The gun just hovers there, tight in his grip. Aimed right for Mark’s heart.
Mark calms himself, still mapping the room. “Why not just do it the easy way? I know right where the stuff is located. I can tell you that and you can just let us go. We’ll disappear, nice and clean. No one else has to get hurt.”
“We could do it that way. But in case my point has not been made perfectly clear, I don’t believe in true love . . .”
His finger begins to squeeze the trigger.
“. . . and I don’t think I trust you anymore either.”
• • •
There’s one last moment before everything goes crazy. One last frozen instant before Ken’s finger squeezes the trigger. Mark sees the look in his eyes, which betrays fear. A terrible, deep lasting fear of something. He’s seen the same look on the faces of other dictators, other operatives, other victims who died under his cruel hand . . .
But this . . .
This is something even bigger.
Then the moment is over.
And all that’s left is what happens next.
• • •
The big black truck arrives at the front gate, fog lights beaming through the mist. The sentry with the down jacket has his hand on his sidearm as the window rolls down, and Reggie Cates is leaning out with a goofy shiteater on his dumb round face: “Hey, dude, can you help me out here? I think I took a wrong turn or something.”
“What seems to be the trouble?”
And even Reggie has to stand back in awed wonder at the sheer redneck dumbness of answering such an obvious question that way. I was asking for directions back to the freeway, idiot. That’s what he wants to say, but instead he starts laughing as stone-cold Xion Baxter slips the razor noose over the sentry’s neck from behind and deprives him of his voice, his air, and his life in about ten seconds.
• • •
At the same moment, the four men hiding in the tree line make their collective move. Only one of the METRO agents on the grounds notices them coming in for the kill. He almost draws his gun before something wet and final slams into his throat and puts him down fast. Like his buddy on the gate, he never has any idea what hits him. Neither do the other men. They all die at the same time.
Tex Smith stands over the body of the agent who almost drew his gun, his knife coated in blood. Sees his men standing over their marks, and they all squawk in silently. Smooth as glass, he thinks.
Then he speaks into a very secure channel on his headset: “Store’s open, boss.”
There are six dead men in the yard and at least three more cops or agents or whatever the hell they are in the house waiting for the slaughter. The truck rolls silently into the clearing, shutting off its lights. Stone-cold Xion Baxter is right behind the truck, his hands dripping with blood.
Tex just loves it when a plan comes together.
• • •
Marty McFly decides he needs a cigarette, and because everybody’s just so darn PC these days, he decides he’ll have it on the front porch. He leaves his guard post on Jollie and Andy’s basement door and begins to walk toward the front foyer, completely unaware that he’s about to be killed.
And—
• • •
Dictator Ken fires his first shot at Mark Jones.
Mark feels the superheat of the slug as it sizzles past his face, his whole body coiling like a giant spring, his feet bouncing him forward, launching like a rocket across the desk, his hand slapping the hot muzzled snarl of Ken’s pistol sideways so that the next shot takes a bite out of the ceiling and sprinkles the room with plaster chips and wood debris. Mark’s right hand grabs the gun and he looks into Dictator Ken’s face, which snarls in his—you fucking shit bastard punk FUCK!—and Mark’s other hand grabs for the Vestika in his right cargo-shorts pocket.
But he doesn’t do it fast enough.
Ken’s fist slams into him from nowhere and knocks him off the desk. Mark drops the Vestika in that moment and eats the hardwood floor.
And he hears someone laugh.
• • •
As we discussed earlier, a gun with a silencer makes a lot of noise. Exactly how much noise depends on where you bought your hardware. Top-of-the-line weapons with state-of-the-art suppression devices can be even louder than the really cheap ones. Some of them sound like hard metal punching against plastic, popping in a cramped room—your basic muted cherry bomb. Others make this odd BAMFF noise, like a car backfiring. The practical idea behind a silencer is that the long-range acoustics are dampened and the sound doesn’t carry far—so you can kill someone quick and, even though they’ll definitely still hear it in the next room, the neighbors won’t freak and the cops won’t come running.
Texarkana Smith hears the two shots from upstairs loud and clear.
Marty McFly hears them too—but he’s still in the process of lighting a smoke with both hands, just as he walks out onto the front porch and runs right into Tex and stone-cold Xion Baxter. The shots, Marty was expecting. This just stops him right there and freezes his heart in his throat.
“Howdy.”
That’s Tex, with his gun out.
Xion is right behind him, clomping onto the porch in his heavy boots, coming right at McFly with the razor-wire garrote.
• • •
Ken doesn’t fire again when he has the chance, which very nearly kills him. Mark’s foot snakes out as the big man pushes the desk aside with one king-hell grunt, and the snaking foot almost makes Ken fall, but it only costs him his aim on the next shot. The bullet shatters one of the windows as Mark rolls across the floor, headed for the Vestika he let slip. One second, two seconds . . .
He comes up with the plastic gun just as Ken gets him locked.
They both come up dead in each other’s sights.
Ken laughs again, and Mark sees that final wisdom electrifying his face again and Mark wonders what the hell it is again. He almost asks Ken why he is doing this. But that never happens.
