The Shadow Agent

by Daniel Judson

  The glass was covered with dark sheets of plastic, the edges of which were sealed with long strips of duct tape.

  The floor, old linoleum, was cold, indicating to Esa that whatever was below this apartment was likely uninhabited.

  As Esa was escorted from the closet, Lyman moved in behind her fast and wound a fresh piece of mechanic’s wire around her left elbow, tightly. Holding the rest of the coil in his hand as though it were the end of a leash, he instructed Durand to cut the wire binding Esa’s wrists.

  Durand did so, and the instant Esa’s hands were free, Lyman maneuvered in front of her, taking several rapid backward steps as he tugged on the wire and pulled her toward the butcher block.

  Her slippery bare feet prevented her from resisting his sudden, violent action. She was slammed into the heavy butcher block, her pelvic bones against the hard wood edge, her lower abdomen nearly level with the surface of the block.

  Lyman continued to step backward and pull Esa forcibly until she was bent over the table, at which point Durand grabbed Esa’s right arm, holding it with one hand to keep Esa down as she passed the wire cutters to Lyman.

  He took them and cut another two-foot-long piece from the coil.

  The instant Durand had handed off the cutters, she grabbed onto Esa’s right arm with her other hand.

  Lyman knelt and pulled Esa’s left arm straight down, and she knew then that he was intending to attach the other end of the wire to the leg of the table.

  After that, he would do the same with her other arm, then secure her ankles, too, ensuring that her legs were spread as far apart as the width of the butcher block would allow.

  Positioning her for maximum vulnerability.

  But Lyman needed two hands to manipulate the wire and fully secure his prisoner’s left arm, so he handed the cutters back to Durand. To accept them, Durand had to remove one hand from Esa’s right arm.

  In the process, Durand’s remaining hand loosened slightly.

  Lyman was focused on winding the stiff wire around the table leg, and this allowed Esa to turn her head and steal a glance at the younger woman.

  Durand was holding the wire cutters with one hand, not by the grips but by the shears—a result of the way Lyman had hastily handed them back to her.

  The grips, then, were right there for Esa to seize.

  At best, wire cutters were not a weapon for killing, but maiming was a perfectly good place to start—the first step, at least, in what would no doubt be a race to get to one of the pistols on the windowsill.

  But it was now or never.

  The fact that Esa was slick from the recent dousing would mean she’d be difficult to hold on to, and this would work to her advantage.

  Snapping her right arm back, sharply drawing her elbow toward her ribs, she slipped free of Durand’s one-handed grasp, then immediately lunged for the tool in Durand’s other hand.

  Closing her fist around the metal grips, Esa saw her chance and took it.

  Twenty-Five

  Tom moved down the long corridor.

  On either side were aluminum roll-up doors, each one roughly the size of a single-car garage door.

  Mounted on the ceiling every twenty feet or so were security cameras, but there was nothing Tom could do about that except keep his chin down so that the long bill of Cahill’s cap shielded his face.

  Reaching the unit marked 955, Tom was confronted with his first problem.

  As with all the doors he had passed, this one was secured by a padlock.

  While the majority of the locks he had passed were the kind that needed a key, this particular unit, however, was secured by a combination lock. The Engineer, careful in all his details, had neglected to inform Tom of this.

  Was it possible, as a precaution, he didn’t want to state the combination in front of Manning?

  Tom froze for a second, staring at the lock, but then he realized that locks such as these required three numbers in the proper sequence to open.

  Each storage unit was identified by three numbers.

  What did he have to lose for trying?

  Holding the lock in his left hand, Tom spun the dial counterclockwise past zero, then turned it clockwise to nine, counterclockwise to five, and then clockwise again to five.

  Yanking down on the housing, he opened the lock.

  Tom removed it and, after setting it on the floor, grabbed the handle at the bottom of the door and lifted it up.

  The aluminum was light, the rollers and casters well lubricated, so the door went up effortlessly and without too much noise.

  With the SureFire weapon light from Cahill’s messenger bag in his left hand, Tom searched the walls just inside the door for a light switch. Locating it, he flipped it up.

  A single overhead bulb lit the five-by-eight space, which was empty save for a case made of protective plastic, similar to the one Carrington had left in the courtyard of the factory.

  Stepping to it, Tom moved around it so he was facing the door, then knelt and opened the case.

  Protected by the dense foam inserts was a tablet, which itself was housed inside an OtterBox case. Tom removed the tablet and stood.

  He powered it up, and a few seconds later, the passcode request was displayed.

  Below it was the option to view the password hint. Tom touched the icon, and a small window opened up on the display, overlaying the passcode keypad.

  SERIAL NUMBER.

  Tom was initially baffled. What serial number? The Engineer had told him it was a seven-digit number, but what seven-digit serial number?

  That in itself had to be a clue, since most devices required even-numbered passcodes—four or six or eight.

  A security program requiring seven digits was likely one that had been custom-made.

  Tom’s memory for numbers meant it could, technically, be any seven digits he’d ever seen, but he doubted Carrington would be so random, particularly since one failed attempt at unlocking the device would delete its contents.

