I turned my attention to the computer on the massive desk. It was on, in sleep mode. I moved the mouse and waited until the screen lightened. As expected, a password box popped up.
I reached into my pocket for the recovery disk.
I paused.
Could it be that easy?
The nameplate on the desk read “Joseph Doors”. The photo of the young fencer was inscribed to Josef Toren. Tor was German for gate, Tueren was doors.
I tapped the J key.
The username field populated itself with “jdoors”, and the password field filled as well, with the bullets that hid the actual password from outsiders. It seemed that Sarah was right. My foes appeared to have placed an inordinate amount of faith in Sleeping Beauty and his shotgun to keep anyone from getting this far. I smiled and pressed “Enter”.
The desktop loaded before my eyes. In keeping with the image of a corporate executive, the wallpaper was an artistically lit shot of a chessboard. I sat down, loaded a blank disk and opened up the main drive.
My run of good luck leveled off; there was no file named “secret identity”, so I just opted to copy all of them.
I sat for a few moments and watched the blue bar on the bottom of the screen slowly grow. It looked like I’d be here a while. This is always the hardest part of any infiltration, sitting and waiting while in a dangerous position. As long as you can be doing something, it isn’t so bad; but just waiting, trying to stay alert, puts a strain on your nerves.
I stood and paced in front of the desk, just to burn off nervous energy. I glanced at my watch, tried to slow my breathing and wondered if the way out would be as easy as the way in. I found myself toying with a paperweight, a heraldic beast in gold, suspended in a heavy glass globe.
The sound of the office door banging open shattered my reverie and the big, square individual I’d seen earlier burst into the room, a German submachine gun leveled at me.
Ah, part of my brain registered. An MP5. Should have guessed.
‘Thank God you’re here,’ I said with relief, putting a touch of Hungarian in my accent. ‘He went that way.’ I pointed to a door in the back corner of the room.
Guards are generally ready for one of several predictable reactions. If I had started to duck behind some furniture or reach for the pistol in my jacket, he’d have emptied the clip into me. If I’d thrown up my hands and pleaded for mercy, he’d likely have thrown me down and held me for questioning. If I’d run, he’d probably have shot me and then thrown me down and held me for questioning.
He was utterly unprepared for me to be happy to see him.
The secret to bluffing is to project the impression that you really do belong where you are. It’s not easy, particularly when you have an automatic weapon pointed at you, but I’d had a lot of practice.
That said, it was a bluff with a weak hand, and not one that would stand up for very long.
He paused for a moment, his steely glare took on an edge of uncertainty, and his eyes flicked to the door I indicated. Even better, the muzzle of his weapon drifted that way, just a bit to the left of me.
Short as the distraction was, it was enough time for me to bring the paperweight around to smash into the side of his head, raising my left hand to deflect the gun if it should swing back toward me.
The blow drove him to his knees, but he kept hold of his weapon. I was behind him in an instant, an arm locked around his neck. He tried to twist the gun around to point at me, then tried to grab my arm and pull it free, but he was already weakening.
‘Take a nap. Take a nap,’ I urged. ‘Come on. Shhhhhhhh. That’s it.’
His body went limp and heavy. I held the choke for a few more seconds, just in case he was faking it. Playing dead is a good way to get someone to release a hold, but it’s hard to do, and hard to keep that fear down if the choke doesn’t stop.
The computer chimed, indicating that the task was finished.
I lowered the insensate guard to the floor and checked the screen. Files copied successfully. I ejected the disk, returned it to its case and slipped it into my pocket.
I could have taken the guard’s MP5, but I wanted to keep at least one hand free, and I have a long-standing reluctance to rely on a weapon I’ve never personally fired. I did take a moment to toss the submachine gun up on top of a high bookshelf. When he came to, he’d assume I’d taken it and, unarmed, he’d probably be less enthusiastic about chasing a guy with an automatic weapon.
