Enemies: The Girl in the Box, Book Seven

by Crane, Robert J.

  “I didn’t kill him.”

  “Yeah, but you killed these lot!” He waved his hands at the other bodies. “How can you be so damned still about it!”

  I shrugged. “They were trying to kill us. I find it hard to dredge up much moral outrage about them being the ones who died instead of us.” For some reason, I didn’t mention that it hadn’t been long ago that I had felt as he had. I looked over the scene of the chaos again. “Even with the suppressors, those gunshots were loud.” I eyed him in mild accusation. “Especially that last one. We should probably get out of here before the police come.”

  “They won’t be coming for quite some time, if at all,” Breandan said quietly, too stunned to pull his eyes off the carnage around us. “Sadly, this is not the first time I’ve heard what sounds like gunfire in this building.”

  “Marvelous,” I said. “Well, I’m going to go pay a visit to this Weissman and see what I can find out from him.”

  “And the fact that he sent a heavily armed group of men to kill us doesn’t concern you at all?” Breandan looked me over. “Your first instinct is to go charging after him now you’ve learned who he is?”

  I nodded slowly. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a straight line into this organization. The first time I’ve ever seen anything of them but men in black carrying guns, other than a telepath who kept pretty quiet about who he’d dealt with. These people are the bogeyman of the meta world, and they’re scaring the hell out of everyone around them. I want to turn that around for a bit.”

  “You’re ballsy,” Breandan pronounced.

  I looked down at my figure with a frown, as though I had to check. “Quite the opposite, actually.”

  With one last forlorn look around his flat, he said, “I don’t suppose it’s going to do me much good to stay here. Sooner or later the police are going to show up and it’d be best if I weren’t here for it.”

  I frowned. “This was all self-defense. It’d be hard to explain to the police but not impossible.”

  “Then why aren’t you staying?”

  I thought about it for a beat. “I’ve got things to do and explaining myself to the cops isn’t one of them.” I reached down and pulled the wallet out of the back pocket of one of the men, trying to decide if I wanted to risk using one of his credit cards to get a room. Probably not until I took out this Weissman, one way or another.

  “Let’s just say my explanations to the police might fall on deaf ears, given my previous history with them,” Breandan said with a grin as he opened the sliding door to his closet, now stained red from the fight, and pulled out a small canvas bag. “Just give me a few minutes to pack and we can take off.”

  “You understand what’s going to happen here, right?” I asked, dead serious. “I’m going to drive to the address I have for this Weissman, and I’m going to brace him hard, like I just did to McClaren. I’ve had a lot of questions dangled in front of me about this organization, Century, and it’s time I got some answers. When I say it could get messy, I mean it, because I’m going to walk in there prepared to bleed Weissman until he starts answering or until he forces me to milk his brain dry. Do you understand?” The quiet, hushed tones of my voice had drained all the color from Breandan’s face, and he gave me a short, sharp nod of acquiescence. “Good,” I said, and felt the wave of nausea crash over me again, both from what had happened five minutes earlier when I woke up coupled with the realization of what I’d done and who I’d killed in the intervening time. “Then if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be needing to vomit again—and after that, we’ll go find this Weissman, and kick down his door.”

  Chapter 21

  We took the assault team’s van. Breandan drove and I rode in the passenger side, head over a garbage can I’d taken with us from his bathroom. I sat over it in misery, the sick feeling I had in my stomach still mysterious in origin. I honestly didn’t know how much of it was from the clangor of voices that was occasionally rising in my head, the possibility I was pregnant, or if it was just stress and nerves from killing so many people in the last twenty-four hours.

  Or it could have been Zollers. Maybe he had planted these Adelaide memories in my head. As fun as it was to glimpse into the past, I could do without the severe nausea.

  I hoped that it was more the latter. Part of me worried it was the possibility of pregnancy, which would be … well, I didn’t know quite what it would be. I hesitated to say disastrous, but on a gut level, that’s how it felt.

