by S L Shelton
Richards turned white and wobbled minutely on his feet, reaching out for the gurney to steady himself. “You’re lying.”
I laughed so genuinely that it sounded cool…one of those rare moments in your life when you have precisely the right response at precisely the right moment. “Okay…if you say so.”
Richards slapped me, openhanded. It barely left a tingle. Obviously, this pathetic man had little personal experience with violence.
Tris rolled her eyes. “Is he ready?”
The doctor shrugged. “I’m here to heal. If you’re asking if he’s ready to be tortured then my professional answer is no.”
“Good enough,” she said, then stepped behind me and shoved the gurney toward the door.
I heard many footsteps behind me as they navigated me through the curved walls of a corridor and into a large cargo elevator. There was silence in the space except for the clacking of machinery and the whine of the elevator motor.
When we reached a higher level, the freight elevator bounced to a halt, and the doors opened. After wheeling me a short distance, my tension rising with each squeak of the gurney wheels, she turned me into a dark room through double steel doors.
The lights came on, humming and blinking to life as if they hadn’t been used for a while.
“Where’s Emrick?” Richards asked from somewhere behind me.
“With his Jaggers.”
“Well get him. We have need of his pharmacy.”
Tris walked around beside me and pulled my tattered shirt aside. “Torture won’t do any good with this one,” she said pointing at my scars, then looked me in the eye. “Will it?”
I just smiled at her.
“Fine,” Richards said. “Let’s see if he has a soft spot for any of the others.”
A moment later, I heard six sets of footsteps enter the room. I arched my head back, and after catching a glimpse of Kathrin standing against the wall looking bored, I saw one of the reporters who had been on the President’s RV, flanked by two Jaggers. Behind her, Seifert came in, similarly bound with his arms behind his back and a two Jagger escort.
Without a word, Tris raised her pistol and fired it into the head of the reporter. She dropped to the concrete floor as a pool spread around her head like a bloody halo.
Jaw clenched, there was nothing I could do to save any of them. As they moved Seifert around the woman’s body, he struggled, resulting in a hard blow to his gut and his arms yanked up behind him. He yelled in angry defiance. “Don’t tell them shit! I’ve been ready for this for years.”
Tris looked at me and smiled as she raised her pistol.
“Stop,” I said quietly.
She lowered her pistol. “You have something to share?”
I nodded.
“Don’t tell them anything!” Seifert screamed, spittle flying from his mouth in rage.
Richards stepped around to see my face. “Give me the list of the accounts where you keep the stolen Combine money.”
I’ll only be able to give these to you once, came a voice in my ear so clearly that I had to look to see who stood next to me. No one was there.
“There is no list. The accounts are in my head,” I said.
Tris raised her pistol again.
“Don’t! I’ll give them to you, but you have to write them down.”
Richards looked toward the door and nodded to someone. A moment later, a man arrived with a laptop computer.
“Bank,” the man said.
“RTR Grand Cayman Banque et Assurance,” I said.
The man nodded, then clicked and typed for a few seconds before nodding.
I closed my eyes as the login, password, and pin, scrolled through my memory. “Dopplar527Rose, is the ID.”
“Password and pin?” the man asked.
“Ampersand, capital T, capital R, g, s, 4, 7, 8, capital G, dollar sign, capital, R, lowercase r, h, 2,” I replied as they clicked across my closed eyelids. “Pin 483001.”
He punched them in then smiled before turning to Richards and nodding. “Three accounts, twelve million total.”
Richards looked at me and grinned. “How many accounts are there?”
I shrugged. “Thousands.”
He shook his head. “Such a great brain. I’d give anything for that kind of recall.”
“I’ll trade it to you right now for a moment alone with you.”
He laughed. “Get to work. It’s going to be a long day.”
The technician at the computer jotted down the information from the first account before looking at me for the next.
