Authors: Brad Taylor
The Ghost cleared the railing and dove into the lake right at the
juncture of a false stream. He started swimming to the far side, looking like a child who had fallen out of a Disney ride, a dark cork in the impossibly blue water.
I saw a bridge crossing the stream, letting tourists continue their promenade along the false sea, and sprinted to it. I reached the far side, and we had a little bit of a “man-in-the-middle,” with Brett and Decoy on one side, me on the other, and a bedraggled terrorist now treading water between us.
When he didn’t move to either side, Decoy jumped in after him, forcing him to choose. He came my way, trying to climb up a maintenance box and jump back onto the promenade. It was easy to beat him to it.
I grabbed him by the lapels and swung him violently onto the ground, surprised at how light he was. His coke-bottle glasses flew off, and he hit the ground hard, knocking the air out of him.
I ripped through every crevice and pocket of his body, trying to find whatever he had that would trigger the explosives in the building. I came up empty.
Brett reached me, saying, “Did we fry the device?”
“There isn’t a fucking device.”
I slapped the Ghost’s face. “What’s the threat? Where is it?”
He looked at me with a sense of calm and satisfaction, as if he’d just won a contest of skill.
“You’re too late.”
J
eff McMasters saw the end
of the lap around the observation deck to his front and gave a silent thank-you. The drone of the official tour guide had endlessly echoed with bits of trivia of the city no matter which direction they looked.
He did have to admit they weren’t kidding about the height. They were so far up in the air that the “ordinary” skyscrapers of downtown Dubai looked like toys. So far up that there had been no vertigo at all. It was like looking out the window of an airplane, the earth so distant that his mind couldn’t compute the effect as being above it.
They reached the elevators, and the guide asked if he’d like to go outside, to the tallest open-air observation deck in the world. He, of course, expressed keen interest, wondering what else the man could blab about.
Blessedly, the tour guide simply said, “Enjoy yourself and let me know when you’re ready to return to the bottom.”
He nodded as if he was having the time of his life and pulled out his international BlackBerry. To his surprise, he had not a single e-mail or missed call. The damn thing rang endlessly, and he’d been out of contact for at least thirty minutes. He looked closer and saw he had no signal.
Must be something to do with this building.
Like a man addicted, he felt the need to get his phone back on the
network. He nodded at Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid and said, “Let’s continue our tour of your fabulous city.”
The sheikh smiled. “Of course. Today is your day.”
As soon as the words came out of the Ghost’s mouth, I knew he’d tricked us. Delayed us to execute his plan. I wanted to scream at my stupidity. I should have hit what I knew—the elevators in the building. I’d gotten tunnel vision when I’d seen him, and now it would cost us.
I wasted no more time on him, knowing there was no pressure on earth I could bring to bear in the short time I had to get him to talk. He was prepared to die. Unlike his accomplice—my ace in the hole.
I started snapping orders. “Brett, target’s yours. Get him back to the van. Decoy, get the EMP gun recharged and ready. Knuckles, what’s your status?”
“Still on the parking-garage road, about to enter the highway. What’s up?”
“Turn around. Come back. Get that little weasel in the van to the basement door. He needs to lead us to the explosive set he saw the Ghost emplace.”
“On the way. Ten seconds out. What about the shit on the hundred-twenty-fifth floor?”
“Nothing we can do about it. We’re going to disable what we have.”
“You think that’ll be enough?”
“I have no idea, just get him moving.”
Sprinting back the way I had come, I saw Knuckles leap out of the van, rushing our captive forward, holding the back of his neck, the man’s feet barely touching the ground. We met up at the stairwell.
“Lead us directly to the location your friend placed the explosives. If you deceive us in any way, I swear to God I’m going to kill you.”
His eyes bugging out of his head, he simply nodded. I swiped his
card, and we entered in a rush. We stood inside for a millisecond before I slapped his stomach.
“Where, dammit? Where?”
His hands cuffed in front, he took off at a trot. “This way. To the shafts.”
He led us through a maze, finally pointing at the gaping holes of two large elevator shafts. And the explosives inside each.
