“Thanks for your help. I really appreciate it.”
“You can’t just leave me wondering—”
Sturm ended the call and watched the woman lift her child into the back seat of a Volvo and buckle her into a booster seat, but in her mind, she saw her own mother and a little girl in dusty overalls who was everything she could no longer be. She averted her eyes before she started to cry again and dialed another number on her cell phone. When the voice on the other end answered, she spoke without bothering to identify herself.
“There’s something you need to see.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Seattle, Washington
4:36 p.m. PST
Porter stood on the end of the commercial pier, watching the waves roll in from the distant, cloud-blanketed horizon, bringing with them the dots that would grow into the ships that would soon enough dock in front of him and unload the day’s catch. The sandwich on the rail beside him was only partially consumed, the coffee long since cold. An ambitious seagull hopped a little closer to his food every time he looked away, until it eventually made its big move and, with a shriek, snatched his sandwich from the wrapper, which spun lazily down toward the water. A boy and his father baited their hooks from a bucket of tiny squids and cast their lines out into the chop over the rail behind him. He tried not to look to the south, where he could see the gold of the Bertha Knight Landes Cultural Center through the outrigger booms of the Dragnet. He tried not to think about his SAC’s words, about how his concerns had been dismissed without the slightest pause for deliberation or the opportunity to state his case. His orders had been explicit, the consequences implied.
Stay the hell away from the waterfront development tonight…or pack your bags for the field office in South Dakota.
How had it come to this?
Seventy-two hours ago, he had been a shooting star in the department, the go-to guy when things needed to be handled quickly and quietly. And now here he was, an outsider in his own investigation, one that no one appeared to want him to solve; a pawn in a political game with rules he couldn’t figure out, let alone understand. Men had died, but no one seemed to remember that inconvenient little detail. Or care, for that matter. There was a child who could write in a dead language living in the ruins, and a private defense contractor preparing to unleash a team of mercenaries into the subterranean warrens. And who could forget the mayor’s fundraiser tomorrow night, which apparently was the only thing that actually mattered…
He flashed back to a thought that had just crossed his mind, but grasping its importance was like trying to grab an eel by the tail.
Men had died…
Before he even realized he was going to do it, he grabbed the brown barrel trash receptacle from the pier beside him and hurled it over the rail. It hit the ocean with a booming splash and bobbed against the pylons before sinking with a belch of air. He heard the zip of fishing lines being hurriedly reeled in and then the clamor of footsteps rushing away from him on the weathered planks.
He buried his face in his hands and then looked out upon the sea again, as though waiting for a ship he knew would never arrive.
He’d never felt so alone, so…displaced. All of the rules he’d devoted his life to enforcing no longer mattered to the men who wrote them. The ideals he cherished were worth nothing on the open market, where money and power were commodities worth far more than trivialities like justice and human life.
A warm breeze that smelled of sea salt and schooling fish raced ahead of the coming storm. He allowed it to caress his face and felt a preternatural sense of calmness settle into his very soul.
Porter smiled, removed his phone from his pocket, and dialed Sturm’s number.
He had agonized over his situation, but there had never really been any decision to make, had there?
“I hear South Dakota’s beautiful this time of year,” he said when she answered.
* * *
Sturm met him at the pier twenty minutes later in faded Levi’s and a black hoodie, and together they had picked their way through the abandoned buildings and vacant lots, and watched the development until it was safe to sprint across the street and scale the fence. She had called in sick for her shift, which had pissed off the watch commander to no end, but, since her days there were numbered, she was impervious to his threats. Besides, the waterfront rousting had been cancelled, which didn’t come as a surprise in the slightest. The entire area needed to be cleared for the big night ahead. Porter had tossed his cell phone into the back of a panel truck with Oregon plates and replaced it with a disposable unit. They were now off the grid and skydiving without parachutes. If anyone found out what they were up to, they’d be hung out to dry by their departments and run out of town by the political machine. And he couldn’t have felt more at ease. He could see it in Sturm’s eyes, as well.
That, and a generous helping of fear.
He wasn’t sure exactly what he thought about the child. All evidence pointed to the fact that she was a brutal killer, more animal than human, and yet this was the same little girl who had cried into Sturm’s chest and carved her heartbreaking tale of her mother’s death and her own feelings of helplessness into the walls around her. She was an enigma: a doll-carrying victim of circumstances beyond her control who ripped out the throats of her prey and consumed their blood. He didn’t know what he was supposed to think or which course of action to take. On one hand, this child was a monster that had killed at least sixteen people that he was aware of and needed to be taken out of play by whatever means possible. On the other, she was just a frightened little girl who’d obviously been abducted from her home after watching her mother die and transported across the ocean into a terrifying world beyond her limited comprehension. Part of him knew he should either subdue her or put her down—if they even found her at all—while the part that seemed to be in control at the moment thought they should do whatever they could to save her, especially considering her value to the men who had smuggled her out of Russia, the same men who would soon descend upon the ruins under the cover of darkness, mere hours from now. He put aside the internal debate and made a firm decision, one that he was confident he could live with.
