They were also in disarray, as if they had been searched and abandoned. There were no shell casings, no bodies, and no blood. Obviously, the terrorists had not gotten what they had come for.
With no good options, Conley did the only thing he could do: he checked the rooms thoroughly himself and then moved on to the next locked room. He knocked and called out to Dani.
He was counting on the fact that even if she were with her colleagues she would respond to him. He certainly didn’t have time to break down every door in the hotel. And he didn’t want to scare whoever was hiding in the other rooms.
Moving down the corridor, he repeated the operation. Then he repeated it again.
This would take a while; each tower had hundreds of rooms. And, of course, there were still the terrorists to deal with.
He was only on his fifth room when he heard noise from far down the hallway, on the other side of the elevator bank that sat at the center of the tower. Looking down the corridor, he could see a small group of men dressed in black file out of the far stairwell. He stayed in the recessed space in front of a door and watched.
There was some commotion and he could see the terrorists handling something big that he couldn’t quite make out. Then he heard them bang on the first room door on their end of the hallway.
He saw them swing the large item they had brought. It was a hand-held battering ram, the kind used by law enforcement. He watched the thing rear back twice and then disappear into the hotel room.
Then he watched the five or six men follow into the room. There was shouting. And then gunshots. More shouting and then more gunshots.
The group moved to the next room and started banging. Conley was on the move, even as he processed what was happening. While Conley was going door-to-door trying to save someone, they were going door-to-door killing people as they searched for the delegation.
For what? To use them as high-level hostages in a negotiation? To torture and kill them? Or to do both? And along the way were they going to murder hundreds or thousands of innocent people on vacation, or a business trip? Well, not if he could help it.
Conley, Amado, and the unnamed snipers outside had made sure the terrorists paid a high price for what they’d done so far. Conley was determined to stop them. Even if he failed he was prepared to make sure their price was quite a bit higher.
He had passed the elevator bank at the center of the tower when he heard the next set of gunshots, the next set of screams. Cursing under his breath, he poured on the speed so that a few seconds later he was able to take a position five doors down from the room.
By then the first terrorist was emerging into the hallway. Conley kept behind his cover and waited until a second terrorist appeared. Then the agent fired two quick shots, dropping both men. A third came running into the hallway and fell.
The remaining terrorists stayed in the room and Conley heard shouting from inside. They were definitely speaking Filipino. Conley recognized a few words but couldn’t translate.
To his surprise, the terrorists went quiet. As usual, they weren’t used to their prey shooting back. With any luck, they were huddled in fear in the hotel room. That image pleased him and then he remembered they were in there with the bodies of the hotel guests they had killed.
The anger returned. Conley decided he’d have to go after them. They would have the defender’s advantage but they were also cowards. In either case, Conley was determined to make sure these particular gunmen didn’t kill another innocent today.
Keeping the AK pointed at the door, Conley slowly moved from his cover into the hallway. There were two or three men inside the room and he knew he could take them even if they rushed out all at once.
Of course, it would be trickier if he had to storm into the room.
And then everything changed. The stairwell door at the end of the hallway opened and two terrorists ran out, rifles firing. Conley slammed himself back behind into the doorway as more bullets filled the air.
He realized that the terrorists in the hotel room had been shouting into their radios for backup—and backup had arrived. He chanced a look into the hall. Four men were there, guns pointed in his direction, as two others peeked out from the hotel room.
Conley slung his rifle and pulled out his Glock. He didn’t have a lot of options now, and none of them were good. He reached out with his pistol and fired three rounds blindly into the hallway.
Then he reached back and grabbed the doorknob. To his surprise, it turned. Pushing the door open, he flung himself inside. Then he slammed the door shut. Out of habit, he locked it—though he knew the lock wouldn’t hold for long. After all, they had their battering ram.
Now he had the defender’s advantage, but he had no illusions about whether it would make much difference given their numbers.
Scanning the room, Conley saw there was no cover. Except for under the bed or in the closet, there was nowhere to hide in the room. There was a window that, at twelve stories up, was no use. Ultimately, there was nothing in his room he could use.
He heard the battering ram crack into the door for the first time. Nothing inside the room, he realized, as his eye settled on a door set against the wall, a door that led to a connecting room. Usually these doors were closed and locked. This one was partly open, which meant that the guests in this room had rented the other as well and had been using them both.
That was it. As the battering ram splintered door and frame behind him, Conley raced to the window, slid it upward, and threw open the curtains. Then he pivoted, vaulted over the bed and slipped through the connecting door. He pulled it mostly shut and then pushed open another door that opened into the second room.
From the empty room, he peered into the room he had just abandoned. Though the terrorists had smashed open the door, they waited to rush in. They peeked in and fired a few test shots into the wall and then the bed. Conley could see two of the men inching into the room. As he had hoped, their focus was on the open window.
