Target

by Cindy Dees

  A few minutes later, she pulled into a parking lot and climbed out of her car. She pulled the collar of her leather coat up around her ears. The Capitol had been in the grip of an arctic cold spell for a couple of days, and the deep freeze wasn’t showing any signs of letting up today, either.

  She hurried into the brown brick, three-story building and was immediately confronted by a glass security wall. She signed a stack of forms and affidavits, submitted to a body search by a female guard, was metal detected, x-rayed and thoroughly scrutinized before she was allowed to pass through the glass partition. Then there was a delay while it was determined whether or not the prisoner in question was awake yet. Frankly, she didn’t care if it was a violation of Richard Dunst’s civil rights to disturb his beauty rest or not. She needed to talk to the guy. Now. Eventually, a combination of sheer insistence and winning charm got her the final signature she needed to interview Dunst, awake or otherwise.

  She carried her documents to a second, double-doored security area watched by guards sitting behind bulletproof glass. One guard buzzed her through while the second guard met her on the far side and walked her down a hallway as sterile as a hospital. The floor was linoleum, the lights bright and fluorescent behind steel mesh covers. Gray steel doors flanked her on either side, pockmarked with heavy, shiny steel rivets.

  The guard stopped in front of one such unmarked door and punched a lengthy sequence into the number pad beside it. A green diode lit on the pad’s face. Putting his weight into it, the guard pulled on the door. It slid open ponderously, its soundproof rubber stripping rubbing on the floor. She stepped into the dim room and blinked in surprise as the guard flipped on the lights. The walls were blindingly pink, an intense peppermint shade that assaulted the eye.

  “What’s with the wall color?” she asked the guard.

  “The shrinks-from-on-high say that Pepto-Bismol pink calms down prisoners. Makes ’em less likely to be violent.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Too busy puking to fight with each other?”

  The guard grinned, then said more seriously, “I’ll bring the prisoner to you here.” He pointed at the pair of surveillance cameras in opposite corners of the small room. “We’ll monitor the meeting with the audio feed turned off like you asked for. Dunst knows the rules. If his hands disappear from plain sight at any time, or he makes any move that might be construed as aggressive or threatening toward you, a guard will step in immediately. If you want a guard to come in, just look up at one of the cameras and nod. You sure you want to be left alone with this guy?”

  “Yes,” she answered firmly. She needed Dunst to feel as though he could talk freely. Off the record.

  The guard shrugged. “Don’t offer the prisoner any item whatsoever, not even a pen or a paperclip. This guy’s a trained killer. Got it?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay then. I think they’ve already got Dunst out and are searching him. I’ll be back with him in a couple of minutes.”

  The heavy door swung shut behind the guard as he left her alone in the vaultlike interview room. She tried to imagine living boxed up in a place like this for the rest of her life. And shuddered. She’d go crazy, pink walls or not.

  She’d been sitting at the steel table for about three minutes when, without warning, the room plunged into darkness. Inky, cavelike blackness without a hint of light. She waited several seconds for the backup power to kick in, but nothing happened. The room stayed dark. What was going on? The blackness and the walls pressed in on her, heavier and heavier, until she thought she was going to suffocate. She had to get out of here.

  She felt her way around the table and stretched an arm out, groping for the door. A step into the void. And another. And then her hand encountered cold metal. With both hands, she felt for the door handle. Please God, let her not be locked in here. They’d told her they would lock her in here with Dunst once he arrived. She found the latch and pushed down on the thumb lever. Putting her weight into it, she leaned on the door. It moved. Thank God. It slid open to reveal another void of total darkness. Jeez. Didn’t they have any emergency generators or something in this place? Using the wall as a guide, she turned to her right and began to make her way down the hall toward the exit.

  Something brushed against her in the dark. And instantly, a powerful blow slammed into her collarbones. A human arm contracted, snakelike, whipping around her neck and yanking her off balance. Scared out of her skin, she screamed as loud as she could. The piercing noise echoed weirdly, amplified to an almost inhuman pitch by the long hallway. A sweaty hand slapped over her mouth, cutting off the sound. It yanked her down violently. She crouched awkwardly, still wrapped in the man’s powerful grip.

