No Mercy

Chapter Thirty-four

“Scorpion, Scorpion, this is Mother Hen.”

As often was the case when radio traffic had died but the bud remained in his ear, the sound of a voice in his head startled him. Boxers, too. Thomas sensed the urgency, but had no way of knowing what it might be.

Jonathan pressed the transmit button on his vest. “Go ahead, Mother.” He suppressed a smile as he spoke to Venice. He was the one who assigned radio designations, and she hated hers.

“Scorpion, you are not alone. I repeat, you are not alone.”

Jonathan motioned for the others to get off the road, such as it was, and they all dove for the foliage on the left side of the overgrown path. Jonathan took a knee and lowered his voice to a whisper. “Okay, you’ve got my attention.”

“There’s another vehicle near yours at the bridge. Looks like a light truck. Maybe an SUV, but a small one. Details are hard to see through the trees.”

“Just the one?” Jonathan whispered.

“I think so. It’s definitely not the Green Brigade. They’re still hours out.”

Then who the hell was it? He looked to Boxers and got a shrug. “How long ago did they arrive?” he asked.

“I can’t say exactly,” Venice advised. He could hear the embarrassment in her voice. “Once you got to the cabin safely, I stepped away for a while. No more than ten minutes.”

Jonathan did the math in his head. Whoever the visitors were, if they’d only had ten minutes, they couldn’t have accomplished very much. “Any sign of people?” he asked.

“Negative. Again, the trees are pretty thick, and it’s too warm for the infrared imaging to do much good.”

Jonathan sighed. Translation: she had no friggin’ clue. “Okay, Mother, thanks for the info. Advise if you see any more detail.” Jonathan motioned for Thomas not to

He rocketed to his full height, his rifle leveled at Sheriff Gail Bonneville and the guy he assumed must be her deputy. “Freeze, Sheriff!” he commanded.

The guy to her right reacted by swinging his shotgun around, and Jonathan stitched the dirt in front of his feet with a three-round burst that made them both jump back.

“Freeze means freeze, goddammit!” he yelled.

And they froze.

“Weapons down!” he commanded.

Gail lowered her Mossberg shotgun by its barrel to rest its butt plate on the ground and let it fall like a tree. The deputy didn’t move.

“I do not want to shoot you,” Jonathan said. He saw in the deputy’s eyes that daring should-I-or-shouldn’t-I look that had gotten so many people killed over the years.

“I don’t want to shoot you either,” Boxers said, emerging from the woods behind them.

The daring look went away. The deputy knew that he’d been beaten. He let his Mossberg fall.

“Sidearms next,” Jonathan said. “Two fingers and slowly, please.”

Using exaggerated movements, they unfastened the straps that secured their weapons in their holsters, and then stooped to ease them onto the overgrown path. Handguns cost too much these days to go throwing them around the way they did in the movies.

“Well done,” Jonathan said. “Now put your hands behind your backs, please, while my big friend zips you guys up.”

It all went as if they’d rehearsed it. Boxers approached from behind and produced two set of zip ties from his vest. They were much more convenient than handcuffs, and more secure. Given the right conditions, ballpoint pen fillers could be used to pick handcuff locks. Without a knife or a good pair of snips, zip tied prisoners stayed zip tied until someone decided to let them go free. Besides, there were no keys to lose.

When they were both secure, Jonathan let his weapon fall against its sling and stepped closer. He gave his most charming smile. “Well, hello, Sheriff Bonneville. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?”

“Taking you down,” said the deputy.

Jonathan allowed his smile to fade as he shifted his gaze. “I don’t believe we’ve met.”

The man just glared.

“This is Jesse Collier,” Gail said. “My right hand.”

Jonathan took his time evaluating what he saw. Middle aged and a little thick of middle, the guy had a life-hardened look about him. Jonathan assessed him as zero bullshit and dangerous. “He looks like a loyal deputy,” he said. “A smart one, who knows when he’s no longer in control and needs to do what he’s told.”

Jesse spat a wad of phlegm that nailed the shoulder of Jonathan’s vest. Boxers dropped him with a savage punch to the kidney. The entire transaction went down with such speed that they all jumped.

“Enough!” Jonathan commanded.