Clearly, they suspected a trick and fired into the curtains. Then they strode up to the window and one of them stuck his head outside. That was when Conley fired. Two impacts to the terrorist’s back threw him forward and out the window.
The gunman next to him turned in time to take another two shots to the chest. By now, the other terrorists had rushed in but Conley was already closing the connecting door on his side and turning the deadbolt.
He ran for the door to the hallway. He imagined the remaining terrorists were still puzzling over the open window and what happened to their friends. As he threw open the hotel room door he took a quick scan of the hallway and was already on the run as he heard the gunmen banging on the connecting doors.
It hadn’t occurred to them to leave a man guarding the hallway. And they were still fussing with the connecting door, rather than simply using the door that led out to the hallway. Conley didn’t want to hang around to see how fast they caught on.
He raced down the corridor, heading for the stairwell on the other side. He was just reaching the elevator bank—and the halfway point of his sprint—when he saw more black-clad terrorists filing out of the stairwell he was aiming for.
Damn, he thought, as he came to a dead stop. The terrorists in front of him had seen him by now and were raising their guns. He also heard shouts behind him, telling him that the geniuses had found their way out of the hotel room one way or another.
Conley didn’t wait for the bullets to start flying; he dove back into the recessed area and partial cover of the main elevator bank. There were three elevators, set about four feet back from the hallway. That gave him pretty good cover from terrorists coming at him from any single direction.
And almost no cover if they were coming from both directions.
It was so bad that Conley found himself wishing the elevator had power. He wondered if he had time to try to pry the elevator doors o
pen; he could take his chances in the elevator shaft.
Then he heard footsteps in the hallway.
Conley hugged the wall and peeked his head out to look into the corridor. A shot rang out from behind him and Conley pulled back. Damn, there was no way to fire in one direction without leaving himself open to gunfire from the other.
Everything seemed to slow outside.
Why hurry when they knew they had him? From this point forward they would be careful. Even if they had him cornered, they knew he could shoot back.
Conley realized that he had shifted his thinking. No longer was he working out ways to do as much damage to the terrorists as possible and move on. Now he was working out ways to do as much damage to them as he could before they cut him down.
Nothing about this trip had gone the way it was supposed to, even aside from the attack. From the moment he’d met Dani, he hadn’t quite been himself. He had gotten involved in a way that he had not let himself do in a long time. And from the beginning of the attack, his first and primary thought had been of her—even though he understood that she wasn’t quite what she had seemed. Though, to be fair, he had told her he was a Southwestern Native American language professor.
He realized that it was very likely that he would not have a chance to uncover all of her secrets, and to get to know the real woman.
From the start, he had acted out of emotion and every step since then had led him right here: with his back to an elevator door and heavily armed enemies closing in on both sides.
Remarkably, Conley didn’t regret a second of the last week.
He wondered what Dan Morgan would think of his choices and realized that Morgan would understand very well. Conley’s only regret now was that he wouldn’t get to tell the story to his old friend.
Conley put a fresh magazine into his AK-47 and switched it to full auto. His hearing told him that there were more terrorists to his right than there were to his left. He made sure his Glock was securely tucked into his belt and prepared to do what good militaries had done from the beginning when they were heavily outnumbered: charge. In the Afghan war, a small band of British soldiers who were out of ammunition had fixed bayonets to their empty rifles and charged a nearly overwhelming force of Taliban…and won the day.
Well, Conley decided to give these terrorists one last surprise. There would only be a few in front of him and the ones behind would just as likely hit their own men as they shot at his back.
It wasn’t much of a plan, but he and Morgan had worked with worse. Conley took a deep breath, let out a loud scream, and raced forward, aiming the AK as best he could and letting it rip. The thirty-two rounds were gone in seconds and Conley was pleased to see one of the three terrorists fall.
Then his Glock was in his hand as he continued. One of the gunmen peeked his head out and Conley was able to put a bullet into almost the exact center of his forehead.
As soon as he took the shot, Conley threw himself to the left side of the hallway. A split second later, he heard gunfire from his right. Without even turning his head, he aimed the Glock in that direction and started firing. By the time he’d fired the second time, his eye had found the target and he was able to put a bullet in the center of the terrorist’s chest.
Conley heard gunfire behind him and was both pleased and surprised that he was still standing. He didn’t risk turning around. Instead he found cover leaning into a recessed door.
He leaned out to take a look with one eye. The terrorists that were behind him were shooting, but not in his direction. They were fighting some group that had gotten behind them.
There was a hail of automatic gunfire and Conley saw three men fall. Two others turned and ran toward Conley’s position. One made it maybe three steps before a bullet hit him from behind. The other caught a round from Conley’s Glock.
And then the hallway went silent.
