“Sir! Hold on!”
Shit, he thought. Had they recognized him? Could he take on both guards at once? His mind raced to devise a strategy, and his eyes hunted his surroundings for possible ad hoc weapons. He turned around to face the guard.
“Yes?”
“Don’t want to forget this.” He had Morgan’s ticket in his hand. “They won’t let you in without it.”
Morgan thanked him and walked away, into the stadium. He went up a flight of stairs, and Conley was there waiting for him.
“No trouble?” Conley asked.
“All good,” he answered. They walked together up more stairs. There was another pair of security guards, dressed in sharp black suits. Morgan and Conley offered their tickets.
“That would be about halfway down and on your right,” said one of the guards, after examining the tickets.
The doors to the luxury boxes were on their right along an elegant wood-paneled hallway. The number of each box was emblazoned on the door. Together, they reached the one they had come for, number thirteen. Morgan caught Conley’s eye and held up three fingers. He counted down, and on his mark, he turned the knob, pushing the door open and rushing in, expecting violent resistance from T.
But, as they stood in the luxury box, with its lounge chairs and bar and wall-mounted high-definition TV, they didn’t see Natasha but rather just a man, handsome, silver-haired, looking at them indignantly.
“Nickerson!” Morgan gasped. He expected the senator to yell for help, but instead he composed himself and then looked at Morgan and Conley with controlled nonchalance.
“I can’t believe how shoddy the security in this place is,” Nickerson said.
Morgan twitched, ready to go for his jugular.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Nickerson. “All I have to do is call out, and there will be a dozen security guards in here.”
“So why haven’t you already?” asked Conley.
“Ah, you must be Cougar,” he said, with mild amusement. “Alive and kicking, I see. I’ll have to let Natasha know that she failed even worse than she thinks.”
He cleared his throat. “The reason I haven’t called the guards is that I have no interest in seeing you captured by them. I must admit, I thought you would have skipped the country by now. But the truth is, I don’t want to attract any attention to myself, which having two men arrested or killed in my box would certainly accomplish. So let me tell you what’s going to happen. You’ll have thirty seconds to leave this stadium before I let security know you’re here. You’ve gotten this far, but I doubt you will be able to evade them if they know you’re inside and what you’re wearing.”
“Or maybe I’d rather snap your neck before I go,” said Morgan.
“No doubt you’d like to. But we all know why you’re here today, and it’s not for me. She is not here, obviously, and your time is running out. Try anything, and I’ll yell. Even if you do manage to kill me, you will risk capture. Get captured, and there’s no one left to stop her. So, what will it be?”
Morgan’s fury was close to flash point, but Conley put his hand on Morgan’s shoulder, which calmed him enough to control himself.
“One day, sooner or later,” said Morgan, “you’re going to pay for everything you’ve done.”
“I’m sure,” said Nickerson dismissively. “Now, off you go.”
Enraged, Morgan stormed out of the VIP box, with Conley behind him. They walked down the hallway they had come in through and past the two entrance guards, who merely regarded them blankly.
“I can’t believe we just left like that,” said Morgan.
“But he’s right, Cobra,” said Conley. “It’s a stalemate situation.”
“And meanwhile, we’re back at square one,” said Morgan.
“There are more than twenty thousand people in this stadium,” said Conley, “we have no idea where to even begin looking for T, and the speech is about to start. So the real pertinent question is, What now?”
Morgan visualized the stadium in his head, analyzing it for secluded vantage points. If he were in T’s position, where would he be? The answer was obvious.
“Lowry, Lowry, come in.”
“This is Lowry,” came his voice in Morgan’s ear.
“Lowry, the roof! Where does the perimeter intersect with the edge of the roof?”
Morgan heard clicking on Lowry’s end. After a few seconds, Lowry told him, “That would be . . . at the stadium lights right above you.”
