Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels)

by J. A. Konrath

  It might be more efficient to just kill them all. Or at the very least it would be more fun.

  She leans on the maître d’ stand and watches the last of the Signature Room employees file into the elevator, following in the wake of diners who were evacuated from the top of the John Hancock building first. They are scared out of their minds, she can smell it, and their fear makes her pulse spike.

  The world is divided into predators and prey. These men and women scurrying to escape the fake bomb threat she and Victor cooked up are weak. They are so desperate for someone to save them, they accept the fake bomb squad uniforms and generic tool boxes without a blink. They dash from their hundred-dollar meals in a scramble to catch the first elevator. They are animals begging to be culled from the herd.

  And she’s itching to do the culling.

  Hammett is aware of the weight of the .45 on her hip, the knife in the sheath at her ankle, but she doesn’t use them. As much as she would enjoy taking each of the remaining sheep out, making them beg, making them scream, she doesn’t have time.

  When the elevator doors close, she turns away and climbs the staircase leading to the floor above. As she ascends to the balcony, she scans the restaurant a floor below. Beyond linen-covered tables and meals abandoned in various stages of being eaten, the city shifts from day to sunset through enormous floor-to-ceiling windows. The dark void of Lake Michigan shifts and sways. Lights of ships dot the horizon, only the occasional red or blue differentiating them from glimpses of stars beginning to light the sky.

  The world is a big place. And Hammett has plans a lot bigger than toying with waiters and chefs. Even the maître d’ who didn’t quite believe her bomb scare story, the one she most itches to kill, isn’t worth it.

  Maybe she’ll catch up with him later.

  She steps onto the balcony’s marble floor and glances past the upper floor’s maître d’ stand. Dressed as bomb squad techs, Victor and his men started searching the bar on the ninety-sixth floor while she was arguing with the manager. She pauses to watch two of them comb the private dining rooms off the bank of elevators. Hammett doesn’t fully trust them. She doesn’t fully trust anyone, but since she needs the money and manpower Victor provides, she will play nice for now.

  She sets off down the long hallway to the lounge to check up on Victor. He better have results.

  In the lounge, the western, southern, and northern vistas open beyond the glass, along with a spectacular sunset. Victor’s men dot the lounge, some searching under tables and looking under the radiator rimming the base of the room with long-handled mirrors. Some behind the center bar, moving bottles and glassware. Some probing the ceiling, checking the recessed lighting fixtures.

  Victor spots Hammett and crosses the bar, the look on his face pure KGB, soulless and mean.

  Hammett’s not sure if she should be worried or turned on. She gestures to his men.

  “Let me guess, you haven’t found it.”

  “My people have gone over everything. It’s not here. She lied.”

  “She wasn’t lying. It’s here. And we would know precisely where if you hadn’t killed the old man.”

  He shrugs. “Accidents happen.”

  “Incompetence and fragile egos happen. A few jokes about your small cock and you’re willing to fuck up the simplest task just to get payback. You men take size so personally.” She lets a smile play across her lips. “Especially those who are not so well-endowed.”

  The fingers of his right hand twitch, as if they long to fondle a trigger. “I didn’t hear any complaints from you last night.”

  Hammett cups Victor’s cheeks. “A little sensitive, comrade? What you lack in size, you make up for. In speed.”

  Victor knocks away her hands. His dead-eyed Russian mask falls back in place. “My superiors are getting impatient. They want a return on their investment. I’m the only thing protecting you right now.”

  As if I need his protection.

  “Don’t threaten me, Victor.”

  “Then get me results.”

  “I did my part. Tell your men to search again. They do a good job and your superiors will have their return.”

  “Right. If you had let me try a few more things on Chandler, my men wouldn’t have to guess the transceiver’s location.”

  She shakes her head. Victor is pretty, but sometimes he’s rather dense. “You really don’t understand the training she’s had, do you? The old man was our leverage. After he was gone, she would have willingly died.”

  “You overestimate her.”

