“That won’t be necessary,” came a voice from the doorway. It was Karen Cattran, the FBI’s lead agent in Denver. She held open her wallet, showing her badge to the assembled medical team.
“As of one this morning, Presbyterian/St. Luke’s Medical Center became a level-one national security site,” she said as she walked to Marks’s bed. “What that means is that as of an hour ago, access into or out of the building is restricted. Denver police, at the direction of my office, have locked down the facility. There are four armed guards in the hallway outside this room. Other than you all, nobody gets in or out of this room, and I mean
nobody.
”
RUA BREVA
CALI, COLOMBIA
Dewey emerged from the half-constructed building at street level while the crowd was still gathering. People were pouring into the streets now, most of them staring up more than twenty-five stories above at the helicopter dangling over them, its rear tail rotor sticking out from a girder.
Dewey wasted no time slipping among the gaping civilians, pretending to be as mystified as they, and trying to ignore the growing pain in his shoulder and the plume of dark red flowing from it.
The pain from the bullet antagonized his every move. There was no way to stop the bleeding; a tourniquet wouldn’t work. Instead, he held the same filthy rag against the wound.
“Are you all right?” a woman asked as he reached the back of the crowd.
He muttered something in Spanish about falling debris, and kept moving. Any delay right now would cost him his life. The killers would be coming for him.
Where were they?
Who
were they?
He glanced warily around. To his left, at the rear of the crowd, he saw two policemen—one a fat man and the other a tall, gaunt-looking
officer—pointing toward him and pushing their way through. Behind them, he saw a well-dressed younger man, dark-skinned, an Afro, leather coat on. He was trying to blend in. But he trailed the policemen too obviously, trying not to be noticed, the only man other than the police not staring at the chopper overhead. Instead he stared at Dewey with cold, determined eyes. It was one of the men from the roof.
Glancing quickly to his right, across more than a hundred people, he quickly made two more gunmen, moving together toward him. It was the way they held their weight as they walked, concealing weapons, and walking just awkwardly enough for Dewey to recognize the altered gait. And the eyes. Those, too, gave them away. He knew the look.
Hunters.
Stalking the perimeters of the crowd.
Dewey cut back into the press of people. As he neared the thickest part of the crowd, he suddenly ducked and pushed back to the right. Using his good arm, he surged forward, bent over, at least twenty yards. He moved past several dozen people too busy to look down, the people, now measuring in the hundreds, seemingly more entranced than ever by the chopper hanging above them.
Standing erect suddenly, he saw to his left the back of the killer’s head, the one with the Afro, not more than ten feet away. He removed the combat knife from his ankle as he slipped past an old man and a woman standing next to the killer.
The chopper above made a loud creaking noise, and the crowd let out a collective scream as a piece of debris fell from above. As the metal descended, with the noise of the crowd’s horror masking what was to come, and their attention on avoiding the falling metal, Dewey came upon the killer, who, unlike the masses around him, continued to cast his eyes desperately across the crowd in search of Dewey. His compact machine gun was now out and in full view, unafraid of even the local police, so important was the termination of his target. Dewey came from behind and wrapped his right arm around the killer’s front. He quickly plunged the knife between the man’s upper ribs, pulling across in a swift motion that severed all connection the heart had with the rest of the body. Just as quickly, he withdrew the blade and moved on, letting the gunman collapse silently to the ground.
Dewey wiped the blade on his pants and slipped the knife back in the sheath, then stepped backwards. The policemen hadn’t heard the strike, but a teenage boy was now leaning over the dead man, and he screamed. Dewey turned and pushed his way back through the fringes of the crowd.
No other gunmen in sight.
Dewey hastened away from the scene and felt a sudden wetness on his hand. Looking down, he saw that his left arm was drenched in blood. It dripped off the end of his fingers, but did not pour. He knew he had time to try to repair it, but not much time, and a hospital was out of the question.
