by Eva Hudson
She continued to tread slowly and carefully, glancing down at the trail of blood every now and then, but mostly keeping eyes front, staring into the gloom, watching for movement.
Now she knew where she was headed, her destination was obvious. The only place inside the building not fitted with smoke detectors was the bunker on basement level three. It had its own water, power and oxygen supply. And it was never used. Sol’s little smoking ‘niche’ was a nuclear fallout shelter.
The bunker had to be at least another hundred yards ahead of her. Its entrance was set into the wall of another corridor that ran perpendicular to this one. Cory Ellis could be anywhere between there and here. Assuming he was here at all. It was quite possible he’d done what he’d come to do, watched Sol die a slow and painful death, and escaped completely without detection.
Ingrid blinked the moisture from her eyes. She wasn’t sure if it was caused by sweat or tears. She glanced up toward the ceiling, at the thick pipes covered in insulating foam. It really was hot down there.
After a few more yards she stopped for a moment and listened. All she could hear was the deep, insistent thrum of the generators.
She picked up a little pace, conscious Sol could very well be struggling for his last breaths just a hundred or so feet away. She forced a little more air into her lungs and continued down the corridor, keeping her eyes fixed on the end, now just thirty or so yards away, occasionally glancing left and right toward maintenance access doors as she passed each one. Sweat was dribbling between her breasts and making her shirt stick to her back.
Finally she reached the last few yards of the corridor. She pressed herself against the wall and edged sideways, barely daring to breathe, not wanting to make too much noise. She got to the end of the corridor, where it met the one running perpendicular to it.
From her position, she could just make out the innocuous painted wooden door set in the wall of the corridor beyond. The door that led to the fortified bunker. She struggled to remember the layout on the other side.
As far as she could recall, this door actually opened onto a square, ten feet by ten interior room. The bunker itself was situated on the other side of a twelve-inch thick titanium reinforced hatch that looked like something from a ship or a submarine—a circular handle set into its center, a punch code security pad on the wall to the right.
Ingrid steadied her breath for a moment.
She had no idea whether Ellis would be armed. He could quite easily have overpowered a Marine the same way she had.
Only one way to find out.
Gun in one hand, she inched forward and reached the wooden door. She bent her head in close. She listened. The blood pumping in her ears pretty much drowned out anything else. She tried to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. Her lips were stuck to her teeth.
She pushed down on the handle. When the latch released, she pushed open the door wide and shuffled sideways, pressing her back flat against the corridor wall. No sound came from within. She waited another couple of seconds then stepped through the doorway. Gun outstretched, she swung left, then right.
The anteroom was empty.
The shiny reinforced hatch leading into the bunker itself was ajar. Ingrid stepped toward it. She peered through the gap.
She couldn’t see much, but about thirty feet away, half obscured by shelves of dried goods and eight-gallon water containers lining both sides of a narrow corridor, she could see into another room, beyond another submarine-style shiny metal door that was open wide. She’d never seen inside the interior room before. She could just make out a figure stooping low, his legs straddling a large object on the floor.
Ingrid slowly opened the hatch in the anteroom wider and stepped into the long, thin corridor that stored the supplies. As carefully as she could, she started walking down the shelf-lined passage, toward the inner room, her eyes fixed on the stooping figure she could see through the open hatch. It was definitely a man. He straightened suddenly.
Ingrid froze.
How had he heard her? She’d been so quiet.
The man started to turn.
“Show me your hands. Now!” she yelled, running along the remainder of the corridor toward the open hatch and the interior room. “Hands over your head!”
He didn’t move.
“I won’t ask you again.”
He turned a little more, one hand gripping his thigh, the other behind his back. As he moved, Ingrid caught a glimpse of Sol’s lifeless body lying at his feet.
“Get away from him.”
“What are you going to do, Agent Skyberg?” Slowly, he turned to face her.
He didn’t look like the photograph or the artist’s impression. His hair was cut in a short crop, close to his scalp. His chin and cheeks were covered in two days’ blonde stubble.
“Hands over your head!” she said again.
He smiled at her.
She suddenly felt vulnerable, standing in the middle of the room, and backed up closer to the hatch, keen not to get locked inside.
“You really think I’m going to do what you say? Haven’t you done your research? You should stop wasting your breath.” He let out a little laugh. “Your friend here stopped wasting his a short time ago.”
“Step away from him.”
“You shoot me, I win. I’ve done everything I came here to do. You don’t shoot me, you die.” He pulled his right arm from behind his back, his right hand wrapped around the handle of a ten-inch screwdriver.
She couldn’t let him have what he wanted. Suicide by cop? No way.
He jabbed the screwdriver toward her. But he was still more than ten feet away. He stepped closer.
“Drop your weapon.”
“Haven’t we just been through that? Weren’t you listening to me? I guess I should make allowances—the carbon monoxide still preventing the oxygen getting to your brain, huh?” He smiled again. “I was pretty pissed when your friend turned up to save you, but then if she hadn’t, I guess we wouldn’t be enjoying this moment together now, would we?”
