by Rachel Caine
"Okay."
Jazz grabbed her by the hand. "L. Don't disappoint me and get killed, okay?"
Lucia, for answer, pulled her into a quick hug, kissed her on the cheek and said, "Go."
Then she grabbed the backpack, shouldered it and watched Jazz head for the fire alarm. She pulled it casually and kept walking.
Alarms and overhead strobes erupted. A computerized voice came on the intercoms, over groans and shouts, and instructed everyone to head for their designated evacuation routes. Lucia stayed where she was, fiddling with her backpack, as people passed her cube. When she didn't hear any more footsteps, she ducked out and down the hall.
The server room doors, labeled with warnings for halon gas systems, plus Restricted Access, Security Area signs, were unlocked. Heart pounding, she stepped inside, blinked at the huge array of servers. Ranks of boxes; blinking red and green lights. The air was cool and dry, the floor a raised, nonstatic surface, springy under her feet.
She spotted a surveillance camera in the corner. They'd have seen her by now. She had very little time.
She slipped the backpack off her shoulder.
During the endless drive, when McCarthy had been at the wheel, she'd unpacked the EMP generator. It came in two pieces—the guts of the unit and a huge, heavy battery. She knelt and took the two parts, mated them together with a snap and flipped the toggle switch.
Lights came on.
"Gregory, if you've screwed me, I swear to God…"
She reached for the activate button, and froze when something cold touched the back of her head.
"This," a male voice said, "is the barrel of a Beretta, and you're going to want to take your hand off the bomb."
Fear and fury raced through her, powerful enough to make her sway, but she slowly raised both hands in the air.
"On both knees," he said, and kicked at her right foot, which was still on the ground. She shifted and obeyed. "Hands behind your head."
The voice sounded familiar, but congested, as if the speaker had a bad cold. She wanted to turn around, but the gun pressed to her head convinced her that curiosity was a bad idea.
"You expecting McCarthy to charge up here to the rescue? That son of a bitch is in custody downstairs. So's your friend Jazz. So you just be a good girl and take these—" a gleaming pair of steel handcuffs jangled in front of her face " — and put them on your right wrist first."
She knew the voice now; she'd finally placed it. Detective Stewart. He really didn't sound well. "You don't have jurisdiction here."
"This has jurisdiction pretty much anywhere, bitch." He pressed with the gun barrel, hard enough to bruise. She winced and involuntarily moved her head forward; the gun followed. She took the handcuffs and snapped one on her right wrist, then—unasked—put her wrists behind her. He snapped them shut. "Ready?" a voice called from the doorway.
"Yeah, she's restrained. Come on in."
The gun finally withdrew, letting her breathe a little, and she couldn't resist twisting to look over her shoulder as the door opened.
Ken Stewart looked terrible—really terrible. His pallor had taken on a corpselike appearance, and his breathing seemed labored. His eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed. He stepped back, giving the newcomers a respectful distance. There were three of them, all with executive polish. The one in front was middle-aged, with dark hair and dark eyes and a foxlike face that looked clever and cold. A slight asymmetry to his face made the right eye look smaller.
He was rich, well-groomed, with an aura of absolute power.
"You're Lucia Garza," he said, and stepped forward. "Stand up. Turn around."
"Careful," Stewart said. "I said she was restrained, not safe."
The man nodded. Lucia got up and turned to face them. "I don't think we've been introduced," she said.
"Not formally, no, but I've been screwing with your life for quite some time now," the man said coolly. "My name is Gil Kavanaugh. I run Eidolon Corporation."
The man—no, the psychic—Simms had handpicked as his successor. The man who was the brains behind this side of the chess game, as Simms was behind the Cross Society. He seemed young for it, but she supposed that monomania was possible at any age.
He looked her in the eyes and said, "I'm not responsible for what was done to you. That was the Cross Society, playing God. If I'd had my way, Ben McCarthy would never have lived to get out of prison, and you wouldn't have ended up on a table with your legs apart, getting raped by doctors. Have they told you why it was so important?"
She felt a cold wave wash over her, and then hot prickles, as if her whole body had experienced numbness and rebirth. Her mind felt extraordinarily clear. "You saw the pictures."
