by SL Huang
Fortunately, the top floor was just as empty as the bottom one had been. As per Rio’s instructions, I found the southeast corner, which turned out to be a conference room. It was slightly less dark than the rest of the building by virtue of the two walls’ worth of windows that let in whatever moon and starlight Southern California had tonight. I dumped my armful of circuit boards and ribbon cable on the table and left to find another nearby office; within fifteen minutes, I had amassed a large pile of random electronic hardware as well as four laptops, a pair of scissors, a utility knife, a roll of scotch tape, and a screwdriver. I surveyed my stash.
“Time to be a motherfucking genius,” I muttered to myself, and set to work.
I wondered if Arthur would come back and find me. I wondered if the people I’d sent him for would find me first.
I wondered if he’d do what I needed him to in the first place. If he’d try. If the base personnel would take him down before he had a chance.
Enough time passed in the dim conference room that I started to wonder how much longer I should give him until I should assume my plan had failed. How much longer until I should start coming up with other options. But then I heard a quiet call from somewhere down the hall: “Russell?”
I drew my gun and didn’t move, in case he wasn’t alone. “In here,” I called, equally softly.
Footsteps approached from down the hallway, and Arthur came in, holstering his own weapon. “They got communications,” he reported. “Think I see a few ways in, but it’ll be tricky. How long will you need in there?”
“Not long,” I said. “Couple of minutes, at most. I’ll, uh, I’ll be able to let you know in a second.” I put my gun down and picked up the utility knife. While Arthur had been gone, I’d had time to twist wires between a whole mess of the circuit components until they twined into an overlapping tangle, as if Checker’s Hole had upchucked on the table. I’d opened the cases of two of the laptops as well, spreading their guts into the jumble. Now I picked up a bundle of wires and started stripping the ends with confidence.
“What can I do?” said Arthur.
I badly wanted to know if he’d made the call, but I couldn’t ask. “Watch the door,” I said instead.
He moved over and did so, Mossberg at the ready. “We going to have to move all what you’re working on over there?”
Shit. I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead, given that this was a fake plan and all. “Uh, yeah,” I said. “Or, no, not all of it. I’ve got to find the pieces here still working. Some bits are fried more than others.”
“You can do that without power?”
“The laptop batteries still have juice,” I said quickly.
Fortunately he seemed to accept that.
I tinkered pointlessly with the components for another twenty minutes, long enough to begin resigning myself to suspecting we’d underestimated Arthur after all. But then he straightened in the doorway with a roar of “Incoming!” and the corridor exploded with gunfire.
I leapt forward, hurled a grenade out into the hallway, and yanked Arthur back into the room with me. The blast thundered against our eardrums and made the wall buckle and shudder—I’d thrown just far enough down the hall not to tear open the conference room. “Get behind me!” I shouted at Arthur over the ringing in my ears.
I risked a glance into the corridor. Hulking, dark shapes swarmed from wall to wall, the stairwells disgorging more of them. Dawna’s mooks.
I could tell within the first split-second that they had been ordered to avoid killing me. To my mathematically-guided vision, they were aiming so far off line that it was laughable, their rifles jerking to the side almost comically as I poked my head out. After all, I had the fabled antidote their boss needed to live, so their plan must have been to overwhelm me physically or intimidate me enough to force my surrender. I also saw some of them packing Tasers and glimpsed at least two with riot guns—apparently the total nonlethal force they’d been able to muster from their armory in a few minutes’ time.
I, however, was not constrained against killing any of them—even my promise to Arthur had only been about the Air Force base personnel—and they never got close enough. The G36 jerked madly in my hands; it took less than half a magazine to take down everybody in the hallway. I was too good to miss, especially when I could see that the guns pointed in my direction weren’t targeting anywhere near me.
Arthur gaped at me. But only for a moment, because then Dawna sent a second wave.
By the fourth offensive, it was becoming clear that her new plan was to run me out of ammo. She probably thought that would force me to surrender.
Well, she was about to find out how wrong she was. I ran out of 5.56 rounds and dumped the G36 to swap out with Arthur for the shotgun; when I ran through the shells for that, I switched to the handguns. I’d long used up the grenades, but setting off any more would likely have taken out the building’s structural supports anyway.
Arthur was doing a good job of backing me up, firing above my head, and if his batting average wasn’t quite a thousand, it was nice to have the cover when I had to reload. Though when I caught a glimpse of the grimness in his eyes, I almost felt bad: Arthur hated killing people, and thanks to my perfect marksmanship, the bodies were piling high enough in the hallway to provide flesh-and-bone cover for each following wave of troops, the blood seeping from beneath them into expanding black pools in the dim light. The Los Angeles Air Force Base was becoming a mass grave. And worse, who knew how many of Dawna’s troops were only here because she’d told them to be in words they couldn’t disobey.
I’d never felt any twinge of regret at defending myself before.
One of my handguns clicked to empty, the slide locking back. I dashed from the doorway, neatly dodging the Taser leads one grunt desperately shot at me and spinning to pistol whip him in the head while I fired the last two rounds out of the gun in my other hand. Then I dove into a slide, the soles of my boots skidding on the wet floor, and came up with one of the dead soldiers’ Berettas. By the time it clicked open, I’d taken out the remaining seven attackers in the hallway.
