Gritting my teeth, I dropped to a half crouch, realizing what had happened. In the dark, I had slammed my injured head into the bottom of a shelf, knocking the shelf loose from the wall.
Groping on the smooth concrete floor for a weapon, I found nothing but screws and small metal brackets. My hands closed on the fallen shelf itself, a lightweight piece of particleboard. Useless.
Hefting it anyway, I froze and listened.
The weird breathing was coming from the far side of the room now. It sounded hollow and plasticky, with a distinct
tock
at the end of each inhale. It also sounded very familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
Despite the odd timbre, the smoker-heavy rhythm of breaths was recognizably Blake’s.
I knew I couldn’t hold my own breath much longer. The chlorine gas itched my skin and stung the insides of my nose and lips, making my eyes water. A lungful of it would leave me bent over, coughing and gagging, helpless while Blake finished me off.
Trying to raise the storage unit door now wasn’t an option, either. Before I could get it open, Blake would nail me from behind again. Instead, holding the piece of shelf out in front of me, I scrambled deeper into the unit. Whatever tool Blake had cold-cocked me with was small and metal hard. I needed a better weapon than a piece of crappy shelving, and I needed it fast.
My lungs spasmed. I was running out of air and time.
Near the center of the storage unit, the flimsy particleboard I held struck something solid and metallic. I lunged forward, dropping the board, and groped in the darkness. My hands touched a cool, curved surface at chest height: a horizontal metal cylinder eight inches in diameter, strapped to a solid framework of metal struts. A quick tap confirmed that it was hollow—a tank. Feeling identical tanks mounted above and below the first, I slid my fingers to the end of one and felt a flat, circular butt-plate.
The chlorine gas burned my eyes, which were still squeezed shut. My chest spasmed again, more insistently this time. I had another ten or twenty seconds at most before I lost voluntary control and sucked the corrosive poison into my lungs.
A sharp headache began to pulse in the center of my skull. The high mosquito-whine of tinnitus rang in my ears.
I sidestepped the other direction, driving deeper into the interior, tracing the length of a tank with shaking fingers. I felt my way down to the other end, where the tank tapered into a smooth, round dome with a projecting metal valve, socketed to a quarter-inch-thick rigid rubber hose.
Recognizing at last what had caused the plasticky
hiss-tock
of Blake’s breathing, I wrapped my hand around the hose and tore it free. Then I twisted the handle of the valve, letting loose an ear-splitting hiss as a plume of escaping wind knocked my hand away and streamed past, inches from my chin.
I plunged my face fully into the flow from the tank. The blowing stream pressed like fingers against my cheeks and eyelids as I gulped in breath after breath of pure, breathable air.
The lights snapped on, sudden and blinding.
The air streaming from the tank had flushed the worst of the chlorine gas away from my eyes, but my vision was still blurred and hazy. Keeping my face close to the valve, inside the flow, I squinted at the corner of the room near the light switch.
I could make out a dark, bulky figure standing against the wall, one arm raised parallel to his body, aiming something at me.
Blake grunted, his voice strangely muffled through the scuba regulator in his mouth. He sounded as if he had developed a lisp, too.
“Put your head against the ROV,” he said. “I’m going to come over and zip-tie your hands behind you.”
“Fuck you,” I gasped. I sucked another breath of air, bracing myself to move quickly. “Put your head against your fat ass. I’m going to come over and shove it in.”
“I will
shoot
you, Trevor.” Blake sounded strangely nasal, too, as if he had a bad cold along with the speech impediment. “I’m not messing around.”
My vision blurred and doubled. I blinked tears, trying to see him clearly.
He was wearing a scuba mask and regulator. They concealed most of his face, but he still looked very wrong somehow. Behind the mask, his eyelids were ridiculously puffy, the eyes narrow slits. His cheeks, bulging out at each side of the mask, looked too fat.
Blake’s whole head seemed too big now, and weirdly lopsided.
Aiming a large handgun at my chest—a stainless steel 1911-style .45 semiautomatic—he bent to one knee with the careful, slow stoop of a man in considerable pain. Using his other hand, he grabbed the end of the thick hose I had fed under the door, and yanked it forcefully.
