Rampage

by John Sandford

  Another driveway went down to the right. “Gotta be a parking garage,” Twist said. He went that way, but at the bottom of the ramp, they faced three brown steel gates, all down, and card readers for which they didn’t have a card.

  “Dammit.” Twist reversed back up the ramp, back to the barrels, and said, “This is where we get out.”

  “Yes.”

  —

  Shay opened the back door for X, touched the gun at her hip and then the knife at the small of her back. Twist was already running as hard as he could around the building toward the entrance.

  The front of the building faced the Manhattan skyline, which was like nothing else in the world, but Shay had eyes only for the entrance as she and X outpaced Twist and got to the side-by-side doors of greenish glass first. She yanked on one, then the other. Locked. Twist looked through the glass and said, “There’s a guard in there.”

  He began banging on the glass with his cane, and the guard waved them away, then put up both hands, a “Wait” sign, and climbed off the stool he’d been sitting on and walked up to the door. He was a pudgy man with a black beard, wearing a baseball cap and sunglasses; though the lobby was dimly lit, and Shay got a vibe….

  The man had one hand slightly behind his butt as he approached the door, and Twist blurted, “He’s got a gun.”

  —

  Shay shouted, “X!” and at that moment, the man on the other side of the door hit the lock bar, and the door popped open and his gun was coming up, and Shay screamed, “Kill him!” and X was in the air.

  The dog hit Denyers high on the chest just as Denyers’s gun went off and Twist shouted something and went down. Shay and X were in the lobby as Denyers rolled across it, hands trying to simultaneously beat away the dog and cover his face, and he fired the gun again, and then X had his gun arm and was dragging him, screaming, across the floor. And then Denyers lost his gun, and Shay shouted at X, “Down, X! Down!”

  X backed away, just a few inches, peering down into Denyers’s face, still snarling, all wolf teeth, right there.

  Denyers groaned, “I’m hurt.”

  He’d been bitten on the neck and arms and was bleeding but not gushing. Shay kicked Denyers’s gun to the other side of the lobby, trained her own gun on him, backed up to the doors, which had automatically closed, and turned to see Twist sitting up on the other side of the glass, blood spreading on the pavement beneath him.

  She pushed the door open, and Twist said, “Hit…”

  Then, suddenly, X again attacked Denyers, and when Shay whirled, she saw the CIA man with another pistol, but the dog was all over him, and she ran back and kicked Denyers in the head, then grabbed his gun arm and wrenched the gun free, feeling Denyers’s trigger finger snap as she did it, and shouted again, “X, down!”

  X backed away, and Denyers groaned again, his face bleeding heavily now. “One more time and I kill you,” Shay snarled at him. “You hear that?”

  “Yes.”

  —

  Twist had managed to drag himself into the lobby and said, “I’m hit in the leg. The bone is broken….”

  There was a trail of blood behind him, but Shay thought, No time.

  She said, “I gotta go up, I gotta stop Thorne.”

  “Go….”

  Shay looked around, spotted a Subway sack on the desk with some napkins. She ran that way…and saw the body of a woman behind the desk. No time. No time to think about it. She grabbed the napkins and ran back to Twist, saying, “There’s a body behind the desk; if he moves, shoot him.”

  Twist, pale as a sheet, held up a cell phone. “I’m calling 911….Hurry.”

  Shay ran to the elevators, shouting at Denyers, “What floor? What floor?” But she could see that one of the elevators was up on twelve and the rest were at the lobby. She pressed the call button, and there was a ding when the doors opened. She and X got in. She thought for one second, then punched 10; an overheard ding could kill her.

  —

  The tenth floor was a construction mess. Out of the elevator, gun in her hand, Shay ran hard to the exit sign at the end of the hall, looked up, listened just for a second, as Harmon had taught her, then ran up the two flights, keeping X in a heel with a slap on her thigh.

  On twelve, she peeked around the doorway. Heard nothing. Bent over and whispered to X, “Find him! Kill him!”

