Andrus was closing in.
She kicked out with both legs, connecting with the desk chair to send it rolling on its casters. The chair banged into Andrus’s knees. He pushed it aside, and by then she was on her feet. She grabbed for her purse, but he was too quick, almost intercepting her hand with his knife, and she had to retreat. She backed away as he advanced. The office was small, and the only exit was the door behind him, the door he had closed.
No way out.
"Gerry…" She could try to reason with him.
Didn’t work. The knife sprang at her again. She dodged sideways, evading the blow, but now she was trapped in a corner, with the file cabinet on one side and a blank wall on the other, Andrus drawing near.
He was tall. She had never realized how tall. In all the time they’d worked together in Denver…
Denver.
He’d been right there during the Mobius killings. And when he’d left town, the killings had stopped.
She should have seen it. Somehow she should have known.
The knife again. Circling toward her. She yanked out the top drawer of the file cabinet, blocking Andrus’s reach. He banged his wrist on the metal drawer and jerked his hand back, then jabbed at her underneath the drawer. He was quick; the strike just missed, the knife blurring past her midsection and driving into the wall. It was caught there, imbedded in the drywall that separated this office from the one next door.
She dived to the floor and snap-rolled past Andrus, or tried to, but he grabbed her by the hair. Sizzles of pain shot through her scalp as he wrenched her backward, and then she was staring up at him as he struggled to work the knife free of the wall, and she knew that once it was loose, he would run the blade across her throat.
His gun rode in his waistband holster, just above her. She grabbed at it, tried to wrest it loose. He released her hair and snatched her wrist, and she sprang upright, jerking him off balance as she threw her body sideways across the desk, slamming his elbow on the desktop, freeing her wrist from his grip, and now the purse was within reach and she closed her fingers over the strap.
He struck her face with the flat of his hand, a powerful blow that nearly knocked her unconscious, but somehow she held on to the purse and now her hand was inside, groping for the gun.
She curled her forefinger over the trigger and squeezed once, blowing a hole in the handbag.
The gunshot was curiously muffled. The purse had acted as a silencer, absorbing the noise. The dull crack of the gun’s report was a sound in a dream, and only the hard recoil made it real.
Andrus spun. She thought he’d been hit. No, he was pivoting away from her, diving behind the desk, and she knew he would draw his own gun, and in these close quarters the two of them might easily kill each other.
She took cover by the file cabinet, not an ideal position but the only one available.
Then Andrus was up and he fired twice, not aiming. She ducked as plaster showered her. Then the door was open, and Andrus was gone.
He’d fled into the hall. Maybe he was on his way back to the main room, hoping to take out some of the crowd—
Take out some of the crowd.
She looked at the computer on the desk, still displaying the newspaper story of a traumatized boy who had Gerald Andrus’s eyes.
And she knew.
Mobius had never been interested in the murder of random strangers. He had planted VX on the subway merely to implicate Hayde and give himself cover.
The deaths that mattered to him, the ones that counted, were always traceable to the defining incident in his life, the standoff in 1968, and the way it had ended—with his mother shooting him, then killing herself.
He hated her for what she’d done. Hated all women. Sought to dominate them, to bring them pain, and finally to take their lives.
But not just women. His mother hadn’t acted alone. In his mind, at least, she’d been driven to her final acts of violence—she’d been trapped, cornered—left with no escape except death.
They had done that. The sheriff’s deputies. Men with guns and badges. Officers of the law. Upholders of authority.
He must hate them, too.
All of them.
And now he had a command center crowded with them—windowless, airtight, five stories underground. A full complement of the top law enforcement officers in the city, along with the politicians they reported to.
A crowd of men with guns and badges, men he hated, men he intended to kill.
He hadn’t used most of the VX. He’d been saving it.
For them.
For now.
43
She had to warn them. No one had come this way, so presumably Andrus’s gunshots had gone unheard in the main room. As for Andrus himself—he was probably on his way out of the command center, leaving his victims to die when the VX was released…if it hadn’t been released already.
Tess opened the office door, risked a glance into the corridor.
Gunshot.
There was no sound this time, only a spray of drywall fragments inches from her head.
She ducked back inside, slammed and locked the door.
A silencer. He’d fitted his service pistol with a silencer.
And he’d been waiting for her—she wasn’t sure where—another office or an intersecting hallway. He intended to make sure she didn’t get out to warn the others.
In the subway he’d planted a vial of VX attached to a bomb. Probably he’d done the same thing here. He could have easily smuggled in the package, left it in the main room.
When the bomb went off and the vial burst, everyone within range would be sprayed with deadly droplets. No one was wearing any protective gear. Penetration of the skin, the eyes, the nostrils would be instantaneous—and fatal.
With only a few drops of VX dribbled into her motel room air conditioner, he had nearly killed her. Now he would release a hundred times as much—in a windowless subterranean chamber. Even those victims who weren’t splashed in the explosion would have trouble getting out before the fumes, rapidly circulating, began to do their work.
