by Juno Rushdan
“No!” one of the guys gasped.
Jasper collapsed on his keyboard, his eyes cold and lifeless. Blood trickled down the side of his ghost-white face.
Bravo snagged Jasper’s collar and tossed his limp body out of the chair.
Her stomach convulsed. She wanted to vomit but locked her lips, straining to stay quiet.
“Delta, get him up,” Bravo said, gesturing to Tim.
A bearded man yanked hard on the back of Tim’s Trekkie For Life T-shirt, forcing one of Kit’s best friends up onto his feet. Tim’s eyes were wide with terror.
Delta shoved Tim toward Jasper’s workstation.
In twenty feet and ten seconds, she and the hallway would be in their direct eyeline.
Dread uncoiled in Kit’s chest. She scrambled backward and groped behind her for the door handle to the mainframe room.
Her fingers found the cool steel lever. She depressed the handle, ducking into the freezing room that was kept cold to protect the hardware, and let the door hang open.
She wasn’t a hide-and-cower kind of gal. Yet here she was, pressed against the wall, wishing it would envelop her. The horror of what was unfolding washed over her.
Tim, Jeff, Marty, Lincoln…were all going to die. Her best friends. Her family.
Her insides roiled. She had to get out of there without being seen.
“Finish the program,” Bravo said, his tone icy, detached.
“But the keyboard…” Tim said. “It’s covered in blood and…”
“Brain matter, bits of skull,” Bravo said. “Unless you want yours added to it, I suggest you finish what Jasper started.”
The click-clack of fingers flying across a keyboard cut through the low hum of the surrounding machinery.
She shivered down to the bone. The loft was a three-minute drive. Charlie would search the apartment and tell Bravo she wasn’t there. Bravo would look for her everywhere.
Oh God. God.
What was she going to do? How could she save the others? How could she save herself?
She stared at the wall of backup hard drives linked to the workstations in the Lair. Her gaze drifted over the rows of blinking lights, up the thin handles of the drives, locking on the name of the system at the top: Sentry.
Jasper’s words rang in her head. Take the Sentry. Make it right.
He was misguided and power hungry, but he was clever enough to feed her a message: grab the backup hard drives and find a way to make these bastards pay.
She scanned the serial numbers of the hard drives. Each one corresponded to dates and individual workstations. The archive was vast, cataloging everything they’d worked on over the past six years. If those killers were going to cover their tracks, they’d destroy the backups as well. The Outliers’ life’s work would be eradicated.
Taking precious minutes to pull all the hard drives was suicide. Besides, there was no way for her to carry them all. But she didn’t know who had worked on what for Bravo’s deranged crew or which workstation harbored the data mother lode.
Whatever horror-gram video they wanted scheduled for broadcast was on Jasper’s computer.
Kit found the hard drive linked to Jasper’s station. It was a real-time mirror backup. If Tim wasn’t done loading the encrypted video, it wouldn’t save, and pulling it would send a pop-up alert. She needed to take Jasper’s hard drive last.
Whatever those terrorists wanted, the work had been divided between five hackers and multiple workstations. Think. Come on. Think.
Lincoln was brilliant, kind, a gentle spirit. A natural who found answers for the most complicated problems. Anything significant would have been given to him to execute.
She found Lincoln’s row.
Flipping the switch, she powered his current drive down and pulled it from the mainframe. Her gaze bounced to the doorway. It was a toss-up between Marty, Tim, and Jeff.
I’m glad she doesn’t know what Tim and Lincoln did, Jasper had said.
Another clue. She chose Tim’s drive and stuffed both in her bag.
The pop of gunfire pierced the drone from the air conditioner, echoing in the pit of her stomach. The gun had a silencer, but the sound was sharp, louder than expected.
She ached to do something, anything to protect the last people in the world she loved. But there wasn’t a damn thing she could do. Not against three men with guns.
Take the drives and get out. She hustled to Jasper’s backups and found the hard drive she needed and shoved it in her satchel.
