“Then you can stop them?” she asked with a slow nod and a strange smile that he could only see in the depths of her eyes.
“As soon as we figure out how to disable this thing in your chest, I’m going to rip their heads off,” he whispered through gnashed teeth.
Natasha smiled. It looked like a literal weight had been lifted from her soul. “As long as they never have a chance to hurt anyone, ever again. And as long as they never get near my sister.”
Natasha wrapped her arms around Cyrus and squeezed him with every ounce of energy that she had left. She buried her face in his chest. He could feel smiling.
“Then it’s going to be okay,” she said in a muffled voice.
Letting go of Cyrus, Natasha turned around quickly and glared at the man who had done this to her. “So, Mister Boone,” she said in a crisp, disciplinary voice. “You and I must have a talk about the way you’ve been treating me and mine.”
Boone’s eyes rose to meet the young woman; her change in demeanor had caught him off-guard. His eyes widened when he saw the semiautomatic held in her single, upraised hand. Cyrus’s hand moved to the holster behind his back but he found it empty.
By then it was too late.
The gun in Natasha’s hand barked and a spent shell casing clattered across the floor. Boone caught the round just below the collarbone. Natasha stepped forward, advancing on the shocked man at a smooth and deliberate pace. She fired twice more, the weapon’s report echoing through the confines of the silent building. With each shot she adjusted her aim, tightening her pattern as the gun recoiled again and again.
The remote device fell from Boone’s fingers as she neared. The hard plastic shell was still clattering from the bounce as she stepped within reach of the man. Leaning over his fallen body, she placed the muzzle of the weapon against his chest.
“Right about here, wouldn’t you say?” she asked in a cold, dry voice that rang with finality.
Cyrus saw her place the muzzle over Boone’s heart. He heard the muffled shot as she pulled the trigger one last time, sending a round into Boone’s chest from point blank range.
Boone was still wide-eyed and slack-jawed as he stared at the ceiling through lifeless, unseeing eyes. Natasha had driven him back two full strides with a withering display of gunfire. A bloody pool was already spreading beneath his unmoving form.
The entire assault had taken seconds. For maybe the first time in his life, Cyrus had found himself paralyzed by what he was seeing.
Natasha turned and looked at Cyrus. A proud smile spanned her face. She glanced once at the gun in her hand and then casually, almost comically, tossed it aside.
“My God!” Cyrus sputtered. “Do you know what you’ve done?”
“Sure do,” she said with a proud, bright-eyed nod. “They were using one tiny bomb to hold three people hostage. I can’t allow that.”
Cyrus grabbed the timer from the floor beside Boone’s lifeless corpse and looked at the display. Only twelve seconds remained. He raised the screen for Natasha to see.
“I don’t suppose there’s a chance he was bluffing?” she hoped.
Cyrus knew that the look in his eye confirmed the worst.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Better to go out like this. Living in constant fear isn’t living at all. Besides, if you look on the bright side, you’ve only got one of these traitorous shits left to deal with.”
“There’s got to be something I can do,” Cyrus muttered. But he knew he couldn’t. His only recourse was to hold her tight. For once, that wasn’t going to be enough. He held her in his arms. It was all he could do.
“Just look out for my family,” she said softly. “That’s all I ask.”
Her body suffered a mild jerk, like a hiccup that happened without a sound. Her eyes pinched with what looked like mild discomfort and Cyrus felt her grow suddenly heavy in his arms.
“Guess it wasn’t a bluff after all,” she said in a tired voice.
Lowering them both to the floor, Cyrus cradled her in his arms. For the first time in his life, he felt truly defeated. He knew nothing could stop the inevitable.
He opened his mouth to speak, but no words would come. He tried again, but still nothing happened. His own eyes were filled with tears. A pain that was deeper than any he’d ever known had stolen his voice.
Natasha smiled and wiped the tears from one of his cheeks. “It’s okay,” she whispered in a fading, angelic voice. Cyrus knew these were her last moments, and she was actually comforting him.