He smiled. "I see everything." He tapped his forehead. "I'm tuned to your channel, you see. Yours, your friends'— at the moment, you really do matter quite a lot. Pity about McCarthy, though. You never should have fallen in love with him. I warned you it would be a mistake—all right, I was somewhat oblique about it, but you're a bright woman. I admit, I didn't expect McCarthy to hold out like he did—
I mean, what straight man just out of prison would? Look at you. Simms must have been pissed, after all the trouble he went to." Kavanaugh tilted his head slightly. "Are you sure you don't want to know about the child?"
The fire alarms cut out suddenly, leaving a taut silence and a continuing ringing in her ears.
"Last chance," he said. "It's a limited time offer."
"No," she said. "I don't want to know what you see."
Kavanaugh sighed and shook his head. "Right," he said. "Let's get her upstairs—"
It was all falling apart. He wouldn't balk at putting bullets in their heads and burying them out in the desert. And she loathed that salacious gleam in his eyes when he'd talked about the pictures. About being in her head.
She avoided Stewart's grabbing hand, let her knees collapse, and fell sideways. Her elbow smacked down hard on the EMP device, on the green button.
"No!" Kavanaugh screamed, but it was too late. There wasn't a buildup and there wasn't a warning. It fired.
There was a smell of frying circuitry, cracks and pops, and every electronic circuit within a thousand feet went dead.
Including the lights.
Lucia rolled, banged into Stewart and sent him stumbling; he fired blind. By the muzzle flash, she got a snapshot of where everyone was standing, and she kicked both feet up, catching Stewart hard in the groin and lifting him literally off the ground. He hit the wall and screamed in high-pitched agony. She slithered backward in that direction and felt his gun on the floor, grabbed it in her cuffed hands and twisted on her knees.
Another muzzle flash, and something like a sledgehammer struck her in the chest. A hit, low and on the right. The afterimage showed her that the two men with Kavanaugh had their guns out. Kavanaugh, preternaturally quick, was already through the door.
She braced herself for the pain, cocked her elbows, and fired without letting herself think. The recoil slammed up through her arms, hard enough to make her cry out, but she didn't let it stop her. Two shots, directed to the positions where she'd seen the two men. She heard one hit the floor. The other staggered, then went down.
She struggled to her feet, sweating and light-headed. It was unnaturally silent, with not even the air vents working in the room.
She hit the glass doors with her shoulder, praying that the locks hadn't been reset, and saw Kavanaugh rounding the corner up ahead. He'd be getting help, and she was handicapped, gun held behind her back. With Jazz and Ben out of action, she didn't have a hope in hell…
And then Kavanaugh backed up, looking as if he'd seen a ghost.
And maybe he had.
Max Simms came into view. He was armed with what looked like one of Jazz's guns, and in that moment, Lucia wondered if they'd all been taken for a ride by the frail-old-man act, because the expression in his eyes…she'd never seen anything like it. Power. Terrible power.
"Endgame," Simms said. "Y
our move, Gil."
Chapter Seventeen
“You can't be here," Kavanaugh said. He backed up, collided with a padded cubicle wall decorated with crayon drawings and clipped-out Dilbert cartoons. "You can't be here. You're dead."
"Do I look dead?" Simms asked mildly.
"I saw you die."
"What, the vision you saw of your man coming up behind me and putting a bullet in my brain?" Simms smiled. "In some reality that happened. Not this one. You should learn to parse time lines better, Gil."
Kavanaugh glanced desperately around, but he was trapped. Lucia, to his right, had her gun on him; Simms had him from the front. A blank wall to his left. A cubicle wall at his back.
"An endgame," Simms continued, "is nothing but the last moves of a foregone conclusion. You were always going to lose, Gil. It was just a matter of sacrificing enough pawns to draw you out."
"Like her?" Kavanaugh's eyes cut to Lucia. "Two for one, is that it?"
"Oh, they're not my pawns," Sirnms replied. "We may very well be theirs. Didn't you understand that when you failed to keep McCarthy in prison by stealing Jazz's files on the case? Or by trying to have him killed inside? This had to happen. Inevitability at work, and neither you nor I have anything to do with it."