Two blocks away, he ducked into a clean-looking bodega and looked for something to stem the flow of blood. He found a package of cloth dish towels in one aisle. He searched quickly, glancing out the front window, looking for his pursuers. In the last row he found a roll of duct tape. Paying quickly, he ripped open the package of cloth towels and pressed one against the bullet wound in his shoulder. As the young Colombian woman behind the cash register watched, he wrapped the duct tape tightly about the rag and rolled it beneath his armpit, securing the rag tightly against the wound. It was temporary—very temporary—but he had more pressing issues to deal with.
One of the other gunmen passed in front of the window then, and Dewey spied him just before the killer turned to look inside. He ducked behind a red soda refrigerator, and held a bloody finger to his lips, pleading with the woman not to give him away. Frozen with fear, she complied. The man passed, and Dewey moved to the door.
Leaving the killers to the right, he went left, then took another left and went up a busy street. Within a block, the dish towel was drenched and within two blocks he felt his left hand becoming slippery again as blood began to seep out and course down his arm. It would do that as long as the lead remained in his shoulder.
After a third block, he glanced behind him and saw his two pursuers sprinting up the street. They were far in the distance, but they had seen him. He started to take a right, but saw a dead end in front of him. To take a left would enable the killers to cut him off. Dewey regretted
not turning at the last street; there was nothing to do now but run like hell straight ahead.
He took the next block at a sprint. Glancing back, he saw a trail of his own blood dripping in his wake. Whatever he did now, he would be easy to follow. He had one other clean towel in his hand, but he knew he would need it. He would have to let the killers follow; he could not simply slip away.
At the next block, he ran right. The humidity was stifling, sweat dripped from his hair, drenched through from his forehead. Cars moved quickly down the narrow street, bumper-to-bumper, the occasional horn blasting. The sidewalks were crowded with street vendors, hawking electronics, watches, artwork, CDs, all laid out on small carpets. Pedestrians crowded in front of the vendors, looking for a bargain. Both sides of the street were lined with shops; a women’s boutique, a sporting goods store, a few cafés, a bodega with a bright green sign that said
PESSA
’s! Dewey sprinted toward the traffic, running between speeding taxis and sedans and the line of parked cars, narrowly dodging cars as he moved, blood coursing down his arm.
“
Sangrando!
” a taxi driver yelled from an open window as Dewey passed, nearly running his dented yellow Toyota into the car in front of him as Dewey kept moving, ahead of his attackers, blood covering his hand as he dashed.
Halfway down the block, he saw a sign to his left:
MOTEL EL ROSARIO
. It was a shabby-looking place, fourteen stories high, gray cement with small square windows, lines of rust-tinted aging streaking down from the roof line. Dewey cut across a break in the cars, hit the sidewalk, moved past the motel’s entrance. At the far corner of the building, the service alley cut between the motel and the next building, and he ran into the opening at a full sprint.
Looking back just as he cornered, he saw the first of the killers at the corner of Omnestra, a block away.
Dewey entered through the service door and ran past a pair of cleaning women on a cigarette break. He took the stairs and climbed, three steps at a time, his heart racing and his lungs burning.
The pain, for Dewey, was just another factor, an element, and long
ago he’d been trained to compartmentalize distractions and place them in their respective boxes. Pain had always been one of Dewey’s strengths: inflicting it, enduring it. Focusing on that kept him moving. Below, the sound of the killers running upstairs toward him echoed up the well between the stairs.
Each flight of stairs caused the rupture at his shoulder to tear and bleed. His chest burned, while blood loss caused him to feel light-headed. Glancing back from a landing at the top of the eighth flight of stairs, he spied the killers. The first was a younger man, wearing a gray T-shirt with a red Puma logo on it. The short-haired Arab stared forward at his path, moving like an athlete up the steps, no hesitation or fatigue in his pace. A short, shiny black submachine gun he held like a sprinter’s baton in front of him, waving it through the air as he moved. But if the first killer was closing in, it was the second who worried Dewey more. Less than half a flight behind the first Arab, the second man suddenly raised his head. His black eyes caught Dewey with a menacing glare, a look of determination, confidence, even enjoyment. The look sent a small, cold tremor through Dewey, an unwelcome sensation that he knew all too well: fear. He quickly tried to push it out of his mind.
