Luke finished the bottle and spat the nipple out. He looked up at her with his baby’s brown eyes. Luke. Keen clutched him to her chest. The babies. The children. She hadn’t really thought about them, about their future. They were in terrible danger. If a Post Office task force showed up, they would be in even more danger. What was she going to do?
“That’s… great,” Keen managed, and put Luke over her shoulder to burp him. “I’m glad the Beekeeper’s great plan is going perfectly. We are the Hive.”
“We are the Hive, baby,” Vernon agreed.
Luke burped in her ear.
* * *
Donald Ressler stared into the darkness of his damp cell and thought of home. He thought of his apartment in Washington, where he had a comfortable bed—and the occasional warm partner to share it. He thought about his living room, with the big TV and the video game system he’d had since college and still dragged out to play sometimes. He thought about the kitchen drawer filled with takeout menus from restaurants all over DC, places that would deliver pizza oozing with melted cheese, spicy Thai noodles, crispy sweet-and-sour pork, or tongue-blistering curry with pillowy naan bread. Oh, yeah. It was the food he missed the most. Even curled on a thin, nasty mattress he had folded in half to get maximum insulation from the ground, even in this itchy, filthy jumpsuit, even in this dark, damp, dull cell, the thing he missed most was the damn food.
He concentrated on the food, used it as both sword and shield. When the Bastard—Ressler’s private name for the Beekeeper—ran him through those treatments and he could feel his mind crumbling bit by bit, he concentrated on the food to keep himself sane. Girardi’s deep dish sausage and mushroom pizza kept him from feeling vulnerable when the drones stung him with their damned tasers. Jade Dragon’s crispy duck stopped him from feeling ashamed when he confessed his sins in the circle. And Moon House’s tender pad thai kept him from feeling naked and alone when the Beekeeper drilled into his mind with those horrible injections. Sometimes it felt like tiny pieces of himself were falling away, slipping through his fingers like water, and clinging to memories of home was the only way to slow the damage.
Slow it. Not stop it.
He knew he was changing. He noticed the way he automatically responded “We are the Hive!” whenever someone said it to him first. He noticed the way he flinched whenever one of the drones waved a taser. He noticed the way he salivated every time the Beekeeper opened that cooler like it was the treasure chest of an Egyptian pharaoh.
He didn’t want to give in, but more than once he found himself thinking how easy it would be. Just do what the Beekeeper wanted, and he could sleep in a real bed, and have a hot shower, and eat real food, and do something besides chip at cold stone for hours on end.
Ressler shifted on the mattress. It was just him and John-the-Bodysnatcher in the pens now. Stuart, the weakling, had turned into a happy Hiver, and Keen had manipulated her way out of the cell one sleep ago. He hoped that she was figuring out a way to contact Reddington, or Cooper, or anyone at all.
More than once he had tried to find a way out of the cell. He had gone over every inch of the place with eyes and fingers, but everything hard was bolted down and everything else was too soft to be useful. Even the so-called food was served on styrofoam, with no cutlery. Nothing to fashion a tool or weapon from. And the drones were frighteningly good at security. Even if Ressler managed to overpower the half-dozen of them that showed up to haul him and John to circle time, it would be all but impossible to make it out of the tunnels without being noticed and caught. Not without help.
FBI regs said when you couldn’t do anything, you sat tight and waited. Eventually, the situation would change. And Donald Ressler always followed the regs. The regs worked. They were tried and tested methods of solving problems. They removed worry from field work. No matter what the situation, the regs had you covered.
Except when they didn’t.
The regs didn’t cover what to do when Audrey died in his arms, and they didn’t cover what to do when physical and emotional pain became so great that the only way to get through another day was to cloud it with little white pills. But they did cover what to do when the little white pills took over those cloudy days—you had to quit cold turkey, and the pain came roaring back so bad that all you could do was yell into your pillow until your voice was gone. And then you hated the regs—but then it was yourself you really hated, because you were weak.
That was it, wasn’t it? He was weak.
