by Greg Rucka
Carrington went silent, giving everyone time to take in what he was saying. Hayes, for his part, no longer cared. He could feel the tension thrumming in waves from his father, feel his own anxiety rising.
Not long now, Hayes thought.
“You’ll control the Board of Directors,” DeVries said, realizing.
“At which point I will promptly name you the new CEO of dataDyne,” Carrington said, and this time, when he smiled, DeVries smiled in return. “Didn’t I say you could trust me, Cassandra?”
“Yes,” she said, and Hayes was appalled to see her reach out across the table and take one of Carrington’s hands in both of her own, squeezing it. “Yes, you did, and I should have believed you.”
“You forgive me now?”
“Of course I do.” She let go of his hand, getting to her feet quickly, and Hayes thought the woman was so excited she would begin bouncing around the room. “I should get back to Paris, I assume you’ll want to do this immediately, yes? I should be ready.”
“Do that. Contact me as soon as you arrive. I’ll have Doctors Rose and Murray make their announcement.” Carrington’s smile was now so broad, Hayes thought it threatened to split the man’s face. “I’ll contact you as soon as Rose is ready to make his statement.”
DeVries seemed to lose direction for a moment, and then she suddenly moved to come around to Carrington’s side of the table. Joanna took a step forward, then stopped as Carrington held up a hand.
Hayes had to look away when DeVries kissed the old man on the cheek.
“Anita, let’s go,” DeVries said, and together the two women left the room.
Carrington’s smile remained in place, and he settled it once more on Hayes and his father. Doctor Murray shifted in his seat, then reached out for the table, making to stand.
“I won’t stay—”
“Sit down,” Carrington barked, and Hayes, his nerves already drawn as taut as piano wire, jumped.
His father sat back down. “Obviously, my presence here is a waste of time, Mister Carrington. You’ve made up your mind, and clearly will not be dissuaded. You have Rose, you don’t need me.”
“And Rose is the one who I want to see pay for what he did,” Carrington said. “If you didn’t create the superflu, if it was Rose alone who was responsible, I’m giving you a chance to say so publicly. To defend yourself. If you choose to leave now, you will lose that opportunity, sir.”
“Or I could have Laurent simply kill you both.”
“He hasn’t had much luck ending Joanna’s life as yet,” Carrington observed. “And even if he should be successful, it does nothing to solve your problems with Doctor Rose. Do you want to risk the chance of him escaping? Do you intend to kill DeVries, as well? Ms. Velez?”
Hayes looked down at his father, saw that Carrington had successfully taken the wind out of his sails.
Then, at once muffled and amplified by the concrete around them, they heard a gunshot.
CHAPTER 32
Carrington Institute “Cooler” Facility—8 km N of St. Harmon—Wya Valley, Wales October 16th, 2020
“Doctor—”
Cassandra held up a finger to her mouth, spinning around on the staircase as she motioned Velez for silence. For a second, she didn’t move, listening. From above, she could still hear the sound of Daniel’s voice, rumbling along the hallway.
God, does that man like to talk, she thought.
Quietly, she continued down the stairs to the ground floor, waited for Velez to join her. The older woman’s expression was pure frustration, the most emotion that Cassandra had yet to see from her. Cassandra reached out, putting a hand to the other woman’s cheek, drawing her head down so she could put her mouth to Velez’s ear.
“I once asked you for a chance to regain your trust, Anita,” Cassandra whispered. “Do as I ask you to, and I shall, right now.”
Velez turned her head, still with Cassandra’s hand on her cheek, her eyes narrowing with suspicion. She whispered in return, saying, “Carrington will destroy dataDyne.”
“I know—unless we stop him.”
The suspicion faded.
“What do you want me to do?”
“Follow me. When you see the opportunity, neutralize Mister Steinberg,” Cassandra said softly. “Quickly, quietly, and nonlethally if you can.”
“You want him left alive?”
“I do.”