I had no idea what had alerted the guard to my presence, but it seemed a good time to be somewhere else. I snuck a quick look into the hallway. Still deserted. I stepped out and made for the stairway, my .45 now clutched in my fist.
I had gone about five feet when the door to the stairs burst open and a man with a carbine surged through. I snapped off a quick shot and made for a side hall off the main passageway.
The man flinched as I fired, but I doubt I hit him. He was only about twenty feet away. If I’d taken a second to aim, I couldn’t have missed, but that would have given him a second to aim, and he had a bigger gun than I did.
As it was, my shot probably distracted him enough that I was around the bend before his reply blew holes in the sheetrock of the corner at the height of my chest. I dropped to a crouch, waited until I heard his steps approaching, then popped back out around the corner, low to the ground, my trusty Colt extended before me.
He was moving quickly toward me, his weapon still at the ready, but pointed too high. About where my head would be if I hadn’t crouched down before leaning out.
This time I did take a second to aim and shot him deliberately, twice, center mass. He jerked as the rounds hit, then flopped back to the floor. He fired reflexively as he fell, but it went high. Behind him, the door banged open and I saw more men swarming up the stairs.
I was running now, looking for a way down.
At the end of the short hallway I saw another door with a narrow, wired glass panel in it. More stairs. I heard footsteps pounding down the main hallway. I backed toward the door, my pistol aimed at the corner. At that moment I did regret not taking the MP5. Running around a corner into a hail of submachine gun fire at a range of fifteen feet would have been a nice object lesson for them.
As my left hand touched the handle of the stairway door, I saw a group of thugs round the corner. Probably three or four of them, but at that moment I’d have sworn there were thirty. I fired into the oncoming horde, which very impressively reversed course and took cover around the corner. If I hit any of them, they didn’t fall right away.
I tore open the door and barreled down two flights of stairs. On the landing, I paused for breath and to consider my next move. This should have me on the ground floor, but not in a place I knew. An older, rusted steel staircase continued down into the basement. Most of these old mills had some access to the canal. Maybe there was a way out below.
Yeah, maybe. Through freezing water filled with ice and rats and the hepatitis bug.
Beat getting shot, though.
If I was lucky, whatever guards there were in the building would still be swarming up to where I’d just come from. On the other hand, they might be smart enough to have already sealed the exits. Maybe the basement was the best idea. But what if the access to the water was sealed off? It could be one big dead end.
My indecision came to an abrupt end as the door burst open and yet another armed heavy rushed through. This one was a taller, leaner model, but otherwise pretty much like the rest. He obviously wasn’t expecting anyone to be there, which I attribute to just how stealthily I was waffling over my next move. He plowed right into me, knocking me back against the wall.
The good thing was that while he was too close for me to bring my pistol to bear, he was too close to bring his automatic weapon to bear, and both of his hands were full of gun, to my one. I grabbed him with my left hand and tried to get a knee in. He might not have been able to shoot me, but he managed to slam the toe of his gunstock into my ribs. I grunted a
s pain blossomed in my side, forcing air from my lungs. He hit me one more time, then I grabbed his weapon and slammed my forehead into his nose. I felt the crunch and took the opportunity to swing him around into the wall. I hit him with the .45, kicked his legs out from under him and shoved him toward the stairs.
Unfortunately, he grabbed a handful of my jacket as he stumbled back. Off balance from the cramp of my bruised ribs, I couldn’t break his hold, and we fell down the stairs together.
On the positive side, I managed to stay on top, using the guard like a well armed toboggan. On the negative, it was still falling down stairs. I felt jarring impacts on my knees and elbows as we tumbled down. My left hand, still keeping the muzzle of his gun away from my body, slammed into a steel baluster, sending a searing bolt of agony up my arm. My right foot hung up somewhere and my ankle wrenched painfully.
We came to rest at the foot of the stairs, tangled together on a dusty cement floor. I lay for a moment in a haze of pain. I shook myself, found that the guard was down for the count, and looked around the space.