For more than twenty minutes, I slowly parsed the information to the man with the computer for a total of less than fifty million dollars in accounts—a tiny fraction of the total we’d stolen.
Richards, being the impatient weasel he was, grabbed the incomplete list of account data and left the room after ten minutes. At the door, he turned and looked at Tris. “Keep it up until I have a hundred billion worth of account totals.”
As soon as he left, my mind started reaching for accounts with smaller amounts. We’d never reach a hundred billion anyway—I didn’t know them all. Only Storc had that information, locked away on his trusty pocket drives.
After twenty accounts with less than fifty thousand dollars each, I started tripping over numbers; invalid user ID, wrong password, invalid pin. On one occasion, I’d even given him a fake bank name. He’d spent ten minutes searching for it only to stand up and rub his eyes in frustration.
“I need a break,” he said. “And I think he needs one too. The information is getting less reliable.”
Tris held her pistol up to Seifert’s head again. “Maybe this will clear up the fog,” she said, grinning at me like a playful child.
“Just…Jesus. Sit me up and give me some water. My head is throbbing.”
She lowered her weapon and nodded to someone behind me. After removing the straps across my chest, they cranked the bed up. One wrist remained cuffed to the side of the bed, and as they lifted, bending me at the waist, my insides started to hurt again.
Once in place, one of the Jaggers handed me a bottle of water. I clanked my cuff against the bed as I tried to reach the top of the bottle.
I looked at the Jagger and shrugged. “A little help?”
He reached over and took the bottle, twisting the top off and returning it without emotion or comment—a damned robot.
I drank slowly as the man responsible for checking the accounts walked around the room, stretching his arms and back, twisting one way then the other.
I looked to the side where Kathrin stood, still leaning against the wall where she’d been the whole time. It didn’t look as though she’d moved. I lifted my half empty water bottle in her direction. “Want some?”
She grinned but shook her head. Not a word.
“What did they do to you?” I asked.
Tris swung her arm around in a wide arc, knocking the bottle from my hand with the blow to my fingers from the barrel of the gun. “Enough. Back to work.” She returned her aim to Seifert’s head.
Seifert glared at her. “Seriously, stop it, Scott. Don’t give them anything.”
I looked over at him. “Don’t worry. None of them will live long enough to spend it.”
A confused grimace spread over his face as Tris tightened her grip.
“And there won’t be enough of her left to do a DNA test on.” I nodded toward Tris.
In a stroke of wild anger I hadn’t seen from ponytail bitch, she crossed the short distance to me in a flash and grabbed me by the throat. “I don’t care about the damned money,” she hissed, her nose only inches from me. “I’m perfectly happy with killing all of you right now.”
I whispered, “Sweet girl,” through my constricted throat.
As if the room were suddenly struck by a tornado, the gurney flipped to its side. At first, I wasn’t certain what had happened, but then, to my joy, two of the Jaggers dropped to the ground in front of me, their necks tw
isted so severely, their heads faced the wrong way as they hit the ground. In the span of less than two seconds after, four shots cracked followed by the sound of three more bodies dropping to the ground.
“Get him,” Seifert said as I heard metal restraints hitting the concrete.
Kathrin stepped in front of me, a pistol aimed somewhere behind me as I struggled on the ground, shielded by the gurney.
“Don’t,” she said to Tris. “I really don’t want to hurt you. Just let me get him out of here…that’s all I want.”
Kathrin kneeled down in front of me and dropped a key within my reach. I quickly unlocked the cuffs and then unfastened the straps across the rest of my body.
“What took you so long?”
“Those guys are fast,” she said. “I had to wait until they were distracted.” She reached down with her free hand and stroked my cheek. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I said as I struggled to my feet and looked at Tris. “Just kill her and let’s go.”
There was a distinct lack of gunfire after several seconds. I straightened myself as much as my wounds would allow, and looked at Kathrin only to see a twisted expression of concentration on her face.
“Kathrin…”
“It’s not that simple,” she whispered, almost embarrassed.
