Power Down

by Ben Coes

  “She was killed with a round from a .45-caliber Colt,” said McCarthy. “Specifically, Andreas’s handgun.”

  “Are you suggesting you can prove he killed his wife after reading a few articles on Nexis?” said Jessica. “And that this wife-killing ex-Delta’s suddenly turned into a terrorist? This is not only not productive, it’s ludicrous. We have a larger threat here. Andreas is not our problem. A group of terrorists is our problem. And Andreas may have information critical to solving that problem.”

  Jessica stood up and left the suite.

  “Wait, Jess,” said Chiles. “The next interagency—”

  “I’ll look at the transcripts,” she said, and closed the door.

  At one thirty, Savoy returned to Jessica’s office, and she set him up in a conference room, next door to her office.

  “You likey?” she asked.

  “Me likey. Where’s the couch?”

  Jessica rolled her eyes and proceeded to brief him on the latest information from the Capitana survivors about the events during the days leading up to the explosion.

  “We need a list of who was on that rig,” she said. “You’re probably equipped to get it soonest from Anson.”

  Savoy nodded. “I’ll get it.”

  “How are the Savage Island survivors?” she asked.

  “They landed in Halifax a couple of hours ago. They’re all at the Marriott. Have your people talk to Spin. He’ll arrange access for interviews, that sort of thing.”

  “Thanks. By the way, I got you and Spin clearance.”

  A low chime rang out from a cell phone on the conference table, interrupting their conversation. Jessica reached out and flipped it open.

  “Tanzer.”

  Jessica listened in silence, then put the phone down.

  “What is it?” asked Savoy.

  “That was one of my agents in Denver. Marks’s ski house is on fire.”

  17

  MARKS’S SKI HOUSE

  Somewhere inside Marks’s head, he heard a voice.

  “Get up,” it whispered. “This is not how it ends.”

  His own voice, telling him not to give up.

  “Get up,” the voice said. “This is not your time to die.”

  He smelled smoke and felt the intense warmth of the inferno around him. How long had he been unconscious? Opening his eyes, he saw chaos. The room was enveloped in smoke and flames.

  For the first time, he suddenly registered the intense pain coming from his shoulder, where he’d been shot, and his head. He lifted his right hand and saw nothing but the dark, terrifying color of blood, coursing from his body. As he held his hand up in front of his face, he saw charred flesh from where he’d gripped the pistol from the fireplace.

  Marks slowly arched his head around, rotating to see his legs. The flames were almost at his ankles as the oriental rug became overtaken with the spreading fire. He felt a sudden burst of heat as flames leapt to his jeans. He shook the leg and batted the flame out. His legs still worked, a good thing.

  “Start moving,” the voice urged. “It will soon get beyond your control.”

  Marks rolled onto his stomach, shouting at the stroke of pain in his shoulder. He looked for a way out. Everywhere, smoke clogged the room. The flames created columns of violent red and orange. The sound was incredibly loud, wood, fabric, and synthetic materials crackling as they burned.

  To the left snow blew through a broken window, vaporizing instantly in the heat. The window the assassin had come through was Marks’s closest exit point. But to reach it he’d have to cross the heart of the growing house fire.

  More flames struck his jeans and he tried to shake them, but the flames clung to the material. Grunting in pain, he managed to put out the flames once again, but they would be back.

  Beyond the sofa and the bodies of the Ansons lay another way out, the doorway to the mudroom—and an exit to the backyard. It was his only hope of survival.

  He registered the sight and memorized the path to the doorway, then closed his eyes, for he knew he would have one opportunity and that if he was to ever see again he needed to protect his eyes from the searing flames and the smoke. He took one last breath.

  Marks placed his blistered right palm against the ground and pushed as hard as he could. He pulled his right knee along the ground beneath him, then the left, so that he was now on his knees. Then, slowly, he moved to his feet and stood.