The room felt spacious, wide open. I couldn’t see the full extent, unlit beyond the trickle of lights filtering through small, high windows at street level, but I did hear the gurgle of water.
I tried to stand, but as soon as I put weight on my right foot, I collapsed. Moving fast was out of the question. I considered his gun, but doubted I could control it one-handed, and the throbbing pain in my left wrist left me no illusions about my ability to use the hand. I crawled a short distance on knees and elbows, looking for refuge. There was a steel door maybe twenty feet away, maybe some shelves with what looked like paint cans on them back in the gloom, but beyond that, nothing I could easily identify.
The sound of a door opening above gave me the motivation I needed to get up. Gritting my teeth, I made for the door with a stumbling, hopping limp, mewling in agony every time my right foot came down.
Chapter 21
SO THAT’S HOW FIXING A BROKEN ANKLE led to lying holed up, injured and low on ammunition in a janitor’s office. The wages of virtue, to steal a phrase from P C Wren.
But that’s OK. He owed me one from Algiers.
I watched the door over the sights of the pistol, trying to control my breathing to reduce the rise and fall of the muzzle. Soft footsteps approached the door.
I concentrated on my sight picture, pushing all the pain and worry to the back of my mind. Wait for the target. Nothing exists but my target and I.
A shape appeared in the dim shadow in the corner of the room near the file cabinet. It took me aback. The door was still closed—no way anyone could have gotten through. I shook my head and refocused, half convinced it was a hallucination.
It wasn’t.
A man stood in the corner, flesh and blood, scanning the room. A naked blade shone in his right hand. I must have moved when I saw him, because he suddenly focused on me, his eyes locking on mine.
Well, his being there was impossible, but the knife looked real enough. As he started toward me, I swung my weapon to bear on him and fired.
He vanished.
Absolutely vanished. My mind jolted to a stunned halt.
Fortunately, a deep, subconscious instinct stepped in for the absent higher brain function. I twisted and flopped down on my back, looking frantically around the room. Not two feet away, a form was coalescing into being, an arm thrusting out above me. I pointed the .45 at the center of the rapidly resolving shape and pulled the trigger. The swirling darkness solidified into a human body twisting and falling to the floor.
Juan’s words about the guy that jumped Tiffany came back to me. He said the guy just vanished into thin air.
The sound of the steel door banging open yanked my attention from the man writhing on the floor next to me.
A man stuck his head and shoulders around the jamb, pointing a pistol into the room. I snapped off a shot and he replied in kind, shrinking back behind the cover of the wall, firing blind.
After a few rounds, I realized that trying to hit the disembodied gun hand was beyond me in my current injured and agitated state, so I switched my aim to the wall that the rest of him had to be behind. I fired twice and the hand dropped the gun and jerked back.
I released a shaky breath, waiting for more movement from the door, thinking that any more foes out there might digest the lesson that sheetrock is no defense against bullets.
I heard urgent whispers, but no advance.
Beside me, my first victim moaned. I twisted painfully around to get a look at him. As I did, my elbow knocked something sliding away. I looked over and saw one of the ubiquitous daggers on the floor a few feet from me.
Shaking with adrenaline and my injuries, I had an urge to put another round in the man, but I restrained myself. There were too many questions.
Most important was: how do I get out of this mess? Most intriguing was: how did this guy do that? It was impossible, but I didn’t get hung up on that for several reasons. One was that I could do the impossible myself, so who was I to judge? And a second was that, impossible or not, I’d seen it happen and lacked the all-too-common ability to ignore concrete fact.
Slowly, or slower than I’d have liked, anyway, I realized that the second question might contain the answer to the first.
‘You want to live?’ I addressed the man.
He groaned in reply. I dragged myself over to him, put a hand on him and sensed his wound. He had a hole in his liver, which bled like mad and hurt like hell. Out of pragmatism, and against my inclination, I sent a little energy through to dull the pain and slow the bleeding.
‘I asked if you want to live,’ I repeated.
