by Sean Black
It was only then, in that moment, that I noticed Eldon was different. Whatever emotions he was experiencing, I couldn’t discern them. There was no aura, no colors that I could see. His face masked his mind. There was no fear, no terror, no anger, nothing. My mind clawed its way back to our last encounter in the tunnels, and I remembered that while he hadn’t shown fear, not even when I had held his life in my hands, I had been able to see some stab of anger. Now there was nothing.
Eldon pressed the barrel of the SIG a little harder into Julia’s temple. She winced with pain. ‘Should have killed me back in Vegas, Tibor.’
‘She’s got nothing to do with this.’ I looked at my wife, shivering with cold and fear in the night air. She looked away, breaking eye contact.
‘Oh, I agree,’ said Eldon.
‘So let her go.’
‘Soon as you toss that gun and anything else you have,’ said Eldon.
I looked back at Julia. I had thought about this moment for a long time. It was what had sustained me. It had allowed me to do the things I had, to endure. My love for her had proved as important as any amount of the chips or implants they had crammed inside me. Finally she looked at me, the yellow aura of fear burning so brightly in the center of her mind that I could barely make out her eyes.
I lowered the gun, all the while holding Julia’s gaze. ‘Okay, count of three,’ I said. ‘I toss it, and you let her go.’
‘Agreed,’ said Eldon.
I counted down. At two, I watched as Eldon eased the pressure of the barrel against Julia’s head, and began to lower the gun. On three, I threw the gun, like a Frisbee, over the edge of the tower.
As good as his word, Eldon shoved Julia to one side. He pivoted slightly, raised the gun again, and fired a single shot. It caught me in the chest. The force threw me backwards with a lot more punch than the previous round I had taken. For a second my feet lifted off the ground. I landed on my back, winded, my mouth opening and closing as I gasped for air. I heard Julia scream. Her reaction to my being hurt gave me comfort. There was sweetness in the thought that she cared. I tried to lift my head to look at her, but I was still too winded to manage even that.
I stayed where I was. I didn’t think the shot had penetrated the thin layer of armor under my skin, but I couldn’t be sure. Eldon had come prepared. Whatever ammunition he was using, it wasn’t standard.
Close-quarters combat of any kind rests on the combatants’ perception. Right now, Eldon must have believed he had the edge. That was fine with me. I stayed where I was, and watched as he walked toward me.
The helicopter had shifted position so that it was side on to us. The door was open, a dark figure leaning out. He held something in front of him. It took me a second to realize that what I had taken, at first glance, to be light reflecting from a rifle scope was the lens of a camera. The helicopter wasn’t there to take down either me or Eldon. Nor was it there to pluck my wife to safety. It was there to capture the moment for posterity. I thought I caught sight of Gillhood but I couldn’t be sure.
I watched as Eldon stopped six feet from me. The pain rolled across my chest in waves. I felt sick. The nausea came with the growing suspicion that we’d all been played by some unseen person or persons.
I rolled onto my side. I raised my arm, hand open, fingers spread wide. Eldon aimed the gun at my head. His finger was on the trigger. Beyond him, I could see Julia hunkered down next to the flag, her hair blown across her face by the wind.
I shifted focus back to Eldon’s index finger as he squeezed the trigger.
SEVENTY-FOUR
I rolled to my left as the muzzle flashed. I swept out my left leg, catching Eldon’s ankles with my heel. He stumbled forward. I pushed onto my feet. Eldon recovered his balance, raised the gun again and took a step back.
Julia was behind Eldon now. She clawed at his face with her nails. He threw an elbow. It caught her flush in the face. I heard her nose crack as she fell backwards. She sat down hard, her face bloodied. I had to fight the urge to go to her, and make sure she was okay. The only way to save her was to destroy Eldon.
I threw myself toward him and took him down at the knees. Another shot rang out. I could feel the flash hot against my body. Eldon was wiry, far stronger than he looked. He caught me a stunning blow on the side of the mouth.
I drew back my fist and punched. The blow caught the side of his head. I was on top of him now, pinning him down. I grabbed his gun arm and pushed it down by his side. One by one, I peeled his fingers from the butt of the gun. It was hard work.
After what seemed like hours, but could only have been a minute at most, I had the gun. I held it like a stone, drew it back and slammed it into the side of Eldon’s head. His right eye socket caved with the force of the blow. I drew my hand back again and slammed the cold metal of the gun into his face again. A third blow, this one lower down, smashed into his mouth.
I sat up, my knees pinning his arms to his sides. His eyes rolled back in his head. He sputtered a mix of blood, saliva and fragments of teeth from his mouth. I stared down at him, mesmerized by the damage I had done. Whatever fight Eldon had had was gone.