“The fuck do you think you are?” Boxers yelled at the contorting deputy. “That’s my friend you just spit on.”

“Big Guy!” Jonathan said, more soothingly this time. “It’s okay.”

“No

“Gail Bonneville and Jesse Collier,” Jonathan said, “allow me to present the rest of the Hughes family-Steve and Julie.”

“What’s going on?” Julie demanded.

Jonathan explained the confrontation on the road as he helped the newcomers into dining table chairs.

“Why are they here?” Stephenson asked.

“If you want the short version,” Jonathan began, “Sheriff Bonneville is better at her job than I had anticipated. When I rescued Thomas, it was from a farmhouse in her jurisdiction.”

“So you admit it now,” Jesse said.

“Not much sense denying at this point,” Jonathan conceded. “Anyway, she’s been hunting for me ever since.” He turned one of the remaining dining chairs around and sat with his chest resting on the cane back, facing Gail. “I do hope, however, that you’ll tell how you connected the final dots. I know it didn’t come from fingerprints-we’ve already established that.”

Gail smiled as she shook her head. “When you unstrap my hands, I’ll fill you in.”

Jonathan smiled. He liked this woman. He even liked her deputy, although of the two of them, he was the one to be feared.

“What was your plan?” Jonathan asked. “Were you going to arrest us single-handedly?”

She shrugged. “If the opportunity arose, I suppose we might have. But really, it was more about recon. Once I got the lay of the land, maybe I would have taken my pictures to the state police and put together a plan to take you out.”

“In spite of your directive from the FBI.”

“Because of my directive from the FBI.”

She had guts, he had to give her that.

Stephenson looked confused. “So, your only interest here is to arrest Scorpion for shooting up your town?”

“And to arrest you for killing the Caldwell family,” Gail replied evenly.

“So you don’t know about the rest?” Julie asked.

Gail and Jesse exchanged looks. “What rest?”

Stephenson laughed heartily and paid for it with a muscle spasm. “Boy, do we have a story for you,” he grunted through the pain.

It took every bit of a half hour to tell the story again-thirty minutes that they could ill afford. By the time they were done, the Hummer and Gail’s Kia Sorrento had both arrived in the front yard, and Thomas and Boxers had joined the confab in the main room.

“So, Sheriff and Deputy, you’ve stepped into the middle of a war that’s about to happen,” Jonathan concluded. “And to tell you the God’s honest truth, I don’t know what I’m going to do about it. You’ve proved yourself to be just crazy enough not to be trusted if I let you go, but it doesn’t seem right to keep you trussed up like a couple of sculptures once the shooting starts. The third option-giving you a gun and asking you to help-doesn’t do much for me, either.”

“Well you sure as hell can’t give Deputy Dawg there a weapon,” Boxers said, pointing at Jesse.

Jonathan stood. “Enough chatting,” he said. “Let’s get to work. Once it gets dark, we’ll be on borrowed time. We’ve got to get that grass cut down out front, and we’ve got to get an ambush set.” He looked at Stephenson. “How about we start with a tour? Are you up for a little hobbling?” He held out his hand and helped the

“What about them?” Boxers asked, indicating the captives. “We gotta do something.”

He had a point. “Zip them to the chairs.”

“I have to go to the bathroom,” Gail said.

Boxers froze. He shot a panicked look to Jonathan. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. For Boxers, the Achilles’ heel was excretory functions. He could wallow to his elbows in blood and brains and not even wince. Pee and poop were entirely different matters.

Trying not to laugh at the look of horror from the big guy, Jonathan’s eyes narrowed as he assessed Gail’s angle. “Okay,” he said at length. “Tom, escort the sheriff to the outhouse.”

“No way!”

“You just have to walk with her,” Jonathan said. “You don’t have to wipe her.”

Gail was blushing. “You know I’m right here, right? And, not to get too graphic, there is the matter of my pants.”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Who’s gonna do that?”

Jonathan rolled his eyes. “Julie?”

She stood. “Sure,” she said, and she helped lift Gail to her feet with a hand on her biceps. “Come on, Sheriff, I’ll help you.”

Before they’d had a chance to move, Jonathan said, “Tom, you go, too, to help your mom.”

