He followed the barrel of his rifle, which he swept slowly from one side of the hallway to the other. His men whispered through the com-link in his ear as they cleared each chamber, but Spears knew that their quarry held every advantage. Down here in the darkness and the close confines, it had the home field advantage. Each step brought Spears nearer the realization that unless this monster broke cover to come after them, their only chance was to blindly stumble upon it.
Water had begun to drip through the rubble overhead and plinked into the stagnant puddles on the floor. The storm must have finally commenced. With so much debris above him, he hadn’t heard a single peal of thunder.
He ducked through a passage in a brick wall and entered the adjacent building. The acoustics changed and he heard the soft echoes of footfalls other than his own. He stepped to his right and across the threshold into a small room, the back half of which had been demolished. There were broken bottles beside heaps of damp and rotting newspapers on one side and piles of feces on the other. The entire room stank of ammonia and despair, a stench he equated to death. He peeked around the corner and watched the barrel of an automatic rifle round the bend in the hallway, followed by the blue, violet, and amber glow of one of his men.
Spears whispered into the microphone strapped to his throat and stepped out into the hallway. Ritter nodded to him and turned back to the corridor that would lead them deeper into the building. Spears took the lead, and together they pressed onward into the dark warrens. The doorways to either side, at least those that were still patent, opened upon little more than rubble and garbage. It was obvious where the rats and the Morlocks made their homes. The piles of shredded blankets, moldy cardboard, and mildewed sheets positively stank of body odor and desperation. The reek of piss made it nearly impossible to breathe. He wondered how anyone could possibly live like this. Already he could feel the fluid settling in his lungs and the tickle of a cough in his throat. He feared no amount of showering would rid him of its taint.
The hallway led to a large central chamber of sorts, the eastern half of which was amassed rubble from the cracked stone floor to the collapsed ceiling. A groan and the gunshot sound of cracking wood overhead reminded him of the necessity for speed. Two doors interrupted the western wall, through which he could see broken conveyors and equipment that looked positively medieval in design draped with dust, lorded over by pyramidal columns of rubble that barely supported the floor above. They could undoubtedly bring the whole works down on them with a loud shout.
Spears smiled at his presence of mind. He’d had the foresight to equip their rifles with suppressors.
They were nearly to the uneven, brick-edged hole in the wall that served as the passageway into the adjoining building when he caught a glimpse of color and the faintest hint of motion from the corner of his vision.
He turned to his left and sighted down the barrel of his IAR. A triangular orifice framed a tunnel that breathed dust. The canted timber that formed the roof appeared petrified; the slanted concrete of the wall quilled with rusted rebar. It couldn’t have been much larger than the kind of ribbed culverts he had crawled through in his youth.
“Report,” he whispered into the wireless com-link. He studied the stillness for any sign of what had drawn his eye.
“Barnaby,” his man said through the earpiece. “There’s no direct route from the west. I had to detour to the north. I’m closing on your position now.”
“Cranston?” Spears whispered.
A tiny sphere of venous blue streaked downward and struck the concrete dust in front of him with a plat.
“Cranston?”
The dust on the floor was black and crusted into a miniature stalagmite. He followed the trajectory upward until he was staring at the ceiling. A rapidly fading blue puddle clung to the decayed wooden slats. As he watched, a droplet swelled, shivered, and then plummeted to the ground.
“Damn it,” Spears whispered.
Ritter’s breathing grew harsh behind him.
Spears sighted down the dark tunnel and eased closer. The dust was slick and muddy underfoot, with just the faintest tint of cobalt blue. The coppery scent of blood pierced the miasma of vile aromas that stalked the ruins as he climbed a mound of rubble and leaned toward the mouth of the tunnel. Its dusty breath smelled of carrion.
A lone blue globule dripped from the low ceiling a half-dozen feet in. It turned black before it hit the ground.
Footsteps behind him announced Barnaby’s arrival. Neither of his remaining men needed to say a word. They knew the score. Cranston had been overcome pretty much right where Spears stood now. The once hot arterial blood that had spattered the ceiling was already cooling below the threshold of the goggles, the puddles underfoot chilled by the earth. And they all knew damn well what had happened to Cranston from there.
And they hadn’t heard a sound.
“Ritter. You follow me. Barnaby. Stand guard here. Nothing gets past you from either side. Understand?”
Spears pulled the trigger and released a fusillade of bullets that was no louder than thumping the side of an empty two-liter bottle. Sparks flew where they ricocheted from the concrete. They impacted with what sounded like timber.
He scurried in right behind them, pulling himself along with his elbows and his knees, his rifle ahead of him. Cranston’s blood soaked through his clothing. It was cool against his skin, but it stoked the heat in his core. Despite the darkness, his vision throbbed with red. His prey couldn’t be too far ahead of him. Once he found it, he was going to make that demon wish it had never clawed its way out of its mother’s wretched womb.
