I was also surprised to discover the depth of the feelings I had for Fleming.
The thought of them hurting her…
The rage kicked in again, and I made a fist so hard my nails cut into my palm.
Despite my strong feelings, I had to be realistic. Attempting to rescue Fleming was a fool’s game. I’d be killed, or captured. No two ways about it.
My primary objective should be to get out of there, find safe ground. The odds were against me being able to do even that much. No doubt the exits were being watched, I had no clue as to enemy numbers, and the only weapon I had was a posy vase.
The elevator doors opened. I stepped into the empty lift, eyeing the buttons.
First floor.
Sixth floor.
One or six. Pick your battle, Chandler.
My finger hovered over the 1.
I hit 6.
Fleming
“The enemy has no mercy,” the Instructor said. “Don’t expect to get any. The only things you can expect are pain and death. If they require information from you, they’ll get it eventually. It’s only a matter of how long you’ll be able to hold out.”
Fleming was in a wheelchair, a generic hospital model rather than one of her custom rides. She wore a hospital gown smelling of lemon bleach, and there were thick Velcro straps around her waist, legs, and arms. The straps hardly seemed necessary. She couldn’t run away. Less than an hour ago she’d come out of surgery after being shot four times in the thighs. But the reason for the wheelchair had nothing to do with her current injuries. Fleming’s legs had been crippled years ago, while she was in service to her country.
Now agents from that same country were holding her prisoner, trying to get her to talk.
Talk? About what? Chandler and I just saved millions of lives. They should be giving me a medal.
“Who do you work for?” the agent asked, staring down at her. He had a long, chalky face, a pointy nose, a pointy widow’s peak. Fleming smelled aftershave on him. Old Spice. He wore the typical black suit of a spook—or spy—and judging by the way the other three in the room regarded him, he was obviously top man on the scene.
“We’re on the same side,” Fleming answered. “But that question is on a need-to-know basis.”
The agent rested his hand on Fleming’s bandaged one—earlier they’d allowed a doctor in to splint her broken fingers.
They still hurt like hell.
“I need to know,” he said. “Who?”
“I take orders from two people. One is the president.”
“And the other?”
“The other one is not you.” Fleming flashed a bright smile.
The man squeezed her hand. Even though the lidocaine hadn’t fully worn off, the pain was instant and overpowering. Fleming gasped.
“You have no identification,” the man said, maintaining his grip. “No fingerprints on file. No hits on our facial recognition software. As far as our government knows, you don’t exist.” He squeezed harder. “Since you don’t exist, I can do anything I want.”
“Anything?” she grunted.
“Anything.”
“Then you might want to brush your teeth. Smells like you were licking Uncle Sam’s ass.”
The agent released Fleming.
For a few seconds, it took everything she had to control her breathing and separate herself from the pain. Since her accident, she’d been behind a desk, working operations from the intel side. But she’d secretly longed to be a field agent again. To be out in the world, where the action was.
Be careful what you wish for…
“The other woman. She’s your sister, yes?”
Fleming forced cool. “Where is she?”
“She’s talking to one of my colleagues. He plays a bit rougher than I do. Your sister is telling him everything.”
Fleming didn’t have to force the laughter. It came naturally. While everyone had a breaking point, they hadn’t had Chandler nearly long enough to reach hers.
The agent frowned. “You think I’m being funny? We’re going to take you, and your sister, someplace where you’ll never see daylight again.”
“Where no one will ever look?” Fleming asked.
“Exactly.”
“Like in your underwear?” It was sophomoric, but the insult felt good.
His frown deepened. “Prepare her for transport,” he told his men.
The other agents moved forward.
“Hold on,” Fleming said. “What’s your name?”
The agent hesitated, then answered, “Malcolm.”
Fleming looked beyond him, to the other men in the room. “Does anyone here have a mint for Malcolm? Or some gum?”
No one chuckled. Tough crowd.
Then one of them produced a syringe.
This was bad.
Very bad.
Fleming understood Malcolm’s threat all too well. The United States had dozens of secret prisons throughout the world. Since it was the last superpower standing, those in charge had decided to wipe their asses with the Constitution. No more due process. No more trials by peers. No trials at all, in fact. US citizens could be kidnapped, tortured, and executed by their own government, all on the hush-hush.
Fleming knew what went on at these black sites. She also knew no one made it out of them alive.
“The president will have your head if you take me anywhere,” Fleming said.
“Right now the president is in the middle of a worldwide scandal. It’s a PR nightmare. I really doubt he cares what happens to you.”
Especially since he probably blames me for his recent problems, Fleming thought.
She and Chandler had saved millions. But that didn’t mean much for the commander in chief’s approval ratings.
“You’re worried,” Malcolm said. “I can tell. You have good reason to be. Are you sure you have nothing to say?”
Fleming stayed quiet.
“Who do you work for?”
“OK, I’ll tell you. I work for M.”
“M?”
“On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. I’m Agent 007. My name is Bond.” Fleming forced herself to smile. “James Bond.”
