He hit the door and it swung open, making the same beeping noise that it had when he’d come the first time. The interior hallway was dark and the building silent. There were four doors on either side of the long hallway and at the end Bilal’s office door was open, with light pouring onto the carpeting. He ran to the first entrance and crouched behind the door. He put his eye to the crack at the doorjamb and saw a man’s figure in the hall. He paused in the room’s doorway for a moment and then continued down the hall.
Smith felt a hand wrap around his ankle. He froze and looked to his right. He saw that it was Bilal, lying on his side with a gun in his right hand. The man’s harsh breathing sounded loud in the room.
“Are you hit?” he whispered.
“Side. Miss Rebecca.” He made a slight coughing sound that Smith didn’t like at all. As a medical doctor, he’d heard it too many times right before someone died.
“Where is she?”
“Office. Go armed. They’re guarding the entrance. Cowards won’t come down the hall to fight me. They have all my gold,” Bilal said. “I can’t let them take it.”
Smith laid his gun on the carpeting and began to run his hands over Bilal. He found the wound and heard Bilal’s sharp intake of breath as he probed it.
“My gold,” Bilal said.
“Forget about the gold. I’m calling for an ambulance.” Smith pulled out his phone and prepared to text Marty.
“Those stinking sheepherders aren’t taking my gold,” Bilal said. Smith tried to send the text, but it failed. He had no service. “My phone isn’t working.” Bilal made a sound that Smith thought might have been a chuckle, if the man hadn’t been near death.
“Roof is metal. It’s safer,” Bilal rasped.
“Is there a phone in this room?”
“On the desk, but I called the police. Told them they have her as a hostage. They caught me doing it and shot me. Bastards think they’ve killed me.”
Smith began to rise and Bilal grabbed his sleeve. “Be careful. It’s a business phone, many lines. If you pick it up, they’ll see the light and know someone’s using it.” Smith lowered back down. “They sent the skinny one to pour their chemicals on my solar panels.”
Smith stilled. “Were the chemicals from a cooler?”
“Yes. Kill them. Get me my gold.” Smith wanted to tell the man that the gold would be worthless if the entire city was dying from a pandemic. He also wished he knew how often the panels kicked back electricity to the grid.
“How many?” Smith asked.
“Four.” Bilal made a choking sound. “One is Dattar. I know of him from the old country. The skinny one is on the roof. There’s an Uzi in the cabinet here. Back right shelf. And a flamethrower in the safe across the hall. The one on the right. The gold is there as well, but not enough to satisfy them. I emptied the rest three days ago and moved it to another location. There’s fifty thousand dollars’ worth left here. Combination six–twenty-five–six for the weapons safe. Burn the building down. The gold will melt, but it will survive.”
“What about Rebecca? Is she alive?”
“They have her. They beat her,” the man choked, “bad. So bad. Her face is…” He closed his eyes and shook his head. He grabbed at Smith’s arm. “The large picture near the safe swings open. There’s a two-way mirror. You can see into the office. My bodyguards would watch while I made transactions.”
“Are the bodyguards here?”
“No,” he said.
“How did the skinny one reach the roof?”
“Drop-down stairs. In the safe room.” The man inhaled. “My son is Malik. You give him the gold. You tell him I love him.” Bilal’s head lolled and the rattling sound came from his throat. Smith watched the man die.
Smith swallowed and immediately regretted it. His throat flared in pain as he did, and his arms continued to burn as if heated. His eyes blurred and watered. He glanced across the room, and the cabinet that Bilal had pointed to swam in his vision. He looked to the rug to find his gun and was horrified to realize that he was unable to see it. He ran his hand along the industrial carpet till the cold metal hit his knuckles.
The cabinet sat on the opposite wall. Smith’s vision readjusted again. It was as if his eyes were warring with the effects of the gas. He grasped the gun and headed across the room. Once he reached the cabinet, his vision again blurred. As the mustard gas symptoms progressed, they would cause blisters to erupt on his corneas. He presumed that they were forming now and that his eyes were reacting.
