Ruthless (Out of the Box Book 3)

by Robert J. Crane

  I had my trusty knife back on my belt. After this, I was seriously thinking about carrying it all the time. Reed opened the door enough for me to slip through. We’d never discussed it, but the breakdown of labor in our relationship always seemed to mean I was stuck doing the killing. Funny how that worked.

  I ended the mercenary with the same back-of-the-skull stab-and-twist that I’d employed in the parking garage, and Reed slipped in place to grab him and drag him sideways into an office. Big guy, my brother. I didn’t mind defaulting to his strength, because he was fairly buff. And trying to manage that lummox as he fell would have been more than I could easily handle.

  We were standing in an office corridor on the back of the building. The majority of the fourth floor was a large, open bullpen where all our cubicle workers did their thing. But on the back side of the building was a hallway that led past conference rooms and empty offices used for consultations or private meetings. Flex space, basically. Dull, white-painted generic rooms that were devoid of personality. I’d suggested beanbag chairs and some sprucing up of the décor, but Ariadne overruled me for budgetary reasons. Her words, not mine. I suspected it was an excuse for her to keep things nice and uptight.

  “Around the corner to your right,” J.J. said, whispering like he was there with us. “He’s facing away and has no clear line of sight to the other guards.”

  I stalked along the corridor and peeked around. There was a good twenty feet of distance between me and the back of the mercenary. That was twenty feet of ground that I had to cross, silently, without him turning around.

  I stared down the hall with slightly widened eyes. J.J. could not possibly be serious. This was pretty much guaranteed to turn noisy, and fast.

  “He hasn’t turned around in five minutes,” J.J. said, as if he sensed my unease. “And you can sneak into the conference room that’s the first door on your left and crouch until you come out of the second door right behind him. Trust me.”

  Who was I to doubt a guy who probably trained himself watching computers and trying to determine how the programmers had coded his enemies’ patterns? Hell, hell, hell.

  “I’ll keep an eye out. If he spots you, I’ll pop out and shoot him,” Reed whispered from behind me.

  I found little reassurance there, but what was I going to do? If we fouled this, it would only cause the other six guards to start shooting hostages, including a few people I actually knew and liked. No pressure or anything.

  I came around the corner stooped over, scrambling along at a walk and trying not to make a whit of sound. None. Do you know how hard that is? The natural noise of even scuffing your shoe wouldn’t do in this case, because tipping this guy off in the slightest would be very, very bad for our plan.

  I was pretty sick of the zero alternatives posed by me not having my powers. If I ever found Eric Simmons’s brain, I was going to kick its ass just for all the crap they’d put me through tonight.

  I made it to the conference room door and kept low. The place had a faint smell of new paint, or maybe old paint that had been enclosed in the room for a while. I made a mental note to leave the doors open if I made it out of this alive.

  I came out the other door and launched up at the back of this guy’s head. I caught him flush, did the twist, and he fell.

  And then I realized there was no one there but me to catch him.

  I tried, really I did. If I’d had my powers, it would have been oh so simple. As it was, I caught his weight, but it was like a single crane trying to keep a bridge the size of the Golden Gate from falling down. Too little, too late.

  We dropped, me trapped under his weight. I hoped for Scott to keep it from happening, but he wasn’t quite fast enough to stop it. I strained, tried, but I was already weak from exposure, from a shoulder injury that flared back to angry life as I tried to muscle the guy into staying upright, and ultimately I just buckled.

  My ass hit the carpet like a teenage girl the first time on a roller rink. Wait. Do teenage girls still skate? I hadn’t, when I was a teen, but I spent most of those years locked away or fighting for my life.

  Either way, I hit, hard. A carcass landed on top of me a moment later, and I felt the warm splat of liquid on my front. I stifled my urge to grunt in pain, but the thump was still terribly loud. The floor was near-silent save for the sobs of the hostages in the distance, and I felt the whole world go so quiet I would have sworn the beating of my heart was the loudest thing in it.

