Out of the Dark

52 Decades-Long Fuse

As Evan bore down on the ERT agent, the man’s submachine gun reached horizontal.

Evan focused on the eyes of the man he was about to let kill him.

Recognized them.

The set of the features, the stubble, the pronounced ridges of the nose.

Evan had seen this face before when he’d pulled files after Doug Wetzel had alerted him to Ricky and Wade Collins.

A cousin.

The pounding of Evan’s footsteps and the whine of ricochets at his heels revved back from slow motion into normal time. He snapped the gas gun up and shot a rubber bullet through the impostor’s eye.

The big man spun violently, one hand tailing up. He fell, his boot pinning the door open. Evan hurdled him, stumbling onto the sidewalk.

Outside, MPD was scrambling to set a perimeter. Evan flew into the mix. If they shot at him, they’d kill one another with crossfire. The primary risk to Evan would come from the countersnipers on the opposing rooftops.

Dodging a crisscross of stunned officers, Evan flung the gas gun aside and grabbed his RoamZone from his pocket. He heard the first whine of a sniper bullet pass his ear. Another round chipped the sidewalk in front of him, spraying grit across his shins.

A deep engine rumble added its voice to the commotion, matched with a vibration of dread inside his own chest. Across the huge street, an SUV screeched to a halt, doors blowing open, CAT members flying out wielding SR-16s. Between them and the countersnipers, Evan had to keep his time on the street to a dead minimum.

He thumbed the first saved number, and a manhole cover blew in the center of Pennsylvania Avenue.

The diversion would buy him two seconds, maybe three, before the countersnipers would reset and pepper his torso.

Across eight cleared traffic lanes, the CAT members reeled back from the manhole explosion, weapons flung skyward. Before they could regroup, Evan sprinted into the middle of the street, directly toward them.

A quarter block away, he saw Orphan A burst out of the Federal Trade Commission Building and wheel to a stop, gaping up the street.

They locked eyes — a split-second connection — as Evan slid across the final three feet of asphalt and dropped through the hole into the sewer.

As he fell, he managed to claw onto the top rung, his body racked punishingly against the steel bars beneath. In the circle of daylight above, bullets rent the air. He fell down onto the ledge below, where another load-out bag awaited him.

The hot reek and dank concrete reminded him of another sewer in another country, the mission that had set this decades-long fuse burning.

He stripped in seconds, kicking his clothes off into the stream of muck to kill any trace DNA.

Naked save for his boxer briefs, he ripped open the bag.

Inside, a hazmat diving suit.

He squirmed into the specialized dry suit, the double-layer vulcanized rubber bunching infuriatingly at his ankles and waist. Yelled commands came from above; the agents would have to approach the open manhole tactically, which would buy him a few more precious seconds.

He raked the zipper up over his chest and then across his back, the second skin clinging to his flesh, sealing at every joint, a perfect insulation. He tugged on the positive-pressure helmet, the special intake valve wheezing into effect, preventing hostile contaminants from entering his lungs.

He noted a shadow above and looked up through the hole in the street to Orphan A. The glare on his face was homicidal.

Another memory flash jolted Evan back beneath the street of that gray foreign city. How young he’d been, patriotic blood flowing through his veins. He’d still thought he could remain above it, pristine and righteous.

He’d thought he could stay clean.

Orphan A reared back, whipping the submachine gun around to aim down into the sewer.

Still looking up at him, Evan stepped off the ledge and vanished into the black murk.