Measure of Danger

by Jay Klages

  He dove to the right of the fire and began crawling on the floor in the direction of the window. Cold water started spraying on top of his head and body. The sprinkler must have engaged. The spray reached most of the bed, stopping the spread of fire toward the interior of the room, but the front of the easy chair was just out of its range and still engulfed in flame at the door. The amount of smoke seemed to intensify as some of the fire had been extinguished.

  He pulled the bed back from the door outside the opening radius. As he stood up and turned to face the door, it started to push open again. He raised the Glock and fired three shots aimed right through the middle of the door frame. The door eased shut again.

  I’ve got to get out of here.

  Kade pulled the wet T-shirt off his face and wrapped it around his left hand, regripping the gun again in the right. He bolted around the left side of the bed, stepped over Hill, and reopened the scorched and perforated door with a single hard yank. Just as the door slammed into the easy chair bonfire again on the outswing, he dove out through the space in the direction of his right shoulder and tumbled into the terrazzo hallway floor.

  Two Sentries were in the hallway, one dead within steps of his room door, the other slumped up against the opposite wall, blood running from a wound between his right shoulder and chest. When the wounded Sentry saw him, he tried to fire but couldn’t lift his arm. He fumbled as he tried to switch the gun to his other hand.

  This bought Kade a fraction of a second. He pivoted on his hip, extended his arms in the direction of the Sentry, and as both of his elbows landed on the floor, he fired twice. The first shot sailed wide down the hall; the second hit the Sentry below the armpit through the ribs, and the gun dropped from his hand.

  He swiveled to a knee and stood, breathing heavily and coughing. The other Associate rooms were close by. Should he try to get others out? Was there time? Would they care?

  His decision was made when he heard the sound of the push bars clunking on the double doors far down the hallway, saw the doors opening, and spotted two more Sentries coming from behind them. He darted back in the opposite direction toward the hallway corner and made a left.

  He didn’t have time to process what he saw next.

  Hank was a hundred feet down the hallway, running toward him with a stun gun in his left hand and a pistol in his right. There was also a Sentry down the hall on one knee with a firearm leveled in his direction.

  “Get down, Hank!” Kade yelled and pressed his back to the wall to make himself a harder target.

  Hank didn’t get down; he instead started to look over his shoulder and run sideways. Before he could turn, a bullet tore into his lower back. He stumbled forward and fell to his knees, stopping as his two hands smacked down on the floor in front of him. Kade fired two shots and neutralized the Sentry with the first one.

  “Come on, Hank, out the door—there!” Kade pointed to the steel door that Carol had walked him through once before. By the time Hank scrambled on all fours to the door, Kade had pushed the door open so Hank could go right in. Two more Sentries came around the corner from the direction of Kade’s room, guns drawn, and he fired a lethal shot from behind the open door before his Glock clicked empty. He shut the door behind him and leaned against it, fished an extra clip out of his pocket and the sock container, and loaded it. Hank turned himself so he was sitting against the cinder block wall.

  Hank had lost the stun gun but still had a Sig Sauer. Another gunshot wound in Hank’s front, just below the collarbone, bled through his AgriteX top. Kade didn’t waste time asking if he was okay, because he knew he wasn’t.

  “Let me see your gun. Can you fire it?” Kade asked. His hearing still felt muted and crackly from the shot he’d fired earlier in the bathroom.

  “Yeah,” Hank said.

  “Okay, there’s no safety on this thing.” Kade made sure a round was chambered and handed it back. “I’m going to stop leaning on this door. Aim at the door frame there and shoot anyone who comes through if they’re dumb enough to try.”

  “Okay,” Hank said.

  Kade stepped toward the outer door, pulled the silver badge from his pocket, and held it at the reader. The reader beeped, but the door didn’t unlock.

  “Shit, they locked everything down.”

  “Try this,” Hank said, and tossed a gold badge on the floor toward Kade. After Kade raised it to the reader, it beeped and the lock clicked.

