Ruthless.Com

Chapter Twenty-Four

"Is there some kind of problem, Mr. Turner?" the man calling himself Lombardi asked from where he sat in the waiting area.

Holding the court papers, a puzzled expression on his face, Turner glanced at him as he returned through a doorway he'd entered just moments ago.

"The name of the corporation simply doesn't show on our database," he said, approaching his chair. "I don't know what to make of it."

Lombardi rose and sidled up to him, studying the papers over his shoulder.

"I'm no expert at this high-tech stuff, but could be it's just misspelled," he said.

Turner shook his head. ' The computers will essentially correct for that sort of error by searching for approximate matches. In this case, nothing came up."

Lombardi grinned.

"Then I guess those papers are fake and the company doesn't exist," he said.

Turner looked at him. "I don't understand…"

Lombardi reached under his jacket and drew the Beretta he'd taken from one of the murdered security guards.

"Oh, I think you do," he said, and rammed the handle of the weapon upward into Turner's nose, shattering his septum and sending tiny slivers of bone into his brain. Turner dropped instantly to the floor, his eyes rolling up in their sockets, dark blood spouting from his nostrils. He spasmed twice, emitted a labored gurgling sound, and died.

Lombardi gestured to the other man as he got up off his seat. Then both went around the body and passed through the entry to the vault area.

A short while before the ringing of the doorbell startled her into alertness, Kirsten had slipped into a doze on the sofa, a kind of syrupy exhaustion having settled over her in the late morning, and stayed with her as she'd done some routine chores — washing the breakfast dishes, straightening up the living room, and gathering the kids' toys from around the apartment and garden and hauling them back into their bedroom closet.

Afterward, sitting down to listen to some light jazz on the stereo, hoping it would calm her mind, she had been surprised at how fast her eyelids had started getting heavy, and thought it quite incredible that she could be simultaneously clipping along full-steam on nervous energy and feeling so mentally fatigued that her brain almost seemed immersed in a pool of thick, lukewarm glue. It was a little like the way she'd felt as a university student studying for final exams, living for days and nights on coffee and chocolate.. only many times more intense.

And now the sound of the buzzer had practically sent her bouncing off the couch, still half out of it, yet conscious of her nerves revving up to speed again.

She glanced at the clock on the wall opposite her. Could Nimec have arrived already? Under average circumstances it would have been highly unlikely he could have made it in so short a time… but he'd explained that he would be returning to the UpLink ground station in Johor, and would probably travel from there into KL by helicopter. Which had also told her a couple of things about him beyond the obvious fact that he was in a hurry. One, he was at least as concerned about Max as she was. And two, he had the sort of clout with Max's boss to pull some major strings, maybe even worked for UpLink himself—

Bzzzzzzzzz!

She crossed the room to the door, straightening her blouse, smoothing her skirt down with her hands. Whoever was out there was really leaning on the bell.

"Yes?" she said, reaching for the doorknob. "Who is it?"

"Johor police," a man said from outside. He was speaking Bahasa. "We want to see Kirsten Chu."

"Excuse me?" she replied in the same language. The blunt, gruff quality of his voice had surprised her as much as his response.

"It's about her call," he said. "We need to ask her some questions."

Kirsten didn't move, hardly even breathed. She was still holding the knob, her fingers suddenly sweating around it.

The Singapore cop with whom she'd spoken had said the Johor authorities would be in touch.. but she hadn't expected them to just show up at the door. Wouldn't they want to phone and make an appointment, if for no other reason than to spare themselves a needless trip in case she wasn't home?

And does he really sound like a police officer? she thought.

Her pulse fluttering in her temples, she raised the spyhole cover, peered outside….

And felt her stomach turn to ice.

Never mind how he'd sounded, none of the men standing in the walk outside — she could see four or five of them through the little two-way mirror — looked anything like police investigators. Their hair was long, their clothes sloppy, and their eyes…

Even had they been wearing bright silver badges and starched blue uniforms, their eyes would have given them away.

"Come on," the one nearest the door said. "Open up."

She pulled away from the spyhole and inhaled shakily.

"Just a minute," she said. "I need to put something on.

The man slammed the door with his forearm.

"Forget the games," he said. "Open it."

Her fingers harrowing her cheeks, Kirsten took a step backward across the living room.

''Open up!9' the man said, beating the door again, hitting it so hard she was afraid it might fly off its hinges.

Terrified, her breaths coming in sharp little bursts, Kirsten whirled and plunged through the apartment.