Another gunshot snapped in the air. They were executing everyone. The familiar ache of loss cut so deep that her soul bled. But there was no time to grieve. She had to move.
Kit peeked around the threshold and glimpsed Tim and Marty. Both dead.
Instead of having qualms about guns, she wished she had an Uzi in her bag.
Bravo and the other man moved out of her sight.
She slipped into the hall, glancing over her shoulder, and hurried toward the exit. Blood pounded in her ears as she zipped past the break room. The door was almost within reach.
Looking back again, she was nearly breathless with dread. Her stomach was a block of ice, but she kept going.
At the door, she pressed the bar handle down gradually, her hands, arms, entire body quaking with the effort. Desperation made her ache to burst across the threshold, but she had to be careful not to make any noise. With a soft click, she cracked the door open and glanced back.
No one was coming.
She ducked into the stairwell. As she let the door close gently, there was the distinct clap of two more gunshots. Something inside her shattered.
They were all dead. Massacred.
Tears hazed her vision, but she beat down the raging sorrow.
She ran to the stairs. Keeping her heels from touching the steps, she descended in silence. She pushed herself to hurry, faster and faster, trying not send her pulse soaring into triple time.
Her legs shook, knees turning to water as if they might buckle.
Kit risked a glance at the door behind her and lost her footing. Her ankle twisted, throwing off her balance.
In a whoosh, she slid down the steps. Her grip on the handrail was gone.
Pain blasted in her tailbone and head in the startling descent. She bit her lip, silencing the scream tearing up her chest as flesh and bone crashed against galvanized steel.
She snagged the railing and jerked to a halt near the bottom floor.
Oh God, had they heard? The noise had been earsplitting. Her gaze shot up to the door.
Terror held her captive, paralyzing her.
Move. You have to move!
Struggling to control her breathing, she used the railing to hoist herself up. Agony pounded everywhere. She stumbled down the last two steps and out the door.
Kit’s chest tightened, like a fist had seized her heart. Breath was snatched from her lungs. She staggered through the side alley and dug in her satchel for her meds.
Peeling open the Ziploc, she fumbled for her propranolol. White light dappled her eyesight, and she grew dizzy. She leaned against the overflowing dumpster behind the Grill.
She popped open the tan bottle and shook a pill into her palm. Crushing pain flared in her chest and her legs locked. She fell into the ripe pile of bagged garbage tucked in the corner pocket between the side of the dumpster and back of the restaurant. Throwing the small white pill under her tongue, she rested against the rancid mound of rubbish and battled for air.
On the other side of the dumpster, a door squeaked open. Metal slammed against brick. Footsteps pounded into the alley and down toward First Street.
The razor-like shards spearing her breastbone lightened. The tightness eased as the medication started to take effect, dilating her coronary arteries.
Heavy footsteps echoed agai
n, coming back toward the alley.
She rolled onto her side and hauled bags of trash on top of herself. The footfalls drew closer. She curled into a ball, the smallest fetal position.
The footfalls stopped near the dumpster. She squeezed her lips together until her jaw hurt, channeling every shred of willpower not to move. Only taking the shallowest breaths, she was petrified to disturb the bags concealing her.
The man stepped around the dumpster, shoes striking the pavement with a dull clunk.
Foul air pressed in. Cool, gelatinous liquid trickled over her leg, tickling and taunting. But she stayed still as stone.
He kicked the dumpster. The ting of metal vibrated through her. Then the scuffle of shoes moved away. Footsteps thudded down the narrow alley. Quick. Heavy. The sound grew fainter.
Kit waited, listening for nearby movement. Each terrifying second ticked through her. Finally, she knocked the reeking bags off her and palmed her way up the wall.
Her rib cage loosened, her sternum relaxing with anxious breaths.
Three blocks to the NoMa–Gallaudet U Metro station, but they might look for her there. She’d have to push seven blocks to Union Station. The massive transportation center housed DC’s busiest Metro station, hubs for commuter rail lines, Amtrak, and Greyhound, and bristled round-the-clock with a sea of traffic. There, she could disappear.