I glanced at Tris who was smiling smugly, slowly stepping toward Kathrin and me.
“Seif, shoot that bitch.”
Kathrin switched her aim to Seifert. “Leave it on the floor, Majesty.”
Seifert looked at her then back at me, anger coloring his cheeks. Instead, with his hands raised, he kicked the Jagger’s Colt toward me. Smart man.
Kathrin clinched her jaw as she drew her aim back to Tris, who had closed a few more feet in distance. “Don’t, Scott,” Kathrin said. “Please don’t pick it up.”
“She killed me…she killed you,” I said, bending to pick up the pistol. “I don’t know what they did to you for two months to make you feel anything for her, but she and Braun were responsible for more deaths in our lives than anyone else.”
“Scott, please don’t pick it up.”
I closed my fingers around the grip of the Delta Elite. Nice weapon—it felt good in my hand.
“Scott, please!”
Tris rushed over as I whipped my arm up. Her foot found my wrist before I’d had a chance to aim and fire. Kathrin wrapped her arm around Tris’s neck and wrenched her away to the ground, the two of them tumbling to the concrete, Tris trying to wrestle the weapon from Kathrin’s hand.
It fired twice, one of the shots buzzing past my head before showering me with concrete from behind.
I looked at Seifert. “Go. Get out of here.”
He hesitated.
I kicked the gun over to him and yelled, “Go! Find the others and get them out of here.”
He turned and bolted for the door, stopping and carefully looking around the doorway.
“Don’t kill any civilians or military,” I said to his back. “They’ll have new orders soon.”
He looked back at me. “Do you want me to get the others out or not?”
I nodded. “Just…do the best you can.”
“Jesus,” he muttered, then ran down the hall.
I ran over to Kathrin and Tris who continued to battle on the ground, each wrapped around the other, trying to gain control of the weapon. I reached down for the Colt in Kathrin’s hand, but Tris kicked out and landed a solid foot in my ribs, sending me to the floor.
“Get out of here,” Kathrin said through a clenched jaw.
I scrambled back to them. “I’m not going anywhere without you.”
I grabbed the weapon, trying to pry it from Kathrin’s and Tris’s grips. It went off again, sending a round whizzing just over my shoulder. I pried my fingers under Tris’s thumb and slowly pulled it away.
Just as Kathrin regained control of the weapon, Tris spun her body around and landed on top of her. Kathrin’s arm jetted forward, keeping the Colt out of her reach.
“I’ve got it,” I said as I reached down and grasped the warm barrel—but Kathrin wouldn’t release it. “Let it go!”
Tris drew up and kicked me in the head, sending me to the ground again. But I kept my grasp on the barrel and looked into Kathrin’s pleading eyes. What did they do to you?
“I won’t kill her,” I said, realizing there was far more going on here than I knew.
She stared at me, regret shaping her red face, but she released her grip.
With the Colt in hand, I stepped behind Tris and pressed the barrel to her shoulder and fired.
“Scott! Don’t!” Kathrin screamed.
Then I popped two more rounds into her brace-clad extended leg, in the center so as to hit the bone.
She whipped around and tried to counter my next shots but her arm failed her, sending her flopping to the floor on her side. Kathrin jumped up and snatched the pistol from my hand with such speed, I honestly didn’t see her hand coming. She knelt over Tris and quickly ran her gaze over her body.
“I said I wouldn’t kill her…I didn’t.”
Kathrin got up and stepped backward, away from Tris. “Just let me get him out of here.”
“You go nowhere without me,” Tris hissed, hate and anger in her voice.
Kathrin shook her head. “It’s not real,” she said. “It was never real.”
In Kathrin’s face, I could tell what she said had no correlation to her emotions on the subject. She clearly felt agonizing conflict over this.
“Kathrin, we have to go,” I said quietly.
She backed away a few more steps. “I’m sorry,” she said to Tris, then slipped her arm around my waist and helped me down the hallway.
