Limitless

by Robert J. Crane

  “I’ll deal with it later,” I said, brushing them off.

  “Sienna,” Wolfe’s husky voice said, causing my eyes to pop open. He used to call me Little Doll with alarming regularity, but hadn’t done that in a couple years. I was starting to feel surrounded, the sun blotted out by their shadows. “Do you know where you are?”

  “On a beach,” I sighed. “A beautiful place with mild temperatures and pleasant winds and an ocean that will feel wonderful on my skin when I go to take a dip in a few minutes.”

  “You’re in a back alley in London,” came the voice of Zack Davis, causing my eyes to snap open, “your throat has been cut, your internal organs have been shredded by a bomb, and you’re less than a minute from dying.”

  I caught a flash of something beyond the beach. There was a faint tapping of something like rain on metal, sirens echoing in the distance, and I saw a dark that was only penetrated by light seeping in from half a hundred holes in a wall of blackness. There was pain everywhere, everything that I could feel was agony, and I let it go—

  And I was back on the beach, back in the sand, legs pulled close to me, the heat on my skin feeling oh-so-good. I could feel the lapping of the tide at my toes, and it felt like it might be time to go up the beach a little further or maybe just let the water wash over me—

  “Sienna,” Zack said again, and I saw him there next to me, a snow falling down around his pale cheeks, all the life gone out of his face. “I don’t want you to end up like this.” His mouth moved unnaturally for the voice that spoke, stiff and dead, his jaw creaking open and closed barely in time with the speech.

  I felt a swell of sickness in my stomach. “Zack, I’m not… I’m not…”

  “You’re getting closer,” he said, all the color washed out of his features. His blond hair, usually a handsome contrast to his tanned face, looked dark and dull against his white skin. “You need to go back to the world. You need to fight.”

  “Yes,” Eve Kappler said, her pixie haircut flashing in front of my eyes as I glimpsed her dead body on a snowy tarmac at night, lights shining down on her in the darkness, “you need to start putting up a fight again.”

  I felt the heat of resentment burn through me. “I don’t know if you’ve just been on vacation yourselves, but I’ve been fighting for a couple years now.”

  “No,” Roberto Bastian said, dead eyes staring at me in judgment, “you’ve been going through the motions for a couple of years.”

  “Or at least one year,” Bjorn said with a darkness in his face. I saw him as he had looked when he died, body lit by the flames of burning buildings all around him..

  “I’ve done what was required of me,” I said.

  “And nothing more,” Gavrikov spoke, and I saw him on the top of a building—the IDS Tower in Minneapolis—home—the sun rising behind him, his skin glowing like it was about to burst into flames.

  “That’s not living, Sienna,” Wolfe said, and the darkness surrounded us completely. I looked around, trying to peer into the infinite black, and saw a single light in the dark. An incandescent bulb pitched a soft glow from above me, lighting a concrete floor beneath my feet. I could smell sweat, fear, and other things. Wolfe’s face peered at me from out of the dark where he lay on my basement floor. “That is little more than surviving.”

  “What is this?” I asked, turning about in the darkness. “An intervention? Because the six of you are the last people in the world who should be lecturing me about—”

  “We’re not in the world, are we?” Zack said, stepping out of the dark. He looked alive again, healthy, that confidence he’d always carried with him evident in the smile on his face. He was wearing a suit, and he looked good in it. His cheeks had a dash of rose.

  Like they had before I’d killed him.

  “No,” I said, staring at him, my voice low and near to cracking. “No, you’re not.”

  “You’ve always been a girl who did what she had to do,” Zack said, and the bulb swayed gently above him, casting a spotlight on his handsome features.

  “You’ve been someone who fought the long odds.” I turned to see Bastian staring at me, his skin flush with life again as well.

  “Who fought the hard fights that no one else would take,” Eve said, stepping into her own little lit circle to my left.

  “No matter what… you fought,” Bjorn said, his massive, tattooed chest on display as he stepped into his place.