Velez nodded, then straightened, and Cassandra let her hand drop from the woman’s face, then moved back onto the stairs, continuing down to the basement. Steinberg, still waiting by the door to the makeshift cell, watched as she descended.
“Can I help you, Doctor?”
Cassandra approached, Velez following, smiling softly. “Anita has told me something about you, Mister Steinberg. I was wondering if you might be interested in a business proposition.”
Steinberg glanced to Velez, then back to her, at once wary and amused. “I think you’re a very attractive woman, Doctor, but I’m afraid my heart belongs to another.”
Cassandra laughed softly, shaking her head, and Steinberg grinned, and that was when Velez kicked him in the stomach. He saw it coming, but not in time, and the blow hit hard enough that Cassandra was certain she heard the breath exploding out from the man’s mouth as he fought to keep from pitching over.
Then Velez had one hand around his wrist, twisting his gun hand savagely, and with her other, she struck him sharply at the base of the skull. Steinberg went flat, motionless, and Velez had the revolver in her hand and dropped to one knee beside him, quickly finding the key to the cell in his pocket.
As she came back to her feet, Cassandra said softly, “Give me the gun.”
“I can’t, Doctor. I can’t let you shoot him.”
“I’m not going to shoot him,” Cassandra said. “Give me the gun, Anita.”
Velez frowned, looking at the revolver in her hand, then handed it over. Then she turned and unlocked the door to the boiler room.
“Wait outside,” Cassandra told her.
Rose’s expression changed from alarm to relief when he saw her, then turned back to alarm when he saw the gun in Cassandra’s hand.
“It’s not my fault,” Rose said. “I was just doing my job.”
“Believe me, I know,” she said. “If anyone here is a victim of circumstance, Doctor Rose, it is you.”
His eyes shifted nervously, jumping from her face to the gun in her hand.
“But you have a problem now, Doctor,” Cassandra continued. “Your secret is out, and whether you are responsible or not is no longer the point. The point is that the entire world will know your name, and they will know what you did, and your intentions in doing it will not matter in the slightest.”
“It was my job,” Rose repeated. “I saw my opportunity and I took it. That was my only crime, and it was no crime at all.”
“We all make mistakes, Doctor, and if we’re lucky, we can live them down. But you won’t. If you give Carrington what he wants, what you will have will not be a life. If you are lucky, it may be an existence, at least for a short while. Doctor Murray has tried to have you killed. Imagine what will happen when all of the relatives, all of the friends, all of the lovers of those who perished from your disease, from Rose’s Flu, learn your name.”
“It wasn’t my fault.” His voice came out in a whisper now. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Thirty-seven million dead.” Cassandra set the revolver on the table in front of him, the single bulb hanging from the ceiling making the silver barrel appear to glow against the ratty tabletop. “Mankind will forget the name of Hitler before they forget the name of Thaddeus Rose.”
Then Cassandra turned and stepped back out of the room, nodding to Velez to close the door. She heard it swing shut, heard the latch fall into place.
She was halfway up the stairs when she heard the shot.
Velez started at the noise.
Cassandra did not.
CHAPTER 33
Carrin
gton Institute “Cooler” Facility—8 km N of St. Harmon—Wye Valley, Wales October 16th, 2020
Jo heard the shot, and she knew it was Steinberg’s gun, and her first thought was that Rose had tried to make a break for it. Even before Carrington could tell her to do so, she’d pivoted to the security console, flicking on the camera controls. The monitors lit one at a time in rapid succession, showing the different surveillance views scattered about the listening post.
She saw Velez and DeVries leaving the basement, and that made no sense, because they should have already left.
She saw Steinberg, facedown on the basement floor, and for an instant thought she’d forget how to breathe.
Then she saw Doctor Thaddeus Rose, his head resting on the table in the boiler room, and it would have been easy to believe he was asleep, except the back of his head was missing. She looked for the weapon he’d used, but didn’t see it on the table or on the ground, and wondered if it had fallen into his lap.