  It had to be something specific, then, maybe something Tom had recently seen.

  Maybe something significant, if not positively then negatively.

  And then Tom recalled the last seven digits he had viewed.

  Seven digits that had caused him to feel deep concern.

  The Colt that Carrington had left for him—that the Engineer had given to Carrington—was roll-stamped with a seven-digit serial number.

  Tom returned to the passcode prompt and entered that series of numbers: 1096409.

  The device instantly unlocked, and Tom was looking at a screen that displayed a half dozen video clips in a grid.

  He touched the first clip with the tip of his finger; the media player opened, and the video began to play.

  It was like looking back in time.

  Tom saw his father’s old study. The quality of the video indicated that this was a recording from a surveillance camera. By the camera’s line of sight, Tom concluded that it had been hidden on his father’s bookshelf.

  The recording ran for a few seconds before a figure entered the frame.

  That figure was George Sexton, Tom’s father.

  A second figure entered the frame a few seconds later.

  Tom was now looking at a much younger Sam Raveis.

  Tom heard his father tell Raveis that they had to keep their voices down because his son was asleep upstairs.

  It was an odd thing to hear the man’s voice again after all these years, and for him to refer to Tom as his son.

  That role of son was from a lifetime ago.

  Raveis asked how Tom was doing, and his father answered, The boy lost his mother and sister.

  Tom considered ending the playback there, but he let it continue.

  The bar at the bottom of the player indicated that this video was just under five minutes long.

  Tom stood there and watched the whole thing.

  And when it was done, he watched two more.

  It took Tom a moment to come back
from the memories that the videos had triggered.

  There wasn’t time to watch the rest, but the ones he had watched had shown him all he needed to know for now.

  And anyway, watching the rest would only stir up even more memories, and he needed to keep his mind clear.

  Putting the device into sleep mode, Tom awoke it again to confirm that the passcode needed to be reentered, then powered the device down and placed it inside the protective case.

  He closed the lid, securing the two clasps. Grabbing the case, he exited the empty storage unit.

  He didn’t bother to close the door behind him as he headed back down the hallway. He reached the elevator, pressed the “Down” button, and was anticipating a long wait, since the car would have to make its way back up to the ninth floor.

  To Tom’s surprise, though, the doors opened immediately. The elevator hadn’t moved since he had exited it moments ago.

  Entering, Tom pressed the button marked LOBBY and waited for the doors to close. They did after a slight delay, and the elevator began its descent, which was as painfully slow as its ascent had been.

  Tom was considering getting off and taking the stairs when the elevator stopped.

  It had passed only the eighth floor and stopped at the seventh.

  Tom had been holding the case with two hands but now let his right hand hang at his side, where it would be ready to initiate the well-drilled maneuver of drawing his sidearm from an open jacket—right hand cupping the bottom corner of the jacket, flipping it back and out of the way before reaching for the grip of his pistol and drawing.

  There was a long pause before the doors parted. Waiting in the corridor were a man and a woman.

  In their late twenties, their arms around each other, they smiled at Tom and boarded the elevator.

  He stepped back to allow them room.

  Turning their backs to him, they seemed to only have eyes for each other, though the male managed to press the already illuminated “Lobby” button without even looking at it.

  Tom recalled the few close-protection details he and his team had worked in their first months together, and how on several of those jobs Torres and Garrick, for the sake of blending into their surroundings, had acted like a couple caught up in new love.

  They had been wholly convincing, and Tom was wondering if the same act was being put on for him now.

  The first detail that caught his eye was that the time of day—barely morning—was all wrong for a couple so passionate about each other, though of course they could have come here after a long night spent drinking.

  Neither of them was carrying anything, so they had to have just dropped something off or, and this seemed a more likely possibility, used the storage room as a location for an illicit tryst.

  Tom had seen stranger things.

  But the detail that he focused on—the one that made clear to him the impending danger—was the presence of a smell.

  It filled the elevator, blending with the woman’s heavy perfume while remaining noticeable and distinctive.

  It was a scent that was both natural and chemical, like pine mixed with alcohol, and Tom had smelled it as recently as the morning before.

  Ballistol—the lubricant he and Torres and Garrick had used to prepare their firearms prior to Tom embarking on his journey to Connecticut.

  And considering the fact that New York was a less-than-firearm-friendly city, the chances of Tom encountering even just one legally armed citizen were low at best.

  No, Tom knew who was in the elevator with him.

  His right hand still hanging at his side, he held the carrying case firmly with his left.

  Lowering his eyes so he could examine the hands of the couple in front of him, he saw that they had one arm around the other’s waist, leaving an arm free for each.

  The elevator had passed the sixth floor and was approaching the fifth when Tom finally broke the silence.

  “You cleaned your sidearms recently,” he said.

  The man and woman half turned their heads, listening to Tom without looking directly at him. They were still smiling, still caught up in each other.

  The man feigned surprise. “What?”

  “You’re carrying firearms,” Tom said. “You cleaned them recently. Ballistol, right? I can smell it.”

