Now that Cyrus was near, the French accent of the guard was unmistakable. He’d seen the man around the building over the last day or two but he’d never interacted with him. Now that he thought about it, there were several guards with French accents.
Could there be a connection?
“Tell me about your communication with Dargo,” the persecutor insisted. His voice was impatient; he bared his teeth as he pronounced each word with precision. He’d clearly been at this for some time.
“I told you,” the seated man said in an exhausted slur. “He radioed an SOS. The plane was going down. I didn’t get his position. We lost communication when we lost him on radar.”
The interrogator turned suddenly, bringing the baton down on his charge with a lightning swing. The blow struck the seated man just below his right shoulder. The crisp snap that issued was more than just the impact of the weapon on flesh. Cyrus cringed. The bone in the seated man’s right arm had just been destroyed.
The man on the floor tipped his head back and howled in agony. His face was drenched in sweat—the kind of perspiration the body secretes, not from exertion, but from times of extreme stress—in this case, torment.
He cocked his head back, banging it against the steel weight machine to which he had been bound. He gasped, each breath a struggle to pull fresh air into his lungs and fight back the pain. His eyes rolled in their sockets as he teetered on the verge of unconsciousness.
The moment the man’s head swung back for the first time, Cyrus recognized his face. The bound guard’s name was Wagner. They’d spent a great deal of time together, while Cyrus convalesced, and in the time that followed. Wagner had shown him respect in that time, bending the rules and allowing him to steal private moments with Natasha.
Seeing Wagner treated this way was unacceptable. Cyrus fought against his better judgment and the urge to step around the corner with his gun blazing. A primal part of him wanted to cut down the sadistic interrogator where he stood.
Still, he could not. The gunshots would give away his position, and he needed to gather as much information as possible before he took the man out. Though it pained him, Cyrus waited.
Wagner sobbed, unable to control himself through what must’ve been staggering pain. The broken arm was just the latest of several savage injuries, Cyrus knew. “Just kill me,” Wagner said through choked breaths.
The Frenchman knelt before him and laid the baton down at his side. He took a hand full of Wagner’s hair in his fist and used it to pull his drooped head up before looking him in the eyes. “Tell me what I want to know and I will not kill you,” the man growled. “Speak now and I will let you go. You can seek medical treatment as soon as my team has taken the Voss family and left the building.”
Wagner looked back through swollen and bloodshot eyes. His breathing slowly came under control. He held the man’s attention for nearly a minute but still said nothing.
“Just tell me what happened to Dargo,” the interrogator insisted. “You managed to delete the recordings before we could pull you out of the communications room, but do not fool yourself. Fortier will recover the data. Once that happens, we will no longer have any use for you.”
Cyrus did the math in his head. One hostile dead when he went over the railing, two more shot in Voss’s office, plus one more in the lab. Add to that a pair of friendlies down in the hallway of the fifth floor, the interrogator, Wagner, and a man —Fortier—working to recover recordings in the radio room. That accounted for nine of the ten Dargo had left behind to protect the compound. It meant there was still one guard missing, and Cyrus couldn’t be sure if he was friend or foe.
What were the chances that any of these men knew the name of the puppet master behind all of this? Whoever was organizing the operation against Voss was skilled enough to keep all information compartmentalized. He was a pro. And that meant that there was likely little more information that the Frenchman could give him.
Good enough.
Stepping around the corner, Cyrus raised his gun. “Hey, asshole,” he growled.
The interrogator released Wagner’s head and launched to his feet as he turned to face Cyrus. The Frenchman was well trained because he wasn’t fully upright when he pulled his gun free from its holster. Cyrus saw recognition in the sadist’s eyes in the half second it took for him to draw. There was a look of satisfaction there. He was excited by the prospect of shooting Cyrus.