He opened the panels and ran his hands along the cool wooden shelf. Encountering a mesh strap, he followed it to the Uzi’s handle, collecting the gun and feeling for a magazine. An elongated one, already loaded, jutted from the handle.
He moved back to the doorway, peered down the hall toward the front door, and froze. Khalil stood there, with the door slightly cracked open, watching outside.
The burning on Smith’s arms spread to his torso, and he felt as though he were a walking torch. If this is what burn victims experienced, he couldn’t understand how they could bear the pain. His skin started to crawl and for a brief moment he thought he heard it crackle as though cooking to a crisp. His eyes kept up their crazy wavering, first focusing, then failing.
The safe room was opposite the one he was in, directly across the hall. The floor was carpeted and Smith gauged how quickly he could cross the distance. Khalil stayed where he was, staring out. Smith took a breath and stepped across to the next room, immediately moving against the wall near the doorway, and waited. No sound came from the hall.
There were two five-foot-tall metal safes on the opposite wall. Next to them, drop-down stairs led to the roof. Smith wrapped the Uzi’s strap over his shoulder and headed toward it. An electronic keypad glowed on the front panel. He punched in the combination and was rewarded with a clicking noise as the door disengaged. It swung open on well-oiled hinges.
In the safe was an arsenal. Several pistols, two AK-47s, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and three shelves of ammunition, several grenades designed both for the launcher and to be thrown, along with two small canisters of fuel attached to a flamethrower. Straps allowed the canisters to be carried on one’s back. Smith once again put his weapons on the floor while he ran his arms through the flamethrower’s straps. The flamethrower hose and nozzle were attached to the canister’s side with a clip. Smith left it there. He wanted his hands free to use the Uzi and the pistol first. He left the safe door open.
Loud thuds came from the back office. Smith heard a woman’s voice cry out. Above his head he heard someone walking on the roof. From the office came the unmistakable sound of a fist against flesh, and Nolan cried out. Smith fought the urge to leap in there with the Uzi firing full bore. His duty was clear; first he needed to stop the man on the roof from spreading the bacteria. The solar panels would feed it directly to the main grid and from there into every home in the northeast region. He needed to get to it quickly before it colonized and while the heat from the flamethrower could still kill it.
He lowered to a crouch and nearly groaned as the burnt skin on his legs stretched. His vision was fluctuating in an erratic pattern, and he could feel his index finger sweating around the gun’s trigger. Through it all he felt the beginnings of a fever, but he couldn’t tell if it was a reaction from being gassed or if he had contracted the virus. A large landscape painting with a frame that was easily three feet square hung on the wall near the safe. Smith pulled on the frame’s edge. It swung away, revealing the two-way mirror into the office. Bilal’s paranoia had paid off. Smith was watching the participants in the office.
Nolan sat in front of the second of Bilal’s computers on the credenza, typing furiously. Her face was a mass of bruises and contusions, and it appeared that her nose was broken. Finger marks imprinted on her neck gave testament to the fact that she’d been strangled, and her bare right arm bled from long slashes of a knife.
Around her stood Harcourt, Dattar, and Manderi. Smith
’s rage flared at the sight of Manderi. If he was the “officer on the scene,” it was clear that no others would be appearing. All the men peered at the computer screen. Three black bags sat on the desk behind Nolan. One was unzipped, revealing bars of gold. Dattar was leaning over Nolan’s shoulder with a bloody knife in his hand. He held the knife to her neck and a line of blood ran from the place of contact with her skin.
Smith turned away and started toward the stairs, climbing them slowly. When his head became level with the roof, he glanced around. He saw a slender man kneeling in front of the solar panels’ conversion box. A cooler sat open next to him. The man was using a scoop and a painter’s brush to apply a gel-like substance to sections of the panels, moving fast.
Smith heard the sound of his phone announcing a text message and froze. His location at the top of the roof must have enabled a signal. The man, though, didn’t hear it. Smith pulled the phone out of his pocket and did his best to read the text, hoping that it would be Klein telling him that the NYPD was on its way.