“Sedate her,” Malcolm ordered.
The needle went in hard, and the drug worked quickly.
Fleming knew this would likely be the last moment of peace she would ever have.
She was tough. But everybody breaks.
And now, Fleming realized with terrifying certainty, she was about to find out what her breaking point was.
The White House
The president of the United States hadn’t slept. And he wondered, with complete seriousness, if he’d ever sleep again.
The day before, the unthinkable had happened. Someone had managed to override the country’s formidable defenses and launch a nuclear missile.
Only two things saved this from being the biggest debacle in the history of the United States. First, the damn thing detonated before hitting its target, causing no damage, collateral or otherwise. Second, the target was a friendly nation. Britain’s prime minister was pissed off, for sure, and demanding answers. But the fact that the nuke had been headed for London and not Pyongyang or Karachi had probably saved the world from an all-out nuclear war.
So while the fate of humanity was assured, at least for the moment, the president was going to have to explain what had happened to the voters, the citizens of the United Kingdom, and the entire world, assuring them it wouldn’t happen again.
The problem was that the president had no idea what had gone wrong. He had his best people on it, and no one could figure out where the directive to launch had originated. No weapons sites had been compromised. No one credible had claimed responsibility. The codes had been encrypted and guaranteed impossible to crack, and all the equipment had been tested and retested five times by three separate teams and assured to be in perfect working order.
The most powerful man in the world felt powerless. Worse, he felt impotent. His ad
visers had come up with various scapegoats and ways to redirect the blame, but none of them rang true, and he wasn’t about to lie to the people, only to be caught later. So instead, the most powerful man on the planet was forced to do something even more reprehensible in the eyes of the world: admit he didn’t know.
With a year left in his second term, he could take the popularity hit. Hell, it would sell more copies of his eventual memoir. But unless this was properly spun, it spelled death for his party, and for his running mate’s chances in the next election. All the policies he’d worked so hard to implement during the past seven years would be scrapped when the opposition took the White House. Much as he disagreed with his vice president on many key issues, he could at least be counted on to continue this administration’s efforts both at home and abroad. But now the VP’s approval rating was synced with his, and at an all-time low, according to CNN.
The president wiped a shaky hand across his face, extending the motion into rubbing his jaw. A few minutes earlier, he’d ordered everyone out of the Oval Office, including the First Lady. He told them he wanted to be alone to compose himself before the next press conference, but in reality he didn’t want anyone to see him so vulnerable. This was the lowest point of his career. Hell, it was the lowest point of his entire life. And there didn’t seem to be any way out.
His breast pocket vibrated, and the president’s breath caught. It was his cell phone. Not the regular one. The special one, the one to which only a handful of people in the world had the number. He placed it to his ear.
“This is the president.”
“Mr. President, we have a lead on the attack. Two operatives. They’re currently in a hospital in Chicago.”
“Who do they work for?”
“That’s the thing, sir. They work for us.”
Chandler
“You are highly trained,” the Instructor said, “and not many people in the world are able to do all the things you can do. But you aren’t bulletproof. Avoid what danger you can. Run from what you can’t avoid. Fight as a last resort.”
The elevator doors opened on the sixth floor. Orthopedics. I kept the floral arrangement at face level, my head still but my eyes sweeping the floor. Three nurses, two in the center island, one in the perpendicular walkway, none of them paying attention to me. A fat guy in jeans, a cast on his arm, stood near the nurse’s station, talking to an elderly woman. Ten rooms to my left, eight to my right, some doors open and some shut. And at the far end of the floor—
—an orange traffic pylon in front of a blue plastic tarp stapled to the walls and blocking the hallway.
I headed for that, maintaining focus on it but keeping hyperaware of my surroundings. I stopped, briefly, at a hospital floor plan on the wall, memorizing the emergency exits. It revealed that the cordoned-off section led to a storage area and a freight elevator. I checked the nurses, each still preoccupied, and beelined toward the tarp. There was a card-stock sign taped at eye level, featuring a smiling construction worker in a hard hat: PARDON OUR DUST.
The posy vase in front of me was the dominating smell, roses and baby’s breath, but beyond it I didn’t catch any scent of plaster powder, sawdust, paint, or other remodeling smells. I dropped to one knee, setting down the arrangement and fiddling with a shoelace, and then took a quick peek under the tarp.
At the end of the hallway I saw three men in black suits. One pushed a gurney, two flanked him. Strapped to that gurney…
Fleming.
Picking up the flowers, I slipped under the tarp and began moving toward them at a quick clip. The nearest agent saw me, immediately reaching into his jacket. But my clothing, and the posies, caused him to hesitate for half a second, long enough for me to pitch the arrangement at his face—a two-handed shove, as if I were tossing a medicine ball.
It hit him in the forehead, and I launched into a sprint, reaching him after the vase broke across his nose in an explosion of water and flowers and shattered glass. I grabbed his emerging gun with my left hand, tugging him by the tie with my right, using speed and momentum to spin him around while bending his pistol to the side. He was quick enough to have gotten his finger inside the trigger guard, which I’d been anticipating, and his index finger hyperextended from the leverage, firing the weapon as his knuckle bent the wrong way.