To be fair, it might’ve been a little vindictive of Cyrus to even let the Frenchman think he had a shot at out-drawing him. Cyrus could’ve shot the man down a dozen times over before the man had either his balance in place or his gun anywhere near a targeting vector. But letting the sadist think he had a chance was about two things. First, it was an opportunity to see how the man reacted to his presence. In the fraction of a second it took for events to unfold, Cyrus didn’t know what to make of the rapid series of expressions he saw play out across the gunman’s face. Only that some of what he saw wasn’t right. The gunman wasn’t as surprised as he should’ve been—or maybe he recognized Cyrus as more of a threat than his cover allowed for.
But mostly, it was about letting the sick bastard know he’d come close to surviving—to winning—just not close enough.
Cyrus squeezed the trigger as he walked toward the man at a smooth, steady pace. Then he squeezed the trigger again and again.
The first round caught the Frenchman in the neck at the base of the spine. He was still spinning to face Cyrus, and drawing his sidearm while he did it. The shot landed exactly as intended, clipping the man’s spine and shattering bones and nerves alike. The following two shots were ancillary, striking his torso a half second apart; both scored direct hits to the man’s heart.
The interrogator’s gun skidded across the floor and his body hit with a heavy thud three feet from where Wagner sat bound. The report from Cyrus’s three shots shocked Wagner awake, returning him from the edge of unconsciousness. His eyes were wide and his head wobbled with a lack of coordination. He looked up in time to see Cyrus stop at the side of the fallen man with his gun still at the ready.
Cyrus looked at the crippled interrogator. He was alive and breathing, but he wouldn’t be for long. Only the man’s eyes moved in their sockets. Cyrus could tell that the he was trying to make sense of his sudden loss of bodily control. When the first bullet shattered his spine, he’d lost all sensory input from his extremities. He didn’t know that his heart had been destroyed or that he had only seconds left to live.
Leaving the man to his fate, Cyrus knelt beside Wagner. Using the knife he’d confiscated earlier, he cut his bindings.
Wagner struggled to sit upright, clutching his right shoulder with his left hand. “My god,” he mumbled. “Where did you come from?”
“Long story,” Cyrus said with a sad smile. “Can you walk?”
A pained chuckle escaped Wagner’s lips. “Not a chance,” he groaned.
“Fair enough.”
Cyrus retrieved the gun from his fallen foe and checked the magazine. It was fully loaded, as he expected, with armor piercing rounds. Taking it, and a spare magazine, he set both beside Wagner on the floor. He stood the extra magazine upright. Should he need it, Wager could singlehandedly eject the spent magazine and slip the gun down over the top of the spare. It was an improvised one-handed operation, but it would keep Wagner safe.
Doing a press check of the newly acquired gun, Cyrus confirmed there was a round in the chamber. “The safety’s off,” he said to Wagner as he handed the weapon to him.
Wagner had watched Cyrus’s entire process with unblinking eyes. He accepted the gun but looked at him with a curious expression. “Given that a lot of thought, have you?” he asked grimly.
Cyrus shrugged. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to leave you here. By my math, there’s still one man unaccounted for. I don’t know if he’s one of ours or one of theirs, but I need to sort that out before we can regroup.”
Laying the gun in his lap, Wagner held
up a hand. “Wait a second. What are you talking about? There’s ten of us on station here.”
Cyrus nodded. He ran a quick tally, explaining the trail of bodies that had led him to the fifth floor. “You said they have a man in the communications room. That makes nine. I need to collect him and then find our missing tenth man.”
“Jesus,” Wagner breathed. His eyes threatened to drift to some faraway place. After a moment, he took a deep breath and winced when he made a move to sit more upright. “Get me up. You’ll need my help.”
“Take it easy,” Cyrus said. He helped the man shift to a slightly more comfortable position and then checked his pulse. It wasn’t good but that was to be expected after everything he’d been through. He should’ve been lost to physical shock by now.
“Just stay here and keep yourself out of trouble,” Cyrus said in a mild tone. “I’ll take care of the rest. But when I’m done, we need to find out what happened to Dargo. Voss told me his plane crashed on the way back from the U.S.”
