Brendan pushed himself off the desk. His vision was cloudy; he could still feel himself rising up through the layers of consciousness as the blood returned to his brain. He spun around and struck out blindly, aiming high. He felt his fist connect with something hard, but fleshy enough to be human – the bodyguard’s neck. The large man cried out and returned the blow with one of his own. His giant fist connected squarely with Brendan’s nose, sending bright bolts of pain upwards toward his eyes, radiating out to his ears, making his jaw rattle like a shuddering, slammed door nearly knocked off its hinges. The force of it sent Brendan backwards, the back of his thighs hitting the desk’s edge, and he toppled over backwards. As he fell, instinct, perhaps, and nothing more, told him to bring his right foot up, and bring it up hard. Despite the pain blasting through his skull like he’d stuck his face in a furnace, Brendan felt a thrill zip through him when he felt his foot connect with something in a direct hit, something soft and vulnerable.
The bodyguard shrieked. For a big man he cried like a girl, Brendan thought, as his own head hit oak.
It was a good kick, dead center to the groin. Brendan thought he heard something clunk to the floor and hoped it was the gun the bodyguard had been holding. Then Brendan blacked out.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE / Monday, 4:59 PM
She heard footsteps. A moment later, a voice outside of the door.
“You inside, we know you have a woman with you. She is an agent for the Department of Justice. We have the building surrounded. Don’t hurt her. Put down any weapons you’re carrying; we’re going to knock down this door. If you don’t resist, if you don’t hurt her, you’ll live. Anything else, and you’ll die. Miss Aiken? You in there?”
Electricity all through her body. Her pulse accelerating. Relief suffusing her being.
The sirens might have faded away, but help was here. They’d managed to gain entry to the building and sneak up to this floor. Her people. Outside of the room. Here to save her.
Apollo thrust the gun in her face, the cold tip of the barrel just touching the flesh between her eyes. His expression was inscrutable. No fear, no remorse, no anything. His blank eyes regarded her like she was a mere object in the room.
For a moment – something. The hint of recognition in his eyes. Then it was gone, and he was wooden again.
She closed her eyes, feeling the elation subside, a coldness filling her.
“Miss Aiken? Speak if you can. Whoever else is in there – don’t hurt her. We can take you alive. This can end well for everybody.”
Her eyes shut, in the blackness, Jennifer thought she saw a dark face. She’d been looking at it for the past few hours, and had come to know it. Apollo’s face there, just a phantom painted against the backs of her eyelids, and he spoke.
No, it can’t.
The gun went off.
* * *
He watched the caravan of police vehicles stream down 10th Avenue. Staryles figured Healy and the girl had raised some ruckus, and someone had dialed 911. He had all the intel if he needed it – who called and from where; in a minute or less he could have the name of the caller, the color of their eyes, what they liked for lunch. Now wasn’t the time. The cops wouldn’t be a problem – in fact, he’d counted on them as the necessary smokescreen for his team to get in and out unnoticed.
The squad cars pulled up in front of John Jay College across the street. There were four NYPD cruisers, and an unmarked one. Staryles smirked as he peered through the window on the fourth floor. More detectives, he thought. Just what the world needed.
He left the windows. The fourth floor was the birthing center at the hospital. A long, softly lit hallway fed into rooms replete with hardwood floors, double beds, and Jacuzzi birthing tubs. No stirrups for the women here; Staryles’ mother had described in horrifying detail the anguish of each of their births to her sons. Times had changed. This was a great place to give birth. A place that Sloane Dewan’s natural mother might have come to, had the circumstances been different.
Instead, the infant had been delivered prematurely in the wet, dark alley behind a Laundromat in White Plains. There was no shock in this for Staryles. Smartly dressed in his suit, he walked along the hallway, smiling pleasantly at the nurses and mothers softly milling about in their scrubs and gowns. He thought of all that he had seen in the world in just twenty-eight years. Surprisingly, the worst of it wasn’t even during wartime. War was hell; everyone knew that. People went on their lame-ass marches and protests, they elected a president who promised to bring the troops home, they lamented the senseless violence, blamed their leaders for wild goose chases like the hunt for WMDs, created scapegoats, and suspected something even more subsurface and nefarious, something they might hesitantly approach, but were terrified to really know. Because it might look like them.
