Third Strike

CHAPTER 34

In the corridor outside, Terry O’Loughlin was sitting next to the groggy security guard. She had both hands pressed over her ears and her eyes tight shut and she jumped when I staggered over and touched her shoulder.

“Is it … over?” she said, pale as winter. “Is he dead?”

“Yes, it’s over,” I said. “And no, he isn’t.”

But maybe he’ll wish he was.

My father paused and looked down at her. “Whereabouts on the second level is the research lab?” he said, and the clipped note was back with a vengeance.

She gathered those lethal legs underneath her and pushed to her feet. “I’ll show you,” she said, doggedly undaunted.

“Just tell us, Terry, and we’ll find it,” Sean said, his voice quiet. He jerked his head. “What started in there isn’t over.”

Her jaw hardened, just a little. “And I helped start it,” she said. “So I won’t shy away from seeing it end.”

Sean stared at her a moment longer, then nodded like she’d passed some kind of test. His eyes flicked to me. “And are you up to this, Charlie?” A challenge there, too.

No.

“I’ll be fine,” I said, knowing he’d sense the lie but have no choice other than to run with it. And even as I spoke, Vondie’s words came back to me, cruel and bitter as a blade.

Keeping those kind of secrets will kill any relationship stone dead. You know that.

Sean moved in close, crowding me. “You’re suffering, Charlie,” he said tightly. “Do you think I can’t see it? If the damned Vicodin will help you get through this, just take it and don’t be so bloody stubborn.”

“I—.” I stepped back, still trembling but gaining steadily. “I’m fine,” I repeated.

He handed me the Glock he’d taken from Collingwood, watched me close my fist around it. I didn’t expect that a man of Collingwood’s experience would carry a weapon unready, but I brushed my index finger over the loaded chamber indicator anyway, just to be sure, dropped the magazine out to verify a full load, slapped it home again, and returned his stare, defiant. “Let’s just get this done.”

“All right.” He stepped back, his face shut down. “Okay, Terry, lead the way.”

She took us up a utility stairwell to the next floor, through a maze of corridors that all looked the same and went on for miles, past labs and huge soulless open-plan office spaces. The place had the sterile smell of air conditioning over new carpet and old sweat, laced with the thin pine scent of industrial cleaning fluid.

We moved as quietly as we could, Sean ahead, Terry directing him, my father behind her, seeming almost unaware of his immediate surroundings, me covering our rear, my limbs returning to me with every stride.

Working weekends was obviously not company policy at Storax. We encountered nobody, saw nothing except the empty cubes of office drones, containing cluttered desks and dead computer monitors. Did these people have any idea what the company that employed them had been working on? If the check arrived each month, did they care?

Terry halted. “The lab’s up ahead,” she said, keeping her voice low. “Through the next set of doors. On your left.”

“Good,” Sean said. “What’s the layout?”

Terry shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve never had cause to go in there before. Maybe if I had …” She broke off, frowning.

“You’ve done more than enough, Terry,” Sean said. He smiled. It was the kind of smile that, when he directed it at me, had a tendency to make me go a little stupid. It seemed to have much the same effect on Terry. “You’d best stay here. I doubt they’ll let you close enough to punt their bollocks into their throats, in any case.”

“Excuse me?”

“He means you probably won’t get a chance to kick them in the balls,” I supplied as I came past her.

“No, I guess not,” she said, looking faintly embarrassed. “But I’ll stay close. I reckon, when this is over, you might just need a good lawyer. And I have a feeling I’ll be making a career move.”

I glanced at my father. “You should stay here, too,” I said abruptly. “We can’t protect you when we go in there. Trying may get us all killed.”

“I don’t expect you to protect me, Charlotte. I expect you to do your job,” my father said, coldly imperious.

I stared at him blankly for a moment before I saw the underlying thread of panic.

If you don’t save her now, how can I live with my part in this?

Was this acceptance at last? If so, why did it feel like it had all come too little, too late? And why did I feel he’d turned into someone whose approval was the last thing I wanted.

