SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (28 page)

You know better.

She watched as Petrino turned his head to watch the street fall away behind the ambulance, his skin flaring red and blue in the reflection of the police lights. Something was keeping the FBI from stepping in to help Brendan Healy.

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR / Monday, 5:22 PM

In the service elevator, he saw with some dismay that Sloane’s head was hanging forward, her chin resting on her chest, which was rising and falling rapidly as she panted. Her hair was damp with sweat from all the intense activity of the past fifteen minutes. So when she lifted her head up as the elevator descended, he was surprised by the serene look on her face. Her color was high, with bright blushes on her cheeks, her eyes ringed with fatigue, but she looked calm. She caught him studying her, and she winked.

He felt a rush of shame and guilt blowing through the pain of his hip, his scorched lungs, his shattered nose.

He had totally upended her life, dragging her into this mess so that he wasn’t alone, because somehow she seemed to get him. The way she registered how he limped or that scar on the side of his face, but never mentioned them. She seemed to understand and accept all of his problems. And in the past day and a half he had seen the light inside of her, her capacity for warmth, patience, and caring that far outweighed the anger which besieged her heart.

He stood looking at her, and she gazed back, and then she kissed him, blood on his lips and everything, and he kissed back.

When they pulled apart, she was scowling. “How did you know how to get to this elevator?”

“My dad worked here. When my parents split up, he started coming here more. I used to come visit him. Was about the only time I ever saw him. Here and Westchester Med.” He stretched his mouth into a wry smile that sent pain through every muscle in his face. “This is my turf.”

When Brendan was growing up his dad had always been on call. He wore a beeper in those days – a device that had seemed space-age to a young Brendan. At the hospital, his father would often deposit Brendan on the very floor they’d just navigated – pediatrics – so he could play with other kids under the watchful eyes of the nurses.

He turned to look at the floor indicators lighting up as they descended. He wondered who, exactly, was pursuing them. Titan now seemed more than ever a wide net, a catch-all meant to obscure the specifics, to hide the real perpetrators.

Brendan realized that the first person who’d ever brought up Titan in connection with Rebecca’s murder was her own father.

Alexander Heilshorn.

He felt his heart shiver. Was that correct? He searched his memories and decided that it was. Brown had mentioned it, too – Brown had played a phone game with him back when Brendan thought Titan was little more than a porn producer. But it was Heilshorn who’d been the first person ever to mention the name to him, claiming that Titan’s function was to protect the interests of online black markets. The only other person to volunteer anything about Titan had been Olivia Jane, in a cryptic statement made after she’d been incarcerated and Reginald Forrester had been killed while awaiting arraignment.

Or, maybe it wasn’t a cryptic at all. What if Titan
did
refer to the men who Heilshorn had hired to do his shovel detail for him, and then Heilshorn himself implicated them when his own daughter was murdered? What was the saying – hide in plain sight? What could an investigator, whether they worked for the Defense Department or the FBI, do with a statement such as “Titan is the government?” Where did that begin? Where could it possibly lead?

As the elevator reached the lowest level of the hospital and the doors opened on the parking garage, Brendan thought that Olivia Jane’s original statement, the one he had condensed, had been more telling.

Titan is so entwined with the government that you’ll never get it free.

It was smoke. It meant nothing. The real foe was not some faceless organization from a pulp novel.

It had a face. It had a shape. It was real.

He turned to Sloane. “You ready for this?”

She took his hand in hers. “Born ready.”

* * *

An army of cops was waiting in the parking garage. The lights from the cruisers washed the entire concrete structure in red and blue. Men and women in uniform were standing behind the squad cars, in front of them, to the rear of them, taking aim with their service pistols and rifles. Half of them wore helmets.

“Don’t move!” bellowed a cop with a megaphone. “Put your hands in the air! Both of you, I want you to set down any weapons, leave them in the elevator, and step slowly out with your hands up.”

It’s the entire 11
th
precinct,
Brendan thought, his heart fluttering like a pigeon’s. His teeth rattled in his head, his skin vibrated. He held his hands out in front of him, slowly raising them in the air. He glanced at Sloane and saw her do the same.

“We’re unarmed,” Brendan called back.

He swallowed, it felt like a stone was sliding down his throat.