  “Maybe.” A buzz tickles her hip. She pulls out her cell phone and checks the display. “If your men can’t manage to locate the transceiver, we’ll go back to the apartment and test your theory. Now hurry. The maître d’ didn’t leave willingly. I wouldn’t be surprised if he calls the authorities to check on our little bomb threat.”

  She steps away from him, walks down the hall, and ducks into the women’s room. Staring out the restroom’s glass wall at the city below, flaming orange in the sunset, she holds the phone to her ear. “Have you gotten inside?”

  “Negative. I’m on a ridge overlooking the house. If anyone leaves, I’ll know.”

  She knows the odds of Clancy getting inside are steep, but her sister’s failure is frustrating all the same.

  Hammett pulls in a steady breath. It’s almost over. She almost has what she wants. She can’t let impatient Russians or impenetrable bunkers get the best of her now.

  “Hold your position.”

  Hammett tucks the phone away. Then, impulsively, she pulls out her tablet PC, just to make sure Chandler is still safe and sound at the apartment.

  When she sees the blips on the screen, every muscle in her body tenses.

  You crafty little bitch. How did you get away?

  Hammett watches the blip move south and quickly figures out where Chandler is headed. She redials her cell.

  “Clancy, it’s Hammett. Chandler is on her way. She’ll be there within half an hour.”

  “Shall I kill her?”

  “Don’t kill her. We still need information.” Hammett smiles, thinking of Clancy’s Hydra report. Clancy could shoot the legs off a butterfly at two thousand yards during a hurricane on a starless night. “Shoot to wound,” she orders her sister. “And make it hurt.”

  “In a fight between two snipers, the outcome is predetermined,” The Instructor said. “The higher ground always wins. Always.”

  The wind carried the scent of oak leaves, wood fire, and Lake Michigan. Driving The Instructor’s car, I passed a handful of McMansions stuck into rustic settings and wound my way closer to the lake. Here gigantic homes dotted multiacre lots forested with oak and maple, most nestled so far off the narrow, twisting road that they couldn’t be seen, even though tree branches were half bare. I checked the tablet PC and continued. The road flanked a forest preserve, and houses fell away to forest and wet-lands. A private road turned off, and I took it.

  The sun was showing off as it went down, throwing spectacular pinks and oranges across the trees, turning the horizon into a Monet painting. Soon it would be dark.

  The only thing worse than a firefight during the daylight was a firefight in the dark.

  I ditched the sedan in a turn off about a mile from the three blips on my tablet PC. I’d zoomed in enough to get a topical layout of the area. One was me. The other was Clancy. The third was unknown. It might be Hammett, though I guessed the blip at the Hancock Center was hers. There was also a blip at the Cook County morgue, which could indicate Forsyth, or Ludlam, or Follett. Or a combination of all three.

  So why was there an extra nearby? Could one of my dead sisters be back in play somehow? Or were there more of these tracker things than The Instructor had indicated?

  Hefting my rifle case, I started through the woods. Clouds scudded across the sky, dark on one side, pastel on the other as the sun dipped down. Night had its own smell, crisp and cool and dangerous.

  Dry leaves sk
ittered and skipped along the dirt. I moved slowly, watching my footing, keeping low. It wouldn’t be easy to spot a sniper through the trees, especially a pro like Clancy supposedly was. I would need all my senses and a liberal dose of luck.

  Make that an extraordinary dose of luck. Matching the blip to the terrain, I saw that my sister had taken the highest point in the area, on a ridge two kilometers to the northwest. From that vantage point, she was the master of this entire domain. My only hope was to lie low and try to sneak up on—

  The shot missed my foot by only a few inches, kicking up a clod of dirt. A millisecond later, the report echoed through the trees, a thunderous boom coming from the ridge.

  I dived behind a fallen tree, rolling onto my back, clutching the rifle case to my chest. I wondered how exposed I was, but didn’t dare check. Since the bullet arrived before the sound, I knew Clancy was firing supersonic rounds. If I peeked my head over the rotting log, chances were I’d have it shot off before I even heard the bullet coming.

