The In Death Collection, Books 16-20

by J. D. Robb

  “Bissel and Kade were not in-house terminations. We believe, though we have no confirmed intel, that Doomsday broke Bissel’s cover, and took them out.”

  “Why?” She backed out of her slot. “If they knew about him, and his connection to Ewing and hers to the Code Red, it would make more sense to watch him, or haul him off and pull data out of his toenails.”

  “He was working a double. We worked over a year to set him up with a Doomsday operative. Look at his profile, and what do you see? An opportunist, a man who cheats on his wife—and his mistress, who likes the good life, spends lavishly. That’s how we wanted him to look, and that part was easy as what you see with Bissel was what you got. It’s how and why we used him to pass carefully arranged data to Doomsday. He took their money. There was no way they’d believe he was behind their philosophies. Just in it for the shine.”

  “You set him up to get close to Ewing to spy on Securecomp, and you set him up to get close to Doomsday to screw with them. You guys are something.”

  “It was working. The worm they’re developing, have developed,” he corrected, “could undermine governments, give the terrorists an open door. If our data banks and surveillance apparatus are severely compromised, we can’t track, we can’t know how and when they might hit. That doesn’t touch on internal crises: banks, military, transport. We needed to slow them down, and to gather intel, to have our defenses fully in place.”

  “And to steal the technology from them to create your own version of the worm.”

  “I can’t confirm that supposition.”

  “You don’t have to. Where does Carter Bissel come in?”

  “Loose cannon. He has serious issues with his brother, and took the time and trouble to learn about the extramaritals. Blackmailed him. That actually worked for us. Solidified Bissel’s cover, gave him another reason for needing quick money. We don’t know where he is, or if he’s alive or dead. Maybe they took him out, maybe they just took him. Maybe he ran or is on a fucking bender.” Frustration eked through. “But we’ll find him.”

  “This just doesn’t jibe for me, Sparrow. Not all the way.” She paused at the exit of the garage. “Terminating Bissel and Kade in that manner was sloppy. And Doomsday hasn’t taken credit. They like credit.”

  “Yeah, but they don’t like being conned. He conned them for months. We’ve gathered significant intel on the worm through Bissel. Enough bits and pieces that we should be able to develop the shield before . . .”

  “Before Securecomp? God, you’re a piece of work.”

  “Look.” He shifted in his seat. “Personally, I don’t give a flying fuck where the shield comes from, as long as we have it in place. But there are some who don’t like the idea of a man with Roarke’s . . . questionable connections having his fingers in a pie this sensitive.”

  “So you undermine Securecomp, get busy like bees to beat Roarke to the punch, so you can beat your red, white, and blue chests and add the big fee to your budget.”

  “Everything about the NYPSD is sunshine and roses, Dallas? You got a perfect system here?”

  “No, but I don’t screw somebody just so I can take the collar.” She eased out into traffic. “I’m seriously thinking about ditching you in front of this nice little cafe where Zeus addicts hang.”

  “Come on, Dallas, give a little, get a little. We need a look at the units you confiscated, and have locked down. The ones you took from the various crime scenes. Or at least the scan and analysis reports. Doomsday has the worm. Even Roarke can’t put together the brain trust we can to complete the shield and complete it now. Without it, we could be facing a crisis of goddamn biblical proportions.”

  At those words, the wrath of God hit. She felt the intense blast of heat, and saw the blinding flash of light. Glass imploded, and the dust of it spewed into her face.

  Instinctively, she wrenched the wheel sideways, slammed the brakes, but her tires were no longer in contact with the road. Dimly she realized they were airborne.

  She choked out a warning for Sparrow to hang on, and through the haze of smoke saw the world revolve. They hit, and the impact snapped her safety harness. She tumbled, stomach pitching, head ringing, and thudded hard on the safety bags that deployed with an explosive snap. The last thing she remembered was the taste of her own blood in her mouth.

  She wasn’t out long, the stink of the smoke, the quality of the screams told her she hadn’t lost consciousness more than a minute or two. That, and the fact that the pain hadn’t had time to fully process in her brain. Her vehicle—what was left of it—was on its top, like a turtle laying on its shell.

