Rhodri didn’t go in for big-ass weapons for the sake of them either. A few throwing stars, a couple of blades, and a Beretta 9000 fit snugly into his grip, to which he added a backup, a HK45. Not to mention a few little surprises stowed about his person. They hadn’t bothered with the beanie hats and the face camouflage. Overdoing it, since once they went in, they were made. And Rhodri wanted everyone to know exactly who was taking them over. They had small cameras fastened to their foreheads with sweatbands. Not a look he was particularly fond of.
Bryn and Domenici stood on the other side of the building. Plan was that they’d meet in the middle. Once they’d opened the place, other Talents would follow them.
Easy. He’d done this a time or three before. But this time, as the saying went, it was personal. He’d get great pleasure in taking out Wilkinson’s kneecaps if he so much as twitched once they found him. And he was in here. They’d tracked him to a lonely farmhouse in Montana, then over to Seattle and back to Chicago again. Doubling up, but not returning to the same place. This one was in the north, in an area that had seen better days, mostly old warehouses and run-down apartment blocks. Not dangerous, though, not close to the area around Englewood, or farther north, around the tracks. Clever choice. Nobody would concern themselves with the comings and goings here. This was a relatively modern building, set in the plot left from something else, rubble filling the space between the wire fence and the warehouse. Three stories max, one of those places that looked as if it wouldn’t last long. But he’d bet anything that inside, there were steel reinforcements. That building was a shell, concealing what was probably more like a fortress.
A few vehicles stood outside, but none held anything of interest. They’d scanned them and sent the reports back. They’d get rid of them, or the follow-up team would.
Adrenaline surged through his blood, but this didn’t feel the same. This time weariness edged his eagerness. When would it end? When could they admit to society at large that they existed, that Talents wanted to be an open part of society? Then the authorities would deal with this. The FBI would be here, perhaps enhanced by Talents. Once, the Department had operated under the shelter of the FBI, but now they used any government agency that would sanction their activities in return for favors. All very black ops, very gray ops, whatever. No color. He was sick of it. He wanted white.
They had communicators in their ears, sensitive mics attached, but they’d use telepathy when they could. All the Crystal team had it down and deep. Nobody could track them except their loved ones, and they were safely ensconced in a secure spot five miles away. With a helicopter on the roof, ready to take off at the first threat.
Not that there’d be one. No more.
Bryn’s voice sounded in his ear. “Countdown, five, four, three, two, one… Go!”
Rhodri and Kai headed for the fence, bolt cutters in hand. They had two minutes, tops, before someone fixed the electricity Bryn had just shorted.
It took one minute, ten seconds before they had a gap large enough to get through. They dropped the cutters and headed for the main building.
Alarms were already sounding, disturbing the grudging peace of the night. Barely ten, a time too early for drunks, too late for families. A good time for a raid. Especially since dark had fallen and Rhodri had fed. The alarms shrieked at them until Rhodri, tired of the noise, took one out with a well-aimed shot. Kai gave him a droll glance. “We’ll be inside soon enough.”
They knew better than to try the door, and as they watched, steel shutters slid down to seal the windows. Why did people always forget the walls?
Kai could hot-wire an engine faster than anyone Rhodri knew, and he barely had time to stand back before a scuffed old black van screeched on takeoff, flashed past, and rammed into the wall between two windows. A satisfying crunch, followed by tapping as masonry came loose and hit the wrecked vehicle. Rhodri couldn’t help it. He laughed. Every man, however old, had a bit of the small boy in him, and watching vans hit walls was usually good for a laugh.
Kai backed the van out, a shower of loose concrete and powder showering around it. He exited the van by the back doors, catapulting out, grinning. “Dented the front doors a tad.” They climbed over the debris to get into the building. Bryn was probably crashing in through the doors at the back. With Domenici partially shifted, they wouldn’t have much of a problem. Rhodri sent a brief message to Bryn and the rest of the team. “We’re in.”
