by Black, Sean
There was a moment of stunned silence, then the screams began again, but where exactly they were coming from was anyone’s guess.
Through the smoke, what was left of the Secret Service detail poured towards The Beast, fanning out to surround it, while others worked to prise open the doors that lay air side up.
Lock got to his feet, the muscles in his legs shaking as he tucked the Glock into the waistband of his trousers.
Ty suddenly appeared through the murk. Lock was as surprised as he guessed Ty was to see him out of custody, but there was no time to dwell on that now. Already the limp body of a child was being lifted carefully from the wreckage of The Beast.
68
As Lock stared at the scene before him, through the fog emerged the President and the First Lady, their arms around each other and their eldest daughter. Lock put a hand on the cruiser to steady himself, wiped the dust from his mouth and took a big gulp of fresh air. They were safe.
Ty clamped a hand on his shoulder. ‘Good shooting, brother.’
Lock glanced round. ‘Thanks.’
They stayed there for a few more minutes, until they heard the first Emergency Medical Service ambulances approaching.
Lock straightened up. ‘Let’s go see if we can find her.’
Together, they roamed the streets for close to an hour. There was no sign of Chance, and the shocked state of most people didn’t help matters.
Rounding the corner on to California Street, Lock caught sight of Carrie reporting live to camera. He waited for her to finish, admiring her quiet composure in the middle of all the chaos.
She threw her arms round his neck when she saw him. ‘You OK?’
‘Yeah, but one of ’em got away.’
‘Jesus, Ryan, will you switch off for two seconds? That’s not what I asked you.’
‘I’ll switch off when she’s found. I had her right in my sights too. I just couldn’t pull the trigger.’
‘Because she was a woman?’
Lock looked straight into Carrie’s eyes. ‘Because she was pregnant. I was aiming dead centre.’
Carrie smoothed her hands across his face, and kissed him softly on the lips. ‘You did the right thing.’
‘But if I’d taken the shot everyone inside the car would have been OK. Have you had any word on how they are yet?’
‘Shaken up real bad, but OK. No word yet on the daughter.’ She hesitated. ‘We’ve also had a report of a multiple homicide over in Oakland. Mom, Dad, two kids. All with their throats cut. Think that had anything to do with Reaper and his daughter?’
‘Sounds like their work.’ Lock took a deep breath and turned towards Ty. ‘Let’s keep looking.’
As he leaned in to kiss Carrie, he swayed, his legs almost folding beneath him. Carrie and Ty caught him between them.
‘I’m fine,’ he said, brushing off their help.
Carrie pointed behind them where an EMS ambulance was parked, the two-man crew taking a brief water break.
‘I got it,’ said Ty, jogging towards them.
‘You need to take care of yourself, Ryan,’ Carrie said. ‘Please, for my sake?’
‘OK,’ Lock said, sighing. ‘But if they give me the all-clear we keep looking for Chance. We’re not safe yet.’
One of the paramedics headed back over with Ty. ‘Sit down on the kerb for me, sir.’
Lock sat, his head in his hands. He was dog-tired.
The paramedic began to run through the usual checks.
‘We’re looking for someone who got lost in the crowd,’ Lock said.
‘Open your eyes for me,’ said the paramedic, checking out Lock’s pupil dilation.
‘White woman. Mid twenties. Blonde hair. She was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt, sneakers. They were white as well.’
‘Could you look up for me?’ the paramedic said.
‘And she was pregnant. Maybe, I dunno, about four months. Not huge, but enough of a bump to be noticeable.’
‘Couple of tattoos? Kind of messed-up ones?’
Lock made eye contact. ‘Yeah. Where’d you see her?’
‘See her? We just dropped her off at St Francis. She said she was having a miscarriage. I tried to take a look at her, but she freaked out. I think she might have just been in shock. But better safe than sorry with someone in that condition, right?’
