by Heskett, Jim
“Living room is clear,” someone called out from the other room.
“Office--or den, or whatever this is--is clear,” said another voice.
“Kitchen is clear,” Ember said as she met four others in the living room. All of them stood, heads swiveling, but they seemed to be the only ones here.
The two from the side entrance of the house joined them. “Utility room is clear, too,” said her Branchmate as he slid his pistol into a hip holster.
Ember noted looks of confusion on their faces, or maybe that was disappointment. She checked around the room. Stairs led up to the second floor, and there were two doors from this room, leading to either closets or a basement. She had to suspect there would be a basement. For what Quinn probably wanted to do with his victims, a guy like him would demand that sort of privacy.
Ember decided to split her six colleagues into three groups. “You, two, check upstairs. You two are with me, and you last two, keep searching this floor. Every door opened, every closet checked.”
Ember took her two people and sent them to check each of the doors in this room. One opened to a closet, and the other into a set of stairs leading down.
Bingo. The basement was where he would have kept his hostages, no doubt about it.
Ember considered recalling everyone to explore the basement together. She noted the duo walking toward the stairs. Bryan was leading another teammate, and they were ascending slowly, eyes wide, weapons up.
Ember saw it a split second before it happened. On one side of the stairs was the wooden railing, on the other, a wall. Several small holes littered the wall. Some at head height, others at waist-level. She didn’t know for sure what it was, but something in her subconscious was screaming at her to take caution.
“Bryan, wait!” Ember said, but it was too late. His foot landed on the next step, a pressure plate triggered, and the sound of a whirring machine hidden somewhere behind the walls filled the air. Several objects zipped out of the little holes in the walls.
Needles or darts, propelled by an unseen force from within the stairwell’s walls.
They zipped like little rockets, and a few of them landed, but Ember knew it would only have taken a single one.
Bryan cried out and fell back, knocking the other Boulder member down the stairs. Less than a full second had passed between stepping on the plate and Bryan crashing to the foot of the stairs.
Ember rushed across the living room to find Bryan lying on the floor, breathing heavily, with half a dozen little sticks jutting out from his flesh, like darts. The ones that had missed him were scattered around the floor nearby.
Bryan's skin turned pale, and his eyes bugged out as spit formed on his lips. He convulsed, then a few seconds later, he stilled as his eyes fixed on a point on the ceiling.
Bryan was dead.
Chapter Thirteen
WELLNER
David Wellner stood and cinched the belt of his pants a little tighter. These were his most flexible slacks, purchased because he hated the tightness of his pants being dictated by the size of his last meal. But, the consequence of comfort was they did tend to feel a little loose at times.
He wished he could get his mind off his belly fat and put it where it needed to be. There were forces at work against him. Days had passed, and he still had no conclusive proof: nothing but innuendos and vague recorded conversations and strange looks.
There had to be a way to root out Jules' intentions to usurp his position. But, how to do that, Wellner didn't know. So, until then, he would let his mind wander to his expanding gut and receding hairline and hope the answer would come to him.
Wellner took his coat from the rack and left his office to find his secretary Naomi also sliding on hers. She stood next to the rack, reaching up. It pulled her dress tight against the curve of her hips, and he stole a quick glance before she turned around to smile at him.
“We meet again.”
Had she caught him leering? He couldn’t tell from her smirking expression. “Going to lunch?”
Naomi nodded. “I don’t know if I’ll have time to eat. Errands, you know. It wouldn’t take me so long if all of downtown Denver didn’t decide to go to lunch at the same time. But, I make do.”
"Oh, don't worry about that. I'm not going to dock your pay if you're fifteen minutes late or anything. I'd rather not have you here all afternoon with a grumbling stomach, honestly." He put a hand to the side of his mouth and leaned forward as if poised to reveal a dire secret. "Just don't let the hourly people down in the switchboard room know I let you do this."
She smiled. “That’s very kind of you, sir.”
Naomi was so young, so pretty. He liked her long fingernails and the music they made on her keyboard, clacking away all day out here in the next room. A blip of desire to ask her to come to lunch with him wandered around in his head, but he decided against it. “As it happens, I’m going that way. I’ll walk you to your car if that’s alright with you.”
“Of course. Thank you, David.”
He crossed the room and opened the door for her. She used to call him President Wellner, but had shifted to David in the last week or two. He didn't mind. Wellner kinda liked it, actually. There were two sorts of people who worked in this building: those who kissed his ass, and those who were polite to his face but did a poor job of hiding the contempt behind their eyes. Naomi's friendly professionalism was a nice change of pace.
They walked down the dimly lit hall of an upper floor of the Denver Consolidated Holdings building, the main headquarters for the administrative and governmental functions of the Denver Assassins Club. Not every member of the government worked here, but enough of them did to make this building the Club’s most well-guarded secret. An immense amount of work went on behind the scenes to keep the basic functions of the organization running. A lot of people. A lot of money.
At the end of the hall, he pressed the elevator button, and they glanced at each other with awkward eyes for the five seconds to wait for the doors to open. He wished he knew how to make small talk with her. Was it her looks or their age difference? Maybe both.
