The room began to spin—just a bit, but it was plenty. Still, for good measure, he took three more sizable draughts. He’d successfully gotten himself drunk and broken his unspoken oath to the near-antique spirit, but for what purpose? Confusion wracked his once-great mind before mutating into blinding rage. Suddenly, he hurled the Scotch bottle at the window before him. The windowpane cracked—the fissure spider-webbing its way to the edges of the frame. The window bowed out slightly in the middle, held together only by the anti-shatter film that coated it.
Holloway stumbled away from the scene, eventually finding himself in a bedroom. He attempted to make his way to the bed but found it increasingly difficult due to the blackness on the edges of his vision closing quickly in upon him. When he felt himself begin to pass out, he tried to aim for the bed.
Misjudging his landing, he found nothing but the floor to welcome him into unconsciousness.
“What’s going on?” Charlie asked, as he hurried to keep pace with Victoria.
“Something’s changed. The old man’s not playing games with you anymore, Charlie. He wants you dead.”
“Is that all?” Charlie joked, but Victoria wheeled upon him.
“This isn’t a joke, Charlie. If the past is any indicator, when my Dad wanted someone dead, they ended up dead. He’s not looking to test you again.”
“He didn’t really
test
me in the first place,” Charlie said. “That key wasn’t hard to find. Now what’s his angle?”
“I don’t know,” she admitted. “But he says he wants you dead, otherwise he’s letting the timer run out and he’s blowing that support on Space Mountain.”
“Do you believe he’d really detonate it?”
“I’ve got to give him the benefit of the doubt. If I roll the dice and call his bluff, I could be condemning innocent people to their deaths. I couldn’t live with that.”
“Neither could I,” Charlie agreed, darkly. “That being said, we’re going to have to be open to the idea of an endgame contingency plan.”
Victoria looked into Charlie’s eyes, fear washing over her.
“You don’t mean—”
“If it comes to that, you’ve got to hand me over,” Charlie told her.
“No! We can find another way,” she managed desperately.
“I know—and we
will
try. I have no desire to die today, but if all else fails, you need to do what’s logical. My life isn’t worth condemning all of these families for; it’s not worth losing Meghan and the girls for. Listen to me, Victoria. If we can’t figure out how to finish this, then you know what you have to do.”
Victoria seemed too distraught to speak. She raised a hand to her brow and paced in a small circle, clearly searching the deepest recesses of her mind for any plan that would save her new friend’s life as well as the innocents in danger. After a moment, she sighed, stopped pacing and gazed out over the waterfront, facing away from him. Charlie made his way over and stood next to her, but remained silent, watching the
Liberty Belle
lazily cruising the Rivers of America. A monumental decision had been made, and the impact it had upon the two valiant upholders of the law was immense.
Slowly, Victoria turned to look at Charlie, whose eyes remained focused on the large paddlewheel ship.
“You’d really do it?” she asked, still trying to get her mind around what this detective was willing to do to save his family.
“Yes,” he replied, without hesitation. His voice did not waver and was filled with a steely determination. Finally losing interest in the ship, Charlie turned to face Victoria.
“The world needs more people like you, Charlie,” she said, quietly.
“I’m just doing my job,” he declared.
Victoria threw her arms around him and squeezed tightly—for a lithe and slight woman, she was surprisingly strong. Startled, Charlie fumbled clumsily for a moment before returning the gesture. She held onto him for a few moments and Charlie could feel her body gradually stiffen. When finally she pulled away, Charlie could see that she’d erased all vulnerability. Victoria Holloway—the brave intelligence agent—had returned, complete with attitude and sense of humor.
“You’re a goddamned real-life hero, Walker,” she said with a grin, punching him lightly on the arm.
“If I agree with you, will you promise not to crush my spine again?” he joked. Victoria’s laughter was a welcome respite after the somber mood recent events had left them in. Her laughter was cut short, however, by nearby voices shouting in complaint.
Looking toward the source of the commotion, they saw Kalani barreling toward them. The massive Hawaiian clumsily dodged guests as he maneuvered his sizable bulk through the dense crowd. Several more people shouted at him in frustration before he finally skidded to a halt before Charlie and Victoria.
“Guys!” he shouted, before taking a few deep breaths and wiping the sweat from his brow. A few people nearby glanced at the large, out-of-breath giant.
“Uh…yeah?” Victoria prodded, urging him to continue.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for you! We’ve got an idea. I think you’re gonna like it!” He smiled wide. Victoria glanced at Charlie—who shrugged—before returning her attention to Kalani.
“I don’t know why you didn’t just call,” Victoria said, gesturing to her phone. Kalani simply stared at her. After a moment, she realized that he wasn’t about to offer any explanations. “Lead on, then, Big Kahuna,” she said with a sweeping gesture of her hand.