‘I swear blood oath,’ he grunted.
‘You want to die, that’s your choice. But if you want a pass on this one, I’m willing to deal.’ I saw uncertainty through the agony etched on his face. ‘Say the word and the pain can go away.’
He nodded.
‘OK, can you get me out of here?’
‘You can’t escape,’ he said. ‘Save me and it will go easy for you.’
I had no idea what he was offering, but it sounded like a very bad deal. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘without your help, those thugs eventually get me. Without my help, you bleed out.’ I shrugged. ‘Your call.’
If he kept arguing, I could tell I was going to shoot him again fairly soon. Obstinacy strains my patience on a good day, and I was not at my best.
‘If I get you out, you fix my wound?’
‘That’s still the offer.’
‘And then?’
‘We walk away. I don’t shoot you, you don’t stab me, and we live to fight another day.’
‘I agree.’
‘How far can we go?’
‘A kilometer, perhaps,’ he replied. ‘I’m not pureblood.’
That was supposed to mean something to me. I nodded like it did. ‘Outside this building, across the river and away from the lights will do.’
‘Heal me and I get you out,’ he grunted.
I didn’t waste more breath on speech. I gave a quick glance at the doorway to make sure the guys outside weren’t making a rush, then reached out and touched the wounded man, doing my thing. The bullet had torn a good sized hole through his liver. A .45 is a big, heavy round, so it took some effort to plug it, to stop all the little vessels from leaking and convince the tissues to knit. Fortunately, the liver is more predisposed to heal than many organs, which helps. I kept my word and repaired the worst damage, got him out of danger; but remembering how they treated Sarah, and Tiffany still lying in that hospital bed, I left him some tattered abdominal muscles. Petty, maybe, but I wanted him to have something to remember me by.
Maybe I was being a bit trusting, patching him up first, but I didn’t know if he could work his magic with a half-inch hole in his gut, and he wasn’t all that keen on helping me anyway, so I figured a little gesture might be called for. Besides, if he tried anything, I still had one more pistol than he did.
So I
guess the moral is trust your fellow man, so long as you’re better armed than he is.
‘OK,’ I told him, ‘Let’s get going.’
He looked in awe at the knitted flesh, touched the new scar over the wound, and registered that the pain was mostly gone. He gave me a long, conflicted look. I’d seen it before, the look of an uneasy truce. He had some grudge, some reason he felt he should hate me, but he was feeling reluctant gratitude for the man who took his pain away and gave him a stay of execution.
He shut his eyes, made that face people do when they concentrate hard, and suddenly the world twisted. My stomach lurched and my senses reeled as the dry, musty, dusty warmth of the custodian’s office was replaced by the cold, misty, almost-clean air of Philips Mills in winter. We were at the bus station, but this late, it was deserted.
We looked at one another uncertainly. He wasn’t the same man whose ankle I’d healed, but he could have been his younger brother. Tall and muscular, his blonde hair cut short, his face all sharp angles, strong chin, no fat to speak of. The eyes were blue and cold. Hard eyes. Eyes that had seen terrible things without blinking. But now, they held a flicker of doubt, of hesitation.
I felt the same conflicted emotions, the wave of unwelcome gratitude. Without his help, I don’t think I’d have made it out of there, any more than he’d have survived that wound without me.
Of course, he wouldn’t have gotten it without me, and I wouldn’t have been in danger in the first place without...
But, there we go. Try to trace blame far enough back and you start sounding like an idiot.
And who knew? With any luck, we might still wind up having to kill one another.
‘OK,’ I said, ‘get out of here.’ I tried not to let the pain from my ankle or my wrist or my ribs show on my face or in my voice. I didn’t know how much he knew about me or my power, whether he expected me to heal myself or not. If he didn’t know my limits, there was no way I was going to enlighten him.
‘This is not over,’ he said. ‘I cannot thank you.’
‘We’re even,’ I replied. ‘We both get to live for now. Worry about later when it comes.’
Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) Page 15