Kit pushed off the wall and hurried down the alley. Her throat clogged with grief, pain, and a rage the likes of which she’d never known.
No matter what, she’d get justice for the Outliers. Some way, somehow, she’d stop whatever Bravo had in the works and see his crew behind bars or dead.
So help her God, even if she had to die trying.
02
Washington, DC
Sunday, 8:30 a.m. EDT
The bells of the Taft Memorial Tower pealed with deep, resonant tones, marking the half hour and fracturing the quiet of the early Sunday morning.
Castle Kinkade scanned his sector of the Upper Senate Park in the heart of DC across from the U.S. Capitol. His gaze combed over gnarled cherry trees, empty pathways flanking the long panel of lawn he occupied, the expansive paved plaza surrounding an elaborate fountain to the north, stone benches, and a vagrant huddled in the dense shade of mature trees to the east.
No sign of either target, although his team only had a physical description of one of the two. And he wasn’t even sure if this was the park where the meet was supposed to take place.
“I’ve got nothing,” Castle said into the mic concealed on the collar of his leather jacket.
His gaze trained on the homeless chick wrapped in a fleece blanket, sitting beside a tree. If not for a long swath of hair falling from the black hoodie pulled over her head and the shock of pale, porcelain skin from a partially exposed bare leg, he wouldn’t have been able to guess at the person’s gender. The brownish-gray color of the blanket blended so well with the bark, her small body almost looked like a natural extension of the tree.
Odd for a vagrant to camp out this close to the Senate buildings, since the Capitol Police did a sweep at sunrise and sunset. In this part of town, the homeless usually hunkered in Columbus Circle near Union Station.
“Dull as watching paint dry on my end.” Alistair Allen’s smooth Queen’s-English accent was loud and clear over Castle’s earpiece.
“I’ve got a vagrant concealed by a blanket near the trees on the—”
“East side. Yes, I have a visual,” Alistair said, sounding even more bored than Castle, as if that were possible. “Here’s a possibility—twentysomething female jogger. Rainbow Brite just jumped out of a Lululemon ad and is coming your way. You should have eyes on in three, two, one.”
The jogger crossed the plaza, wearing pants and a matching jacket with neon bands of pink, orange, purple, and blue. She ran by at a steady pace, eyes straight ahead, passed an elderly man feeding pigeons, and left the park.
The older gentleman hadn’t been there a moment ago. He must’ve come from the southwest side off the street. Maybe he was their mark, trying to appear casual while waiting for his contact.
Castle patted the dog he’d brought with him, keeping the potential suspect under surveillance. The white-bearded man took his time scattering grains of rice for the birds. Once his paper bag was empty, he glanced around as if looking for someone. Castle stayed loose and ready, but the man merely picked up a cane from a nearby bench and moseyed on without making contact with anyone.
Alistair sighed. “You’d think with our dynamic duo, we’d get lucky.”
The Brit, staking out the Lower Senate Garden on the other side of the fountain, wasn’t Castle’s first, second, or even third choice of partner on any assignment. To Alistair, lucky equated to getting shot at. And when the MI6 castoff turned Gray Box operative was involved, bullets were guaranteed to fly.
But desperate times, desperate measures.
Since the Gray Box had discovered a shipment of government-manufactured bioweapons had been hijacked, their off-the-books covert organization had been doing everything possible to track down the thieves and recover the bioagents. Their techie, Willow Harper—a hacking, coding, fact-finding genius—had recently struck pay dirt when her keyword-hunter program nailed two online messages. Both contained the text string Z-1984, the top- secret name for the nastiest of the stolen bioweapons.
The messages had been sent via a spoofed IP address through an encrypted IRC—Internet Relay Chat—a real-time-only sea of thousands of chat channels where text history could disappear like ripples in the water. Both messages had gone from a Kit01Y0L0, their first lead and primary target, to Illuminati411, a conspiracy theorist blogger. The last communication had established the specifics for a face-to-face meet at an unnamed park near Massachusetts Avenue, set to happen now.