Thomas made a slashing motion with his hand-a definitive denial. “No. I am not-”

“Tom, I want you to stay with your mom.” This time, his tone conveyed his real message, and everyone in the room caught the subtext. Jonathan didn’t trust either woman.

Thomas conceded, even as Julie’s back stiffened.

“Let’s not argue, okay?” Thomas said, getting ahead of his mother’s inevitable complaint. “Let’s just do this and get it over with.”

Jonathan’s tour of the DuBois property started by heading up the stairs. The steps led directly to the master bedroom, where the ceiling was barely high enough to allow him to stand upright in the parallel troughs between the rough-hewn oak beams. A sagging double bed and a small table filled the space.

“Cozy,” Jonathan said.

Stephenson chuckled. “As a kid, I used to think this place was huge.”

“I guess it helps to be four feet tall.” He knocked on the nearest beam with his fist. “Solid.”

“Family lore has it that my grandfather built the place with his own hands. Not sure how he got the three-hundred-pound beams up.”

“Not a man to be trifled with,” Jonathan said. “I need to know if your wife is going to be a liability.” He launched that last part like a torpedo.

“Excuse me?”

“Do I need to watch my back when she’s around?”

Stephenson waved off the notion as foolish. “She’s not a violent woman. That’s part of why she’s being so…difficult. You have nothing to worry about.”

“You’re sure.”

“I’m better than sure. She’s just terrified. Hell, so am I.”

Fair enough, Jonathan thought. “Next I need see the GVX.”

Boxers came along. As barns go, the one on the DuBois property was small, but built to the same standards as the house. The heavy timber pillars looked brand new even if the fifteen-foot of they supported needed considerable repair. An ancient John Deere tractor stood in the far corner, still hooked up to the enormous cutting deck that clearly hadn’t been used in a while. “There you go, Big Guy,” Jonathan said, pointing. “Fill that baby with fuel from the spares on the Hummer and mow down all that free cover out front.”

“On it,” Boxers said, and he headed out the door to get things moving.

The barn in general smelled of mud and old gasoline, and light leaking through spaces in the walls cut pinstripes through the dust that stirred as they entered. Stephenson explained, “It’s a place to store stuff we never use. As a kid, it was my retreat. My fort. I used to hide out in the loft.”

Next to the tractor sat a relatively new three-quarter-ton truck. “Is that the vehicle you helped yourself to?” Jonathan asked, pointing.

“That’s the one.”

“And how much germ juice is in there?” Jonathan slipped a mini-Maglite out of a loop on his belt and twisted it on, launching a piercing white beam across the floor. “Show me,” he said.

Stephenson hobbled to the back of the truck and pulled open the back door. All they could see were five wooden crates, each of them three feet square. The one closest to the rear of the vehicle had clearly been opened, and its lid hastily replaced. “That’s the one I took the cylinders out of on the night we were trying to free Thomas,” he explained, pointing.

Jonathan hoisted himself into the truck for a closer look.

Stephenson continued, “Tibor met me at a truck stop outside of Shepherdstown that night. I left the truck there and took the three canisters that Conger wanted and we went the rest of the way by car.”

The canisters themselves were about the size and shape of a salami, and constructed of what appeared to be stainless steel. Jonathan hefted one and guessed the weight to be maybe six pounds.

“Not much to them, is there?’ Stephenson said.

“A couple of pounds is a lot of germs. Why do you think Tibor Rothman agreed to come along with you?”

Stephenson pursed his lips and shrugged. “I really don’t know. My begging helped, I think.” He meant it as a joke, but it fell flat. “I talked myself into believing that the only way to have a chance long-term, if everything went right, was to have an eyewitness from the press to report what had happened.”

Jonathan put the canister back in the crate and closed the top. “That wouldn’t make them all the more anxious to kill you?”

“Maybe, but for a different reason. In that case, they’d be killing me because they were pissed. Everybody would know who did it, and for what reason, and because of that, I figured they’d be less inclined to go to the trouble.”

Jonathan smiled. “Good old-fashioned reverse logic. Why did you and Tibor split up after you bolted from the drop-off site?”

“Harder to catch two moving targets than one. I ended up taking a bus back to the truck stop where I left this beast.” He patted the side of the truck. “By the time I got back to it, I figured the story would have broken and it would have been over. But the story never broke. I guessed that meant Tibor was missing and I decided to go into hiding.”