They hadn’t sensed any living things behind that wall, and they’d been right. They’d broken into some kind of storeroom, bandages and other medical supplies tumbling off the shelves to land on the dusty paintwork of the van. They plowed through them, and Rhodri kicked the door open. “Always easier to break out than break in,” he commented laconically.
They found themselves in a featureless corridor. Featureless, that was, except for four guards bearing down on them with weapons. Certainly not the kind of guards a casual visitor might expect. Navy clad, bearing heavy-duty weapons, carbines, maybe. He didn’t stop to ID them.
With a single blast of psi, he froze all four just long enough to take his two out. Two neat shots behind him told him Kai had followed suit.
A disembodied voice sounded in their heads. “Left.”
Even though he could only hear instructions, her voice warmed him and kept him on the right track.
They raced to the end of the hallway and followed instructions. They heard staccato gunfire, followed by Bryn’s terse assurance that they were okay, and headed for the center of the floor. He and Kai were to head for the stairs and take the upper floor. Then they’d do the top floor together, with the backup team sweeping for hostiles.
Esti had sent them Wilkinson’s psi signature, the one thing he couldn’t change when he morphed into another form. And he had Esti to contend with. She’d make sure they could find him.
They downed a couple of guards before they found the stairs. They were through a pair of double doors. The origins of this place were obvious, the thick cement floors, the breeze blocks stacked and roughly mortared to make rooms. The floor looked to contain offices and storerooms, but Rhodri didn’t think they’d find anything interesting here. Not unless they had a bunker-style basement, and their scans hadn’t shown anything like that. Not that it ruled out the possibility entirely.
They ran up the stairs, crouching, only too aware of the blind spot at the top. Someone shot down at them from the top floor, but by hugging the outer wall, they gave their attacker hard targets. Then Rhodri got a lucky blast with his psi and stunned the man long enough for them to get into the next floor.
People were waiting there. Of course they were. But Kai and Rhodri had faced this kind of situation before, and they wanted to live to do it again. They only needed to give each other one-word commands and two more fell. Rhodri took no joy in his ability to take opponents down efficiently. Just part of his job. He didn’t trust anyone who found pleasure in more than a good job well done. If he had stronger psi, he’d have taken them down that way, but telepathy was about his limit. That and flashing, but he wasn’t sure that was psi, since only vampires could do it.
The occasional sound of gunfire and shouts marked where Bryn and Dom were making their steady way through the ground floor. They’d scan it effectively, take what hard drives they could get without slowing themselves down too much, and carry on. Kai and Rhodri swept their head cameras around the room for the team at the office to study more closely and ensure there were no booby traps or staff left to wreak havoc. The vehicles would arrive soon for prisoners. But Rhodri could sense the presence of Talents here, like a hum in the air.
They’d find more once they’d taken the jamming devices out.
This floor had narrower passageways and more rooms. The first few contained hospital beds, empty ones. The Talents, the merchandise that they’d contained had probably been moved to another facility. Or maybe Wilkinson’s people weren’t as clever as they used to be. His heart warmed at that thought.
A victory, and he knew just how he wanted to celebrate it.
He contacted Bryn. “Anything?”
“A ton of shit. It all looks routine and normal for a warehouse, which makes me think there’s more here. Still searching and scanning. You?”
“There are Talents up here.”
The sound of gunfire and crashes outside the building told him the main team was entering the premises. Thank fuck. That meant the Department had winged Talents in the air, preventing any attempt at escape, in case they had a helicopter up there. They’d have the building ringed by now.
The official reports would have this down as a drug operation, but Cristos would need to make it right in certain quarters. Not that Rhodri cared right now. If taking Wilkinson down meant he had to spend the rest of his life on the run, he’d do it.
The next door. He motioned to Kai, who nodded, his usually friendly expression completely gone now, replaced by a stern determination. Kai went in high, Rhodri low.