“I’m glad you picked me,” I whispered as I leaned on her.
“I didn’t have a choice,” she said with a grin. “I was Jagger paired to you before they even messed with my DNA.”
“How romantic.”
She stopped as we got to an intersection in the hallway, looking both directions. “Which way?”
I shook my head as pain and cold began to fill my gut. “I don’t know. Never been here before.”
She closed her eyes and lifted her chin as if she were sniffing the air. After a second, she pulled me to the right and down a short set of stairs. When we reached the end of the corridor we were stopped by an oval metal doorway, a hatch with wheel cranked latch dogs.
She turned the wheel and spun the latches free before pushing the door in. It was some sort of tube. Mount Weather…it was a missile site.
The dark shaft extended sixty or more feet below us if the echo were any indication, and over a hundred and fifty feet straight up.
“Shit,” we muttered simultaneously.
As she reached down to pick me up again, Tris rounded the corner, hobbling on her braced leg, her left arm swinging as if it were the sewn on arm of a rag doll. “You’re not going anywhere without me,” she said and lifted her good arm.
As if fired from a rifle, her hand flashed forward, releasing a blade aimed at my head. Kathrin grabbed for it, but my hand was already there. The blade sunk into my flesh through my palm, Kathrin’s hand grasping the handle simultaneously.
Tris charged as she had released the blade and slammed into Kathrin, shoving us through the opening on the side of the old missile silo. As we fell backward, I flailed momentarily, but reached up and grabbed Tris by the ponytail.
Kathrin clung to the door with one hand and around my waist with the other. For a tense second, I thought we might pull ourselves back up, but Tris twisted her body and my fingers began to slip from her hair.
When my fingers failed, Kathrin and I tumbled backward into the launch tube.
I reached back as her arms encircled my chest from behind. “I love you, sweet girl.”
“I love you, my sweet man,” she said, then twisted her body, rotating herself below me.
“No—!”
We slammed into the concrete. Over the scream of
pain shot through my nerve endings, I heard a combination of my body and hers break, bones crushed, limbs twisted. And worse, I felt the stab of her ribs through my back and side. She had sacrificed herself completely on the minuscule chance it would save me.
I listened as she tried to draw breath through her broken chest before falling silent. My eyes and mind failed me, and I began to fall into darkness. Above, Tris continued to struggle, clinging to the hatchway with her one good arm.
“She’s dead!” I screamed up the shaft, using what seemed to be my very last breath. My voice echoed in fading reverberation up the launch tube, its hate and anguish painting the smooth silo walls with the sound.
Tris’s grasp failed—or she let go. In either case, she fell toward us. As blood filled my eyes, I reached deep into my dying core and pulled the blade from my hand, thrusting it up with all my strength, my arm rigid. She landed at an angle across my legs, but her head, her face, landed on my outstretched arm, shattering it and her head across my blade and fist.
There was nothing else left for me to do but die. And so, I closed my eyes and let the pain wash over me, embracing it.
Not yet, whispered a voice in my ear. Breathe.
seventeen
Tuesday to Thursday, May 10th to 12th
7:15 a.m. on May 10th — Oval Office, White House, Washington, D.C.
MICHAEL CASEY stood in front of the door leading to the President’s study. He looked across the room at the back of Hector Velazquez who stood just outside the French doors to the West Colonnade on a small patio outside the Oval Office.
The President sat opposite two candidates for Department Directorships—Department of Homeland Security and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
“Again, I apologize for the early hour, and doubling up on our expectations chat,” the President said as he stood and extended his hand. “I have a lot of openings to fill.”
One of the men stepped forward to shake hands first. “Not a problem at all, sir. It’s an honor to be considered for the position.”
“I agree,” the other gentleman said, extending his hand to shake the President’s hand. “After what you’ve been through, I’m amazed you’re in the office at all. It’s a testament to your dedication and patriotism.”