The sweat from Ingrid’s forehead was sliding into her eyes. She didn’t dare blink.
“Drop your weapon.”
“Isn’t that getting a little tired?”
“This is your last warning.”
He laughed at her and took a deep breath, his shoulders almost shrugging up to his ears. Then he exhaled and his whole body seemed to go limp.
A second later he launched forward, hurling himself toward her.
Ingrid squeezed the trigger. She saw the effect of the bullet before she heard the deafening crack. Ellis jerked backward, but didn’t fall. A long moment passed. The screwdriver slipped from his hand. Then he came at her again.
She fired.
He stalled. Dropped to his knees. Pitched forward. He landed just a couple of feet from her. Blood started oozing onto the floor beneath him. His arms and legs twitched.
Ingrid turned back toward the door and searched for the panic button, her eyes still misted with sweat. She located the big red plunger switch and thumped her fist against it.
A piercing wail erupted from loudspeakers in the corridor outside. Ingrid skirted around Ellis’ twitching body and kneeled next to Sol. She kept her gun trained on Ellis’ back.
But Cory Ellis wasn’t going anywhere.
And neither was Sol.
45
Three days later
Marshall opened the door, but refused to look at Ingrid as she entered the room. He was still pissed at her for being right. The way things were between them at the moment, it seemed he might never be able to forgive her. The fact that she’d broken off their engagement the night before seemed much less important to him than what he perceived as her attack on his professional capabilities.
She couldn’t worry about Marshall’s feelings. She was right and he was wrong. They both needed to move on.
Right now she had to stay focused. She was about to conduct the most important suspect interview of her career.
She stood at the viewing window and stared at Cory Ellis. He was staring right back at her. Beneath his tee shirt, his entire right side, all the way from his shoulder to his hip, was covered in strapping and bandage. Even though Ingrid hadn’t been on a shooting range for over six weeks, her aim had still been accurate enough to miss the major arteries and his heart and lungs. His shoulder blade would need a lot of reconstructive surgery. But that wasn’t her problem. She’d been determined he wouldn’t use her the same way his father had used the prison guard. Suicide by cop was never going to be an option.
“I could have gotten him to talk. I just needed a little more time,” Marshall said.
He’d been telling her that for the last two days. But the chief had lost patience and given in to Ellis’ demands: he was pleading the fifth unless Ingrid interviewed him herself.
The door to the observation room opened and the deputy chief of the FBI mission, Amy Louden, came in. She nodded to Ingrid and Marshall, settled herself in a chair, and stared toward the prisoner.
“They’re always much smaller than you think they’re going to be,” Louden said, turning to Ingrid.
“Ma’am?” Ingrid glanced at Ellis, who was grinning toward the glass now.
“In my experience, at any rate.” Louden raised her eyebrows expectantly. “Shall we get this started? I have a feeling it may take some time. Remind me—what’s the current estimated death toll?”
Ingrid opened her mouth to speak, but Marshall beat her to it.
“We’ve identified at least five people connected to the imprisonment of Ellis’ father who have died either in unexplained accidents or unsolved homicides,” he said.
“Are we expecting to add to that list?”
“At the moment we’d like to get confirmation he’s responsible for those killings. He might volunteer further information in the course of questioning.”
“And the killings here in London?”
“As far as we know, in addition to the City trader, there were two fatalities outside of embassy property—the Latvian woman and the realtor. We’re not pursuing those as a priority. We’ll liaise with our London colleagues, of course.” Marshall glanced at Ellis. “But there’s no way we’re handing him over. He’s coming back to the US to face trial.”
Louden had tilted her head impatiently. Ingrid winced a little inside. Marshall was stating the goddamn obvious. The deputy chief turned away and leaned her elbows on the table in front of her. “When you’re ready, agent.”
Ingrid did her best to cover the discreet earpiece wedged into her left ear with her hair. But it wasn’t really long enough to do the job. She stepped out into the corridor and took a deep breath. She hadn’t interviewed a suspect on her own for nearly a year. She wanted to ensure Ellis wouldn’t pick up on any potential weakness in her technique. If she went into that room presenting anything other than supreme confidence, he’d be able to detect it in a heartbeat. She straightened her collar, tugged at the bottom of her jacket and opened the door.
Striding into the room, she stared into Ellis’ face and didn’t take her eyes off him as she lowered herself onto the plastic and metal chair opposite his, determined not to be the one to blink first.
After a few seconds Ellis smiled at her. “OK—you win.” He dropped his gaze toward the single handcuff tethering his one functioning hand to the table. “Where would you like to start, Ingrid?”
“How about the beginning?”
“Why be so conventional? Why don’t I talk to you about the assistant deputy chief, huh? Wouldn’t you like to hear how he pleaded with me to spare his life? Or maybe I should tell you all about how he and his fellow agents harassed my family for months before my father’s arrest?”
“Was that when you decided you’d kill him? All those years ago? Most teenagers would have been dating girls and hanging out at the mall.”
“Most teenagers weren’t hounded out of high school.”