  “You beat one hundred of the strongest people on the planet,” Gavrikov said, his skin wreathed in flame.

  “Mercy was a concept for lesser mortals,” Wolfe said, his dark hair looking like menacing fur on his body.

  “Whatever it took,” Zack said.

  “No matter what,” Gavrikov said.

  “No mercy,” Eve said.

  “No fear,” Bastian said.

  “No stopping,” Bjorn said.

  “Until the job was done,” Wolfe said.

  I stood quietly at the center of the circle, not even bothering to turn to face my accusers, because the world spun so I didn’t have to. As each of them spoke, the circle rotated to bring them right in front of my face, edging ever closer the longer this wore on. At the present rate of acceleration, I realized I’d be tasting Wolfe’s most recent dinner in a couple more minutes. He was a cannibal, so that prospect held little appeal for me. “What do you want?” I asked.

  “For you to be you,” Zack said, hands buried in his pants pockets. He shrugged and did it with a boyish smile. “For you to go back to being you, the you that fought for the whole world. For you to turn back the clock a couple years, shake off the weariness, dig deep, and get after this man in the ski mask like you’re out for his blood.”

  “I can’t do it like that anymore,” I said, looking away. “Guys, there are rules. Perfectly reasonable rules. We have a society here that doesn’t respond well to the level of destruction that—”

  There was a chorus of crosstalk that felt like it burned my ears. I recoiled away, and the world spun around me.

  “Don’t be a fool—”

  “—can’t keep doing this—”

  “—better as you were—”

  “—world burning around you—”

  “—going to die—”

  “STOP!” I said, and they did. The world slowed, the spin reduced, and I stared at each of them in turn as they stood in the quiet darkness, the light bulbs above each of their heads shining down on them. “I’m not the same person I was back then. I have a job and a responsibility. I’m not some rogue agent flying under the radar who can just do whatever she wants without fear of the consequences. I blew up a resort, in case you forgot. I haven’t forgotten because it landed me in about a hundred and fifty hours of disciplinary hearings that never got aired on C-Span. I have a job to do. I’m very good at it. No one else can do it. And in order to keep doing it, I have rules to play by—”

  “Rules will get you killed,” Wolfe said.

  “Rules limit your freedom of action,” Bjorn said.

  “Freedom comes with responsibility,” I said. “This is a civilized society—”

  “So called,” Gavrikov said with a dismissive snort.

  “—and you don’t just roll around killing people,” I said. “This isn’t me, being outmatched, outgunned, and in danger of losing everything and getting everyone killed. This isn’t war any longer.”

  Bastian chucked a thumb over his shoulder. “I don’t know if you just weren’t paying attention when that guy in the mask blew up those buildings, but that looked like a declaration of war to me.”

  “Not the same,” I said. “He’s got like, three people.”

  “How many do you have?” Eve asked, a little snottily.

  “I’ve got me, and that’s always been enough,” I said.

  “You’re dying, Sienna,” Zack said.

  “I’ll fix that in a minute,” I said. “One thing at a time, because right now I’m arguing with the people in my head, apparently.”


  “What are you willing to do to stop this man?” Wolfe asked, and the world grew still around me. His black eyes stared at me and I stared back.

  “What I have to do,” I said.

  “Whatever it takes?” Wolfe asked, staring back at me, hard.

  “Within limits,” I said, folding my arms and staring right back.

  “Those limits will be his best weapon,” Zack said. “And once he figures out where you won’t go, that’s where he’ll stay.”

  “You don’t even know who this is,” I said.

  “But we know what he just did,” Bastian said. “He killed a lot of people for a painting.”

  “To prove a point,” Gavrikov said.

  “Oh, yeah?” I wheeled on him. “And what was the point? Chaos for the sake of chaos?”

  “To show anyone watching that this is a man who has no limits to what he’ll do in order to get what he wants,” Wolfe said.

  I stared at the big, hairy bastard. “You’d know a little something about that, I suppose.”