An instant later the door crashed open behind her.

The entryway through which the intruders had left the waiting room led to a short passage, which itself gave into another small, boxy room that was bare except for a computer workstation on the right, and a wall-mounted biometric scanner across from it beside a reinforced steel door.

"Lombardi" went straight over to the scanner. This was the part of the job that made him uptight. He'd been telling Turner the truth when he remarked that he was no technical wizard, and felt it would have been easy enough to steer the supervisor back into the room at gunpoint, force him to let the system take his readings, and in that way gain access to the vault. But the concern was that Turner might have triggered some discreet alarm had that been done. Caine's instructions had been explicit, and they'd been warned not to deviate from them under any circumstances.

Standing before the scanning unit, Lombardi raised his left hand to the level of the cameras designed to image his facial and iris characteristics, turning it so the artificial star-sapphire ring on his fourth finger would be visible to their lenses. Then, keeping that hand perfectly motionless, he placed his right hand flat on the machine's glass opto-electrical pad. Ordinarily this would both activate the unit and take readings of his fingerprint and palm geometry, which would then be converted to algorithms and matched to stored employee-identification data. But by an arcane process he did not quite understand, the specific star pattern on his ring would key a match with a simple data-string buried in the system mainframe's hard drive, which caused — or, according to Caine, was supposed to cause — the normal image-recognition sequence to be bypassed.

Lombardi held his breath and waited, one hand up, the other on the unit's clear glass interface, staring at its eye-level VDU. A red light had begun to glow beneath the glass, indicating the scanner had been activated by his touch… but if all was going as planned, the readings of its thermal sensors would be ignored by the computers.

Five seconds went by.

Ten.

He waited.

And then the words CLEARED TO ENTER appeared in the middle of the screen.

He exhaled, heard the faint click of the vault's lock mechanism retracting, and turned to his partner, who was already working open the heavy steel door.

They were in.

Kirsten ran toward the back of the apartment, hearing the door burst open behind her, hearing the men who'd been outside come pounding through the living room at her heels. She had only a vague notion of what to do, but it was all she had, and there was no choice except to go with it. If she could make it to the back door before they caught up, get into the building's central parking court, then maybe—

Suddenly a hand reached out from behind and snatched the sleeve of her blouse, pulling at her, yanking her backward. She stumbled, and almost lost her balance, but somehow managed to keep her legs underneath her, keep moving, carried by her own forward momentum. She twisted sharply as her pursuer tried to get his other hand around her, heard a loud ripping sound, and then was free of his grasp, racing across the room again, scrambling toward the door, a ragged streamer of cotton dangling from her arm.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Stop, you bitch!"

Kirsten was within several feet of the back door now, the kitchen on her immediate right, the hallway leading to the bedrooms on her left. She lunged ahead, shooting her hand out in front of her, reaching for the doorknob, thinking she might make it, thinking she really might, when the man whose grip she'd managed to escape a moment earlier sprang at her in a flying tackle, the full weight of his body whumping into her, his arms clamping around her waist.

He spun Kirsten around and swept her in toward his chest, trying to get a firmer hold on her. Frantic, she snatched a glance past his shoulder, saw his companions rushing up through the living room, and thrust her hands out at his face, clawing at him, digging her fingers into his eyes.

That bought her a momentary reprieve. Emitting an animal yelp of pain, her attacker shoved fiercely away from her and covered his face with his hands, spinning in a blind semicircle, bowling wildly into the men behind him. At the same time, Kirsten flung herself at the door, clutched the knob, and tore it open.

Gasping for breath, a gale wind of terror and desperation roaring through her brain, she dashed out into the automobile court.

When the white-smocked techie first opened the door to the security office, the coffee she brought the guys every day at the same time balanced on a cafeteria tray in one hand, she simply couldn't credit her eyes. She stood there in the doorway, looking at the bodies and the blood streaming from the unrecognizable remains of their heads, the blood spattered everywhere in the room, the blood and strings of gristle covering the monitors on which closed-circuit images of the halls were still flashing through their preset sequences as if nothing eventful had occurred to disrupt the daily routine, and then suddenly the world went into a crazy tilt and the two coffee cups spilled from the tray and hit the floor where there was all that blood and gore and she opened her mouth wide and screamed, screamed at the top of her lungs

Screamed until long after half the people in the building had come running toward the office to see what in the name of God and his blessed angels was the matter.

