by Chris Holm
Yancey picked up a framed photo from the side table, glanced at it, and tossed it aside. “And where is ol’ Calvin?”
“Credit card records put him in Reno. Business trip, looks like.”
“Was our guy holding Mrs. Broussard against her will?”
“Not as far as we could tell—which is why we elected to restrain her.”
“What’s your connection to this lady, Frank? You keeping Calvin’s side of the bed warm while he’s gone?”
A single tear slid down Lois’s cheek. Segreti made noises of protest through his gag.
“Sorry, buddy, I didn’t quite get that. But don’t worry, we’ll have plenty of time to catch up when I transport you to our facility up north for questioning.”
Segreti’s eyes, wide and pleading, darted from Yancey to Reyes.
“If this guy’s tied to the attack in some way, shouldn’t we turn him over to the authorities?” Reyes asked.
“Sure,” Yancey replied. “And I’ll be happy to—just as soon as I’m done with him.”
Segreti thrashed against his restraints. The dog on Lois’s lap growled as Yancey stepped in close and hit Frank twice. Segreti doubled over and sucked wind through his gag. Yancey grabbed him by the hair and yanked him upright.
That’s when the dog lunged.
Yancey yelped as Ella’s teeth sank into his forearm. He released Segreti and flailed wildly until he shook the dog free.
Ella sailed past Lois and slammed into a side table. The lamp atop it rocked and fell, shattering when it hit the floor.
“You okay, boss?” Reyes asked.
Yancey cradled his injured arm to his chest. Blood seeped into his sleeve. “I’m fine.”
“Weddle,” Reyes said, “shut that thing in a bedroom, would you?”
“No,” Yancey replied. “Leave it be.”
Ella hunkered low and snarled.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Reyes asked.
Yancey drew his .357 and aimed it at the dog. “You’re goddamn right I’m sure.”
Lois shrieked through her gag. Segreti strained against his zip-ties.
“Whoa,” Reyes said. “I think maybe we should all just take a breath.”
Yancey ignored him and instead addressed Ella directly. “Christ, look at you. You’re more throw pillow than dog—proof positive that man makes for a capricious god. It took only a couple thousand years for us to turn wolves into accessories for rich bitches.”
“Seriously, boss. I get that you’re pissed, but there’s no need for this. Let me stash her somewhere out of sight, okay?”
“But it’s all just window dressing, ain’t it?” Yancey continued. “Deep down, you’re still half wild; all you wanna do is fight and fuck. It’s not your fault, really—it’s ours for thinking we could change your nature. But if you wanna play Big Bad Wolf with me, I’ll show you how we deal with wolves where I come from.”
“For fuck’s sake, Yancey, put the gun down!”
“You know, son,” Yancey said without taking his eyes off the dog, “it seems to me this little shit ain’t the only one around here who needs to learn who’s in charge.”
Yancey pulled the trigger.
His gun thundered.
But not before Lois threw herself off the couch.
With her arms and legs bound, she went down hard. Yancey’s shot ran parallel to the couch and angled downward to the spot where Ella stood. As Lois fell, it caught her in the sternum. Segreti screamed into his gag. Reyes rushed to Lois’s side—but there was no saving her. The bullet had passed clean through and left an exit wound the size of his fist. She was dead before she hit the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Reyes said. “What did you do?”
Yancey stared at Lois’s corpse in wide-eyed disbelief.
“It wasn’t…” he said. “I didn’t…”
And then the lights went out.
32.
WHAT THE FUCK is going on?”
The house’s background whir ceased as appliances shut down. Yancey’s voice echoed, shrill and desperate, in the sudden quiet. His hands were sweaty. His mouth was dry. He became painfully aware of his own breathing and the roar of his pulse in his ears.
A rustling to his left. A squeak of couch springs. A struggle. A thud. A grunt.
Then, one by one, flashlights came on around the room.
Reyes still crouched beside the fallen woman, blood pooling black beneath her; lifeless eyes reflecting the flashlights’ beams, but now his gun was drawn and his head was cocked to one side, listening.
