Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (299 page)

The gun bucked wildly and the shot missed, blasting a fist-sized hole in the far wall. Chunks of drywall and pieces of two-by-four stud flew everywhere, tiny missiles peppering the room but incredibly not hitting the terrorist. Or if they had, he didn’t react. Fine white dust blew out of the hole and coated the man’s arm. The art print Nick had ruined with the keys fell to the floor, jarred off the wall by the concussive pistol blast.

Nick couldn’t believe his eyes. The man was still standing. He was less than ten feet away, and the bullet had missed him. Even though he had never fired a pistol before, even though he was shaking and slipping into shock, even though he was blasting away at a moving target while on the move himself, Nick had fully expected to put the man down.

Now he was in big trouble. Nick squeezed the trigger again. This time the sound of the bullet being fired was muffled, like he was hearing it underwater as his ears were still ringing from the first shot.

The terrorist tumbled backward, crashing into the corner of the conference room with a force that surprised Nick. Blood sprayed out of a hole the slug had punched in the man’s chest, forming a delicate crimson arc that flew through the air and splashed onto the conference table, reminding Nick of the famous fountains at one of the resort hotels in Vegas that he and Lisa had visited a lifetime ago on their honeymoon.

The length of the bloody arcs immediately began to shorten as the dying terrorist’s heart weakened. The second one barely reached the edge of the table, the one after that only made it halfway.

Nick frantically tried to sight the pistol in his badly shaking hand to take out the other man. But the missed first shot had cost him. When Nick located the man, he knew right away that he was too late. The terrorist had his weapon aimed at Nick’s chest. Unlike Nick’s gun, this man’s weapon was held firmly and steadily in two hands. A look of grim determination spread across the man’s face. He was not rushing; he was moving at a measured, almost leisurely pace.

It was over. Nick could not escape.

CHAPTER SEVENTY

Nick waited for the end, seeing everything in slow motion. It felt as though he had been inside the fishbowl for hours, bullets flying everywhere, but in reality it had been no more than a few seconds. Powdery white drywall dust continued to fly, riding the air currents, slowly making its way across the room to where Nick was standing. The last of the chunks of plaster and wood chips blasted out of the wall by his first errant shot—the missed shot that had condemned Nick to death—were touching down at destinations all over the room.

The terrorist Nick had actually hit was still bleeding, but the initial gush of arterial blood from his chest had slowed to a trickle and was now dribbling down what was left of the man’s shirt. His eyes were open but unfocused. He was dying.

Nick knew he would be joining the man in death in a second. He was still fighting, still desperately trying to get his weapon to do what his brain was telling it to do, but he felt slow and off balance, lopsided somehow. The gun refused to point at the second terrorist. It refused to do anything at all. It was stuttering in his shaking hand, and he knew he would never hit anything he was aiming at. The ironic thought occurred to him that he might actually shoot himself.

Nick watched as the second man took forever to aim at his chest. He was going to be shot in the heart as he watched it happen. In a corner of his mind, he wondered if Lisa had watched the knife slit her throat open while she was trapped in her car. He hoped not.

The pistol was now incredibly heavy in his hand and completely useless. It felt like he was holding a brick. His shoulder was burning, his left hand numb. Nerve damage, he figured; it had to be. He wondered how it would feel to die, whether there would be a lot of pain or maybe none at all. He thought about Lisa and hoped she would be waiting to greet him, wherever he ended up after this.

He finally heard the shot that would end his life, the sound fuzzy and strange thanks to the damage the other shots had done to his ears. The sound of the bullet being fired seemed strangely insignificant considering it was to be the instrument of his death. Nick waited to be blasted across the room and into the wall like the man he had shot. He waited for the blood to spurt out of him in rapidly diminishing arcs.

It didn’t happen.

Nothing happened.

Instead, he watched in slack-jawed amazement as the man who was going to kill him jerked like he had been hit with a baseball bat and then smashed down onto the conference table, struck in the side of the head by a bullet. Shards of bone and grey brain matter splattered the wall to Nick’s left as the man’s blood sprayed onto the off-white background, completing a Dali-esque tableau of blood-red destruction inside the fishbowl.

The terrorist’s body flopped on the table as comprehension dawned in his dimming eyes. His hands opened and closed like he was reaching for something with which to pull himself upright and he gasped for air. The left side of his skull was gone, replaced by a jagged, gaping hole. He twitched twice and finally was still.

Nick glanced right in time to see Special Agent Cunningham, eyes wide, face bone white, nose mashed grotesquely to the right side of her face, standing on one leg in a modified shooter’s stance, leaning back against the far corner of the room for support.

She was shaking as badly as Nick was, maybe more so. She looked at Nick with haunted eyes and opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. Nick heard an unintelligible croaking noise that morphed into a whimper as the gun fell from her hand. She stumbled toward him, her weight shifting to her mangled right leg, and crumpled to the floor.

CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

Nick clutched a bouquet of yellow roses in his good hand as he paused in front of the open hospital door. He felt foolish. He was sweating and just as nervous as he had been before facing off against the terrorist known as Tony Andretti—authorities were still trying, thus far to no avail, to determine his real name and country of origin, not that Nick really cared—armed only with a rechargeable pneumatic nail gun.

“Jeez, asshole, get a grip,” he muttered to himself, pushing through the doorway and into the hospital room before he could lose his nerve. Inside, Agent Cunningham stared listlessly at a television bolted into a metal stand in the upper left corner of the room. She looked impossibly tiny and helpless in the bed, surrounded by beeping machines and what appeared to be shiny metallic and chrome torture devices. Her right leg was immobilized, suspended above the bed by a system of pulleys and cables that looked to Nick like they should be used to hoist a building.

One of the network news shows was broadcasting on the television’s snowy screen, treating the story of the attempted assassination of President Cartwright with the usual overblown media hysteria.

Agent Cunningham finally noticed Nick after a moment and muted the TV with a remote. “Can I help you?”

He smiled in amusement. “You already did. You saved my life yesterday, Agent Cunningham. It would be pretty hard to top that—don’t you think?”

Recognition dawned in her eyes, and she grinned sheepishly. Nick thought she looked beautiful, even with the two puffy black eyes she would be sporting for a while and her grossly misshapen broken nose. “Sorry about that; I should have recognized you. And please call me Kristin.” She shrugged and shook her head. “It must be all these drugs they’re pumping into me; they’ve made me a little groggy.”

“No problem, Kristin. I’m not exactly at my best right now, either.” He placed the flowers on a small table next to the bed and extended his hand, grimacing as the motion pulled at the bandages wrapped tightly around his shoulder.

Kristin watched him and winced. “Are you all right? They told me you got shot but that you really
nailed
that Andretti character.” She smiled wickedly.

“I’m fine,” he answered. “It’s just a flesh wound. Isn’t that what all those Hollywood hero types are supposed to say?”

This time she giggled. It sounded nasally thanks to the cotton wadding stuffed into her rebuilt nose.

“Anyway, I’m not really sure what the protocol is for dealing with getting shot in the shoulder by a fanatical terrorist. In my line of work, people don’t generally come after me with guns. Actually,” he whispered conspiratorially, “it hurts like hell. Some hero, huh?”

“You
are
a hero. You saved my life just as much as I saved yours. The doctors tell me I wouldn’t have lasted much longer inside that conference room, considering how much blood I had lost. If you hadn’t acted when you did, we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now, so I would say you deserve some flowers, too.” She looked ruefully at her immobilized leg. “I guess I’ll have to owe you.”

Changing the subject, she said, “They caught the two guys who were camped out by the airport waiting to shoot down the president’s plane. They were parked in a marsh, and when it became clear that something had gone wrong, they tried to escape, but they got into a gun battle with a local cop. He was wounded but managed to shoot out one of their tires. The idiots escaped on foot but were apprehended before they made it two miles. I hear the cop they shot is doing well and is expected to recover fully.”

She examined her fingernails. “They killed someone in another car that stumbled on to them. He was just a kid.”

“I heard. It seems they killed a lot of people.”

“I’m sorry about your coworkers.”

“Thank you.”

An awkward silence descended over the room, and Nick mumbled, “Well, I guess I should be going. The doctors said you need your rest and that I could only have a couple of minutes. Thanks again—”

“Your wife was a hero too, you know.”

Nick stared at the floor. “I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if she had reported what she discovered sooner. Even just a day or two earlier, instead of holding on to the binder. Maybe if she had acted a little more decisively, the whole mess could have been avoided before it ever got started.”

Kristin shook her head emphatically. “You can’t look at it like that. She didn’t realize the significance of what she discovered. You better believe that if she’d had any idea how serious it was, she would have taken action immediately. Either way, it’s not her fault she didn’t live long enough to tell anyone about it.”

Nick sighed. “Yeah, I know. But thanks anyway for saying so. I really appreciate it. That means a lot.”

“Hey,” Kristin said, “when I get out of this prison and can get around again, maybe we could do dinner and fill each other in on what exactly happened in that building. It’s one thing to get a debriefing from the officious administrative types; it’s another thing entirely to go over it with the one person who was heavily involved. Plus, I make a mean pot roast. Are you game?”

Nick smiled at her and said, “Sounds great. I haven’t had a real meal since … well … you know.” He scuffed his shoe absently on the institutional grey tile. “Anyway, I’ll be back to check on you in a couple of days. Maybe even bring some more flowers.”

He lifted the bouquet off the table and placed it in her arms, then turned once again to go. It was time to get back to work. The airplanes were waiting.