  She spat out blood and shifted enough to reach Sparrow, to check for a pulse in his throat. She found a weak one, though her hand came away slick with blood that was still running down his face.

  She heard the sirens now, and the rush of feet, the shouted orders that said cops. Dimly she thought, If you are going to take a sudden, unexpected air trip while still in road mode, it is good to do so within a block of Cop Central.

  “I’m on the job,” she called out and began to try to wriggle her way back, out of the smashed driver door and window. “Dallas, Lieutenant. There’s a civilian pinned in here—bleeding bad.”

  “Take it easy, Lieutenant. MTs are on the way. You probably don’t want to move until—”

  “Get me the hell out of here.” She tried to dig into the roadbed with the toes of her boots, searching for traction. She made it two inches before hands gripped her legs, her hips, and eased her out of the wreckage.

  “How bad you hurt?”

  She managed to focus on the face, recognized Detective Baxter. “I can still see you, so I’m in considerable pain. But I think I’m just banged up. Passenger’s bad.”

  “They’re getting to him.”

  She winced as Baxter ran his hands over her, checking for breaks. “You better not be using this to cop a feel.”

  “Just one of those little bonuses life hands you. Got some lacerations, probably going to have contusions all over that nifty bod of yours.”

  “Shoulder burns.”

  “You gonna punch me if I take a look?”

  “Not this time.”

  She rolled her head back, closed her eyes as he unbuttoned her ruined shirt. “Friction burns from the harness, looks like,” he told her.

  “I want to stand up.”

  “Just take it easy until the medicals look at you.”

  “Give me a damn hand up, Baxter. I want to see the damage.”

  He helped her up, and when her vision didn’t waver, she figured she’d gotten off lucky.

  The same couldn’t be said of Sparrow. The passenger side had taken the brunt when it rammed a maxibus on one of its revolutions. Trueheart was working with another uniform to sheer away the metal trapping Sparrow inside.

  “He’s pinned between the door and the dash,” Trueheart called out. “Looks like his leg’s broken, maybe his arm, too. But he’s breathing.”

  She stepped back as the MTs hustled up. One wriggled into the driver’s side where she’d wriggled out. The calls turned to medical jargon and orders. She heard talk about spinal and neck injuries, and cursed.

  Then she looked at the car.

  “Holy Jesus Christ.”

  The front end was all but disintegrated. Metal was blackened, melted, fused to metal. Window glass had gone to powder and continued to smoke.

  “It looks like . . .”

  “Like it was hit with a short-range missile,” Baxter finished. “You’d be toast if it’d broadsided you instead of skimming the front end. I was heading in to Central, and saw this flash, this streak. Big boom, and a vehicle, yours, flew right over mine. Flew up, came down, flipped three times then spun around like a top. Smashed a couple of civilian vehicles, laid waste to a glide-cart, skipped the curb, skipped back, then plowed into a maxi like a torpedo.”

  “Civilian casualties?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She could see some of the
injured, and hear weeping, some screaming. Soy dogs, soft drink tubes, candy sticks were scattered over the street and sidewalk like some nasty buffet.

  “Harness held, until the last minute.” She wiped absently at a trickle of blood on her temple. “It held, or God knows . . . Reinforcements in the roof kept us from being crushed like a couple of recycled milk cartons. Major damage on the passenger side from the crash. He got the worst of it.”

  Baxter watched the MTs fix the unconscious man to a back-and-neck board. “Friend of yours?”

  “No.”

  “You piss somebody off enough to fire missiles at you or did he?”

  “Good question.”

  “You need to have the MTs look you over.”

  “Probably.” The pain was seeping through now, making mincemeat of the adrenaline and shock. “I hate that. Really do. And you know what else? The guys in requisitions are going to slap me around for this. They’re going to slap me around, then give me some piece of shit transpo to punish me.”