She kissed him. One last slow, gentle kiss…served up with the smile that had won his heart a lifetime before. Her lips moved slowly, “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Jonny. I love you more than you’ll ever know.”
And with that, she was gone. Her focus never shifted; her beautiful eyes never closed, but the light he’d loved in so many ways simply disappeared. A flame of grace, kindness and love that would burn no more.
Chapter 35
The Stillson Building
8:04 pm
The cool night air bucked against Cyrus’s face as he hoisted himself to the top of the five-foot high cinderblock wall. The drop on the inside was more significant, eight feet, but nothing to worry about. He adjusted the pack strapped to his back and took a long, deep breath. The crisp air was a relief, not nearly as cold as it had been on Kapros, but unseasonably pleasant for this time of year in the northeastern United States.
His fingers slid slowly across the marble finish applied to the walls paralleling both ends of the penthouse’s wide patio. He’d approached through a service area that occupied the majority of the building’s rooftop. It was separated from the patio and hidden by the eight-foot wall. Walking across the patio and stopping near the outer rail, Cyrus took a moment to appreciate the cityscape. The apartment had a breathtaking view of the skyline. With the city streets more than seventy floors below, the ever-present noises of a world in constant motion were easy to ignore.
Pulling a phone from his pocket, Cyrus moved silently through the moonlit night. He approached the pair of wide sliding glass doors that blocked his entry to the penthouse. The alarm system protecting the apartment was top of the line; there were motion and thermal sensors, plus compression pads built into the frames of each door. It was a system that would take considerable effort to crack…luckily, he didn’t have to bother.
Dialing a number from memory, Cyrus placed a call. When the automated system answered, he entered a pair of 24-digit codes. After that, he waited only two seconds to hear a pair of soft audio chimes. The line disconnected automatically.
If his information was correct, the chimes indicated the remote override code was accepted by the penthouse’s alarm system. It was funny, he mused. With all the money that went into adding features that provided top of the line security, so many of the people protected by such systems were often unable to manage them for themselves. Such foolishness led to a dizzying array of remote access options being built into the high-end systems. Those options that made it easier for the homeowner and the security company to coexist, but they greatly undermined the overall strength of the system.
Still, knowing something to be true wasn’t the same as proving it. While it took Cyrus only seconds to defeat the conventional lock on the sliding glass door, he still held his breath as he pulled the handle and slid it open along its track. A distant chime sounded, the security system signaling that one of the external doors had been opened. But it wasn’t an alarm. Waiting in silence for what seemed like endless seconds, Cyrus exhaled a sigh of relief when no additional alert was forthcoming. He pulled the door shut and lowered the pack from his back.
As his eyes adjusted to the apartment’s darkness, Cyrus slowly drank in his surroundings. He was standing just off a handsomely appointed formal dining room with a long table that provided enough seating for twelve. A massive china cabinet was built into the far wall. Through its etched glass doors he could make out stacks of serving settings and fl
atware.
To his right was a sprawling kitchen, complete with modern, industrial grade appliances and a massive island countertop. It was an amusing setup, since Cyrus had it on good authority that the apartment’s owner never cooked for herself. Still, the open sterile expanse of the kitchen was ideal for his needs. He deposited the backpack on the island and set about unpacking his gear.
It had been four days since he had delivered Natasha’s body to her father at the family compound. It was, without question, the most agonizing experience of his life and only the second most heartbreaking. Watching her die in his arms would always be his single worst moment. He’d been powerless to save her. If there was ever an event to top that experience, he hoped the fates would be merciful enough not to let him survive it.
Voss had dealt with the loss in a way that only a man who had already suffered great loss could. He’d knelt over his oldest daughter and wept without saying a word. When he was done, he stood and exited the room without comment. Cyrus knew the man was crushed beyond comprehension. He could relate.