SEVENTY-FIVE
On either side of the tower came the sound of men climbing the ladders from the suspension cables. I sat back a little and angled the gun so that it was pointed at Eldon’s face.
I glanced toward Julia. I had lost sight of her features. The lips, eyes and nose I had fallen in love with were burned away by the intense yellow glow that rose like an orb from the center of her skull. I pushed it away, my mind, the human part of it, battling with whatever they had placed inside it. It flared, then dimmed. I could see her face again.
I got to my feet, and took a step toward her. There was only one way out for us, only one way off the bridge. It was risky. This time there would be no harness, and no cord to stop us hitting the water.
The fingers of her right hand fell into mine. I stared into her eyes. She was even more beautiful than I had remembered. ‘Trust me. We’ll go together,’ I told her, the words echoing from our past.
She pulled back from me, the tips of her fingers sliding through mine until we were no longer touching. An orb of yellow flared again. I reached up and touched her face, trying to brush it away.
‘Byron, you need help,’ she said.
There was a scuffle of boots on metal. A helmeted head popped over the edge. Pivoting round, I aimed the Springfield and let off a warning shot. The head disappeared.
‘Here, take my hand.’ I reached out to her but she backed away.
‘Even if I wanted to,’ she said, ‘I’d never survive the drop.’
‘We could be together,’ I told her. ‘Isn’t that what you want?’
‘Put down the gun, Byron. Let them help you.’
I shook my head as she stared at me. Her features began to fall away again, pushed out by the yellow. She took another step back. I could still see her eyes as they welled with tears. A second later they were gone, pushed out by the color of fear.
It was then I knew for sure that the source of my wife’s terror wasn’t Eldon, or the drop from the top of the bridge to the black water, or even the dozens of weapons trained, unseen, below us. The source of her terror was me.
The SWAT team were breaching the top of the ladders now. I looked down to see half a dozen red dots dancing across my body, forming a perfect kill pattern.
The black-gloved hand of one of the SWAT team members clamped onto Julia’s shoulder. She glanced round, startled, but as she looked at them, the yellow faded at the edges as her fear receded. The message was simple. To her they were rescuers.
She looked back at me, and mouthed two silent words of apology. ‘I’m sorry.’ Her eyes pleaded for my forgiveness. She was torn. I already knew the question she was struggling with. It was the same question I had confronted, with no answer. Am I a man, or something beyond a man?
Our actions define us. I was no exception. I had killed, therefore I was a killer. It was b
inary in its simplicity. No amount of special pleading would change that. Julia was of another world and, I now knew, she always had been. It had been foolish for us to think we could be other than who we were. She was fully human, and I was not.
I watched as a ballistic shield was thrown up in front of her, and more men swarmed between us. I fought the desire to go to her. Letting go was not part of my program. I was engineered to secure objectives, and Julia had been my objective. She had driven me on and sustained me through all of this.
But what happened when you found that the rescued didn’t need rescuing? Did you forge ahead blindly, hoping to persuade them of the purity of your intent? Or did you give way to the painful realization that every drop of blood that had been spilled was for nothing? The human part of me already knew the answer.
I could still see her face as I let the gun drop from my hand. Slowly I got to my feet. I waited for the salvo of bullets to erupt. My insides turned over. The implant began to whisper to me as the human part of my mind began to retreat, overwhelmed by the torment of Julia’s rejection.
I raised my arms high above my head in surrender. Behind me the Stars and Stripes wilted as the wind died. Instructions were shouted, but I could no longer pick out the words.
The Manhattan skyline glistened to my left. I took a deep breath, filling my lungs. Pushing off with my right foot, I ran for the edge of the tower. A shot caught me in the back. My torso lurched forward but I kept moving, clearing the edge of the tower, and falling, arms spread out into the cold night air.
I tumbled in free-fall through the air toward the water below. Lights glittered all around me as I tumbled through the blue-black night. Seconds passed. I hit the surface, the force of the impact knocking the air from my chest. I surrendered, and let the water take me.
SEVENTY-SIX
Associated Press, New York
The body of a man recovered from the East River yesterday, following what the Department of Homeland Security, the NYPD, and FBI have described as a domestic-terrorism-related incident, has been identified as Harold Graves, a federal liaison official working with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The cause of death is believed to be multiple gunshot wounds.
Authorities are still seeking former special-forces veteran and State Department official Byron Tibor, following an incident on the Brooklyn Bridge on Monday night, which resulted in the deaths of three NYPD officers. A second man, whose name has not yet been released to the media, was taken into custody at the scene. Tibor’s wife, Julia Tibor, an associate professor at the Department of International Relations at Columbia University, is believed to be recovering at a private medical facility in New Jersey.