“That part’s covered,” Wagner said with a pained smile. “I was able to make arrangements before they pulled me out of the booth.”
“I don’t understand,” Cyrus admitted.
“Dargo called in from his sat-phone and said they were going down. He didn’t want to make the call over an open frequency because he was afraid the attack on the jet might be part of a coordinated assault on us here.”
Wagner shook his head, likely considering the call and all that had happened in the short time since. “I guess he was right. We just couldn’t have guessed that it was part of an attack from operatives already on the inside—our own guys.”
Cyrus offered a nod of understanding. He was with him so far.
“Anyway,” Wagner continued, “Dargo had me sound the alert and put the facility on lockdown. That was priority one, as far as he was concerned. But after I lost contact with him, I had another idea. I was able to set it in motion before these bastards broke into the radio room.
“I knew we were already spread dangerously thin, men either lost on Gretchen’s detail, or in the air with Dargo. And he was right about a coordinated attack. We just didn’t expect it to come from the inside. We didn’t have the resources to launch a rescue mission for the downed plane, given our situation.”
“What’s the plan?” Cyrus asked. He couldn’t figure out how Wagner thought he could rescue survivors from the plane at that point.
“I contacted King Borden on a secure line. I didn’t even have to explain much,” Wagner admitted. “I just told him that we had a jet going down nearby and that we had a security breach. By that point, I had these sonsofbitches tearing at the radio room door.”
Wagner was straining to tell the story through clenched teeth. Rage was clear in his eyes as he looked at the dead man only a few feet away. “So I gave Borden the last known coordinates. He said he would deal with it.”
Cyrus still didn’t understand. “What can the King of a small island nation do in this situation?”
“I can only guess,” Wagner said. “But the King has a sizable personal security force and substantial resources. Kapros doesn’t have its own military, but it does have rich mineral resources that have brought about partnerships with the world’s leading nations. The country is not without assets. If anyone has the resources to recover the downed jet before it’s too late, it’s King August Borden.”
“And he was willing do all of that with just a phone call?” Cyrus was skeptical.
Wagner’s eyes rolled as he fought to remain conscious. “Did I mention that Borden is godfather to both Anna and Natasha?”
Cyrus grinned. That wasn’t mentioned in any of the Coalition’s files.
————
Cyrus was able to move with greater speed on his way to the security office. He’d committed Voss’s crude map to memory and had confidence that at least one of the two unaccounted for security guards was in the process of recovering a recording of Dargo’s distress call. Things were making more sense now, too. Wagner had been the one who put the facility on lockdown, a situation not ideal for the invading force since it restricted their ability to move freely throughout the building.
There was another advantage to the situation. If Cyrus could take the man in the radio room alive, he could gather additional intelligence. While he still believed that the operation had been tightly compartmentalized, restricting information was difficult. Operatives often knew more than they were supposed to; it was a hazard of the trade.
Moving silently down the last stretch of hallway, the pair of sliding doors leading to the security office and communications room came into view. If Wagner was right, Cyrus’s target would be locked inside that room, struggling to recover deleted recordings. Still, Cyrus wasn’t about to rush in blind.
Tapping Voss’s code into the panel beside the door, Cyrus brought up the camera showing what was waiting for him beyond. It was a wide room with the main wall covered by dozens of LCD displays. They showed security feeds from all over the compound.
Unfortunately, the room was unmanned. That’s when Cyrus felt the barrel of a gun touch the back of his head.
“Toss it,” a voice from behind ordered.
The unseen figure also possessed a distinct French accent. It didn’t take a detective to find commonality among the rogue portion of Dargo’s force.
The gun fell from Cyrus’s fingers. It hit the tile floor with a clatter, shattering the eerie silence. Very slowly, he raised his hands to near shoulder level. It was a calm, submissive gesture. The security feeds that were displayed across the walls of the office flashed through Cyrus’s mind and he realized that his target had literally seen him coming.