•••
“So check this out,” Mason said, when Charlie, Victoria and Kalani had made their way back to the Liberty Tree. “While you nerds were out riding rides and eating churros,
we
were doing research. McCoy just returned from his…uh…trip, and we sent him to check out Space Mountain.”
“He never mentioned being back,” Victoria said.
“I didn’t know if your Dad had your phone tapped, so I told him to leave it out. Anyway, we were listening in on your phone call and when your Dad said that there’s no way we can disarm the bomb, he wasn’t kidding. McCoy found the device and managed to send a picture. It’s washy because of the flash and bad autofocus, but you’ll get the idea.”
Mason spun his laptop around so that Charlie and Victoria could see the screen. Attached to one of the support beams was a steel box. It had no visible openings or seams except for a small hole from which jutted a short antenna.
“What am I looking at, Jar?” Victoria asked.
“You’re looking at the world’s most gangster unidirectional explosive charge. That box is welded straight to the beam. The charge is inside, so we can’t access it to physically disarm it—at least not in time. McCoy checked it out and that box is filled with water.”
“What’s the water do?” Charlie asked.
“It acts as a focusing agent—kind of a makeshift way to aim the explosion. Instead of allowing the blast to discharge its energy equally in all directions, it forces most of the energy into the direction without water—in this case, straight into the beam. The angle of the blast and the height at which the support would be cut would break the track and aim it directly at the queue. Your Dad must have had a seriously badass engineer come up with this.”
Victoria straightened.
“If we can’t disarm it, why am I sitting here listening this useless information?” Victoria barked, still clearly on edge from Charlie’s decision to sacrifice himself.
“Because there’s an upside, Vee. The bomb itself isn’t very powerful, since it’s in such a small enclosure. It’ll take out the support, but that’s about it. The good part is that there’s no danger of anyone being injured from the blast itself.”
“How does this help us?”
“Because if we can get those trains to stop running, then we’ve effectively neutralized the threat—the trains are the real threat, not the bomb. Worse comes to worst: he detonates the bomb, and Disney has to build a new section of track. No loss of life. I think we can all live with a little loss of property as a consequence.”
“We already went over the evac option—he’ll blow the ride as soon as he knows. You listened in, you’ve heard this already.”
“No, not an evac, Vee.”
“Then
what
?” she demanded, impatiently.
Kalani offered the solution, and it was ingenious. “We break the ride.”
Charlie laughed aloud. It was so simple a solution that he was shocked nobody had thought of it earlier. If Holloway was as thorough as Charlie believed him to be, then he knew that rides and attractions experienced downtime due to mechanical difficulties and other unfortunate events almost daily. He’d have to have anticipated the possibility that the ride could experience a technical malfunction and need to be repaired. Therefore, he wouldn’t detonate the bomb simply because the ride was down for fifteen minutes or so. If they could manufacture some ‘technical difficulties’ then the ride would have to go down for maintenance. At that point, even if Holloway detonated the bomb, nobody would be hurt and the damage would be purely structural.
“You guys are on to something,” Victoria said with a smile.
For a split second, she turned to Charlie and he caught her eye. He saw relief brightening her features and imagined that his expression mirrored hers. There would be no reason for self-sacrifice today. X-ray Team had come up with the solution that could finally give them the edge they needed.
With the bomb neutralized and the members of Chaos Squad identified, it would simply be a matter of taking them out and bringing the fight to Holloway’s doorstep. Unfortunately, that meant that Meghan, Violet and Katie had become Holloway’s sole pieces of leverage. The old man was ruthless and clever, so Charlie assumed that when he found out about the loss of his bomb, he would do everything in his power to stop Charlie from reaching his family.
What Holloway did not know—could
never
know—were the lengths a man would go to in order to rescue the ones he loves. Charlie was willing to move Heaven and Earth and fight his way through Hell to save his girls and was fully prepared to ruin the day of anyone that tried to stand in his way. The time for playing fair had come and gone. Now Charlie was prepared to play the game on Holloway’s terms—smart and ruthless.
Charlie and X-ray Team were about to become a serious thorn in Spencer Holloway’s side.
Brody Kinney’s head throbbed something fierce from all of the goddamn squinting he’d been doing. This was definitely a three-Excedrin headache. He fished around in the cargo pocket of his pants for the small bottle of migraine relief medicine and shook three pills out into his hand. Short on water and fresh out of patience, he chewed the caplets so that the medicine could work its way into his system faster.
