“It will still take them forty-five minutes to get up here. But the choppers will be surveilling. They’ll drop troopers.”
I could hear them already approaching in the distance.
“What do we do? We’re trapped. They’ll get us on the way down!”
At that, Yusef unhooked the webbing harnesses and instructed me to put one on and lock it, which I did. He did the same. He went back inside the wall and came back out rolling a wooden wheel of rope.
“We’ve been preparing for this.…”
“Thanks for inviting me along. We killed three people.”
“Will you cut it out? Next time you should let them kill you. Or I will.”
He motioned for me to move, and I helped him maneuver the wheel up and over the courtyard wall and heft it back out onto the outer rim.
We pushed the wheel to the impenetrable, sheer cliff side, and he unraveled it—hundreds of feet of rope—and then cut it in half, looped each around a turret, secured them with knots, and attached them to our rappel devices on the harnesses. He anchored various other things, while I stood in shock, looking straight down into a four-thousand-foot drop.
He tested both the ropes and the devices, unclipped the daisy chain from the anchors, and said, “Get in position.”
“What position? I can’t!”
He took me by the shoulders, pushed me to the edge, and turned me around so I was facing the castle and standing with my back to the drop.
“Now, place your left hand around the rope.… Okay, good; move it down six inches above the rappel device. Move your left hand between the clip and the anchors.”
I did as I was told, shaking every step of the way.
“Okay, good. Now grab the rope that hangs down out of the rappel device with your right hand—that’s your break hand—and slide your hand on the rope back to your right hip and wrap the rope slightly around your right hip.”
I was getting better at taking orders, and was doing fine following the next few directions—until he said, “Now step back off the edge.”
“What? No!”
He locked himself in next to me on the next turret and came alongside of me. “Step off!”
I didn’t budge. “Goddammit—step off, Alazais! You’ve done it before.”
“I haven’t done it ever before, so fuck you!”
Yes, you have. Just not in this life. The dream … the dream.
I rechecked the harness and then took the biggest step of my life. I turned my back to the mountain and fell backward—and put my future once again into the hands of the assassin.
Holding on for dear life and letting myself down slowly, I began to rappel downward. Or creep downward, is more like it.
“Let some of the rope in your right hand slide up through the rappel device,” he ordered as he hung next to me. As I did this I felt myself sliding more easily down the rope.
When we got partway down, and we ran out of rope, he swung into me, grabbed me around the waist, and together we swung over to an overhang and stepped onto it, grabbing onto branches.
“Now what?” I said, shaking.
“Now we unhook ourselves and make our way down. We’ve gone through the worst of it.”
He tied one end of a piece of the rope he’d taken from the welding shed to me and the other end to himself, and we began creeping, crawling on ledges that were no more than six inches wide at some points, until we finally got to level ground some one thousand feet up. The choppers were above us, but even I knew nobody in them would be looking on this side, and even if they were, they wouldn’t see us in all the tangles of brambles and the jutting rocks.
“Toss your gun.”
“No.”
“Yes, leave the gun.”
“And take the cannoli?”
With that he grabbed my gun and tossed it along with his into the brambles.
“Why did you do that?”
No answer.
It took an hour more of descending on hands and knees before we could see the valley clearly. In another half hour, we touched ground. Happy to be alive but in pain from the gashes on my knees, which had opened wide, I still kissed the ground.
He untied us and said, “Now let’s go see what’s going on.”
“What?”
He took the water and disinfectant towelettes out of his backpack, redressed my knees and hands, cleaned my face and his, dusted us off, reached into his bag, and pulled out a terrible hat, which he pulled over my terrible hair, saying, “A bonnie boonie.”
Jeez. Loony is more like it.
He grabbed my hand and began walking me, or more accurately pulling me, around the perimeter. I could see dozens of flashing cherry lights atop cop cars, ambulances, armored vehicles, and even a tank assembled in the Valley of the Burned, where they’d set up a command center, as the cops prepared for all-out battle. With us.