He nodded to Sean, a stiff jerk of the head. Sean nodded back. Then we were moving forwards, the pair of us, strides matching. I’d seen Sean kill and it hadn’t affected the way I felt about him. But seeing my father primed to do the same had sickened me to the soul. Ironic that it was probably a mirror image of how he felt about me.

I shut it out, shoved it down deep, and did the only thing I knew how to do well—prepared to kill two strangers without even knowing their names.

We went through the doors into the research lab totally in sync. Low left, and high right, angled so we were covering each other’s back.

As soon as we were through the door, we saw them. Buzz-cut and the limping pickup driver. I had the Glock up and sighted instantly, but the picture presented meant I did not fire. Neither of us did.

The lab was mostly white, lined with cupboards and workbenches, with half a dozen clearly delineated workstations. No clutter. Just mundane, like a particularly large kitchen that happens to have no appliances. It smelled of something sharp and acidic that I couldn’t place.

My mother was perched on one of the high stools that were slotted into each workstation. It had been dragged out into the center of the tiled floor and she sat very upright, with her knees together and, from the awkward set of her shoulders, her hands bound behind her back.

The man I’d christened Buzz-cut was standing to her right, which made him mine. He had a large-caliber silvered semiautomatic with the hammer back and the muzzle jammed into my mother’s ear, where it wasn’t going to come off target easily.

As soon as we’d come in, my mother’s eyes flew to mine and stayed there. She was terrified, but I saw the relief creep into them at the sight of us—at the sight of me. The situation was hopeless, impossible, but she saw us and for some reason I didn’t think I’d ever be able to fathom, it gave her hope.

The pickup driver was far right, splitting our field of fire. Sean’s Glock seemed to lock onto him of its own accord. The pickup driver also held a Glock. Without hesitation, he pointed it right back.

“Looks like we have a standoff,” Sean said. “Are you prepared to die here, gentlemen?”

“If we have to,” Buzz-cut said calmly.

“You must see this is not a winnable situation,” I said evenly. “From either side. You shoot, we shoot. People will die. What’s the point?”

He shrugged. “Surrender is not an option,” he said, and I saw the fierce pride in him. He skimmed eyes over me that were cold and flat. “You should know that, ma’am.”

So, he’d been a soldier, recognized like for like.

“O-kay, so, what happens now?” I said, allowing a hint of impatience to show. “We all wait here till we die of old age?”

Buzz-cut didn’t answer. Time bunched up around us, slow and heavy, as we waited for the first nerves to fail.

Then, suddenly, the door behind us punched open. Sean and I darted sideways, ready to meet a new threat, but it didn’t take a fraction of a second to know we were outgunned.

The six-man team that entered were dressed in SWAT black, armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, utterly focused, and completely multilateral when it came to taking sides. They pointed weapons at all of us.

I tuned out the yell of commands to give ourselves up and get down on the ground, and kept the sights of the Glock lined up steady on Buzz-cut’s face. Until he lowered his weapon, I was damned if I was going to lower mine.

The pickup driver was the first to fold. But then, I suppose he had the freshest memory of what it meant to be shot. He came off target, letting the barrel rise as he brought both hands up. Very slowly, using only his finger and thumb, he laid the gun on the ground. When he straightened, his hands were already linked behind his head.

As soon as the pickup driver surrendered his gun, Sean snapped his aim across to Buzz-cut, nearly giving the two guys who were covering him heart failure. If they’d been any less well trained, less experienced, they probably would have taken him out right there and then.

The shouting died away. They must have known they were wasting their breath. I wondered how long it would be before the shooting started.

Then I heard more footsteps slightly behind me, to my right. Two sets. Not the harsh dull clatter of boots on tile, but the lighter tread of good shoes with leather soles. I didn’t take my eyes away from Buzz-cut, even when I saw the way he stiffened at the new arrivals.

“Sean, Charlie,” Parker Armstrong said in a calm and reasonable voice. “Please lower your weapons.”