She saw all of these things, and at once realized that everyone else in the room, Carrington, Murray, and Laurent Hayes, were seeing them, as well.
“You’ve just lost your bargaining power, Mr. Carrington. How unfortunate,” Doctor Murray said. “Now, Laurent.”
Jo didn’t even bother to turn toward Carrington, just threw herself backwards into the air, angling for the table. She had the Falcon in its holster at her back, but there wasn’t time, and she knew that, and right now it was all about time, and the fact that there wasn’t enough of it.
She beat Laurent Hayes, but just barely, twisting as she hit the table on her side to face him, catching hold of one of his outstretched arms as the man lunged for Carrington’s throat. She pulled him with her, yanking him out of his trajectory and forcing him to follow hers, and instead of fighting her, he went with it, and together they tumbled across the table and crashed onto the concrete floor. They separated immediately, and Jo arched her back and got her feet beneath her, springing upright again, thinking that she’d be up before him, that she’d beat him on speed every time in the past.
Except this time, and she wasn’t yet on her feet when the kick connected high on her left side, and she felt her ribs give with the impact, flexing nearly to the breaking point. The blow sent her down once more, sprawling across the floor, and she felt the rough concrete raking her face and hands, and this time Jo didn’t even have her legs beneath her before Laurent Hayes was on her again.
He stomped on her back, at the base of her spine, and the pain and the panic both hit at once, and Jo screamed in outrage as much as remembered agony, trying to twist out of the pin. She felt his hand touching her skin for an instant, realized he’d seen the Falcon and was going for it, and that once he had it, he’d shoot Carrington, then her, and in the strange adrenaline-stretched time that her perception had become, she thought that it wasn’t fair, that it was just like her father’s death all over again, that it would be her fault, all over again.
She couldn’t push up, she just wasn’t strong enough, but she could move, and as she felt Hayes pulling the gun free, she swung her legs around, both together, putting all of the motion into her hips. It felt awkward and weak, but it was enough, and his foot slipped free of her, and she finished the motion on her back, bringing her legs up. He’d brought the Falcon around, trying to get a bead on Carrington, and to Jo’s eyes it seemed that Daniel was diving for cover with all the speed and grace of a collapsing glacier. The gun cracked, the shot missing, and Jo had her legs perpendicular now, snapping her ankles together in a scissor around Hayes’s outstretched arm, still using the muscle momentum to continue her flip, trying to twist again onto her belly, to bring Hayes down with her.
It worked and it didn’t. Hayes lost the gun, but had to yank himself free to keep from falling. Jo continued the move, now with her hands beneath her, and she flipped herself up, over, coming down on her feet just as Hayes roared and kicked at her again. He was fast, faster than he’d been before, she was sure of it, and if he was a better fighter, if he had been a soldier, perhaps, and not a killer, he’d have picked his attacks more carefully. But he was motivated by hatred, Jo realized, by his desire to shame her and hurt her and punish her, and because of that he kicked high, for her face, and that slowed him down.
She bobbed out of the kick, answered it with a one-two punch of her own, and the first he blocked, but the second he didn’t. Jo felt the satisfaction of her fist finding purchase against his sternum, and Hayes backpedaled, trying to get more room to move, and each ended up with an arm’s length between them, and began circling.
“You’re dinner,” Hayes told her. “You’re my meat.”
“My daddy loved me,” Jo said. “Does yours?”
Hayes roared again, feinted a kick, and then punched at her face with his right. She caught the feint in time, not buying it, but the punch came faster and harder than she’d expected, and her block was incomplete. She felt her nose sting, felt the instant heat of blood coming loose from her nostrils.
“That’s good, bleed for me,” Hayes said.
“It’s not about blood, asshole,” Jo told him. “It’s about winning.”
He swung at her again, and she danced back, then realized, almost too late, what he was trying to do. Hayes dove low, past her side, trying to reach the Falcon on the floor, and the decision and the move confirmed two things that Jo had already begun to suspect. The first was that he really didn’t know how to fight, at least not with his hands and his feet. He had strength, he had speed, but he didn’t know how to use them. All of his strikes had been to noncritical areas or to badly chosen ones, consistently going high, trying to give her wounds that would satisfy his hatred, rather than injuries that would end the fight.
