Sifters (Sifters Series Book 1)

by Shane Scollins

  “Pretty much.”

  Dia looked up to the ductwork along the ceiling.

  “We got it,” Tallon said. “Let’s go.”

  They headed back toward the door they’d entered through when Tallon stopped. He raised a glance to the top of the door and stepped back.

  “What is it?” Dia asked as her hand moved into her pocket and rested firmly onto the grip of the pistol.

  “The camera moved. We can’t leave this way now. I wasted too much time.” He took a few steps into the center of the room.

  A small canister came clinking down the corridor and across the floor. It exploded into a bright flash of white light. In an instant, they were enveloped by smoke, and when it cleared, they were surrounded.

  “Don’t even think about it, Washburn,” one of the armed men said.

  “Frank.” Tallon dropped his chin and then dropped his gun to the floor.

  “You too, girly. Gun on the floor, or bullet to the brain, you choose.”

  Dia slowly placed her gun on the floor.

  Chapter 24

  Arlon McQuaid peeked around the corner and waited for Frank to show up. Once he did, Arlon strode confidently to meet with him midway down the drab concrete corridor.

  “We got ‘em,” Frank informed. “What should we do?”

  Arlon firmed his lips. “I really don’t want to kill him.”

  Frank squinted. “I understand, but there’s really no other way. I think he knows too much. I know he knows too much.”

  “Frank, you haven’t been here long enough to know what he knows.”

  “All due respect, sir, but I don’t work for you. I’m here on the sole authority of the Steering Committee. I know Tallon was your pal, and maybe you’re too close to this. But I can guarantee you that what you think he knows is only ten percent of what he actually knows.”

  “Let me talk to him.”

  “I think that would be unwise.” Frank scratched his shaved head.

  “All due respect to you, the mayor, and the Steering Committee, but this is my company, and this is my property. I will do what I want on this. This company put the mayor in office and he knows it. He’s not going to go against my wishes.” Arlon walked past him nervously. He didn’t trust Frank or any of the mercenaries the committee decided must take over the security of this operation. But he had to admit he’d lost some measure of control on this one. And his advisory board thought it was best to let the mayor make the calls if for no other reason than if this went bad, the mayor would fall and not Cortech.

  Arlon felt himself growing more nervous by the minute. He got to the holding cell and saw Tallon and the girl sitting on opposite sides of the thick-barred cell.

  “Tallon.” Arlon shook his head sadly.

  Tallon stood and stepped face-to-face with him, wrapping his muscled hands around the bars.

  Arlon blew an audible breath and cleared his throat. “I didn’t want it to come to this. I was hoping you’d just leave town.”

  “I’d planned on it, until you came after my family.” Tallon flexed his considerable forearms as he gripped the bars tighter.

  “That was not my idea.”

  “Why, Arlon?”

  “Why what?”

  “What could Chloe possibly know that she needed to die for?”

  “She’s dead?” Arlon was taken aback.

  “What did you expect? You send scumbags like Frank after her.”

  “Tallon, I swear to you, it wasn’t like that. She wasn’t supposed to die. They were just supposed to get information from her. I didn’t authorize that.”

  “What information? What could she know? She’s just a kid.”

  Arlon closed his eyes and shook his head. “There’s something you need to see.” He reached into his breast pocket and pulled his phone out, cued up a video and twisted the device so Tallon could watch. “Chloe sent this to me six weeks ago. She wanted a million dollars or she was going to the police and the press with this.”

  Tallon’s arms fell softly from the bars, slack to his side. “This is impossible.”

  “I tried to dissuade her. But she was insistent. Tallon, she wouldn’t back down. When the mayor got word, he ordered me to fire you. He knew you wouldn’t be able to do what needed to be done. I tried to talk him out of it. We went back and forth for weeks. I convinced him to let you stick around until the Simmonds situation was handled because I knew you’d handle it right, at least I thought you would.”

  “You should have let me talk to her.”

  “It escalated quickly. The mayor got a copy two weeks after I did. At that point, it was a mess.” Arlon slid the phone back into his pocket. “I’m sorry, Tallon. But Cortech is my responsibility. The employees, the shareholders, the billions of dollars of revenue, that’s bigger than you and I put together.”

  “What bigger secret is she talking about?”

  Arlon just shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now. What’s done is done.”

  “It matters to me. What secret, Arlon?”

  He dropped his gaze, turned, and walked away.

  * * *

  Tallon felt like someone slapped him in the face and then shot him in the gut. He eased onto the bench along the concrete wall and let his head fall back into the hard surface.

  “What was that about?” Dia asked.

  Tallon shook his head. “What was she thinking, trying to blackmail Arlon McQuaid? Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “Tell you what?”

  “Chloe knows everything. She knows about the schools, and that something strange is going on with the undiagnosed kids. Apparently, she also knows some secret that is so dangerous it may have gotten her killed. She was going to blow the whistle on something big to the free press.” He shook his head. “She wants to incite an uprising.”

  “That’s why they went after her?”

  Tallon nodded. “This is my fault. The only way she could’ve known about anything was through me.”