Segreti was sprawled beside him, straddled by two Bellum men. It seemed he’d tried to make a move despite his bonds. Yancey wished he’d died in the attempt. It would have saved Yancey the trouble of killing him.
Speaking of, that little shit of a dog was nowhere to be seen.
Yancey knew he was in danger of losing control of the situation. He tamped down his rising panic and forced some steel into his voice. “I want a goddamn sitrep now!”
“Could be an outage,” one of his men replied. “FEMA sent around a memo about the rescue effort taxing the power grid. Warned the lights could flicker.”
“It’s not an outage,” Reyes said. He nodded toward the curtains. Light shone through the narrow gap where they met. “The streetlights are still on. Which means we’ve got company.”
“Get him up,” Yancey said. The men who’d tackled Segreti hauled him to his feet and held him upright by his elbows. “Remove his gag.”
Once they had, Segreti spat in Yancey’s face. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “I swear you’ll pay for what you did to Lois.”
“Don’t you dare blame me for this! Her death is on your conscience, not mine. You’re the one who put her in harm’s way.”
Segreti turned his head and locked eyes with Reyes. “That how you see it? His actions seem justified to you? Because I promise, Lois ain’t the first innocen—”
Yancey pistol-whipped Segreti. Segreti’s head rocked sideways, blood spraying from his mouth. He sagged, his weight supported by the men on either side of him, and his eyes showed only whites.
Yancey cocked back his hand to hit him again. Reyes grabbed his wrist to halt the blow.
“Yancey! He’s had enough!”
Yancey yanked his hand free and wheeled on Reyes. They stood nose to nose in the darkness, grips tightening on their weapons. “Are you questioning my authority, son?”
The moment hung between them—fraught, electric. The armed men around them tensed. Yancey felt as if his future hinged on the outcome of this confrontation. Reyes’s challenge painted him as fallible and weak. He couldn’t afford to let it stand.
Reyes glanced around the room, and realized that he was on his own.
He relaxed his posture and backed down.
“No,” he said.
Yancey smiled, wide and predatory. “I’m sorry—I must’ve misheard. No what?”
“No, sir,” Reyes replied through gritted teeth.
“Attaboy,” Yancey said, his confidence returning. He looked at Segreti, who was once again conscious, although his eyes swam woozily in their sockets. “So, Frank—who’s your friend out there?”
Segreti frowned. Spat blood on the floor. “Fuck if I know. I didn’t think I had any left.”
“Don’t worry,” Yancey said, “you won’t for long. Reyes, McTiernan, Bigelow, Stahelski, go check the perimeter. Weddle, Swinson, Lutz, you stay in here with me.”
The men, save Reyes, muttered their assent and geared up.
Yancey gave Reyes a hard look.
Reyes returned it.
“There a problem?” Yancey asked.
“Not so long as the prisoner is still alive when we get back.”
The streetlights looked like paper lanterns in the fog and bathed the neighborhood in gauzy white. In the long shadows of the Broussard house’s backyard, though, their illumination dwindled to the false twilight of a horror-movie poster.
The back door c
reaked slowly open. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then two mercenaries slipped into the night, nearly invisible in their matte-black body armor. They moved with silent precision, one advancing while the other covered him.
Hendricks studied them from the shadows, assessing strengths and weaknesses.
He’d watched the house for ten minutes, trying to formulate a plan of attack, but when Yancey arrived, he knew he had to make his move. Hendricks had been creeping toward the house when he heard the gunshot. For a moment, he’d worried he was too late. Then Segreti screamed—which meant he might be injured but was still alive.
In every scenario he considered, Hendricks was outnumbered and outgunned. The mercs carried MP5 assault rifles, fully automatic, thirty rounds to a magazine, and spare mags in their vests. And if they’d sent two men out the back, it was safe to assume there were at least two more around front. All Hendricks had was Pappas’s .45, which wouldn’t penetrate their body armor.
Their armor, however, afforded Hendricks some advantages. It slowed reaction times. Limited mobility. Dulled hearing. Narrowed visual fields. And the night-vision goggles they wore beneath their helmets were next to useless in the roiling fog.
