Read Zig Zag for Free Online Page B

the
passengers, either. Instead, they walked up an adjacent stairway. A
van awaited them. The young man in the driver's seat was polite,
courteous, and kind; he clearly wanted to practice his night-school
English on them.
    "In
Madrid, there isn't so much cold, eh? I mean, now."
    "You
said it," replied the older man, good-naturedly. He was tall and
thin, with snowy hair and a bald spot on top that he hid with a
comb-over. "I love Madrid. Come whenever I get the chance."
    "In
Milan, I think it was cold," the driver continued. He knew where
their plane had come in from.
    "Too
true. Though more than cold, rain." And then, linguistically
reciprocating, the older man added, in second-rate Spanish, "Much
pleasing to return to good Spanish climate."
    They
both laughed. The driver couldn't hear the other man laugh, the burly
one. And, judging by his looks and the expression on his face when
he'd climbed into the van, he decided he'd rather not hear him laugh,
anyway.
    If
he even knew how to laugh.
    Businessmen, the
driver thought. Or
a businessman and his bodyguard.
    The
van circled the terminal. Now it stopped and another dark-suited man
opened the door and stood aside to let the two men out. The van drove
off, and that was the last the driver saw of them.
    The
Mercedes had tinted windows. As they settled into the wide leather
seats, the older man got a call on the cell phone he'd just turned
on.
    "Harrison,"
he said. "Yes. Yes. Wait, I need more information. When did it
happen? Who is it?" He pulled a flexible computer screen, thin
as a strip of fabric, from his coat pocket and unrolled it on his
knees like a tablecloth, touching the interactive surface as he
spoke. "Yeah. Yeah. No, no change of plans. Fine."
    But
after he hung up, nothing seemed "fine." He pursed his lips
tightly as he watched the floppy, illuminated screen on his legs. The
burly man glanced away from the window to look at it, too. On it
shone some sort of blue map with moving red and green dots.
    "We've
got a problem," said the white-haired man.
    "I don't
know if we're being followed or not," she said, "but take
this exit and drive through San Lorenzo for a while. The streets are
narrow there; maybe we can throw them off."
    Victor
silently followed her orders. He got off the freeway and took an
access road to the labyrinthine subdivision. His car was an old
Renault Scenic with no computer or GPS, so
Victor had no idea where he was going. He read out street names as if
in a dream: Dominicos, Franciscanos ... Nerves made him feel there
was some form of divine intervention responsible for all this. A
memory suddenly popped into his anguished mind: he used to drive
Elisa home in his old car, the first one he'd had, when they were
both students in David Blanes's summer course at Alighieri
University. Those were happier times. Now things were a little
different. He had a bigger car, he taught at the university, Elisa
had gone crazy and was armed with a huge knife, and they were both
fleeing some unknown danger as fast as they possibly could. This
is real life, he
surmised. Things
change.
    He
heard the crinkling of plastic and saw that she'd taken her knife
partway out of its wrapper. The streetlights' reflection twinkled on
the blade.
    He
felt as if his heart skipped a beat. No, worse. He felt as if it was
melting, or being stretched out like a spit-covered piece of gum,
auricles and ventricles forming one solid mass. She's
lost her mind, his
common sense told him. And
you let her get into your car and now she's forcing you to take her
wherever she wants to go. It
was all coming clear. The following day, his car would be found
abandoned in some ditch, his body inside it. What would she have
done? Decapitate him, maybe, judging by the size of that knife. Slit
his throat, though maybe she'd kiss him first. "I always loved
you, Victor, I just couldn't tell you." Then zzzzzzzzzzzip. He'd
hear it before he felt it, the sound of her slashing his carotid
artery, the blade