“But there are other people in the building who have weapons. They’re coming.”

A few of the cops exchanged looks. The one with the megaphone lowered it for a moment, looking like he just forgot what he had for dinner. Then he brought it back to his lips. His voice was still amplified and loud, but less authoritative.

“Walk this way, both of you. Slowly.”

Brendan and Sloane did as commanded. As they stepped out of the elevator, the doors closed behind them. Brendan heard the motor and cables haul it back up to where the agents, at least one or two of them, were surely waiting to board. The others – he didn’t know how many more were in the building – would be finding another way down. He remembered the cameras – they weren’t there in his father’s day – but he was sure as shit there was video surveillance in the parking garage. Whoever was the eye in the sky knew exactly where Brendan and Sloane were and what was going on.

He considered two possibilities: Either their pursuers would arrive and attempt to hostilely reclaim their quarry, or, seeing the NYPD in full phalanx would keep them away.

The megaphone cop turned to another NYPD officer and said something Brendan couldn’t hear, and jerked his head. A detail of three cops moved up closer, two hands on their pistols, with the one who had been given an order by the megaphone cop. The quartet came towards Brendan and Sloane. When they were close, the cop out in front grabbed Brendan. Another was there in a second, and they brought him to the ground so fast he felt a split second of freefall vertigo. He twisted his head in time to see them do the same to Sloane.

“Don’t hurt her,” he said. His breath blew bits of dirt and dust around on the gritty garage floor.

Megaphone lowered the amplifier again. Another cop, plainclothes, came jogging up beside him. Then the two of them came over as the cops cuffed Brendan and Sloane with thick plastic ties.

Now Brendan felt a firm pressure under his arms as the cops hoisted him to his feet. Sloane too. The air smelled of cop-sweat, starchy uniforms, the exhaust and oil of the parking garage.

The plainclothes cop and the megaphone cop, probably a detective and a sergeant, respectively, Brendan thought, stuck both of their noses in his face.

“You caused quite a bit of fucking trouble,” the sergeant said. “Now who are you talking about, how many more you got in there with weapons?”

He stood eye to eye with Brendan, about five foot ten. He wore the blue sergeant’s stripes patch on one shoulder of his uniform. His eyes were the color of dried mud, his skin pock-marked from adolescent acne likely followed by years of smoking and drinking.

“Just take us. Book us,” Brendan said. He felt suddenly exhausted.

The sergeant turned away from Brendan and sized up Sloane. All the cops seemed to be staring at them now as they stood there, sergeant and the detective pressing into them.

The sergeant’s eyes returned to Brendan. “Oh we’ll book you,” he said. He glanced at the other cops, signaling them to get moving. Brendan risked a look back at the elevator as they started pulling him forward. The car had reached the sixth floor. As he watched, the indicator for the fifth floor lit up. It was coming back.

* * *

The arresting officers moved Brendan and Sloane toward a van. A police officer standing by opened the rear doors.

There were squawks as several radios went off at once, just garbled static that buried a voice Brendan couldn’t understand. The sergeant plucked a walkie-talkie from his belt and stuck it in front of his mouth.

“Copy. We’re sending up the EMTs for the doctor. Go medics.”

Brendan could feel the hot stares of the policemen as they put their weapons away and eased down. Probably some of them felt let down, had wanted a little trigger-action, while a few of them had probably just popped their cherries when they’d unsnapped their holsters for the first time.

Brendan met their gazes. His thoughts had become a jumbled mess, but one idea pulsed through the din of his mind – he was no longer a cop. He didn’t even feel like a detective anymore, a private investigator, none of it. There didn’t seem to be any clear lines anymore. There didn’t seem to be any order in the world.

And just before the cops loaded Brendan and Sloane into the back of the van, somebody shouted.

CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE / Monday, 5:29 PM

The elevator hadn’t even made it all the way down yet. The female agent was walking fast, the kind of wanting-to-run-but-can’t walking those athletes did in the Olympics. It was the woman from the stairs, coming from the other end of the garage, where it sloped up towards the street. She was holding something out in front of her; it jerked up and down as she closed in. A badge.

“Hey,” she was shouting. “Hey-hey-hey. Those are ours, guys.”

“The fuck?” said one of the cops near Brendan.