“Let me get down outta this,” Jonathan said. “Shit gives braced himself, his left leg ahead of his right. He settled himself with a deep breath and tightened his whole hand around the pistol-grip stock as he tucked his shoulder in. When the weapon barked, the kid seemed ready for it. Even without binoculars, Jonathan could see the white gouge that the bullet carved into the bark of the tree.

“Very nice,” he said, meaning it. “Give me another.”

Thomas set himself and fired again. More wood flew.

Jonathan grinned. “Excellent. Where’d you learn to shoot?”

“A buddy of mine at school has a farm. I’ve killed hundreds of bottles in the last four years.”

“Bottles don’t shoot back at you,” Boxers growled. “Ever shot anything that was alive?”

Thomas had had it with Boxers’ grousing. “What the hell is your problem with me? I’m on your side.”

“I don’t need you on my side,” Boxers said.

“But he’s here, isn’t he?” Jonathan said. “He’s volunteered to put himself in harm’s way, and we’re going to need the extra manpower.”

“Against these yahoos that are on their way? Bullshit.”

“That’s enough!” Jonathan snapped.

“It’s crazy!” the big man snapped back. “Can we talk privately?”

“We don’t have time,” Jonathan said. What was the point? He knew where the conversation was going to go. “Just say what’s on your mind.”

Boxers shook his head. “Not in front of the kid.”

“Hey!” Thomas barked. “What is with-”

“You don’t know shit, kid. You don’t even know what you’re getting into.”

“I know enough,” Thomas said.

“No you don’t! And the fact that you think you do is even scarier.” He turned to Jonathan. “You don’t have the right to expose them like this. It’s wrong, and you know it.”

Jonathan stared, stunned.

“I’m good for this, Scorpion,” Thomas said.

Piss and vinegar, Jonathan thought.

“What are you gonna do, Scorpion?” Boxers pressed. “You want me to speak freely, I’ll speak freely. You got the only two people who actually know how to shoot tied up on the porch, you got one who’s ready to surrender to anybody who’ll listen, you got an old guy with a bad leg, and a kid who thinks we’re gonna be attacked by bottles. What in that picture looks anything but crazy to you? If these Brigade yahoos are good enough to make us need what we’ve got, then we’re completely screwed. You’re gonna get them killed.”

Jonathan didn’t know what to say. Andrew Hawkins’s description of Ivan Patrick’s demagoguery echoed in his head. If Boxers was right-if he was asking too much from people who had no chance to deliver-then Jonathan and Ivan had something terrible in common. He said nothing as he turned and started walking toward the tree line.

“Where you goin’?” Boxers wanted to know.

Jonathan kept walking. He needed to think. A knot had formed in his stomach. Say what you like, package it as you wish, this was a revenge mission-a murder mission-and he realized now that it was a poisonous one. Dom and Ven were both right. Boxers had even seen it, for God’s sake enough for me. Now let’s get ready to kill some bad guys.”

This time as Boxers led, Jonathan followed. As he walked, he thought about Boxers’ question. The coming fight would go as it would go. Far more difficult was the next step. Irene Rivers could not have been more direct in her warning: the weapons they had in their possession were a Homeland Security issue now, meaning presumption of guilt and suspension of all civil rights. It meant disappearing. Poof. It meant never having existed at all.

Jonathan had learned years ago that it was a mistake to second-guess the past, but under the circumstances of the last week, he found it impossible not to. The ripple effect of Thomas’s rescue was staggering in its scope, the number of ruined lives and people killed-with more to come tonight.

All because of…what? Greed, he supposed. That was the common denominator. The Patrones and Carlyle Industries had been greedy for money, Fabian Conger had been greedy for attention, and the agencies that had funded the project in the first place were greedy for power. All the rest were soldiers, pawns, or merely collateral damage.

There had to be a way to stop the juggernaut of destruction. There had to be an exit strategy that would allow them to win this for real. All Jonathan had to do was find the right handle to pull.

Good old-fashioned reverse logic.

A fully formed plan came to him just like that, out of nowhere. He jerked to a stop and Boxers turned.

“What’s wrong now?” Big Guy asked.

“Not a thing,” Jonathan said with a grin. “I’ve got the answer.”