  “There we go,” he said. He opened the exterior door a hair and stuck the empty clip in the space to hold it open while he ran back to Hank. “Come on, let’s go.” When Kade went to pull him to his feet, Hank groaned in pain. He began to release him slowly.

  “No, pull me up,” Hank said. “Do it.”

  Kade struggled to bring him all the way to his feet and Hank took a few seconds standing to catch his breath while Kade leaned on the interior door again.

  “This is where we’ve got to split up,” Hank said. “I’m hit twice . . . the one in the back’s bad. I’m not going to make it out of here.”

  “Come on, man.”

  “No, it’s all right, I got what I wanted. I didn’t think Heather would have an extra Sentry in her office. That bitch. So fuck it. I’ll go out the door here to the left, toward the main entrance. You go right and head for the woods. I’ll try and buy you a few minutes.”

  Kade’s look said he wanted to debate it, but Hank yelled at him.

  “Just fucking go! There’s no time.”

  “Okay,” Kade said. He took the gun and squeezed Hank’s forearm. “Thanks, buddy.”

  “You got it.”

  Hank took a few deep breaths and Kade pushed the door open for him.

  And they ran.

  CHAPTER 42

  Friday, June 28

  7:15 a.m. (PDT)

  AgriteX

  Scanning in front of him for Sentries or Guardians, Kade sprinted on the dirt-and-gravel path to the circular turnaround where it joined the wider trail connecting AgriteX to the LLFC facility. The morning was cool and overcast, and he felt a spitting drizzle of rain on his face. As he reached the path, he heard the pops of gunshots from behind him. It was hard to tell how close with his hearing still screwed up.

  He’d covered another forty yards when a chunk of dirt erupted upward a few yards down in front of him, accompanied by a louder and deeper-sounding gunshot. He jumped off the path to his left as another dirt clod exploded beside him, and he headed into the woods. Another dozen shots sounded in the distance far behind him, smaller pops.

  Those two big shots—had to be a sniper.

  He ran for another three or four minutes, keeping the path just within his view, until he heard some kind of siren back in the direction of the headquarters lasting for about a minute. Slowing to a walk and catching his breath, he remembered he had Hill’s two-way radio in his cargo pocket and pulled it out. It was a bright yellow, ruggedized Motorola model. He pressed the “+” button to increase the volume and a radio conversation became audible.

  “. . . during the search, lethal force is authorized. Teams One through Five, you need to ensure you’re looking inside the perimeter. Six through ten will continue roving sweeps until further orders are given. Acknowledge in sequence.”

  Kade listened as “Team One, roger,” through “Team Ten, roger,” sounded over the radio, and then he picked up the pace into a run again. So Hill wasn’t a team leader, but they’d eventually figure out that he wasn’t responding to his radio if they hadn’t already.

  What do they know about me?

  They know I’m armed. They’re thinking I’m going to make it to their perimeter in the next hour.

  They’ve got ten teams in the hunt—probably like a hundred people. It’ll take them a few minutes to get organized and moving, but not long.

  No dogs, thank God.

  Two minutes later, he slowed to a stop and started thinking about his footprints, which were sometimes visible behind him while he was running. The green growth
and dead organic material on the forest floor helped his cause some, but his shoes had a deep tread. He ran toward the path again, right up to its edge, then stopped, took the shoes off, and tied the laces together. He walked back into the woods for five minutes, satisfied he was leaving no visible tracks. He heard another faint pop of a firearm in the distance, but couldn’t tell the direction.

  They’ll send search teams through the woods to push me toward the perimeter teams. I can’t play that game.

  Since he was beginning to hear the background sounds of the forest, he knew his hearing was coming back to where it should be. After another few minutes of walking, he found a cluster of spruces with trunks about three feet in diameter and he stopped to put his shoes back on. The low branches on these trees were just moss-covered stubs a few feet long, but they were spaced close together near the bottom of the trunk.