Kirsten squatted on her haunches between two parked cars, trembling with fright, trying not to move, afraid the slightest sound would give her position away to her pursuers. She could hear their feet crunching on the asphalt as they moved up and down the aisles, searching for her amid the rows of slotted vehicles. There weren't as many cars in the lot as there would have been at night, when many more residents of the apartment complex would be home from work, but she would take what small blessings she could… and for the first time in her life feel grateful for the large government-sponsored housing developments that had virtually wiped out the city's traditional architecture.

More footsteps. Closer. She hugged herself, trying to think clearly through her fear. If she could manage to hide until someone came along either to leave or fetch his car… or perhaps inch her way around toward the driveway leading to the street, then maybe she'd have a chance to get some help…

Kirsten heard the crunch of another footfall, this one no more than two aisles down to the left of her, then an entirely different set a little further off to the right.

They were boxing her in on either side.

She stiffened, biting down on the fleshy part of her hand, stifling a mutinous scream. While part of her kept insisting that she give in to the urge, there was a more rational part that understood it would be the worst mistake she could possible make. If she screamed, they'd know exactly where she was, would be on her in an instant, well before anyone could come to her aid.

No, she dared not do it. Dared not make a sound. Dared not move a muscle.

The moment she did, Kirsten was sure she would be theirs.

The optical mini-CDs were stored in specially designed, alphanumerically-tabbed electronic "stacks" lining the walls of the vault. Once inside, the pair of intruders had been able to locate the object of their search within seconds. At the touch of a button, the disc was scanned, identified by a bar code imprinted on its surface, and then ejected from the repository in a gleaming stainless-steel tray.

Slipping the disk into a protective plastic sleeve he took from a wall dispenser, Lombardi dropped it into the breast pocket of his jacket and gave his partner the ready signal.

The two men strode from the vault less than three minutes after entering it, passed through the waiting area without a glance at the dead supervisor, and reentered the outer corridor as if they had nothing to hide.

They were swinging back into the main entry hall when the lab tech's screams pierced the air and all hell broke loose around them.

Kirsten knew she wouldn't be able to hide from her pursuers much longer.

The man she'd heard on her left had reached the end of the aisle he'd been searching, swung into the aisle immediately beside the one where she was crouched, and then turned back up in her direction, pausing every couple of steps to poke his head back and forth between the cars. He was now standing directly across from her, separated from her by a single row of vehicles. And the others were closing in from elsewhere around the court.

The man on the left took a step up the aisle, then another. Kirsten's breath came to a stop. She could see his boots and the bottoms of his jeans under the chassis of the car she was leaning against. Her heart was booming in her ears like a timpani, and in the panicky, half-crazed moment before she got a handle on herself, Kirsten was afraid he'd be able to hear it as well.

In a minute or so he would turn up her aisle, and it would be over.

She had never in her life felt so terribly helpless and alone.

God, God, what am I going to do?

No opening had presented itself. Nobody had driven in or out of the lot, and she had no reason to think anybody would before it was too late to make any difference.

She suddenly realized the only thing she could do was run for it, break for the driveway, and hope that by some miracle she could reach the street before they did. She knew even that wouldn't necessarily mean she was safe— the men who'd come after her and Max had been willing to strike on a thoroughfare as busy as Scotts Road, strike with hundreds of pedestrians around, for godsakes. If this group was just a fraction as bold, they might not have the slightest concern about who saw them.

But she hadn't any choice. It was either leave the pot or be cooked.

She waited another second, took a deep gulp of air, and then forced herself to spring to her feet.

The man on the left spotted her instantly. Their eyes made the briefest contact, hers full of hunted terror, his absent of any hint of sympathy or compassion.

Then he rasped an order to his companions and came hurtling across the aisle at her.

Kirsten turned and fled.

The first indication that something was wrong came the moment they pulled their rental car up to the curb, and was the only one they needed. If there were a way to think things were normal after arriving at a person's home and finding the door kicked in, Nimec didn't know it.

He glanced out the windshield at the street, at the outside stairs, at the walkways spanning the rows of doors on the building's upper stories. All were empty.

"Have your weapons ready," he said to Noriko and Osmar. He withdrew his own Beretta 8040 from its concealment holster, ejected its standard ten-round clip, and chocked in the twelve-round magazine/grip extension. "Don't seem to be any eyes around, but if somebody does call the local gendarmes, we'll get it straight with them later."

Following his lead, the others jogged out of the car and across the ground level unit's front yard to the partially open door.

Nimec instinctively moved to the right of the door frame, gesturing the others to the left, making sure there was some wall between them and whatever potential threat might be inside.