One of the men took up a position behind the Jaguar in the driveway and provided cover for the other while he jogged toward the tree line. Hendricks smiled. He’d figured that’s where they’d begin their search, which was why he wasn’t hiding in the tree line.
Training is good. Training is valuable. But the wrong training leads to regimented thinking, which can be turned against you on the battlefield.
Thanks to the fog, Hendricks couldn’t see the one searching the tree line, so he closed his eyes and listened. Heard the muffled crunch of dropped pine needles beneath boots, the dry rustle of underbrush disturbed. When the man completed his search, he shouted, “Clear! You see anything on your end?”
“Nada,” the one behind the car replied. “I’ve got eyes on the house’s electric meter, though, and it looks like it’s been fucked with. Come cover me, and I’ll see if I can get the lights back on.”
“Copy that.”
The meter box was located on a small, single-story addition nestled in the back left crook of the house’s original cross gable, where shadows ran thick. A flower bed encircled the addition. Shrubberies partially hid the meter box. A garden hose hung just beside.
On the roof of the addition, a gently slanting plane some fifteen feet off the ground, Hendricks lay in wait.
“Look at this—someone yanked the fucking dial off.”
His partner glanced over his shoulder without lowering his weapon, which was aimed vaguely toward the tree line. “That enough to kill the power?”
“Beats me.”
In fact, it was. Electric companies aren’t wild about supplying power free of charge, so juice will flow only if the meter is plugged into the meter box. Removing it is a simple—if illegal—matter of snapping off the wire security seal and yanking the piece containing the display dial from its housing.
“They take it with ’em?”
“Dunno. Maybe.” He clipped his weapon to his vest and rooted around the flower bed for a second. “Wait—got it.”
“Is it busted?”
The merc wiped soil off the meter and turned it over in his hands. On the back were four prongs, which corresponded to four exposed slots in the box. “Doesn’t seem to be.”
“Put it back, then. See what happens.”
“On it. Watch my six.”
He lined the prongs up with the slots and plugged the meter in.
A white-hot burst of sparks lit up the night. The air crackled with electricity. The smell of ozone and scorched hair invaded Hendricks’s nostrils as 220 volts blew the man backward into the yard.
Hendricks had used the hose to drench the meter and the box before he’d scaled the trellis, and he’d counted on the darkness and the man’s tactical gloves to hide that fact until it was too late. If he were being honest with himself, he wasn’t sure if it’d work.
The electrocuted merc landed, limbs rigid, on the grass. His hair and clothes were smoking. An involuntary groan escaped his lips. The man covering him cried out and dropped his weapon when the sparks erupted from the meter box, his night-vision goggles amplifying the light and blinding him. He stripped them off and tossed them aside, staggering. Then he rubbed uselessly at his eyes and called to his fallen friend.
“Bigs? Bigs, are you okay? Talk to me—I can’t see you!”
And that’s when Hendricks leaped.
Reyes was inspecting the underbrush to the right of the front porch when the streetlights dimmed. On the far side of the house, a brilliant flash of white, accompanied by a firecracker pop, turned night to day. Stahelski shouted something and was quickly silenced.
Reyes took off running toward the backyard.
The fog was thick; the grass was damp. Reyes wished he were wearing a bulletproof vest beneath his suit jacket and cursed his treadless dress shoes with every slip. McTiernan—who’d been nearer to the backyard when the light show started—was well ahead of him and more sure-footed in his combat boots. It wasn’t long before he vanished into the mist.
Visibility was shit. Still, near as Reyes could tell, the backyard was empty. No Bigelow, no McTiernan, no Stahelski. They weren’t far, though. He could hear them engaged in battle somewhere to his right: The dull thwack of blows exchanged. The wet, popping sound of tendons snapping. A crunch of bone. A strangled cry. And then silence. Reyes hoped the sudden hush meant his men had neutralized the threat.
