“Valerie,” Canvas said in an annoyed tone, “I’m waiting.”
She took what she supposed to be a final breath, mentally said a private prayer for the souls of her children, then turned to the case.
First combination: 6-6-6.
Second combination: 0-1-8.
“Not that I don’t trust you, dear,” Canvas said as he placed the case on a chair in front of her. He waved everybody back to his side of the room, then nodded at the case. “If you please.”
She closed her eyes for a moment. Then—her conscience clear, committed, ready—she snapped the latches up, turned each toward the outside of the case, then lifted the lid.
“Impressive,” the first mumbled to Canvas as they watched her reach in for the files.
The butt of the cocked and loaded Browning slid easily into her hand, just the way she’d practiced.
First the one directly in front of you, then anyone to your right, then my shot—and don’t freakin’ miss—then the floor.
Xenos’s words echoed in her brain in the nanosecond between thought and action. Then she pulled back from the case.
The first shot exploded through the room, paralyzing everyone. It took off the top of the head of one of the interrogators. Before any reaction could set in, she’d already swung the gun around and fired a lethal shot into the chest of one of the guards. As she dropped straight to the floor, her arm flew straight up and she fired twice more.
Time seemed to stop, her mind expand, as she could plainly see the panic setting in across the room. The man they called Canvas dived for the door. A confused guard had got his gun caught on his jacket lining and died from her next shot. Another shot and another of the interrogators died. Too late, she saw two more guards—their guns already out—move to her right.
There was no chance, she would die, but not before she slapped the security case from the chair, activating the document-destruct device. Three seconds after it had started, she prepared to die …as an animal’s scream filled the air.
Something heavy fell on her, and she realized with a start that it was a body. She rolled out from under it just in time to see Xenos drop the second corpse—the man’s head turned around facing backward with a stunned expression—on the floor by her. With a roar, he grabbed the man’s gun and leaped out the door firing a nonstop barrage.
Praying she wasn’t going insane, Valerie followed him.
They ran the length of the corridor, Xenos killing two more guards at almost point-blank range, their brains exploding over the fleeing couple. A door started to open behind them and Valerie fired three rounds into it. She heard something drop to the floor but never looked back.
They burst through the fire door onto the stairs, less than a minute after it had started.
“Up!” Xenos said in an urgent whisper.
“But…”
She never finished her confused thought as two men came through the door. Xenos threw her to the side and slammed into them. The first toppled over the railing, then caromed off concrete stairs for the next three floors. The other regained his balance—if not the gun, which had been knocked from his hand. He pulled a knife from his boot, but it was pointless. Adrenalized fury grabbed the man’s hand, turning it up toward his face, driving it through his eye.
“Up!” Xenos yelled again as he grabbed the fallen gun and hurried up the stairs behind Valerie.
Two flights later they broke into the corridor, both taking deadly aim at the emptiness there.
Xenos led her slowly through the building.
“What now?” Valerie said, panting, trying to suppress the bile that had risen three-quarters of the way in her throat.
“Nice shooting,” was all he said as he kept his eyes forward and moved slowly.
For the first time she saw the ragged rope at his right wrist, along with the wound she caused when she’d shot. The man was covered with blood—his and several others’—was wounded, broken in almost every possible way. But he seemed unaware of it, just a preternatural beast from Hell’s depths wandering an office building looking for people to kill.
“They’ll look downstairs first,” he finally said as they paused by a drinking fountain. He cupped his hand and splashed water into his swelling-shut eyes. “We’ve got ten minutes,” tops.
“Then what?”
Something across the corridor seemed to catch his attention. “Watch the elevators and the stairs. Anyone comes through”—he handed her his gun—“kill them.”
Valerie couldn’t breathe. Her heart was racing, the guns abnormally heavy in her grasp. “But what if it’s some innocent guy coming to work?”
Xenos was closely examining a door to an office. “No innocents today,” he mumbled. “Dentist’s office.” He tried the knob, studied the door frame, then stepped back. A deep breath, then he kicked the door open with a crashing splintering of wood.
