Ruthless (Out of the Box Book 3)

by Robert J. Crane

  “Is that Phillips?” J.J. asked, one step below panic. “No one, man. No one is on this call. You’re … you’re having post-traumatic stress hallucinations. Err … post chemical-exposure delusions. Delirium!”

  “J.J., don’t be an idiot,” I said as I honed in on my target. They were not getting away. “You’ve saved a lot of lives tonight. You’re not going to get in trouble for being a weirdo on an open channel.” Probably. Up to Phillips, I guess.

  “I hate to interrupt this,” Harper said, “but Sienna … what’s your plan for dealing with the plane?”

  I smiled as I turned on the afterburners and went supersonic. Phillips had told me to act at my discretion …

  54.

  Natasya

  The plane rattled as it rose, the subtle, low thunder that would shake a teacup in its saucer, would send light tremors through a body. Natasya held tight to her armrests, facing forward, watching the bulkhead, waiting. She was counting seconds, waiting for something to happen, though she didn’t know exactly what. The sky to fall, the world to end.

  Something.

  Anything.

  The plane rattled again, another subtle vibration. The pilot’s chatter was barely audible, the cockpit door standing open because no one had bothered to shut it before takeoff. The mood had been tense, but now it seemed ten thousand kilos lighter, and Vitalik was actually joking with one of the mercenaries. They were chortling among themselves because the plane was off the ground now, because they would be in Cuba in a little over three hours, and they’d be flying low to avoid radar most of the way.

  It should be clear sailing. A little more stressful if the authorities were after them, but hardly a deal-breaker. The hard part was behind them, in theory.

  The plane rattled again, and Natasya squeezed her hand rest a little harder.

  “Hey,” Vitalik said, low, staring across at her. “It’s okay. We made it.”

  “This isn’t Cuba yet,” she cautioned him.

  “It’s not far,” he replied. He was smiling at her. He did that sometimes, thinking he could charm her like he did other women. It hadn’t worked so far; she was wise to his type before she’d ever even met him. “Relax.”

  “I’ll relax when I’m on the tarmac in Havana and been welcomed with open arms by our comrades,” she said, but the moment after she said it, she knew it wasn’t true.

  She’d be looking over her shoulder for the rest of her life.

  She was about to voice one of these thoughts to Vitalik when the pilot spoke loud enough she could hear him even in the cabin.

  “What the hell is that?”

  And then the world exploded around her.

  55.

  Sienna

  Bringing a plane out of the sky isn’t very hard, especially a small, two-engine plane like the one my targets were riding in. All I’d have had to do was rip the engines off, or drop something in there to blow them up, then let Sir Isaac Newton’s most famous discovery work its magic.

  But it lacked style. It lacked pizzazz.

  It’s not good enough, Sienna, Wolfe said. Not … ruthless enough.

  Sadly, on this point, Sir Devious Evil Serial Killer and I agreed.

  So, instead, I flew at them and smashed into the plane at supersonic speed, feet first.

  As far as brilliant ideas went, it was not among my best. It was actually cavalier and reckless and daft and—you get the point, insert various other synonyms for “stupid” here.

  But after a night of feeling like these people were hounding my every step, running me to ground, it felt damned good to just unleash some good old-fashioned havoc into their annoying little lives.

  I used Wolfe’s power to heal as I was smashing into the plane. The whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion now that my metahuman reflexes had returned. I crashed into the cockpit, kept going through the door to the passenger cabin, and then hit the back wall hard enough to rip the plane in half with the concussive force that I’d brought with me, like a meteor hitting the earth.

  My clothes ripped and tore, my skin shredded and reformed, my bones shattered and regrew, and when it was over, I hovered in mid-air, a little dazed, and watched the wreckage of a Gulfstream jet spiral down to the empty farmland below in about ten thousand pieces.

  Well, nine thousand and ninety-nine pieces, anyway. One of them wasn’t falling.