  He found an angular rock and placed it at the bottom of the tree he selected to climb, the rock pointing in the direction of the path he’d come from. Just in case he got disoriented later in the night. He put his pistol in his cargo pocket and began to step on the first few branches, realizing as soon as he was off the ground that the moss was going to make this a slippery ascent. It was a slow, tiring effort making sure he had good handholds.

  When he’d climbed about twenty feet, he froze. In his peripheral vision, he saw six black uniforms moving through the forest at a speed walk. The uniforms made the Sentries easy to pick out, and he worried about his own navy-blue outfit being conspicuous. They approached from his two o’clock and passed behind him while he remained motionless and prayed. He turned his head after five minutes and saw they were nowhere in view.

  He thought about climbing higher but then worried about the eventual descent. He decided to climb just another three feet to a spot where two solid branches were beside each other at a wide angle. With his back against the trunk, he situated himself, straddling one of the moss-covered branches. If needed, he could quickly shift to the other branch and be less visible from another direction.

  The air carried the scent of fresh soil and evergreens, but the smell of his burned hair was stronger. His hair must have caught on fire before the sprinkler activated. His scalp and the left side of his face felt like they might have some light burns. He was hungry and thirsty, but he was going to have to just suck it up and sit here all day. Night would be more of an equalizer given the number of people who were out hunting for him.

  Thinking about shooting Hill and looking right into his eyes while doing it made Kade shudder. He didn’t know for sure, but between Hill and the other Sentries in the headquarters building, he’d killed at least one man, if not three to four. In the army, he’d worked on targeting insurgents in Iraq, whether through air support, unmanned drone strikes, or raids. But that was indirect responsibility, not up close and personal like this.

  His dad had spoken a few times about killing two armed suspects on police duty, and said he’d killed a number of the enemy while part of his squad in Vietnam, but had never provided details. Now Kade knew how he must have felt, and that was not a new milestone he’d been striving for.

  He pulled the gold badge from his pocket, which had DRAKOS etched on it, and wondered what act of violence Hank had carried out to obtain it. By now, Hank had to be dead. He thought about Lin, Daniel, and Walter, and what would become of them. He would’ve liked to have given them the chance to get out, but then again, that wasn’t his mission. They may not have wanted to leave. Everything about his op had been so botched that he’d probably get charged with manslaughter or at least heavily reprimanded if he even made it back to safety.

  As he replayed his final encounter with Hill again and again, breaking it down in mental slow motion, it validated something he’d felt over the last two weeks, now that he had hours to sort it out. It was what he’d discerned in Hill’s eyes in those seconds before he pulled the trigger. What he’d been able to see in Hank and others’ faces. He could feel a threatening intent if he was up close enough. He could see the signals and feel the level of intensity in their faces.

  This had only started after the Chapter had put the chipset in his head. He knew it had been damaged enough to lose function, but something remained, or something had changed in his perception. His MRI had been cut short. Maybe these were symptoms of the kind of tumor that Hank was sporting, and he didn’t have much time. Walter had mentioned some kind of neural growth stimulant used in part of the Guardian protocol. Kade really didn’t know what to think.

  He vowed that for whatever time he had left, he was going to make every minute count. The Chapter had authorized lethal force against him, so they were now more than an investigative target. He would have to adapt his mindset further and be prepared to kill again if necessary.

  They are now the enemy.

  CHAPTER 43

  Friday, June 28

  7:21 a.m. (PDT)

  AgriteX

  Pierce stood in the security room behind the technician as she started up the recorded digital surveillance video. It showed Hank Stanfield leave his room, arrive at the employee health clinic suite, and check in at the front desk. The female nurse assistant took Stanfield to a treatment room and told him the doctor would see him in a few minutes. Hank sat on the exam table with his eyes shut and arms crossed.

  Pierce froze and listened to the audio as it began. He had ordered a Guardian to be present during this exam due to Stanfield’s volatile temperament.