One problem. There were six parks near Massachusetts Avenue, spread over ten miles spanning from one end of the District to the other.
The Gray Box was comprised of elite talent, running the gamut from former spec ops such as himself to ex-CIA, NSA, and external foreign intelligence services. But they weren’t magicians capable of cloning themselves and were stretched bare-bones-thin on this op.
Castle threw a frisbee across the manicured grassy lawn of the upper section of the park. Achilles shot over the public lawn after it like a black-and-tan ballistic missile. The team’s four-legged buddy officially belonged to Knox Cody, their second-in-command and currently on assignment in the sandbox. Castle had helped Knox train the dog. The Doberman-German shepherd mix caught the frisbee midair and bounded back, happy to stay warm in the crisp air and play along, giving Castle a cover for his presence.
Blending in required substantial effort. At six four and packing two hundred forty pounds of lean muscle, he was taller and broader than most men and stood out like the Washington Monument if he loitered.
Add a dog and a game of fetch, and he became an ordinary Joe enjoying the fall weather. Far easier to disregard. Making it possible for him to get close to a potentially skittish target he needed to bag and drag back to headquarters for questioning.
“Possible eyes on Illuminati411,” Alistair said over comms. “A middle-aged, balding male is passing the reflecting pool, headed your way. The Truth Is Out There sweatshirt and flip-flops. I think we have a winner.”
“Copy.”
A sharp whistle brought Achilles running back to sit at Castle’s feet. Adjusting his sunglasses on the bridge of his nose, he knelt facing north for a clear visual of the steps Illuminati411 would need to take to get to this section of the quiet park. He scratched the dog’s head and fed him beefy bite-sized treats from his pocket.
“Let the others know we have possible action at our location,” Castle said low with a smile, as if speaking to Achilles. “Prepare to reposition.”
Alistair would check in with the operatives spread across the
five other parks and relocate to a discreet position where he’d use the miniature parabolic microphone to overhear the conversation without being seen. They’d bag the primary target and find out how the person knew about Z-1984.
A stout, mustached guy wearing sweats emerged from the staircase. The sound of rubber slapping the pavement rose above the bubbling gurgle of the large fountain.
The man turned, surveying the park left and right, shuffling his way down the path. One lone tourist snapped pictures of the Capitol and fountain, then meandered down the opposite set of stairs.
Stopping beside a trash can, the mustached man looked around, winded, as if he’d been rushing. He pulled out a smartphone from the pocket of his sweatpants, checked something on the screen, and plopped down on a concrete bench.
Every passing second wound Castle tighter, heightening his awareness. Those seconds bled into minutes, torqueing him to coiled readiness. Adrenaline fired hot in his veins and he ached for action like a junkie in need of a fix. Still kneeling, he extended his hand and Achilles put his paw on his palm. He pretended to inspect the dog’s mitt, but all the while, his senses were keyed in on the surrounding environment, down to the slightest shift in the wind.
On the edge of the grassy area to the east shrouded by trees, the homeless girl scrambled to her feet. She lowered her head, clutching the blanket around herself, and stepped out of the gloomy patch of shade. Something bulky flapped beneath the fleece material as she strode between the trees toward the walkway dotted with benches. Her head swiveled, nervous eyes scoping out the grounds. Her gaze glided over Castle without a second of hesitation.
Bringing Achilles was turning out to be such a clever idea, he might have to invest in a canine of his own. He petted the dog’s head and fed him an extra treat.
Heavy bells a hundred yards from his position rang in a rich ding-dong for fifteen seconds, marking the third quarter of the hour. 8:45.
The girl crept up to the trash can beside the bench the mustached man sat on. She removed the blanket in a graceful one-handed move Castle had only seen executed flawlessly in movies and stuffed it into the trash. A large satchel hung across her lean body. Beneath the hoodie and a black jacket, the scraggy young woman wore a blue dress with a hemline falling higher than midthigh, showing off the longest, tautest legs—albeit on the too-thin side. She wore ankle boots in navy velvet that shimmered in the sunlight, embroidered with colorful flowers.