Brett Battles: The Destroyed

Fifty-five seconds passed, sixty, then the door to car number one opened and a party of six exited.

Twenty more seconds and another ding, followed by the door to number two parting.

When the clock reached two minutes, she frowned. Number four still hadn’t arrived. That didn’t make sense. It should have Ding.

She tensed as the light next to number four lit up.

There was a pause, then the doors slid apart.

The nineteenth floor was only half finished. One wing of rooms looked ready to go, but the hallway leading through the other half was still in the process of being painted, and had yet to have the signature purple carpet laid down.

The man with the gun walked behind Rosen while the woman led the way down the unfinished corridor.

“Look,” Rosen said. “I don’t know what you want or who you might think I am, but you’ve made a mistake. I’m just here for a business meeting. You let me go, I won’t say a word.”

“No mistake,” the man said.

“Of course it’s a mistake!” Rosen argued, looking back over his shoulder.

If the man had been close enough, Rosen would have gone for the gun, but the guy was several feet back, out of range.

“Turn around,” the man said.

Son of a bitch. This was a trap from the beginning, Rosen thought.

As they neared the end of the hall, the woman opened a door and walked inside.

“Keep moving,” the gunman ordered Rosen.

This was his chance, Rosen realized. As he stepped across the threshold, he reached out, grabbed the handle, then jerked the door closed behind him and engaged the lock.

The only direction Rosen could go in the small area beyond was left. He raced down the short hallway, and entered a room lit only by the light of the city flowing in through the windows. He tensed to take on the woman.

She was there, all right, but she wasn’t alone. Another man stood beside her, a gun in his hand.

Rosen felt the blood drain from his face.

Behind him, the door opened, and the gunman from the hallway joined them.

“Whatever it is you want, I’ll get it. Money? Is that it? Tell me how much you want.”

“Larry, don’t embarrass yourself,” the new man said.

Rosen stared at him for a moment, then his eyes widened. “Scott?” As soon as he said the other man’s name, the full reality of what was going on hit him. “No. No. I haven’t said anything. I kept my mouth shut. I…I’ve never-”

“Then what are you doing here?” his former colleague asked.

“Just a business meeting,” he said. But his words closed the trap completely, and he knew it. “You know about the email.”

“Of course we know about the email.”

Rosen began shaking his head. “I wasn’t going to say anything. I wanted to see who sent it, that’s all. I wanted to be able to tell you who it was.”

“You should have said something before you got on that plane.” The man turned and headed for the windowed wall.

Rosen stumbled forward as he was shoved from behind. Nearing the windows, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before-a door in the glass wall. Beyond it was a patio stretching the length of the suite.

“Open it,” the woman said.

He hesitated, looking over at the man he called Scott. “Please. I realize it was just a test, but I wasn’t going to say anything. I swear.”

“Test? We didn’t send the email, Larry,” the man said. “Open the door.”

“What? Then how did you-”

“You know we can do anything that needs to be done,” the man said. “Now open the door or get shoved through it.”

Mila stared at her monitor as the door for car number four remained open for several seconds, then closed again without anyone disembarking.

Where the hell is Rosen?

She stared at the screen, her mind racing through the possibilities until she snapped herself out of it, and slammed her computer shut. Whatever his reason for not showing up, the time for watching was over. Even if Rosen did show up, there was no way she’d meet with him now. The moment she set foot anywhere near that restaurant, she knew the remainder of her life would be measured in seconds.

She shoved her laptop into her bag as she scanned the room to make sure she’d left nothing behind. She then moved to the door and carefully pulled it open.

The hallway was empty.

Wasting no time, she sprinted to the stairwell entrance and headed down.

The stairs let out in the back corner of the main lobby. She moved carefully through the doorway, knowing the man who hadn’t hopped onto the elevator was around somewhere.

She was positive Rosen had no idea who he was supposed to meet, so his friends wouldn’t know, either. But even if they saw her, they wouldn’t know it was her. She had taken the extra precaution of changing her appearance as much as possible. She was dressed in jeans and a beige men’s shirt. A brown baseball cap covered her hair, cut short a week earlier. On her face was a pair of non-prescription, wire-frame glasses. With her breasts wrapped tightly, she looked like a young man of no more than twenty-one, an age that was actually several years in her past. She was just another tourist: bland, and not worth a second look.

At least that’s what she was hoping.

As she passed the reception desk, she finally spotted the other man. He looked even more intimidating in person than on her computer monitor. She’d seen men like him hundreds of times before. He was a pro for sure.

She forced herself to keep walking like she needed to be somewhere but wasn’t in a hurry. When the man turned his gaze in her direction, she was sure she’d done something to tip him off. Fortunately, her old training took control, and she neither hurried nor slowed down, keeping the pleasant smile on her face as she walked right by the man.

Though she could no longer see if he was looking at her, she sensed that he’d written her off as no one important.

As she neared the front, she realized she’d been holding her breath and finally let it out.

The doorman noticed her approach and opened the door. “Have a good evening, sir,” he said as she stepped outside.

She nodded her thanks, and began walking down the sidewalk away from the hotel.

She’d made it. She was free. No, not free, she realized. Not until she got out of Tanzania.

Whoosh.

The sound had come from behind and above her somewhere. It was strange enough to make her turn to see what it was, but she’d barely started twisting around when the whoosh was replaced by a loud, wet smack.

On a portion of the sidewalk close to the hotel’s front entrance lay the twisted body of a man.

Without even thinking, she ran toward him.

If he’d been a jumper, she would have expected him to be lying on his stomach, face smashed into the ground. Instead, he was on his back, his eyes open and staring blankly at the night sky, terror still etched on his face.

On Lawrence Rosen’s face.

She knelt down beside the man she had tricked into coming to Tanzania.

He was dead; there was no question about that. His glassy eyes reflected images he would never see.

She looked up the building, but could see no obvious spot from where he started his fall. The thought that this was an accident didn’t even cross her mind. Nor did she consider the possibility that he’d come all this way just to throw himself to his death.

Someone else did this.

The man and the woman who had been on the elevator with him.

Get out of here. Now!

She jumped up.

“Do you know him?”

It was the doorman. He and several others who’d been out front had begun gathering around the body.

She shook her head. “No,” she whispered.

“Is he dead?”

She nodded.