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A moment later he switched off the comms unit, breaking the connection.

Fitzpatrick was dead.

If they could get to the commander at Fallon how could he be sure that they would be safe there?

He consulted the navigation unit again, looking for an alternative.

39

THE
TWO
DEAD men were laid out on the small patio behind his house. Ellie had refused to have them inside, not even for a minute. It was her home and he and his crime scene could go directly to hell in a hand basket. Besides, hadn’t he been right there and seen what had happened?
Time to put away the notebook Lars. Looks like this one’s all wrapped up
.
But first you can take the bodies out with the goddamned trash. They’d better not be in my house when I get back from taking Jake to the vet.

Once Lars had removed their balaclavas he had recognized them immediately. The two men from the black Cadillac outside the Chevron on New Year’s Eve. He’d met a third man on the stairs, had managed to get a couple of shots in before the man had turned and fled. Blood on the bannister, some more on the kitchen floor and on the driveway outside. Fresh, bright red. Looked like an arterial bleed. He wouldn’t get far. Jed and Larry were out looking for him now.

No signs of forced entry. They must have picked the lock on the kitchen door. He’d found traces of hamburger on the kitchen floor. Most likely some sort of tranquilizer, crushed up and mixed in with the meat and shoved through the door. Jake would have wolfed it down and gone looking for seconds.

He looked over the equipment the men had been carrying while he waited for the coroner to send a van up from the mortuary. Gas masks, canisters of carbon monoxide, soft silicone facemasks attached to each small metal cylinder. Silenced automatics. But they hadn’t planned to use those unless something went wrong. No, it was supposed to look like an accident. The silicone masks pressed to their faces, the gas inhaled while they slept, every lungful finding its way directly into their bloodstreams, the molecules binding to their red blood cells, starving their bodies of oxygen. He guessed it would have taken only minutes before they would have lost consciousness; death would have followed shortly afterwards. Afterwards they would have damaged the flue that vented gas from the house’s hot water system. The Henrikssens. Just another tragic couple who had neglected to have their appliances serviced.

His cell phone rang and he dug it out of his pocket, checking the screen. Number withheld. Maybe it was Fitzpatrick, returning his call. He’d been trying to reach him ever since he’d dealt with the men who had broken into his house. If they were after him and Ellie they would surely be after the commander as well.

‘Sheriff Henrikssen?’

A voice he didn’t recognize. The accent neutral, perhaps British. Certainly not Nevada. Background noise. Regular, mechanical. Muted but familiar. A helicopter?

‘Who is this?’

‘Sheriff you need to listen, I don’t have much time. My name is Cody. You may know me as Carl Gant or Luke Jackson.’

‘Where are you, Cody? Is Doctor Stone with you?’

‘I have Alison.’

‘Is she alright?’

A pause.

‘No. That’s why I’m calling. We were taken by the people who were behind what happened at Mount Grant. Alison was tortured. It looks like she was given something that’s caused some sort of brain damage. I’m flying her to the University Medical Center in Las Vegas. It’s a Level I trauma center, which means it will have neurosurgical capabilities, and a heliport. I need you to get in touch with them and tell them I’m on my way, and that I have a sample of whatever it is they’ve given her.’

‘Okay.’

‘But you need to tell them that no attempt is to be made to apprehend me.’

Lars paused.

‘And why would I do that?’

‘Because I’m not going to allow myself to be apprehended today, Sheriff, and if a couple of hospital security guards take it into their heads to try somebody might get hurt. Besides, there’s something else I need to do as soon as I’ve dropped Alison off.’

‘You know where he is don’t you?’

‘I think I do.’

‘Then why don’t you just tell me? Let the authorities handle this.’

‘No disrespect, Sheriff, but I’m not sure that’s a great idea. From what Alison’s told me I think you may also have some idea how long this has been going on. I’m guessing to have avoided the attention of the FBI all these years he’s probably got someone pretty high up on the inside.’

