by P. R. Adams
Ravi relaxed slightly. “Our weapons are appropriate to this threat now that we’ve seen it.”
I turned back to him. “I still don’t think you could stop them, not unless you’re packing something special. Maybe you are, but you’ll need more than vests to stand up to those weapons of theirs.”
“We’re ready for them.”
No specifics but confidence. They had taken measures. “What was your thinking when you reviewed their tactics? Because, I have to admit, I wasn’t impressed. Senator, you’re alive because that first time they attacked, they were cocky. The guy who slit your throat at the assembly hall was on a rooftop two buildings over from the Ming Dynasty. They could have set up explosives. Or used sniper rifles.”
Ravi leaned forward, now wearing an irritated grin. “They were sending a signal that first attack. Taunting.”
“Probably. Or they were sloppy.” I leaned toward him as well. “I don’t think they were alone in that.”
Weaver cleared her throat. “Ravi, maybe you could take Gillian to meet Radha and Glen? She really should meet the rest of the team.”
Muscles bulged along Ravi’s jaw, but like a pro he opened the door and waited for Gillian. She hesitated, shot me a look that said not to screw things up, then followed Ravi out. The bald Southeast Asian man settled in the doorway, positioned for a pivot and a clean shot at me should I prove to be a problem.
Weaver leaned forward with a soft grunt and said, “Triet?” She said it Americanized, like treat. When the bald-headed man turned and leaned into the room, she gave him a pleasant but no-bullshit smile. “Would you be so kind as to close the door? I’d like to talk with Mr. Mendoza privately.”
Triet did as ordered, but I caught his warning glance: I’ll be right outside the door.
“Would you help me to the bathroom, Stefan?” Weaver held out a hand covered with sensors and bandages.
For someone who’d just come out of a coma, she was surprisingly stable. She wrapped an arm around my waist, something I would have found comforting and promising before developing feelings for her daughter. Now everything felt awkward. Once through the door, she wobbled a bit. It would have taken nothing to push her toward the toilet, just let her head crack off the porcelain.
I grabbed her by the hips, pulled her upright.
She let out a surprised “oh” and held me tighter.
Once we reached the toilet, she lifted the back of her gown and lowered herself onto the seat. “They’ve been having me drink so much. I’m sure you understand.”
“Of course.” I turned for the door.
“It’s good to see Gillian happy. She’s had such a difficult life.” Sarcastic.
I glanced back, but Weaver’s head was down; I closed the door.
The operative in me wanted to finish the job. I searched for potential tools: sharp objects she could fall against, pillows to smother her with, poisons…anything that could pass for a natural death. My mind rebelled against the idea of killing her. It was the connection to Gillian. I’d come to terms with killing decent or innocent people long ago. If it meant serving the national interest, I had no compulsions at all about it. But now I was losing control, seeking excuses. Killing her should be just another payday, but wasn’t.
The toilet flushed. Water ran. It was too late. I had taken too long. Indecision.
I knocked. “You decent?”
The door opened, and she held out a hand. “I’ve been told I was pretty amazing.” Impish smile, twinkling eyes, probing for any chance I might still be interested.
I helped her onto the bed, scolding myself the whole way. She was suddenly a dirty old woman, desperate, trying to steal from her daughter. Where was the concern for someone who had a difficult life?
It was a weak attempt to turn her into a villain that I could hate and kill.
Weaver patted my arm. “Did Gillian tell you about her childhood?”
“We’ve mostly talked business.”
That assessing look and impish smile. “It doesn’t seem like you two have done much talking at all. But that’s fine. She seems to really care for you. What does she know about you? Your history with the Agency, the sort of work you do now? You do work now, right?”
Calm. Just stay calm. Don’t show a thing. “I’m a security consultant, like she said.”
“Ravi says he’s talked to some people. He’s former Agency, too. Hated it. Hated the way they exploit and destroy people while exporting chaos. We disagree about that. I think we need the Agency. Someone like you, with all your specialized military expertise, you’re classic recruit material. But they burn through your type so quickly, don’t they? Is that what happened to you? Did they abandon you after you proved to be too much trouble?”
