Ill Wind Page 0,62

full minute for my brain to start connecting chemical chains long enough to remember Bad Bob, the tainted coffee, the collapse. Jesus, what kind of a bastard ruins Jamaican Blue Mountain with knockout drops?

I was lying on the leather couch, and my hands were tied behind my back. I could barely feel them, but I knew it was going to be painful if-when-I worked my way free. I blinked shadows from my eyes, shook my head to get hair out of my way, and found Bad Bob sitting in the leather armchair just about five feet away. The bathrobe was gone, replaced by a pair of khaki pants and a loud Hawaiian print shirt. He was holding a half-empty glass of something on the rocks, which might have been apple juice but probably had a lot more punch.

"Don't struggle," he said. "You'll just dislocate a shoulder, and I'm not much on the medical stuff."

My tongue felt thick as a sausage, but I managed to fit it around words. "Fuck you, you bastard. Let me go."

His bushy white eyebrows rose. They curled up and out, and reminded me of a lynx. The eyes were predatory, too.

"Ah, ah, be nice," he said. "My offer to you was absolutely valid. We're going to do some great work together."

"What in the hell do you think you're doing? You think you can just abduct me and-" My brain caught up with my mouth and told it to shut up, because he had abducted me, and chances were he was going to get away with it, too. Nobody knew I'd come here. I had no close friends, no confidants. I hadn't spoken to my sister or my mother in a month. John Foster might wonder where I'd gotten off to, but like most Wardens, I wasn't a slave to the nine-to-five. Could take weeks for anybody to begin to worry.

"You'll be fine," he said. He took a long slug of his drink, made a face, and put the crystal tumbler on a glass table next to him. There was no sound of anybody else in the house, just the usual everyday hum of electrics and air circulation. The surf hitting the shore came as a dull, unceasing drum. "I have something important for you to take part in, and I want your word that you're going to take this responsibility seriously. You're going to change the world."

I had a lot of ambition, but changing the world was a little outside the scope. I tried the ropes again, felt sharp pain dig into my shoulder, and decided to work on things a little less directly. I couldn't go head-to-head with Bad Bob Biringanine . . . few people on the planet could. But maybe I could take him from behind.

I started slowly, slowly working the oxygen out of the mixture in the room. Nothing obvious, because obvious would get me swatted like a fly. At the fastest rate I dared to work, I needed to buy at least ten minutes for the O2 levels to drop far enough to put him to sleep. If he didn't realize what I was doing. The alcohol would help that, slow his perceptions and make him more susceptible to nodding off.

"I-I came here to work for you," I said. "Really. You didn't have to drug me. You could have just explained it to me."

"Sweetheart, I couldn't really take the chance you wouldn't agree. I need you. It's more of a draft than a volunteer army." His eyes skipped away from me, toward the windows, where the Atlantic rolled endlessly toward the Pacific. "Stop fucking with the air in here or I'll knock you out and do this while you're unconscious. It doesn't really matter, either way. I just thought you'd like to be a witness."

I swallowed hard and let my manipulations of the oxygen drop. "To what?"

"To your transformation. I'm about to transform you from some second-rate, arrogant little weatherworker to a world-class talent. And in return, you're going to save my life." He got up, stretched, and went to refill his glass from a crystal-stoppered decanter on the sideboard, near something that looked like an authentic Chinese terra-cotta solider, like the ones found in the emperor's tomb. It almost looked real enough to walk across the room.

"Sir, please, I have no idea what you're-"

"Shut up." He didn't raise his voice, but there was something dark