"Kirsten, this is Pete Nimec!" he called through the opening, leaning his head around the splintered jamb. "Are you okay in there?"

No reply.

He pulled back against the wall, cocked his pistol, and looked across the doorway at his teammates.

"Go!" he said.

They rushed into the apartment and fanned out in a practiced crossover maneuver, Nimec moving to the left of the entrance, gun held ready, Noriko and Osmar following him and buttonhooking to the right. The three of them rapidly pivoted to cover the center of the room with their weapons, legs apart, making broad sweeps of their sectors of fire.

They seemed to be alone in the place.

"Kirsten, you here?" Nimec called again.

Still no answer.

Noriko tapped his arm. "Look," she said, pointing straight across the living room.

The back door was wide open.

Nimec's eyes flicked between her and Osmar.

"Come on," he said, and rushed toward the door.

The two intruders paused in the hall and exchanged glances. Confused, frightened staffers poured from doorways on either side of them. Not a word was spoken. They could see that the greatest commotion was down the left bend of the corridor, and knew the bodies of the guards had been discovered. Their original intention had been to walk out the main entrance, and they would have to gamble on still being able to leave that way in the disturbance. It would be dangerous, but any attempt to leave the building through emergency exits would trip sensors that would likely pinpoint the specific door being opened. And they had no illusions about having eliminated the threat from security. The men at the surveillance monitors would not have been the sole members of the plainclothes team on premises. And there was the uniformed guard at the door.

The intruders could only keep their fingers crossed that he'd be sufficiently distracted for them to slip past. Otherwise, they'd have to kill him, too.

They moved forward through the scared, noisy people in the corridor, and were nearly at the checkpoint where they'd had to leave their guns when an alarm sounded, a loud on-and-off noise that grated on the eardrums. The guard at the door seemed to be tracking them with his eyes as they approached.

"We're going out to radio for assistance," the one who'd called himself Lombardi said. His hand was in his jacket pocket.

The guard looked at him.

"I'm sorry," he said. "The building's been sealed."

"Don't insult me," Lomardi said. "We have a job to do."

He started to move forward, Samford walking beside him. The alarm grated on and on.

The guard clamped a hand around Lombardi's arm.

"You need to call somebody, we have phones in here," he said. "But nobody's leaving."

Lombardi smiled. His hand was still in his jacket.

"Don't bet on it," he said, and squeezed the trigger of the pistol he'd taken from the guards in the monitor room.

Hit at point-blank range, the security guard catapulted backward off his feet, a cloud of blood exploding from his chest. Lombardi pumped two more bullets into him as he dropped to the ground, finishing him.

He turned to his companion and waved him along. He was aware of screams, pale faces, racing feet behind them on the concrete floor.

They hastened toward the door, and got as far as the archway of the weapons detector when someone behind them shouted out an order to halt. They kept walking.

"I said freeze!" the voice repeated. "This is your final warning!"

Without turning, they quickened their pace.

A gunshot fired out from behind them. Lombardi whirled and saw a plainclothes guard in the center of the corridor, both hands around a gun, his knees bent in a shooter's stance. Lombardi returned fire, missed, heard a thud-thud-thud from the suited guard's gun, and then was slapped across the middle by something he didn't see. He looked down at himself, his eyes wide with shock, and had just enough time to glimpse the bloody amalgam of flesh and shredded clothing that had replaced his stomach before he crumpled in a dying heap.

The other intruder reached for his own gun, but before he'd gotten it out of his pocket saw two more plainclothesmen emerge from the branching corridors at his rear. They all had their weapons drawn, and had triangulated their aim to put him in a perfect crossfire.

"Hold it!" he said. Dropping the gun to the floor, kicking it away from him, and slowly raising his hands above his head. "Don't shoot, okay? Okay?"

Their guns extended, the Sword ops moved in and took him.

Swinging around the grille of a car, Kirsten tore into the aisle and ran like hell, making for the driveway in a wild headlong dash.

She heard overlapping footsteps behind her, close, close, and pushed herself to move even faster, her legs pumping, arms working at her sides like pistons—

And then, suddenly, one of her pursuers sprang from behind a parked car several yards in front of her.

Between her and the driveway.

His right eye was bloodshot and swollen, and there was a thin line of blood trickling down his cheek from its lower lid.

It was the man she'd grappled with in the apartment. He had some kind of gun in his hand — a submachine gun, she thought, though she was hardly an expert — and was holding it out at her.