“Aren’t those called leading questions?” I pulled my arm from her grip.
She grabbed my wrist with desperate strength. “Why were you at the Ming Dynasty that morning? Were you on assignment?”
“It was coincidence.” I pulled her hand away and set it on the blanket as gently as I could. “I should go.”
She waited until I was at the door before saying, “I don’t think I like the idea of Gillian sleeping with an older man, especially someone like you. Actually, I’m surprised she’s turned to men at all. Regardless, she’s too young and vulnerable. Her grandmother coddled her too much. She’s very naive and idealistic. Dangerously.”
I scraped to a stop. Threats were layered in there. My opportunity with Weaver had slipped away. “She’s an adult. I think she knows what she’s doing.” I opened the door.
“You have no idea who she is,” Weaver hissed.
Triet blocked the entry and craned his neck to look past me.
Weaver sighed. “Let him go.”
Triet stepped aside. Ravi and Gillian came into sight around the corner of the hallway to my right with another of the security team, a dark-haired kid who had gone into the Ming Dynasty, Ravi’s number one. The Indian guard to my left cocked his head curiously at me. Beyond him, a nurse walked toward us, engrossed in a data device held in her left hand. A pouch rode on her slender hip. She was long and lean, with black hair and a warm, olive skin tone beneath thick makeup. She wore dark blue scrubs but tight. Dangerously tight. Her pace was fluid, quick. Her back was erect. Nothing like the other nurses.
Maribel. She wouldn’t be alone, not in such a secure area.
There were a dozen people in scrubs of different colors. He could be—
A doctor rounded the corner behind Gillian and Ravi. Same build as Jose. Same efficient and confident stride. A surgical cap covered a black toupee. Greasy makeup covered his jaw where Chan’s flamethrower had struck.
They had managed to penetrate security somehow. Jacinto!
I shoved the Indian guard toward Maribel and shouted, “Ravi, assassins!”
Maribel reacted immediately, striking the Indian guard in the face with the data device. He gasped, staggered aside, then assumed a defensive stance—both arms up and a narrowed profile.
Triet pulled his weapon, first pointing it at me but shifting to Maribel when she pulled her transparent knife and sliced off the Indian guard’s forward hand at the wrist.
I fell back into the room as Triet opened fire. His pistol sounded more like a cannon.
They’d gone for more than just armor-piercing rounds.
It wasn’t enough.
Maribel took the round in her right shoulder and kept coming. She got to Triet as he put another round into her, center mass.
The blade took his gun arm off at the shoulder, then a slash severed his head, which bounced off the door and into the room.
Weaver screamed. Down the hall, gunfire. More screaming.
Maribel flicked gore off the knife blade and came at me.
The bullets had hurt her, slowed her, and I had seen her in action enough to know what was coming. I stepped in and barely got a hand under her forearm, deflecting her swing, then I kicked her in the knee.
She lost
balance for a second.
I kicked again, striking at the shin of the leg keeping her up. It bent when it should have snapped.
Maribel rolled away and regained her footing—unsteady but still upright.
I pressed the attack, feigning a kick and then striking her shoulder when she swung at my leg. She backpedaled into the hallway, nearly fell when the shin seemed to buckle.
I slammed the door and yelled at Weaver, “Get in the bathroom!”
There was no time to help her or even watch. The hallway door shuddered from a powerful impact. Maribel.
The handle twisted; I held it. Barely.
A cannon roared, and something whizzed close by my head. Triet’s pistol.
I dropped and rolled behind the chair as two more shots blew through the door and wall, tracking to where my chest had been.
Maribel flung the door open. The pistol came up.
I kicked the chair at her.
It shattered against the door and spoiled her shot. The round tore away a chunk of tile inches from my head. She fired again as I ran at her, grazing my left arm. It was still functional.