Elbowing the paramedic aside, Lock jumped to his feet. Carrie was standing by the mini-van, Ty at her side. Exhaustion forgotten, he ran over to them. ‘Quick, where’d they take the President and his family?’
Carrie thought for a moment. ‘St Francis. Why?’
‘Because we have to get over there – now!’
69
The hospital was chaotic. Cops, doctors, nurses and the walking wounded from the blast filled the waiting area. Chance had been handed a stack of forms then left to her own devices. No one gave her a second look.
She flagged down a passing nurse. ‘Is there a ladies’ room?’
‘Down there, honey,’ the nurse said, gesturing further down a corridor that led towards the treatment rooms.
Chance had dumped her backpack back at the scene. All she had now were the clothes she was standing in, and her knife. But that was hidden. Which was why she’d freaked out when the paramedic had tried to examine her.
She slipped into the relative cool of the ladies’ room and locked herself in one of the stalls. With the knife retrieved, she walked back out, using the pretext of getting cleaned up to wait at the sinks without arousing suspicion.
She didn’t have long to wait for what she needed. A harassed-looking resident ran towards a stall, firing a ‘Can’t even get the time to have a pee in this place’ before stepping inside.
With three quick steps, Chance was at the stall door before the woman could lock it.
‘What the—’
Chance pushed her back and held the knife to her throat. ‘One more word and you die. Nod if you understand me. Now, get undressed.’
The resident stripped out of her scrubs. Chance took off her own jeans and T-shirt and donned the scrubs. Then she slashed a strip from the jeans, and did the same with the T-shirt. She jammed a piece of T-shirt into the resident’s mouth and tied the young woman’s hands behind her back with the denim strip.
‘OK, turn round.’
The resident banged her shins against the toilet bowl as she did so, her cry of pain and then her screams muffled as Chance reached round and slashed her throat, making sure to slice the carotid artery.
One good thing about what she was wearing, Chance thought as she left the ladies’ room: no one was going to notice a little blood.
70
St Francis Hospital was four blocks away and the roads were crammed with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Lock and Ty ran, as best they could, towards it, as Carrie tried to get word to the hospital – a task complicated by the fact that the cell phone network was seriously overloaded, as was the hospital’s switchboard.
There was no sign of the civil unrest or the race war Reaper had been aiming for. From what Carrie had gleaned, the country was still in shock. But, so far at least, people were being drawn together by their collective fear rather than divided by it. Lock, however, knew that this might not hold if Chance got to finish her mission.
He was forced to stop to catch his breath, hands on knees. He could see the entrance to the hospital up ahead.
‘We’re gonna have to clear people out of the way,’ he told Ty. ‘If she’s in there and about to make a move, she’s going to be relying on hiding in the crowd.’
‘OK, I’ll see you up there,’ said Ty, moving off, his long legs carrying him faster than Lock could manage.
Lock straightened up and broke into a semi-run, pushing himself through the pain. He turned left on to Pine Street, the doors of the emergency room in plain view.
It was chaos, far beyond a normal big-city emergency room. Triage had spilled out on to the sidewalk. Lock managed to walk straight in, past Ty, who was engaged in
a heated argument with a couple of security guards. In the main foyer he spotted a couple of Secret Service agents having a vehement discussion of their own with a guy in a suit and a St Francis Hospital badge that identified him as some sort of manager.
‘We need this whole front area clear,’ they were yelling. ‘The President’s going to make a statement.’
‘Then book a goddamn hotel,’ the manager yelled back. ‘This is a hospital.’
Lock left them to it, walking on, up a long corridor with rooms off it. Ten doors ahead he saw a phalanx of Secret Service personnel, some in suits, some in T-shirts or windbreakers. He jogged towards them.
Chance stood in a private room, her back pressed against the door. The patient occupying the room was too far gone to offer any resistance. Rather than stab him, she had cut his oxygen line and let nature take its course.
Further down the corridor was where she guessed the President was holding vigil with his family. There were too many people there, so she’d waited. There was chatter about a press conference out front – she had heard a couple of yuppie types talking about it just before she elected to duck in here. All she had to do now was bide her time.