"You're insane," Kavanaugh said flatly.
"You've made a fortune out of the disasters of others," Simms said. "So have I. Maybe that does make us insane. It definitely makes us culpable."
"Then kill me."
Simms smiled. "Now that is inevitable."
Lucia, intent on holding aim in an achingly difficult position behind her back, heard the elevator doors rumble open, and shifted her attention that direction.
Uniformed guards. "Simms!" she yelled, and darted out of the line of fire. Kavanaugh was already moving. When she looked back, Simms was gone, Kavanaugh was heading for safety, and she was on her own. Again.
She dodged through the cube farm, hoping she wouldn't reach a dead end, and somehow found the stairs. She elbowed the handle down and tried to decide which direction would be best. Down was obvious, and that was why she hesitated.
"Lucia!" Jazz's voice echoed in the stairwell. "Get your ass up here!"
She breathed a sigh of relief, wished she could wipe her sweaty hair out of her face, and took the stairs up at a run.
* * *
Jazz and Ben met her on the seventh floor landing, and Jazz had the handcuff keys out. She spun Lucia around and worked the lock, and Lucia, panting, said, "What the hell happened?"
"Complicated," Jazz said briefly.
"Jazz got the handcuff key and Taser out of your purse, opened her cuffs and took out the guards," Ben said.
"Okay, not so complicated." The handcuffs clicked free. "Simms is here."
"Yes. I saw him."
"EMP go off?"
"Their servers are completely dark. If Manny has managed to take down the backups—"
"He will." Jazz looked vivid with the excitement of the chase, green eyes gleaming. "All of them. Cross Society servers, too."
"What?"
"I talked Borden into it," she said. "We tracked the system through Gabriel, Pike & Laskins, and found their server nodes. Manny's working on it. By the time this is over, both sides should be down for the count."
"Except for the psychics."
"Yeah, well. Beyond going on a killing spree—which I'm not in favor of for once—I don't see a way around that."
"Maybe it doesn't matter," Ben said. Lucia pulled out her gun and checked the clip. "Simms said that their psychics are specific in their predictions. Maybe they can still help people. It's when it gets to be a strategy that things go to hell."
"You know what? Not my problem." Jazz looked at each of them in turn. "You good to go?"
"Yes. Where?" Lucia asked.
"Roof. Kavanaugh's got a nifty black helicopter."
They took the stairs at a run.
Kavanaugh was already on board, and the rotors were turning, when they banged through the exit. Lucia's feet slid on gravel as she stopped. Kavanaugh was facing them, and his eyes widened. He said something into a headphone.
"Uh-oh," Jazz said. "That's not good."
Max Simms was in the helicopter, too. Handcuffed.
"Oh, dammit!” Lucia took aim, but the chopper was moving and the shot was risky; with Simms in the aircraft any shot she could make would be potentially lethal. She let her gun fall back to her side.
Simms was watching her with those wide, cold blue eyes. Smiling in that creepy, secretive way. Lucia felt McCarthy's hand on her shoulder, urging her back to the cover of the concrete wall. "Guards could be coming!" he yelled over the chop of the rotors. The helicopter was ten feet up, and rising. "This is done—we can't do anything. Let's go!"
There was a flutter of color on the gravel, something red, half buried under a handful of rocks. Lucia ran for it, grabbed it, and made it back to the safety of the wall as the helicopter gracefully spun in the air, preparing to head out. It exploded.
The concussion hit with a wave of pressure that triggered Lucia to involuntarily cover her head and close her eyes, and then the unbelievably loud roar of the explosion rolled over them.
She forced her eyes open and saw the blackened shell of the helicopter heading back to the roof at terminal velocity.
"Run!" she screamed, and pushed the other two ahead of her.
They made it to the back of the roof just as the wreck crashed in a fireball, sending blazing fragments spinning. Rotors broke loose and pinwheeled wildly. Lucia went flat, taking Ben and Jazz with her, while metal hissed overhead. Some of it embedded itself in the low wall at the edge of the roof, as if a nail bomb had gone off.