  A voice snarled in her ear in a bare whisper, “Shut up if you don’t want the bastard to kill you.”

  No sooner had the words left her assailant’s mouth than a deafening explosion cracked. The hard body against hers lurched spasmodically and the arm around her neck went slack. The guy toppled over, knocking her to the floor with him.

  “Shit. Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit,” the man now sprawled half on top of her chanted under his breath. “Can you shoot, lady?” he ground out.

  “Yeah,” she gasped under his crushing weight.

  “I dropped my pistol. I think it fell against the far wall. Find it, will you, so the prisoner doesn’t grab it.”

  Prisoner. This was one of the guards. And someone must be trying to break out of the jail. She wiggled out from under him, which was no small feat. Crawling on her hands and knees and feeling around on the floor in the dark, her hands encountered something slippery and wet. A metallic smell announced that it was blood. She jerked her hands away. Who’d shot the guard beside her? And where was that blasted gun? On this highly waxed linoleum, the darn thing could’ve slid halfway down the hall.

  And then she heard a rhythmic noise above the rasping breaths of the wounded guard. Slapping. Like feet hitting the floor. Running. Toward her from the direction of the cell block. In this dark, it was impossible to tell if it was another guard charging to the rescue or the prisoner making a break for it.

  She froze, crouched by the wall, straining to gauge the running person’s distance from her. To tackle or not to tackle. That was the question. A door opened at the far end of the hall and a sliver of light spilled into the narrow space. Several voices shouted. They echoed so loudly she couldn’t understand a word. But they sounded furious.

  Another shot rang out from the direction of the running man, and the door slammed shut once more, plunging the hall back into blackness, made all the thicker by the brief exposure of her eyes to light.

  Acting purely on instinct, she reached out as the running footsteps approached. Something hard cracked into her forearm. Felt like a shin. A grunt and a thud. She dived for the guy, but he threw her off violently. She grabbed again, coming up with nothing more than a fistful of hair as he jerked away from her grasp. She wrapped her arms around whatever she could grab. Felt like an ankle. What must have been a fist connected with her left ear. She lost her grip on the guy’s leg, and heard him scramble off in the dark. Where were the damned emergency lights?

  She couldn’t go anywhere for now, so she crawled back to the injured guard. Maybe she could help him, at any rate.

  “Where are you hit?” she whispered.

  Nothing. The guy must’ve passed out. Not good. She prayed it was pain that had knocked the guy out and not blood loss. His breathing sounded terrible. He was shot in the chest cavity, then. She felt around on his upper body, following the wetness on his shirt to a small, round wound under his left arm. Lucky shot. It had just missed his bulletproof vest and hit him in the armpit. She couldn’t tell the angle of entry in the dark to take a guess at the damage he’d suffered. Based on the sucking noises coming from him, his left lung was collapsed at a minimum.

  She jumped as a barrage of shots exploded from the direction the prisoner’d just gone. Hopefully, the guards had just killed the jerk.
>
  Meanwhile, the guy beside her sounded bad. It was damned hard to render first aid by feel without any supplies or equipment whatsoever. For lack of anything more to do in the inky dark, she put her hand over the hole and applied pressure to it. The sucking noise abated some.

  It seemed to take forever, but the overhead lights finally flickered back on. Oh, God. There was blood everywhere. Her guard was breathing but unconscious, his face deathly pale. Probably a combination of blood loss and shock. She shouted for a medic and prayed someone heard her in the chaos that erupted as the doors opened and a SWAT team burst into the hall.

  “I’m Army,” she cried out. “This guard’s been shot. Someone ran past me that way in the dark.” She gestured with her head.

  An EMT took over care of the guard’s chest wound while another guard helped her to her feet.