“Don’t touch them. Find the detonators. They’ll be electronic. Knock them out with the EMP gun.”
We fanned out, and I saw a snake of wire leading from the explosives in the right shaft. I followed it with my eyes, winding and curving on the ground like a child’s maze. Eventually, I ended up at the wall between the shafts themselves. And saw a blinking light.
“Decoy! There! Between the shafts! Hit it with the gun!”
He immediately took a knee, aiming the EMP. I heard a distinctive hum, then saw a blinding flash, followed by a shock wave that launched me backward.
I sat up, attempting to shake the ringing from my ears, looking to see if anyone on the team had been injured. Another sound penetrated the stillness. Something like a freight train loose on the tracks, coming from the shafts themselves.
The elevators.
I rolled backward as fast as I could, and another explosion rocked the basement, this one from the kinetic energy of a double-decker elevator hitting the earth from over ten thousand feet in the air.
L
ucas began dressing himself
and said, “Now Pike and I share something else in common.”
Her wrists strapped to the top of the bed frame, Jennifer said nothing. Her panties and bra had been ripped off, but her pants remained wrapped around her lower legs, her shirt bunched up to her neck.
Lucas continued, “I’m sorry it has to end this way, but I’ve got a plane to catch, and I can’t have you messing anything up. I mean that. You and Pike are the closest thing I have to friends, and it pains me to do this.”
Jennifer tested the lamp wire around her wrists. During the assault she’d fought like a wild animal, to no avail, but had felt the wire loosen. It wasn’t the best for holding knots, and she thought she could work it to her advantage, especially since Lucas hadn’t bothered to tie her legs down. She continued to act catatonic. Defenseless. Simply staring at him with large eyes.
Lucas picked up a pillow from the floor. “I wish I could have simply talked to Pike. Let him know that it was all professional. Just like the targets he attacks. There’s nothing personal in it at all. In a way, I’m glad I missed him three years ago.”
He held up the pillow. “Someday he’ll come to grips with what he is, and he’ll see that he’s just like me. It’s taking him a little longer, but it’s true. He and I are the same.”
He leaned over her. “I’ve heard that suffocation is the most painless
way to go. Once you pass out, you feel nothing. Of course, I can’t prove it, since no one I’ve done this to could give me an opinion when it was over. It’s the best I can do, given the circumstances.”
He brought the pillow to her face and hesitated, staring into her eyes. She rotated her body, bringing her legs into her stomach. She lashed out with all the strength she had in a mule kick, hitting him in his upper chest.
Caught off guard, Lucas flew across the room into the far wall. Jennifer yanked one arm free, then frantically began working her hand out of the second loop. Lucas sprang up and rushed her. She snapped out with a side kick, connecting again, and felt the hand slip out.
She jumped off the end of the bed, putting Lucas behind her, the door to the living room to her front. She yanked her pants up with one hand and clawed at the door with the other, getting it open. She almost made it out before he tackled her, bellowing in rage.
They bounced off the table in front of the anteroom television, then hit the floor. She rolled onto her back, Lucas straddling her body and trapping her left arm. She whipped her right elbow up and caught him on the chin, stunning him enough to allow her to snake out of his grasp. She leapt to her feet and he followed suit, slamming her into the wall. Rattled, the blow cutting her ability to think, she felt herself rotated around until her back was to the wall, her arms trapped in his grip.
He leaned into her face, the spittle flying out.
“You fucking bitch. Never want to make it easy. Always want the fucking pain. So be it.”
He reached his hands up to the base of her neck to repeat the pummeling she’d endured earlier. She stared into his snarling visage and felt his hands close. She knew she was done.
No way out.
She thought of Pike. Of how he wouldn’t quit. Never, ever quit.
Never. Ever. Quit.
She whipped her head forward, catching him just above the bridge of his nose with the bony part of her forehead. He shrieked, and she
did it again, feeling the nose crunch underneath the blow. Feeling him back up to escape.
She turned and ran, reaching the door to freedom a millisecond before him. She felt his breath on her neck, his hands grabbing her shirt. She launched a leg backward, felt it connect and heard him grunt, then she was outside.