  Above the din of the smoldering house, he heard a penetrating sound, a structural creaking noise, and felt the earth move slightly. He knew that the whole house would soon be destroyed, and the cracking was the sound of the ceiling timbers, weakening as they burned. Another crack, slower and more ominous. He kept his eyes closed, listening, and moved quickly to his right. From above, a roof timber crashed inches from where he now stood, its impact on the floor nearly toppling him.

  “Run!” the voice yelled. “Run, goddamnit, run!”

  He ran then, wildly, cutting through the flame wall with eyes still closed, knowing that if he hit a wall or tripped on some other obstruction he would die then and there.

  As in a dream, all thoughts were now blurred. Marks felt only the intense pain of the flames against his shirt, his bleeding shoulder, and his scorched palm. The bright light of the fire beckoned him to open his eyes and destroy his sight forever.

  And the voice, that was still there too.

  “Run!” it yelled. “Run, Teddy, run!”

  He sprinted through the wall of flames and entered the mudroom at the back of the big house. Marks kept his eyes closed, running blindly into yet more heat with a faith and a belief that something cooler, safer, lay beyond the intense heat. Suddenly, he came to the large oak door. He grabbed the searing-hot doorknob. The door swung out and icy air blew past him, jolted him, almost as painful as the flames. He opened his eyes. He saw the back of the house and its yard now covered in snow. The blizzard created a near whiteout. He ran now, his clothing almost completely in flames, and leapt into the snowbank.

  A night crewman aboard the Sno-Cat at Snowmass called in the fire. Despite the blizzard conditions, he was able to see the flames from more than a mile away.

  The first truck from the Aspen fire department arrived less than six minutes later. It took the first responders the better part of half an hour to notice Marks outside the burning chalet. He looked like a blackened snow angel in a deep drift, his sooty outline already being obscured by rapidly falling snow.

  “Do we know who it is?” asked an Aspen police officer as he trailed the EMTs.

  The EMTs didn’t answer, but put Marks’s body on a gurney and moved him to their truck, an oxygen mask to the face. “He’s alive,” said one of the medics, a woman who held her small hand at the side of the neck. “His pulse is weak, but he’s alive.”

  The other EMT dusted off snow from Marks’s body, and inspected the scorched clothing.

  “Damage isn’t too bad, except the hand,” he said. “Christ, the clothing . . . he was on fire; snow probably saved his life.”

  The Aspen cop suddenly noticed the growing pool of red on Marks’s snow-covered shoulder. Violating protocol, he reached down and brushed away the bloody slush. “Look. There’s blood pouring out of his shoulder.”

  The EMT removed the rest of the snow, revealing bare skin and a purplish, raw red wound from which blood poured unabated.

  “That’s a bullet wound,” said the EMT, applying pressure to the shoulder. “He was shot.”

  “We need to get him to Presbyterian,” said his partner.

  “We’ll stabilize him on the way to Aspen Valley,” she told the cop. “Can you make sure they prep the Trauma Hawk?”

  “Absolutely. How long until you’re there?”

  “We’ll be there in ten minutes. Make sure it’s ready to lift when we get there.”

  The helicopter ride from Aspen Valley Hospital to Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center in Denver took an hour, and was treacherous. Visibility was horrible due to the b
lizzard, and wind tossed the Sikorsky S76-C+ about wildly. But it touched down safely almost exactly one hour after the ambulance left the driveway of Marks’s ski house.

  Two medics greeted the helicopter as it landed and ran the stretcher to the open doors of the roof elevator. Six floors below, they unstrapped Marks’s body atop an operating room table, then methodically peeled the burned shreds of clothing from the body.

  Across Marks’s chest, a jagged purple scar, two inches wide, ran like a ribbon from the left armpit down across his nipple to just above the belly button. On the biceps of his right arm, a small Navy blue tattoo was visible: an eagle clawing a trident, pistol, and an anchor.

  Two doctors and four nurses were gathered about the body.

  “Navy SEAL,” said one of the doctors, pointing at the tattoo.

  “How do you know?” asked a nurse.

  “That’s a SEAL trident on the shoulder,” said the doctor as he ran his fingers across the scar. “Look at that stitch work. That’s a war scar. MASH work. This guy’s seen some serious shit.”