  You don’t want to be a mother? Zack’s voice asked me.

  I looked at Breandan out of the corner of my eyes as he drove down the road I’d pointed him toward. I had sifted directions out of McClaren’s memory and was letting him know every few minutes when he’d have to make a turn. “Not sure I’m ready,” I said quietly, without opening my mouth, and hoped Breandan couldn’t hear it. “Not in the world we’re living in now, with my kind being hunted to extinction.”

  I could hear the sadness in Zack’s reply. It’d be the only thing left of me in the world. The only sign that I was ever in the world, that baby. If there is a baby.

  “Try to imagine me explaining to him or her how their father is still watching them,” I said, looking at Breandan for any sign that he was hearing me. He appeared edgy, nervous, naturally, but he kept his eyes on the road. “This is not the preferred method for raising a child.”

  But we could—

  “Let’s talk about it later,” I said, and threw up again into the depths of the pail. “Take a left turn up ahead,” I said as I came up again and pointed at the approaching cross street.

  Breandan glanced sideways at me. “Finished talking to yourself?”

  I glared at him. “I wasn’t talking to myself. I was talking to …” I let my voice trail off.

  “You hear voices?” Breandan said as he guided the van into a turn. It was a bleary day, and the dark sky above us looked ready to rain down at any moment. “Normally I’d say that’s a sign of being crazy.”

  I kept my calm as I favored him with a bleak smile. “But in my case, it’s not?”

  “There are plenty of other signs that you’re crazy,” he said, shaking his head as he straightened out the wheel. “Besides, I think the voices in your head are actually real.”

  “They are.” I used a hand to smooth out the shirt I wore under my tactical vest. It was the same one I’d been wearing for over a day, without bothering to change. I glanced into the back of the van, where my bag waited, along with the MP5 submachine guns I’d taken from the hit squad. “I know the rest of the story sounds crazy. But in the last six months, almost a third of our kind has been wiped out globally.”

  He looked at me seriously and gave me a brief nod. “I believe you. Even if we left aside the fact that in the last sixty minutes, almost all of me was wiped out,” he said with a calm he couldn’t have produced only twenty minutes ago, “I get the feeling you’re in the middle of some things I would have preferred to remain out of if I’d had my druthers. Unfortunately,” he said ruefully, “it would appear that my druthers are well nigh irrelevant since you’re the only reason I’m presently alive.”

  “You didn’t have to come with me,” I said. “This is going to be dangerous. Could be deadly. I have no idea what kind of powers this Weissman has at his disposal. You could have run, gone to ground. They might not have found you.”

  “They shouldn’t have been able to find me this time,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road. “But since they already want me dead anyway and have shown an apparent talent for making it happen, absent your help, I don’t think me sticking about and trying to hide is going to do me much good.” He shook his head. “No, I think my best bet is to cling to someone who actually knows how to fight these bastards off.” He looked over at me with a grim smile. “That means I’m going to be stuck with you for quite some time yet, methinks.”

  “Oh, yay.”

  “You could act a little happier. I did give you a place to stay in your hour of
need, after all.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I don’t do well in groups.” Because I was already a group, all by my lonesome, just me and the ghosts of the people I’d killed.

  The van bumped along as we went, the smell of gun oil strong in the air as we slid through the streets of South London. I considered briefly the idea that Breandan could be right, that I could be a mother. It wasn’t a fun thought. I had a house, true, but it wasn’t much of a home. After all, there was still very obvious proof in the basement of how my mother had raised me there, a steel box designed to keep me confined. The world around us was going to hell, and if I went back to live in Minneapolis to raise a child, would I be very smart if I didn’t try to keep us on a low profile the way my mother had? After all, someone was trying very hard to wipe out every last member of our species at the moment and they were making a damned good show of it. If I didn’t want to be another body on the floor of a church basement somewhere, I’d need to keep out of their sight. Or at least out of the range of the telepaths they were apparently using to track us.

  “Telepaths,” I breathed, and I heard a chorus of agreement within.