He had been too weak to stop himself falling in love with Audrey, too weak to stop her murder, too weak to keep himself off the pills. And that was why, once Keen had gone rogue, he had gone after her with a zeal that made him squirm even now, in this dark, damp cell on this unforgiving mattress. Even when she had shown him she was innocent, he had cited the regs and gone after her even harder, just to show that he wasn’t weak. The regs made him strong.
But in the end, the regs had broken him again. Keen had proven to everyone that she was innocent, and the FBI had taken her back, while Ressler—the fool who had followed the regs—had been forced to beg her forgiveness. She said she understood, but that made it even worse. Keen had already ferreted out his love affair with the little white pills. If she understood why he had pursued her so relentlessly, it meant that she also understood he was weak, and he hated that.
He chewed the inside of his mouth. That wasn’t really true. He liked Keen and respected her. They got on fine now. They did. He was putting his own thoughts into her. Or was he? He clenched a fist at his temple. It was hard to tell in this place. He was hungry all the time, and exhausted and stressed, and sometimes he felt as though it would be so much easier to just hand himself over to the Hive. The regs were really easy here: just do as the Beekeeper said. He’d be great on their security teams. He had already seen areas of inefficiency in their operation, and if Ressler told the Beekeeper about them, maybe even volunteered to help clear them up, he could probably get some extra food, maybe even some meat or peanut butter. He was used to commanding a team, so he’d be an officer or something very shortly. Why not? No more thoughts of Audrey, no more thoughts of pills, no more—
He pinched himself hard, his own private sting.
What was he thinking? It was this place, the way the Beekeeper drilled into his memory with those damned drugs and confession sessions. He had to keep it together. He had to…
“Ressler!”
The whisper jerked him upright. Keen was standing at the bars of his cage, her features barely visible in the dim light. Ressler scrambled to his feet, then wobbled under the head rush and the lack of food.
“Keen!” he said. “Are you all right? Are you holding… a baby?”
“No time,” she said. “You have to escape. Now. Tonight.”
“How?” Ressler hissed. “Keys. Guards. Drones.”
Keen dropped a shiny object into the pen. “I lifted it off one of the drones. I’ll take care of the guards. Wait for the signal.”
“Why now?” he whisper-shouted. “What’s going on?”
“The Beekeeper is making sarin gas. He’s going to use it on the towns around this place to carve out his own little kingdom. Probably tomorrow.” She shifted the baby. “You have to get help now!”
The blood in Ressler’s body iced over. “Jesus.”
“I have to go.”
Keen turned her back and vanished up the tunnel, baby clutched in her arms. It was the strangest damn thing Ressler had seen, and in the Hive, that was saying a lot.
“Don’t leave me here,” John the Bodysnatcher hissed from his own cell. Crap! Ressler had completely forgotten about him. “You have to take me. If you don’t, I’ll shout.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
Ressler was already reaching awkwardly through the bars, trying to maneuver the key into the lock. It was freaking hard. The key was small, it was dark, and he was working from the outside in. Why couldn’t Keen have just opened the lock for him? The key poked at the lock,
missed, poked once more, went partially in, then slipped back out. Ressler gritted his teeth and tried again. Metal scraped on metal, horribly loud in the quiet cave. Someone would come any second now, he was sure. They’d see him with his arm outside the cage. He poked at the lock again.
An alarm shrieked in his ear and whirling red lights slashed through the darkness. Ressler jumped, and the key fell from his fingers. It tinked and bounced on the floor. No! Where was it?
“What the hell happened?” John demanded.
“That must be Keen’s doing,” Ressler said. “Where’s the key?”
“You dropped it?” John clutched at his own bars. “Oh my god! You’re dumber than a bowl of oatmeal.”
“Not helping,” Ressler snapped. “Do you see it?”
John craned his neck, trying to see through the bars. The alarm continued its screech. “Nowhere. Damn it!”
