And still the round pinged and pinged.
Xalbador gripped Dex around the midsection, fighting a tug-of-war over the mangled arm. Dex jammed the gun through the gap again, and Evan clustered both ends of the garrote in one hand and grabbed for the barrel with the other, forcing the bore to the side of his head.
The gun bucked powerfully—he felt the ache in the bones of his fingers—but didn’t fire. He squeezed the slide assembly even tighter, keeping the pistol from cycling. As long as he held on, it wouldn’t be able to eject the round it had already fired. Torquing his wrist, he managed to wrench the .45 free of Dex’s grip. The pistol skittered across the Lexan floor behind him.
The first shot was still rocketing around the enclosure, whining and cracking off the walls. He felt the air move, the bullet riffling the hair on his head, missing by a whisper.
The world was nothing but the ringing aftermath of a struck bell; his head felt thick and dead, stuffed with rags. Dex reared back again, Xalbador yanking him, the door yawning wide. Evan’s fists ached around the wooden handles. His boots slipped on the slick Lexan. Dex and Xalbador were going to rip him right out of the box.
He lost his feet, swinging around on his ass, pulled by the garrote toward the threshold. At the last minute, he threw a boot wide, wedging it against the doorframe, and hurled himself back.
The tendons snapped audibly. Evan toppled backward. The severed hand fell free, slapping the floor.
Dex and Xalbador cartwheeled away, Dex’s stump flinging up, trailing crimson mist. Evan heard the bullet zing overhead and then silence—it must’ve flown out the open door. He scrambled forward, reaching for the metal handle and slamming the thick door.
Dex rolled on the floor, clutching his arm. Xalbador crawled out from beneath him, transmitter in hand, trying in vain to electrify Evan’s shock collar.
Holding the door shut, Evan groped behind him for the severed hand. His fingers cupped Dex’s. He gathered the hand in and slapped it against the sensor panel. It leaked blood, but the noose had held, still cinched around the base of the hand above the jagged line of the wrist.
The sensor whirred and processed. Had the bootlaces held enough blood in the hand for the sensor to read the vein pattern?
Xalbador was on his feet now.
The screen lit up.
READING.
READING.
In his peripheral vision, Evan sensed bodies pouring through the doorway, backup arriving.
Finally command buttons littered the screen—LOCK, OPEN, DISABLE, RECODE.
Evan thumbed RECODE.
Xalbador lunged for the handle.
Evan spread his own hand on the panel. The screen flashed green, and the lugs engaged with a clang an instant before Xalbador curled his hands around the handle.
Xalbador tore at the steel bar, his flailing locks spattering sweat across the Lexan. He stopped flailing. His shoulders sank.
He and Evan stared at each other through the transparent door.
Behind Xalbador, Dex rose to his feet and aimed his muted screams at the elaborate chandelier. Bidders and guards sprinted into the ballroom, jostling and shouting and overturning chairs. At the head of the pack, René halted, the sole point of stillness in the room. His face was flushed in streaks along the lines of plastic surgeries past. A cold rage cemented his jaw.
He glared at Evan, locked safely inside the Lexan vault. Removing his transmitter from a pocket inside his suit jacket, he aimed it at Evan and squeezed.
Evan took a step back, picked up the .45, righted the folding chair, and sat.
René squeezed the transmitter again, then hurled it aside. He charged across to the vault and tugged on the handle, his thin hair cascading over his forehead. Then he stopped, sweeping his bangs back into place. “So you’ve locked yourself in your own cell.” His voice, filtered through the panel, had a tinny quality. “You think that gives you some kind of advantage?”
Evan leaned to pick up Dex’s severed hand from the floor. The blood-dripping scowl inked on the skin was now augmented with the real thing.
The alligator skin below René’s left eye twitched. A squiggle of a vein showed at his temple. “We still have you trapped.” He coughed out a laugh that was equal parts fury and disbelief. “How exactly do you see this ending?”
Evan lifted Dex’s florid scowl. And placed it over his mouth.