The second killer yelled and the first one suddenly raised his machine gun and ripped a quick burst of slugs up the stairwell. Dewey ducked against the wall and continued his ascent, keeping fear as far from his mind as he could by concentrating on, even welcoming, the intense pain that now flowered in his gaping shoulder blade. He could deal with pain, work through it, let it guide him even. But fear had no antidote; it was the enemy of the warrior.
On the ground, blood spatters followed Dewey like the proverbial bread-crumb trail. The blood dripped in a scattered line from his fingertips as he climbed. Soon, he was at the top landing of the motel. A large steel door with the number fourteen on it stood in front of him, leading to the hallway and guest rooms. Dewey stopped, again glanced down, then looked at the doorway. They would follow him, and the blood was their guide. Worse, the blood was now flowing unabated, a steady stream running from his hand, like a leaky spigot. If he did not repair the arm soon, it wouldn’t matter if they caught up to him or not; he would
bleed out. He could try to take them on the stairs, but he only had two bullets left in the Colt. One false shot and he would die right then and there, outgunned by a pair of fully automatic machine guns with loaded magazines.
Dewey stared at the entrance to the fourteenth floor for several seconds. The sound of the footsteps grew louder from below. He reached for the door, placed his blood-soaked fingers on the steel handle, pulled the door open.
Then he stopped. He let blood course from his fingertips across the cement of the landing to the fourteenth-floor entrance, a rough, crimson line that led onto the dark purple carpet of the floor. He turned, looked down the stairwell in the direction of his pursuers. He pressed his body against the outer wall of the stairwell. Carefully, he began his descent. He hugged the wall as he moved, letting the blood from his hands drip down onto the path of blood already on the ground. He moved down the stairwell, his head light, reeling in pain. The killers were rising quickly he knew, but he kept moving.
With his right hand, Dewey held the Colt in front of him, cocked to fire. He took the first flight, looked at the entrance door to the thirteenth floor, and kept going. At the twelfth floor, he glanced again at the floor entrance, but kept moving.
The scratching sound of shoes on cement came from below, louder, closer and closer now. But still, Dewey moved down the next set of steps. He descended as quickly and as quietly as he could, careful to let the blood from his arm drip onto the same scarlet track he’d left on the way up the stairs.
He could not allow the terrorists to look up and see him, so he kept pressed to the wall. But it meant he would have to guess where they were, and how close they had gotten.
He passed the entrance to the tenth floor, then the ninth, and could, suddenly, hear the fast, labored breathing of the first terrorist, so close now, coming up the steps. And yet, Dewey slipped past the ninth floor, step after step, until he saw the small white number eight affixed to the door of the eighth floor. At the eighth-floor landing, the killers sounded just below him, less than half a flight. A shadow danced ominously on
the white wall just below. Pressing his arm and hand against his chest to stop the dripping blood, Dewey slipped through the stair exit into the dim hallway of the eighth floor.
Dewey waited just inside the door frame, his Colt M1911 out, raised and cocked to fire. The men passed the door in a loud sprint, following the trail of blood to the top floor.
Dewey belted the pistol and walked down the hallway. He knocked on the third door, heard footsteps, then said, “
Lo siento, accidente.
” He knocked on the next door and heard nothing. He took the knife from the sheath, pushed aside the jamb, and inserted the blade along the door edge, then forced the blade down onto the lock and pushed in. The door popped open. He took the
DO NOT DISTURB
sign and placed it on the doorknob and shut the door, then chained it.
Inside, a suitcase was open on the floor, a suit laid out on the unmade bed.