A gleam of silver caught Ressler’s eye. The key was on the ground outside the bars. He lunged for it. His fingertips touched it. He scrabbled at the tiny bit of metal, praying to anyone who was listening. The key wouldn’t come. Sounds of commotion could be heard down the tunnel.
“Come on!” John was dancing inside his cell.
Ressler snatched his fingers back, spat on them, and reached for the key again. The saliva made his skin slightly sticky, and it was just enough to drag the key into grasping distance. Relieved, he snatched it up, then wrenched his arm around, feeling for the lock. For once, something went right, and he was able to jam the key into the lock. The door clicked open, and he was free.
“Don’t forget me!” John yelled.
For a moment, Ressler considered leaving him. It would take precious seconds to unlock his cage and the Bodysnatcher was a kidnapper and a murderer. But he had promised to free him, and the regs said you kept your word. Ressler yanked the key out of his lock and opened John’s cage door.
There was a moment, a tiny moment, when they made eye contact across the threshold. Each man knew the other was thinking the same thing: I’m your opposite. I should club you down and run like hell. The moment passed. John bolted from the cage, and they ran down the tunnel—
—straight into four masked drones.
The drones paused in surprise. Ressler plowed into them without hesitation. He slammed his shoulder into one and knocked him into a second. The second drone’s head smacked the tunnel wall with a wet crack. The alarm continued its blare. Ressler wanted to punch the first drone, but hesitated—the mask. The drone took advantage of the moment to snatch his taser from his holster. The end snapped with a blue spark.
One of the other drones rushed at John, who twisted aside. The last drone hesitated, as though unsure of which target to choose. The drone with the taser fired the extendable electrodes at Ressler. Ressler flung himself to one side, and the electrodes went into the back of the fourth drone. He went down, twitching. Ressler snapped a roundhouse kick at the drone with the taser. The taser went flying. Scuffling noises came from behind him, but Ressler ignored them. The drone went for the pistol at his belt. Ressler grabbed the gas canister on his mask and yanked. The drone went off-balance, and Ressler brought the drone’s face down on his knee. Pain lanced through his leg when the mask hit. The drone went limp and collapsed. Ressler grabbed at his holster.
“Freeze!”
Ressler spun, winded, pistol in his hand. The last drone held John with a gun to his head.
“Back to your cell. Move! Or he’s dead.”
The perp had a hostage. Regs said to set his weapon down and back away. Do whatever the perp said until a chance came to save the hostage.
“I said back to your cell!” the drone barked.
The hell with the regs.
Ressler raised his own pistol. “So shoot him.”
That gave the drone pause. “What?”
“I don’t care if he lives or dies. Shoot him.” Ressler took aim, both hands, feet planted. “Then I can shoot you and get the hell out of here.”
“Hey!” John said.
The drone clearly didn’t know how to respond to this. He actually leaned a little ways away from John.
Ressler took the shot.
It was clean. Straight through the drone’s mask and head. Blood sprayed out the back. The drone slumped, nearly dragging John down with him. John flung the drone’s arm away.
“What the hell was that?” he demanded as Ressler snatched up one of the masks from the floor. “That was a stupid bluff.”
“Bluff?” Ressler pulled on a mask. “You’re a killer and a kidnapper. What the hell makes you think I care if you live or die?”
“Oh. That.” John put on a mask as well and reached for a pistol. Ressler kicked his hand away.
“Not for you,” he said. “Let’s go. Keen set off that alarm somehow. We probably don’t have much time.”
Although it had felt much longer, the escape and fight had only taken a couple of minutes. Masked drones were rushing through the hive tunnels, and Ressler and John joined them, anonymous in their own masks. Most of them seemed to be heading in the same direction, so they followed the crowd.
A stream of drones filed from a small tunnel that seemed to be leading outside. The ceiling came down lower and lower, until Ressler was forced to hands and knees to crawl. A pair of hands pulled him out, and for a moment he panicked, thinking he’d been caught, until he realized the drone was there to help.