Services for the slain NYPD officers are taking place today and tomorrow.
SEVENTY-SEVEN
I stand across the street from our old apartment, the exhaust fumes of the early-evening traffic and the burnished gold leaves of the late fall taking me back to the time before. It’s cold. I stamp my boots on the sidewalk, trying to force warmth into my feet. A woman walking a tiny dog swaddled in a fleece sweater skirts around me. In a city of perpetual motion, standing quietly, watching, is a suspect activity, especially when you look as I do.
I scare people. They see something in my eyes. At first, I thought it was death, but it’s not. Death is a presence, and what they see in me isn’t a presence so much as an absence.
I glance back to the apartment building. The light is failing. The last of the sunlight turns the building’s stone front to a rich honey-gold for a few precious minutes as I wait it out. I tell myself that I have come this far, and seen so much, that everything that has passed before me requires that I hold my position. I have to see her again.
The traffic is building up on Riverside Drive. Beneath the car horns I can hear each engine, the individual whirr of a timing belt, the low hum of a hybrid’s batteries, I can trace a single bead of water as it falls from mud flap to road. I can shift my mind so that in the building behind I can hear conversations behind closed apartment doors all the way down to the scrape of a kitchen chair as a woman gets up, or the shift from sitcom babble to a news anchor’s earnest drone as her fifteen-year-old daughter changes the channel.
My eyes roam the surface of the building to a point where I can see the stone fascia not as a flat plane but as a pitted moonscape of peaks and indentations. Flaws in the stone, flecks of brown or black where the rest is grey, are sharp and clear. Every sound is crisp and fierce. Everything is dialed up so that I exist in a permanent state of hyper-reality.
Some noises take me back to a place I would rather forget. The rattle of a loose pipe as water runs through it sounds like a .50 machine gun being fired in the distance. It makes me shiver, not in fear but from a memory of my feet frozen near-solid in my boots.
Suddenly I catch sight of her as she steps out from under the canopied entrance, the liveried doorman of the building sheltering her under his umbrella as a cab pulls up. He opens the door for her. She is about to get in. But in the moment before she ducks inside, she stops and notices the solitary man studying her from across the way. Her bright blue eyes fly wide open, then narrow again, as her conscious mind overrides what she is looking straight at and she judges what she is seeing as a cruel trick. She stands there for a moment, the doorman behind her, everyone and everything frozen in place. Although there is traffic, none of it breaks her gaze. The city is lost to us, momentarily still and silent.
She ducks out of sight, the top of the umbrella shielding the space above the roof of the cab. It pulls away. The traffic begins to flow again. Pedestrians filter back into focus: a nanny pushing an old-style Silver Cross pram; an elderly couple, the man’s hand touching his wife’s sleeve – a vision of the life I had imagined for us.
I will a picture into my mind of her still standing on the sidewalk, the cab uptown to her office at Columbia University abandoned. But she is gone.
Did she recognize me? The flare of yellow in her mind before she ducked into the cab tells me that she did. It makes her getting into the cab all the more wrenching. I had hoped that the passage of time might have changed her view of me. It hasn’t. I have the answer I came for.
I turn away from the home I had, and walk back toward the river.
Thank you for reading
We invite you to share your thoughts and reactions
Amazon.com
Amazon UK
Goodreads
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my editor, Hazel Orme, and to Nick Castle for his terrific cover design. Thanks also to my agent Scott Miller, and his assistant, Stephanie Hoover, as well as the rest of the team at Trident in New York.
As with every book, I am immensely grateful for the support of family and friends on both sides of the Atlantic, especially Marta and Caitlin. Last but not least, thank you to my readers who make all the hard work worthwhile.
Sign up to Sean Black's VIP mailing list for news, contests and FREE E-books.
Your email will be kept confidential. You will not be spammed. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Click the link below to sign up:
http://seanblackauthor.com/subscribe/
The Ryan Lock Series
Lockdown: The First Ryan Lock Novel
Deadlock:The Second Ryan Lock Novel
Gridlock: The Third Ryan Lock Novel
The Devil's Bounty: The Fourth Ryan Lock Novel
Lock & Load: A Ryan Lock Short
The Innocent: The Fifth Ryan Lock Novel
Fire Point: The Sixth Ryan Lock Novel
The Byron Tibor Series:
Post: The First Byron Tibor Novel
Blood Country: The Second Byron Tibor Novel (coming soon)
iends