Ritter’s scraping and scratching sounds trailed him into the constricting tube. The air grew colder and damper by the second. The carrion smell intensified in the stillness. His barrel clattered from something hard. He corrected his course to the right. The ground grew steeper as he crawled, the swatches of blood making purchase tenuous at best. Ritter cursed behind him and a cascade of pebbles tumbled down the slope.
He felt the stirring of the air and heard the change in intonation before he crawled out from the tunnel and sensed the ceiling rise above him, as though a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
The only color was provided by a heap off to his left against a jagged mound of concrete. A cold blue radiance burned in its center mass. The night vision allowed him to see the outline of the boots, the shape of the hunched back, the crown of the head. The aperture of the goggles stood from Cranston’s forehead like a narwhal’s horn.
Spears stood to his full height and turned slowly in a circle.
“Mother of God,” he whispered.
He was in a domed chamber no larger than his master bathroom, but he felt as though he were inside a bee hive. The rubble surrounding him was honeycombed with black tunnels that led off in dozens of different directions.
From this one point, his prey could potentially travel throughout the ruins, from building to building.
It could be anywhere by now.
TWENTY-ONE
Seattle, Washington
5:27 a.m. PST
Porter crouched in the cab of an earthmover two hundred yards from where the men had parked their Humvee and studied the exterior of the building through his binoculars. If the men caught a reflection from his lenses when they emerged, they could easily mistake it for the cracked window of the dirty yellow Caterpillar. They had been underground for more than two hours already. Hunting, he assumed. But it was only a matter of time before the workers arrived to grade the area around the cultural center and lay slate paving stones in time for the ribbon-cutting ceremony still scheduled for Saturday night. There were massive rolls of chain link and hundreds of silver posts that would be erected around the ruins themselves, while the fencing would be torn down from in front of the center itself to allow it to be viewed in all its splendor from the main thoroughfare. Never mind the fact that people had died here. It was all about raising the necessary capital to kick this project
into high gear. He wondered how much of that capital was being invested into the men crawling through the rubble down there.
He glanced through the rear window at the eastern horizon. The merest hint of pink stained the bellies of the clouds. The men down there would emerge soon. They would want to be long gone by the time the sun rose. Already, the occasional set of headlights cruised past and tires buzzed on the wet asphalt of the main road.
Movement at the base of the building drew his eye, a mere shifting of the shadows. The first man crawled out of the ruins, then turned around and reached back through the darkened orifice from which he had just emerged. He struggled with something heavy before crawling backward, dragging its weight along with him. A second man clambered from the hole while the first turned and scanned the surrounding area through his night vision apparatus.
Porter instinctively dropped down under the steering wheel and pressed himself to the dirty floor. Even if they were utilizing thermal imaging, they wouldn’t be able to detect him through the cold steel-reinforced door. He waited nearly two full minutes before climbing back up onto the seat and risking a peek through the binoculars.
The men were already across the weeded lot and to their car. One man opened the rear door and stepped back. The other two, who carried a massive black vinyl or plastic bag between them, hefted it into the back of the Hummer and slammed the tailgate closed.
Porter ducked again. Undoubtedly, they would scan the lot once more to make sure that no one had seen them and get the hell out of there before anyone did.
By the time Porter raised his head, the rectangular brake lights were jostling down over the curb onto the main road. They flared long enough for one of the men to hop out and close the gate behind them before fading from view. He waited several minutes longer, listening for the sound of the Hummer’s engine to return. Once he was confident that they weren’t coming back, he shouldered the door open and dropped down to the ground.
Gulls squalled from the decrepit pier to the west. Several wheeled against the sky above where the men had parked; the tips of their wing feathers painted crimson by the rising sun. Containers banged and thumped far to the north, where the commercial dock sleepily came to life with the sounds of grinding gears, thrumming motors, and the air horns of the mighty Handimax container ships.
He followed the Hummer’s tracks to the deep impressions where its tires had sunken into the mud. The men’s footprints were clearly defined and impossible to miss. He could tell where they had stood, the prints deep and smeared where they had labored with the weight of the bag’s contents. Crouching, he fished his flashlight from his jacket pocket and shined it across the ground. A smattering of scarlet reflected from a golden clump of trampled grass. He dabbed his fingertip onto one of the drops and rubbed it into the pad of his thumb until it dried and coagulated.
Blood. As he had expected.
Four men had gone in, but only three had come out. At least, three had walked to the Hummer. A fourth had been in the large plastic or vinyl bag, either the remaining member of their entourage, or whatever they had tracked down underground. He favored the former. Surely if they’d found their prey there would have been another bag to load into the trunk.
So what had happened to their man? How had he been killed? Porter could only speculate, but regardless, this confirmed the fact that these men knew exactly what was down there.
And that was precisely what he needed to find out. It was still his job to track down whoever or whatever was responsible for the deaths of so many, and to make sure that it wasn’t able to kill again. Even if he had to go toe-to-toe with his SAC. Or any other self-serving government official.
Porter wiped his fingers on the wet grass and rose to his feet. The waves to the west sparkled like jewels. A soft breeze brought with it the smells of gasoline, brine, and whatever carcasses had rolled up onto the shore to rot during the night.