I slammed into her and drove her into the wall, gun arm pinned down against her bad leg.
Another shot, but this one came from the hallway.
She brought her free arm up for a fatal neck strike; I got a shoulder up. The impact knocked me away.
I held onto the gun arm.
Something moved in the doorway to my right.
Jose. Battered but still functional. He brought his knife up.
I hauled Maribel’s arm up just as the knife came at my back. The blade sliced through her just below the elbow, revealing the same innards as my own arm.
Maribel staggered out of the door, ruined arm flailing to keep her balance.
Jose froze.
I dropped to the floor, tore the gun out of Maribel’s hand, and put a round an inch above his eyes, tearing away a palm-sized piece from the top of his head. He convulsed but didn’t fall.
I fired again, this time blowing out his left eye.
He dropped the knife and collapsed to the floor.
Something that wasn’t quite blood—slick, almost clear—trickled from the wounds, carrying bits of brain inside.
I pulled a bullet from the gun as I got up, glanced at Weaver’s bed to be sure she wasn’t there, and ran into the hallway. Shoe prints tracked through the blood-covered floor. The Indian guard was down, slipping into shock. Farther out, the beefy man guarding the elevator was down, but there was no sign of blood.
Maribel was nowhere to be seen.
I pivoted to check the other end of the hallway. The guard from the Ming Dynasty was on the ground, bleeding out and twitching. Ravi leaned against the wall over a fallen form—Gillian!
I jumped over Triet’s corpse and ran to her. “Gillian!”
Ravi’s dazed eyes flicked up. “She’s fine. Knocked into the wall.”
I squatted next to her. She was trying to focus, trying just to breathe.
Ravi stumbled past me. “Senator Weaver?”
I brushed hair from Gillian’s face. I wanted to carry her away from the slaughter, to watch over her. I couldn’t. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
I helped Ravi past Triet and into Weaver’s room. The blankets were thrown back. The bathroom door was partially open.
Ravi took a clumsy step. “Senator Weaver? Kelly?”
He pushed the door open.
Weaver was face down on the floor. No blood. No visible wounds.
Ravi dropped to a knee beside her and put a hand to her throat. “No pulse! Get a nurse!”
I ran back into the hallway. Staff cowered behind whatever cover they had found—some in rooms, others around corners.
“Threat’s gone,” I shouted. “Senator Weaver needs attention. Move it!”
Two nurses rushed past me into the room. Of course they’d known Weaver was down. The remote sensors had probably fired off the second she stopped breathing, but no one was going to run into the middle of a firefight. I was being irrational.
I was throwing away the team’s payday.
Because of Gillian.
I ran back to check on her, cursing myself and the situation I’d fallen into and everything in the whole world.
I really had lost control.
Chapter 25
Robot janitors wheezed and whirred as they scrubbed blood from the walls and floor tiles in the hall outside Weaver’s room. Their efforts created a strawberry-colored slurry topped with a cherry-cream foam, all slurped up by a darting wheeled robot with a snaking tube attachment. I watched the clunky ballet from a prickly medieval torture device posing as a chair pressed against the wall across from Weaver’s open door. The detergent’s sharp chemical smell had given me a headache, but I couldn’t leave without clearance from the hospital’s director of security, and she was busy walking the police through her team’s crime scene analysis. I took another sip of the dark sludge the hospital drink machine sold as coffee, tried to find comfort in the earthy aroma, but settled on watching Gillian. She stood at the foot of her mother’s bed, arms crossed, head down. Ravi stood just to Gillian’s right, but they might as well have been miles away.
Hard-soled shoes scuffed across tile to my left. I looked up, saw Special Agent Lyndsey Hines wince as she sipped at a coffee cup from the same machine that had robbed me a few minutes earlier. She wore a brown jacket and long skirt that blended nicely with her skin. To no one in particular, she said, “Not even on my worst enemy.”
I snorted. “The coffee or your job?”