As they stepped into the elevator, and she pressed the B1 button, she asked, "Do you ski or board?"
"Neither. When I was young, sure, but now, I can't handle the I-70 traffic. I hate to spend a Saturday sitting in a car. And the lift lines are always so crowded… it's a lot of work for a couple of hours of fun."
She nodded. “I hear you. But, why live in Colorado if you can’t take advantage of the snow?”
“Why, indeed.”
The elevator door opened and they exited out onto the subterranean parking garage: concrete columns and fluorescent lighting casting its sickly white glow down on the hard surfaces. A rush of warm air hit his face, warmer than the upstairs, for sure. The change puzzled him. The garage was usually chillier than this.
Naomi parted from him and took a few steps to the left, and Wellner opened his mouth to wish her a happy lunch when the blast of a gun cracked through the silence of the garage.
What the hell?
He didn’t have time to react; he couldn’t react. He felt the air whiff by his pants, and his eyes shot down to see a clean hole through the thigh of his pant leg.
Wellner had been shot. Or shot at. He wasn’t sure at the moment.
He didn’t feel blood rushing out. No pain.
The reverberation of the gunshot caused his ears a moment of disassociation. A rush of dizziness passed through him. He opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying to push the ringing sound out of his head.
It didn’t work.
He spun to his right to see a man in black clothes, with a black mask over his head—two holes for eyes and one for the mouth. Fifteen feet away.
Where had this man come from? Had he been hiding in the shadows?
The attacker still held a gun in his right hand: a big thing, a revolver with a barrel-like a cannon. A dozen feet away, standing amid the concrete columns of the parking
garage.
Wellner stood, frozen in terror. He could see the black eyes inside the mask, full of venom and hate. White teeth gritted.
The man took a step back, then raised his gun arm again. He narrowed one eye, and the other focused on the sight at the end of the barrel.
Wellner felt a hand on his arm, tugging his sleeve, pulling him out of the way. His body jerked back, away from the shooter. He had no control over this motion, and he felt his feet shift forward, his body angling.
Naomi jumped in front of him and rushed forward, holding something in her hand. Her keys dangled, hanging from a keyring attached to a little cylinder inside a leather case. Her thumb was resting on the top of it, where a tiny red plastic tab held back the contents of the container.
She pressed down, and a tight stream of pink mist spewed from it, directly into the man's face.
Wellner stumbled but did not fall. He caught a whiff of the spray, and his lungs immediately began to burn. He launched into a rapid-fire burst of coughs.
Pepper spray, nearly pure capsaicin, police-grade. A voluminous cloud of the stuff surrounded the man in black.
Naomi bellowed at him, a screeching war cry. Finger still on the nozzle, ejecting the pepper spray. The shooter staggered back, hands up to his eyes, screaming in pain. The pistol slipped from his grasp as he bumped into a Volkswagen sedan, triggering the alarm.
Wellner himself took a step away, trying to breathe, but finding himself unable to fill his lungs. His eyes watered. Everything in front of him turned into a blur, and bile raced up into his throat. He could see the cloud of spray was several feet away from him, but he could still feel it.
Naomi was still pressing the release tab on the canister of pepper spray, now coughing herself. Wellner’s blurry vision caught the sight of two people running in this direction. Gray uniforms. Security guards. He could barely make them out, but he listened to the implements on their belts jingling as they sprinted.
The attacker in the dark clothes stumbled a bit, then snatched his pistol from the ground and fired off a few wild shots toward the oncoming security guards. Wellner sank to his knees, feeling like his face was on fire. He could see only flashes of light as tears streamed from his eyes.
Naomi appeared in front of him, her face red, hacking and coughing. Time seemed to slip. Wellner's eyes closed. He had flashbacks to a couple of years ago when Ember had saved his life from another attack.
When he opened his eyes again, Naomi's beautiful young face filled his vision. The edges of everything blurred, and he couldn't draw a full breath.
“David? Sir, are you okay? I’m so sorry I accidentally sprayed you. I sprayed myself, too. I’m not supposed to discharge it in an enclosed space, but I didn’t know what else to do. Are you okay? Did you get hit?”
He grunted out the words, his throat barely open. “No… he… missed.”
Wellner blinked to look past her, and he saw the two security guards on the cement, both of them with trails of blood leaking out. Everything beyond a twenty-foot radius was blurry and dark, but he couldn’t see the man in black anywhere in the area.
“Where did the guy go?” Wellner said, wheezing each breath. His lungs were dry and scratchy like sandpaper.
"I think he's gone. He shot those two men and then ran off that way." She pointed toward the light at the open exit to the garage. He blinked, and some of his vision came back, but his eyes now burned, as well as his lungs.
Naomi helped him to his feet and he winced as pain rippled through his chest.
“Jules,” he said, pushing the word out through clenched teeth.
“Sir?”
“The Vice President. She did this. She sent that man to kill me.”