  X surged down the hall. Shay went after him, leading with the muzzle of her gun.

  —

  Two doors down from the elevator, Thorne’s eyes were fixed on the computer screen. The president had just climbed up on the speaker’s stand and was shaking hands with the celebrities and other politicians on the stand with him. Thorne had to wait until the president settled at the podium before he could select him as the target and pull the trigger.

  At the distance he was shooting from, it would take a bit more than two seconds for the bullet to arrive at the target. In two seconds, a man could easily move ten feet or more, even at a stroll. The target had to be relatively fixed, and the podium and teleprompter would do that for him.

  The president was wearing a dark suit, which stood out neatly against the bright colors of the crowd on the other side of him. He shook a few more hands, then stepped to the podium, then moved past it, arms in a V, waving to the crowd.

  And then back to the podium.

  The scope had a video screen much like those on digital cameras, where the operator could select a person to follow with the focus—or even a part of a person to follow with the focus.

  When the president had settled in to speak, Thorne moved the fluorescent green cross to the center of his back and pressed the K key, which was “Select Target.” An orange outline immediately sprang up around the president’s dark jacket. Too big an area: the rifle could fire when targeted on the lower back. That’d probably be fatal, given the large fragmenting .338 slug, but not a sure thing. Using the computer’s touch pad, Thorne manually narrowed the target area to a four-inch patch in the middle of the president’s back, the kill zone.

  The president moved to one side, and the patch followed, but the cross remained where it had been.

  What was that? Footsteps in the hallway? Focus….

  He went back to the rifle and, as gently as he could, reached across and pulled the trigger. The rifle was now ready to fire.

  When he hit Command-F, the rifle would fire as soon as its sensor decided that the target patch was motionless and centered on the targeting cross.

  Thorne’s fingers hovered over the keys.

  I will live forever….

  Command…F.

  —

  X paused at the doorway and looked back at Shay, and she screamed, “Kill!” and X launched himself into the room like a wolf and, a quarter second later, hit the squatting Thorne in the face.

  The gun fired, but Thorne had the sickening impression that just as it did, his left arm brushed the gun’s stock.

  Just brushed it…

  —

  The dog was all over him, savaging his face, but Thorne had been in desperate fights before, and he ignored the pain and focused on one thought: Gun. He was aware that he was screaming but let that go as his free hand, the one away from the dog, found the gun in his waistband and pulled it and automatically fired it. He had no idea where the slug would go, but the muzzle blast should give him a tenth of a second, and that would be all he’d need to swing the gun around and kill the animal.

  And it worked: X froze for just that sliver in time, and Thorne’s hand came around, and though one of his eyes was clogged with blood, he could see out of the other one, and the pistol was coming up—

  And his hand exploded and the pistol flew six feet away, clattering on the hard floor, and he registered the fact that he’d been shot, and he batted the dog with his bloody hand….

  The dog was back on him, and an ankle appeared near him, and a girl’s voice was screaming, “Stop! Stop it or I’ll shoot you!” and he thought, Amateur hour…

 
His hand snaked out, and he had the ankle, and he pulled as hard as he could. There was another shot but no impact, and the girl came down, and in some tiny corner of his mind, he registered the red hair….

  The dog was ripping at the back of his neck, and Thorne grabbed a chunk of red hair and yanked again, almost blind now from the blood, but he could feel where she was, and she had that gun….

  —

  Thorne grabbed her hair and yanked hard, hit her four or five times in the side, hard, and Shay, already on her knees, fell on top of him, and X peeled off a piece of Thorne’s scalp, and Thorne was screaming like a man falling out of a tall building, and he was clawing his way up her arm, where he got hold of her gun and was ripping it away from her. She tried to hold on but he had a hundred pounds of muscle on her, and she felt the gun slipping out of her control.

  Because of the way they were lying, in a pile, the dog alternately ripping and howling, Shay’s free arm was useless, flailing around, and she hit him with it, but the blows bounced off the top of his head and she knew she wasn’t hurting him….