• • •
Jollie hears the glass break from way down in the basement.
She thought she heard something when the silenced shots happened also, but it didn’t sound like much, this far down.
Now, she’s worried.
• • •
Xion Baxter holds Marty McFly dead on his feet, just like he did with the sentry. McFly put up a little bit of a fight, but they always do that when you come straight at them. It’s never really a problem. He broke both of McFly’s arms for his trouble. Tex checks his breath with a tiny pocket mirror to make sure the guy is dead, then looks back at his men on the lawn. They’re all standing over the bodies of the agents they’ve killed, fanned out at their positions at the trees. Stone-cold bastards, just like Xion.
He motions for Xion to enter the house.
“Alive,” he says. “The boss wants them alive.”
Xion nods, his reptile brain flickering back over the video he was shown, just over an hour ago. That shaky handheld Flip-cam business. The sleeping girl and the two guys, marked as targets. He knows exactly what they look like, and will recognize their faces instantly when he sees them. He moves quietly through the open front door and sees the shapes of men with guns in the hall.
Reggie Cates starts to join them, but Tex puts out a hand. “Stay here. We’re going in first.”
“No goddamn problem.”
In the rear with the gear, Reggie thinks. That’s where I like it.
Tex enters the house, just as he hears the silenced pistol go off on the second floor again—and Xion’s gun barks much louder, not silenced at all.
And the whole goddamn shooting match breaks out.
• • •
Dictator Ken’s big gun eats another hole in nothing as Mark gets him in the chest. The Vestika barks like a demon and does its job with extreme prejudice�
�just blows the living shit out of Ken, in fact—carving a hole the size of a basketball dead center, removing his heart and spraying the joint with about a gallon of the red stuff. It’s a big bang-boom-splat combination that resounds with megaton fury and a ten-ton wet kiss in the enclosed space—and then, suddenly, there are more big booms that seem to come from every direction, shaking the whole house. Gunfire all around, like being dropped in the middle of a war zone.
And then Ken gets really mad.
• • •
Xion Baxter’s big gun thunderclaps in the hallway on the first floor below Mark, making curses at the two agents who’ve come running up the hallway—and the giant sound happens almost exactly at the same time Mark fires the Vestika, directly above their heads. It’s full-on loud. Sounds like meteorites coming in, express delivery. People are screaming like it’s the end of the world, and gunmen are yanking their triggers.
The whole house has gone fucking ballistic.
Tex Smith opens fire as a backup man for Xion and doesn’t hit anything living, but his shots are ear-shattering heavy metal and they create property damage along the hallway wall, shredding wood and stucco and wallpaper in deep-fried skews.
Motherfucking spooks, he thinks, just as someone’s bullet scrapes across his shoulder, spitting blood into his right eye.
• • •
Dictator Ken stumbles on his feet and almost dies, realizing he has a giant thruway in his body, right in the prime real estate where his most vital muscle used to hang out, and the bloody remains of that muscle are dripping on his head from the ceiling and oozing down the walls of his office.
He opens his mouth and words come out. Mark almost hears what he says. The thunder in the house drowns the sound. He sees Ken’s lips move in slow motion, making desperate syllables between deafening booms that shake the floor.
Ken’s eyes, pleading.
Scared shitless.
Don’t understand . . . what you’ve done . . .
And then Ken’s hand raises the gun again and Mark shoots him again, shaving his mouth off, just below the eyes. The sound of the Vestika blows through the house one more time, making that incredibly loud BOOM, and it kills whatever Ken was saying in that moment too—everything consumed by the terrible frenzy of the battle, and Mark is cursing himself for not taking Ken alive and for coming here in the first place, for not protecting Jollie and Andy, just cursing himself in general because this is what he is, a stone killer and a bad bastard and a shooter with no choice in the world . . .
• • •
One of the METRO agents aims his gun from around the far corner of the hall directly below Mark and takes all of Xion Baxter’s teeth out with one shot, sending them flying through the back of his skull like shattered pearls, and the bullet keeps on going, just missing Texarkana Smith, who is half-blind now, stumbling backward with blood in his eye, his brain still screaming about Fucking spooks and What the hell? and Goddammit and a lot of other noise. Everybody is pretty much deaf now. Xion shoots back at the agents on reflex, zilched on his feet. His reptile brain fires in spasms, doing the death-rattle thing.
• • •
Jollie and Andy hear all this from the basement and start really freaking out.
• • •
“Man, they’re blowing this place all to hell,” Reggie Cates says, thinking about the action inside the house and how his boss walked right into it. He’s seen a lot of fearless ones like that in his short career, and he’s seen them all get blown away. Eddie tells him the cowboys are the ones who always get shot. Eddie also tells him to be ambitious, but never draw attention.
He hears stone-cold Xion Baxter’s gun fire again from inside the house, thinks that might be it for old Xion—and he thinks about the prize at the end of this big bad rainbow of blood and guts.
The Molly.
Reggie was there when Eddie got word that those kids jacked him. Reggie was there when Darian Stanwell called in the boys. Reggie insisted on going along with the team, even though Eddie hates that big damn truck of his.
