Into Twilight (The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Book 1)
Page 33
“Who do you work for?”
My world slipping away. My freedom. I couldn’t scream despite the pain and fury.
“Who do you work for?”
“No one, motherfucker.” I was sure I screamed it. I felt it in my chest—rumbling, rasping.
My eyes came back online.
The sky was a gray so dark, it could have been a moonless night. Smoke and fire climbed skyward from a hole in the wall far above. Blue and red flashes—police bar lights—reflected off that wall and smoke. The bomb shield’s blast panels fluttered above, chasing me down. Ravi’s corpse trailed smoked.
I twisted. The man-made lake was blacker than the sky above, closing. Closing.
Impact.
The air went out of me in lazy, fat bubbles. Ravi carried me deeper, still testing me even beyond death. Dark water became thick, black hair that tugged and entangled. Its bone-numbing cold was a pressure against my chest. I shivered, felt the descent stop with a gentle bump.
I needed to swim. Find the bubbles and go where they went.
I pushed Ravi’s body away and tried to orient myself. If I wasn’t so desperate for air, I could blow a few bubbles and follow them up, but my lungs were empty. Or I could relax and hope my body had some sort of buoyancy despite the lack of air and the cybernetic limbs and reinforced bones.
No such luck.
My eyes! Infrared. Ultraviolet. Something had to work!
Something had stopped my descent. The lake bottom! How far away now? I kicked out, flailed with my arms.
Dead vegetation, mud.
I needed to breathe. I needed to get out of the lethal cold.
I got both feet under me, squatted, and kicked off.
Rising. Kicking. Swimming through darkness. Fighting against the urge to breathe.
Light! The fire in Weaver’s room!
I broke the surface, sucked in the wintry air.
More lights off to my left. Red. Blue. White.
Police.
The fire was barely visible now. What had there been to feed it? The curtains, the bedding? Weaver’s body? Gillian? The sprinkler system would work, with or without power.
I spun around and kicked for the opposite side of the lake, then quickly realized I had to get out. Right then. The water would kill me if I wasn’t careful.
The water became shallow, then I was at the shore, hauling myself out, staying low to the ground. I needed a plan. My data device was gone. My cybernetic implant was trashed. There was no way to reach the rest of the team, assuming they were still alive. Had Stovall found them after they’d come out of hiding?
Voices. Lights flashing in the rain.
I had my bearings now, so I crawled for the parking garage as fast as I could. Weaver’s SUVs, Gillian’s car, even a random vehicle—I needed something to get me out of the area.
A couple police in rain slickers stood at lake’s edge maybe thirty-five or forty feet away, running flashlights across the lake surface. Their voices were a muddy jumble that could have come from fifty yards away. They squatted and threw legs over the edge, then climbed down to the slippery lakeside. I scrambled up and out, rolled clear, then low-walked to the nearest car.
Emergency vehicles were everywhere. People huddled at the far end of the parking lot, taking shelter under tarps and umbrellas.
All eyes were on the blown-out window. A team had to be inside the hospital, heading up.
I got up and ran for the parking garage, sliding on the thin film of ice that still remained over frozen pools in the covered areas. I followed the stairs up to the secure floor, then back down one level. Somewhere in there, my hearing started to return. At first it was the dull boom of my steps, but before long, I could make out the scrape of shoe sole on concrete.
The spiral ramp led up to the secure level and stopped at the gate. With power off, the cameras weren’t going to capture my image, and the alarms were offline. I dropped to the concrete, pushed the gate up, and slid under.
Getting back up was harder than dropping down. My abdomen and back cramped up. I was shivering, cramping, and it threatened to leave me immobile. I rubbed my sides and tried again from all fours. That worked, but the cramps still worked at me. I needed to warm up soon.
I found Gillian’s car. It was a basic enough model that I knew several methods for overcoming its security. I went with the crudest, popping the biometrics module from the undercarriage beneath the driver’s door. That rendered the vehicle security-free, which would have to do.
Without security, the door opened easily enough. I climbed in and turned the seat heater on; the quick wave of heat along the length of my back was ecstasy.
Just as I reached for the car’s start button, I spotted the beam of a flashlight. I dropped down so that only one eye was above the bottom of the window. Two police officers came into view, a man and a woman, both of them large in their rain slickers. A woman trailed them—black, late thirties or early forties, round cheeks, full lips with red lipstick.
Lyndsey. She wore a sand-colored coat over another brown pantsuit.
