The Syringe
Adrenaline rushes through Yasira’s veins.
She gets up. Her thoughts are racing. What happened?
Why is the power off? A power outage? But now of all times?
No storm, no lightning. Besides, what about the hydrogen tanks?
Wouldn’t they make Messerschmidt’s house independent?
The transformer box. Someone must have cut the power at the transformer box.
Yasira hears faint male voices. Maybe it’s just the reinforcements Michael called for.
But they wouldn’t be here so quickly . .
. Impossible. Is someone after Messerschmidt?
No. She is reminded of the black Passat she spotted after her furious departure from the BKA.
Maybe someone really was on her trail. But she drove like a maniac.
A GPS tracker perhaps? These things are now even available on .
If Yasira had been under surveillance for some time, it wouldn’t have been a problem to attach such a tracker to her car.
Quietly, she makes her way to the door of the office and peeks through carefully.
There is no one in the hallway. “I can take care of myself,” is what she told her daughter.
“Always been the best on the shooting range.” Only, what good is that without a gun?
All she has is that stupid rock in her coat pocket.
A truly prehistoric weapon. Nevertheless, she takes it in her right hand.
She hears footsteps coming from the front door.
Yasira sneaks into the hallway. Where to?
Someone is kicking at the front door. Yasira is less than two meters away.
The door holds. The patio, Yasira thinks.
Maybe she can escape through the patio. And then into the woods.
Woods . . . Like Lena . . . Another kick. The door trembles.
As she passes the kitchen, Yasira pauses.
Knives! Knives are better than rocks. She steps over the body of Scarlett’s last developer and sneaks to the knife block.
She sets the rock aside and takes a carving knife into each hand.
From the corner of her eye, she spots a movement outside the open kitchen window.
Instinctively, she ducks down before turning to the window.
In the last of the twilight, she sees a man in camouflage, covered by a balaclava.
He is holding a machine gun. An Active Homeland-Protection patch is sewn onto his clothes.
Damn! The man must have spotted Yasira too.
“In the kitchen!” he shouts. “She’s in the kitchen.”
Yasira disappears into the hallway. She is already in the living room.
She hears the front door crash behind her.
Knives in hand, she runs toward the patio door.
A guy in camouflage and a balaclava comes running around the corner, blocking her escape route.
Is it the same guy? Is it another one? Yasira can’t tell.
The man comes toward her through the still open patio door.
Without a second thought, Yasira throws the knife in her right hand.
The thing is too big and, of course, she is no skilled knife thrower.
It’s more an act of desperation and she knows it.
But luck seems to be on her side. The knife hits him in the shoulder.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t penetrate deeply. Nevertheless, the man screams out.
“You fucking bitch!” he roars.
He pulls the knife out of his shoulder. Yasira seizes the opportunity and kicks him in the stomach.
Right after that, she swings the knife in her left hand at the hand holding the submachine gun, but the masked man sees her move coming, backs away and Yasira’s blow goes nowhere.
Now I’m dead, she thinks. I didn’t seize my chance.
The guy just needs to pull the trigger. But he doesn’t pull the trigger.
Why not? He’s got the gun pointed at Yasira.
“Drop the knife!” he orders.
They want me alive, Yasira thinks. Why? They want me alive. Alive. Can I use that as an advantage? Yasira doesn’t drop the knife.
“What do you want from me?” she asks to buy time.
“Revenge for Lena!” the man replies.
Revenge? How so? No, no. This can’t be happening! Are these people really that crazy? She needs to tell the guy about Scarlett, maybe then he’ll . . . She opens her mouth but then hears a noise behind her. Immediately she is hit hard on the back of the head.
Yasira drops to the floor. Her head hurts.
“The ketamine,” says a voice.
Blurred, Yasira sees another masked man in camouflage coming toward her.
He has a syringe in his hand. She tries to hit him with the knife, but a fourth man takes the weapon from her.
The guy who hit her turns Yasira onto her back and presses her arms against the ground with his knees.
The others help him to hold her down. She screams and tries desperately to fight back, but her opponents are too many and too strong.
The man with the syringe exposes the crook of her left arm, calmly looks for a vein and sticks the needle in.
It hardly hurts. It’s not the first time he’s done this, Yasira thinks, perhaps a paramedic.
Within seconds, she passes out.