Conley leaned back into his cover and took a breath, once again vaguely surprised and pleased to be alive. He wondered who had just saved him. Or if the military or police who had provided the snipers that had saved his butt in the skyway had gotten into the building.
“Don’t shoot. I’m an American. I’m going to come out slowly,” he said.
“Peter,” a voice called out. No, not a voice, her voice. Dani?
“Dani is that you?” he said, not even trying to keep the shock out of his own voice.
“You can come out Peter, it’s clear,” she said.
He had time to wonder if the minister’s security detail had routed the terrorists as he stepped out into the hallway.
Black-clad bodies were laid out haphazardly up and down the hallway. Dani stood in the center, maybe twenty feet away.
She was alone.
He was angry that her security detail would leave her out in the open like that. If there were well-trained enough to take down this group, they should be doing a better job protecting her.
And then Conley noticed that she was holding a Chinese assault rifle. She was handling it like a professional, in precisely the way a deputy to the Chinese finance minister would not. She was wearing the same business suit and sensible shoes she had been wearing earlier but her body language, her expression…everything else about her was different.
In that instant, Conley understood something about Dani. She might have been a deputy to the Chinese finance minister but she was also an intelligence agent, and a very highly trained one.
“You have an interesting skill set for someone in your line of work,” he said.
“I could say the same about you. Who knew that Southwestern Native American language studies was such a broad subject,” she said.
“We can talk later, if we survive,” Conley said.
Dani scanned him and asked, “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head.
She handed him a radio headset, like the ones the terrorists wore—like the one she now wore. “In case we get separated.” Conley took it.
Then he grabbed her wrist and said, “Wait.” He studied her, taking in the differences, the beginning of understanding forming in his brain.
She flashed him a smile and said. “Come on. We’ve got eleven more floors to clear if we’re going to get out of here.”
Dani turned and raced for the stairwell door, and Conley followed.
Chapter 30
The beeping phone roused Bloch from her office couch. She shook herself awake and answered.
“I think I have something,” Jenny Morgan said. “I think I may have found something.”
A few minutes later, Bloch entered Shepard’s domain, where Jenny was the only one there and awake, though she had been the one insisting that everyone get some periodic rest.
Bloch sat down in a chair in Jenny’s workstation. On the screen were a series of windows that showed what Bloch instantly recognized as satellite thermal imagery.
“I’ve been helping Shepard create a search criteria for the controlled fires the terrorists will have to use if they have an accident in the lab,” Jenny said.
The woman’s voice was flat but Bloch detected something else there. Was it a note of concern? Worry? Panic? All of the above perhaps?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t over the theoretical doom and gloom end-of-the-world scenario they were all fighting to prevent. It was over something much more immediate.
The fact was that Jenny and Dan Morgan’s daughter was now a hostage in a secret terrorist lab, which was developing a super virus. And not only was an accident in such a lab possible, it was likely—if not inevitable, given the fact that the terrorists hadn’t bothered with any of the normal safety protocols.
And worse yet, such an accident and the fire that the terrorists would set to contain it was the best hope they had at finding the lab. For now, that was their best-case scenario.
“I’m helping Shepard develop a base
line. It’s the dry season in much of the search area, so there are quite a few brush fires, full-on wildfires, and, of course, the occasional building and house fires. In addition, there’s private and local government incineration.
“The problem is that most of these are not immediately distinguishable from whatever the terrorists would use. Our experts say their best bet would be to dump anything or anyone affected by the virus into a hole and burn it for as long as they could.”
“Wouldn’t a controlled lab fire be hotter than, say, a brush fire?” Bloch asked.
“Not really, we’re looking at 800 to 1200 degrees for most of what we’re likely to see burning on the ground. That goes for everything from a barbecue to a fire at a municipal dump,” Jenny said.
“So what are we even looking for?” Bloch said.
“We’re not sure, we’re just looking. But this is what I found,” Jenny said, pointing to the screen.
The window showed a thermal image that appeared identical to every other thermal image in every other widow on the large screen—with the same pixelated yellow and red colors.
“It looks like all of the—”
“Look at the shape,” Jenny said.
Then Bloch saw it. Amazing. Once she did, she couldn’t believe it hadn’t screamed itself out to her.
“The shape…” she said.
“It’s a perfect rectangle. Looks like maybe ten feet by twenty feet,” Jenny said.
“There were dozens of ground fires on the screen, each burning in odd shapes, with bulges and fingers jutting out randomly.”
Of course, it was early for there to be an accident in the lab—her people had told her that it would take days to get any viable virus, let alone have an accident with one.
And yet the perfect rectangle bothered her. Nature could be messy and it could be beautiful, but it was almost never perfect.
“I’ll get Shepard up, we’ll have him look a little deeper. Then Bloch realized that she had a man nearby. Morgan had refused to come back to base, certain that they were on the right track with the search—and not wanting to be caught in transit if Zeta found the lab.”
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