  It seemed unfair somehow that she ended up being escorted into a room and interrogated herself. A crime-scene investigator examined her hands under a magnifying glass and picked tiny fibers off her palm with tweezers.

  “As I suspected,” the guy announced after examining the fibers closely.

  “What?” Diana asked.

  “A wig. This is fake hair. Won’t get any DNA from it.”

  Nonetheless, the guy took away the bits of hair she’d grabbed for analysis. Finally, after she’d given the same statement to no less than four different people, a man in an expensive suit stepped into the room. Not a beat cop in threads like that.

  “Captain Lockworth, I’m Agent Flaherty. Thank you for answering our questions so patiently. How are you doing?”

  She noticed he didn’t say who he was an agent of. Fine. She could play that game, too. “I’m all right. Ready for a few answers of my own.”

  He perched a hip on the corner of the room’s lone table and smiled pleasantly. “Fire away.”

  “Who raced by me in the dark?”

  “A prisoner trying to escape. Name’s Roscoe Dupree.”

  The guy watched her intently as he said the name. As if it was supposed to mean something to her. In fact, it did tickle at the edge of her memory. She’d heard that name somewhere before. “Did he get away?” she asked curiously.

  “Unfortunately, yes. But I have every confidence we’ll pick him up soon. And what did you say brought you here today?”

  Her mind snapped back to business. “I’m here to speak to Richard Dunst. It’s a matter of great urgency. While I realize you’ve just had an escape and things are crazy around here, I still really need to speak to him.”

  “That would be difficult, Captain. Roscoe Dupree is Richard Dunst.”

  Memory flooded her. Of course. Roscoe Dupree was yet another name for the man known as Dunst. He’d used the Dupree identity in Berzhaan when he’d dealt with a Berzhaani rebel group that was trying to overthrow the government there. He’d worked under the Dunst name when he obtained a bomb and gave it to the Q-group to use to kill Gabe Monihan in Chicago. And he’d escaped? Today of all days? Could Dunst, a trained killer, be involved in the plan to assassinate the next President of the United States on this, his inauguration day? Surely that was no coincidence. Not good. Not good at all.

  “What can you tell me about how he escaped?” she asked the agent urgently.

  Flaherty shrugged. “We don’t know for sure.”

  She took a calming breath. No sense making this guy any more suspicious than he already was. “I’d like to hear your best guess,” she asked quietly. “It’s important. National security important.”

  He looked her in the eye and she held his gaze for a long moment. She saw him weighing her words. Weighing her. This guy smelled like FBI all the way. And clearly, he didn’t trust her completely. But she saw with relief the instant when he decided for reasons of his own to answer her question. Frankly, she didn’t care what game he was playing as long as she got what she needed.

  “Dupree-Dunst-got a knife and a disguise-presumably to wear once he got out of here-from somewhere. Overpowered a guard in the hallway while en route to the interview with you. Took the guard’s gun and ran down this hallway, briefly impeded by you.”

  “How’d the power go out? Doesn’t this place have emergency power of some sort?”

  Flaherty’s jaw rippled. “We don’t know yet how both the primary and backup power systems went down.”

  “How did Dunst get out the door? Surely it fails to a locked mode in a facility like this.”

  An outright clench tensed Flaherty’s jaw this time. He gritted out, “The lockdown mode on the exit Dunst used never engaged properly. He ran up, pulled the damn door open and shot his way out.”

  “How’d he egress the area? Surely you’d have caught him by now if he were on foot. How did a getaway car get through the front gate?”

  “Good question. We’ve got film but the license plate was intentionally obscured.”

  Just like the car the guy who broke into her house used. She asked sharply, “Did they use a black plastic garbage bag over the plate? Drive a late model silver sedan? Four doors? Foreign make?”

  The guy lurched to his feet. Paced a lap of the tiny space and came back to the table, planting his palms on it and leaning toward her aggressively. “And just how in the hell did you know that? Are you working with Dunst? It’s pretty damned convenient that you showed up at this ungodly hour, insisting that Dunst be dragged out of his cell and brought out here.”

