The Nephilim (13 page)

He turned around to see who was addressing him, not stupid enough to come out from behind the tree, and saw the three Treasury agents from the diner standing behind him. All had weapons drawn and all of them were pointed at him, and for a moment he wondered if the world had gone mad. He wasn't the only one wondering that.

“Gun!” One of the agents yelled it out and for a brief moment Garrick wondered why. He looked around hurriedly. Who had a gun? And then he realised the shocking truth just as they started firing at him. It was him!

The vest took the first couple of bullets for which he was unbelievably grateful. But it didn't stop the impacts and he gasped as the pain hit. They were using heavy calibre handguns. Not nines, forty fives maybe. Then one of the bullets tore straight through his arm and the pain got much worse. Even as he was reeling from that another bullet smashed into his thigh and he knew he was in trouble.

The pain was terrible, the bullets burning through his flesh like hot pokers, and the injuries were serious. There was blood everywhere, running down his arm, running down his leg. Worse than that though was the weakness he felt. His injured leg threatened to collapse beneath him. A further two slugs sent into his vest sealed the deal and he fell to the ground while the agents were all yelling “Treasury” at the top of their lungs. As if they were trying to identify themselves to other Treasury agents. What other Treasury agents?

After that things turned truly strange. Bullets were still flying in all directions, people were yelling all around and he didn't know what was being said by anyone. But what he did know was that one of the Treasury agents was hit, and while he was wearing a vest the bullet had somehow snuck through a gap. Garrick saw the bright red blood appear on his white shirt around his collar and then saw him fall just as he had.

The other two agents suddenly rushed him as he lay there, and he was quickly rolled on to his stomach, kneed in the back and handcuffed, all while the gun battle carried on. The agent who was down was holding up his ID to the sky and still screaming “Treasury” at the top of his lungs for some unknown reason, while all around other agents were yelling “FBI”. After that the Treasury agents started yelling at him to do something. But he couldn't. There was a roaring in his ears and he couldn't quite work out what the men were yelling at him. He couldn't really move either. All he could do was lie there on the leaf covered forest floor and wonder if the world had gone completely mad.

He was still wondering that as the light left his eyes.

Chapter Eight

He was in a hospital. Garrick knew that even before he opened his eyes. He could hear the sounds of medical equipment monitoring vital signs and smell disinfectant. He could hear people talking in hushed tones. And then when he did finally open his eyes he could see the white acoustic ceiling tiles he'd expected. He could see the rails too around his bed area, and the floral curtains hanging from them that the nurses or doctors would pull shut when they wanted to examine a patient in private.

He was alive, and as the memories came flooding back of the capture and the reason he was in hospital, he knew that that was a lucky thing. The agents had scored at least two strikes on him and even if neither of them had hit anything vital, blood loss could still have killed him. Assuming they hadn't gone on to shoot him in the head while he was lying on the ground – which thankfully they hadn't done.

Looking around he could see he was in a ward with three other patients, some of whom were connected up to monitoring equipment, though at least none looked to be on life support. None of the other patients were looking at him. Nor were they reading magazines or talking to each other or doing any of the things patients normally did. Instead they were all staring intently at the double doors to the ward, almost as if they were expecting the nurses to come.

But the nurses weren't coming. They weren't attending to any patients at the moment. Neither were the doctors. And the other patients weren't expecting them. He knew that because he could hear the doctors just outside. They were talking to men somewhere out in the corridor. Angry men. They were trying to calm them down, telling them that this was a hospital, not a place for shouting and screaming. They weren't having a lot of luck though.

The men were trying to restrain themselves a little bit, but not succeeding completely. In fact they were only a little short of screaming incoherently at one another. And strangely he realised that he knew one of them. Garrick recognised the voice of the deputy director, even though he was yelling. He'd never heard him yell before. But then he was apparently saying something about his fellow agents being shot in the line of duty, and operations being compromised by incompetent agents, so Garrick could understand his anger. He felt it himself.

The other man he didn't know. But he recognised the anger in him too. And he was yelling something about corruption within the bureau and mass murder. Both men were losing control, and this was not the place for that. The dirty laundry of the bureau shouldn't be aired in public.

Meanwhile he was lying in a hospital bed, handcuffed as he quickly discovered, to the railing, and starting to wonder just what was happening. He remembered the Treasury agents showing up and shooting him in the middle of a gun battle they'd caused. But he had no idea what the hell he was supposed to have done.

It had to be something to do with the girl, Katarinka. He knew that. He'd had no other involvement with Treasury since then, and he'd recognised the agents who had shot him. But his involvement with her had ended. It had ended well over a week before when he'd dropped her off at the Academy. And as far as he knew the Treasury only suspected her of an association with Benedict. Not complicity in his crimes. Unless that had changed? Maybe it had, he thought, since to go from her mere association with a counterfeiter to arresting and shooting the FBI agent who had escorted her to school, made even less sense than everything else.