And yet these babies were born. Born into a country where the fertility rate had dropped dramatically since his parents’ day and was still dropping, dipping below what anthropologists knew was the number that civilizations never returned from. Anglo-Saxon Christians were dying faster than if they were being poisoned by thallium – thallium, his father’s favorite chemical. Muslims were the fastest growing religious group on the planet. Within a few short years, they would dominate Europe and America.
He passed silently by the rooms where women gave birth, and another room where a newborn was bundled against its mother’s chest.
Heilshorn’s hospital. Heilshorn, who would preserve the race, the culture, the ethos of America at all costs. A man who would save the children if only for their induction into a tightly controlled world ruled by a politico-military elite. He wanted more children born; poor, middle, upper class – it didn’t matter. He funded poorer hospitals throughout the city, free clinics, and volunteer-based programs. Women and children were commodities to him, built for pleasure, or built for breeding. If the two intersected, Heilshorn patched the gap.
At the end of the hallway, Staryles came to a door which read employees only. The door looked like it led to a dingy break-room, or storage. Staryles knew better.
It was locked, but Staryles was prepared. He inserted two bent rods in the lock that disengaged the tumblers, and then he turned the knob.
It was dark in there, but his eyes detected the screens, his pupils dilated and took in the light.
“Hey,” said a shape coming toward him. As his eyes adjusted, Staryles made out the security uniform. The guy wearing it wasn’t much older than he was.
Heilshorn’s bodyguard hadn’t been responding to his texts. There was every chance he had the situation wrapped up, and all Staryles was going to have to do was clean up – take Healy’s body and the girl’s body from Heilshorn’s office and dispose of them – but he had underestimated the detective before, and wasn’t going to again.
He slashed upwards and to the side, a perfect incision along the security guard’s carotid artery. Knowing what would come next, Staryles ducked, grabbed the guard by the waist and twisted him around, in one graceful motion. The guard’s neck was spraying blood, and it fanned out across the room, but not a drop touched Staryles. The blood splattered on the second guard in the room, a woman, who was on her way over, her hand on the butt of her holstered Glock. She cried out as the other guard, exsanguinating from his neck, dropped in a heap on the floor.
Staryles sprung from his crouching position, and cut her throat. She gasped and stumbled back – he was unable to reach her and twist her away in the same fashion as the first guard, so he just jumped back. She took a couple of steps, clawing at her throat, the blood fountaining. A few drops landed on Staryles’ jacket – he could hear them pitter-patter like soft raindrops.
He cursed and looked down at his suit as the female guard fell to the floor, pulling a chair down with her.
He shouldn’t wipe the blood – he knew that – the stain would only get rubbed in more. He pinched the fabric and pulled the soiled spot away from his body as if it were diseased. He stepped carefully over the first
guard and sat himself in the one upright chair. He peered at the bank of monitors in the dark room, the sepia glare making his face yellow, his eyes reflecting the images as he searched them.
He scanned the nine screens, six of which were quad screens. There was another security station, but this was where the real surveillance and recording went on.
And then he saw them.
A camera mounted in the hallway on the top floor showed Healy and the girl were just leaving Heilshorn’s office.
Staryles had to deal with his suit jacket. He looked around and saw a crumpled napkin sitting next to the remnants of a McDonald’s meal, a few fries still in their cardboard container. No. Instead he found a piece of scrap paper in his pocket. He glanced at it to make sure it didn’t bear any sensitive information. He used it to blot the blood on his jacket, then wadded it up carefully, and stuck it back in his pocket. From his suit pocket he took out his transmitter. Cell phone texting was done. He pulled out the small BTE microphone and receiver unit and hooked it in place over the hard cartilage of his right ear. His team was on the same frequency.