I snagged a few more weapons off our downed enemies and returned to the doorway, handing Arthur a share of the new munitions. My boots left wet, red footprints behind me. The crisp burnt scent of gunpowder clogged the air and stung my nostrils, the hazy smoke from the fray curling through corridor.
“What’s the plan?” Arthur asked, holding a Beretta at high ready and not taking his eyes off the death-wrapped hall.
“We fight,” I said.
“Can’t fight forever.”
“I can.”
His eyes strayed to the bodies, skittering across the blood. “God help me, I maybe believe you,” he mumbled, so softly I wasn’t sure he knew he said it out loud.
I had a stolen M4 settled against my shoulder, waiting. But this time the building stayed quiet.
One minute.
Two minutes.
“Get back into the room,” I said, taking my own advice and retreating to the table.
“Ain’t got a vantage point,” Arthur objected. “When they come—”
“They aren’t coming,” I said.
“Wait, what? Russell—”
“You can watch and wait if you want,” I said. But I couldn’t. If I did, I might compromise the whole plan. My eye fell on the scattered computer components. “I have to fix this,” I said, putting down the gun.
“Russell—” started Arthur again. His tone clearly thought I had gone insane.
I forced myself to turn my back to the door. “It’s important,” I said, and picked up a circuit board as if it had meaning. It was a PCI card of some kind. I didn’t even know what it did.
I took the utility knife and started prying tiny microchips off it. They went flying into the chaos of components with tiny pings.
They weren’t so loud that I couldn’t hear the footsteps in the hallway.
It was only one set of footsteps this time. One l
ight, quiet set of footsteps.
Arthur was silent, and didn’t fire.
I was gripping the utility knife so hard my hand was shaking. I still held the PCI card in my other hand, but my brain was buzzing so madly with something I was fairly sure was terror that I couldn’t even remember what I was pretending to be doing with it.
Arthur moved back from the doorway. The footsteps entered the room.
“Good evening,” said Dawna Polk.
Chapter 35
I kept my eyes on the circuit board in my hand, as Rio had told me.
“You have something I need,” said Dawna.
Rio had also cautioned me not to speak, but she was impossible not to respond to. “You came all alone?”
“You won’t kill me,” said Dawna, her voice a low, even purr. “On the other hand, you are unusually effective at dispatching my people. I would hate to be caught in a crossfire.”
I heard her take another few steps into the room. Felt her eyes on the back of my neck.
They pierced me. Observing. Studying. She knew.
Rio’s voice echoed in my brain, telling me under no circumstances to let her see my face, making me promise, impressing upon me that the slim probability we had of this working existed only as long as I kept my head down—I felt myself turning and tried to stop, tried to deny her, to keep her limited to my body language—don’t look up, keep your eyes away, don’t ruin everything, we’re so close—!
No words, no precautions, no plans made any difference, not against her. I turned and met Dawna’s eyes, and the moment I did, the smallest datum that she might have been lacking snapped into place.
She knew everything.
She knew that Checker was far outside the county, that he was the one scrambling to stream our code, that I had left it all in his hands.
She knew that she had never been poisoned, that Rio and I had invented the story so Arthur would feel compelled to call her and tell her where I was, because Arthur’s messed-up brain was still sympathetic enough to her not to want her dead. She knew we had chosen such a story so she wouldn’t bomb the building outright and kill us all once she found out our location.
She knew that I was bait, and that I was bait because I could take out every mook she sent against me until she was forced to come down herself.
And she knew that Rio was at that moment taking aim with a high-powered rifle directly at her head.
None of it should have mattered. She shouldn’t have had anywhere left to go. She was unarmed, and even if she’d had a weapon and the skill to go with it, nothing should have made a difference against a sniper. We should have been able to beat her, once and for all, finally: Rio was one of the few human beings on the planet mentally capable of killing her, and we’d lured her into his sights.
Almost.
I didn’t know precisely where Rio was, but I had glimpsed the heights of nearby buildings, could draw the array of lines that might angle through the windows to target anyone in this room. Even with the most generous of estimates, Dawna Polk needed to take half of one step more.
And because I knew it, she knew it.
In the split-second between meeting my eyes and having her brain matter spattered across the floor, Dawna Polk registered exactly what was happening. She knew our entire plan, and the moment she knew it, it failed.
She smiled.
She stopped and took a step backward, out of danger, and flicked her eyes to Arthur—
—who spun with the speed of an action hero and aimed the Beretta in his hand exactly at my center of mass.
And I, someone who could have turned Arthur Tresting into a smear on the carpet without so much as thinking about it, who could have disarmed and incapacitated him in a fraction of normal human reaction time before he ever got the gun on me—I hesitated. I didn’t stop him.
Dawna twitched her head at Arthur and me, and we sidestepped closer to the windows, until the dim ambient light outlined us clearly. “Call him down,” she said.
It didn’t cross my mind to disobey her. I gestured at the windows, beckoning at Rio from a thousand yards away, not taking my eyes off the barrel of Arthur’s gun.