When he turned the corner to the side yard, his foot caught on something, tripping him. It was Bigelow. He lay flat on his back in the grass and stank like a perm gone wrong. Portions of his uniform had either melted or blown off, and his exposed skin was badly burned. Reyes checked him for a pulse and felt one, slow and weak.
Stahelski was slumped against the house not far away, his tongue lolling, eyes bulging. His helmet had been yanked backward off his head and twisted until its chinstrap cut off blood flow to his brain. Beside him was McTiernan, his right leg bent at an unnatural angle, his face misshapen by what looked to be a broken jaw.
Their guns, Reyes noted, were missing.
Reyes scrabbled over to check on the men. They were alive, but barely. Somehow, Bigelow, McTiernan, and Stahelski had all been incapacitated without anybody—friend or foe—firing a single shot.
Luckily for Reyes, McTiernan had managed to injure his assailant. His combat knife lay beside him on the grass, and a trail of blood led from it into the fog.
Reyes followed it, pulse racing, his finger on the trigger of his SIG Sauer. Fog obliterated the world around him. After thirty yards or so, the blood trail stopped. Then a cold circle of gunmetal touched the base of Reyes’s neck, and he realized he’d been had.
“Slick move, leaving a decoy blood trail,” he said. “What, did you slice open your own goddamn arm?”
“Shut up,” the man behind him whispered. “Put your hands behind your head. And take your finger off the trigger or the last thing you’ll ever see is your teeth leaving your face.”
Reyes complied. The man behind him took his weapon. Nylon rustled as he stashed it in a jacket pocket. “Now get on your knees.”
Reyes started to do so. Then he spun and looped his arm around the man’s wrist, pinning the gun against his side and wrenching it sideways.
The gun fell. Reyes dove and grabbed it. The man tackled him, and the gun slipped from Reyes’s hand and skidded across the lawn.
Reyes was on his stomach in the grass. His assailant drove a knee in his back and grasped for his forearm, trying to maneuver him into an armlock.
Reyes elbowed him in the temple and received three quick jabs to the kidneys for his trouble. Pain spread, wet and loose, in Reyes’s guts. He curled up instinctively to protect himself. The man rose and kicked him twice. Reyes swept the man’s legs out from under him, and he went down hard.
Reyes was on
him in an instant, straddling his chest and raining punches. His opponent was well trained; he anticipated, blocked, deflected. As Reyes’s speed waned, the man caught his swinging fist and responded with an open palm to Reyes’s face, trying to break Reyes’s nose. Reyes dodged it but overbalanced and toppled.
They rolled, grappling, for a moment, each struggling for an edge. Reyes’s hands slipped free. He took hold of his assailant’s neck and squeezed, only to release his grip when he felt the gun that he’d surrendered digging into the tender flesh beneath his chin.
The man rose but kept the SIG Sauer trained on Reyes’s face. He collected his firearm from where it lay a few feet away and aimed that at Reyes too.
“There are more men inside the house,” Reyes rasped between breaths. “If you shoot me, they’ll come running.”
“Not fast enough to do you any good.”
Now that the man used his full voice, Reyes thought there was something familiar about it. He squinted up at him in the dim half-light, eyes widening as recognition dawned.
“Hendricks?”
33.
REYES?” HENDRICKS SAID. “What the hell are you doing here?”
The two of them had worked together years ago, when Hendricks’s Special Forces unit was brought in on a mission to rescue eleven U.S. NGO workers—three of whom were actually CIA assets—who’d been kidnapped by narco-guerrillas in Colombia. Reyes had been the Company’s top field agent in the area at the time, working out of the U.S. embassy in Bogotá, officially as a cultural attaché.
“That’s a funny question coming from a guy I heard was dead.”
“Those reports were greatly exaggerated.”
Reyes looked him up and down. “Maybe not greatly. You look like shit.”
Hendricks believed him. His cheeks felt flushed. His throat was parched. The stitched-up knife wound in his side was burning up and seeping blood.
“Really? I’ve never felt better. When did you go private? Last time we crossed paths, you were with the CIA.”
“Yeah, well, last time we crossed paths, you were one of the good guys.”