“This is Hades. Top floor, headed for the elevator. No, wait, the stairs. West stairwell.”
He looked down at his jacket again. He’d managed to blot most of the blood but the stain was black in the wash of the monitor light. That really pissed him off.
* * *
Brendan remembered a discussion from school about waking up in the morning. It was, in a sense, the closest you were to death all day. Your heart rate and breathing had slowed down, your circulation had decreased in speed and volume, and in order to get out of bed and go take that much needed piss, you took this huge blast of cortisol from your adrenal gland, waking everything up so you could walk, talk, think, with blood feeding your brain.
His father had died one morning. Thanksgiving morning, Gerard Healy had risen from his bed, seventy-two years old, and had a massive stroke. Eleven years ago. His parents had been separated, and Brendan was planning to make the rounds and visit them both with Angie, the woman he’d just married and had a baby with. He remembered that time so clearly – he remembered the high blush of Angie’s cheeks, the perfect round redness to them, matching the tip of her nose. The way she reacted to the cold reminded him of a singer he’d once seen on a Macy’s Parade float coming up Sixth Avenue. Her face daubed with color, eyes glistening as she had sung “Gloria,” his daughter’s name. He never told Angie that the reason he pushed so hard for that name was because of a boyhood crush on that singer in the parade, or that that singer was partly responsible for the way he felt about Angie on cold days, so deeply in love with her, infatuated and satisfied.
Of course there was far more than just a resemblance to a boyhood crush. Angie could be tough, but she was incredibly generous. Tolerant, patient, kind. Perhaps, he had sometimes thought over the years with a bright sting of guilt, too patient. By rights she could have – maybe she should have left him right then and there, on that Thanksgiving, when he found out his father had died.
Brendan had been three-sheets to the wind by late afternoon and by evening he had been drunk enough to vomit on himself, something he rarely did. And Angie had been patient, and she had been kind, and she had cleaned him up. Even after Gloria was born, Angie still tended to Brendan, still showed him her motherly side – it wasn’t all for the baby. And he knew it, and it made him feel guilty for being so needy, for needing this twenty-five-year-old woman to take care of him as much as the infant they shared. But he had been in school, and his career had been promising. It didn’t matter that his father had pulled the strings to get him into Langone. It didn’t matter that his father had, in fact, just about always been pulling the strings, talking to the right people, sending the money, getting Brendan back together when he got out of shape. That was what you did for your only child, Brendan figured.
And yet his mother had raised him. She had fed him. She had taught him about women, and penitence, and God. He remembered her with a book in her hands. She was serious, not always quick to smile, though when she did it was as if she were sharing a secret. She was earthy, yet spiritual.
His father hadn’t lived a flashy life – there was almost something proletariat, drab, about the way Gerard Healy had lived, as if he’d been a doctor in a third world country in a former life, walking around in a creased white lab coat with a stethoscope swinging from his neck, ducking through the flaps of a hospital tent in the dusty heat. But now he worked in New York City, the place John Lennon called the new Rome. He was classy, he attended parties and events and dinners where he wore his gold watches and slicked his dark black hair back and looked around with smiling eyes decorated with fans of wrinkles.
When Gerard had died, Katherine Healy had wept with the news, and Brendan had always the impression that she cried not so much for the man that had been lost, but for some life that had been running unfulfilled, and was finally neutered completely, lost to time.
During the funeral she had been the picture of composure, watching the faces of the distinguished men and women that attended. Gerard Healy’s memorial service had been well attended. One after the other they took her small hand and whispered their condolences. Doctors and lawyers and businessmen and politicians. Some faces he’d recognized, most faces he hadn’t.
A young Philip Largo had been among them.
He suddenly remembered the man now, standing just inside the narthex of the church; his eyes with dark circles round them, like a raccoon, and the way his mouth turned up at the corners, as if he was in on some secret. As if he knew he was going to change the world for the better.