The other two men had sprung into action, one pushing Fleming around the corner, the other dropping to a knee in a shooting stance.
I flipped over my guy’s shoulder, putting him between me and the shooter, yanking the gun off his broken finger and dropping to the floor between his legs.
Two shots into the center mass of the agent on his knee, two more aiming up into the groin of Vaseface, and then I was taking a running dive onto the waxed tile floor, sliding on my belly, coming up on my side, and aiming in the direction where I’d last seen Fleming, just in time to witness the service elevator doors closing.
I scrambled to my feet, racing toward the lift, sighting the small hole in the door. Contrary to action movies starring Bruce Willis, it is damn near impossible to pull elevator doors open because they have a locking mechanism. Firefighters and those servicing the elevator use a drop key to disengage the lock. I didn’t have one, but I did have a Glock, and I aimed the barrel a few inches below the keyhole and fired four times in a tight grouping, then dug the butt of the gun between the doors.
I was able to pry them open, and I immediately jumped into the shaft after the plummeting car. I fell about twenty feet, a potentially lethal drop, but since the elevator and I were moving in the same direction I didn’t hit with fatal force. I bent my knees and let my heels bounce against my ass, absorbing the hard impact while also keeping my balance. Even though I’d set my jaw, my molars clacked together hard enough to rattle my fillings. I felt a stab of pain in the side of my tongue where I’d bitten it, and the taste of blood tinged my mouth.
It was too dark to see much of anything, but I’d been in a few elevator shafts in my life and knew my way around. Judging from the sound, I determined the counterweight was to my left, and under my right foot I could feel the edge of the ceiling hatch. I moved farther right, sensing the wall behind me rushing past as we descended.
The agent below had to have heard me land, but if he was experienced, he wouldn’t fire. Shooting in public places draws attention, and bullets and elevator cables aren’t a good match.
I held my breath for a moment, anticipating the shots. They didn’t come.
The lift stopped, and the doors opened. I waited, listening for the sound of gurney wheels, opting not to poke my head inside and have it shot off. When I heard the squeak of Fleming’s cart being pushed away, I palm-slapped the hatch open and took a quick look.
The agent had pushed Fleming into a group of people milling in the lobby. I dropped through the opening, easing myself down with one arm, the other bringing up the gun.
“Down!” I yelled.
A few people dropped down. A few screamed. Some ran after the agent, blocking my shot.
I slipped through the elevator doors as they were closing, having to hopscotch over the civilians on the floor, rushing toward the exit doors at least three seconds behind my quarry. But he might as well have had an hour’s head start; I was soon flanked by two, make that three, men in black suits, hands in jackets as they fought the crowd to get to me.
Did they want me alive? Or was I expendable because they had my sister?
It didn’t matter. Either way I was outnumbered and outgunned, and we were in a hospital lobby filled with innocent people. Whatever secret branch of government this was, if they had the power to lock down a hospital, they wouldn’t care much about collateral damage.
Unless I got out of there, innocents were going to die.
I switched directions, leapfrogging a cowering woman, trying to keep Fleming in sight as the agents closed in. As the gurney went out the exit, two more men in black suits came in the same door, blocking my pursuit.
I’d done my share of
shooting while running, and though I was better than most, I still missed more often than not—it was damn near impossible to keep a gun steady at a full sprint. The Glock I held was a Model 21, chambered for .45 ACP. Its capacity was thirteen rounds, and I’d fired eight. I couldn’t afford to waste any of the five shots I had left. But I also couldn’t afford to stop, giving the agents surrounding me a stationary target.
As the new arrivals drew their weapons, I noticed a young mother in my peripheral vision, holding her baby tight as she crouched behind a water fountain. The stroller in front of her was empty.
Time to switch directions.
I made for the fountain and belly-flopped onto the stroller. Riding it like a boogie board, speeding toward the exit at a good clip, I extended the gun.
Wheels were smoother than footsteps, and my aim was true. Two shots. Two hits. Both agents went down, and I rolled between their falling bodies, coasting into the parking lot.
I saw Fleming’s gurney being shoved into the back of an ambulance, already beginning to pull away.
I also saw six more agents converging.
I shifted my body weight, trying to steer left, but the carriage overturned, sending me rolling onto the blacktop. I tucked my arms in, protecting my head, using my toes to skid to a stop, and then I was on my feet again, sprinting after the ambulance. Gunfire peppered the asphalt around me.
Three of the agents got between me and my sister, one of them bringing up—
—Jesus, a Mac-10? Who the hell were these guys?
The submachine gun burped, spitting nineteen rounds a second. I’d barely had time to slide beneath the barrage, one leg out in front and one behind me like an MLB base thief, tearing my jeans to shreds on the parking lot sidewalk as the bullets screamed inches above my head.
Apparently they didn’t need me alive.
Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Page 25