Reggie hears another cannon fire off inside the house and someone yells: “You son of a BITCH!” Glass breaks. Another scream. A voice crackles over his headset:
“Reggie, get in here! We’re pinned down in the hallway!”
Fuck that, Reggie thinks. I ain’t about to go in there. Besides . . . you assholes forgot why we’re really here. And I bet I know right where it’s stashed.
Reggie gets really ambitious in a big hurry.
• • •
Dictator Ken unravels like a loose-meat zombie, and the remains slop down on top of Mark, trying to strangle him.
• • •
Stone-cold Xion Baxter weaves in the line of fire, taking two more hits, his gun blazing in all directions like an out-of-control bullet hose. Tex Smith crouches in the foyer and gets a grip, forcing his bad eye shut, trying to fire again, his gun clicking empty.
• • •
Jollie screams that this just can’t be happening.
• • •
Reggie moves for the two cars parked near the porch, zeroes right in on the really nice one—the shiny red Lexus, which looks like the kind of car a drug dealer would drive. Moves to the trunk. Uses a lockpick from his wallet and starts jimmying the keyhole.
“Reggie, goddamn you! Where the hell ARE YOU!”
Getting rich, Reggie thinks. And fuck you, man.
• • •
The two agents see Xion Baxter fall down dead in the hall and charge out like idiots, right into Tex Smith’s backup gun—the P220 Sig Sauer .45 from his other shoulder holster. It’s supposed to be the “most accurate .45 right out of the box,” according to the website he bought it from last week, and they must’ve have been right about that because when he squints, still half-blind, and fires just one shot, the bullet practically guides itself, blowing through both men, gutting them simultaneously in a super-size blast wave. A new push of confidence pours in through the sting in his eyes and the pain in his shoulder, as he fires five times more, taking their heads off like rotten pumpkins. He stands to his feet. His ears thrumming hard. It’s so loud in here now, you can’t hear anything—every damn sound in the universe all rolled up into one big dirty obnoxious BOOM that seems to go on and on and on and on and . . .
• • •
Mark Jones almost chokes to death with the twitching fingers of Dictator Ken’s dying hands latched around his throat. And he sees the man finally go, with that terrible unrecognizable look in his eyes . . . and those words he never really heard: Don’t know what you’ve done, kid . . . something like that.
But he can’t think about it now.
He pushes the bloody pieces of Dictator Ken off him and stands to his feet near the top of the stairs, checking the clip in his gun—four goddamn shots left, one in the chamber. How did this happen? Who is the bad guy here? All of these thoughts come crashing in at the same time, kickstarting a series of really fast info-blip answers, which all basically amount to the same plan he had a few seconds ago—get to the window, get down there, kill the enemy, protect Jollie and Andy—but the shots are all still ringing in his head, the smells of blood and gunpowder are fighting in his nostrils, the whole world is exploded and spinning in some berserk freeform mega-miasma . . .
And here comes Tex, charging up the stairs.
“Ready or not, here I come, kids!”
Mark hears the voice and it snaps him back to reality. He fires at the guy as he reaches the second-floor landing—misses by a country mile when Tex dives into the room and hits the floor. Freezes as Tex locks him up from a low crouch.
“Howdy,” says Tex.
And that’s the last thing the guy ever says.
• • •
Because that’s right when Reggie Cates gets the trunk of the Lexus open. What Reggie sees inside the tru
nk is not six million dollars’ worth of pure ecstasy. It’s a pile of fragmentation grenades and a big anti-fucking-infantry mine.
And fifteen pounds of C-4.
I’m rich, bitch, he thinks, just before the whole world explodes.
9
four seconds
Fifteen pounds of plastic explosives is really bad news.
There’s enough killpower in just a few pounds to blow up someone’s house—not to mention his car, his kids, half the neighbor’s yard—but fifteen pounds is straight-up nuts. Apocalypse in a can. They teach you stuff like that in METRO. They teach you about sneaky tricks and backup plans, contingencies that will deal with the enemy in a pinch and bring down a whole city block in the bargain—and they give you the tools to make it happen, of course, but you have to know how to use them right. A bomb is only as smart as the means by which its maker chooses to detonate the son of a bitch. Even a tactical nuclear warhead won’t do its job without proper orders.
A lot of people don’t know that it’s impossible to turn C-4 into wholesale destruction without a very specific series of chemical reactions—for example, you can light a match and it won’t blow up, you can drop this shit on the floor and stomp on it with everything you’ve got and nothing will happen. Even firing a high-velocity round right into the package at close range won’t make fireworks. Without the means of delivering a high-temperature kinetic charge—something hot and fast and sparkly, like a phosphorous strike—you could hand it to your kids and they’d never know the difference between this stuff and Play-Doh, except that it smells really bad. Mark Jones would have reminded us that the entire plot of the movie Die Hard is built on a search for detonators so that the bad guys can blow up a building with plastic explosives. Without a detonator, your basic terrorist is basically screwed. Mark Jones knows that too. He rigged up his contingency plan earlier this morning, just before his first meeting with Maggie Ortega/Penelope Cranston.
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