  I didn’t dare take a breath, didn’t want to speak. Scott appeared with Reed a moment later, whisper quiet, but the damage had already been done. That thump had surely been heard around the world, or around the floor at least. We had to have been blown, and men with guns were surely on their way even as we sat there, paralyzed—

  Except no noise came to herald the running boots of men with guns, no shouts and cries of anger at the loss of their comrades came from the mercenaries. We were safe.

  Well, as safe as three people who were outnumbered two to one by armed men could be.

  I didn’t even have to ask; Scott hauled the guy’s corpse off of me and dragged him quietly into the conference room, depositing him behind the table. My shirt was bloody, and Reed nodded at it, like I couldn’t feel it on my skin. Yes, bro, I’ve got blood on me. A totally new experience for your sister.

  Scott emerged from the conference room, his feet whispering on the soft carpet, and I nodded toward the corner ahead. Then I sighed, quietly. We still had six guys to deal with, after all. At least if they’d come charging it would have been over, one way or another.

  “Now what?” Reed asked, whispering into his microphone. I could hear him digitally and in person, which created an irritating stereo effect.

  “Now we storm a room with six armed men who have a hundred targets to turn their weapons loose on,” I said. I was keeping my voice pretty even to hide the fact that this scared the crap out of me. Going at Natasya and Simmons was easy compared to this. If I failed against them, it would be me who died.

  In this scenario, the consequences for failure were … steeper.

  “Uh oh,” J.J. said, voice in our ears. “Uh … guys … you’re not going to like this.”

  I didn’t even need to hear him finish to know what had happened. It was like a nightmare that followed you after you woke up, that dread feeling in your stomach that haunts you after the awakening settling over me as I stood in that hallway, pondering my scary, immediate future and the worse moments to follow if I succeeded in rescuing the hostages.

  Anselmo Serafini was loose.

  43.

  “Set a timer for sixty seconds,” I whispered, “because that’s about all the time we’ll have once we start shooting before he’s up here and has to be dealt with.”

  “He’s pretty much invincible against bullets,” Reed said in a whisper, “but you think we can deal with him?”

  “We’ll have to,” I said, inching up to the corner and peering down the straight hallway into the bullpen ahead. I was fortunate in that Ariadne had made a concession to livability and we had some potted plants out for decoration in the hallways. It gave me cover to look around the corner and peer through the branches.

  They were a long ways off and partially occluded by the cover of the plants, but I could see three guys on my side. I ducked back around the corner and whispered, “Reed, Scott, go check the other side. I didn’t see any of the guards when we came up, so I doubt they’re in quite the straight line these are.”

  “They’re not,” J.J. said, “they’re farther around the corner on that side because all the cubicles and desks are broken down and piled up on that side of the room. But all three of them are over there, similar pattern, and they’re all looking out the office windows in alternating turns to see if they can spot you coming.”

  “Okay,” I said, peeping out again. These guys were actually in a perfect position to guard. I watched them looking around, and they were pretty alert. They were expecting outside threats
, though, not one coming noiselessly from inside, so they didn’t tend to look down the hallway I was observing them from. That was the job of the two sentries I’d killed. I gave it another minute at most before they got suspicious of those guys’ absence and the wheels started to come off the wagon.

  The three guys on my side were spinning, but they were doing it in a slow, controlled manner. If you were watching them, you’d just think they were sort of standing there, inching around to look slowly in a 360-degree turn. One of them had eyes on the hostages at all times, and most of the time at least two of them did. The last guy would be looking through the offices and out the windows to the snowfield below.

  I ducked back again and confirmed that Reed and Scott had moved around to the other side of the hallway. I caught sight of Reed retreating around the corner back toward the stairs just before he disappeared. They’d have a clear approach all the way up to the bullpen.

  “Sienna, you should move up,” J.J. said.

  “Can’t,” I said. “They’re watching.”

  “They’re facing down the hall like once every two minutes or so. You’ll be fine.”