  The gun was going….

  —

  And she thought, Knife.

  She found the familiar handle at the small of her back, gripped it with one bloody hand, and as Thorne pulled the pistol free, she struck with it, half blindly, and connected.

  The knife, once a carpenter’s file, now carefully ground down to a blade guaranteed not to break on bone or tendon or ligament, punched a hole in Thorne’s chest.

  Thorne’s body went rigid, still clutching at her, began to shake, shake hard, and then…stopped.

  —

  Shay rolled away from him, onto her back. X came over, whimpered once, and licked her face.

  Her nose hurt, and both her sides were on fire. She tried to sit up, but her head swam and darkness crowded her vision down to a tiny pinprick….Better to lie still.

  —

  The first responders, two young men with drawn guns, found her on the floor, Thorne dead beside her, X hovering over her.

  X snarled at them, and Shay said, “Don’t shoot my dog.”

  Nobody told her anything.

  Ambulance people and men in suits took her out on a gurney. Shay saw there was blood on the lobby floor but saw no sign of Twist or the bad guy; three people in white crime scene suits were hovering over the body behind the desk. She saw X: he was on the end of a chain, with a full head muzzle, and he whined as she went by. She’d cooperated with that—the first cops said it was either the muzzle or they’d shoot him. She’d kept the dog quiet while they muzzled him, but where they took him after the lobby, she didn’t know. They took her to a hospital.

  They cleaned her up, gave her an MRI, then put her in a large single room with metal walls and built-in restraints on the bed and told her to sleep. Which was impossible.

  She asked repeatedly about Harmon and Twist and the president, but nobody would tell her anything.

  A balding doctor who might have portrayed a wise old medic in a bad soap opera did tell her that her nasal septum—nose bone—had been cracked in the fight and she’d need a nose support for a week or so, but it’d be fine when her giant black eyes went away. She also had cracked ribs on both sides, and he recommended she avoid laughing. That had been a kind of doctor joke, she decided. So not funny.

  A lot of suits came to talk with her, and she told them everything: every last thing. Then she told them again. And again. For hours.

  She asked if Twist was being treated in the same hospital, and finally one doctor on an overnight shift gave her a quick nod behind the backs of the security people.

  And then a tiny, efficient nurse who’d been doing the blood pressure checks and changing out the drips from what seemed like the beginning leaned down and whispered into her ear one very good thing….

  “They say now that you saved the president’s life.”

  —

  On what she thought was the morning of the third day, someone wheeled Twist into her room; he was sitting up on a bed, one leg immobilized in a fat white cast. She would have flung her arms around him if either of them could have gotten that near to the other.

  Shay asked, “Your leg?”

  “Busted by the bullet,” Twist said. “Maybe the best news of my life.”

  “What?”

  “The orthopods here say my original injury was badly fixed. They say they can rework everything. Might have a few extra screws and bolts, but they tell me I should be able to run again…real running, no cane.”

  “That’s amazing, Twist,” she said.

  “What about you? Your face…”

  “It’ll heal,” said Shay. “Broken nose, couple ribs. I’ve been asking about you, but nobody would tell me anything.”

  “Nobody would tell me anything, either. Then this guy”—he pointed up at the orderly—“just came and got me.”

  “You’ve got a visitor,” the orderly mumbled.

  Shay asked Twist, “What happened to…that guy in the lobby? The guy who shot you?”

  “I don’t know. They took us both out on stretchers; I haven’t seen him since, and…” He shrugged.

  She glanced at the orderly, then asked, “Cruz? Cade? Harmon?”

  Twist shook his head. “No idea.”

  —

  A visitor arrived: Harmon pushed through the door with a package under his arm.

  He had a rosy healing scrape on his cheekbone, and he said to Shay, “Jesus. You look like shit.”

  “Thanks. So do you,” Shay said. And, “Please, please, tell me that’s not a box of chocolates under your arm.”

  Harmon looked embarrassed and said, “Yeah, but, uh…they’re for Twist.”