  Heather Drakos and Guardian Emmett entered the room, and Emmett sat in the chair by the door.

  “Hi, Mr. Stanfield,” Drakos said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Why is he in here?” Stanfield said and pointed to Emmett.

  “We’re on an enhanced security level, so having observers during exams is part of the deal,” she said.

  “Sounds like a violation of patient privacy,” Hank said, followed by another inaudible grumble of words.

  “So what can we help you with today?” she asked. “You complained of some incontinence and a rash?”

  “Yeah, I’m starting to wet myself more, and now I got this rash right here all around my waist.”

  “Okay, let’s see it,” she said.

  Hank slid off the table as if preparing to lift up his shirt or unbuckle his pants, but instead he lunged straight for Emmett. The Guardian reacted with remarkable quickness, reaching for his stun gun first, but Hank countered by grabbing Emmett’s wrist with both hands, managing to pry the device free. Then Hank saw Emmett pull a handgun out of a holster on his right hip with his free hand, lightning fast.

  Hank delivered a hard head butt to Emmett’s nose, but as Emmett recoiled, he squeezed off a shot hitting Hank’s left shoulder and spinning him sideways. The head butt made Emmett bring his hands to his face for a moment, but before he could see clearly enough again to aim another shot, Hank reached out and touched him with the prongs of the stun gun and pressed the button.

  The shock immobilized Emmett for a few seconds, but by that time, Hank had removed Emmett’s weapon and smashed him on the head with the barrel until he stopped moving. Hank turned his head and saw Drakos beside him at the sink counter filling a syringe, so he jumped over to stun her before she could finish.

  He stunned her once more, causing her to fall and sprawl on the floor. After he grabbed the syringe from the counter, he got down on the floor and put his hands around her throat. The blood from his shoulder gunshot wound ran on to her neck and face.

  “This is for everyone you ruined,” Hank said as he choked her with one hand, and with the other, he stuck the syringe in the side of her neck and pushed the plunger.

  After watching the segment, Pierce felt breathless. “Turn it off,” he told the tech, and she stopped the video. He wished Heather had kept her weapon on her person as he’d always urged. While he was glad a group of Sentries had finally gunned down Stanfield, it was little satisfaction for what he’d just witnessed.

  Pierce put his hand on
the tech’s shoulder.

  “Begin deleting the surveillance file archives and discontinue recording,” he said. “We’ll use real-time surveillance only. Someone will come by later to collect the hardware.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  Pierce exited the security room, strode down the hall to the executive wing, and met four Guardians inside conference room 1.

  “Start the Associate relocation now,” he said. “Get them loaded up; we’re going to ship them off early to Nevada. What’s the status on the IP?”

  “All of the servers are already on their way to Montana,” Guardian St. John said.

  “Great.” Pierce turned to Guardian Latimore. “Make sure the mobile command unit is fully loaded.”

  “Roger,” Latimore said.

  “Status on Sims?” Pierce said to Guardian Haven.

  “The perimeter is tight and we’re conducting zone sweeps,” Haven replied.

  “Find him.”

  “What about Stanfield’s body?” Guardian Ratcliff asked.

  “Put it in cold storage.”

  CHAPTER 44

  Friday, June 28

  1:05 p.m. (PDT)

  FBI field office, Portland, Oregon

  Carla Singleton dialed out from the briefing room to Velasquez as he was driving back from a meeting with the Oregon State Police. Morris sat next to Singleton with an uneaten cheeseburger in front of him.

  “This is Chris.”

  “Chris,” Morris said, “I’ve got Jerry, Troy, and Jeff on the line, and Carla here with me. We’ve got big news: we just received information that Flash left the AgriteX corporate building, and he’s been on the run since about seven thirty this morning.”

  “That’s great,” Velasquez said. “Wait, he’s been on the run for over five hours and we’re only finding out about it now?”

  “Water under the bridge,” Morris said. “The intel was an interagency gift, so I’m just happy we have it.”