  I felt my face crease into a sneer. “This isn’t a videogame, J.J. They don’t have clearly defined cones of vision, okay? If they see movement, they’ll assume trouble, and everything will hit the fan. I can’t chance sneaking up the hallway, because if I get seen, this game’s over, and they’re not turning in any sort of regular pattern.” I watched one of the guys turn around at random, straight back to the hostages. “See?”

  “Hmm,” he said, and I could tell that the unpredictability of humans was something he hadn’t taken into account.

  I stared straight ahead, through the leaves, making as little motion as possible. Something occurred to me about the way those guys were standing …

  I drew back around the corner, analyzing it in my head. It might work. Maybe.

  Maybe.

  I glanced down at my shotgun and let it rest in its sling. This was not the weapon I needed for this occasion. I unholstered my Glock, reflecting that it wasn’t really the right choice, either. My M-16 would have been preferable, but I didn’t have it, thanks to Miksa Fenes. Dick. I would have asked Reed for the MP5 I’d given him, but it wasn’t that much of an improvement over the Glock for what I was planning. Which was craziness. Absolute craziness.

  “Do you have a shot?” I asked, breathing into the silence of the hallway. I felt a rising sense of urgency and stripped my backpack off my back for a quick inventory. I’d already done one, but like an addict I needed to do it again, just to confirm that I wasn’t wrong.

  A bandolier of M209 grenades. Not gonna be much help in a place where civilians could get killed by shrapnel. I thought about discarding them, but wrapped them around my chest for later. Waste not, want not.

  I had one white phosphorus grenade left. I stuck it on my belt for safekeeping.

  I had several magazines of 5.56 ammo for the rifle I no longer had. Discard.

  I had a first aid kit that had mostly been stripped bare. And I wasn’t going to have much time to patch up from here on out, I figured.

  I slid the last couple of mags for the Glock into my belt along with a couple spares for the shotgun. Then I left the backpack on the ground. No need for excess weight or drag at this point, because shit was about to get real. We were going to need to move fast in order to pull this next part off.

  J.J. was the one who finally answered for Reed and Scott. I should have figured with them lurking just around the corner from the enemy, they wouldn’t be able to speak. “They’re nodding yes, I can see them on the camera. Looks like they’re ready to go if you are.”

  I looked around the corner at my targets again. Reed and Scott were two guys against three targets. Manageable. That’s like one and a half each. I was one against three, and I didn’t have my meta reflexes or strength, which was going to slow my target acquisition and make a mess of my ability to control the recoil from my handgun.

  And this was a long, long shot.

  “I’ve got HRT on the line, and they’re on a chopper, inbound,” J.J. said. “ETA five minutes. Can you wait?”

  “Nope,” I said.

  “Is there a chance any of the hostages are armed and could help?” J.J. asked hopefully.

  I stared at my three targets, just down the hall, dark silhouettes in tactical clothing. Probably a good choice on their parts that they’d shed the bright white catering uniforms they’d infiltrated in. Made my job marginally harder. “Unlikely. We don’t have that many people here, no one from ops, and most of the guests are soft political types.” We were on our own. “Go on my signal,” I said, taking a slow breath.

  I waited until they were all facing the other way and crept down the hall to the next potted plant, hiding behind it as best I could to obscure their line of sight to me. It wasn’t perfect, but it got me about thirty feet closer. I repeated it again, making it to the next plant in the line, and figure that was about as good as it was going to get without blowing my luck.

  I looked at my targets, all in a row, and hoped, hoped, hoped that this would go the way I saw it in my head. I took another slow breath, ran my tongue around in my dry mouth, and felt like I was tasting seven hours of accumulated hunger writhing around in my belly. But there was another hunger driving me on, one that was primal, one that filled me with a numb, cold anger that seethed through like the hypothermia, one that was told me the job wasn’t done. Not yet.

  I stared straight ahead, blinked one last time, and whispered, “Go.”

  44.