  “You don’t know that,” Dia replied.

  “There’s no other way. Only a handful of people know about what’s been going on. Cortech has made sure no one knows. I’ve made sure of it.” Tallon searched his mind for a clue that Chloe was up to something, and he never noticed it. In one sense, that was a shock, but in another, the apple clearly didn’t fall far from the tree. Maybe he shouldn’t be surprised at all.

  “I’m sorry, Tallon. But obviously this was no one’s fault.”

  “I let them do their dirty work, and I facilitated it. I could have done something long ago. But I looked away. I always considered it above my pay-grade to concern myself. I just did my job and kept my mouth shut.”

  “Well, that’s convenient.” Dia crossed her arms.

  Tallon could see the disgust on her face, and it bothered him. “It’s not an excuse, it’s a reality. I was selfish, I know. But I’ve changed my views. I didn’t used to be like this.”

  Dia sighed. “No one used to be like this. We’ve all let this world change us. I didn’t want to be this.”

  Tallon smiled slightly. “I wanted to be a soldier like my father. Or a cop like my grandfather.”

  “You didn’t miss the target by much.”

  Tallon looked at her. “Maybe not at first, but I have lately. I wanted to be a hero, not a villain.”

  “There’s still time for that.” Dia leaned forward. “If we could get out of here, there’s time to right a lot of wrongs.”

  Tallon took a deep breath. It was time to fight again. He’d never lost a battle in his life and he was not about to start now.

  Frank’s men took his guns, but not his hidden throwing knives. They were concealed under a Velcro flap in his tactical vest for situations just like this. He also had those three small sticks of C-8.

  Tallon knew exactly how Frank and his team were going to play this. They only had one book, and Grant Washburn wrote it. Tallon’s father shared every secret with his son, including the things that weren’t in the manual
.

  “What’re they going to do with us?” Dia asked.

  “They’re probably going to drive us out to the wastelands and shoot us in the head.”

  “That’s not optimal.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Tallon stood and examined the construction of the bars. They were welded, not bolted. If he could find the weakest structural point, he might be able to blow it apart.

  The problem was that it would make a heck of a noise, which would send one of Frank’s men down here with a shoot-to-kill finger on his trigger.

  Of course, he had a plan.

  Chapter 25

  Dia didn’t really get nervous often, but a teeny bit of some feeling crept in. It didn’t matter, because whatever happened next was better than just sitting here waiting to die. If she was going to die, it was going to be kicking and punching with every last ounce of will, and every last draw of breath. It was the only way she knew.

  She watched Tallon wrapping the pieces of explosive putty around the lower right corner of the cell bars. With a quick yank, he pulled out the plastic strip and twisted the two colors together. Within seconds they started to smoke, and he dove to the floor. About a second later the explosion thumped the room.

  Dia waited a beat and then ran quickly through the newly opened space between the last bar and the concrete wall, and lay on the floor outside the cell. She closed her eyes among the pieces of rubble and debris that had blown around and waited.

  She heard the running steps coming toward her, but she stayed prone. Once she heard the signal, a slight click, she opened her eye slightly, gauged how far the man was, and popped up in a flash.

  The man swung his rifle toward her, but she blocked it and stepped into him with an elbow to the face. She dropped and spun, sweeping her leg around into the man’s knee. Then with a thrust she jabbed the knife at the man’s throat, but he blocked it. He countered with a kick of his own, right at her chest. She was able to sink back to her butt, and the booted foot breezed by her face.

  The man went for his sidearm. He got it and pointed it at her, and for a brief moment time seemed to stand still. She’d never frozen in the face of death before in her life, but suddenly she couldn’t even blink, eyes locked on the black hole of the barrel from which the deadly projectile was about to burst forth. But the bang of the pistol never came.

  From between the bars of the cell, a flash of steel split the air and stuck into the man’s temple. Tallon had thrown a deadly knife from inside the cell. She glanced toward him and saw the blood of the other man pooling on the floor around his neck. Tallon bent over, retrieved the man’s pistol, and handed it to Dia. “Let’s go.”

  He took off down the hallway in the opposite direction, and she followed. It started to hit her how close she was to death as she slid Tallon’s throwing knife into her pocket. That was as close as she’d been since the time that Prepper had the drop on her with a crossbow pointed at her heart. That encounter didn’t end well for him when she spiked him in the temple.

  They came to a door. Tallon leaned his shoulder into it and busted it open with a crack, hardly slowing for a moment. They stopped on the other side in the center of the empty hallway.

  Tallon looked at the three doors for a moment. “We’re going to the roof.”

  They ran up several flights of short, steep stairs and emerged into the gray morning light of an overcast rooftop. They were on one of the shorter buildings on the block. Several taller buildings lurked overhead and one smaller brick one below.

  Tallon ran over to a maintenance shed, and with a well-placed bullet blew the padlock open. He yanked the door and removed two large bundles of nylon rope and a long hooking system with pulleys and counterweights.

  “What’s that stuff?”

  “Have you ever rappelled?”

  “No.”

  “It’s easy.”