Dargo had suffered no such communication breakdown. He had demanded every detail of what had happened. It was only after a very thorough debrief that Cyrus was allowed to leave the compound. He’d decided he was done with the Coalition long before that night’s disaster. It didn’t matter that the operations Monica and Boone had been running were entirely independent of the larger organization. Too much blood had been spilled, too many lies told…and too much life lost.
Though it was never actually expressed, Cyrus suspected that his release from the compound had hinged on his decision to leave the Coalition. He never asked because it didn’t matter. He had only two more tasks to perform before he put every bit of that old life behind him.
The first led him to Monica Fichtner’s penthouse apartment on the seventy-fifth floor of the Stillson Building. It was an incredible home. One look was enough to convince any rational person that she was living well beyond her means. The penthouse was valued at $3.2 million in the present market; it had been appraised for $2.9 million when she’d purchased it seven years earlier. The fact that the United States system of checks and balances so frequently excluded its highest level executives didn’t surprise him, but it galled him just the same.
But while Monica Fichtner had found a position of power that was entirely free from outside oversight, Cyrus reasoned that it was not free from justice.
At least not tonight.
Bracing the last corner of the six-and-a-half-foot long, soft-sided box, the remaining pleats went instantly rigid. The rig was a larger version of the semi-rigid container he’d used on the train at the start of the Paris operation. Only this box was oblong, being only three feet wide, and it used an entirely different set of binary chemicals. At twenty-four inches deep, the box looked like a camper’s version of a casket that was missing the lid. The sides were a flexible, collapsible plastic polymer that had been pulled tight across a few sturdy rails to construct a temporary box.
Keeping the lights off, Cyrus continued to work in darkness. He pushed the lightweight rig across the smooth stone tiles of the kitchen floor. He positioned it within a few feet of the island counter which contained a vegetable rinsing station. After retrieving a short section of flexible tube from his bag, he clamped one end over the water faucet nozzle and dropped the other end inside the oblong box on the floor.
He eyed the bottom of the box as cold water began to spread across it. This was an aspect of the job he’d never done for himself. The company had people who specialized in this sort of thing. Plus, under normal circumstances he would’ve drawn the line long before reaching this point. Generally speaking he didn’t have the stomach for this kind of work. Tonight was a rare exception; tonight he had no moral qualms or objections about what was about to happen.
It was justified.
It was more than justified. In fact, there was a certain degree of poetic justice at play that rivaled even the practicality of the methods he was employing.
The water reached the proper level, filling one-third of the soft-sided box. Cyrus had just turned off the faucet when he heard the sound of movement in the penthouse’s private elevator. He glanced at his watch. His target was right on time.
When the thin shadowed figure stepped from the elevator, she was accompanied by a pair of stout, hulking men in ill-fitting suit coats. The thin figure stepped further into the room, moving through shadows with practiced ease. Cyrus saw her head toward a series of light switches on the wall and decided to let her go.
The moment the lights of the entryway sparked to life, Cyrus stepped behind the pair of burly security guards with a Taser grasped firmly in each hand. He placed the metal prods of the devices against the neck of each man at exactly the same moment and triggered them without warning. Both men hit the floor before they were even aware they were under attack.
The snapping crackle of the Taser discharge caught Monica Fichtner by surprise. With a shriek, she spun to face Cyrus, her flats slipping on the smooth tile floor. As her arms pin-wheeled for balance, the small handbag slipped from her grasp and clattered across the floor.
Monica’s wide-eyed speechlessness was rewarding, as far as Cyrus was concerned. He knew the woman would be too self-important to believe him a viable threat, even after all that had happened. Catching her so off-guard was a satisfying bonus.
She recovered her will more quickly than expected, however, and dove across the floor in the direction of her fallen purse. Of course she would be armed. It was her last line of defense, Cyrus reasoned.
There was a clatter as she dashed across the cold tile on her hands and knees. Her efforts were hindered by the narrow hem of her knee length skirt and the gripless soles of her thousand dollar shoes. Her fingers quickly wrapped around the small designer handbag. She tried to pull it closer to her body and retrieve her weapon only to discover that the bag was stuck to the floor.