She felt heat on her back, then slaps. She was on fire. She rolled and stripped off the blue-and-white-checked shirt. Jazz was slowly getting to her feet, staring at the inferno that was melting the tar around it in into a hissing pool.
"Holy Christ," she said. "Two psychics, and they didn't see that coming?" She holstered her gun and held out a hand to Lucia, but Ben was ahead of her, a strong presence lifting her upright.
He had a long bloody cut on one cheek that would need stitches. Other than that, none of them was harmed.
Lucia tried to get her head together. "We need to retrieve the EMP and get the hell out," she said. "Now."
Jazz nodded. "And how do we do that without running into their guys coming up?"
McCarthy, for answer, unbuttoned his flannel shirt to show the vest underneath. He had his old badge on a chain, and he pulled it out so it showed on top of the black ballistic nylon. "Show your Kevlar," he said. "Get out your guns and follow me."
They hit the stairs, and were two flights down before they heard the sound of running feet headed up. The fire alarms were pulsing again. The building was a kicked ants' nest, people flooding in from every floor, confused and afraid.
"Make way!" McCarthy yelled. "Move right! Move right! FBI! FBI!"
And, miraculously, it worked. In the confusion, nobody had time to question; even uniformed guards pressed to the side as they plunged down another flight, then another and another.
They burst through the stair doors onto the server floor and headed for the room at a dead run. It didn't matter now who saw them; everyone was running, clutching purses and briefcases and laptops. Yelling questions and panicked instructions.
When they opened the server room door, Ken Stewart was standing there, swaying, with the EMP. It was dead, of course. But it was physical proof of what had just happened, and it had Lucia's fingerprints on it.
Their guns leveled on him. "Drop it," McCarthy said. "I mean it, Ken.”
"You're going to jail." He looked feverish, spots of color high in a chalk-pale face. He coughed, and there was blood on his lips. He wiped it off on his sleeve. "I'm dying, but I'll still see you in hell."
He could barely breathe, Lucia saw. He'd looked sick before, every time she'd seen him—progressively worse, in fact. Coughing. Taking p
ills.
Taking antibiotics.
"Oh, my God," she said. "Anthrax. It was you."
Stewart dropped the EMP. It hit the floor with a heavy boom, and McCarthy edged forward to pick it up. "Watch him," he warned, and holstered his gun. Jazz and Lucia kept their aim steady, but Stewart just stared down at McCarthy with furious, glittering eyes. "Why? Why try to kill her?" Ben asked.
"Because it got to you."
McCarthy's back was to them, but Lucia saw rigidity in his shoulders, down his spine.
"Where'd you get it? The anthrax?"
Stewart grinned, showing bloody teeth. "Amazing what you can find, working anticrime task force. Bullshit redneck biochemists all over the place these days. Think they're saving the world from whatever it is they hate. You were right, Garza. I'd been to that lab before. Bought myself a nice little present."
"You stupid, twisted bastard," McCarthy said. "How long have you worked for Eidolon?"
"Since they told me you shot three people in the head. I trusted you, man. I liked you."
"I liked you, too," he said, and backed up. "But you got played, Ken. Just like I did. Only you got played a hell of a lot worse."
"And he's about to get played one more time," Lucia said. "Surveillance was digital, and it's as trashed as everything else. All that's left is physical evidence." She tossed Stewart his gun, careful to keep her hand wrapped in the sleeve of her shirt. Even sick as he was, he caught it out of the air, steadied it and instantly focused it on her.
And fired.
Click.
"Thank you," she said. "I removed the rounds, obviously, before I returned it to you. And by the way, those two men on the floor? They're on your service weapon. Just like the three bodies in Kansas City were on Ben's. I hope you have better luck explaining it."
McCarthy had bagged the EMP, and now zipped the backpack shut with a decisive jerk. Stewart was staring uncomprehendingly at the gun in his grasp. He coughed again, and more blood spattered his hand as he tried to cover his mouth.
"Oh, man," McCarthy said, watching him. "I hate you, Ken, but I don't hate you that much. Get some help."