It was Marty. The text read, Erasing her keystrokes as she types. Buying you more time.
Smith swiped the phone face, set it to vibrate, and replied, Where the hell is my backup?
Smith angled the pistol over the roof’s edge and took aim, but paused. Once he fired, he would reveal his position, and he fully expected both Khalil and Manderi to come after him. The silence of a knife would be ideal, but he would have to crawl back down the stairs, into the weapons safe, find a knife, and retrace his steps. He would have done it, but he didn’t recall seeing any knives in the stash. His phone vibrated. Smith looked at the text.
Brand and Beckmann here silent approach there are no windows to shoot through if we storm the building will they kill the hostage?
Smith typed back, Yes.
His phone vibrated and Brand wrote, High angle view of building await your instructions.
Smith’s vision began to blur, his eyes were watering. He blinked, but it didn’t clear his vision this time. It was now or never. He put the keypad up to his eyes and squinted at the lit screen. He typed, Shoot the guy on the roof.
Beckmann’s gunshot wasn’t as loud as Smith’s would have been, but it wasn’t as quiet as Smith had hoped, either. He heard a group of voices raised as the crew in the office reacted to the shot. Smith watched the man slump, then collapse backward. Smith vaulted up the rest of the stairs and ran to the coolers. The dead man lay sprawled over them and Smith rolled the body off. Inside he saw a tub of the gelatinous substance that the man had been working with, as well as several capped test tubes. Smith grabbed a test tube, shoved it in his pocket, and stepped back. He unclipped the flamethrower’s nozzle and opened the ignition valve. He felt around for a button to engage the spark plug, finding it on the gun’s side. A small flame appeared at the end of the thrower. He aimed it at the coolers and pressed the fuel-release trigger.
The resulting flame shot forward, engulfing the cooler in flames. Smith could see the fire, but not much else as his vision contracted even more. He worked his way around the panels, running the flame along every access wire. The smell of burnt rubber and wire filled the air along with a toxic brew of melting plastic from the cooler. He angled the column of flame onto the panels and the fire whooshed along the flat surface and fell off the edge. The edges of the ducts on the roof began to burn, and he felt the metal growing hot under his feet. He heard shoes pounding up the stairwell, and he turned in the direction of the noise, keeping the flame on. He shot it at the doorway.
The heavy canisters hampered his movement. His vision was contracting down to one small pinpoint before flaring wide again. When it contracted, the column of flame was just a small orange line.
The solar panels were burning at various wire access points, and the roof was heating up to a frightening degree. He kept dodging and pivoting, keeping his soles from burning while trying to make himself a tougher target to hit in case someone attempted to shoot through the roof. He ran to the stairs and angled the flame down them before turning and descending. The Uzi was in his other hand. He leaped down the stairs two at a time, missing the last few and staggering into the room. A body lay on the floor next to the picture frame. When he got close, he saw that it was Khalil. Blood pumped from a bullet hole in his chest.
Smith looked into the office and saw Harcourt, a gun in his hand, zipping up the bullion bags. Nolan still worked at the computer and tears ran down her face. Dattar, his face red with his fury, kept her there, screaming into her ear. What he said was unintelligible, but Smith had little doubt that it had to do with the erasing letters.
Smith shrugged the Uzi strap off his shoulder and aimed at the glass and at an angle that would hit Harcourt. He pressed the trigger. The resulting shots shattered the glass and a hit sent Harcourt spinning against the wall. He dropped out of Smith’s line of vision as bits of glass rained into the room. Dattar straightened and Nolan slammed the chair backward, catching him in the stomach and pinning him against the desk. Smith aimed and fired several bullets into Dattar. Nolan screamed over and over and covered her ears with her hands. Smith knocked out the remaining glass in the frame, grabbed the side wall and jumped up to sit in the opening, twisting to swing his leg over and dropping into the room. Harcourt was gone, but a smear of blood streaked the floor from where he had dropped, indicating that he had managed to crawl out of the room. Manderi was missing. The bags of gold remained on the desk.
