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He got close to the fence, pretended to stretch, then let out an exaggerated sigh before unzipping his fly and taking a leak into a dry patch of scrubgrass that could use some watering.
He watched the cameras as he finished up, betting that it wasn’t particularly unusual for some dude to be pissing in that vacant lot. Mumbai wasn’t exactly known for its adequate public bathroom facilities.
Ice waited for the camera closest to him to complete its slow swivel, then finished quickly, zipped up safely, and darted to the fence, getting there while still in the camera’s temporary blind spot.
Ice crouched down against the bottom of the fence, crab-walked until he was directly beneath the camera. He pulled out a Leatherman multi-tool from his cargo flap, opened up the needle-nosed plier option.
Glancing around to make sure nobody was watching, Ice stood quickly and shimmied up the chain-link fence. Then in one quick move he shoved the sharp narrow pliers into the tiny space between two metal plates of the camera-base, twisting the joint until the camera stopped swiveling.
He could have simply smashed the camera lens, but that would cause the screen to go blank in the security center. Much better to jam the swivel mechanism. It wouldn’t be as noticeable to a zoned-out security-guy staring at a hundred tiny black-and-white squares on a computer monitor.
Ice dropped back down to the ground, crept over to the second camera, waited for his chance, then disabled its swivel mechanism the same way.
Now confidence surged in him. He’d made it to the airport, disabled the cameras, was just a chain-link fence away from a sea of waiting electric vehicles with boxy baggage cars attached. Thankfully Mumbai was in the path of South Asia’s legendary annual monsoon rains, so all the electric vehicles were covered, which would hopefully obscure Ice well enough to get them beneath the Air India jumbo-jet’s open belly.
Ice hurried back to the Honda, grabbed his duffel from the backseat, slung it across his body and pulled the straps tight, leaving both arms free to carry Indy.
He pulled open the front door, hope rising in him that maybe she’d pulled herself back to the here and now, that perhaps the manic surge of memories had worked itself through her well enough for her to walk properly, get over the fence if he boosted her up.
But the rising hope came crashing down when he got the door open and looked at her eyes.
She was catatonic.
Breathing regular but shallow.
Eyes wide but sightless.
“Fuck!” Ice shouted, panic ripping through him. Suddenly he was second-guessing every decision he’d made.
Maybe he’d overestimated her mental resilience.
Perhaps he’d underestimated the impact of releasing those physically-stored memories.
Hell, maybe he should’ve just kept her in that hotel room, holed up in there with that DO NOT DISTURB sign hanging outside, taken the chance that nobody else was going to come after them for at least ten or twelve hours—enough time for the drug to wear off.
Instead Ice had rolled the dice with Indy’s sanity.
Made a choice that maybe wasn’t his to fucking make.
But staying in that room could have turned out worse—after all, Indy would have been forced to spend ten hours staring at her dead mother. And even if she handled that, staying in that room in their compromised states of mind could very easily have made them paranoid, triggered them to do something even more risky. It would very likely have ended with them both in a Mumbai prison, separated and sequestered, at the center of a murder investigation and an international incident. And there was no guarantee that either of them would have emerged sane—or even alive—at the end of that chain of choices.
Anyway, they were here now, and there was no choice but to go forward. Although time felt elastic in this state of mind, Ice couldn’t turn back the clock, didn’t get a do-over for decisions he’d made on instinct.
Instincts that were almost certainly compromised by the drug.
“Indy,” he whispered, leaning close and carefully pulling the tape off her lips. “Hey, do you hear me?”
Indy stared straight ahead, unblinking and unresponsive. Now Ice was starting to lose it himself. The LSD would still be surging pretty strong, so if she was sitting glassy-eyed like a zoned-out zombie, it was not a good sign.
He was losing her.
Maybe he’d already lost her.
Urgency fired Ice’s blood, sparked every nerve, awakened every instinct. He had to get her to that plane, get them safely tucked away, get to work on bringing her back from wherever her demons had dragged her.
Ice whipped out his knife and cut through the duct-tape holding her to the seat. He sliced through the strips binding her wrists and ankles, put the knife away, leaned forward across the front seat, then carefully hoisted her out, cradling her against his body with utmost care, like she was delicate and damaged.
Ice’s heart sank even further as Indy hung limp in his arms, her head lolling back, those wide wired eyes still vacant and empty, dead and desolate.