It made sense. The light arrays would be a perfect cover from any eyes scanning the roofline, making anyone looking directly into them effectively blind. He mentally kicked himself for not thinking of it sooner. “Then that’s where she’ll be,” said Morgan. “Lowry, how do we get there?”
“Let me see . . .” Morgan heard typing on the other side. Then, “There’s a door down the hallway to your left that will take you to the maintenance area. Gain access to that, and I’ll direct you from there.”
They walked down the hallway. Finding the door, Morgan tested the knob to check if it was locked, when a voice from behind him bellowed, “Hey, what are you doing?”
It was one of the upstairs guards, in his black suit. Morgan noticed the bulge of a gun under his jacket.
“I’m sorry, sir, we were just looking for the bathroom.”
“Well, that’s not it,” he said brusquely. And then he stopped, as if he were listening to something in his earpiece. As he looked at Morgan and Conley, his eyes went wide, and his hand went for his gun. But he was too slow. Morgan elbowed him in the face and followed with a left hook to his temple. The man fell down, out cold.
He took the guard’s gun, a Colt semiautomatic, and checked it for ammo—a full clip. Morgan tucked it into his pants behind his back. Then he took the earpiece from the man’s ear and crushed it beneath his foot.
“Can you get that door open?” he said to Conley. Morgan kept lookout while Conley worked the lock with his tools. He opened it in under a minute and helped Morgan drag the unconscious man inside.
“Lowry, we’re in. Where now?”
“Up, baby, up.” He directed them through the twisting tunnels, past exposed pipes and raw concrete, until they opened a white door and saw, in the distance, the brightly illuminated dome of the Capitol and the Washington Monument towering behind it. They were on the flat top of the main section of the stadium, and on that rested the roof itself, white and undulating.
“On your left, you’ll find a ladder to the top,” said Lowry.
Morgan climbed first. When he reached the top, he looked around. There were four arrays of stadium lights, two on each side. “Lowry, which one is it?”
“How am I supposed to know? They’re all about the same distance from the podium.”
She could be at any one. Morgan looked in both directions. There wasn’t time to think about this. “I’ll go left,” he said, and he ran toward the nearest array, while Conley took the cue and ran right.
He scanned the scaffolding on the light arrays, each of which had four levels of narrow catwalks for maintenance. No sign of her on the nearest one. He sprinted toward the far lights. Below, in the stadium, the people were cheering. Senator McKay had just been announced.
Morgan approached the next group of stadium lights and saw a figure crouching on the second-tier catwalk, looking through the scope of a rifle whose muzzle extended out, in between the lights. T. He slowed his pace, stepped lightly, and didn’t say a word, careful so as not to alert her to his presence. Morgan climbed quietly onto the platform, the din below concealing whatever noise he made, his gun on her the entire time, and, once on his feet, he yelled over the applause, “Natasha! Step away from the rifle!”
CHAPTER 42
Immersed in the noise of the cheering crowd below them, Natasha looked at Morgan and the gun in his hand without emotion. She took her hands slowly and deliberately off the rifle. She looked at him without speaking. Slowly, her lips curled into a smirk.
; “Away from the rifle. Now!”
She got to her feet and raised her hands, palms out. “So, you’ve found me. I suppose you think that means you won, don’t you?”
“I seem to be the one with the gun,” he said.
“Maybe. But I know something you don’t.”
“Oh, yeah? What’s that?”
“Fail-safe. Redundancy. Shooting her, this whole business with the rifle, this is Plan B. The backup. You can kill me now, and she still dies. In fact, kill me now, and you have no possibility at all of preventing her death.” She continued to smile, and Morgan recognized that she was triumphant.
He kept the gun on her. “Is there any chance you’re going to tell me how to save her?”
“Perhaps, Cobra. As I see it, we are in a position to make an exchange here.”
“Yeah? What do you want?”
“Drop the gun and let me go. I’ll shout it to you as I run away.”
“You think I’m falling for that?” he asked, unmoved. “You’d say anything to get out of this.”
“A fair point. But do you think you have a choice in the matter?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I shoot you here and now.”