  “What?” Breandan said.

  “In the memory I took, Weissman said they were using telepaths to identify metas,” I said, drumming my fingers along the plastic-leather coating of the van’s interior. “If we could find those telepaths, take them out of the game—”

  “You mean kill them, don’t you?” Breandan asked.

  “Then Century’s scheme comes crashing down, doesn’t it?” I wasn’t asking Breandan. By this point I was staring out the front window, trying to figure it out. Was Weissman a telepath? How many did they have? I narrowed my eyes. My real question, which I wasn’t sure I wanted to admit, was how many would I have to kill to succeed at waylaying their plans? “Without trackers, it’s going to be damned hard to find their targets.”

  “Uh, if you say so,” Breandan said, nudging me back to reality.

  “Turn here, then left again,” I said, pointing at a warehouse ahead. “It’s there.” I looked at the visor above his head and hit a button that caused a heavy metal garage door to open. Darkness shrouded the interior and I reached back to grab one of the guns and checked to make sure a round was chambered. “I think you might want to wait here.”

  “I don’t know that that’s so wise,” Breandan said. “How about I follow two paces behind you?”

  “Not such a grand idea,” I said, scooping up the second submachine gun we’d brought and strapping it around my chest. “I’ve seen you use a gun, and I don’t want you to handle another until you’ve had some basic lessons in safety drilled into your head.” I gave him a sympathetic look. “Sorry. But you’re more dangerous to me with a gun than you are to them.”

  “Oh, I see how it is,” he said with a look of hurt. “You shoot one bloke in the head by accident and it’s all over, then.”

  “Yes,” I said, opening the door, “that’s how it is. Because I’m attached to my head, and I don’t need any more holes in it.”

  “Bloody violent Americans.”

  “Says the man who just blew some poor, unarmed bastard’s brains out.”

  Before he could respond I hit the ground in the warehouse moving like Parks had taught me, sweeping the corners for hostiles. If this Weissman was a telepath, there was no way I was going to sneak up on him. If he had surveillance cameras of any sort, I similarly had little chance to catch him by surprise. If he didn’t, then theoretically he should be expecting his own men and would be surprised by a girl with a submachine gun creeping into his lair. Theoretically. This was the problem with theory; it wasn’t proven. A thousand things could go wrong that I could think of and countless more that I couldn’t. What if the team was supposed to call him on the way back to check in?

  “Maybe this wasn’t such a great plan,” I whispered.

  I wasn’t going to say it, Bastian said, but I’m glad you realize it now.

  If you see this Weissman with a gun, Eve said, try to jump out in front of it, will you? Catch the bullet in your teeth. You can do it. I believe in you.

  “I get the feeling that Eve’s decided not to be a team player,” I whispered. “Somebody do something about that, please?”

  There was the sudden sense of motion in my mind and it was as though I could see Eve being attacked, thrown to the back of my mind by shadows, tossed into the nether regions while screaming in protest. It was almost as though there was a clang, a damnably familiar sound for some reason, and her presence was gone. I shrugged. “Thanks.”

  I was in an open bay, spread wide along the largest part of the warehouse building. I dived through McClaren’s memory in a flash, and saw that there were offices to my left. The whole room was shrouded in shadows, like ink had dripped down and covered the walls outside of the places where lamps broke the dark. I could see the outline of the door that led to the offices, still shut. I knew from McClaren’s memory it was to keep out the chill that was ever present here in the bay.

  “Where are we going?” Breandan said from behind me. I didn’t bother to turn back, just made a slow motion with my offhand (the one that wasn’t on the grip of my weapon) that showed him we were moving forward. “Oh, okay.”

  I fired him a sizzling look, then whispered low. “We don’t know if Weissman’s a meta. If he is, he may hear us. Go silent.”