The surprise was such that, for a moment, neither of us moved.

“In case it’s escaped your attention, Parker,” I said, without turning, talking through gritted teeth to avoid moving my jaw and unsettling my aim, “the guy over there has a gun to the head of a hostage.”

I had to think of her in those terms. Depersonalize it. It was the only way I could function.

“It hadn’t,” Parker said, and his voice was dry now, “but I need you to trust me on this.”

There came a silence into which I swear I could hear the beat of my own heart.

“If he pulls the trigger,” Sean said in that pleasantly lethal tone I knew so well, “I will kill him, regardless.”

“And if you don’t, I’ll kill him for you,” Parker said, diamond hard and just as polished. “But it won’t come to that. We will work this out. Stand down, both of you.”

Sean let out his breath on a long hiss, then relaxed out of a shooter’s stance. With a feeling of hollow regret, I did the same. The nearest man in black held out his hand for the Glock. I stared him down and kept it in my hand, letting it hang alongside my leg with my finger outside the guard. He saw the blood in my eye, shrugged, and didn’t make an issue of it.

Across the room, my mother’s lids fluttered closed, like she was praying. I couldn’t bear to watch, glanced towards Parker instead and saw my boss was back in his usual sobersuited office attire. He looked tired, the lines on his face more deeply etched than when I’d last seen him in the rest stop south of Boston, only days ago.

He acknowledged our capitulation with no more than the twitch of his facial muscles, but a little of the tension went out of his shoulders. He’d staked his reputation on being able to control us, I realized, and more besides.

Parker threw a look to the man who was standing silently alongside him. I’ve played my part. Now you play yours.

The other man was older, someone I’d never seen before, with a silver mustache and cold, cold eyes. He, too, was wearing a somber suit, with a bland tie and spit-polished shoes, but he was military through to his bones. He accepted Parker’s unspoken challenge without a flicker, and lifted his chin, letting his voice carry over to Buzz-cut.

“You too, son,” he said, low and slow like tires on a gravel road. “Stand down, now.”

Buzz-cut braced, like he had to force himself not to come to attention.

“Sir, I am acting under direct orders from Mr. Collingwood—”

“Mr. Collingwood is no longer … fit for duty,” the man said, slicing him off. He let his eyes trail briefly over me and there was nothing in them. It was like being gazed at by a snake. “He has been relieved.”

A faint flush appeared across Buzz-cut’s cheeks. “I’m sorry, sir, but my orders still stand. Mr. Collingwood was very clear on that.”

You had to admire his guts, if nothing else. Six men pointing guns at him and he never flinched, never wavered. Easy to see why Collingwood had chosen this man to do his dirty work.

My mother’s eyes were still closed. As I watched, a single tear broke loose from the confines of her right eye and trickled slowly down her cheek.

“Son,” the man with the gray mustache said, with ominous quiet that was more effective than any parade-ground bark, “you know who I am, don’t you?”

Buzz-cut paled visibly. “Yessir!” he said. And still he didn’t lift the gun away from my mother’s head.

I caught a slight movement behind Parker. My father and Terry O’Loughlin had moved into the doorway of the lab. They would have been told to stay back, I knew, but could no more obey that command than voluntarily stop breathing. The man with the mustache ignored them both.

“I don’t know what Mr. Collingwood told you, son,” he said. He took a step forwards, speaking each word clearly, so there would be no mistakes, “but I can tell you, right now, that you have been involved in an unsanctioned operation. Do you understand what that means?”

“Sir?”

For the first time, his gun lightened a fraction. To my left, one of the SWAT team rolled his shoulders a little and settled more fully into the stock of his own weapon.