The President held his youngest daughter’s hand, watched her heart monitor and prayed. Right here, right now, the weight of parenthood was making him feel like the most impotent man in the world rather than the most powerful.
The door opened. A staffer tiptoed in and bent down next to him. ‘Sir, they’re ready for you out front.’
He nodded and got to his feet. ‘Give me a second here, Rob. Then I’ll be right out.’
‘Yes, Mr President.’
He bent down and softly kissed his daughter’s forehead. ‘I’ll be right back, sweetheart. OK? And I still haven’t forgotten about that sundae I owe you and your sister.’
He straightened up, sliding on his game-face at the same time as the door opened again and the head of his personal escort section walked in.
‘Sir, we’ve had a change of plan. The woman involved in the attack – we have credible evidence that she’s inside the hospital.’
The President blanched. ‘Ashley can’t be moved.’
‘I understand that. We want you and the family to stay exactly where you are.’
‘And where is the woman who tried to kill us?’
‘We’re trying to locate her right now.’
Lock nudged Ty’s elbow. ‘Come on, you have to get dressed.’
Ty broke off from his argument with the hospital security guards. ‘What you talking about?’
Lock was joined by one of the Secret Service agents. ‘Come with us.’
The agent led Lock and Ty back out of the front entrance and around the side of the building. A fire exit door opened and a suited Secret Service agent ushered them inside. They were led down another short stretch of corridor and into a side room.
A woman handed Ty a suit carrier, brushing off some dust from the vinyl covering. ‘Here, put this on. The quicker we get this done, the quicker the President can address the nation.’
Someone else flung Ty a lightweight vest. ‘You’ll want this on under the shirt.’
‘Someone mind telling me what the hell’s going on?’ Ty protested.
‘Remember how everyone thought we were nuts trying to stop someone killing Reaper?’ Lock asked him, stripping off himself.
‘Uh-huh.’
‘We’re about to prove to them that they were right. We really are nuts.’
71
The door at the far end of the corridor opened and the President strode out, four Secret Service agents immediately falling into a diamond formation around him. His head was bowed in thought as he studied his speech. Six steps further along, where the corridor widened another foot, four more suited agents fell into step, filling the gaps in the diamond so that the President was almost completely obscured.
Lock, who was now sporting a suit similar to the other members of the personal escort section, took the rear point of the diamond, which gave him the best eyes-on in the narrow corridor.
He’d never had much time for the Secret Service before, disliking their whole frat-boy, shade-wearing, talking-into-their-sleeve shtick. But he had to hand it to them, when it came to walking drills they had their shit down cold.
Up ahead, a man on a gurney was being propelled towards them by a three-person medical team. The man had an oxygen mask over his mouth and his chest was shredded with shrapnel wounds. They shifted as far as they could to try and let him pass before the President raised his hand, signaling for them to stop.
‘Wait. I want to see how this guy’s doing.’
‘I think you can see how he’s doing, sir,’ Lock snapped from the back. ‘What we really need to do is keep moving.’
Yeah, he definitely wasn’t cut out for the Secret Service, Lock thought.
The President did as he was told and the medical team squeezed the wounded man past them on their right as a door on the left-hand side of the corridor opened and a woman in bloodstained medical scrubs stepped out parallel to the front member of the President’s personal escort. She had a mask pulled over her face but seemed startled because she flattened herself against the closed door to allow them past with a deferential ‘Excuse me.’
As she straightened out against the door, Lock saw the hard swell of her belly. This time there was no hesitation.
‘Threat left!’ he screamed.
As the personal escort pivoted round and the President was propelled out of the way, Chance made her move. The knife, which had been down by her side, came up in a slashing arc, cutting the throat of the agent closest to her.
From the corner of his eye, Lock saw a flash of hand as the next closest agent reached for his weapon. A gun might be handy in a knife fight, but only if you had some distance, and not when you were dealing in fractions of a second.