  “Hello, Natasya,” I said, and she slowly moved up to hover in front of me. Her lip was bleeding, her ears had blood dripping out of both canals. She had a lot of lacerations, and she held her arm at a funny angle, like it hurt to straighten it. “So … your power is that you can fly?”

  “Yes,” she said, still in that flawless English.

  “Kinda useful, isn’t it?” There was no reason not to be polite now. She had the look that told me she was about a half-inch from passing out.

  “It has its purposes,” she replied.

  “If you got to be the unit-commanding badass you are with nothing but flying as a power,” I said, looking at her evenly, “you must have developed quite the reputation in the Soviet Army.”

  She stared back at me. “I suspect mine mirrors your own,” she said, sounding … weary. I wondered why she hadn’t run, hadn’t tried to hide in the wreckage and pretend to die. It would have been a smart move.

  Then I saw her eyes. They were … empty. Haunted. She’d been pursued all night, too, I realized. Every time I’d crammed one of her plans to kill me back in her face, the screws must have tightened somehow.

  Now she was as afraid of me any one of those prisoners I’d bluffed back into their cells earlier in the night. Three decades in a prison of her own, and now she was looking at me with that same fear I’d seen from them. She couldn’t beat me. She knew it. She hadn’t stood a chance even when I was depowered; she didn’t have a hope now that I was staring her down with everything at my disposal.

  She’d built her reputation on unrelenting viciousness, on doing whatever it took to get the job done. And tonight she’d finally met someone just like her, but maybe a few degrees meaner.

  “How do you want this to go?” I asked.

  She looked at me with bare misery. “I want to go to Cuba.” There wasn’t a note of hope in her voice that told me she believed it was even possible.

  I just stared back at her. “How do you want this to go down?” I asked again, with a little more emphasis this time. “A cell? Or …”

  Now she just looked pained. “No. No more imprisonment. Please.”

  I stared at her, and I felt … pity. She saw the look in my eyes, and she knew. There was a hint of a plea in there. She knew she was at my mercy, that I could drag her back to the Cube and stick her in the ground forever if I wanted to. She’d be another part of my collection, another unwilling soul serving out a sentence for her crimes that she could never outrun.

  She didn’t want it, of course, but she’d committed the crime, and she should have to serve the time, right?

  I let out a deep sigh, and stared at her pleading eyes again, and I knew what she was asking of me. And it was well within my power to give it. “Who’s the brain?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know who she is. She contacted us by phone, by computer. She presented a plan. Made an offer. We never met face to face, never exchanged a name. She wanted Simmons, though. He’s important to her.” I could tell by the way she said it that this was her plea bargain.

  “Okay,” I said, resigned, and I floated toward her. She didn’t run, and when I got close enough, she turned away from me.

  “I’ve fought your government for most of my life,” she said, into the quiet night. “It was always ideological, never personal. Do me a professional courtesy … and make it quick.”

  So I punched her in the back of the head hard enough to stun a bull.

  I could have shot her, I guess, but I didn’t feel that merciful. She’d been part of a conspiracy to commit terrorist acts on my agency, and her actions had contributed to t
he deaths of several members of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. She’d let Anselmo Serafini out of my jail, sent people to kill me. My mercy has limits.

  I watched her fall out of the sky without a bit of remorse.

  56.

  I floated to the earth to do my duty, to confirm the kill. I found her impaled on a pine tree in a small wood, head and neck askew in a way that told me she was finished. I floated to the ground and felt my feet sink into the snow as I looked out across the wreckage of the plane.

  Vitalik was nearby, already dead. It wasn’t a pretty sight, because these sorts of things never are. It looked like he’d tried to save himself by shooting frost at the ground, but it hadn’t slowed his impact enough to keep him alive. A couple other guys wearing tac vests were also dead. I searched and searched, my fingers numb from the cold, my nose frozen, but I could not—for the life of me—find Eric Simmons’s body anywhere.