Cupping a hand over his brow to block out the fierce glare of the relentless Floridian sun, he scanned everything in his field of view. He stood uncomfortably on the hot pavement near the main entrance to Bay Lake Tower—purposely far from the welcoming shade of the large portico, where his continued presence would be easily noticed. His usual strain of bad luck had caused his sunglasses to fall from his face and into the dark waters of the Seven Seas Lagoon earlier in the day when he’d bounced over another boat’s wake while using one of the Sea Raycers to zip around the lake.
He’d sped around the lake aimlessly for the half-hour he’d paid for. He’d made up a halfhearted excuse about wanting to survey the land with his own eyes and he’d fed the boss some bullshit along the lines of: “I never rely on technology; I only trust what I can see.” The entire thing was fabricated. In reality, he relied on technology most of the time; he trusted it more than his own eyes. Fortunately, the boss had been strangely distracted and had waved him off without objection. The old man seemed distant, as if something had been on his mind—but Brody was paid far too well to pry.
Regardless of his boss’s mental state, he was still furious that all of the squinting he’d been doing had given him a seriously bad fucking headache, and he’d been wasting his time standing in the sun all day for no real reason. The boss must have been punishing him for his mishandling of the situation the previous night. How was he supposed to know that Walker would be able to see through their cover? Brody wasn’t a goddamned Jedi. He couldn’t just wave his hand and make the detective forget. Walker was a smart little fucker. He didn’t waste
any
time in figuring out who they really were. Brody and Brent had played their parts well, but it just wasn’t good enough.
Next time I see that asshole detective, I’m going to beat him to death with my bare hands.
All day, he’d wished agonizing death upon the clever detective for making him look bad in front of the boss. After all, this guy was the reason Chaos Squad was here in the first place. Brody wished that the detective would magically materialize before him so he could break the little fuck’s teeth out of his stupid skull.
Brody may not have been the sharpest knife in the drawer, but he was fully aware of this and he embraced it. Fortunately, people didn’t hire guys like Brody Kinney for their massive intellect; they hired guys like him for their ruthlessness, their muscle and their confirmed kill counts.
Brody was in his early forties, his age bolstering his abilities with a wealth of brutal experience. For almost two decades he’d made a living out of conflict, shipping off to wherever the fighting became too much to handle for the average foot soldier. Brody may have been the hammer of God with a firearm, but he was an absolutely unstoppable killing machine in hand-to-hand combat. Anyone could kill with a bullet, but few had the prowess to overcome an armed and trained opponent using nothing but hands and feet. He longed to pit himself against the detective. Walker was fit and capable, but he was still just a detective—a puzzle solver, not a fighter. Brody Kinney, on the other hand, was a machine, conditioned and programmed to kill efficiently and without remorse.
Just as he was fading into his fourteenth consecutive daydream about beating Walker into a thick red paste, his cell phone vibrated. Glancing at the screen, he instantly answered. It was the boss calling—and nobody ignores the boss, no matter how tough they are.
“Kinney,” Brody answered.
“Kinney, recall your team immediately,” ordered Holloway. “Meet me in my villa in thirty minutes. There have been new developments that we need to discuss and there are plans that must be made. We may have been compromised.”
Compromised? But how?
This was unbelievable. Walker was clearly smart, but how in the world could one man compromise the cover of an entire highly trained unit? That kind of thinking was above Brody’s pay grade, yet he couldn’t help but wonder. Still, he held his tongue and remained calm.
“Affirmative,” was all he said, when he wanted to say:
Compromised? What the hell are you talking about? You said this was going to be easy.
Holloway disconnected the call instantly and left Brody alone with his thoughts. Refusing to waste time with inefficient and fruitless thinking, Brody contacted his team using a secure communications channel. Tapping the small button on his earpiece that would connect him to the other eleven men, he spoke.
“Hi kids, it’s Dad. Grandfather has requested a family reunion ASAP. Put in your two-weeks’ notice and catch the nearest ride to the estate.”
Affirmatives all around. Chaos Squad was efficient, brutal and ruthless yet still retained a healthy respect for the chain of command. When Brody spoke, they listened and acted. As light and absurd as their call-signs and radio chatter were, they took their work very seriously with responses as quick and professional as possible. Brody said nothing else, expecting each of his men to follow their orders and report back.
Hand once more raised to his brow, Brody turned his gaze toward the upper floors of the Tower. Scanning the windows absently, he pondered what the meaning of this recall could possibly be. Beginning his walk inside, his mind raced with possibilities.
•••
Brody was the first member of Chaos Squad to arrive, being the closest to the building when the recall order was given, and he entered his boss’s villa while the old man was fastening the buttons on what appeared to be a new shirt.
“Hello, Kinney. Please, have a seat,” Holloway said, motioning to a high-backed chair at the dining table. “Since you’re here ahead of the others, I’d like to speak with you alone for a moment before they arrive.”