And all of this would happen at any minute. As soon as the bomb’s timer went off.
She had to clear the station. There must be a way.
By now Andrus might have left. He couldn’t hang around until the explosion, not if he wanted to survive.
She risked another look into the hall. Across the way, the door to another room hung open. Through the doorway she saw cardboard boxes, piles of equipment. Some sort of storage area.
Had the door been open when she’d come down the hall? Or had Andrus opened it, and was he hiding inside?
She glanced in both directions. To her left, a blank wall—dead end. To her right, several more doors, all closed, with the continuing hubbub of the main room audible in the distance, around the corner.
She had to risk leaving cover, even though in the corridor she would be exposed, vulnerable to Andrus if he was hidden anywhere along its length.
She lifted her gun, took a breath, and moved into the hall with one quick step, crossing to the far side and hugging the wall.
No sound but the distant voices.
No movement.
Except…
A crack of light, widening, in a doorway down the hall.
Someone was behind that door, easing it open, preparing to shoot.
On blind reflex she leaped into the storeroom, then shut and locked the door behind her.
Andrus hadn’t left.
And now she was trapped in here.
She looked around the room. Cartons, cleaning supplies, a rack of hazmat suits and helmets, six in all…
And the control panel for the public-address system. A microphone, a bank of illuminated push buttons, a pair of amplifier cabinets.
She scanned the panel, saw something labeled a voice-storage module with a list of prerecorded announcements pasted below. Announcement One was titled ALERT & EVAC.
She powered on the amplifier
s, activated the first announcement, and a female voice, deeper than her own, blared over the speaker in the ceiling and the other speakers throughout the complex.
"This is an alert. The premises are not secure. Evacuate immediately. This is an alert. The premises…"
Behind her, the door shuddered.
Andrus, shooting at the lock.
Tess ducked behind the PA console, and the door flew open.
She fired three rounds at the doorway before realizing that no one was there.
He’d shot off the lock, flung the door wide—and taken cover.
The recording continued. From the main room came shouts of authoritative voices telling the command center’s occupants to exit single-file, no delays, everybody out.
She shouldn’t leave the storeroom, not without knowing where he was, but she was tired of this cat-and-mouse game, so she burst into the hall, gun raised, ready to kill or be killed.
No one was there.
Andrus had left the area.
So what to do?
Make a run for it, she decided, join the crowd fleeing out the door. Leave Andrus down here, if he chose to hide and die. The VX fumes would get him—and if not, he would be trapped, caught in another standoff, like the one that had started it all in 1968.
She started down the hall, checking every door she passed, aware that Andrus could be concealed behind any one of them. The PA system bleated its insistent message all around her.
Turning the corner, she saw the main room straight ahead. Already it had mostly emptied out. The two LAPD representatives—the ones whose voices she’d heard—were hustling stragglers through the doorway.
And on a chair in the middle of the room, neatly draped without a crease—Andrus’s jacket.
That was where he’d left the bomb. Under his jacket, on the chair.
She opened her mouth to cry out, tell the policemen to grab the jacket and fling it away—
And the room exploded.
44
Noise, light, a shattering blast, and Tess pivoted and dived around the corner before she could be spattered with debris.
Her ears chimed. Bluish lights shimmered across her field of vision.
This bomb had been more powerful than the one in the subway. Mobius—Andrus—wasn’t fooling around here.
She struggled to her feet and dared a look back.
The main room was hidden in a cloud of smoke and dust and shining droplets that made rainbows in the air. The droplets were VX, and they were everywhere in the room.
She peered toward the exit. Had the last evacuees made it out? She couldn’t tell. The haze of debris was too thick.
All she could make out were a few overturned chairs and smashed computer consoles, and ragged pieces of Andrus’s jacket fluttering in the breeze from the air-conditioning.
The air-conditioning…which even now was drawing in the mist of VX, to circulate it throughout the complex.
The filters were designed to screen out toxins only from outside. Against a nerve agent already inside the command center, the filters would be useless.
She couldn’t exit through the main room. To go in there would mean instant death.
But there was no other way out.
She was stuck in here, and all she could do was wait until the AC system brought the gas to her. It wouldn’t take long.
Her best bet was to take refuge in the rear of the facility, as far from the main room as possible.
She retreated down the hall to the last two doorways, the office and the storeroom. The office, she supposed, was a better refuge. It had a phone and a computer—maybe she could get in touch with the outside world. There was nothing in the storeroom except the PA system, still repeating its idiot spiel, and some boxes and gear and—
The hazmat suits.
A rack of them. She’d seen them when she’d entered, though she had barely registered their existence at the time.
She darted into the storeroom, and yes, there they were, five orange suits and matching helmets.
Five…
There had been six before.
Then she understood.
Andrus had forced open the door in order to draw her out. He hadn’t wanted to engage her in a firefight. He had wanted—needed—access to the suits.