They moved toward the SUVs, running flashlights along the windows and leaning in to search the interior, then they moved to the other vehicles.
No way could I avoid detection.
There were only three of them, but they all had guns, and I was unarmed.
They separated as they came to the row of vehicles the car was in, and began calling out updates. Names. They were identifying who might be missing. It didn’t seem likely they had found the bodies already.
Lyndsey circled the car next to the one I was in. Could I trust her? I couldn’t see any other choice.
I rapped the window with a knuckle.
She spun, reached for her gun, then stopped. She turned toward the two cops and set her gun hand on the car roof. “All right,” she said. “I’ll get the last few. If you could get me an update on the limo up on the roof, that would be wonderful.”
The cops glanced at each other, then headed back the way they’d come.
Lyndsey waited a minute, then she walked to the other side of the car. I opened the door. Without the shades, I could see that her eyes were a brown the shade of a washed-out teakwood, and there were puffy bags beneath them. As she dropped into the seat, those eyes stayed locked with mine.
“Pretty ugly ride for an Agency man,” she said.
“Former Agency man.”
“Got your gift.” She snorted when my eyebrows went up. “Maribel Clavel. You sure know how to treat a lady nice.”
“She wasn’t a lady.”
Lyndsey leaned closer and sniffed at me. “You in that explosion?”
“Outer edge of it.” I held up my hands, examining them for the first time. Mud stained the creases. Sections of skin had been burned. My coat was darkened the length of my forearms.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“I guessed wrong. You’re going to find Ravi Lingam’s body in the lake.”
“And Senator Weaver?”
“Dead, up in the hospital room. Along with Gillian McFarland, the senator’s daughter.”
She rocked in the seat for a moment. “How’d you guess wrong?”
“I thought Ravi was…the mole. It’s complicated.”
“So it was Weaver’s kid? I told you she was a dangerous kid.”
“Yeah.” The shakes hit me again. I could tell myself it was Dong’s doing, that I would’ve seen through Gillian’s manipulation without the interference. Maybe I would have.
“Police say the fire department just radioed about finding a lot of charred bodies about seventy miles north of here. A big mansion, blown up and burned to the ground. Two more bodies with multiple bullet wounds out on the lawn, sprawled out near a couple air limos like the one sitting up on the hospital roof. Are they going to find your fingerprints anywhere?”
“No. You’ll find Dong Jianjun inside the mansion. The others were members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And a big Greek guy I don�
�t know. Nikos. Their muscle.”
She shook her head. “You get out of bed wrong today?”
“Self-defense. They hired me for a job. I refused.”
Those teakwood-colored eyes tracked across my face. “What now?”
“I need to disappear. Stovall’s still out there. I don’t know where my team is, but if they’re alive they know to hide.”
She pulled her shades out of the interior pocket of her coat and slipped them on. “You could always turn state’s evidence, testify against him. Folks find out the Agency’s up to illegal activities, lots of things would change.”
I started the car and turned the heat on full. “I would never live long enough to testify. Neither would Stovall.”
“You be careful out there, Mendoza.” She popped the door open and got out. “Lots of people’re going to be gunning for you.”
I squeezed the steering wheel. “I’ll be waiting.”
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THE END
Acknowledgments
Thank you so much for reading Into Twilight. When I created the setting for Jack Rimes and the ERF, my influences were largely SF literature and cinema classics from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. But there were other influences, among them the cyberpunk works of Gibson, Williams, and Sterling. Corporations run amok, conspiracies, intrigue, and governments either incapable of leadership or unwilling to provide it in crises where it’s most needed—that defines cyberpunk. And those times create the ultimate in anti-heroes. Enter Stefan Mendoza.
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If you enjoyed this book, I hope you’ll give the rest of the trilogy a shot. Reviews and word of mouth are always appreciated, and they’re the best means of a book finding success.
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For updates on new releases and news on other series, please visit my website and sign up for my mailing list at:
http://www.p-r-adams.com
About the Author
I was born and raised in Tampa, Florida. I joined the Air Force, and my career took me from coast to coast before depositing me in the St. Louis, Missouri area for several years. After a tour in Korea and a short return to the St. Louis area, I retired and moved to the greater Denver, Colorado metropolitan area.
I write speculative fiction, mostly science fiction and fantasy. My favorite writers over the years have been Robert E. Howard, Philip K. Dick, Roger Zelazny, and Michael Crichton.
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