  “Sienna?” Reed asked over the earpiece. “Are you coming back?”

  I stood in the middle of a clearing, the sun rising over the rolling hills behind some trees, turning the sky a fiery shade of orange. The little twigs and branches of dead saplings poked out of the snow as I stood there, the wind rolling over me. Snow stirred and drifted, a little cloud like dust caught on the breeze. “Yeah,” I said, satisfied with the view but not the final conclusion I’d come to. “I’ll be right there.”

  Simmons had gotten away.

  57.

  I set down outside headquarters in the middle of a sea of blue and red police lights that were warring with the orange of the dawn. Reed was standing there waiting, along with Andrew Phillips, who had his arms folded over his massive chest, surveying everything with a disinterested eye. Also, his lips were puckered in displeasure, which I assume was related to his first week on the job being a massive screwup. Try and keep that one under the radar, dick.

  “Glad you made it back,” Reed said before my feet even touched the ground. He looked a little worried. “And that you got your powers back.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and turned my attention rather darkly to Phillips. “Did you know what got stolen from that chemical weapons depot?”

  “No,” Phillips replied, staring back at me evenly.

  I didn’t like that answer, so I tried for another one. “Did you know that the government had a chemical weapon for suppressing metahuman powers?”

  Not an inch of movement in that face. “Yes.” He must have seen the surprise on mine, because he went on. “You shouldn’t be all that surprised; the government’s known about metas since the days when they held a convention in Philadelphia to decide how to run this country. Now that modern chemistry has brought us to the point where we can kill our fellow humans by the millions if need be, why wouldn’t someone have turned that expertise toward something less lethal and more useful?”

  “Useful?” Reed snapped. “Might have been useful when we were in the fight for our lives against Sovereign.”

  Phillips didn’t even blink. “It didn’t exist then. It was created specifically to stop Sovereign, but it wasn’t ready until after you’d already killed him.”

  “And now they’re keeping it around, I assume?” I asked without surprise. Phillips had made a few annoyingly good points.

  “Fair assumption,” he said.

  “Why?” Reed asked. I could tell he was a lot more exercised about this whole thing than I was.

  Phillips looked straight at me, and I could tell what he was thinking, so I took the words right out of his mouth. “In case we quit,” I said. Phillips gave me a subtle nod; on anyone else, it might have been approval.

  “I’ll expect your report later today,” Phillips said, turning away from me. I guess we were done with having a conversation.

  “What?” I asked.

  “You’ve got a senator and two members of congress who want an explanation for what happened to them tonight,” Phillips said, turning back. “Something they can share with the press, something that makes the situation seem under control.”

  “Most of the perpetrators are dead,” I replied. “Report over.”

  “Give me something written,” he said, starting to walk away, “Directions to take the investigation from here, an accounting of what happened as best you remember. Try to keep it to five thousand words or less. Also, you’ll have to meet with Jackie to prep for at least one interview, maybe more.” He disappeared into a crowd of police, back into headquarters.

  “What the hell, I’ve got homework?” I asked. “What is this, high school?”

  “If it was, you’d be having the time of your life, wouldn’t you?” Reed cracked. I turned to face him, but I could see that not all was quite right with him. He had that look on his face that said we were going to have a discussion at some point. Sooner rather than later, I suspected.

  I heard a car come to a stop and turned to see Scott easing out of a local PD patrol car, Jeremy Hampton stepping out of the other side. They both took in the scene with a quick look and headed over to me. Scott was taking his time, but Hampton looked like he was back to normal, not a hint of injury.

  “Ms. Nealon,” Hampton said, doing that finger to the forehead, tip of the hat salute again. “I’m pleased to see you made it through everything all right.” His lips were tightly pursed, and I remembered again the helicopter.

  “I’m sorry about your men, Mr. Hampton,” and I watched him wince. “You have my condolences.”