  Simmons

  When that Anselmo guy popped out of his cell, it was like looking into his own future, Eric thought. The dude was probably pretty cultured before he went in. He had that look, that old-school European elegance, but it was completely shot to shit by however many years of beard and hair growth. The guy was shaggy, like he’d been living under a bridge for a decade, but he was still in okay shape for all that. Maybe from perpetual showers or something, because they’d had a functional setup for one in their cells.

  “I cannot tell you how good it is to breathe the free air once more,” Anselmo said, his all-white paper prisoner uniform a little crinkled. Simmons didn’t get the “free air” thing, really, because it smelled like this place was seriously recycled and unhealthy, but he let it pass. Anselmo adjusted the uniform, like he was gonna straighten all the creases with his hands. Simmons thought he had a gleam in his eye, like he was living la vida loca or whatever, ready to tear up the town. He had a good energy. “I cannot thank you enough,” he finished with a bow toward Natasya.

  “No need for thanks,” Natasya said, stiff as a brick. Simmons had been watching her since he got out, and his considered opinion was that she was the stick in the mud sort. Or the stick up the ass sort. He’d been on jobs with those kinds of guys before, the ones who always brought a really negative vibe, always thinking of how things could go wrong. He hadn’t exactly known her for very long, of course, but ten minutes was enough to form a basic opinion. “When the moment comes, perhaps you might help us with Sienna Nealon?”

  “I would be more than glad to assist you,” Anselmo said, and the gleam in his eyes grew. “I have very bitter feelings about how our last encounter proceeded, and a desire to … express them to her personally.”

  “Well, this is the time,” Simmons said, feeling like he was stepping into the grown-ups’ conversation, “because she is currently sans powers, man. She’s weak like a kitten.”

  Natasya gave him a pretty pointed look. “She’s still dangerous.”

  “Perhaps to others,” Anselmo said with a shrug that reaffirmed Simmons’s opinion of him. The dude had game. “I doubt I will have any great difficulty with her. She can shoot me all she pleases, and it will do her little good. I will simply smile,” which he did, a great big infectious grin that made Simmons smile a little too, “and then I will remove her skin a few inches at a time.”

  Natasya di
dn’t show much reaction to that, but Simmons couldn’t help himself. “Dude, you are like … my new hero. I would love to see you do that.” Anselmo beamed at him, and Simmons couldn’t help himself; he nodded and smiled back. “I would pay to see you do that. In slow-mo. With popcorn. Maybe a green tea or something—”

  Natasya let out a sudden, harsh outflow of air. “Who else should we let out of here? We could use assistance—”

  “I have two friends,” Anselmo said, nodding toward a cell around the bend, and then one a couple doors down. “Their assistance would be appreciated—”

  A sharp trilling noise interrupted them, the sound of Natasya’s cell phone, which she’d taken back from Eric as soon as she could. A little possessive, he figured, but it was okay because he didn’t have anything else to urgent say to Cassidy anyway. He just wanted to get out of here, maybe throw a little hurt first, drop this place down a few hundred feet into the earth on the way out if he could manage it.

  “Yes?” Natasya asked. Simmons could tell it was Cassidy just from the look Natasya got when she answered. Her face was still, and she barely reacted to whatever news was given, just enough to take her mouth away from the speaker to talk directly to Anselmo. “Our guards with the hostages are being attacked right now. Fourth floor.”

  Anselmo stared at her, placid. “Do you know that it is the girl in question?”

  Natasya waited just a moment before delivering her answer, like she was waiting to hear for herself. “It is.”

  Anselmo made an abrupt right turn, his paper uniform trailing in the breeze created by his sudden, swift motion as he took off for the door. “Upstairs?” he called back.

  “Straight up,” Natasya said, watching him retreat into the tunnel that led to the surface.

  Simmons couldn’t help himself. He knew he was wearing a goofy, awed grin, just watching that walking badass heading up to rip the limbs off that silly little chick. He was tempted to follow, really did want to watch her get her comeuppance. “This is gonna be so awesome. He’s gonna rip her to pieces.”