53
Some Delicacies
Confusion and mayhem roiled through the ballroom, catching like a flame. Sark had someone by the lapel—a Somalian warlord?—his drawn-back fist restrained by one of the narcos. Dex staggered out leaving a jagged trail of blood, another narco at his side. Candy and Orphan M had appeared. They alone looked composed, leaning against the grand piano in the rear of the room, a nightclub act between sets. Candy caught Evan’s eye.
And she grinned.
Behind her beautiful teeth, there was hunger.
René gestured frantically for the guards to get everyone under control.
Evan sat calmly on his chair watching the show.
As the commotion built to a crescendo, Xalbador swapped out his less-lethal shotgun for an AK-47. Standing on a chair, he swept the barrel across the crowd. “¡Cállense!” he shouted. “Shut up!”
It took some prodding from the other narcos, but at last a version of order had been restored.
“I can sell him, box and all,” René said, addressing the crowd of bidders. “You can buy him and starve him to death, like a lizard in a jar. Savor every minute.”
“This is not our agreement,” Sark said. “I want it to be worse than this for him. I want access to his soft flesh.”
The Widow Lakshminarayanan made a throaty sound of agreement. The others voiced their displeasure.
“He has a gun,” the Somalian said.
“He’s locked inside a bulletproof box,” René said.
“What if he—”
“If he so much as opens that door, he’ll be looking straight down the barrel of an AK-47.”
Evan made eye contact with Candy in the back of the ballroom. Though he couldn’t be sure from this distance, it seemed she was enjoying herself almost as much as he was. The clamor grew, and René waded into the group to make assurances.
A debate raged over what to do. No simple solution was forthcoming. Evan had taken René’s biggest strength, his ingenuity, and turned it against him.
Lexan is bullet-resistant, impact-resistant, heat-resistant up to 212 degrees and cold-resistant down to 40 below. And that’s at normal thickness. The vault walls were a solid foot deep. René had thought he was building Evan a cage.
But he’d made him a suit of armor.
Evan relaxed in his chair. He wouldn’t be going anywhere anytime soon. And the customers were growing increasingly displeased.
“—sarin nerve gas through the rear vent,” the Serbian was recommending.
“How does that get him in hand?” Sark said. “We must hire a crane. Drop this box from a great height and shatter him free.”
The Hong Kong gangster’s translator was working overtime to keep his employer in the conversation. “—get the entire unit offshore on one of our crude-oil tankers. We can slide him off into the sea and watch him sink.”
A chorus of protests went up, the argument threatening to explode into violence. At last Assim pulled René aside. They quietly conducted a more serious discussion at the fringe of the chairs.
When they were done, René signaled to Xalbador, who quieted the scrum once again.
“We have a solution,” René said.
Sark’s glaucomic eyes found a sudden focus. “Which is?”
“Breaching the vault,” Assim said.
At this, Candy stepped forward, interested at last. M hung behind her, his eyes level with her shoulder, observing the scene quietly.
“Mr. al-Hakeem and I were just discussing the risk of damaging the goods,” René said. “We’d hate for the overpressure from the charge to pancake the No
where Man’s vital organs.”
“Yes,” Sark said. “That would be a shame.”
“Fortunately, I have quite a bit of experience,” Assim said.
“Blowing shit up,” Sark said. “This is not breaching.”
Assim raised a shaking hand and smoothed his wispy mustache. “Al-Mansoura, Yemen, 2010. Bucheli, Colombia, 2011. Gombe, Nigeria, 2012. Taji, Iraq, 2013.”
“What are these?”
“Prisons,” Candy said, her grin growing broader. “Jails. Detention Facilities.” She turned to address the group. “The good news is that this piece of shit has busted through perimeter walls, cells, and dungeons on three continents.”
“Four,” Assim said. “Edmonton Max Security Institution.” A wan smile. “Last month.”
René turned, casting his brown gaze at Evan. “You have to get him out alive.”
“I could blast a sardine out of a tin without snapping a slender little bone. Believe me…” Assim smiled, showing his broken front teeth. “I want him alive more than you do.”
“Do you have explosives on the premises?” Candy asked.