He returned his flashlight to his jacket and removed the handheld GPS tracking device. The unit was no larger than a cell phone; its transmitter the size of a cockroach. A green beacon radiated concentric circles from the center of the screen. The map of shifting streets beneath it showed him where the Hummer was now and in which direction it was traveling. He had planted the magnetized tracking device on the inside of the wheel well where no one would ever find it and then packed mud on top of it. Wherever they went, he would find them.
The time had come to go on the offensive.
Damn the consequences.
* * *
He passed the compound once, discretely, then found a place to park three blocks to the north and one block to the east, behind the loading dock of an interstate trucking company. Single-engine planes buzzed low overhead against the ceiling of wispy clouds. There was a commercial airport about ten miles to the east, the kind of small-scale operation that serviced hobbyists, shippers, and jump-flights up and down the Pacific coast. He had watched air shows there as a kid, from folding chairs in the back of his father’s pickup truck, back when there was still the hope of turning this area into a commercial hub that serviced Canada and beyond. Everything around here was zoned industrial. Most of the buildings looked as though their better days were so far behind them that blowing asbestos into the rafters would be considered modernization. While still in obvious use, there were boarded and taped windows, and weeds had grown up through the cracks in the faded asphalt parking lots. The warehouses seemed to sag and the Dumpsters in the alleys were rusted and overflowing with garbage that had to be several weeks old. Everything looked as though it was in dire need of an arsonist’s touch.
Everything, that is, except for the complex he had driven for nearly an hour past the wharves to find.
The twenty-foot chain link fence that lined the roadway positively shined. The coils of concertina wire on top of it looked sharp enough to disembowel anyone foolish enough to attempt to scale it. Security cameras covered every inch of the perimeter, directed past a culvert reminiscent of a moat at the base of the fence and toward the street, fifteen feet away. A guard shack stood at the edge of the lone point of entry. Any car that passed through found itself in a trap, facing yet another gate and a thorough search by uniformed security personnel with German shepherds and long poles with mirrors to search under the vehicles. Only when the car was thoroughly vetted would it be allowed to pass through the second gate and into a circular drive that wound around a small hill covered with a rainbow of perennials and a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. The main building looked like an ordinary office building: a six-story box of gray bricks and smoked glass. Parking lots dotted with luxury sedans and SUVs he would never be able to afford on his salary reached around the sides of the building, behind which dozens of identical concrete and aluminum warehouses stretched as far as the eye could see. The property was enormous, easily thirty or forty acres, and wherever the Humvee might have gone, he couldn’t see it from the street. All he knew was that it was back in there somewhere, and, for now, that was enough. He had identified his opposition.
This changed everything.
Porter stopped in a convenience store with bars over windows so thick with grime he couldn’t read the sun-bleached promotional posters taped to them from the inside and bought a cup of coffee that tasted like it had been precipitated to a sludge of grounds and then reheated. He whistled to himself as he walked down the street, pausing only long enough to sip from the steaming Styrofoam cup. When he neared the compound, he did so on the opposite side of the street and from behind a row of tractor-trailers that hadn’t been moved in so long that their windshield wipers were buried in leaves and trash had drifted up against their tires. He found a suitable wash of shadows under a massive oak tree and behind a half-dead privet hedge, which afforded him a decent view of the guard shack and the main building through a snarl of skeletal branches. He adjusted the focus on his binoculars and read the inconspicuous sign stationed near the entrance, opposite the security post like the menu in a drive-thru.
“Phobos,” he whispered. “What in the world is a private defense contractor doing sneaking around under those condemned buildings?”
That wasn’t the foremost question on his mind, though. Of more importance was the nature of Phobos’s involvement. These weren’t featherweights he was dealing with here. These were professional, military-trained mercenaries who were leased to governments and major corporations all over the globe to provide security when their militaries and private armies alone weren’t sufficient. These were the best and the brightest, men who only crawled out from under their rocks when a fortune was in the offing, the kind of money that only a select few domestic entities could provide. Not the paltry sums that could be secreted from the city’s coffers. There were other interests in play here, and for the life of him, Porter couldn’t even wager a guess as to whom. If preserving the timetable of the waterfront renovation project was the primary concern, then they wouldn’t be worried about their funding if they had enough cash sitting around to hire a private army.
No. Those pieces didn’t fit together.
Phobos’s involvement had to be personal in nature. It had applied a ton of pressure onto people unaccustomed to being leveraged in order to buy its presumably elite team some quality time alone in the ruins.
Porter had to figure out that reason. It was the key to his entire investigation. He could feel it.
Uncover Phobos’s motivation, and he would learn what was responsible for the violent murders. And every bit as importantly, who was ultimately behind it.
And he was running out of time to do so.
In less than thirty-six hours, if he couldn’t find a way to stop it or convince the mayor to postpone his soiree, there would be hundreds of men and women clad in tuxedos and evening gowns dancing the night away within two hundred yards of a monster capable of butchering them all.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 13