“You are going to gamble with the senator’s life?” she asked. “Perhaps I am lying. You know that I am perfectly capable of it. That if it were not true, I would make it up. But the cost of calling my bluff is too great.”
He stood there, the gun pointed at her chest, sweat dripping down his forehead from the heat of the stadium lights. The cheering of the crowd began to die down, and he heard McKay’s voice reverberate throughout the stadium, “Thank you! Thank you so much!”
“Tick-tock, Cobra. In a minute or two, the senator will be a corpse unless I tell you how to save her. Make your choice. What does Cobra care about more? His duty or a personal score?”
His hand twitched on his weapon.
“Move, slowly. Leave the bag, and keep your hands where I can see them,” he said.
She stood from her crouch. Morgan was standing between her and the ladder down to the stadium roof, and she had to get past him. She took her time walking toward him, never breaking eye contact.
“Thank you,” the senator said again. Then she began, solemnly, “We are living in a time of deep moral crisis in our government. A time when corruption has become so entrenched that we are no longer surprised by each new scandal.”
As Natasha squeezed past Morgan, brushing up against his body, she puckered her lips and blew him a kiss. He jabbed the barrel of the gun against her side.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “Such impatience.”
She descended the ladder, lingering just a fraction too long on each step.
“Our leaders have betrayed our trust, forsaking their oath of office for power and petty personal gain.” McKay’s voice was clear and passionate.
Natasha looked up at him, her eyes at the level of his feet.
“Well?” he demanded.
“The gun, Cobra. Toss it.”
Grimacing, he released the clip, which fell with a clang at his feet, then tossed the gun onto the stadium roof near where she stood.
“And for the sake of Beltway cronyism, this treachery”—McKay’s voice rang out over the speakers—“and it is treachery, folks, a betrayal of the trust of the American people—goes unchallenged and unreported.”
“That was my end of the bargain,” said Morgan. “Now let’s hear yours.”
“On second thought,” said Natasha, with a superior smile, “I think I’ll let you figure it out on your own. Let’s just say I left a little present for her. Now we find out whether you can still think on your feet, Cobra.”
She turned around and ran from him, toward the outer edge of the roof. He tensed, ready to go after her, but stopped midstride. Had she lied? If not, what was Plan A?
“Seeing all of you here tonight, I know that I am not the only one who thinks this cannot go on,” said McKay.
“Cougar, Cougar, come in,” said Morgan.
“I’m here, Cobra. What’s happening?”
“Cougar, she’s making a run for it. I need you to go after her. Keep as close to her as you can!”
“Got it,” said Conley.
“Lowry, did you catch that?” said Morgan.
“I got the gist. Do you believe her?”
“I don’t think I have a choice,” he said.
“What do you figure it is, a second shooter?” asked Lowry.
“No,” said Morgan. “That’s not her style. She likes to take care of things herself. She wouldn’t trust someone else with this.”
“Could be a bomb in the podium,” said Lowry. “Did she have a detonator on her?”
Morgan looked down to where Natasha had left her pack.
“But what do we do about it?” asked McKay.
The pack was mostly empty. The rifle, he figured, would have taken up most of the space, and apart from that there were some tools and some folded-up straps of some kind, like narrow seat belts. But as he rummaged, his hand found a small cylindrical object, bright orange with a white cap.
“No. But there is something here. A pill container. The label says it’s . . . ” He strained to read the tiny print, “Hydrosol . . . Hydroxocobalamin.”
“Hydroxo . . . cobalamin . . .” he heard Lowry murmuring and typing. “Apparently that’s another name for vitamin B12a. But I don’t know why that would be . . .”
It dawned on him almost immediately. “I know,” said Morgan. “It’s an antidote for cyanide.”
“Why would she . . . Oh, God.”
“She’s going to poison the senator,” said Morgan.
“How was she going to do that?”