“Dex is being choppered out for medical attention as we speak,” René said. “My exceedingly discreet transport team will deliver whatever Mr. al-Hakeem requires within a few hours.”
“Take your time.” Candy looked across at Evan and ran her tongue along her lips. “Some delicacies are worth waiting for.”
* * *
WHERE R U?
EN ROUTE WITH THE TEAM. CONFIRMING COORDINATES, BUT WE LOOK TO BE LESS THAN AN HOUR OUT.
VAULT ABOUT 2 B BREACHED. THEN AUCTION WILL COMMENCE.
STALL IT. WIN THE AUCTION. ORPHAN X IS NOT TO LEAVE PREMISES UNTIL I ARRIVE.
HURRY.
* * *
The air tasted recycled. Evan tucked the edges of the plastic trash liner into the shock collar, making sure the buffer hadn’t slid out of place. He could hear his breaths off the Lexan walls, vibrating his eardrums, an inside-a-snare-drum effect. The folding chair pressed hard and cold into his lower back. The bidders milled about, their focus directed at him in passing, as if he were a fish tank in a crowded lobby. So many of his enemies were right in this very room. And yet they constituted only a fraction of those who wanted him dead.
With some fanfare the explosives arrived at last, a wooden shipping crate stickered with a hazmat logo and carted in by three narcos. Assim directed them to place the crate in the back of the ballroom behind the rows of folding chairs. His motor skills might have deteriorated, but at the sight of the explosives he snapped into his body differently, all simmering intensity and curt directives.
Again Candy and Evan locked eyes across the rows of chairs. She pursed her lips. Let them pop open. A good-bye kiss.
This time Evan actually found himself smiling back.
After assessing the crate, Assim walked over to the Lexan vault and measured the door, a pencil protruding from his lips. He ignored Evan, focused only on the task. Then he walked back to the crate and ordered the men to unload it. They lifted out a spool of hundred-grain detonating cord. Thin plastic tubing packed with pentaerythritol tetranitrate, det cord explodes at four miles a second, giving the effect of simultaneous detonation. A linear precision cutting charge, it can be wrapped around a concrete pylon or contoured to any outline of choice, the best bet in the world of explosives to get that Wile E. Coyote–shaped-hole-in-a-wall effect. It is ideal for rock-carving work, building demolition, dock-pile removal.
But it is best for breaching.
Before Assim was done, it would knock the Lexan door off its hinges and Evan off his feet, leaving him exposed to a firing squad of AK-47s.
The explosives and gunpowder amassed in the ballroom could take out a small militia group.
Evan had a handgun.
To be precise, he had six bullets in a Kimber .45. Given what he was facing, it wasn’t much of a weapon.
He heard Jack, perennial teacher and father, laughing at him from beyond the grave. That Kimber’s not your weapon. You are the weapon. And your finger’s the safety.
As a child, as an operator in high-threat zones, as an impostor in the ordinary-life world of Castle Heights, he moved alone. For as long as he could remember, loneliness had been his companion. But never had he felt as isolated as he did now, locked in a transparent box, surrounded by people competing for the right to slaughter him.
He wished Jack were here.
Over the years he felt Jack’s absence acutely—as loss, as guilt, as remorse. But not like this.
Right now he missed Jack himself. Jack of the baseball-catcher build. Jack of the world-class squint, the well-grooved crow’s-feet. Jack who always knew when to not say anything, when to just rest a hand on Evan’s boy-skinny shoulder.
Evan had been unwilling to admit to himself what a toll the last week and a half had taken. But now the rawness overtook him, threatening to divert his focus. He snapped himself back into line, reminded himself where he was and what was at stake. He was in a shark cage circled by great whites; the last thing he could afford right now was a stroll down memory lane. Jack was dead. It was up to Evan and Evan alone.
The bidders had settled in to wait not so patiently on the folding chairs, quarreling or sitting sullenly. Candy McClure and Orphan M were the only two not in the room. Evan wondered what plans they were hatching in private. As much for show as for anything else, René kept one dedicated guard standing by the vault door, his AK trained on Evan. Back by the grand piano, Assim was on his knees, cutting precise lengths of det cord off the spool.