  Although I’d excelled at long-distance shooting during training, the sniper mindset had never been a good fit for me. The best snipers were almost supernatural with their patience. In a full ghillie suit—a mesh covering woven with camouflage fabric and often actual leaves, weeds, and moss until the wearer looked like a swamp monster—it might take a sniper an entire day to cross a single acre of land, creeping an inch at a time, blending perfectly into the foliage. While waiting for a shot, it wasn’t unusual for a sniper to bivouac for a week or more in a single area, never moving more than a few feet.

  I opened the clasps on my rifle case. Working quickly, while there was still a sliver of light left, I began to assemble my M24. It was a modified takedown version of the Remington 700 rifle, upgraded for military use. This one was rebarreled for .300 Winchester Magnum ammo, had a muzzle flash hider, a Leupold day scope, and a AN/PVS-26 night vision device. I finished putting the rifle together by feel just as the sun made its exit, all the while holding my breath and waiting for Clancy’s next shot. Though an excellent weapon, the M24 had a maximum effective range of eight hundred meters. I could maybe hit her at a thousand meters, but that would be pushing it.

  Unfortunately, Clancy was at least eighteen hundred meters away. Not only did she have the eagle-eye vantage point, but she was no doubt using a more powerful weapon than mine. She probably had a ghillie suit as well, rendering my night vision practically useless for spotting her.

  I put my chances at survival under ten percent. As for actually killing Clancy, the odds were too astronomical to even bother calculating. Add the fact that my whole body hurt and my thoughts felt sluggish after the hellish day I’d had, and I had to admit that Jack Daniels was probably right. I was going to get killed.

  But I had one thing going for me.

  I had nothing to lose.

  And the world should fear the angry assassin with nothing to lose.

  Holding the starlight scope to my eye, I took in my surroundings, deciding where to go next, wondering if it even mattered. My training dictated the best course of action would be to draw her fire, then quickly run southwest, which provided brush cover and a gradual elevation, which would put us on more even footing.

  But Clancy had the same training I did. So I looked for the worst direction to go. That would be straight ahead, into forty meters of open meadow. Flat terrain, no cover at all. Suicidal, but she wouldn’t expect it. If I sprinted fast enough, I could get to the copse of trees across the meadow before she could line up a shot. It was particularly tricky to hit a moving target at long distance, so I had a minute chance of making it. Maybe.

  I rolled onto my stomach, my rifle on the ground in front of me, an extra magazine of ten rounds in my pocket, and I gradually spread out my legs, straddling the dirt. Staying flat, I brought my knees up until I must have resembled a bullfrog.

  Then I jumped like one, springing forward over the log, feeling then hearing the shot pass under my spread-eagled leap. As soon as I hit the ground, I was tearing ass across the meadow, a full-out sprint in the dark, my rifle in one hand and my scope in the other, counting my steps until I was sure I was near the tree line, then sliding like a baseball player as another shot cracked, so close I felt it breeze by my hip.

  I rolled into the tree cover, pulse pounding in my ears, amazed I was still alive. I was perhaps fifty meters closer. If I did that seven more times, and my luck held, I might get a chance to defend myself.

  I stayed in the thicket, surrounded by trees, and gained another fifty meters before coming to a second clearing. This one was wider than before. It had two routes through it, neither very promising. One path had high weeds that I could perhaps crawl through, but if Clancy had a thermal camera I might as well be strolling across a football field in broad daylight. The other was a lengthy zigzag through thornbushes.

  I didn’t want to die tangled up in thornbushes, so I went for the weeds. The first ten strides were straight, then I cut left, then right, then right again, then left, not thinking about direction so much as trying to be random. If I didn’t know my next move, neither would Clancy.

  Just as I reached another tree line, I felt a tug at my leg and heard the rifle report. I put my back to a big oak, scooted onto my butt, and used the scope to check my injury.

  The bullet had cut through my pants and lightly grazed my thigh, leaving a streak that looked, and felt, like a burn. It was such a minor wound I didn’t even need to dress it, but it made me think.

  Four shots fired, and all at my legs. Legs are much harder to hit than center mass.