  “I’m just glad you got the ones responsible,” Hampton said. “I hope we get a chance to work together in the future, under better circumstances.” He did that same non-regulation salute again before walking off toward some unmarked cars in the distance. I assumed they were FBI, then I caught a glimpse of Agent Li in the midst of them and knew it for a fact.

  “You still know how to throw a party, Sienna,” Scott said, and I turned back to him. He was holding himself at a little bit of an angle, like he was hurting, and I kept myself from hugging him.

  I laughed, faintly, though it was mostly to humor him. “Thank you for coming, Scott.”

  His face clouded slightly, like he was trying to remember something. “Why wouldn’t I? I couldn’t leave a couple friends in danger, not on something like this.”

  “You are the man,” Reed said, and took his hand in a bro-shake-turned-fistbump. It was very masculine.

  “I should get home,” Scott said, cringing as he turned his body maybe a little too fast. “Get a shower, go to bed. Maybe if I get back soon, I won’t have to explain why I look like I’ve been out all night fighting to my parents.”

  “Dude, you live with your mom and dad?” Reed asked.

  Scott smiled, a little embarrassed. “What? They’ve got a guest wing.”

  I shook my head at him. “Hide your shame, fellow millennial. Don’t wear it on your sleeve for all to see.”

  His smile crinkled his eyes in a way that I hadn’t seen from him in … longer than I can remember. “Take care, Sienna.” He shifted his gaze to my brother. “Reed, you too.” With that, I saw him head toward a cop car, presumably to get a ride back to wherever he’d parked when he came to save my sorry bacon.

  Reed and I watched him go. “That was interesting,” my brother said after he was out of earshot. Which, for a meta, takes a while.

  “What?” I asked, my gaze falling on Ariadne, who was sitting just inside the lobby with some of the other hostages, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. Based on the look on her face, part of me thought I should go talk to her. She’d killed someone tonight, after all. That was a heady feeling.

  I decided against it. My first kill was so long ago I could barely remember it at this point, and there had been so very many between then and now that part of me felt like I had absolutely nothing to share with her that would be of interest.

  “Scott,” Reed said, drawing my attention back to the question he posed. “And you. I would have thought, after the breakup you had, things would be … I don’t know … a little more �
�� emotional … between the two of you.”

  I felt my face freeze, and it had nothing to do with being exposed to frigid air all night. “We’re all grown-ups here,” I said and turned to walk away, back toward the dormitory building. He followed and said nothing, but I could tell by the silence that he didn’t quite believe me.

  58.

  I opened the door to my quarters, and my faithful dog greeted me with a wagging tail and a little mewl. I fell into a chair and patted his head, only then realizing that my brother had followed me in and was now standing by the door, frowning.

  “What?” I asked, craning my neck to look at him. Sleep would be a mercy for me at this point, not that he was inclined to grant it. A flash of what I’d done to Natasya Sokolov came back to me, and I found myself strangely untroubled.

  “Where was your dog when we were here earlier?” he asked, staring at my mutt.

  “Hiding, probably,” I said, letting my head roll back onto the back of the couch. “Gunfire, explosions going on, strangers all up in this area … not the sort of things dogs like to be around for, you know.”

  “Huh,” Reed said, and shrugged. “Those Russians … did you ever get the background on them?”

  “Just the basics in the files,” I said, “woefully incomplete. Why?”

  “At the bottom of what I read was kind of a footnote,” he said, still standing at the entry, “sort of half supposition, half backchannel intel, maybe. Something about how the four of them had gotten sent to that prison in the first place, the one in Siberia.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “Go on.”

  “They rebelled against the Soviet government for some reason,” Reed said, shuffling between his feet. This wasn’t the conversation he wanted to have. This was the conversation he was killing time with until he got his courage up. “But the thing I want to know … is if these guys were the ones who rebelled against the government … who do you suppose stopped them? And where do you think those people … or person … are now, whoever they are?”