  His eyes were blacker than the darkness around him. “Wolfe knows everything about it.”

  “Thanks for the advice,” I said, and waved them off. “I could use a little help pulling my guts back in, if you’re done with the sermon.”

  “Sienna—” Their voices were in a chorus, concern and fear and a ripple of anger all together.

  “I will take care of it,” I said, and my tone was all ice, all the way down, a whole shelf of it. “Thank you for your opinions.”

  With that, I stepped through the sunlight blue into the darkness and re-entered that world of pain, of agony that encompassed my whole body, and of sirens in the distance under the bleak and stormy sky.

  Chapter 42

  I pulled myself out of the dumpster a few minutes later, my skin bloody, my clothing tattered and shredded. I was wearier than I could ever recall having been. Drawing the power of Wolfe to heal my body nearly drained whatever stamina I had left. He’d been right when he’d said I was close to dying. There had been a heavy layer of blood in the dumpster from more lacerations than I could rightly count, and even as I pushed the lid up and hooked my upper body over the edge to come tumbling out to the pavement below, I was still so weak that I couldn’t immediately stand.

  “My God,” came a voice from down the alley. Footsteps pounded toward me as drops of rain fell on my face. I could smell everything, and it smelled like I’d gone dumpster diving in a medical waste bin. Webster’s face came into view above me, and he halted before kneeling next to me. “Are you there, Sienna?”

  “I am right here, yes,” I said in a nearly normal tone of voice. “Trust your eyes on that one.”

  “Where are you hurt?” he asked, urgently running his fingers over my shredded clothes. In any other situation, it might have been considered copping a feel, but since he looked utterly panicked and I’d been bleeding out from the places his fingers were treading, there was really nothing erotic about it. Unfortunately.

  “Mostly on my pride,” I said, brushing his hands away gently. “Although there’s a hell of a metaphorical bruise on my ass where it just got kicked.”

  He blinked at me, then blinked again. “You’re—you’re all right, then?” He didn’t look like he believed me. Like he hadn’t seen me regrow a foot yesterday.

  “I’m more or less fine,” I said, gingerly sitting up. “How’s the count back at the gallery?”

  His face paled, which took some doing since he’d already been white as a blank canvas when he’d shown up and seen me. “Not good, though I think it would have been a great deal worse if you hadn’t dissolved that bomb’s effects.”

  “These people are some nasty customers,” I said, my voice hoarse and cracking. “It’s the guy.”

  “The guy?” Webster said, sheathing the baton he was carrying in his hand like an afterthought. “What guy?”

  “That guy from Angus Waterman’s house,” I said, suppressing a coughing fit that was threatening to consume me if I didn’t get a drink of water soon. “Our guy. The one we’re hunting.”

  “This is him?” Webster asked, a little disbelieving. “That seems a bit farfetched.” He paused then glanced down at my ragged appearance. “Are you quite sure you’re all right?”

  “It’s him,” I said firmly. “Think about it—a serial killer using bombs? He had a woman with them who used two knives to dispatch your SWAT team, another guy lurking in the background that was probably our bomb maker, and the man himself taunted the hell out of me.” I thought back to what he’d said. “He mentioned Omega. This is about Omega somehow.”

  “Bloody hell,” Webster said. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” I said. I was pretty certain I hadn’t been hallucinating that. I ran a scraping, ripped-up boot across the pavement as I drew my leg closer to me. “He was pretty blatant about it.”

  Webster looked like he was trying to decide whether to believe me or not. “Hell, hell and more hell,” he said finally. “Can you walk?”

  I pushed against the ground and failed to rise. “Give me a minute,” I said.

  I saw motion above and looked up to see his hand extended, reaching down to me. I took it, and he pulled me to my feet. With maybe a little help from my own strength. “Thanks,” I said.

  “We need to get everything he said to you down on paper,” Webster said, starting back down the alley toward the gallery. “Every word, every gesture, a description of the people you saw—everything. Any part of it might be a clue that could lead us to him.”