  As a precaution, they immersed Marks’s body in a tub filled with a thick agarlike burn salve called Peroxidol, though his body didn’t appear to have suffered any serious burns beyond his palm. He’d gotten out in time. The bullet wound, however, had cost him more than two quarts of blood. They also found several large contusions on his back, neck, and one to the side of the head.

  The surgery took several hours. They repaired the shoulder and bandaged Marks’s hand. After it was complete, the surgeon turned to one of the nurses.

  “I want a brain scan on this guy,” said one of the doctors after they had removed the shrapnel and were suturing up the shoulder. “That contusion on his skull looks serious.”

  “We ought to let the police know about him, too,” added the other surgeon. “Someone needs to figure out who he is. There was obviously some kind of struggle here.”

  “That won’t be necessary,” came a voice from the doorway. It was Karen Cattran, the FBI’s lead agent in Denver. She held open her wallet, showing her badge to the assembled medical team.

  “As of one this morning, Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center became a level-one national security site,” she said as she walked to Marks’s bed. “What that means is that as of an hour ago, access into or out of the building is restricted. Denver police, at the direction of my office, have locked down the facility. There are four armed guards in the hallway outside this room. Other than you all, nobody gets in or out of this room, and I mean nobody.”

  18

  RUA BREVA

  CALI, COLOMBIA

  Dewey emerged from the half-constructed building at street level while the crowd was still gathering. People were pouring into the streets now, most of them staring up more than twenty-five stories above at the helicopter dangling over them, its rear tail rotor sticking out from a girder.

  Dewey wasted no time slipping among the gaping civilians, pretending to be as mystified as they, and trying to ignore the growing pain in his shoulder and the plume of dark red flowing from it.

  The pain from the bullet antagonized his every move. There was no way to stop the bleeding; a tourniquet wouldn’t work. Instead, he held the same filthy rag against the wound.

  “Are you all right?” a woman asked as he reached the back of the crowd.

  He muttered something in Spanish about falling debris, and kept moving. Any delay right now would cost him his life. The killers would be coming for him.

  Where were they? Who were they?

  He glanced warily around. To his left, at the rear of the crowd, he saw two policemen—one a fat man and the other a tall, gaunt-looking officer—pointing toward him and pushing their way through. Behind them, he saw a well-dressed younger man, dark-skinned, an Afro, leather coat on. He was trying to blend in. But he trailed the policemen too obviously, trying not to be noticed, the only man other than the police not staring at the chopper overhead. Instead he stared at Dewey with cold, determined eyes. It was one of the men from the roof.

  Glancing quickly to his right, across more than a hundred people, he quickly made two more gunmen, moving together toward him. It was the way they held their weight as they walked, concealing weapons, and walking just awkwardly enough for Dewey to recognize the altered gait. And the eyes. Those, too, gave them away. He knew the look.

  Hunters. Stalking the perimeters of the crowd.

  Dewey cut back into the press of people. As he neared the thickest part of the crowd, he suddenly ducked and pushed back to the right. Using his good arm, he surged forward, bent over, at least twenty yards. He moved past several dozen people too busy to look down, the people, now measuring in the hundreds, seemingly more entranced than ever by the chopper hanging above them.

  Standing erect suddenly, he saw to his left the back of the killer’s head, the one with the Afro, not more than ten feet away. He removed the combat knife from his ankle as he slipped past an old man and a woman standing next to the killer.

  The chopper above made a loud creaking noise, and the crowd let out a collective scream as a piece of debris fell from above. As the metal descended, with the noise of the crowd’s horror masking what was to come, and their attention on avoiding the falling metal, Dewey came upon the killer, who, unlike the masses around him, continued to cast his eyes desperately across the crowd in search of Dewey. His compact machine gun was now out and in full view, unafraid of even the local police, so important was the termination of his target. Dewey came from behind and wrapped his right arm around the killer’s front. He quickly plunged the knife between the man’s upper ribs, pulling across in a swift motion that severed all connection the heart had with the rest of the body. Just as quickly, he withdrew the blade and moved on, letting the gunman collapse silently to the ground.