  She hobbled over to the curb, sat among the confusion and noise. Then sneered in warning at the MT who headed, with his kit, in her direction. “You even think about using a pressure syringe on me,” Eve told her, “and I’m taking you down.”

  “You want the pain, you keep the pain.” The MT shrugged and opened his kit. “But let’s have a look.”

  It took her another two hours to get home, and then she had to catch a ride with Baxter as she’d been ordered not to drive. Since she didn’t have anything to drive, it wasn’t hard to follow orders.

  “I guess I’m supposed to ask you in for a drink now or some happy shit.”

  “That’s right, but I’ll take a raincheck. I got a date. Scorching date, and I’m running behind.”

  “Appreciate the ride.”

  “That’s your best comeback? You’re in bad shape. Take a pill, Dallas,” he suggested as she eased her aching body out. “Flake out awhile.”

  “I’m okay. Go bang the bimbo of the week.”

  “Now that’s more like it.” He gave a cheery chuckle and drove away.

  She limped into the house, but couldn’t quite limp past Summerset.

  He looked down his nose, sniffed. “I see you’ve managed to destroy several more articles of clothing.”

  “Yeah, I thought I’d rip and burn them while wearing them, just to see what happened.”

  “I assume your vehicle suffered similarly as it’s not in evidence.”

  “It’s trash. But then, it always was.” She headed for the stairs, but he blocked her path, then scooped up the cat who was trying to climb up her legs.

  “For God’s sake, Lieutenant, take the elevator. And you may as well take something voluntarily for the pain before you have to be humiliated into it.”

  “I’m walking it off so I don’t stiffen up and start to look like you.” She knew it was stubborn, she knew it was stupid, but she took the stairs. The worst was, if he hadn’t been there at the door, lurking, she’d have taken the damn elevator in the first place.

  She was dripping with sweat by the time she made it to the bedroom, so she simply stripped off her ruined clothes, tossed her weapon and her communicator on the bed, and whimpered her way into the shower.

  “Jets on half power,” she ordered. “One hundred degrees.”

  The soft spray of hot water stung, then soothed. She braced her hands against the tile wall, dipped her head, and let it flow over her.

  Who had they been after? she wondered. Her or Sparrow? She was betting on herself. Sparrow, and the civilians in the line of fire, were just what they’d call collateral damage. So why try to take her out, and why hadn’t they done a better job of it?

  Sloppy, sloppy, she thought. It’s all been sloppy.

  “Jets off,” she grunted, and feeling a bit steadier, stepped out of the shower.

  She knew her heart shouldn’t have jolted when she saw Roarke. Summerset—the big, fat tattletale—would have told him.

  “The MTs cleared me,” she said quickly. “I’m just banged up, that’s all.”

  “I can see that. You don’t want the drying tube. The hot air won’t do you any good. Here.” He picked up a bathsheet, walked to her, and wrapped it gently around her. “Do I have to force a blocker on you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s something.” He feathered his fingers over the abrasions on her face. “We may be angry with each other, Eve, but you should have contacted me. I shouldn’t have heard you’d been in an accident from a damn media bulletin.”

  “They didn’t release names,” she began, then trailed off.

  “They didn’t have to.”

  “I didn’t think. I’m sorry, I really didn’t think about it. It’s not because I’m—whatever I am with you right now. I didn’t think about the media, or that you’d hear anything about it until I got back and could tell you myself.”

  “All right. You need to lie down.”

  “I’ll take the blocker, but I’m not going down. AD Sparrow’s bad. He was with me. His spine’s messed up, and there’s severe head trauma. The passenger side was—shit. Shit. I don’t know how he lived through it. It was a short-range missile.”

  She scooped her hair back and went into the bedroom to sit.

  “You said missile.”

  “Yeah. Probably one of those nifty one-man jobs. Handheld launcher. He must’ve fired from the roof across from Central. Had me staked out. Maybe Sparrow, but I’m thinking me. To mess up the investigation? To mess you up? Both?” She shook her head. “Maybe to put the HSO on the hot seat, taking out a cop when they couldn’t get her to pass the investigation over to them. Maybe to throw the suspicion onto the terrorists.”

