking at the back of her hand. Hammett pulled away, and my fillet knife sunk into her thigh.

  Our eyes locked, and I could guess my panicked expression mirrored hers.

  Then Hammett let go of the power line.

  Her legs remained tangled in mine.

  For the longest second of my life, I hung there, one-handed, holding both of us.

  Then my hand slipped, and we fell.

  Fleming

  “Life is tragedy,” the Instructor said. “Get used to it.”

  Clenching Tequila’s hand in hers, so tight she was no doubt hurting him, Fleming watched her sisters fight on the power line.

  She gasped when Chandler fell and hung by her knees.

  She yelled when Hammett joined her beneath the wires, locking legs.

  And when they fell, something inside Fleming broke, and she screamed like she’d never screamed in her life.

  Lund

  It was damn near impossi
ble to drive while also watching Chandler do her high-wire act, but Lund managed to get to the field under the electrical towers without wrecking his truck or harming the horses in the trailer.

  When driving over the grassland became too bumpy, he threw it into park. Then he fumbled for his cell phone to dial the fire chief in Lake Delton. Baraboo’s fire truck only had a three-story ladder. He needed one of the big boys, one with a hundred-foot hydraulic telescoping platform, to cherry-pick Chandler off the line. He tried to search his list of contacts for the number, pressed the wrong button, and wound up in the programming menu.

  Cursing himself, he slowed down and went name by name, carefully selecting the correct number, setting his jaw as it rang once, twice, three times—

  “Lund.”

  Val had her hand on his arm, gripping it tight. Lund looked up and saw Chandler and the woman she was fighting, hanging by their hands, the big bow of the deflated balloon in a wide arc ten meters below them, flapping in the wind.

  Lund squeezed the phone. He had the urge to do something, anything, but could only sit in his truck, every muscle tensed, eyes glued and powerless. He’d only known Chandler a short time, but he felt something between them, something more than the physical attraction they shared. Lund had fought some terrible blazes alongside some very good people. The bonds formed in combat were strong ones, and he shared lifelong friendships with men he’d met in the midst of a firefight, friendships forged in an instant when lives depended on another’s actions.

  He knew Chandler. Recognized her bravery, her self-sacrifice. Understood her on a base, core level.

  She was one of the good guys.

  “This is Chief Potash of the Delton Fire Department. I’m away from my phone right now. If this is an emergency, dial nine one one.”

  Lund swore, disconnected, and dialed Delton direct. He only knew a few of the men who worked there, so it could take a bit of convincing to get them to travel outside their district, but maybe he’d get lucky.