  The couple didn’t reply, simply continued to face each other, holding the same smiles.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Tom said. “You can just walk away. We can all just walk away.”

  The man looked forward, but the woman turned her head till she was looking at Tom.

  Her now-frozen smile looked strained.

  “Tell whoever sent you that I took the stairs,” Tom said to her.

  She didn’t reply.

  Finally, the man shook his head. “There’s a team watching the stairs, just in case.”

  “Then tell them I didn’t let you onto the elevator.”

  “The surveillance cameras are being monitored,” the man said.

  Tom glanced up just far enough to glimpse the low-profile camera mounted in the right rear corner of the car.

  “So I guess we’re fucked, then,” Tom said.

  The woman turned forward. She and her partner remained that way, their eyes on the door.

  Tom had flustered them, probably even embarrassed them, but he knew their hesitation wouldn’t last.

  Chances were their intention wasn’t to strike while inside the elevator; confined spaces, as a rule, were more dangerous than open areas, which allowed an attacker to put just the right amount of distance between himself and his target.

  There was also the chance that these two, and the team on the stairs, had come here to abduct Tom rather than to kill him.

  After all, what good was the encrypted tablet without the passcode?

  But by calling them out, Tom had forced their hand—it was either attack or be attacked.

  In any conflict, victory tended to favor the aggressor, which was why Tom didn’t wait for them to make their move.

  Sweeping back his jacket, he reached for the holstered Colt at his waist.

  But the couple had had the same thought, because the instant Tom broke for his weapon, they abandoned their mutual embrace and reached for theirs.

  In a split second, the three occupants of the elevator were in motion.

  Outgunned and lacking the element of surprise, Tom improvised.

  Twenty-Six

  The first blow Esa landed was to the woman whose grasp she had just escaped.

  Owing to her position in relation to Durand, as well as the manner in which she was holding the wire cutters, the best strike Esa could manage was a hammer blow—the weakest of all strikes.

  But the ends of the tool’s metal grips were jutting out from the bottom of her hand like a pummel, and this would significantly increase the potential for inflicting serious damage—not just to the soft tissue and bone in the area of direct impact, but to Durand’s brain as the shock wave generated by the hit would send that vital organ slamming against the inner skull.

  Esa aimed for Durand’s temple but missed it by an inch, striking the woman’s cheekbone just below her right eye.

  Despite the fact that Esa had missed the optimal target, the blow was enough to send Durand straight to the floor.

  And while the angle of attack on Durand had been limited, the options for striking Lyman, who was crouched down with his head bent as he worked to attach the stiff wire to the table’s leg, were worse.

  Esa could barely reach across the butcher block, never mind take a swing down its left side in an attempt to drive the sharp ends of the wire cutters into the back of Lyman’s skull.

  And such an attack in itself was likely to be less than effective.

  The only real option was for Esa to once again make good use of the fact that her bare body was slick with water.

  The instant Durand was struck, Lyman had been alerted to trouble, but before he had time to react, Esa pushed herself a
long the top of the butcher block.

  Slipping across the wood, she slid off and threw her body onto Lyman’s still-bent back.

  Her hope was to line up a clear shot at his temple, where the skull was its thinnest, or maybe the side of his neck, where his carotid artery ran, or at worst, an ear.

  The nose of the wire cutters was no more than two inches long, so a deep puncture was out of the question, but if serious injury couldn’t be immediately inflicted, then excruciating pain was second best.

  Lyman, however, had the situational awareness of a wrestler, because as soon as Esa landed on his back, he abandoned his attempt to stand and instead tucked into an even deeper crouch, simultaneously raising his right shoulder and easily rolling her off and onto the floor.

  Landing on her back, Esa felt a sudden ache in her chest as the air was knocked out of her lungs, but she ignored that. She anticipated that Lyman’s next move would be to mount her, so she was ready, countering him by thrusting the cutters into the nearest soft target—his groin—just as he climbed on top of her.

  She followed the first jab with another, and then a third, all of them in rapid succession.

  Instinctively, Lyman grabbed for her wrist with both hands, held it with all his considerable strength, but this meant her left arm was free.

  The other end of the wire had been wound only once around the leg of the butcher block, and done so loosely, so Esa was free to reach up for Lyman’s face.

  Closing her hand into a fist but keeping her thumb extended, she lunged for his eye, jabbing into it deeply with her thumb.

  But Lyman’s grip on her wrist didn’t lessen, and the triple jab to his groin, while undoubtedly painful, seemed to only anger him.

  Abandoning his plan to mount Esa, he instead planted his feet firmly on the floor and stood, pulling her up by her one arm till she was standing, then grabbing her throat with his other hand.

  Bracing himself, he lifted her until only her toes were touching the linoleum.

  After taking several steps, Lyman stopped suddenly and flung her backward through the air.

  Before she could even brace herself for the hard landing, Esa hit the floor on her left side.

  To avoid sliding, she drew her knees to her chest, shaping herself into a ball. Coming to a stop after only a foot, she immediately looked at Lyman, who was obviously beginning to feel the effects of her attacks on his eye and groin.