Lock threw himself forward at Chance as she lunged past the stricken agent and sprang towards the President, her knife held in a hammer grip. Rather than move, though, the President shrugged off his designated bodyguard and, stepping back, bent low, so that the arc of the knife caught air rather than flesh.
As Chance fell, the President punched back his elbow, catching her in the throat – hard. The knife tumbled from her hand and there was a scramble to retrieve it. Lock caught her feet, his arms wrapping her ankles as she kicked back, catching him in the face.
The President followed Chance and Lock to the floor. She landed on her face, the President on her back. The President grabbed for her wrist, levering it up, bringing her arm with it, twisting the joint and breaking it with an audible snap.
Chance gasped with pain. Her eyes closed. When she opened them, she found herself staring up at Tyrone.
‘What’s the matter?’ Ty asked her, his teeth bared, his eyes narrow with fury. ‘We all look alike to you people?’
72
‘Wait, I want to see how this guy’s doing,’ Lock said, parodying Ty’s only line as President.
‘Hey, I got into the role a little too much. Sue me.’
Treble-cuffed, Chance was being loaded into the back of a patrol car at the rear of the hospital, having been checked over by the medical staff to make sure that both she and her unborn baby were fine. The knife was already gone for forensic examination, but it looked eerily like the one that had been used on Ken Prager.
Lock hadn’t stopped to count the total dead, but with the family over in Oakland and bombings added in, it was well into double figures. Even if Reaper hadn’t achieved what he’d set out to, a lot of people had been sacrificed to his unholy war.
A voice from behind them: ‘Mr Johnson, Mr Lock.’
They turned to see the President. He had a cigarette in one hand. He took a puff, waved it in the air at them. ‘I think I’m allowed, just this once,’ he said. He switched the cigarette to his left hand and extended his right hand to each of them in turn. ‘Thank you. Both.’
Lock shook his hand first. In his l
ine of work he was used to encountering celebrities, but this was a little different. This President had a movie-star halo with none of the accompanying ego.
‘How’s your family?’
The President closed his eyes for the briefest of moments, and Lock got a rare glimpse of a man who already had the weight of the world’s problems on his shoulders. ‘My wife and our eldest are both fine, and the doctor’s just told me that Ashley’s off the critical list and she’s going to be fine.’
‘That’s great news, sir,’ Lock said.
‘Gentlemen, thanks again.’
And then he was gone, his regular security detail falling in behind as he walked back into the hospital to resume his private vigil over his daughter.
A small phalanx of FBI agents was making its way across the parking lot towards Lock and Ty. This is going to be one hell of a debrief, thought Lock as they closed in.
The agent in front put out his hand. ‘FBI Agent Breedlove. We’d like to talk to you.’
‘And I’d like to talk to you,’ Lock said. ‘But I haven’t slept in a hundred years, so it’s going to have to wait.’
‘This can’t wait,’ said Breedlove, lifting his sunglasses, as if somehow this gesture conveyed the gravity of the situation.
Lock looked at him. ‘You can either arrest me or you can wait. If you arrest me, I won’t be cooperating. If you let me get some sleep, you can have everything my scrambled brain contains.’
Breedlove hesitated. His cell phone sounded – a James Bond ring tone.
‘Hey, 007, you want to get that?’ Lock said.
Breedlove killed the call, then turned to his colleagues. ‘We’ll speak to him in the morning,’ he said, trying to make it sound like it was his idea.
In truth, Lock was bone-tired, but he needed time to himself to order what had happened in his own mind. Even with Reaper dead, Chance in custody and the President safe, something was still bothering him. He understood Chance’s desire to see her father free. He got that Reaper would have used giving testimony as a way of allowing himself an opportunity to escape. He even got how Reaper saw liberty as a way of fulfilling his sick fantasy of sparking a race war. But there was something else, a piece of the jigsaw that hadn’t yet slotted into place.