Still, he put that madness to one side for a bit as he tried to work out how badly he was injured. It was actually quite hard to tell. His body felt a little as though it was wrapped in cotton wool, something that he guessed was due to the pain medication he'd been given. He couldn't see his injuries as he was heavily bandaged. And there was no nurse there to tell him anything useful. But he could wiggle his toes and move his fingers about, so that had to be a good sign when he remembered being shot in the arm and the leg. Equally the beeping from the machine by his head seemed to have a metronomic quality to it. He had to take that as a positive as well. More than that he guessed he'd have to wait to find out.

Garrick let his attention return to the argument in the hallway. An argument that was growing worse by the minute. Well, louder anyway. It was an argument that centred on him.

Charges were being threatened. Charges against him, though for what the unknown man didn't say. And charges had already been laid against the three Treasury agents. In fact from what he could make out, one of them was already in the holding cells and being questioned while the other two were somewhere in the hospital with him.

That was as it should be in his view. Shooting an FBI agent and compromising a sensitive operation; all were unbelievable mistakes to make, and smacked of gross incompetence. Actually it was criminal. And when it wasn't just him who had been shot as a result of their arrival on the scene, Garrick was all for locking them away for life. These people should not have badges and guns. Not even the plastic toy guns kids had.

Yet he was still cuffed to the bed.

That did not strike Garrick as a good thing. No matter how incompetent these Treasury agents were, the fact that he was in cuffs had to mean that they truly did believe him guilty of something. Something that at a guess had to do with Benedict and the girl. Or did it? Could it be something completely different? Taxes maybe?

But it wasn't. It had to be Benedict. He knew that when he heard the deputy director arguing about the press outside and what they would say. Who else could cause such a noise?

It was apparently a media circus. Agents were down, the suspect was dead and everyone was yelling at everyone. The shoot out between agencies had hit prime time news and by the sounds of things Treasury weren't doing too well out of it. So, did they actually believe him guilty of something? Or were they just desperately trying to dig themselves out of a publicity hole by using him as a scapegoat? After all, if they could go to the press and say they'd actually arrested a known criminal FBI agent it might manage to overshadow all the other bungling mistakes the agents had made. Mistakes that had gotten other agents shot and the serial killer killed. That last didn't bother him too much, but he supposed the man had been denied the right to a fair trial by the bungled arrest. And the families of his victims had been denied the chance to see him stand trial.

Eventually Garrick decided to find out just how deep the rabbit hole was.

“Oy!”

He could have been polite. Addressed whoever it was out there more formally. But he'd been shot. He was cuffed to a hospital bed. He didn't feel as though he really wanted to be polite. And when the men didn't answer him, busy as they were with their own argument, he shouted it at them again, louder than before. Finally that got a response, and a moment later he heard the argument stop and then the sound of their feet on the lino floor. Moments later he watched the pair of them push aside the double doors to the ward and step into view.

One of them he knew to be Deputy Director Simons. The deputy director was someone he saw most months, on the TV more often than in the building. He was a smartly dressed man with greying hair who had always impressed him as being sharp. The other he didn't know. But then he didn't know anyone from Treasury. And his experiences with them lately suggested strongly that he probably didn't want to.

“Special Agent Hamilton.”

The deputy director greeted him a little too politely, something that worried Garrick a little. But he still knew he'd done nothing wrong. Well, nothing that these two could know about anyway.

“Deputy Director.” Garrick decided to rein in his attitude a little. At least until he knew what was happening.

“Well the doctors have said you'll make a full recovery with a few month’s rest. That's the good news. The bad is that Treasury are wanting to prosecute you for a whole raft of offences including aiding and abetting a known felon.”

The deputy director didn't sugar coat things, but then he never did. It wasn't his style. He was direct to a fault. Still, it gave Garrick something to work with.

“Who? Katarinka Nelos is a known felon? That doesn't seem likely since she's a teenager. And in any case I asked if she was suspected of involvement in any crimes when the agents turned up at the diner and they said no. So I didn't aid her at all. I just took her to school.”

And that he knew had to be his story. He had to stick to it. It was just fortunate for him then that it was the truth.

“That's not what my agents say!”

The other man was all but bristling with anger as he set about accusing him of something. But then he was the sort to get hot under the collar as far as Garrick could see. His face was already turning red.

“My agents say that you deliberately obstructed their investigation. They say you helped Armando Benedict's associate to flee custody. And they say that you did it because you yourself are a known associate of Armando Benedict.”

“That's a lie!”

Garrick should have been more controlled. More circumspect. But the charges were serious and a complete load of crap. The man wasn't just talking about getting him fired; he was talking about putting him in jail – all for obeying the orders of an angel. That wasn't right. And the one thing he couldn't do was defend himself by telling them the actual truth.

“Is it?” The man suddenly came much closer and stared straight at him as though he was prosecuting him already. “Is it really?”

“And I suppose you're also going to tell me that when you were arrested you didn't then fire on our agents, badly wounding one and starting a cross fire between agencies that resulted in three more agents being shot.”

“What the hell are you talking about? I was in the middle of a shoot out – one started by your own people as they bowled up in the middle of an operation with their sirens flashing and let the suspect know that we were there. They called my name while I was crouched behind a tree out of ammunition. I turned and they shot me. There's no confusion about any of that.”