  He handed her a small blue pill and a glass of water. “Your word you’ll swallow it or I’ll check under your tongue.”

  “I’m not quite feeling up to sex games. Leave my tongue alone. I’m swallowing it.”

  Some of the warmth came back in his eyes as he sat beside her. “Why isn’t it the HSO or Doomsday?”

  “Not very covert to launch a missile at a cop car in New York traffic in the middle of the day. If they wanted me out, they’d find a more subtle way and without losing one of the assistant directors in the process.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So, this is like a quiz?”

  “The MTs may have cleared you, but you look as if you’ve been run over by a truck. I’d like to see if you’re thinking clearly at least. Why not Doomsday, then? Subtle isn’t their style.”

  “First, technos don’t send a man out to shoot missiles. That’s why they’re technos. And if they did break pattern, they wouldn’t have missed. And it was a miss. Couple of feet down, hit the car broadside, and we’re gone. They send somebody to take out a cop and/or an operative, they’re not going to be so half-assed about it. Plus, I think they’d have gone bigger. If they could get a man into position, why not use a bigger toy, and take out a chunk of Central? Hit Cop Central and you’ve got the kind of media foray they love. Take out a car, and it’s a little bulletin. Not big. This has the earmark of desperation or temper, not organization. How’m I doing?”

  “Your brain doesn’t appear to have been unduly scrambled.” He rose, wandered to the window. “Why didn’t you tell me you’d been called to the Tower?”

  “We’re straddling a line here,” she said after a moment. “I don’t like it, I don’t like feeling . . . apart from you. But that’s the reality of it.”

  “So it seems.”

  “Someone tried to kill me today. Will you hunt them down?”

  He didn’t turn. “It’s entirely different, Eve. I’ve had to . . . adjust myself when it comes to your work, what you do, what may be done to you. I love you, and loving you I have to accept that you are what you are, and do what you do. It costs me.”

  He turned now, looked at her with those wild blue eyes. “Considerably.”

  “It was your choice. It was always your choice.”

 
; “As if I had one, from the minute I saw you. What you face now, I can accept, and admire you for facing it. What you faced then, what was forced on you when you had no defense, I can’t accept.”

  “It won’t change anything.”

  “That’s a matter of perspective. Does it change anything to put a killer in a cage after his victim’s in the ground? You believe it does, and so do I. And debating this now is only going to push us both further over on our own sides of that line. We both have work.”

  “Yeah, we both have work.” She got to her feet. She would stand, she thought. Had to. Even if she couldn’t stand with him.

  “Before we were so rudely interrupted, Sparrow told me that Bissel was a double agent. The HSO was using him to get intel from Doomsday. Giving them structured intel in return for payment. It was a long con. They wrapped Ewing up in it due to her position at Securecomp. They wanted a handle on your technology and projects, and most particularly in recent months, whatever they could get on your Code Red. They want, and apparently seriously want, to scoop you on the shield.”

  “I suppose the idea of the private sector having that kind of technology irritates them. Using Bissel was sensible. He plays all ends—using Reva to gain data on Securecomp, posing as the greedy turncoat to gain knowledge of Doomsday.”

  “His brother was blackmailing him over the extramaritals. But that suited their purposes. Sparrow claims they don’t know where Carter Bissel is. He might be telling the truth, but I’m not buying little brother as your standard blackmailer. No reason to corrupt his personal units, no reason for him to disappear or be disappeared. Doesn’t jibe.”

  “He who can play turncoat can actually be one.”

  She smiled. “There you go.”

  She hated to admit it but the blocker helped. Even so the thin cotton pants and loose T-shirt felt heavy on her abused body. When Peabody took one look at her and winced, Eve decided she probably looked worse than she felt.

  “You don’t look like you can hit me at the moment,” Peabody began, “so I’m going to ask. Don’t you think you should be in the hospital?”

  “Don’t let appearances deceive you. No, I shouldn’t be in the hospital, and yes, I can still hit you. Bring me up on Powell.”