Never Back Down

by William Casey Moreton

  Coburn watched the building through his open window, then he turned to Sabrina. “Staying in the car?”

  “Not a chance,” she said.

  87

  The commercial office building occupied a major slice of one city block. There was a lobby with tile and a row of three elevators. Coburn ran his eyes down the glass placard on the wall between the elevators. He tracked down until he saw Folston Industrial Leasing. Third floor.

  An elevator door was already open. He gestured Sabrina in with a nod and followed her, found the panel of buttons and punched number three with his middle knuckle. The elevator opened onto a corridor and they followed it to the right. Folston Industrial Leasing was on the left side of the hall. The company name, suite number and hours of operation were stenciled on the door in white. The lights were out. Coburn cupped his hands against the glass to look inside. The office looked dark and empty, like it was a holiday or the weekend. He tested the door.

  “Locked,” he said.

  “Maybe it’s lunchtime.”

  Coburn shook his head. “Too early. An operation like this isn’t going to shut down for lunch. Somebody would stay behind to answer the phone and mind the business. Too much competition in this day and age to shut down for an hour. The boss might take a business lunch to indulge a favorite client, or a potential client, but no way he’s gonna leave his front desk unattended. The secretary would bring a lunch or have a sub or salad or pasta delivered. She would eat at her desk five days out of the week, and it would likely be a working lunch. Take bites between phone calls. Keep a napkin close so she wouldn’t get crumbs or grease on her keyboard.”

  “Coffee run, maybe?”

  “Doubt it. They’d make their own coffee. The good stuff too, because clients would want a cup while they talked numbers or while they sat and waited.”

  He cupped his hands again and squinted against the glare on the glass.

  “See anything?” she asked.

  He saw the secretary’s desk just inside, arranged at a precise right angle to the door. The phone was ringing and he could see a blinking yellow light on the black console. An appointment planner was open on the desk and there was a cup of coffee beside the phone that was nearly full.

  “What do you think?” she asked.

  Coburn didn’t answer. He tried the door again then glanced down the length of the hall.

  “Let’s grab a cup of coffee and come back in half an hour,” she suggested.

  Coburn walked past her and stopped at the next office suite. It was a dentist’s office. And the next one after that was a legal office. A small law firm made up of two attorneys practicing personal injury law. Coburn peeked through the glass at each door and then walked down to the end of the corridor to the public restroom. He pushed through the door, stood at the sink and glanced around. He didn’t see what he was looking for.

  Sabrina didn’t move.

  Coburn came back out from the restroom and stood with his hands on his hips. His eyes panned toward the dogleg in the corridor and spotted something he could use hanging on the wall - a fire extinguisher. It was in a metal case with a glass front. He popped the door open and lifted out the extinguisher. He carried it with two fingers of his right hand hooked under the spray trigger. He left the pin in and carried the extinguisher at his side. He walked back to Sabrina at the door to Folston Industrial Leasing.

  Sabrina stared at the metal canister then she gave him a look.

  “Stand back,” he said.

  She stepped around behind him.

  Coburn glanced over his shoulder down the hall. A mother and her young child came out of the dentist’s office and headed for the elevator. Coburn waited. When the elevator door closed, he moved quickly. He raised the extinguisher with both hands, then smashed the round bottom end against the door glass. The glass spider webbed on initial contact. He whacked it again and the glass crumbled. It fell to the floor in shards.

  Sabrina jumped back.

  “Dude!”

  Coburn lowered the extinguisher to his side and used the other hand to reach through the wrecked window glass to unlock the door. He turned the handle and the door opened.

  “Dude,” she said again.

  “Wait right here,” he said. “I’ll only be a minute.”

  Sabrina stared at him wide-eyed and nodded.

  • • •

  Eva DuPont heard a heavy thump outside and then, a few seconds later, the sound of glass breaking. She froze. She checked that the gun had a fresh clip and that a round was chambered. She went down into a squat. She looked over at Christopher Folston to make sure he was dead. Then she cautiously rose up two or three inches and looked through the glass of Folston’s office door. She saw the red canister of a fire extinguisher cleaning out the glass of the outside door. Then a hand reached in and unlocked the door.

  Eva DuPont’s pulse remained steady. She didn’t sweat it. No worries. She decided to sit tight for a moment and see if whoever it was would go away. If not, she would simply kill again.

  88

  The door scraped across the broken glass on the floor when Coburn opened it. He edged around the mess and then raked the big pieces to one side with the side of his shoe. The smaller stuff crunched underfoot. He looked back at Sabrina through the open door. She took one step forward just to have a better look inside.

  Coburn found a wall switch. He leaned over the receptionist’s desk and hit the lights. The fluorescents were hidden behind pebbled plastic screens, like every other office around the globe. He smelled coffee. The good stuff, as he expected. It smelled good enough to make him want to pour a cup.

  He made a quick survey of the room from where he stood. The office furnishings were basic office pieces from a boring office supply catalogue. The receptionist’s desk was metal and plain, and her rolling chair looked like it had come from Wal-Mart. There were filing cabinets against a wall and shelves piled high with blueprints and schematics rolled into tubes.