Outside, the sun was beginning to set. Warm air, the first summer breeze he had felt in so long, coursed over him, though he couldn’t smell anything through the mask. A crowd of drones milled about uncertainly on the hillside. Ressler looked for Keen and Stuart, but didn’t see either of them. If they were wearing masks, he wouldn’t recognize them anyway.
“Any idea what’s going on?” he asked the drone who was helping the masked Bodysnatcher out of the narrow tunnel exist.
“You mean you don’t know?” the drone said.
Uh oh. Ressler thought fast.
“I was asleep when the alarm went off. I just grabbed my mask and ran, like protocol said.”
“Evacuation alarm from the chem lab,” he said shortly. “Someone probably dropped a beaker.”
A ways down the hill came the Beekeeper himself, with his white hair and heavy glasses. He was shouting something.
Ressler grabbed John. “Come on.”
They sidled toward the edge of the crowd of drones. Ressler had no idea the Beekeeper had this many people under his thumb. There had to be well over two hundred here. And children! Jesus, they had children. Ressler had seen the baby in Keen’s arms and hadn’t had time to think about it, but babies meant children, and children always became human shields. God damn it!
Run now, worry later, he told himself.
They made it to the thicker part of the woods at the edge of the crowd and almost stumbled over the collection of boxy beehives. John swore and backpedaled. Two bees landed on the plastic eyes of Ressler’s mask, and he was suddenly glad for the full-body jumpsuit. They skirted the hives and dove toward the hill as a voice shouted for them to halt. A pair of shots rang out.
“Go!” Ressler snapped, and ran himself, ducking and weaving. More shots zinged by, and bark chipped off a tree near Ressler’s arm. John was a little behind and to Ressler’s left.
“I need a goddamned gun, you asshole,” he said, breathing heavily.
“Shut up and run.” Ressler’s legs were shaky. He could feel the energy draining from him. Days of confinement, bad food, and stress had taken their toll. Running downhill on uneven ground and forcing their way through brush made it all the more difficult. Thin branches scored Ressler’s hands and whipped at the eyes on his mask, making him flinch. John stumbled over a root, recovered his balance, and kept running.
Shouts and barked orders rang from the woods around them. Already the Hive was mustering a search party. Ressler swore. They were organized and quick. He ducked under another branch and tried to keep his breathing up. Should they try to fi
nd a place to hide instead? Ressler glanced about him, trying to figure out where they were, but he was completely turned around and the mask made it hard to see. He snatched it off and flung it away.
An armed drone came out of a grove to Ressler’s right. Without thinking, Ressler shot twice at the drone, and he went down. But another drone was following, and a second, and a third. John swore. Ressler leaped over a fallen tree for cover. The tree was on the downward side of the foothill, however, and the opposite side was much lower than the closer side. He landed badly. Bark and rocks scratched his side and red pain sliced up his ankle and shin. But the downward slope and the tree gave him more cover than he had expected.
On the other side of the tree, John shouted, “I surrender! Don’t shoot!”
There was a clacking of guns. Ressler scuttled deeper into the undergrowth farther downhill. Part of him said he should go back and help John, but the more sensible part of him said that he was outnumbered and out-armed by at least four to one, and it was smarter to get the hell out of here, find help, bring back the FBI.
“Where’s your friend?” a distant voice demanded. But Ressler kept moving farther and farther away. Finally, he deemed it safe to break into a limping jog. What little strength he had left was flagging, and he was alone.
He came across a narrow game trail. Ressler thought a moment, then chose a random direction and ran, hoping it wasn’t taking him back toward the Hive. It was safer to stay in the woods, but on the trail he could gain some ground for a few minutes, then hit the trees again. The sun had sunk a little lower in the sky and it was still only early evening, but he was afraid of getting more lost in the trees anyway.
The voices he had heard had faded entirely. He paused once to listen. Nothing but bird song and insects. Heat lay thick over everything. Sweat ran down Ressler’s back, and he mopped his forehead with his sleeve, then ran off again.
The Blacklist--The Beekeeper No. 159 Page 18