He was just going to have to wing it.
The sky was gray when they crawled down into the warrens, the lightning that stabbed from one storm cloud to the next imbued with red from the setting sun as though made from electrical flame. They didn’t have a whole lot of time to attempt Sturm’s plan. If they couldn’t find the girl quickly enough, they were going to have to get the hell out of there regardless. The last thing they could afford was to be down there in the darkness when Spears and his men arrived. Following last night’s failure, they will have adjusted their plan of attack, and Porter had a sour feeling in the pit of his stomach that insisted he didn’t want to learn firsthand what they intended to do.
“I’ll follow the route to the left,” Sturm whispered, shining her flashlight through the dust motes toward a collapsed section of the brick wall. “You go—”
“The hell if I’m letting you out of my sight.”
“I can take care of myself. And I know these tunnels far better than you do.”
“We can’t risk getting separated. When the time comes to get out of here, we’re going to have to do so in a hurry. And you’d better believe I’ll drag you out of her kicking and screaming if I have to.”
She opened her mouth to argue, but glanced at her watch and simply shook her head.
“We need to get moving,” she said. “How long do you figure we have before our company arrives?”
“Not nearly long enough to do what we need to do.”
“Then we’d better get this show on the road.”
She turned away from him and started deeper into the ruins. He grabbed her by the arm and spun her around so that their faces were only inches apart.
“I need to make sure you understand what will happen if the forces that are coming find us down here. These aren’t t
he kind of men who are going to just let us walk away.”
She drew her pistol from its holster, chambered a round with a snick, and offered a crooked grin that answered his question. Unfortunately, he still had one more.
“And what if we find this girl and she’s not the helpless innocent that you think she is?”
Sturm’s smile faltered.
That was all the answer he needed.
* * *
It was all he could do to keep from glancing at his watch every few seconds. Time was slipping away from them far too quickly. The sun had set at 5:44 p.m. That was just over two hours ago when he last checked, and they still hadn’t encountered any sign of the child. They were living on borrowed time now. He tried to convince himself that the men who were coming would wait a while to minimize their chances of being seen, but he knew better. They were in an abandoned industrial district, in a closed construction site hidden from the road by the fence and the artwork. There were no houses nearby, and the closest potential witnesses were nearly a mile away at the commercial wharf where even cannon fire would be masked by the roar of engines, the booming of offloaded containers, and the beeping of forklifts. The powers-that-be had ensured that there would be no law enforcement presence or intervention and had given Phobos the green light to do whatever needed to be done to resolve this situation before the ribbon cutting ceremony tomorrow night. He knew for certain that the men wouldn’t walk blindly into the rubble on a hunting expedition as they had last night. They will have amended their plans to compensate for their failure and ensure there would be no repeat performance. They had to know they had a short window to make this happen or it would be closed to them forever. Whatever they had planned, it was going to be big. Porter wished he had an inkling of what was in store. He was gambling on the child’s importance to these men. If he was wrong, then they just might be willing to incinerate the ruins, with Sturm and him inside.
They had cleared the main passages first, before following the conveyor chute into the heart of the honeycomb. The girl hadn’t been in her den as they had hoped, and every tunnel they explored led them to another dead end without any indication that she was even still down here. She had the advantage of familiarity with her surroundings, while it felt as though he and Sturm were merely bumbling through the maze, their flashlights about as effective as fireflies in the oily darkness. Every so often, he stopped and listened, but never heard anything more than the grumbling of the settling rubble, the skittering of pebbles through the debris, and the occasional distant rumble of thunder that shook loose cascades of dirt and dust. Once he thought he heard a scuffing sound in the tunnel behind them, but there had been nothing there when he turned around.
He rounded a bend and felt his knuckles scrape the soles of Sturm’s shoes.
She lay prone in front of him, her flashlight beam muted by her palm, which glowed faintly red.
“Did you hear that?” she whispered.
He was about to ask what she had heard when what sounded like a muffled gunshot echoed from somewhere above him. Then another. And another.
Sturm looked back at him, her eyes wide, her face made stark-white by his light.
They weren’t gunshots, he realized.
Those were the sounds of car doors closing.
They were out of time.
“They’re here,” he whispered.
III
In order to get power and retain it, it is necessary to love power;
but love of power is not connected with goodness
but with qualities that are the opposite of goodness,
such as pride, cunning, and cruelty.
—Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy
TWENTY-NINE
Seattle, Washington
8:57 p.m. PST
There was no point in being quiet now. They were about to go in full-bore and there was nothing anyone or anything could do about it. The three black SUVs were parked side by side, tailgates open. He and his men donned their backpacks, clipped their flashbangs to their hips, and the “special” canisters to the harnesses on their chests so they would be within easy reach. They were dressed in black, from their stocking caps to their boots, and had painted their faces to match. Their night vision/thermal fusion goggles stood from their brows like a third insectile eye. They wore gas masks over their noses and mouths, their voices made tinny by the filters and the rebreathing apparatuses.
His men all knew their assignments and struck off toward their positions without a word. They had gone over the plan in painstaking detail until Spears was certain there would be no mistakes and synchronized their watches the second they stepped out of the cars. Once their assault commenced, everything was going to move at lightning speed and there would be no room for error. This would not be like last night. They were going to swoop in and out like an eagle falling upon a mouse, and then this operation would be over and they could get down to the real mission, the one that would change the world and make him the richest man alive in the process.
They all assumed their posts and blended into the shadows while they waited for the prearranged moment to arrive. Spears crouched in the tall weeds beside the northernmost, and, judging by the riot of footprints, the most oft-used, entrance to the underground warrens. When the creature came charging out of there, he prayed to God it would come right at him. He wanted to be the one to bring it down. Not in hopes of using it as leverage to weasel out of paying the men their promised bonuses, but because, from the very beginning, it felt as though events had conspired to place him at this particular point at that this precise moment in time. Call it fate, destiny, kismet, whatever. His entire life had built up to this one defining event, and he would finally achieve the greatness to which he had always aspired. The cost had been great, but the reward would be even greater. History was written by men who had the courage to seize the world by the throat and throttle it like the thrashing serpent that it was. This was his hour, his time. His name would be written in the annals of time with the likes of Patton and Truman, the khans and the Caesars, men who had conquered the world, or, as his son might have said, made it their bitch.
He pictured Nelson, and imagined the awe his son would have expressed had he known the enormous evolutionary leap that was about to be taken thanks to his magnificent discovery.
Spears wiped a tear of pride from his lashes before it could form and stared down at his watch.
Five.
He gripped a flashbang in each fist and crawled toward the dark opening.
Four.
He crouched just outside the orifice and peered inside.
Three.
No heat signature. No movement.
Two.
He glanced to either side and watched his men peel from the shadows.
One.
He pulled the pins and tossed the canister in his right hand first, then the one in his left, straight ahead into the tunnel.
Showtime.
Brilliant golden light exploded from the orifice with a loud whoomph that echoed across the waterfront.
He lowered his goggles, scurried through the hole, and dropped down into the sublevel. Smoke swirled and eddied around him. There was no heat signature waiting for him, no sign of movement. His respirator made a mechanical wheezing sound. Gravel crunched underfoot. Loose concrete and pebbles rained from the ceiling. He unstrapped the tear gas gun, which looked like a sawed off shotgun with an absurdly wide barrel, from his right thigh, loaded a canister of CR gas, and fired it down the corridor to his left. He broke the breech and loaded another and another and another and fired them off into the darkness, trailing swirling vortices of smoke behind them. They clattered out of sight and then exploded into toxic aerosol clouds that filled the tunnels. Before the gas reached him, he spun, hauled himself back into the tunnel and scurried toward the fresh air.
In a matter of moments, the dibenzoxazepine agent would filter through the ruins, following any air passage through the rubble. The lachrymatory gas was
ten times more powerful than ordinary tear gas. Even the most transient exposure would cause intense skin irritation, especially to the mucus membranes, temporary blindness, gasping, coughing, and overwhelming panic. There was a risk of immediate incapacitation, but with the resilience the creature had already demonstrated, he wasn’t overly concerned. The instant that thing felt the searing pain in its eyes and throat, it would make a mad dash for the nearest egress to the surface.
And they would be waiting.
It would stumble in blind agony right into their clutches. A bullet through both kneecaps and there would be no possibility of escape. Quick and easy. In and out. Spears had this mission planned perfectly, right down to the smallest detail. If the agent overwhelmed it, then all they would have to do is go in there after it and drag its flailing carcass back out. It would be in so much pain that he couldn’t imagine it would put up any kind of fight at all. He’d seen the damage the CR gas could do. It had been used for riot control in South Africa two decades ago, and it had worked like a charm. The only problem was the mass casualties by asphyxiation and pulmonary edema in the weak and infirm segments of the population, which was why it was now classified as a combat class chemical weapon and such a challenge to procure.
He crawled out of the tunnel and assumed his post. Tendrils of yellowish-white smoke spiraled up out of the rubble. A glance to either side confirmed that his men were ready and waiting.
It was only a matter of time now. That monster was going to come flying out of the ruins at any second, tears streaming from its sightless eyes, unable to breathe through its closing throat.
He seated the butt of his assault rifle against his shoulder, assumed his shooter’s stance, and scrutinized the black orifice through the wisps of smoke.
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 18