A loud clunk came from outside—the sound of the five-gallon drum tipping over. He pulled a few more feet of hose inside, freeing the other end from the drum so chlorine gas would no longer flow into the storage unit.
I stayed hunched over the stream of air from the tank as if it were a drinking fountain, breathing from it while I watched for an opportunity. But the muzzle of the pistol never drifted far enough.
With a grunt, Blake stood up again, breathing heavily through his regulator.
I rubbed the back of my head, feeling sticky wetness and sending another spike of pain through my skull.
“Ow!” I said. “You fucking
pistol-whipped
me? That really hurt!”
“I was trying to knock you out,” he said.
I laughed, and the vise of agony tightened around my temples.
“Doesn’t usually work,” I said.
“I didn’t want to hit you
too
hard by mistake,” he said.
Probing my bleeding scalp with my fingers and finding nothing broken, I relaxed.
“I have a really hard skull,” I said.
I could see Blake better now. Even from across the room, I could see how badly his gun hand was shaking. His face was a mess: swollen and blotched with purple. Someone had really tooled him over.
Blake raised the gun and aimed it at my forehead. “I doubt even
your
thick skull is hard enough to stop a bullet,” he said.
The muzzle traced a jittering figure eight in the air.
I looked at his deformed face. Seeing the full extent of his injuries, I felt a pang of sorrow tighten my throat.
Blake was no threat to me. He was terrified, hurt, and in pain. And out of shape and old.
“Who did this to you?” I asked.
Blake’s bruised eyes widened behind the mask.
“What?”
He sounded incredulous.
“It’s not a trick question, Blake.” I straightened and took a step toward him, holding out a hand. He flinched violently and stepped back. I could feel rage starting to build inside of me, tightening my neck and forearms like cables.
But I wasn’t angry at poor Blake.
I was angry at whoever had hurt him this way.
And furious at myself, too, for getting this so wrong.
Blake wasn’t a killer. He was a gentle kook who wasted his weekends building lame underwater vehicles, like this silly ROV whose ballast tank I had just tapped for air. He was an eccentric white-collar dork whose big dream was to salvage crusty old Navy artifacts nobody else wanted.
What kind of sick fuck could take a harmless old guy like Blake and beat him half to death, like some ’08er OPW skinhead working over a Mexican gangbanger from Bako? Blake could have had a heart attack or a stroke. He might
still
die from the head injuries I was looking at.
My lips skinned back from my teeth and my voice turned into a guttural snarl. “Who the
fuck
did this to you?”
“I don’t understand,” he said. “You’re asking me… who did this? Are you joking?” He took a step backward and steadied the gun as best he could with his other hand. The way he moved his arm told me he had some cracked ribs, too. It reminded me of the bruise on my own side from the sprinkler head, which was competing with a splitting headache for my attention.
Blake’s quavering voice went up an octave. “Trevor… you’re seriously trying to say that… at this exact moment, you
don’t know
who beat me up?”
I didn’t, but I was getting a weird idea that I couldn’t shake. My anger drained away, and a chill raced down my back. Goose bumps popped up on my arms, triggered by the memory of PETMAN stalking me through Blake’s lab, leaning over me as I eased past his chest, those powerful steel arms poised on each side of my head...
My voice dropped to a surprised whisper. “Did fucking
PETMAN
do this to you?”
“
PETMAN
?” Blake stared at me like I was crazy, and I realized how stupid I sounded.
“Just kidding,” I said. “I have no clue at all who beat you up, and I don’t want to play some dumb guessing game. So tell me.”
“Oh, shit.” He shook his head, taking another step backward, still looking at me like I was crazy.
“Don’t make me say this to you, Trevor. I can’t. You’ll kill me.”
“Wait a minute… you think
I
beat you up or something?” My eyes narrowed in annoyance. “How hard did
you
get hit in the head, Blake?”
“Oh, shit.” Even through the regulator, he sounded as though he was about to cry. “I don’t know what you want from me now. I don’t know what to do, and I’m so tired of being afraid. I just want it all to stop.”