  The secretary was still logged into the phone. It was ringing again and a line was blinking. From the look of things, she hadn’t expected to be gone more than a minute or so, but the lights were off and the screensaver was running through its cycle.

  Coburn walked past her desk. There was an enclosed office at the east end of the room. Folston’s office, he guessed. It was walled in and the upper two-thirds was frosted glass. There was a window in the door.

  He still had the extinguisher, his fingers hooked around the hose and the trigger. It occurred to him to set it on the corner of the receptionist’s desk, but at the moment it felt smart to keep it close.

  So Folston’s secretary had stepped out and Folston’s office was black. Coburn crossed to the office door and tested the handle. Locked. He peered through the glass in the door. There was no light except the bleed-in from the outer office and maybe some outside glow from a window.

  He bumped the metal canister against the door. It gonged loudly because there was nothing inside the hollow cylinder except dry chemical. He considered the glass in the door and the frosted glass on either side. He didn’t want to smash out any more windows.

  He tried another angle and squinted. His eyes tracked back along the leading edge of Folston’s desk. Again there was a glow from a computer. He heard a sound and turned. Sabrina had taken a step inside and crunched lightly on some glass. She shot him a worried look, as if to say sorry.

  Coburn set the extinguisher at his feet and absently glanced through the glass in Folston’s office door one more time. When he did, a shape caught his eye. He leaned closer and cupped a hand against the glare.

  The shape was on the floor, protruding from the south end of Folston’s desk. Coburn squinted hard. He couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a hand. A hand attached to an arm. He tried the door handle again. Rattled it. And when he did, the frosted glass to the left side of his head exploded. It shattered outward from a single point and the entire pane rained to the floor.

  Coburn in
stinctively shielded his face with his forearm and ducked his head away. He went down on one knee and heard a bullet hit the metal upright of the doorframe. He grabbed the fire extinguisher.

  He heard someone scrambling, and did some scrambling of his own.

  “Get down!” he shouted to Sabrina.

  She instantly dropped to all fours and scuttled out into the corridor.

  Coburn saw a shadow move and he glanced overhead. Another shot was fired and it rang off the metal canister in his hands. He watched the shadow move back and forth and then disappear. He heard footsteps hurriedly crunching through shattered glass and judged the gunman to be on the exact opposite side of the wall from him.

  He glanced back toward the open door and the corridor. Split-second calculations buzzed through his brain. What were the odds he could make it to the secretary’s desk? Not good, he decided. He would need two, maybe three seconds of travel time, during which he would be fully exposed - with the gunman only eighteen inches away when he stood to run. Not good odds at all.

  Coburn decided he was going to have to be proactive if he wanted to survive. Six inches of wall couldn’t protect him long, especially when the upper half was glass. So he sucked in a deep breath and swung the extinguisher overhead and smashed it through the glass, and then jumped to his feet and leaped over the wall.

  89

  Eva DuPont had hesitated a moment too long, and that fact cost her. The gun still held plenty of rounds to do the job, but that didn’t matter if she didn’t have time to pull the trigger.

  She knew that whoever the guy was, he was low to the wall and there was only about six feet of wall on that side of the office door. So the plan was to just start blasting. The wall was mostly two layers of half-inch sheetrock separated by a few aluminum wall studs and maybe some electrical wiring. Nothing in there to really slow down a 9mm round too drastically. She planned to punch holes in the wall until she punched a hole or two through the chump on the other side. That was the plan, anyway.

  But the plan changed.

  When the window shattered, he came over the wall and charged straight at her.

  90

  Coburn followed the metal canister through the wall of glass. Shards rained down on him and he could feel the cuts on his head, neck, shoulders, and hands. He used the momentum to carry him up and over and into Folston’s office, with no idea of what to expect on the other side except someone with a gun. He thrust the canister out ahead of him and felt the contact. Their bodies collided and they went hard to the floor.

  Eva DuPont managed to get off two shots but the fire extinguisher had knocked her arms downward and the shots went wide and wild. Suddenly, she felt a heavy force pushing her over and she was falling backward. She went down on her back and the breath was punched from her lungs by the body crushing down on top of her. Worst of all, she lost her grip on the gun and it went skittering away from her hand.

  They crashed to the floor and slid together to the back wall. The sound of breaking glass was lost in the physical impact of the bodily collision.

  Eva tried to get her hands up to claw at him, but both arms were helplessly pinned. Then Coburn punched her in the throat. The blow left her gasping like a fish washed onto shore by the tide. It was only then that Coburn realized the gunman was a woman and how tiny she actually was. Then he turned his head, spotted the bodies of Folston and the secretary, and he immediately realized that Lee had been exactly right.

  91

  “Who are you?”

  “Nobody. Nobody at all,” Eva DuPont answered.

  “Who sent you to kill these people?”

  Coburn stared hard at her, waiting for a response. He could see her mind working. She was looking for a way out of this, but he had her gun and had it aimed at the back of her head.

  “It wasn’t me,” she said coolly. “They were dead when I got here. I walked in and found them. When you came in, I thought you were the killer coming back and I panicked.”

  There was very little conviction behind the lie, but her acting ability was almost plausible.