Monica looked up from her supplicant position with wide, terrified eyes to see Cyrus standing with one boot on the strap of the handbag. She opened her mouth to protest but Cyrus simply hooked his heel through the inside of the strap and jerked his foot back. The purse sailed from her grip and soared to the far side of the room.
“How dare you!” Monica bellowed, finding her voice for the first time. “Do you have any idea what—.”
Grabbing her by the lapels of her blazer, Cyrus hoisted the woman effortlessly to her feet. She let out a horrified whimper, but her countenance shifted instantly back to one of righteous indignation the moment he freed her and stepped back.
“I’ll see that you burn for this!” she fumed. She was seething; her anger and fury was far beyond anything Cyrus had ever witnessed, even in the woman’s most venomous fits.
She took a breath, winding up for what Cyrus knew would be the mother of all tirades. But he beat her to the punch. With the snap of his wrist, a three-foot long carbon fiber telescoping baton sprang to full length in his right hand. With a single, violent snap of the weapon, Cyrus landed a blow to the side of the woman’s neck, just below the jaw and the base of her skull. The sound of her cervical vertebrae shattering was unmistakable. She dropped like a marionette with its strings chopped.
Cyrus didn’t take a moment to admire his handiwork. He moved quickly to the unconscious security guards and bound them hand and foot with thick zip ties. He dragged each man to a spare bedroom down the hall and left them behind a closed door. His target was the Red Queen, not the poor saps charged with her protection.
When Cyrus returned, Monica was still in the same small heap on the entryway floor. While her body had been completely paralyzed by his devastating blow, her eyes were open and alert—filled with their own form of crippling fear. They tracked him as he walked back into the room.
Cyrus stood over Monica’s body. He bent over and looked directly into her eyes. They were wide, unblinking, and streaming with tears. Still, he said nothing. He just watched her for several long moments,
wondering if she had any idea what was coming next.
Without offering a word, Cyrus stood and circled her motionless form. He grabbed her by the back of the collar and dragged her across the foyer, through the family room, down the hall, and into the kitchen. He pulled her paralyzed body until it lay neatly beside the long box filled partially with water. He let go of her collar and heard her head strike the stone tile with a hollow ‘thud’.
While he didn’t take pleasure in what he was doing, Cyrus knew it to be the most practical means to an end. Plus, it was the only way that true justice would be served. People in Monica Fichtner’s position never went to prison for their misdeeds. Too often, it was better for everyone involved if even the most heinous atrocities were covered up and tucked away. Covered up for the greater good. There was always some bureaucratic justification for it.
Not this time.
Cyrus pulled a pair of one-liter bottles from the backpack on the counter. He shook the first bottle violently for thirty seconds before setting it aside and repeating the procedure on the second. Circling the counter, he approached Monica’s thin form. He still couldn’t believe that it had come down to this. So much loss of life. So much damage had been done by two people.
After taking a few deep breaths to steel himself, Cyrus knelt and scooped Monica up in his arms. Her eyes followed him with unblinking horror until he raised her from the floor and her head tipped backward without support.
He carefully lowered her paralyzed form into the improvised vat of cold kitchen water in the middle of the room. As soon as her body was laid out, it became buoyant. Her head floated up and her eyes once more fell upon him. There was horrified recognition there; he knew it without any doubt. She was familiar with the disintegration rig. It was, after all, a Coalition invention.
Pushing the pair of liter bottles aside, Cyrus reached into the backpack once more and retrieved a full-face mask with an integrated re-breather. It looked like something out of a science fiction film with the pair of small flat discs mounted underneath the large facial lens. The twin filters scrubbed the air free of vapor-based toxins with absolute efficiency; all without requiring the use of bulky oxygen tanks.
Rogue Faction Part 2: A Cyrus Cooper Thriller: Book Three Page 29