DeWitty. Maybe others.

‘And he’s used to covering his tracks. He got to Fitzpatrick this morning. Waited until he’d left the base to pick up his wife and then a truck ran his car off the road. Made to look like a DUI. There won’t be a lot of evidence pointing to him.’

‘How do you plan to stop him?’

A pause.

‘Sheriff you don’t want to know that.’

Lars considered what he was being told. Men had been sent for him and for Ellie as they slept in their beds. Fitzpatrick and his wife, killed that morning. Alison Stone tortured. Joseph Brandt, thirty years in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. God knows how many others abducted for their blood, their organs. He heard Ellie’s voice in his head.

Time to put away the notebook, Lars.

‘Are you sure you’re going to be able to handle whatever you find wherever you’re going?’

Another pause, longer this time.

‘I don’t know. But none of us will be safe until whoever’s behind this has been dealt with. He won’t be expecting me and with eight of his men stranded in the desert it’s the best chance I’m likely to get.’

‘And assuming you get to him, whoever he is, will you be able to do it?’

‘I’ve killed men before.’

‘Like this?’

This time there was no answer.

‘Alright, I’ll put the call in to UMC. But first you need to listen to me for a moment.’

40

IT
TOOK
LESS than a minute to touch down on the helipad. He delivered Alison and one of the vials he had taken from the room where she had been interrogated, explaining briefly to the medics who met him on the roof what had happened to her. As the sheriff had promised there was no attempt to restrain him. Then he was taking off again, the navigation unit showing him his next destination. It was only a few miles to the south and would take less than a minute in the Lynx. 

Suddenly it seemed like madness; he had no idea what he might face there. But he could see no other choice. When the Lynx’s navigation system had displayed its recent flight history he had realized that this had to be the place. He had seen enough of the facility to know its purpose. Once the organs that were harvested there were out of the donors’ bodies they would need to be transported quickly to the new host, which meant that whoever needed those organs had to be close by. And what he had said to Henrikssen was true: they would never be safe until the person who was behind all of this had been dealt with.

They wouldn’t be expecting him. They would assume he would run for Fallon. With a bit of luck it would take them some time to enable the GPS tracker and lock on to the Lynx. Even if they had already acquired him there was a good chance they would think he was simply heading for one of the city’s hospitals. By the time they realized he was coming for them he would already be there. There was bound to be a protection detail but they would have orders not to hurt him, and he could use that to his advantage. He felt inside the pocket of the overalls for the silenced Colt he had taken from the blond man outside the facility. Fitzpatrick and Carla had been murdered. He had seen the looks on the faces of the medics who had taken Alison from him. Whatever she had been given they hadn’t held out much hope for her recovery. The sheriff was wrong. He had no reservations about dealing with whoever got in his way.

He brought the Lynx in to land, touching down lightly on the helipad of a twenty-storey building half a mile south of the Strip, the rotors still turning as he jumped out and ran for the only door that led off the rooftop.

The door was unlocked. It led to a half-flight of concrete stairs and another door. He drew the Colt from the pocket of his overalls and opened the door a crack, peering through to check there was no-one waiting for him.

He stepped through into a single wide, well-lit corridor. The place looked like a hospital, like the facility he had just escaped from. He moved swiftly, checking the doors as he went. An operating theatre, what looked like an intensive care unit, a storage room containing a crash cart and oxygen tanks. A security room. Banks of servers, green and red LEDs flickering intermittently in the darkness. A row of screens, showing feeds from various cameras. This was the place. Whoever had ordered his abduction had to be here.

At the end the corridor turned right. He inched up to the corner, peering around. A nurse’s station, a nurse sitting in front of bank of monitors. A single guard standing in front of a door opposite, head bent forward, finger to one ear, speaking into his comms unit. He would have heard the helicopter land on the roof, would now be trying to contact the men who were still at the facility. There was no way to close the distance without being seen, but he couldn’t afford to wait. Within seconds the man would realize what had happened.