“Not from a distance, she couldn’t. Whatever it is, it’s already in place.” He thought for a moment, looking at the senator through the scope. Then he said, “The water!”
“What?” asked Lowry.
“She said it’s going to be a spectacle. There’s no way she can deliver the poison from here. That means the cyanide is already there. The only way she could be sure the senator would take it when she was onstage would be to put it in the senator’s water. The water that’s sitting on the podium right now.”
“Are you sure, Cobra” asked Lowry. “This whole thing could be nothing but misdirection.”
“It fits her MO.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“The only thing I can do from here,” said Morgan. “I shoot at her and take care that I miss.”
He knelt at T’s rifle and looked through the scope.
“Cobra, are you crazy?”
“It’s the only way to save her now. The only way to interrupt this speech right now.”
“There are times when we despair,” continued McKay, “and it seems like there is nothing we, as citizens, can do to change anything.”
There was no wind. It was a straight, clear shot. The heat off the lights was a furnace, and sweat ran down his brow and dripped from his nose. He tore off the fake mustache, not needing it anymore. He took off the suit jacket and laid it on the platform in front of the rifle.
“Even if Natasha wasn’t lying,” exhorted Lowry, “and even if you manage to pull this off, you’ll cause a panic. They’ll think you’re shooting at her, and all twenty thousand people in this stadium are going to rush for the exits. People might die.”
“I need to do it. I can’t let Nickerson win.” He looked through the scope. A shot straight through the podium would do it. It would hit the stage, McKay would be unscathed, and her security detail would usher her off to safety.
“Cobra, think about this!”
“But I, for one, believe that in a democracy, it is in the citizens’ power to change things,” said McKay. “So consider this a call to action!”
The crowd erupted in wild cheering and applause.
And then it happened in a split second. She took the glass and began to raise it to her mouth. A shot through the podium would no longer be e
nough. He had to act immediately. There was no time to take careful aim, yet if he was off by a hairbreadth, he would be doing T’s job for her.
He squeezed the trigger.
The glass shattered in Senator McKay’s hand. Ten thousand screams rang out, a thousand cameras flashed, and her security detail sprang into action.
He didn’t have time to observe the aftermath. It wouldn’t be long until they worked out a rough trajectory from the bullet hole in the stage. They were probably scanning the roofline now for him. He’d done what he had come to do. Now he had to get the hell out of there. Morgan left the rifle where it was, climbed down onto the roof, and ran back in the direction from which he had come.
“Now you’ve done it,” said Lowry.
“How’s Cougar?” Morgan asked.
“Still on Natasha’s tail. He’s almost out to the parking lot. Cobra, you have to get the hell out of there. Guards are swarming up to the roof. At least five are going to be there in under two minutes.”
“Can I get down the way I came up?”
“Not unless you’re planning on shooting your way out of there.”
“Then find me a way to get the hell off this roof!”
“I’m trying!”
He was almost to the edge of the roof, with nowhere to go. “Lowry, which way did Natasha leave?”
“Same way you got there. Why?”
She couldn’t have counted on leaving the same way. If she had shot the senator, she would be in exactly the same predicament he was in now. She wouldn’t have trusted her escape to chance. There had to be another way out of there. He looked along the edge of the roof, and then he saw it.
“Lowry, I think I’ve found the way down.”
The rope was sitting in black coils, anchored tightly to a sturdy railing. He ran toward it and found it already threaded through the rappel device, with a locking carabiner attached to it. But there was no harness—that was in Natasha’s pack, two hundred feet away.
There was no time to go back for it now. He’d have to make do with what he had. Morgan attached the carabiner to his belt and pulled hard. He could only hope that it would hold. He removed his button-down shirt, leaving him in his undershirt, and wrapped it crudely around his right hand. Then he looked down. At the bottom of the first drop was the main body of the stadium, on which the roof sat, and over that edge was a long, sheer drop with nothing but thin, vertical slats for support. Below, people were swarming out of the stadium. He climbed over the railing and stood with his back to empty space.
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