Naomi frowned at him and rubbed his back. Wellner braced himself against the wall and studied his secretary. It didn’t look like she shared his certainty, but that didn’t matter. He knew the truth.
Jules had moved on from stairwell conversations and clandestine planning to an actual attempted murder.
Wellner knew he had to do something, and soon.
Chapter Fourteen
EMBER
Ember took a step back from Bryan, dead at the bottom of the stairs. Five remaining Boulder Branch members stood around her, all of them staring down at their former colleague. A half a dozen darts jutted from his legs and upper torso. More than that were dormant on the floor. Ember didn’t know what had been in those darts, but it had worked fast. Bryan had been dead within seconds of hitting the floor.
“This is crazy,” she heard one of her colleagues whisper. “Whoever did this is one devious bastard,” said another. She heard the venom in their voices, loud and clear, but there was an undertone as well.
Fear.
They — the trained professional assassins Ember worked with — were used to death; death was their business. But the death of one of their own, a colleague, was a death of a different type.
Ember pictured Charlie, the older man who had taken her under his wing when she’d first joined the Denver Assassins Club. Almost a mentor, he’d been like a kindly uncle instead. And because of her, he was also now dead.
Bryan’s death would affect her, but she needed it to affect her later, not now. Now, she needed to find Quinn.
I need to kill Quinn.
She sucked in a sharp, quick breath, blinked once, then looked around at her coworkers.
“There’s no time for this,” Ember said. “We know who did it. Quinn. This is his house. Somehow he knew we were coming, and we walked right into his trap. But we can’t stand around and think about it. We need to check out the basement and get Bryan out of here, ASAP.”
She pointed at three people and assigned them to take care of Bryan’s body. It took no time for them to snap into action. They lifted Bryan by the hands and carried his lifeless husk toward the kitchen. His face tilted toward her, and Ember took one last look at him.
Bryan had been around when Ember was new. He had been kind to her, just like Charlie had been. When she was still a recruit, Ember had mistakenly delivered a memo to someone else that had been meant for Bryan. By the time she had figured out her mistake and taken it to him, she had expected him to berate her. But, he did no such thing. He'd been kind and had given her tips on how to understand the complex coded message system for internal Branch documents.
That had been Ember's first taste of the personable side of the Denver Assassins Club. Up until that moment, she had been only an undercover FBI agent tasked with infiltrating a criminal organization.
It was only when she made the smallest effort to know Bryan and Charlie and others that she realized there were good people inside the DAC, as well. Real people.
And now, Bryan Eppstein was dead because no one had been careful enough to check the stairs before they had soldiered up there. A careless, sloppy mistake. A mistake of underestimation.
Ember blinked to look away from Bryan, and she motioned for the other two to join her in the basement. She was careful this time crossing the room, examining the ceiling and walls and floor for any surprises.
As they stood in front of the open basement door, she turned to her two teammates and said, “I’m sure I don’t need to tell you this, but keep your eyes open. Probably more traps.”
She led the descent down the steps, slow and deliberate. Guns up, she relied on the two behind her to shine flashlights down into the darkness. She could smell the stink of raw sweat and fear right away. A piece of string dangling in front of her caught her attention, and she waited for the others to point their flashlights at it before doing anything.
The cord for a light.
“Wait,” she said. She reached, slowly, delicately, up toward the lightbulb. She had to stand on her tiptoes to reach it, but her fingers clasped around the outside of the bulb. It was something she’d read, long ago in her training, back at Quantico.
She could even hear her instructor's voice, booming loudly over the sound of the rickety fan in the old warehouse
where they’d been training for the week.
"Every light switch, every lightbulb can bring instant death. Heat up the bulb's metal where it meets the glass, and it'll slide right off. Then, a tablespoon of black powder, right inside, right up against the element."
She pulled the bulb out of the ceiling fixture and shook it. It was empty, nothing inside but lightbulb guts.
Satisfied, she screwed it back in and put her hand on the cord once again.
She gritted her teeth. We can’t be wasting time. She could think of a thousand other tricks like this one, but she also knew Quinn was under a deadline, too. He probably hadn't had time to boobytrap the entire house.
She tugged on the cord. That light, along with several others, flicked on in a sequence. Ember could now see into the basement. She couldn't say for sure, but she got the feeling this room had been only recently abandoned.
There were three twin mattresses on the floor. Three sets of handcuffs attached to load-bearing beams and to the floor, all the cuffs sitting dormant and unlocked. There were three separate spaces in the dust, along with paths for footprints.
“Quinn has two more,” she said.
Or, had.
Chapter Fifteen
QUINN
Quinn double-checked the lock on the door before opening it. He didn't come to this house often, so he felt a little out of place. Out of sorts. He didn't like being this far south of Denver, actually. He had always preferred the northwest suburbs like Broomfield and Westminster. Too much crime down here.
His fingers trailed over the wood of the door, thinking about what was on the other side. His special group of three was now whittled down to two. He wondered if he’d been kidding himself, thinking that Ember would make them a trio again. Besides, even if he did capture her, he would only have four more days until he had to exterminate her to fulfill the contract.