The sergeant and the detective went towards her. Brendan saw that half the cops who had holstered the weapons a moment ago, now had them out again, trained on the woman. When the elevator chimed that it had reached the garage level, most of the cops swung in that direction, their faces lighting up with alarm.

Two agents stepped out of the service elevator. They had their badges out, too. They both also brandished automatic handguns.

“Woah, woah, woah!” someone was yelling. Brendan saw the sergeant pat the air with his hands and look around at his men. “Everybody calm down.”

“Put those weapons away,” one of the agents from the elevator said. Brendan recognized him, the one who had called himself Hermes. He looked like he’d gotten a little workout running around the hospital – his perfect hair was slicked with sweat, he was breathing hard.

“You put yours away,” a cop shouted back from the group surrounding Brendan.

“Agent Persephone,” the woman declared to the sergeant, holding her badge higher in the air in front of her. “Central Security Service.”

Brendan’s breath caught in his throat. His mouth was desert-dry; he had no spit. The woman had identified herself as CSS, an organization he only knew a little about, but which had the combined resources of the CIA and the National Security Agency.

“Why’d you come down through here?” the plainclothes cop asked.

Agent Persephone put her badge away, but her gun stayed out. “We wanted to avoid a scene,” she said. She didn’t need to gesture or even nod toward the mob of cops and swirling lights to suggest that a scene was exactly what this level of law enforcement created.

“That man and that woman are in our custody,” she said.

The tension palpably decreased around Brendan. It was a living thing – the violence and testosterone and nerve-wracked endocrine systems put out some kind of acrid perfume into the air. Now it was dissipating as the NYPD people realized that this was turning into the usual bureaucratic bullshit, the eye-rolling juris-my-diction argument that festered in every crime scene while blood coagulated and bodies went into rigor mortis. Whose perp was it? Blah blah blah. County? City? State detectives coming in on this one? And so on.

Brendan didn’t feel so relieved. He strained to hear every word between the sergeant and female agent, but the cops milling around were already starting to murmur and move around, their shoes noisy on the concrete.

“Sarge? What’re we doing here?” This was the policeman nearest Brendan, still holding him with a hand hooked under his bicep.

The sergeant stuck his hand out in the cop’s direction.
Hold on
.

“I got a call from a civilian,” the sergeant was saying, “that these two people had him at gunpoint. The city doesn’t respond to a threat like this lightly. This is terrorism.”

Brendan felt something milky and grey roll over in his stomach at the sound of the word.

“I understand,” Persephone was saying in what Brendan was sure was her most patient voice. CSS? The woman was a killer. He knew she was. Ex-military. They all were. They moved like operatives, not analysts. He tried to recall what he knew about the CSS. There wasn’t much in the way of public information about them, but he’d seen a little here, a little there. They had been formed in the 1970s by presidential directive, and tied into Army Intelligence and Security Command, Naval Security, the Marines, Airforce Intelligence – basically the entirety of the U.S. Military. They executed black-bag style operations and operated unmanned aerial vehicles – UAVs, commonly called drones.

He glanced at the two men near the elevator. They kept their weapons out, but Brendan saw they had been lowered, barrels pointing down. They were watching Persephone and the sergeant. But then Hermes turned and looked at Brendan.

Brendan looked back, unblinking.

Hermes wanted him so bad he could taste it, thought Brendan.

“You want them, you come down to the station and you fill out the paperwork. I’ve got a captain, a lieutenant, a bureau chief, and the whole city of New York to answer to, okay? Reporters are going to be here any second if they’re not already outside. This goes by the book.”

The sergeant spoke loudly, making sure everyone heard, Brendan thought.

Persephone spoke quietly, and Brendan could hear little of her calmly articulated but venomous threats. There was something about the sergeant shoveling penguin shit for the rest of his life on the South Pole if she snapped her fingers.

The sergeant was not going to back down. He turned on his heel and started back towards the van. His face was a contorted with indignation and doubt, but he raised one hand, stuck a finger in the air and twirled it around, indicating that his force get going. For a moment, Brendan saw Hermes overcome with pure hate and frustration, and then he disappeared as Brendan and Sloane were shoved into the back of the van. The plainclothes detective piled in after them and began reading Brendan and Sloane their Miranda rights. The doors slammed and the tires squawked as the NYPD drove them away.