Brody nodded and made his way toward the proffered seat, noticing as he did so that one of the window sections in the great glass wall was severely cracked; the remnants of a glass bottle lay nearby in a puddle of dark liquid. He smelled alcohol.
What the hell happened in here?
Taking a seat, Brody sat with his practiced ramrod-straight posture and looked toward his boss, eagerly awaiting whatever it was that the old man had to say.
Sighing, Holloway placed his palms on the table and kept his head down while he spoke.
“We have a very serious problem, Mr. Kinney,” he stated, his voice still a bit strange.
“How serious?” Brody asked.
A pause. Holloway took a sip from a mug of coffee sitting on the table in front of him
“My daughter,” Holloway stated.
“The Fed?”
“Central Intelligence,” Holloway corrected.
“What about her?”
Holloway looked up, his eyes narrowing as if the light hurt them.
“She’s here.”
Brody scowled. “Now we’ve got the Company to deal with—on
top
of Walker?” he asked, mildly annoyed.
“Not on top of
—
in conjunction with
,
” Holloway corrected again. “She has come to the aid of the detective, and she has brought a team along with her. I do not currently know the size of their force. So, not only do we face Detective Walker but my daughter and her confederates, as well.”
Brody thought about this for a moment—the girl’s presence certainly did complicate matters, but they still had cards left to play.
“Well, we’ve still got Walker’s family,” Brody offered. “And the bomb.”
“Not really,” Holloway countered. “We can’t execute the family or detonate the bomb. Those are the only reasons Company agents haven’t stormed this room already.”
“Let them come,” Brody challenged, his words laced with bravado. “Chaos will destroy them.”
“You have good intentions, but you’re failing to think. My daughter and Detective Walker are two of the most fiercely intelligent people on the planet, rivaled only by myself. No amount of muscle can stop them, should they wish to eliminate us. The mind is a dangerous weapon, Kinney. Never underestimate it.”
Brody’s hands clenched into fists as he leaned forward in his seat, gritting his teeth. He respected Holloway, but did the old man really think some egghead could outthink a bullet to the face? It was absurd. Charlie Walker was a human being, not some deity; he could—and
would
—be killed.
“Boss, just let me take out Walker. I could do it in no time at all.”
“Sadly, Jeremy thought the exact same thing—and attempted to do so against my wishes. He is no longer breathing.” Brody’s surprise must have immediately shown on his face. Holloway arched an eyebrow at him.
For the first time, Brody began to feel a bit of apprehension at the thought of facing Walker. Brody had seen Jeremy in action and, while not a military man, the kid had top-notch abilities. Jeremy O’Neill had been a world-class combatant and if
he
had failed while trying to eliminate Walker, then perhaps Brody was dangerously underestimating the detective’s abilities. Brody had no doubt that he was the more highly skilled fighter, and therefore could succeed where Jeremy could not, but he still had a newfound grudging respect for the detective and he took a mental note not to underestimate him again.
“So, what’s the plan?” Brody asked.
“The plan is to wait for the rest of the team. However, I wanted to run over a few things with you before they arrive.”
“Shoot.”
“The coming hours are certain to test Chaos Squad to their limits. It’s a definite possibility that there may be casualties on our side. Are you willing to accept this?”
“I never accept casualties on my side, but I am prepared for the worst—if that counts for anything.”
“A well-spoken answer,” Holloway said, thoughtfully. “Truth is: we are facing an enemy unlike any we have crossed swords with before. With Victoria and Walker at the helm, even a small team of trained operatives can deal heavy damage to our organization.” Holloway looked somber, but still spoke with hope.
“Are you trying to tell me that a cop, a half-assed spy and a team of Company muscle can stand a chance against Chaos Squad?” Brody asked.
“That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you. Understand this, Kinney: if you do not abandon your ego, it will be the death of you and your team. I understand the need for confidence in your line of work, but an overinflated ego can only be detrimental to your success. Assuming you have won any battle before you’ve begun to fight is the surest way to fail.”
Still irritated, Brody sat in silence for a few moments, thinking about the implications of what his boss was telling him. His team had been together, training and operating, for nearly two decades. In that time, they’d never lost a man and they’d always come out on top. It was tough for Brody to ignore eighteen years of constant successes—successes that were a direct result of his team’s training and hard work.
“Then what do you suggest I do?” he asked.
“I suggest you go about this differently. Smarter. Brute force alone cannot win this for us. We must think, and then act.”
The sound of the door opening drew their attention and they watched as the other members of Chaos Squad entered the room. Brody caught Masters’ eye and told his old friend everything he needed to know with one look: the situation is bad—get pissed. Brody eagerly awaited Holloway’s reveal as the remainder of his team found various seats throughout the villa.
When everyone was settled in, Holloway cleared his throat and began.