While she’d gone down the hall and nearly walked right into the explosion, he’d been suiting up. Now he was in a mobile self-contained environment, breathing filtered air, protected from exposure. He was safe even in this toxic atmosphere.
And she could be, too.
She grabbed a suit from the rack and spread it out on the floor, then prepared to step into it. To do so, she would have to put down her gun. For a minute or two she would be completely vulnerable. If Andrus crept up, he could take her out before she had any chance to react.
Couldn’t be helped. She had to get into the suit or the fumes would kill her.
She set the gun down, then slipped her feet inside the baggy socks built into the suit. She pulled the suit up around her armpits, then worked her arms into the sleeves until her hands had filled out the heavy-duty rubber gloves attached by gaskets. A row of yellow rubber boots lay underneath the suits. She slipped into the nearest pair.
The suit wasn’t heavy, but it was large—at least one size too big for her—and awkward to handle, and she found herself struggling with the thick folds of neoprene rubber. A seam, similar to the closure of a Ziploc bag, ran up the suit from the midsection to the chin. She pressed the flaps together, sealing the front of the suit.
Now only her head was exposed. She removed a helmet from the shelf above the rack. It was not a hard plastic shell like an astronaut’s helmet, but rather a loose tent of cloth with a flexible face mask in front, and when she dropped it over her head she felt as if she were enclosed in a bubble. Another Ziploc seal secured the bubble helmet to the suit, and now she was fully protected.
A rush of claustrophobia drained her strength, and for a moment she had a suicidal impulse to remove the helmet. She fought off the fear.
The air trapped in the suit would go stale in only a few minutes. She groped for the battery-operated air pack at the back of the suit and turned it on.
The electric blower came to life, and the suit puffed up with an inflow of air. Filters in the built-in air circulation system would screen out VX and any other toxin. At least, that was the theory.
The suit, inflated, had swelled to twice its original size. Instead of hanging off her, it was now as hard and smooth as an exoskeleton. She must look like the Michelin Man. The thought almost made her smile, but the smile died when she noticed a fine mist clouding the room.
The VX had made its way through the complex’s air-conditioning vents. The storage room was filling with it. If she’d been a minute slower in donning the suit, she would be dying right now.
45
She picked up her gun, holding it awkwardly in her gloved hand. Carefully she tried inserting her forefinger between the trigger and the trigger guard. Couldn’t do it. The glove, swollen with air, made it impossible to get a grip on the trigger. She was unable to shoot.
Of course, Andrus couldn’t use his gun either.
Over the roar of the blower, the PA continued its announcement. She turned to the control panel and shut it off.
"Hi, Tess."
Andrus’s voice, close to her ear. He was right behind her. She tried to pivot, but the clumsy suit made any quick motion impossible. Slowly she turned in a graceless pirouette, an oversize ballerina in a puffy suit. She expected to come face-to-face with Andrus and see the lifted muzzle of his gun.
But he wasn’t there. The room was empty except for her.
"Hope I didn’t startle you."
His voice, as close as ever. She realized it was coming from inside her suit.
The bubble helmet was equipped with a radio set—microphone and speaker. He was addressing her over the air, from the transceiver in his own suit.
"I don’t startle that easil
y," she lied.
"Don’t you? Funny. I could have sworn I heard you gasp. But I could be wrong. After all, I also thought you’d be dead by now."
He’d assumed she’d been killed in the explosion. That was why he hadn’t lingered by the storeroom to get the drop on her.
But silencing the PA system had been a giveaway that she was still alive. And he must know where she was—at the control panel.
She had to get out of here before he came this way. Shuffling in her rubber boots, she moved toward the door.
"You’ve spoiled things, Tess." He was trying to sound cool, faintly amused, but she heard the undertone of raw anger in his voice. "My careful plans have been shot to hell—and all because of you."
"Sorry."
"You’re not. But I’ll make you sorry. You’re not getting out of this. You’re going to die down here."
"It’s your own future I’d be concerned about, if I were you."
Out in the hall now. Moving in the suit was hard work—like wading through thick silt or operating under the higher gravity of an alien planet. Her faceplate had fogged up with sweat. She rubbed her face against the visor to clear it.
"Not at all," Andrus said. "I intend to come out of this just fine. An hour from now, I’ll be safe…and free."
She glanced inside the office across the corridor. Andrus wasn’t there. The office looked eerily normal, a place of business like any other, except for the knife—Mobius’s knife, a knife that had slit throats—still stuck in the wall.
She hesitated, then took a step inside the office.
"How will you manage that trick?" she asked.
"Before long, a hazmat team will enter this installation. I’ll blend in with them, leave with them. Easy enough—these suits all look alike."
"They’ll be looking for you."
"Eventually—but at first they’ll assume I was killed in the blast. They’ll mourn for their beloved assistant director, I’m sure. But they’ll forget one thing."
"What’s that?"
"It’s Easter, Tess—and I am the resurrection and the life."
Next Victim Page 27