  Tallon ran to the edge of the building. Dia followed and leaned out over the three-foot white concrete wall, looking to the ground that loomed several stories below. She didn’t know how many feet it was, but it was more than enough to assure death if you hit the ground from here.

  Tallon set up the rig, hooked a carabineer to the rebar hoop on the roof and another to a loop of rope. “Here, wrap this around your waist like this.” He showed her how, and she followed him step-by-step until he was done. He then checked the knots and connected the counterweights to the other rebar eyehooks on the roof. Then he jumped up on the wall.

  “C’mon, jump up here.”

  Dia climbed up, glancing over the edge and trying not to think about falling to her death. She wasn’t really afraid of heights, she’d just never encountered them to this extreme before. She’d been to the top of the water tower in her town many times, but this was different.

  “Grab here, super tight, let out an arm’s length of slack and jump. You’ll swing into the building feet-first. Like this. You just grip it, and rip it.”

  She watched him jump off the edge, swing out and back into the building.

  “Now you go!” he yelled up to her.

  Dia let out a length of rope, and then re-gripped it tight with the glove, looped around the back of her hand. She leaned back, getting the feeling of her weight against her fingers. She could feel the tension in her hand. With faith in her own ability, she jumped. Swinging out, she felt her stomach flip-flop, but she dropped down and glided right back, slamming her feet into the wall. It was actually kind of fun.

  “Good job, keep going.” Tallon went again.

  Dia didn’t hesitate while the feeling and motion was still fresh in her mind. She went again, and again. With each pass, she was taking increasingly larger lengths of rope, and touching back into the building softer and easier. Before long, she was having so much fun she didn’t even think about the fact that they were running for their lives.

  The ground came up too quickly. She clicked the carabineer off her waist, and let the rope drop to her feet.

  “C’mon.” Tallon took off up the alley toward the road. Dia checked to make sure the pistol was still in her pocket, and it was.

  They got to the busy sidewalk and blended right into the crowd for a moment. Then Tallon stopped and turned quickly toward the street.

  Dia saw them too, three men wearing the same black and red outfits were coming at them, shifting between people in the crowd. They moved into the street to cut them off, but Tallon turned back against traffic in the opposite direction.

  “Follow my lead,” he said back to her.

  She stayed close to him. A garbage truck and a bus chugged down the street, and in a flash Tallon darted into the road right at the trucks. She followed. They sliced between the two large vehicles and ran alongside the bus, using it as a shield. When they got close to where they’d first turned back, they darted across the last lane of traffic and into a narrow alley.

  They continued sprinting until they reached the end of the path and onto the next block, where they turned back around toward midtown.

  A couple blocks of cutting through alleys and darting across streets and Tallon went into a small convenience store. He plucked a cheap prepaid cell phone off the rack and quickly activated it while they stood in the store.

  Tallon dialed. “Hey, I need you, ASAP. Meet me the corner of Eight Ave by Rolo’s Bodega.”

  Chapter 26

  Dia started to slide into the back seat of the black sedan, but Tallon stopped her. “No, you take the front.”

  “Why?” Dia asked.

  “Cortech facial recognition cameras will be looking for me as the primary target. We have less of a chance they’ll pick you up.”

  Dia shrugged and got into the seat next to an attractive blonde girl behind the wheel. She nodded to Dia and sped away from the curb.

  “Thanks, Joce,” Tallon said from the back.

  “Hey, what’re best friends for?”

  “Dia, this is Jocelyn,” Tallon offered.

  Dia nodded. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”


  Tallon said, “Take us to Lockwood.”

  Jocelyn cut across two lanes with a screech of the tires. “You got it.”

  They rode in silence for a few moments. Dia just took in the sights of the city and tried to mark the blocks in her mind as they exited the midtown area and headed into the Holland Tunnel.

  “Jocelyn, did you know Chloe tried to blackmail McQuaid?” Tallon asked.

  She looked up at him in the rearview mirror. “Huh? What’re you talking about?”

  “She tried to blackmail Arlon McQuaid and the mayor.”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure? With what? I think someone’s pulling your jack.”

  “I’m positive. I saw the proof, a video. That’s why Cortech fired me. They needed her taken out.”

  She nodded thoughtfully. “And they knew you’d have nothing to do with that.”

  “There’s something else going on, and I need to get to the bottom of it.”

  Dia asked, “This ties right into what’s going on with my brother?”

  “It’s all connected,” Tallon said. “I just have to figure out the whole story, because I’m missing something.”

  Jocelyn suggested, “Maybe you’re missing something obvious that you’ve overlooked. You’ve been too close to Cortech for too long. Maybe what you’re looking for will come to light now that you’ve stepped away.”

  They drove out of the city and through the industrialized annex area until they got to a more rural section at the far end of the annex. The modular wall that delineated the border was just up ahead of them, splitting through a swath of trees.

  They pulled up to a square, white building with a large, red dragon drawn in street graffiti style artistically rendered on the side. The words Lockwood Loki bowed above the dragon in gray letters.

  “What is this place?” Dia asked as she shut the car door.

  “A safe place.” Tallon headed toward the front door. An electronic security lock disengaged. They went inside.