  Which meant my sister wasn’t trying to kill me. Only disable me.

  That perked up my spirits a bit. If they needed me alive, they couldn’t risk a lethal hit. Which meant more careful shot selection. Which meant fewer shots. Which meant drastically increased odds of me surviving.

  In an odd sort of way, it made me invulnerable.

  I didn’t think about my next route. I just ran like hell, straight into the thin trees, up the gradual incline, feeling completely exposed and yet bulletproof at the same time. Either my mad dash confused Clancy or she’d lost me in the darkness, because she didn’t fire again for the entire length of my sprint. By the time I came to rest beside an outcropping of dirt and rocks, panting like a dog, I was unable to prevent the incredulous smile that had formed on my face. As far as I could tell, I was within a thousand meters of the ridge.

  I checked the tablet PC to make sure, covering it with my shirt so the glow didn’t attract attention. Sure enough, Clancy’s blip was only 730 meters away. She hadn’t moved. Neither had the other, unknown blip, which was 510 meters due east. I attached my night vision to the rail in front of the scope and sighted east, through crooked, green-hued trees. I saw what appeared to be the corner of a stone house, recessed into the side of a hill. If I had to take a guess, the house, and the source of the blip, was Jacob’s stronghold, and Clancy was keeping watch on it.

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  I tugged back the bolt and loaded a round, then flopped onto my belly and set up my bipod. I was still panting from the run, and I took several deep breaths in an effort to slow my respiration and counter the rise in my heart rate. Then I assumed the standard sniping position. Body in line with the weapon. Heels flat on the ground. Elbows comfortable. The butt of the weapon resting on the fist of my nonfiring hand. My face against the cheek plate. Then I adjusted the eyepiece focus ring and the range focus ring and tried to locate my sister.

  She helped me by firing once again, the round burying itself into the dirt between my calves. My pulse spiked, and I fought the urge to roll away, instead zooming in on the tiny barrel flash I’d seen.

  Clancy fired once more, shooting off the tip of my right shoe. That’s when I saw her in the scope, an amorphous mound of green moss draped over a gigantic rifle barrel, so far away she was barely visible. It was a calm night, with a slight northeast wind, and the elevation and bullet drop were hard to judge on the fly. I cou
ldn’t make out Clancy’s features, but aimed where her head would be and exhaled while I gently squeezed the trigger.

  My shot fell short by at least ten meters.

  Steady. Stay calm.

  I worked the bolt and relaxed my fist, raising the barrel a hair to account for the incline and gravity—like all projectiles, bullets moved in an arc and were pulled downward toward the earth. I hissed out a breath and squeezed another round off a bit too soon. It sailed harmlessly over Clancy’s head.

  Breathe in, breathe out.

  Relax, stay calm, don’t rush it.

  Don’t think about getting shot.

  Don’t worry about missing again.

  I’m ice, and my blood is antifreeze.

  Clancy returned fire, but my shot must have unnerved her, because her round hit a few feet to my right. That’s the biggest danger in a sniper firefight. You want so badly to kill before you get killed that you don’t take your time.

  But she recovered quickly, firing less than a second later, grazing my left thigh with another searing burn.

  That’s when I decided to cheat. She might have been the better shot than me, but technology had improved since we’d been trained by Hydra.

  I tugged out the tablet PC and saw Clancy was 728.5 meters away. I zeroed out my scope, adjusted for elevation, then hit the dual high buttons on my side-mounted AN/PEQ-2. This was an infrared illumination system, only visible through night vision. The narrow beam was a laser dot for pinpointing targets. The wide beam was like a flashlight, illuminating a cone of visibility.

  No doubt Clancy was equipped with this as well, but she hadn’t used it because it was ridiculously easy to spot by the opposition, almost like a signal flare. But in this case, we both knew where the other person was. I just needed to be able to hit the bitch.

  Letting out a slow breath through clenched teeth, I centered the tiny laser dot alongside her scope, right at her closed eye—my closed eye—and fired.

  Clancy’s head erupted in a brilliant green explosion of brain matter and bone.