“What is this? Am I meant to feel sorry for you?”
“Not as sorry as I feel for you.”
Ingrid maintained a neutral expression.
“I mean,” he continued, “it can’t be easy for you carrying all that pain around. There’s no escaping it, is there?”
“I think you may be mistaking me for somebody else.”
“Not at all. I can see the suffering in your eyes.”
“Don’t let this slip out of your control,” Marshall murmured into her earpiece.
She thought about removing the device from her ear. A running commentary from Marshall wasn’t going to help anyone.
“How naive do you think I am, Ellis? I know what you’re trying to do. This isn’t Silence of the Lambs, we’re not playing a game of quid pro quo. Either you’re going to tell me what you’ve done, or you’re not. It doesn’t really matter to me one way or the other.” She relaxed back into her chair. “We have enough forensic evidence to convict you of at least two murders. Your DNA has been detected on the clothes of Isaac Coleman. Plus there’s all the evidence found at the restaurant in Savannah. Two murders is more than enough to put you away.”
Ellis tilted back his head and yanked at the metal cuff. “You can’t deny it. Something happened to you When you were a child maybe. Or a teenager, like me. You must have lost someone like I did. I can see it in your eyes.”
She studied his face. There was no expression there to read. Ellis was on a fishing expedition. Everyone had pain some place in their past. If he thought he could unnerve her with a carnival fortune teller’s trick, he was sorely mistaken.
“Stay focused, agent,” Marshall said in an urgent whisper.
Ingrid supposed he was putting on a show for the deputy chief. She wished he would shut the hell up.
“What I’d be interested in knowing,” Ingrid said, leaning forward a little, “is why it took you so long to do anything. I mean, your dad was shot dead in 1992, and yet you waited a whole decade before you acted.”
The muscles in his jaw flexed and bulged. It was the first real sign she was having some impact.
“Oh wait, maybe it took your mother’s suicide for you to finally grow a pair, huh? Two parents who chose to end their lives. That’s got to make you feel pretty unloved and abandoned, I guess.”
Ellis blinked slowly at her but said nothing.
“Nice of your mom to end it all on the anniversary of your dad’s death. I guess she was just thinking of you. You’d only have one day in the year to truly dread.”
He licked his lips.
“Even then, you still waited to make your move. It couldn’t have taken you that long to track down the prison guard. But then I guess it was a big step—your first kill. Must have taken you months to summon the… I was going to say courage… but there’s nothing brave about shooting an unarmed man in the face at point blank range.”
“You know nothing about it.”
“But that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? For you to enlighten me.” She pulled the miniature speaker from her ear and laid it on the table. “You have my undivided attention.”
Ellis stared into her face, searching. Ingrid stared right back at him.
“No,” he said emphatically. He blew out a breath. “I’ve changed my mind. You don’t get to know. I won’t give you the satisfaction. I’m not telling you anything.” He stared toward the mirror set into the wall. “This interview is terminated.”
46
Frustrated as hell, Ingrid scooped up the earpiece and marched out the room. She threw open the door into the observation room.
“That went well,” Marshall said. “Maybe the combative approach wasn’t the right one after all.” He was clearly trying to embarrass her in front of the deputy chief.
She ignored him. “I’m certain he’ll come around, ma’am.”
Louden raised her eyebrows.
“If we leave him to stew a while, the need to boast about his achievements will overwhelm him. He’ll be begging to speak to me again.”
&
nbsp; “How long are we going to let Ellis dictate the timetable?” Marshall said, his face and the tips of his ears reddening. “Maybe someone else should have a crack at him.”
Deputy Chief Louden tensed as he raised his voice. “The BAU guys have profiled him. I assume you’ve read their report?”
Both Ingrid and Marshall nodded back at her. Ingrid had been surprised and hesitantly self-satisfied that their profile matched the one she’d compiled almost point for point.
Louden turned to face Marshall. “So I suppose you know Agent Skyberg’s approach is the one they’ve recommended?”
“Yes, ma’am.” Marshall was balling his fists and breathing fast. Ingrid knew that if he didn’t shout at someone or punch a wall soon, he risked exploding.
“He still hasn’t requested a lawyer,” Louden said. “Ensure someone asks him if he’s still happy with that situation.”
“I get the feeling he wants a one on one… a gladiatorial contest.” Ingrid regretted making the interview sound like a boxing match as soon as the words left her mouth.
“I think you’re absolutely right,” Louden said. “Are you happy to continue to be his opponent?”
“Absolutely, ma’am.”
“Let’s hope he decides to start talking again soon.” With that Louden left the room.
As soon as the door closed behind her, Marshall turned to Ingrid. “Are you trying to sabotage my career?”
Ingrid started to move toward the door. Marshall blocked her path.
“Come on, Marsh, let’s not get things out of proportion.”
“You can call me SSA Claybourne while we’re in a work environment.”
The way he was acting, Ingrid sure as hell didn’t want to be in any other kind of environment with him. She was waiting for him to relieve his pent up frustration by shouting at her. “About last night… we didn’t really finish the conversation—”