She sprinted to the north elevator bank. The one with the envoy’s security. She got within sight of it and started walking, checking her appearance. Her shirt was back in place, but she had abrasions on her wrists, and her hair, she knew, must look wild.
She glanced behind her and saw Lucas scowling from the entrance to his room. He pointed a finger at her like a weapon, then blew the tip as if he was clearing smoke before shutting the door. She continued past the elevators until she reached a stairwell, ignoring the stares of the security men. She sprinted down them and ran to her car. A minute later, she was out of the garage and pulled over to the side of the road, throwing up on the shoulder.
She collected herself, sitting in the front seat and panting, unable to fully come to grips with what had just happened. She felt a simmering rage. Pulling out her phone, she saw several missed calls from the team.
Out chasing a terrorist while I was raped.
At that moment she decided to keep the attack a secret. To pretend the abomination was nothing more than a bad dream that had never happened. She’d help the team find and capture Lucas, then watch him get the Taskforce version of justice. For the first time, she understood fully what that meant. Embraced the reasons why. Wanted to be the one who dropped the hammer.
She texted Pike, telling him she was okay and on the way back. She put the phone away without calling, not caring what had transpired with the Ghost. She drove to their hotel and went to her room. She stripped out of her clothes and went straight to the shower, letting the hot water beat her body.
She began scrubbing furiously as if she was covered in poison,
doing whatever it took to cleanse her skin of Lucas’s touch. After an initial flurry, she stopped. She clinically surveyed the damage to keep her mind off the implications of the assault, wondering how she could keep it secret.
She had vicious bruises to her abdomen and a bite mark on one breast, but all of that could be hidden. Lucas had never struck her in the face, so nothing obvious would show. The biggest issue was the abrasions on her wrists. It would be hard to hide them. She thought of how she could bandage them, what she would say to the men of the team, when the enormity of the entire attack came crashing down, flooding her, drowning her.
She curled up in a ball in the bottom of the shower and wept.
T
he makeshift TOC
was a flurry of activity, with all hands either deleting computer files, packing up equipment, or talking on the phone. I reached Jennifer’s voice mail yet again and felt a trickle of dread. I’d received a text from her saying she was inbound, but all I really knew was that it had come from her phone. So far, the entire mission had been a debacle, like we had been painted with a curse, and the lack of contact with her was beginning to go beyond the “worried” stage and into the “screw the mission” stage.
Not that I could mess things up any worse. We had barely made it out of the Burj Khalifa intact, with seemingly every first responder in the country rolling in to the alarm calls. The bottom of the basement had looked like someone had detonated a car bomb in it, with the elevator shafts completely destroyed. I would have been happy with simple mechanical damage, but that wasn’t the only thing left behind.
When I’d cleared my head enough to take stock, I’d seen the remains of quite a few people. Torn arms and legs, heads smashed beyond recognition, it was hard to tell how many people were dead. Not that it mattered. Only two counted: the sheikh of Dubai and McMasters. I was pretty sure they would be found in the pile and returned my focus on getting the hell out of the country.
Someone else’s problem now.
There’d been a rumor that someone had survived, and Blaine had
raced out of the TOC to see if he could run anything to ground. I knew he was just wishing. I’d seen the damage. No way anyone lived through a fall like that.
A television in the back of the room, on an English-speaking channel, was going on and on about the disaster. I’d eventually tuned it out, focusing on getting everything sterilized, but Decoy hadn’t. He got my attention.
“What?”
“They’re saying an elevator has failed in the Burj.”
“Okay. I don’t need to watch the news for that. I saw it.”
“No. They’re saying
an
elevator. Not elevators, plural.”
I stopped what I was doing, now paying attention.
“Did you see two elevators come down?” he asked.
Before I could answer, Blaine entered the room. Smiling. He should have been morose as hell, having given the order for a unilateral hit without Omega authority from the Oversight Council, then having it backfire in his face. He was done and should know it. I wondered if maybe he hadn’t cracked.