The second was that he was afraid of pain, that each time she’d landed a hit, or threatened to, he’d backed off.
She let him take the gun, heard him cry out in triumph, and as he came up with it, she put an elbow into his face, and then a fist into the side of his wrist. He cried out, lost the gun a second time, and once more staggered back, now with a nosebleed to match Jo’s own. As he pulled away, Jo put her toe into the side of the Falcon, sending it skittering across the floor, beneath the table and to the open door onto the hallway.
Hayes was wiping blood from his nose, trying to ignore his bleeding while keeping his eyes on her. From the corner of her eye, Jo could see both Doctor Murray and Carrington trying to stay out of their way, each of them attempting to edge toward the exit at the same time. Jo shifted to her left, trying to block Murray’s progress while giving Carrington an opening, but as soon as he moved, Hayes compensated as well.
“Come on,” she told Hayes. “This is what you’ve been waiting for, isn’t it? Come and hurt me.”
Hayes swiped at the blood on his face again, feinted left, then tried to kick high to her right, going for her head. Again he was quick, almost quick enough to do it, but again he’d picked a bad target, and Jo snapped a front kick to his shin before he’d completed his execution. Hayes cried out in pain, hobbling back again.
The exchange had pulled her out of position, though, and she saw Doctor Murray break for the door, but duck as he did it, and she realized that he, like his adopted son, wanted the Falcon. But unlike with Hayes, she couldn’t let him get it, he had too much distance on her.
Jo pivoted, throwing herself over the table at Murray, hearing Hayes screaming obscenities at her as she did so. She caught the doctor in the side just as he’d reached the pistol, and he couldn’t get a grip on it, and the gun, Doctor Murray, and Jo all went crashing out into the hallway.
“Wrong move, bitch,” Hayes shouted at her from inside the room, and Jo looked up to see that he’d reached Carrington, had one hand at the older man’s throat, the other at the back of his head. “Want to see me rip his head off?”
“Don’t!” Jo scrambled to her feet, raising her hands. Out of the corner of her eye, from the stairwell, she saw motion, someone rushing up to their floor, ei
ther Velez or DeVries. She didn’t know, and she didn’t dare to look away from Hayes. “Leave him alone!”
“No, no no no, you get to watch me kill him, and then I’m going to kill you,” Hayes said.
Held in Hayes’s grip, she could see Carrington struggling for air, his cheeks flushing red. He wouldn’t be able to take the hold for long, she realized, and she had no doubt that Hayes would do as he threatened.
Jo stepped back, putting her foot against the side of Doctor Murray’s neck. “You do it, I’ll kill him.”
Murray croaked out something, perhaps a plea, but Hayes didn’t blink, didn’t even hesitate.
“You don’t have the balls,” he said. “You’re not a killer, you’re just some girl pretending to be one. You won’t do it.”
He tightened his grip around Carrington’s throat, using his hand to force the old man higher, onto his tiptoes.
The movement in her periphery had stopped, and Jo saw something glinting, a flash of metal off to her right. She saw Velez moving into view, pressing herself against the wall.
Jo removed her foot from Murray’s neck, exhaling hard. She forced her hands to unclench, opened her palms, turning them out, away from her body.
“You’re right, I can’t kill him,” she said.
“Too bad,” Hayes said.
Then Velez threw Jo the revolver, the bulky, silver-barreled DY357 Magnum that Steinberg carried, the one she hadn’t seen in Rose’s hand or lap because it hadn’t been there to see.
The one she hated because it was just like her father’s.
Jo swept her right hand up, palm out, catching the gun without looking away from Hayes, and all in the same motion, brought the weapon around, firing once.
As always, the bullet went exactly where she wanted it to go.
“But I sure as hell can kill you,” Jo told him.