If he hadn’t steeled himself, the sight would have made him vomit. A Talent for sure, and when he forced his reeling mind into obedience, he detected a shape-shifter sigil. The guy lay on a table, one arm strapped to a separate, smaller table. What was left of his arm, that was. Someone had flayed it and opened it up, pinning the flesh to the board underneath, making it excruciatingly painful and almost impossible to heal. Even Talents had a limit to the amount of regeneration they could do.
While Kai watched, Rhodri forced himself to contact the Talent, whose mind had degenerated into wordless shrieks of agony. He pulled out the pins holding the vivisected arm to the table one by one, but regretfully left the arm strapped down. This man couldn’t think straight, and he’d probably damage himself. At least the arm could begin to heal, though God knew if the man would ever recover mentally. He was naked, a sheet draped over his hips, but Rhodri couldn’t detect any more damage. And of course he’d be shot full of Cephalox, preventing him from shape-shifting. “Hey, buddy, we’re the good guys. Someone will pick you up and take you to a proper hospital soon. Hang in there.” The man opened his mouth, but no sound came out, only a soundless scream.
They passed to the next room. The same. This time Kai did his best to make the person comfortable while Rhodri stood guard. But by the time Kai had loosened the Talent’s bonds, Rhodri realized what Wilkinson was doing here. “He’s trying to slow us down. He’s putting some of the worst here to give him a chance.”
“To do what?”
“Let’s find out.”
Although every instinct they had screamed at them to help the Talents they found in the next rooms, they left them alone, answering the pleas for help with, “Hold on. Someone’s coming to care for you. It won’t be long now.” They left the doors open so those Talents capable of communicating could tell each other what was happening and find some solace in company. Most Talents were so used to sharing their thoughts that isolation was an agonizing form of torture. He and Kai couldn’t do much, but they could give them that part back.
The atmosphere filled with chatter as they moved on, some anguished, some relieved, but they didn’t bother Kai or Rhodri, who kept their minds fixed on their course—to locate and take out Geoffrey Wilkinson, any way they could, preferably alive.
Or at least, that was the order. But Talents were rarely good at following orders to the letter. After seeing the occupants of those rooms, Rhodri was in no mood to follow orders. Merely wipe the scum off the face of the earth. And he’d bet Kai felt the same, although he didn’t ask.
Weapons at the ready—mental and physical—they went through the rooms, sensing the presence of Wilkinson advancing and retreating. He had to be moving, and maybe he had some secret ways of getting in and out of the building. That wouldn’t help him now.
Toward the end of the second hallway, they felt the signature stronger. Rhodri glanced at a grim-faced Kai. “Is he leading us on? Has he duplicated his signature?”
“It’s him. If he had an identical twin, they wouldn’t share the signature. I have it too. Have faith, my friend. We have him.”
Rhodri wished he could feel as certain, but he did have faith. The man was running, which was enough to tell them something. And he didn’t know they had his psi. The only other possibility was that Esti had betrayed them. Recent events had shaken his belief that he really knew Esti, least of all that she’d been working for Wilkinson since he “recruited” her after the events of the year before. She hadn’t told anyone, hadn’t appeared any different.
Closer still. He glanced at Kai, who nodded. “This is it.”
Another bleak room, but this time with two people in it. Esti, lying unconscious on the floor, and a man strapped to yet another gurney. This one was worse than any of the others Rhodri had seen, bad though they were. His arms were fastened, one hand twisted and useless, the other pinned down—literally. He wore underwear but nothing else. His legs were banded, but it didn’t matter, because they were a bloody mess. Someone had sliced them up a treat, and then roughly cauterized the wounds.
The man turned his head, his eyes an aching void of agony and pain. “Help me.” His voice, thready and hoarse, evidence of hours of screaming. Nobody could bear pain like that for long. He’d have gone mad eventually. Kai circled the gurney until he reached Esti. He bent, not taking his attention from the man, and felt her pulse. “She’s alive,” he said.
“We can use this. He doesn’t know we know,” Rhodri said.
“Okay. But be fucking careful.”
“What did they do to you?”