Rio had told me this was a bad idea. I hadn’t listened.
“You thought you could trap me?” said Dawna. She sounded more surprised and amused than angry.
My throat was dry. “I had to give it a shot.”
“No pun intended,” said Dawna.
I gritted my teeth. “I didn’t know you had a sense of humor.”
“Of course I do,” she said. “I have a great enjoyment of language in particular. I admit I don’t enjoy the more ribald—bullying, shall we say—brand of humor. It gives me no pleasure to put other people down.”
“You put down a lot of your people out there today,” I said. I half-saw her stiffen out of the corner of my eye. “Hey, you’re the one who likes puns.”
“I admit, we fell for the first part of your ruse.” Her voice was still soft, but the words had turned dangerous and threatening, the sound of a cobra sliding over dead leaves. “You killed many good men and women tonight. I won’t forget it.”
Well, that was a bit unfair. Where did she get off blaming me for defending myself?
Her tone became derisive. “Ms. Russell. Really. You set a trap to murder me, and then call your violence self-defense? Oh, you bring self-justifying, irrational absurdity to a new level.”
It was the first time she had ever spoken to me anything less than politely. It sounded out of place and slightly shocking, like hearing a priest start cussing.
“You think me incapable of your brand of anger?” Dawna scoffed. “I may not enjoy debasing myself, but I assure you, I am not above temper. A great many of my people have now lost their lives thanks to you, and you have caused me an unconscionable expenditure of time and resources—far more than you are worth. And if your programmer friend is even partially successful, you will cause untold casualties.” Her words whipped at me, cold and furious. “You condemn us for playing God, yet you decide to toy with the same forces when you have no concept of the fallout. Do you have any idea how many people all over the world would die if your little plan were to be successful? Do you?”
“At least one,” I shot back, even as no small part of me wondered if she was right.
“You know I speak the truth,” she spat, responding to my thoughts again rather than to my comeback. “You consider yourself intelligent, yet you would be willing to let so many millions suffer and be killed, because you have the gall to judge that they should, because we are somehow evil for helping them.”
I heard a noise at the door and glanced over, but it wasn’t Rio, only one of Dawna’s paramilitary troops. “Track down the programmer,” she ordered him. “He’ll have driven west from Yucca Valley. Check electronics stores along the edge of the blackout zone for break-ins; he’ll need a computer. This is our top priority—put everybody on it.”
He nodded smartly and left again.
Shit. Checker. My stomach curdled in dread.
“Oh, dispense with the drama,” Dawna said disgustedly. “They’re not going to kill him. Your co-conspirator has some skill; he’s already been deemed to be useful enough to come and work for us.”
The dread froze into horror.
“I grow tired of your judgment,” snapped Dawna.
“Then stop reading my thoughts,” I retorted.
She fell silent.
I was still trying not to look at her, not that it mattered anymore. Instead I kept my attention on Arthur. He was staring fixedly at the gun in his hand as he pointed it at me, his jaw bunched, all the muscles in his face vibrating with tension. A bead of sweat slipped down his neck and slid under his collar.
Poor guy.
Rio appeared in the room.
He materialized so suddenly and quietly that I could have sworn Dawna started slightly. She recovered in less than a breath, however. “I’m glad to see you are being wise,” she said, her voice coo
l again. “If you had tried to kill me, Ms. Russell would be dead.”
Rio lifted one shoulder in a miniscule half-shrug, as if to say, Maybe, maybe not. His hands were empty and held out to his sides.
Dawna nodded, her lips curving upward in a slight smile. “Yes, perhaps you would have been skilled enough to rescue her and still accomplish your assassination. It seems I was correct in thinking you would not risk it.”
“Quite a chance to take,” I pointed out to Dawna. I couldn’t help but feel a squeezing disappointment; some part of me had still hoped Rio might pull a rabbit out of a hat and save us all.
“Not terribly,” said Dawna. She turned away from Arthur and me, ignoring us and addressing Rio. “You really are predictable in your own way. Did you honestly think this would work?”
Rio shrugged again. “It was a gamble. I judged it worth it.”
“You shouldn’t have told Ms. Russell your plan, then. She gave you away.”
“Regretfully unavoidable,” said Rio. “It was her idea.”
“Then someone else should have played your bait.”
Rio’s gaze flickered to the doorway, to the bodies that littered the floor outside it.
“I suppose not,” said Dawna. “She does seem to have some unforeseeable skills, our Ms. Russell. Is that why you like her?”
Rio didn’t answer.
“So, a continued mystery,” said Dawna. “I like mysteries in people. I see so few of them. She has no idea, and you aren’t telling me.”
Rio still said nothing. I wanted desperately to ask him what she was talking about.
“I would love to know what you have done to her,” murmured Dawna. “Inspiring such loyalty. Of course, the weakness seems to go both ways.”
“You brought me down here,” said Rio. “What do you want?”
“You, of course,” said Dawna. “I had still thought to harness your power, but unfortunately my colleagues have deemed our lack of success in that area…indicative. The decision has been made that you are a liability with too little potential for turning to an asset.”