“Get behind me,” Smith said. Nolan staggered up and limped as she walked toward him. She still cried. Smith could see her trying to regain control of her sobs. “Where’s Manderi?”
“He went with Khalil to check out the gunshot.”
So he killed Khalil and was still in the building, Smith thought. He wouldn’t leave without eliminating all the witnesses. Nor would Harcourt.
“Did Bilal tell you if there were escape routes in this building?”
“Only the doors. The windows are glass blocks. He had a secret escape, but he never told me its location.”
“We can’t leave through the hall. Manderi could cover that too easily, and we’ll have no room to maneuver. We’re going to crawl through that opening and go up to the roof on an access stairway. The building is only one story, so you’ll have to either find a fire escape or jump down.” He moved to the opening, angling his legs over. Nolan followed. He kept the flamethrower aimed at the door, providing her cover. He jutted his chin in the direction of the stairs.
“Take my phone. When you get to the top of the stairs, access my last text message and reply to say that you’re going to the roof and not to shoot. When you do, run like hell. Find a safe place to hole up for a while. Get a message to me when you can.”
“Aren’t you coming with me? I’m not leaving if you don’t,” Nolan said.
“I’ll come after you.” He delivered the half truth with as much sincerity as he could, but he could tell that she wasn’t buying it. He leaned closer to her. “Go.” He watched her climb the stairs, but before she made it to the top, his vision contracted. He didn’t see her disappear.
He headed back toward the open door, inching along until he could see down the hall. If Manderi and Harcourt were there, he couldn’t see them, but he had an excellent idea about what they might do. He took a deep breath and darted to the door, hiding behind the open panel. His vision was down to a pinpoint and from the tight feeling in the center of his eye he could tell it wouldn’t expand again. He paused, listening. After a few seconds he heard an expected sound. A small cough. Harcourt, he presumed. It was a rare man who could maintain complete silence after getting shot.
He heard the stealthy footsteps coming down the hall. A form flitted past the open door. Smith saw Manderi’s shoulder appear in the corner of the broken two-way-window frame.
“Hurry,” Harcourt said. Smith couldn’t see the other man, but he recognized his voice. They’d done exactly what Smith thought they would. They’d gone back for the gold.
S
mith rose, moved to stand in the doorway, pointed the flamethrower in the direction of the open safe, and pulled on the fuel trigger. The flames easily covered the twelve feet to the container and engulfed the inside of it. The ordnance exploded.
The resulting fireball knocked Smith off his feet and slammed him across the hall and against the opposite wall. He shrugged out of the backpack in a panic, fearful that the fuel on his back would be the next to explode. He rose and ran down the hall in the direction of the front door. A second explosion rocked the building and pushed him to his knees. He thought he heard a man’s screams, but the roar of the fire blotted out most sounds.
He moved forward, keeping one hand on the wall as a guide because he had no vision. Smoke choked him. He heard gunshots, and a bullet hit the wall next to his head, but he didn’t flinch or stop his flight.
The third explosion took out the rest of the hall, and he felt the suction pull on him as the blast created a vacuum. He reached the front door and tumbled out of it. The cold night air hit his face and he sucked in a breath of fresh air. Something sharp pierced the side of his shoe and sunk into his foot, but he barely noticed the pain. He ran forward, tripped over a curb, and slammed his knee into what he supposed was a parked car.
“Smith?” Smith heard Brand’s voice and felt a hand on his elbow guiding him. “You’re at an open car door. Watch your head.” Brand put his hand on top of Smith’s skull to help him clear the door panel. He crawled into the vehicle and sat back. The car door slammed, and Brand knocked on the car’s side. Someone put the car in motion.
“Air conditioning. My skin is on fire,” Smith said. His voice came out as a croak. “I can’t see.”
“The mustard gas?” It was Beckmann’s voice. “Hold on, I’m heading to a hospital.”
“You steal this car?” Smith said.
The Janus Reprisal Page 33