Tears shimmered in the man’s blue eyes. He had the sigil of a dragon in his mind, beautifully done. “Everything. They let me shape-shift and then cut off my wings. They—they plundered my mind. Raped it. I don’t think I can take anymore. I don’t know what I told them. In the end I said yes to everything.”
“Tell us about the staff here.”
“Please unfasten me.”
Rhodri lowered his weapon and glanced at Kai, who nodded. He took a step forward, but not too far. “We need to know, fast. We don’t have many people here, so we might have to cut and run. How many people are here?”
The man blinked. “A lot,” he said. “This is one of their main places. We’ve been here a long time. Get me out of here, please. I’ll do anything.”
Rhodri sent a message to Bryn. “Not many people. It’s a holding pen. Watch for transport arriving to take people away.”
“I want to get out of here fast. Our vehicles are arriving soon. But we take the bastard.”
“Too right.”
He leaned over to loosen the bonds on the man. “He’s masquerading as a patient. Do we go along with it?”
“Yes, but don’t take any chances.”
“Received and understood.”
He wrenched the padlocks free from the bands that fastened the man down, although he doubted it was needed. He probably had some kind of trick mechanism in case they hadn’t bought his story. “They’ll take you to hospital.”
“I think he’d be better taken directly to the Department,” Kai said. “We have the best equipment there.”
Clever, to make it appear that they were taking him right into the center of their operations. “We have that new antidote for Cephalox.” He had no idea he could lie so well or make it up as he went along like that. “Best if we give him that and let him heal himself.”
“I don’t believe it. Really?” The man tried to lift himself up on one elbow but sank back against the bloodstained sheets with a groan. “I can’t.”
Esti groaned, and Kai turned her attention to her. Then he paused and took a step back.
“Wait. Scan.”
Chapter Seventeen
Rhodri didn’t understand what Kai meant until he tried another scan. He located Esti’s psi signature, then the man on the bed—Wilkinson. No, wait. Fuck. Three, the third so close to the man on the bed that he hadn’t spotted it right away.
Then everything happened at once. Someone rolle
d out from under the sheet-draped gurney, firing as he went, a firearm in each hand, like something out of the Wild West. He rolled across the room until he got to Esti, then grabbed her, pushed her in front of him. The muscles on his arm bulged where he held her, so tightly she wouldn’t be able to breathe well. He stared at them, dark eyes fierce, a frown creasing his forehead.
He slid back until he had the wall behind him and held one of his weapons to Esti’s head. Then he glanced down at her, back at them, and smiled. “Your choice, gentlemen. You can’t take me out, and Esti’s still under. She can’t help you. You try anything, and I’ll kill her. Simple as that.” A lock of black hair fell over his forehead, and he flicked it back with a toss of his head. This was the basic Wilkinson, the not-metamorphed one, and this, Rhodri realized, was his quarry, the man he’d been chasing for years. All his incarnations had been variations on his true form, sometimes larger, softer, other times skinnier, but always this man had been at the center of the transformations.
Rhodri didn’t have a clear shot. Neither did Kai, but they had Wilkinson pinned.
Slowly Kai got to his feet, but Wilkinson lifted Esti’s still-unconscious body to cover his body and head.
Wilkinson pulled a remote from his pocket and thumbed a button. Before they could react, the sound of metallic clangs echoed through the hallway outside. Fuck. It had been a trap. Wilkinson had isolated them. There was no hope of help. They were on their own.
Wilkinson’s psi probably equaled theirs, maybe surpassed it. They only had a few options, and Rhodri rapidly went through them. “Distract him, Kai. Do something but don’t get hurt.”
“Easy peasy,” came Kai’s satirical response. Kai kicked the gurney, sending it spinning across the room. It landed with a crash against the far wall, and the man on it screamed, high-pitched, horrible, more like a wounded animal than a human being. A shot hammered through the room, landing in a spot just above Wilkinson’s head. Chips of concrete splintered, sending a cascade of powder and rubble onto Wilkinson. He shook his head, presumably to clear his vision.
Department 57: Bloody Crystal Page 18