She pulled out a data device and pretended to type in notes while recording the hospital security director escort an Asian man in a gray business suit past the robots and into Weaver’s room. The door closed, and Lyndsey began to actually tap at the device screen.
The Asian man looked far too familiar to be coincidental. I needed to be sure. “Put that guy in a Chinese security officer’s uniform, and I swear I would recognize him.”
“Dong Jianjun.” She didn’t stop typing or look at me. “Officially, he’s a consultant. Like you.”
“Unofficially?”
She glanced at me, one eyebrow cocked. “Chinese Intelligence Service.” Like you.
I chuckled as she moved away, apparently recording the forensic tags the hospital team had left. When she returned, I saw the virtual bodies on the display and looked away.
“You okay?” she asked.
“That detergent. They must make it from acid.”
“Let’s take a ride.” She turned to go.
“I’m waiting on clearance from the security director.”
Lyndsey didn’t even slow. “All taken care of.”
We passed unconcerned police and curious hospital security personnel; they saw me on Lyndsey’s heel and went back to their work. She made a beeline to the elevators and didn’t slow until her back was to the wall and the door closed.
When the elevator started down, I asked her, “Want to tell me how Senator Weaver is connected to Stovall?”
“Who said she is?”
“You wouldn’t be here if she wasn’t. Or are you trying to connect everything through Ravi?”
“An attack on a sitting U.S. senator, and you don’t think the FBI cares? That’s rich.”
“How long did you spend at the scene? Ten minutes? Fifteen? That’s not a lot of caring.”
That rated a smirk. “I got what I needed.”
I left it alone. On the bottom floor, she swung by the cafeteria for a coffee and a red apple. I tried one too and quickly regretted it. There was no flavor, and the meat was dry and pulpy. I tossed it into a garbage bin as we exited the cafeteria.
She shook her head. “Mr. Moneybags. I pay a buck for something, I eat it.”
“It’s wasted money. I don’t need to punish myself more than that.”
When she opened the door to the parking lot, a frigid wind slapped me in the face. Lamps cast the vehicles an eerie
blue. She hurried to her car, popping open the doors remotely. I threw myself in beside her and shivered until the seat warmed my back. It was still a challenge truly feeling the cold in my core but not my extremities.
The motor hummed as it came to life, and she handed me her data device. “You ask some dangerous questions.”
Dong Jianjun stared at me from the screen. He sat in a restaurant booth across from someone blocked from the camera view. Once again, Dong was dressed in a simple business suit instead of a security uniform. The table had dishes on it—painted with an elegant style. Asian script and design. A small, handleless tea cup rested in front of his folded hands. I drilled in, studied the plate, saw what looked like remnants of noodles and vegetables and a brown sauce.
I had to be sure. “This the Ming Dynasty?”
“Good eye.”
The car backed out and headed for the street while Lyndsey tapped at another data device. A personal one, but still simple like the ones Chan had given us, not extravagant like Gillian’s. Money.
I took the image through every rotation I could, searching for reflective surfaces or other cameras. Nothing. “Is this from the night before the assassination attempt?”
“And a good guess. What aren’t you good at?”
“Giant intuitive leaps.”
“Or patience.” She sighed and bit into her apple, talking around it as she chewed. “Our friend Dong represents the interests of the Chinese government. You remember them? They want Senator Weaver to be President Weaver, prevent the Chinese corporations from becoming less Chinese.”
“Right.”
“So he’s a, shall we say, person of interest.”
“Wait. Are you saying the FBI is getting involved in elections now?”
“Now? Where the hell have you been your whole life?”
I stared out the window for a bit, watching the streetlights and cars. “You’re doing nothing to restore my faith in politics.”
“Not my job.” She finished off her apple and set the core into a small waste tray, then wiped her fingers and face with a towel, which went into the tray on top of the apple. “Don’t get your underwear all twisted up. We can’t get involved directly. We’ve got enough embarrassing incidents in our past that there’s specific legislation around what we can and can’t do. It’s just bad for business.”