And later that day, too, Angie being patient with him as Brendan drank straight vodka, falling over – she had bent over him on the living room floor and put her arms around him and tried to pull him up. It was so close, the memory, that he could feel her hands around him now, pulling on him, trying to drag him back into the land of the living.
“Brendan, Brendan get up.”
Only this Angie sounded more frantic than he remembered. This Angie had ice in her voice.
“Brendan, we have to go.”
He opened his eyes. He saw the back of a man’s head. He could smell the sharp, chemical odor of the fire-extinguisher foam. He felt the hands tugging at him, trying to lift him off the oak desk.
He pushed himself up and away from the desk, and rose unsteadily to his feet and looked at Sloane. Her eyes were hard and calculating. “We have to get out of here. Right now.”
There was a sound that made Brendan think of a wounded bear in the woods. A low groan of agony. He looked behind him to where the bodyguard was crumpled in a heap on the floor of Heilshorn’s office, both of his hands covering his crotch. Then Brendan looked at Heilshorn, lying on his desk, immobile. He recalled Sloane throwing the fire extinguisher and hitting the old man in the chest. The way he lay now, just the horseshoe of dark hair visible on his balding head, his arms flattened beneath him, he looked dead.
Sloane had a fistful of Brendan’s sleeve and was tugging hard on his arm. The bodyguard moaned again. He was trying to get up. Brendan stepped over the man and let Sloane pull him towards the door. The bodyguard reached up and grabbed Brendan’s leg. Brendan tried to shake his iron grip, while Sloane continued to yank on his arm. Finally Brendan tore his arm from her grip. He punched the bodyguard in the face. His knuckles exploded with pain – it was like hitting a brick. But the force of the blow was enough to drive the big man’s head back and the rear of his skull bounced off of the floor and Brendan saw his eyes flutter.
Sloane had picked up his revolver off the floor, and handed it to him, grip first. He took it wordlessly, and the two of them looked at one another. Brendan hadn’t felt as close to another person in a long, long time. He took her by the waist and pulled her up to him and buried his face in her neck. He felt her thin, lithe arms encircle his back.
A moment later and he was following her out of the door and into the hallway.
CHA
PTER FORTY-TWO / Monday, 5:10 PM
There was silence after the gunshot. Just a split second of nothing, long enough for Jennifer to realize that she wasn’t dead, that the bullet had not entered her brain and killed her. Had it hit her somewhere else? Had it blown out the side of her head, through her cheek or ear? Then there was the unmistakable mail-sack thump of a body hitting the ground.
She opened her eyes and saw that Apollo had gone over backwards and was lying on the hardwood floor. A shiny pool of blood was forming underneath him.
He’d shot himself not her.
“Miss Aiken!” The voice on the other side of the door sounded panicked. A second later and there was a concussive, wood-splitting crash as two SWAT members drove the bullram through the door and came stumbling into the room.
More men poured in immediately after – first other SWAT who took up defensive positions, taking a knee and aiming their weapons into the room, and then two men in suits, ties flying, as one of the SWAT yelled “clear!” and they came running in.
The first suited man slowed and cautiously approached Apollo’s prone body, keeping a small handgun trained on him. The other locked eyes with her – she was sure it was the man who had been shouting from outside of the room – and then he started to take in the full implication of her appearance; she could see the shock in his eyes, and could only imagine how she looked.
She’d been taken some time ago – when had it been? That morning? Yesterday? Her mind was running away without her, but some sane part still operating realized that the day outside had never fully turned to night. It was getting darker out there so maybe it was evening. That would have made it about eight or ten hours that she had been locked up here, the poison working through her veins. She hadn’t even had a sip of water, and her lips were cracked and dry, her mouth felt like wool. She was still in her running clothes.
“They gave me thallium,” she said to the agent.
SURVIVORS (crime thriller books) Page 25