Cody took a breath and stepped around the corner, gun drawn, leveled at the guard. The man was pre-occupied with his earpiece and it was the nurse who saw him first, her mouth dropping open as her eyes flicked to the Colt. The guard saw him an instant later, taking only a fraction of a second to register what was happening. The man was fast, his hand already halfway inside his jacket, instinctively reaching for the weapon holstered there, before he appreciated the reality of his situation. He raised both hands slowly, palms forward, to show the gun remained in its holster.

The nurse had not moved from her station. Cody moved forward, keeping the gun on the guard.

‘On the floor, hands behind your head, interlace your fingers.’

The man hesitated a second. Cody raised the gun a fraction of an inch. The guard read the look in his eyes and complied.

He reached inside his jacket and withdrew a Colt similar to the one he had taken from the blond man outside the facility from the shoulder holster, shoving it into the pocket of his overalls. He also took the man’s comms unit, removing the one he had taken from the blond man at the facility, placing the new unit in his ear. Then he marched them back along the corridor. There was duct tape in the storage room he had passed on his way and he used it to bind both of them securely. He stepped back into the corridor, locking the door from the outside. It should hold them long enough for what he needed to do.

So far he had been lucky. Whoever lived here was clearly conscious about security. A protection detail was normally stationed on the floor below but the nurse had told him that they had left in a hurry within the last hour, leaving only her and the guard in the penthouse. There was an elevator that operated by key card that went only to the lobby. With the guard’s pass he was able to disable it. The only other way down was by the fire exit. The door that led to the stairwell was made of steel, several inches thick, the locking mechanism accessible only from the inside. It would take some time for anyone to break through.

Which only left the roof, and there was nothing he could do about that. He didn’t have long. They might be only minutes away and he needed to make sure he was gone before they arrived. He took the comms unit he had taken from the blond man at the facility from his pocket, tapping it to check that the channel was still open. Satisfied, he reached for the handle of the door opposite the nurse’s station that the man had been guarding. The door was unlocked and he stepped into a large, dimly lit room. His eyes adjusted quickly after the bright corridor.

In the middle of the room lay an old man, his shrunken frame lost in a large bed. A tube from a drip suspended above the bed snaked into a cannula embedded in a skeletal forearm resting above the bedcovers. The hands were twisted and arthritic, long fingers ending in thick, curved nails. He was peering up at several screens suspended from the ceiling.

It took a moment for the old man to realize someone had entered the room. He turned his head slowly, squinting in the darkness, trying to make out who might have entered his inner sanctum uninvited. His upper lip curled in preparation for the rebuke he would deliver.

Cody examined the face staring up at him from the bed. The man looked impossibly old, the skin liver-spotted, parchment thin. One eye was milky white, sightless, sunken in a rheumy, wrinkled socket. But the other, the one that now examined him, was shockingly green, even in the dim light. It betrayed a determination that the rest of his body seemed to lack.

For a long moment the old man said nothing, and then the eye opened a fraction wider as at last he realized who was standing over him.

‘You!’

It came out as little more than a whisper. A trace of an accent, hard to place.

The old man struggled to sit up. His fingers scrabbled for the emergency call button tethered to the side of the bed. Cody held up the comms unit he had taken from his pocket, nodding to the door.

‘He won’t be coming to help you.’

The old man slowly released the call button and stared back at him.

Cody looked up at the images displayed on the screens suspended above the bed. Pictures of himself as Mitchell, Jackson, Kyle, Gant. Surveillance photographs of Fitzpatrick and Carla, a man wearing a sheriff’s uniform who he realized must be Lars Henrikssen. Feeds from cameras at the facility. The room where Alison had been tortured. The evidence was all there, damning. He had found who he had been looking for. He reached into the pocket of his overalls, pulling out the silenced Colt.