  “The door was locked. The lights were off. You had the gun,” Coburn said. “Why are you here?”

  “That’s my business.”

  “Try again. I have the number for 911 memorized. You can explain your business to the cops.”

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  Eva was lying on her stomach with her hands tied behind her back with an old extension cord. Coburn stood over her. Sabrina was seated on the corner of Folston’s desk.

  The light was on. Sabrina had closed the outside door and locked it and cut the lights to the main office area. There was glass everywhere. The broken glass on the floor in Folston’s office sparkled under the glare of the fluorescents.

  “My name is John Coburn, and I’m trying to locate an old friend. I happen to think that you and I are after the same person.”

  He watched her process and deliberate.

  “My gut tells me you were sent from the Pentagon,” Coburn said.

  “Whatever happened here has nothing to do with me.”

  “For a pretty little thing you sure know how to use a gun.”

  “Everyone could use a little self-defense training. The world would be a safer place, don’t you think?”

  Coburn planted a heavy foot in the middle of her back and grabbed a handfull of hair and lifted her head off the floor. Her face twisted in pain. Coburn knew he needed to get out of there before the damage to the outer door was noticed and people started asking questions and the police got involved. If they got all tied up in that mess the day would be done.

  He had done a body search and had found her BlackBerry. He scrolled through the recent calls, both in and out, and skimmed her messages. The most recent outgoing email contained a name and a set of coordinates. The name was Armstrong.

  “Who is Armstrong?” he asked.

  “Your guess is as good as mine.”

  He twisted his fist in her hair. Her mouth gaped open and she made pleading sounds.

  “Why did you kill Folston?”

  “That’s one of the rules. Leave no witnesses.”

  Coburn glanced at Sabrina, then back at the small blond woman on the floor.

  “What did Folston tell you?”

  “Everything I needed to know.”

  “You are one of the assassins. You were sent to kill Brian Ripley.”

  “John Coburn,” Eva whispered. “I remember your name from the police report.”

  “You were in New York?”

  Eva did not answer.

  He found Folston’s cell phone and scrolled through its calls and messages. There were several recent texts. The ID’s attached to the texts were obviously code names. Several of the texts were from someone called Jupiter. There were others from someone called Vienna. This recent slew of texts had been received in the last thirty minutes.

  Most of the messages from Jupiter said simply: WHERE ARE YOU? or CALL MY CELL or NEED TO DEAL W/ARMSTRONG. The last said: GOING TO ARMSTRONG.

  The texts from Vienna said: CALL ME or PREPARING TO LEAVE FOR NEW YORK. The last stated: CHANGE OF PLANS/SMITH COMING TO ME.

  Coburn had what he needed.

  Jupiter was Smith, and Vienna was Armstrong. Smith had left New York to meet Armstrong at the coordinates in the email on Eva DuPont’s BlackBerry.

  They brought Eva DuPont’s ankles up behind her and hitched them to the same extension cord, and left her lying in the floor in a perfect row with the bodies of Folston and the secretary. Coburn wiped his prints off the gun and wedged it down the back of Eva’s pants. Then he dialed 911 on Folston’s desk phone and told them there had been a shooting. He dropped the phone and left it hanging by its cord.

  Coburn followed Sabrina through the broken glass and out the door.

  92

  Traffic was dense and sluggish until they got out of Manhattan. The black Tahoe was stuck behind a Greyhound bus for several miles, eating its exhaust fumes. Smith
and his men rode in silence.

  Caspian listened to the sounds of the world around him through the green garbage bag. He had no idea what day it was or how long he had been held captive. He was exhausted and hungry and dehydrated. He was scared. Scared because the clock was ticking down and his options were limited. Sooner or later his time would run out.

  They had him belted into the second row seat between two of Smith’s men. There was a zip tie around his wrists and his hands were in his lap. He listened to the hum of the road beneath the Tahoe.

  “Please take this bag off. I can’t breathe.” His voice was hoarse. His throat was raw. He needed water.

  “Soon enough,” Smith said.

  “Please, I need air.”

  “No.”

  “Just five minutes. I’m begging you.”

  Smith glanced over his shoulder and frowned. He didn’t see the harm. Letting Caspian have some air for a few minutes while they were on the highway wouldn’t hurt anything. He nodded at Miller who pulled the bag up and off Caspian’s head and stuffed it on the floor at his feet.

  Caspian squinted against the light and sucked in a long, deep lungful of air. He saw the road ahead and the dull gray urban landscape passing outside the windows on either side. His eyes stayed forward. His body language didn’t change. The driver kept his eyes on him in the mirror. Smith checked on him every few minutes, like there was a chance he might have magically evaporated and left behind an empty seat.

  From the moment they had loaded him into the Tahoe, Caspian had been busy. His movements had been limited and he’d had to be subtle, but he’d done more than simply sit and wait. He was seated on the junction of the two seat cushions that made up the second row seat. The seam was directly between his legs. Slowly and patiently he had dipped his fingers between his legs and between the seat cushions and fished around. The Tahoe was mostly clean, but things still fell and got trapped. Coins, trash, crumbs. Things.