  She reared back in shock. “I am not working with Richard Dunst! I’m here because I believe he’s involved in a conspiracy to kill Gabe Monihan. I want to nail this bastard!”

  Flaherty stared at her in silence. She knew the technique. Guilt makes people babble to fill the silence. She used the moment to think hard. Flaherty was right about one thing. Dunst must have had inside help to slip him the weapon. He also needed technologically advanced help from outside to hack into the building’s electrical system. How else would both systems have failed at once? This building was undoubtedly hooked into the DOD power grid, which was hardened against all manner of attacks from without. It was a favorite target of hackers, and a damned hard one to get into.

  Inside help. High-level hacking. Getaway car in place. Prison locks tampered with. And the whole thing precisely timed and executed. Not the work of a few radical yahoos. Somebody smart, powerful and knowledgeable planned and executed Dunst’s escape. She seriously needed to run all this through Oracle’s analysis program.

  Flaherty’s cell phone rang, and he listened briefly before pocketing it again. “The getaway car was just found. It was abandoned down by the river. Apparently our man got away by boat.”

  Damn. Dunst was free. She looked up at the agent. “Am I free to go, now? This escape just increased my workload for today dramatically.”

  “Not a chance, lady.”

  She winced. Time was the one thing she couldn’t spare right now. But she also couldn’t afford to get combative with this guy if she wanted to get out of here anytime soon.

  He fired a question at her aggressively. “How long have you been working for the Q-group?”

  She lurched. “Q-group? Me? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “Answer the question,” he snapped.

  How was she supposed to respond to an absurd accusation like that? It was a Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife-yet sort of question. “I do not work for the Q-group,” she stated emphatically.

  “Then why is your e-mail address plastered all over the Q-group chat room?”

  She stared in undisguised shock. Who was this guy? How in the world did he even know what her e-mail address was, let alone that she’d been visiting Q-group hangouts online? And how was it that he was here, now, at an obscure prisoner facility, questioning her? Alarm bells clanged wildly in her gut.

  Flaherty commented smoothly, “Army pay doesn’t go too far in an expensive town like this, does it? A nice car, a nice house, nice clothes-” he eyed her sleek suede pants pointedly “-they all cost big bucks. How does a girl like you do
it?”

  He was accusing her of going over to the enemy for money? Betraying her country in the name of designer fashion? She answered the guy’s slimy innuendo through gritted teeth. “I have a trust fund. A big, fat one from my grandfather.”

  The agent crossed his arms. “Ah, yes. Joseph Lockworth. Former director of the CIA. Pretty handy to be related to someone like that who can hide the family skeletons.”

  A memory surged forward in her brain, unbidden.

  Crouching at the top of the stairs in her flannel nightgown, clutching Lammy, her precious stuffed lamb. She’d hauled that poor toy with her everywhere in those first days after The Incident.

  Something bad had happened to Mommy. One day she was her laughing, smiling, soft-smelling self and gave the best hugs in the world. And the next day, she got all sad and had a funny look in her eyes all the time. And stopped hugging.

  Men in suits kept coming to the door. Daddy tried at first to make them go away, but they never did. They yelled at Mommy sometimes and asked her questions that made her cry. One time, Gramps came over and yelled at Mommy, but he stopped after a while. He said he supposed every family had a skeleton in the closet. He said he’d do his best to cover up this one.

  For weeks after that, she’d been terrified of closets. She kept expecting a dead, bony body to jump out of one at her. Her big sister, Josie, was terribly brave and didn’t mind opening closet doors, which was the only way she ever got clean clothes to wear. Daddy was too sad to notice whether or not she wore the same thing to school three days in a row.

  “How much is Q-group paying you?” Flaherty barked.

  She enunciated each word clearly. “I…do…not…work…for…Q-group. I work for Army Intelligence and I’m trying to apprehend those bastards. Now, are you going to charge me with something or may I get out of here and go try to track down the killer you just let escape before he kills someone?”