I felt really bad for Blake. Stepping away from the diminishing flow of tank air, I sniffed. The atmosphere inside the storage unit smelled like an indoor pool, but at least it was breathable now.
Time to quit fooling around. I needed to find out who had hurt Blake, and get Blake someplace safe so he could get proper medical attention.
“It’s okay,” I said. “You won’t have to be afraid much longer.”
A wordless squeal of terror came out of his mouth. The gun wavered in his hand, and his elbow drew back toward his body.
I was suddenly afraid of what he might do. I could still picture Cassie, with Kate’s face buried in her shoulder, mouthing the words
“suicide watch”
at me. I needed to get the gun away from Blake before he decided to turn it on himself.
“Let’s just calm down and talk this through,” I said. “I can guess most of it already. Someone caught you here and beat you up…”—I squinted at his bruises, gauging their color, which was aging from purple to green—”…on Saturday or Sunday. Whoever it was, they told you that
I
asked them to beat you up—”
“No, to
kill
me,” Blake said. “You want me
dead
, Trevor, just like McNulty. Only no one would ever find
my
body.”
His beefy frame shuddered with silent sobs. “Leaving me alive was a personal favor. You were never supposed to find out. I was going to g-go away forever, like I promised—just disappear—but instead, I’m stuck here.”
“They took your white key card—”
“My whole wallet,” he said. “Credit cards, IDs, everything. To show
you,
as proof I was dead. I mean, how was I supposed to get away, then? With no money or ID?”
With a sinking sensation, I now realized what Garmin and I had both missed.
Key-card records were meaningless. Whoever had sabotaged Frankenstein and killed Bennett didn’t have to be one of the DARPA leads at all. With Blake’s key card in hand, it could be anyone.
“But it wasn’t me, Blake.” I kept my body loose, tracking the gun in my peripheral vision, ready to spring. “I had nothing to do with
any
of it. So you need to tell me
who
—”
A muffled metallic pop sounded outside the door, sending something spattering against the side of the storage unit. A soft whoosh followed, and I almost cringed—because I could picture exactly what was happening outside.
The chemical reaction I had set in motion had spontaneously combusted. The fallen container had burst, spraying flaming hydrazine against the wall next to us.
“Oh, shit.” Blake half turned toward the sound, grabbing at his hair with his free hand and spitting out the scuba regulator. “Are we
on fire
?”
I nodded. “Got an extinguisher?”
Then the phone in my pocket rang. I pulled it out and saw that it was Cassie. Shrugging, I stepped toward Blake, holding the phone out to him.
“It’s for you.”
“What…
who?
” He instinctively reached for the phone with his free hand, and the gun’s muzzle drifted off target.
I dived forward, grabbed the gun by the slide, and yanked it out of his shaking fingers.
With a trapped moan, Blake crumpled to a squat at my feet and wrapped his arms protectively around his head. Getting a proper grip on the gun, I stepped back, putting a little space between us.
“Ssshh,”
I said. “Just relax. Try to think of something happy.”
Shuddering, he curled tighter.
Pressing the mag-release, I let the full magazine fall to the concrete and kicked it away. It slid out of sight beneath the ROV. Then I racked the pistol’s slide, ejecting the chambered round to send it tumbling end-over-end through the air in a long arc of brass. Dropping to a squat across from Blake, I slammed the hammer-end of the gun against the concrete floor, knocking the slide completely loose from the frame.
I tossed the parts onto the floor in front of Blake. Surprised the clatter, he lowered his arms and looked up. “You broke it.”
“I don’t like having guns pointed at me, and that’s twice today already.”
I slid an arm under his shoulders and gently helped him to his feet, giving him a reassuring pat on the back.
“Let’s go find that fire extinguisher,” I said. “Then we’ll get you to a doctor.”
I
got Blake into the Mustang’s passenger seat, but before I could turn the key he grabbed my arm in a vise-tight grip.
“I can’t go to a hospital,” he said. “They’ll find me there. They’ll kill me.”
“
Who?
” I asked for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Just fucking tell me
already, Blake, and they’ll never hurt you again. Because
I’m
going to find them first.”