And somewhere deep inside, a siren screamed to life.
“All exits locked down and covered by closed circuit; elevators shut down. Floors three through basement are clear. We’re starting up now.”
Canvas nodded as he listened to another report coming in on a radio. “Damage?”
The guard shook his head and bit his lips. “Too fucking much,” he said in shocked tones. But the look on his employer’s face quickly snapped him back to order.
“Five in the room including two of the players, but I think the Kraut got out clean.” He took a deep breath. “Three in the corridor, two more in the stairwell.”
“Personnel?”
“We’re down to five not counting you and me and a medic.” The man seemed to drift. “I mean, I’d heard stories, you know? But I never thought that, I mean, Jesus!”
“Hey!”
“Sorry, boss.”
Canvas put his arm around the nervous man. “Pull the men back. I need those bodies out of there before the coppers show, right?”
The man seemed to regain himself. “No chance of that. No one could’ve heard the shots, and we shut down the building’s telephone trunks as soon as it happened.”
Just then an alarm from one of the upper floors broke through the otherwise silent darkness.
“Hello, Jerry.” Canvas smiled up at the darkened building. “Get those bodies out through the garage now! We’ve got maybe five minutes.” The man raced into the building.
Canvas changed the frequency on his radio, then pressed the call key for ten seconds. Finally, shaking his head, he spoke into the microphone.
“Point taken, Jerry.” His voice echoed through the building’s emergency intercom. “But this is just starting, right? Game on and all that.” He swallowed hard, forcing all anxiety out of his voice. “No authorities, or the lady’s children are done for. You know me, you know what I mean, right? He released the button.”
“Hey,” Colin? Xenos’s voice sounded tinny and far away over the intercom’s relay.
“Yeah?”
“Let it go, man.”
Canvas looked long and hard at the upper floors of the building before answering. Even longer and deeper into the heart of the man on the other end of the radio.
“‘Fraid I can’t. You take the money, you hook the fish.’”
A long, fanged silence.
“I understand,” Xenos said flatly.
Canvas sighed, turned away, and started toward a waiting car. In the distance red flashing lights and squealing sirens could be heard.
“How’d you know they wouldn’t kill them?” Valerie looked shocked as Xenos hurriedly cleaned himself up in the dentist’s office.
“Leverage,” he mumbled. “With you in their control, your kids were almost worthless and therefore expendable. With you loose”—he pulled a sweater he’d found in a desk drawer over his head—“the kids are all they have to keep you quiet; under control.”
Valerie helped him adjust his clothes. “But what now? If I go to the FBI or anyone…”
“He
will
kill them. Guaranteed.”
“So what do we do now?”
He threw some bandages and disinfectant into a canvas bag and headed out. “We leave.”
“How? We can’t talk to the cops, and the others are probably waiting right outside for us!”
Xenos took a deep breath, then turned to her. “Well, we just have… uh, we’ve gotta…”
Valerie barely caught him as he toppled over. His weight knocked her over and they collapsed to the floor.
“Swell.”
The sniper scope’s crosshairs moved steadily back and forth over the parking garage’s mesh doors. Its infrared sighting mechanism casting the gate and the street around it in an eerie pale orange.
“Nothing,” the sniper said as he continued to monitor the area. “Maybe they’re gonna try another way.”
Canvas just shook his head. “This is how they’ll come.”
“How do you know?”
The big man smiled spasmodically. “It’s how
I
would do it.”
As a child, they’d called it “shaft surfing.” Valerie could still remember her mother’s frightened expression the few times her only daughter had been caught doing it. She also remembered two neighborhood boys who had been crushed to death or electrocuted while crouching in the slippery darkness, waiting to “catch a ride.” But she’d always been unafraid, and if the boys could do it, well, she had to do it better.
The elevator doors opened easily, the way she’d remembered they did. And the car itself was just two flights below, maybe twenty feet. The trick now was the timing.
Made all the more complicated by the half-conscious man beside her.