"No more shit from you," he said in Bahasa.

She halted, glanced over her shoulder.

Two more of the men who'd come for her were walking quickly up the aisle in her direction, their firearms held downward, flat against their legs. The fourth stalker had emerged near the spot where she'd been hiding.

"Just come on over here, I won't hurt you," said the one blocking her path to the driveway. He motioned with his gun. "Let's go."

Kirsten didn't budge, and was amazed to realize she was shaking her head in the negative.

He shrugged, holding his weapon steady. She could hear the other three coming close behind her.

"You want to wrestle some, more, we wrestle," he said, and took a step forward.

"Hold it right there! Bayaso reya/"

The voice echoing through the court stopped all four of the men in their tracks. An expression of stunned surprise on his features, the one in front of Kirsten abruptly looked around for its source.

"Drop the gun!" the voice said in Bahasa.

Still looking from side to side, the man blocking the driveway moved the gun off of Kirsten, but didn't lower it.

Kirsten heard a crack like the sound of a detonating firecracker. And then a blossom of crimson appeared in the middle of the man's rib cage and he pitched facedown to the asphalt, his submachine gun clattering from his grasp.

"I hope the rest of you are smarter," the voice said. "It's finished."

Kirsten turned her head, saw one of the gunmen behind her start to raise his weapon, instantly heard two more sharp cracks — only now coming from a different part of the court. The man screamed and fell over clutching his knees, blood spraying out from between his fingers.

The remaining pair of men tossed down their weapons and started to run, scrambling out of the aisle, and then bolting wildly toward the driveway exit. No one tried to stop them.

Her eyes wide and staring, Kirsten looked uncomprehendingly around the court, and all at once saw a brown-skinned Malay spring to his feet behind the tail of a car, several aisles down and directly across from where the first stalker had fallen dead. An instant later two more people appeared near the one who'd been shot in the knees — a white man with close-cropped hair and an Oriental woman.

The man with the short hair holstered his gun beneath his jacket and approached her.

"Kirsten, it's okay, you're safe," he said in a calm, level voice. "I'm Pete Nimec."

She started to say something in response, but her throat had closed up, and her teeth were chattering too violently.

Instead, she strode over to him, put her face against his shoulder, put her arms around him, and started crying.

Noriko had gone to wait in the apartment with Kirsten while Nimec and Osmar took care of business in the parking court.

"Mr. Nimec," Osmar said. "There is something I must show you."

"Right."

Nimec finished flex-cuffing the wounded man, folded a blanket he'd gotten from the apartment under his head, then went over to Osmar.

Kneeling over the body of the one he'd dropped, the Malay lifted his motionless hand off the asphalt.

"You see kris tattoo?" he said, glancing up at Nimec.

Nimec nodded. "Guy I cuffed has exactly the same marking on him. What the hell is it, some kind of cult sign?"

Osmar shook his head.

"Is more like what you Americans call…" He made a low sound of concentration in his throat, as if groping hard for words. Then he snapped his fingers. "Ah," he said. "Colors"

"Gang colors, you mean," Nimec said. "As in the Crips and Bloods."

Osmar nodded, and placed his finger on the tattooed skin. "The kris, many pirate gangs have such marks. But you see designs on blade?"

Nimec squatted beside him for a closer look. He did indeed see them — grotesque anthropomorphic figures that reminded him a little of the paintings on Egyptian tombs.

"They are rakasa," Osmar said. "Demons. Different for each brotherhood."

Sudden understanding spread across Nimec's features.

'These two punks… someone familiar with regional gang crime would be able tell their affiliation from the markings," he said

Osmar nodded again. "And this one, I know well from when I was with police," he said. "The men work for Khao Luan. He is Kuomintang."

The word rang a vague bell. Nimec searched his memory a few seconds.

"A heroin trader?" he said finally.

Another nod. "None are more powerful. The Thai army, they make him to flee during pacification program. Ten years ago, maybe more. Since then, he is in Indonesia."

Nimec gave him an imperative look. "Where? Does anybody know where?"

"Everyone knows, and everyone fears to touch him," Osmar said. "In parts of Banjarmasin, the Thai has longer arms than the government."

Nimec was quiet, letting it all sink in. What connection could a man like that have to Monolith? What on earth had Max stumbled onto?

After a moment he clapped a hand on Osmar's arm and nodded firmly.

"My friend, we're about to do some more island-hopping," he said. "And I promise you, if this guy's involved in Blackburn's disappearance, I'll cut his fucking arms off myself"