  Dewey wiped the blade on his pants and slipped the knife back in the sheath, then stepped backwards. The policemen hadn’t heard the strike, but a teenage boy was now leaning over the dead man, and he screamed. Dewey turned and pushed his way back through the fringes of the crowd.

  No other gunmen in sight.

  Dewey hastened away from the scene and felt a sudden wetness on his hand. Looking down, he saw that his left arm was drenched in blood. It dripped off the end of his fingers, but did not pour. He knew he had time to try to repair it, but not much time, and a hospital was out of the question.

  Two blocks away, he ducked into a clean-looking bodega and looked for something to stem the flow of blood. He found a package of cloth dish towels in one aisle. He searched quickly, glancing out the front window, looking for his pursuers. In the last row he found a roll of duct tape. Paying quickly, he ripped open the package of cloth towels and pressed one against the bullet wound in his shoulder. As the young Colombian woman behind the cash register watched, he wrapped the duct tape tightly about the rag and rolled it beneath his armpit, securing the rag tightly against the wound. It was temporary—very temporary—but he had more pressing issues to deal with.

  One of the other gunmen passed in front of the window then, and Dewey spied him just before the killer turned to look inside. He ducked behind a red soda refrigerator, and held a bloody finger to his lips, pleading with the woman not to give him away. Frozen with fear, she complied. The man passed, and Dewey moved to the door.

  Leaving the killers to the right, he went left, then took another left and went up a busy street. Within a block, the dish towel was drenched and within two blocks he felt his left hand becoming slippery again as blood began to seep out and course down his arm. It would do that as long as the lead remained in his shoulder.

  After a third block, he glanced behind him and saw his two pursuers sprinting up the street. They were far in the distance, but they had seen him. He started to take a right, but saw a dead end in front of him. To take a left would enable the killers to cut him off. Dewey regretted not turning at the last street; there was nothing to do now but run like hell straight ahead.

  He too
k the next block at a sprint. Glancing back, he saw a trail of his own blood dripping in his wake. Whatever he did now, he would be easy to follow. He had one other clean towel in his hand, but he knew he would need it. He would have to let the killers follow; he could not simply slip away.

  At the next block, he ran right. The humidity was stifling, sweat dripped from his hair, drenched through from his forehead. Cars moved quickly down the narrow street, bumper-to-bumper, the occasional horn blasting. The sidewalks were crowded with street vendors, hawking electronics, watches, artwork, CDs, all laid out on small carpets. Pedestrians crowded in front of the vendors, looking for a bargain. Both sides of the street were lined with shops; a women’s boutique, a sporting goods store, a few cafés, a bodega with a bright green sign that said PESSA’s! Dewey sprinted toward the traffic, running between speeding taxis and sedans and the line of parked cars, narrowly dodging cars as he moved, blood coursing down his arm.

  “Sangrando!” a taxi driver yelled from an open window as Dewey passed, nearly running his dented yellow Toyota into the car in front of him as Dewey kept moving, ahead of his attackers, blood covering his hand as he dashed.

  Halfway down the block, he saw a sign to his left: MOTEL EL ROSARIO. It was a shabby-looking place, fourteen stories high, gray cement with small square windows, lines of rust-tinted aging streaking down from the roof line. Dewey cut across a break in the cars, hit the sidewalk, moved past the motel’s entrance. At the far corner of the building, the service alley cut between the motel and the next building, and he ran into the opening at a full sprint.

  Looking back just as he cornered, he saw the first of the killers at the corner of Omnestra, a block away.

  Dewey entered through the service door and ran past a pair of cleaning women on a cigarette break. He took the stairs and climbed, three steps at a time, his heart racing and his lungs burning.

  The pain, for Dewey, was just another factor, an element, and long ago he’d been trained to compartmentalize distractions and place them in their respective boxes. Pain had always been one of Dewey’s strengths: inflicting it, enduring it. Focusing on that kept him moving. Below, the sound of the killers running upstairs toward him echoed up the well between the stairs.