“Hey! You ready for this?”
Xenos nodded, saving his strength for the next few minutes.
The two of them sat on the threshold of the elevator, their feet dangling in the shaft. Valerie leaned forward watching the car below them. After several minutes, it began to move up.
“Okay. Here we go. When you feel it hit your feet, just lean forward quickly and let it take your weight.”
“I know.”
Valerie held her breath as she saw the car start upward
again. She’d been the 103rd Street Champion for an entire summer. Twenty-six cars ridden consecutively over one summer vacation.
“Here it comes. Wait. Wait. Wai …Now,” she whispered as she leaned forward and half fell onto the top of the elevator. All the while praying that Xenos was conscious enough to do it right.
“Hey, Sarge. You hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“A thump. I heard a thump.”
The Bristol police sergeant shook his head. “I didn’t hear nothing. Now get ready. Larsen, Washington, you go left. D’Amico, you’re with me on the right.”
The elevator bell rang, and the doors opened on an empty floor.
Three hours later—after a perfunctory police investigation of a break-in at a dentist’s office, amid the morning crush of arriving office workers—a limping man heavily leaning on a smaller woman casually walked out the front door of the office building and hailed a cab.
Xi Lin Huan was a patient man, born of a patient people. A man of dedication, national loyalty, and pure—state-endorsed—vision. For forty years he had waited his turn, stood in lines, accepted his lot as his due at that moment. Forty years from private soldier in the border skirmishes with Burma to commanding officer of the Long-Range Study Organization of the People’s Liberation Army.
At sixty-three, he was arguably one of the most powerful men in the People’s Republic of China.
From his office deep beneath the Forbidden City he oversaw the most delicate, the most daring intelligence operations in the world. Plans that stretched across decades and shifting alliances.
Operations begun by men long dead; who died happily knowing that their work would one day bear fruit.
There were—in fact—seven such operations in place across the globe. Intricate intelligence warfares that were designed to leave the PRC the sole remaining superpower in a post-Cold War world.
And the one on his mind as he took his usual late night walk among the brightly lit gardens of the former Imperial Palace was code-named
Apple Blossom.
Xi was followed by his aides as he strolled along the green paths. One by one, following a gesture or a nod,
they would come forward, give their morning reports, receive orders, then fall back into the pack. None of the others ever close enough to hear a carelessly loud word or read the lips of the general.
Xi had spent nine years as a member of the pack, understood their nervousness and ambition—the problems they brought to him might have begun before they were born—but he still gave them little comfort or help. None had been offered him, and his country had none offered to it in the last half century. And if these younger men behind him were to carry on the work he stewarded, they must learn to be as hard as he.
He stopped by a small flower bush, kneeled down, and began a meticulous examination of the leaves. A moment later one of the packlings stepped forward, bowed, then stood beside him.
“Sir.”
“Proceed,” Xi said as he turned the leaves in his callused hands.
“The, uh, German reports that there has been an incident.” The young officer stiffened.
An incident
—LRSO shorthand for a major disaster. And many a messenger had suffered for delivering such a message.
“Continue,” the old general said as he brushed some aphids off the flower.
“Sir. It has been reported that Yü and Xuë have been lost.”
The insects seemed to be coming from a colony in the dirt between two flower bushes. As he listened, Xi pulled out a pencil and began probing in the dirt.
“There were additional fatalities and a possible compromising of operational integrity.”
The pencil traced a small trough in the dirt, which Xi spit into several times. As he expected, the tiny bugs began to swarm out of their nest along the path. Xi watched in fascination as they divided into forward scouts, flanking columns, and a main body that held back as the others moved into the trough or along its sides.
“Responsibility?” he asked distractedly.
“Primarily Congresswoman Alvarez, with assistance from Indigo One.”
“Continue.”
The young man almost hesitated. It was so short a moment, virtually unnoticed, but it spoke volumes to the man watching the insects prepare for battle.
And it guaranteed that the man’s promotion had been put back for at least five years.