It was a foolish mistake.
“You’ve been a busy boy,” the Frenchman said. He kicked the gun away and stepped out of Cyrus’s reach. “Turn around slowly.”
Completing a slow rotation, Cyrus met the eye of the gunman. As with the others, he’d seen this man around the building. “You’ve been watching me?”
The gunman offered a nervous grin. The look told Cyrus that the sweat clinging to the man’s face wasn’t from exertion. He was feeling the strain of the situation. No…he looked closer at his eyes—the man was afraid. Obviously, the operation hadn’t gone according to plan. But from the looks of this guy, the plan had diverged from any scenario his team was prepared to handle.
Cyrus took a certain amount of pride in that.
“You want out,” Cyrus said, suddenly understanding the man. “You’ve watched everything that’s happened and you want out, but you can’t make it. You were locked in when Wagner put the building in lockdown.”
The Frenchman’s complete lack of response was all the confirmation Cyrus needed.
“Wow,” he continued. “Wagner screwed you good. No wonder your buddy was working him over like that.”
The gun pointed at Cyrus wobbled slightly as the Frenchman virtually throttled it in a white-knuckled grip. A slight tick caused the corner of his eye to twitch, and Cyrus knew his opponent was weighing his options.
“What has you more worried,” Cyrus pressed. “Getting out of here in one piece, or dealing with your employer when you come back empty-handed?”
The twitch at the corner of the man’s eye told Cyrus he was onto something.
“Someone must’ve found the magic number. Getting you to turn on the rest of your team? That couldn’t come cheap.”
When the gunman raised his second hand to steady a tremble that was becoming impossible to hide, Cyrus fought the urge to smile. The man was scared, but the failed mission wasn’t his only problem. He had serious concerns about the person, or persons, who had put him and his friends up to this.
Now he just needed to learn what he could about the puppet master behind the Frenchmen’s betrayal. A common thread had emerged over the course of the repeated attacks. And though Cyrus hadn’t been able to contact Command to confirm his suspicions, everything he’d seen was reinforcing his g
ut feelings. Each attack had been separate and unique, conducted by a small team of hitters. On the train, it had been a three-person team. The operation at the bar was a larger, more concerted effort, but something about the series of events had Cyrus rethinking what had happened. He had originally thought the attack at the bar and the subsequent ambush at the airport bus terminal were orchestrated by the same, larger team. But upon reflection, he suspected the attacks were the work of separate hit squads, dispatched independently and sent after him, not Natasha. The way they operated, even the way they moved, had been entirely different.
And now he was dealing with a group of Frenchmen already embedded and working for Voss under Dargo’s command. The Frenchmen had been loyal to Voss and Dargo at one time, and had turned on their employers. But why? Or, more importantly, why now? Dargo wasn’t just security conscious—there was such a thing as borderline paranoia and Dargo lived well on the other side of that border. For these men to make it to the inside it would’ve required extensive preparation and a very long-term plan. Cyrus knew how those operations worked. He’d lived them. But nothing that had happened in any of the prior attacks displayed that required level of preparation. In fact, each attack seemed almost improvised. No one knew Cyrus and Natasha would be at the bar that night, and certainly not at the bus station lockers after trading bullets at the bar.
It was far more likely that the French portion of Dargo’s team turning on the rest wasn’t planned in advance. Their treachery was more likely the result of bribery or some kind of coercion. Long-term plants would’ve had a better plan and had a better understanding of the building’s security systems.
The use of disparate mercenary teams against him told Cyrus something more. He wasn’t dealing with an organization with personnel and resources. It was more likely that a single person—at most, a small group—was behind everything. What was lacked in manpower was made up for in willingness to throw money at the problem in the form of mercenary muscle.
Rogue Faction Part 2: A Cyrus Cooper Thriller: Book Three Page 11