The man with the mustache sighed, took another step. “Mr. Collingwood took it upon himself to encourage Storax to investigate the side effects of one of their drugs without withdrawing it from testing. In order to do this, he lied, falsified his reports, and misused the resources placed at his disposal by the federal government. He may even have believed he was doing the right thing, but in truth he was off the books—off the goddamn planet, if I’m any judge,” he said, temper finally cracking through like a whip. “And I will tell you now that I intend to deal with his transgressions most … severely. He may have convinced you he was a patriot but in reality, son, he was a traitor. A traitor,” he went on, beating the message home with measured strokes, “who has brought disgrace to his country and his office … and to the people who placed their trust in him.”

Uncertainty reamed Buzz-cut’s features. His eyes skimmed over the man with the silver mustache, the SWAT team, calculating the odds. It can’t have taken him long to work out that resistance was, indeed, futile. I cursed him from inside my head, spitting soundless screams, as if I could compel him to yield by will alone.

But still he held.

The silence stretched, gossamer threads that sparked and snapped under the artificial lights. My eyes locked onto my mother’s face, the flutter of her eyelids as God knows what thoughts careered through her mind. If she died here, now, then everything we’d been through—everything we’d done—would have been for nothing.

“What we have to decide here, son,” the man with the mustache went on, halfway across the narrow gulf that separated them now, “is just where your loyalties lie. Did you trust Mr. Collingwood’s word implicitly, or did you actively collaborate with him to develop a bioweapon using a company that’s foreign-owned, operating on U.S. soil? The stand you’re making here leads me to believe you knew all the risks. This is the last stand of a desperate man, son, not a patriot.”

“Sir! I am a patriot, sir!” Buzz-cut rapped out, voice close to breaking.

“Well, in that case, son,” the man murmured, “you’d best prove it to me.”

He took a final step, bringing him within a meter of Buzz-cut. He held out his hand, palm up. After a long, agonizing two seconds, Buzz-cut withdrew the gun from my mother’s skull and let the hammer down slowly. He reversed his hold and handed the piece over to the man with the mustache, grip first in smartly formal presentation.

I heard a collective exhalation, the quiet gush of relief from the SWAT team as they realized that today was not their day to kill or die.

The man with the mustache handed off the gun to one of his men, who crabbed forwards to take it. Another yanked Buzz-cut’s wrists behind him and tightened the PlastiCuffs in place.

Buzz-cut stood, head down, gaze turned inwards, as if replaying all the things he’d done without question, on Collingwood’s say-so. More than he could justify, if his misery was anything to go by. More than he could bear. When he lifted his head, his eyes were glistening.

My mother opened her own eyes, very slowly, the shock blatant in them. Sean elbowed his way through the mill of black and brought out the same pocketknife my father had used to torture Collingwood. He sliced through the ties binding her wrists.

With nothing to hold them, her arms flopped forwards and, when she climbed down from the stool, her legs folded under her. Sean tucked an arm behind her knees and lifted her without apparent effort. She clung to him and let the tears fall freely now. When I fell in alongside she grabbed my hand with icy fingers, paper skin over fragile bones, and wouldn’t let go.

As Sean carried my mother past the man with the mustache, he reached out and put a hand on Sean’s arm. The touch was light, the way it can be when it’s backed by limitless strength and power.

“You and Miss Fox wouldn’t be thinking of taking off again, would you, Mr. Meyer?” he said, making it both a threat and a polite inquiry, all at the same time.

Sean paused just long enough to make his lack of intimidation felt. “No,” he said.

The man nodded. “Good, because this time you would have the full weight of the U.S. government tracking you down,” he said. “I believe we have some things to discuss. I trust you’ll make yourself available.”

Sean bridled but kept it in check. “Yes sir,” he said, in the same blankly neutral tone that skated thinly along the borders of insubordination.

“I’m sure that you will,” the man with the mustache said. His gaze shifted onto my father, who’d come forwards, unable to hold back any longer. “This whole thing has been a goddamned mess,” he added in that careful way of his, eyes moving to me now. “It’s going to take some cleaning up.”

“I’m sure we can work something out,” I said, injecting just as much steel into my own voice.

I thought I saw a wisp of a smile skim across the older man’s face, but it didn’t trouble his eyes.

“Oh, I’m sure we can,” he said.