  “Agreed,” I said, following behind him with just a little bit of a limp. It wasn’t because I was hurt, it was because once more my boot had been damaged so badly that I was walking with an uneven gait. “I just need to make one stop first.”

  “Oh?” He slowed to let me catch up. “Where’s that?”

  “A clothing store,” I said, matching his shortened strides with my wobbly walk. I gestured toward my shredded outfit, sweeping over the bloodied flesh exposed by the bomb damage. “Can I borrow a few dollars—err, pounds?”

  Webster just looked me over once quickly and turned his head again, like he was trying his best not to gaze on anything that might maybe have been exposed. “Of course,” he said, but I could see the blush on his cheeks even under the dirt from the explosion.

  Chapter 43

  “Murder, murder, murder,” I said, standing in the middle of the bullpen in New Scotland Yard. “Why kill the guy out in Hounslow other than to somehow penetrate the city’s surveillance grid?”

  “I told you that’s not all linked,” Webster said. It was depressingly quiet in here, the bitter smell of stale coffee left un-drunk filling the air.

  “I read there are like two hundred thousand cameras in London,” I said, pacing around in my new jeans and blouse. I’d gone more practical and less dressy this time. Also, cheaper. Webster didn’t dress impressively enough for me to blow his clothing budget with impunity, so I’d gone as practical and low-cost as I could. “You can’t tell me that someone doesn’t have the ability to run through each of them.”

  “I don’t know,” he said with a shake of his head. “Some of them are private, some of them belong to individual towns—”

  “Wonderful,” I snarled into the empty air. The bullpen was pretty well abandoned save for the two of us. “So someone is watching, maybe. They’ve at least got the ability to black out certain cameras that could give us a hint of where they are, but apparently there’s no central location we could go to… I dunno, watch where the cameras started to go dark so we might have a hint of where this guy is going next?”

  “Well,” Webster said, “that’s how I understand it, yes.”

  “Gahhhh,” I said, letting out a slow breath. “Okay. So. We need to get access to the systems one by one—”

  “I can try to do that,” he said, making a note on a pad. “Though I have my doubts whether the commissioner will believe that the bloke who did the gallery heist is th
e same one we’ve been after.”

  “We need to figure out how they got to this guy that worked the system. If they’re doing this, there has to be more network in place than you know about.”

  “I don’t even know who we’d speak to about that,” he said.

  “And I need something to eat, desperately,” I said, feeling at least some of my current state of crabbiness being brought on by the angry rumble in my belly. Healing always drained me, especially my stomach.

  He blinked at me. “Well, I suspect I can do something about that, at least.”

  “Good,” I said, feeling a little embarrassed, “because I’m still broke.” I didn’t have an ATM card to my name, and it was a few miles past embarrassing.

  “How’s your phone?” he asked.

  “Not so good,” I said, holding up the debris that I’d retrieved from my pocket before I’d discarded my old clothes. The faceplate was shattered, a spider web of cracks spreading out from the upper right hand corner. A piece the size of my thumb had been broken cleanly away, revealing a speaker and some other little electronic doodads beneath. “I don’t think it’s salvageable.”

  “I bet the mobile insurance people see you coming and close the shop straightaway.”

  I stared at the broken phone. “Honestly, this doesn’t happen to me anymore. This is like… a throwback to the way things were a couple years ago, when I couldn’t own anything nice without it getting destroyed.”

  “Back in time,” Webster said with a single nod. “Right, so. Fancy a curry? Fish and chips? You Americans like hamburgers, right?”

  “This American fancies whatever the hell she can put in her mouth at the moment,” I said, and it took a second for my brain to catch up on that one. “I mean, whatever you’re hungry for is fine.” I knew I blushed on that one.

  He chuckled, but not too much. “Fish and chips?”

  “Sure,” I said and grabbed the cheap plastic poncho I’d bought for a pound instead of spending Webster’s money on an actual coat. It did a billowing thing of its own as I pulled it on over my head, but this was way less cool than what his trench coat did.