A ring of duct tape dangling from his mouth, Assim walked back to the Lexan vault again. With shaking hands he taped a length of det cord along the hinge side of the door. He used smaller strips to augment the main charge. When he was done, he stood back to admire his work.
For a moment he and Evan faced each other through the Lexan.
“Ready to get yanked through the looking glass?” Assim tapped the Lexan. “We’re minutes away.”
Evan felt his heart rate quicken, so he focused on his breathing. Right now there was nothing to do but inhale and exhale, inhale and exhale.
Heading back down the aisle toward the staging point in the rear of the ballroom, Assim snapped his fingers. Two guards carried over a hefty olive green ammo can. They moved cautiously, setting down the metal box with extreme care. Assim unlatched the lid, smiled down at the contents. It took two men to lift out the initiation assembly. They did so gingerly. It was a factory-assembled unit, fifty feet of wasp yellow nonelectric shock tube wound around a coil, the blasting cap already crimped onto the end. Given that it was shock-sensitive, even a four-foot drop onto the hardwood could set it off.
The non-el shock tube, once unrolled and connected to the det cord, would function like a fuse. From a healthy standoff, Assim would flip a lever, propagating the firing impulse through the shock tube snaking across the ballroom floor to the vault door. A fraction of a second later, Evan would be lying on his back inside the blasted-open Lexan vault, bleeding from his ears.
Sensing that a climax was near, the bidders vacated their chairs, gathering around Assim.
René turned to Xalbador. “Two of our guests are missing.”
One of the other narcos said, “They’re resting in their room until the auction starts.”
“Get them,” René said.
Xalbador nodded and started out.
René turned back to the room. “Are we ready?”
Assim rose, his legs trembling from the exertion. He’d sweated through his shirt. “Just have to connect the shock tube to the det cord.”
Sark elbowed his way through the cluster. “What will you use to initiate?”
A faint whirring sound carried across the rows of empty chairs and then a loud clank. The bidders turned as one.
Evan lowered his palm from the inside panel, the vault door clicking open. He jabbed the door out, knocking the guard onto his ass, then swung it back to use as a s
hield. He peered from the slender gap, the Kimber .45 pointed.
“I have a suggestion,” he said.
54
Bad Dogs
From there it went fast.
Evan put his first bullet through Assim’s shoulder, making the man tumble to the side and clearing the sight line to the initiation assembly.
The toppled guard unleashed the AK at Evan, but the swung-open slab of the door deflected his fire, the rounds whining off the angled Lexan.
René looked from Evan to Assim and back to Evan, his ruddy cheeks lighting with realization. Grabbing the Widow Lakshminarayanan’s sari, he flung her in front of the initiation assembly to block Evan’s angle.
Evan shot her through the back of the calf. She screeched and balled up as he’d hoped she would. The yellow shock tube and crimped blasting cap peeked into view above the crown of her head.
Evan fired and missed, the bullet blowing out one of the legs of the piano.
From the doorway Xalbador screamed orders at the remaining guards.
René backpedaled in the surging crowd, grabbing Sark’s jacket from behind and pivoting them both, putting the man’s girth between him and the explosives.
Evan fired at the assembly again, but the volley of bullets from the guard’s AK drove the Lexan door into his arm, his shot sailing wide. The guard’s flurry was punctuated with a click, the magazine finally run dry.
Over by the doorway, Xalbador picked up the slack, firing haphazardly. His rounds sprayed the Lexan wall, but Evan tuned him out.
He aimed the .45.
Two bullets left.
The bidders stampeded for the exits, bodies and kicked-over chairs flickering across his field of vision. The blasting cap strobed in and out of view.
Even in the mayhem, he found an inner calm. Inhale. Exhale. Wait for the space between heartbeats.
He let a final cool breath pass through his teeth.
With steady, even pressure, he pulled the trigger.
The bullet struck the cap at its union with the shock tube. The first explosion was instantaneous, the shock wave lifting Assim and the widow off the floor, their limbs spread, heads corkscrewing on broken necks.
The Nowhere Man--An Orphan X Novel Page 23