“Don’t shoot him,” shouted someone behind Hal.
Hal knew that voice. It broke his concentration and his head snapped around. Evans, Richard Evans. He tried to reach for Evans, but couldn’t. The tranquilizer now coursed through his blood and he didn’t have the energy to hold Fletcher and Evans at the same time.
Fletcher shook herself from a stupor and stammered, “Hood, where … where’s Hood?”
“Dead. Where’s the psychic?”
“In the elevator.”
Hal released Fletcher and dived through the surface of Evans’s thoughts and intentions and suddenly realized what was about to happen. “Richard Evans,” Hal said, vaguely aware that his words had begun to slur. “Out of retirement for the likes of me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Bennet,” snapped the old man. Hal didn’t hear the rest of what he said; he shouted silently at Mira.
In the mirror mounted near the top of the elevator door, Mira saw Evans, Fletcher, Bennet. She pressed her back to the wall and stood slowly. Get the doors shut, get outta here, she thought.
Then Bennet’s voice boomed in her skull. He’s going to kill you. Get outta here, now, fast!
All the terror she had kept locked up inside of her since early this morning sprang to the surface. Adrenaline poured into her. She lunged for the control panel, slammed the heel of her hand over the CLOSE button. Nothing happened.
In the mirror, she saw Evans moving toward the elevator and heard Fletcher say, “What the hell are you doing, Rich?”
“Taking care of business.”
“What business?” Fletcher sidestepped toward him. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Mira kept punching the CLOSE button, begging the doors to shut, anxiously scanning the control panel for a master switch. “Krackett, I’m talking about Krackett.” Evans stopped and turned, facing Fletcher. “Krackett sent me down here, Lenora. To bring Hal back. And to kill you.” Then he fired.
Fletcher fell back in a spray of blood, her head struck the wall, and her gun hit the floor and spun across it. Evans kicked it out of the way and continued on toward the elevator, toward Mira.
Their eyes met in the small round mirror at the top of the door and she leaped upward, knocking loose one of the lighting panels in the ceiling. She grabbed onto the metal bar and jerked her legs up toward her body; the first blast tore through the back wall.
Evans laughed and kept moving toward the elevator. Mira swung her body back to push off against the wall behind her, but a wave of energy slammed into the elevator, energy so powerful it exploded the mirror and every light fixture in the hallway. Ping, ping, ping. Glass and plastic rained down, the elevator doors slammed shut, the hulking heap started to move, and in her head she heard Bennet again.
I proved you wrong. Run like hell.
“Christ, Hal,” Evans said, shaking his head as he turned to face him. “That was stupid. I’m prepared to offer you the world and you’re helping the only person left alive who can threaten what we do.”
“What you do.” Everything had started to blur. “I’m outta the loop, Evans.”
“Don’t be a fool.” He stepped over Fletcher’s body as though it were roadkill. “We’re prepared to offer a much more lucrative deal this time.”
“Really. And what kind of deal would that be?” He remained on his knees because Evans found him less threatening that way. “I’m willing to listen.”
“I think you’re bullshitting me, Hal,” Evans said, and shot him in the knee.
Hal already had reached for him and barely felt the pain. He reached with everything that remained inside him and seized the fucker’s willpower and began to mold it, direct it, doing exactly what Evans and Steele had taught him so many years ago.
Even as Mira raced out of the building, into the rain, the connection between her and Hal Bennet remained. She saw what he saw, felt what he felt. When Evans shot Bennet in the right knee, her own knee exploded with pain and she rolled through the sand, clutching her knee, her mouth frozen in a silent scream.
She tried to sever the connection between them, but she didn’t have the strength. She felt him reach into Evans, grab control of him, and saw Evans struggling against the awesome power that he had helped create. Then Evans sank to the floor, sobbing even as he jammed the barrel of the rifle into his own mouth.
She shrieked then, shrieked to break away, to separate, to sever, and suddenly she popped free and rolled through sand, sobbing and shrieking and still clutching her knee.
The final shot echoed out across the beach, vibrating against the wet air like some long, erratic musical chord. It faded and she heard only the hum of an approaching plane and the soft drumming of the rain against the sand.
A light drizzle still fell as the medics carried Fletcher and Bennet out of the building. Sheppard stood near the ambulance, watching.
Both of them were still alive, which was more than he-could say for Richard Evans, who had left the building in a body bag. Fletcher was unconscious and Bennet was nearly there, his eyes rolling around in their sockets like loose marbles.
As they started to put his stretcher into the ambulance, he raised his hand and gestured at Sheppard. He stepped forward, but Mira came up behind him and caught his arm. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t.”
He looked at her, hair wet from the rain, clothes soaked through, eyes filled with emotions he couldn’t identify. “He’s too drugged up to do anything,” Sheppard said. “I’ll be right back.”
She grabbed onto his arm and went with him. They stopped alongside the stretcher and Bennet pushed his oxygen mask to one side. “Computer. In the chickee. An encrypted file. Everything … about Delphi.” His eyes slipped to Mira and something passed between them, something Sheppard felt but couldn’t decipher. Then the medics put Bennet in the ambulance and moments later, it sped down the driveway.
“What happened just then?” Sheppard asked her.
She pressed her folded arms against her waist and blinked back tears or raindrops, he couldn’t tell which. “He said he was sorry.”
“I didn’t hear him say a damn thing.”
“I know.”
He glanced back toward the street, as if he expected the answer to be there, but the ambulance was gone. Mira reached for his hand and laced her fingers through his. Softly, she said, “Let’s go home.”
To be continued in:
BLACK WATER
The Hanged Man Page 33