  He handed the box to Twist, who said, “Thank you,” and looked pleased, and added, “Nothing like a visitor bearing chocolates.”

  The orderly said, “He’s not the visitor. I didn’t know he was coming.”

  —

  Two seconds later, a muscular man in a blue suit, with a bug in his ear, pushed into the room, looked at the orderly, and tipped his head, and the orderly left. Another two seconds, and President Terrance Berman walked in.

  Shay said, “Ohhh.” Then the president, who she would have said looked taller and thinner on TV, said cheerfully, “So. You’re the people who saved my life.”

  The president shook hands with all of them, looking each of them square in the eye and saying simply, “Thank you.” It was so heartfelt and sincere that Shay found herself near tears.

  The president lingered next to her. “I understand you turn seventeen next week. Happy birthday. But you’re too young for this stuff. Go back to school.”

  “I’ll do that,” Shay said.

  “College, too,” he said. “When you get a letter from the secretary of education, don’t throw it away. Uncle Sam’s got a scholarship in mind.”

  Twist said, “Uh…sir…nobody exactly told us what happened.”

  “Well then, I’ll tell you,” the president said. “I was standing there with my mouth open when my teleprompter exploded and I was swarmed by the Secret Service, and then I was running down some stairs and got shoved into a limo. A woman in the crowd took the bullet.” He grimaced. “She lost her arm.”

  “Oh no,” Shay said.

  “Sadly, yes. I visited with her a few minutes ago. The bullet was the size of a brick. Well, that’s an exaggeration. But if it had hit me in the back, as intended, I’d be dead.”

  “Wow,” Shay said.

  “Yes, wow,” said the president. “Again, my thanks. To all of you.”

  “President Berman, sir,” Shay said tentatively, unsure of title etiquette, “we know Thorne is dead, but what about the guy in the lobby?”

  “The man in the lobby was a CIA operative who was trying to help you out,” the president said, a slight tone to his voice. “Thorne was a deranged man, acting alone.”

  “What!”

  “Shocking, I know. Listen, here’s the story: you good citizens al
erted everyone to the Thorne threat—the FBI and also the army chief of staff. News spread to the White House. The CIA agent, who was in New York with my entourage, was in a position to get across the river in a hurry. You all met at the building where Thorne was, but Thorne had already killed the security guard and his girlfriend and managed to wound both the agent and Twist. You, Shay, had remained in the car until you heard the gunfire, and when you rushed to help them, you found that Thorne had already taken the elevator up. You took another elevator up. After a vicious struggle, you and your dog managed to overcome Thorne, who died in the struggle, but only after he managed to get off a shot. Your dog, by the way, is fine.”

  They were all silent, a bit stunned.

  Shay couldn’t leave it alone. “But…you know why they were shooting at you in the first place, right?”

  The president lifted a finger to his lips. “The story I’ve told you is what a very thorough investigation will find and what the public will know. But I assure you, the guilty will be punished. We are not in a place where all the guilty can be publicly punished. I hope you understand that. I would rather it not be known that a top official in the CIA and a billionaire who contributed to the campaigns of pretty much every major politician were tangled up in a conspiracy to assassinate the president, and the actual assassination of a senator, in order to cover up a despicable and horrific scientific enterprise. I’m not sure the American public could stand it. I’m not sure I can stand it.”

  “But they’ll be punished?” Shay pressed. “The guy in the lobby, and Royce, and Dr. Janes…and all of Singular?”

  The president nodded. “Yes. I promise you. Every single one.”

  Shay said, “And the vice president?”

  The president put a finger across his lips again.

  Twist: “But the whole point…”

  The president: “Trust me.”

  —

  Then he was gone, like a mirage, leaving an empty space in the room. Shay could hardly believe he’d been there. Two doctors hustled in, now free to tell them when they’d be released, and another Secret Service agent showed up with some papers to sign—“You agree not to talk about this with anyone. It’s all being declared top-secret….”