  Breandan nodded once then continued to crouch like an idiot, as though he could somehow hide by bending his large frame forward to sneak. I wanted to tell him he looked like a moron, but he was the only backup I had, so I chose silence as a form of tact. There was a faint sound of water dripping in the corner, and the smell of oils were thick here, along with something else, like this place had been around a while and hadn’t ever been exposed to the elements much. My feet made low, quiet noises with each step I took toward the door, and I wondered what I’d find waiting beyond.

  McClaren’s memories told me that Weissman was most likely in his office, which was at the end of the hall behind the door. I crept toward it, even steps, covering ground quickly and quietly. Breandan, for his part, did much the same, only marginally noisier than I was. When I opened the door, I tried to assume a normal tread. I was only going to get one shot at this, and if Weissman was out of position, I’d be ready, but if he wasn’t, just walking in pretending to be his returning raiding party would probably allow me to catch him by surprise. Probably. Well, hopefully.

  The hallway was a hundred feet long, and the walls were a dim brick, like the rest of the building. The lighting wasn’t any better here than it had been out in the bay, and I started to wonder why the place was so dark. I pondered and realized that it wouldn’t surprise me if Century had vampires working for them. They were sensitive to light and excellent trackers, which would be just the thing for the outfit that was looking to find and eliminate all the meta-humans on the planet.

  I crept down the hall, trying to walk normally, not muffle my steps, and I saw Breandan looking at me wide-eyed. I waved him forward and walked at a casual stride but kept my gun up as I came down the corridor, ready to wheel at the slightest notice of any danger. McClaren’s memory told me the place was clear, but his information was only as good as his most recent visit, which had been a couple hours ago. Just because he thought there was no one else coming didn’t mean he was right, after all.

  I reached the last door and searched through McClaren’s thoughts again. A simple knock would suffice; that measure of courtesy was perfectly normal for how he’d treat Weissman. I gave one sharp thunk on the wood, and heard a voice from inside. “Come in.” It was high, and a little nasally. It was exactly as I’d heard it in McClaren’s mind.

  I turned the knob and flung the door open, bursting in with my gun up and the barrel aimed straight at Weissman. He was exactly as I recalled—thin, a mop of dark hair up top. His age was tough to gauge, but he looked around forty, without any sign of grey hair. Wrinkles were also strangely absent, and he covered his sho
ck reasonably well as he stared down the barrel of my gun.

  “Sienna Nealon,” he said with a careful swallow as he leaned back in his chair, his hands raised where I could see them. He seemed deeply unconcerned.

  “You know me,” I said. I wasn’t asking. “Should I be afraid?”

  He chuckled. “You’re the one holding the gun, not me.”

  “Now, now,” I said. “Perhaps I should have asked, ‘How do you know me?’”

  He gave a slight nod, all calm assurance. “That is a better question. The answer is … because you’re the only meta-human in the entire world that I’m not allowed to kill.”

  Chapter 22

  I looked over the man across the desk, his slicked-back hair and oily demeanor reminding me of every joke I’d ever heard about greasy salesmen. He smiled, and I suddenly wondered exactly why he was so damned happy to be looking down the barrel of a gun. “Well, now, isn’t that a change from just a few months ago when your people tried to put me in the ground right after Andromeda?” I asked, getting the sense that I should pull the trigger and save myself whatever trouble he was cooking up.

  He grimaced slightly. “Things change.” His face took a moment to readjust back to a smile. “It’s such a pleasure to finally be able to formally meet you.”

  “The feeling is not mutual,” I said. “McClaren wasn’t impressed with you as a boss.” I lied. I hadn’t drained enough of McClaren to get that impression, and what I’d gotten from him at the meeting this morning had been fairly limited, mostly focused on the assignment.

  “So you killed him?” Weissman nodded subtly. “Good for you. I’d heard you were on the killing floor now, off the bench, as it were.” He smiled again. “Zollers thought you’d never come around to it. I told him he was wrong, that everyone can be a killer if they’re pushed hard enough, but I think, really, he was just afraid to give you that push.”

  “Maybe he was afraid of what would happen to whoever did the pushing,” I said, but I didn’t smile.