I, Weapon

by Vaughn Heppner

  “Tell the pilot to hurry,” she said.

  “So what that Bannon’s wife is alive,” Max said. “Who cares now that we have the assassin in sight? We need to take him down and finish this. I almost killed him, and would have if you hadn’t ordered me to come with you.”

  Parker lips thinned and she turned her head, staring at Max.

  “What’s his wife doing at a sanatorium anyway?” Max asked. “Is she a failed assassin?”

  “Like you said, you’re here per my orders,” Parker told him, “to guard me, not to pepper me with questions.”

  Max matched her stare. He’d almost killed Bannon. If the man hadn’t tripped—bam—a round in the head would have ended all of this. He could see Parker’s worry, and he didn’t get it.

  “Boss, there’s a lot more going on today than just this woman. You know that, right?”

  “Do you happen to remember who my father is?” Parker asked sharply.

  Max scowled as he moved the rifle on his lap to another position. “We should be concentrating on Bannon. We have to take him out. Everything is secondary to that.”

  “We will take him out,” Parker said, sounding distracted as she searched for something in her pockets. “He can’t run forever.”

  “Hey,” Max said. “I got news for you. Bannon isn’t running. We’re running.”

  “You know what I mean. Now where did I put that?”

  “I’m not sure I do know,” Max said. “We lost the video of Bannon stalking the Justice. So our hands have been tied. Your father hasn’t even called in the rest of Homeland Security. Forget about alerting the FBI yet that we know who the killer is. You should tell the pilot to go back. The others need me to help them take down Bannon.”

  Parker shrugged. “If they don’t get the video, the Controller will think of something else.”

  “How do you figure that? We’d be crazy to give the media doctored video.”

  “I don’t see why,” Parker said. “We do it all the time.”

  Max looked at her in surprise. She was panicking, he realized. Usually, she was sharp. “This is about a Supreme Court Justice,” he said, in his explaining voice. “That makes it an entirely different ball game. Whatever videos go public are going to be studied in excruciating detail. The video has to be genuine or the media and others are going to be coming after us instead of after Bannon.”

  “Will you shut up about the video?” Parker shouted. “I can’t think with your endless babbling. I have to decide where to take her.”

  “Her? You mean Bannon’s wife?”

  Parker made a sound of exasperation. “Karl said you were the smartest of his gunmen. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”

  Max moved the rifle again. He wanted to turn it on this witch. “Listen, boss, this isn’t the time to get smart with me.”

  Parker’s eyes widened and she focused on Max, forgetting about whatever it was she searched for in her pockets. “I could have you cashiered for speaking to me like that.”

  “Hey, LeBron is dead and Karl is dead. We’re playing for keeps with the best assassin in the business.”

  “You never cared about Karl. And earlier today your interrogations nearly killed Susan Bither.”

  “Susan is lying if she said I tried to kill her,” Max said.

  “You stupid fool. None of that matters now, none of it.”

  Max lifted his rifle one-handed and he prodded Parker with the barrel. “I’m getting tired of your attitude.”

  Color flushed Parker’s cheeks. With a savage motion, she brushed away the barrel. “What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing a few bullets won’t cure.”

  “If you harm me, my father would hunt the ends of the Earth for you. He wouldn’t just shoot you, either. He’d bring you to a special room where they’d keep you alive for a long, long time, and you would be begging to die.”

  Setting the rifle back on his lap, Max turned away. Her threats held weight because of the Controller, a soulless manipulator if there ever was one. This wasn’t Afghanistan. There a man could plug an officious officer and call it “insurgency.” He desired to make them—make Parker—need him.

  “So you think you’d turn me into one of your assassin zombies, huh?”

  Parker grinned. “Now we understand each other. You’re here to make sure Bannon doesn’t reach me, and that’s it.”

  “Maybe I should let him.” Max decided to argue just a little more, as he’d read somewhere that it was better to make a person work to convince you. It made them believe they’d really been persuasive.

  “Bannon’s in Great America,” Max said. “We need to turn around and take him down now. That’s how you deal with an assassin. You flush him out instead of waiting for him to come for you in the dark of night.”

  “That’s what’s wrong with you people,” Parker said. “You’ve been underestimating Bannon. He’s resourceful beyond anything you’ve conceived. You can’t take him down. Look what happened in Great America. His training—” Parker abruptly stopped speaking.

  “Go on,” Max said, leaning closer. “This is getting interesting.”

  “The way to deal with Bannon, with any of the assassins, is to deflect them. Once they target you, it’s over.”

  Max bristled. He’d almost killed the man a few minutes ago. If Bannon hadn’t tripped at exactly the right—or wrong—moment, the assassin would be dead, at the hand of yours truly.

  “We’ll get him,” Max said.

  “You haven’t so far. He wants his wife. That’s the target. I’m his way to get to her. Well, I’m not going to let him reach his wife, because I’m going to remove her from the board.”

  “I don’t get that,” Max said. “Why not use her as bait?”

  “No!” Parker shouted.

  Max frowned. There was something more going on here. The woman was Bannon’s wife, but who was she to Parker?

  Max studied the doctor. “You’re worried about something and not just Bannon, at least not just him, strictly speaking.”

  Parker looked out the open bay door. Max looked out, too. The Greater Bay Area moved underneath them as they headed north for Berkeley.

  “Here’s the drill,” Parker said. “We land. You come with me. No, wait,” she said, shaking her head. “You move away from the chopper and set up an ambush.”

  “You think Bannon will show up?”

  “We have to plan for the possibility,” she said.

  “So call up the police. Call your father and then the FBI. If we know where Bannon is headed, we should lay a trap for him and finish this.”

  Parker laughed uneasily. “You saw what happened in Great America. He spotted the best and eliminated them. Mass numbers of amateurs aren’t going to succeed. But maybe one well-concealed sniper can get lucky. I hope we won’t have to find out. That’s why we’re moving now before Bannon can extricate himself from the amusement park.”

  Max turned away. He didn’t want to mess with Parker because he feared the Controller. But the way Parker was acting about Bannon’s wife…

  “Does the Controller know about the woman?” Max asked.

  “Of course,” Parker said. “Now how about you shut up so I can think?”

  Max nodded slowly. Something peculiar was going on, but he wasn’t sure how to exploit it. If he played this right, he might soon have something over Parker. And the ace card would be killing Bannon. He knew the assassin was coming. It was time to show everyone that he—Max—was the world’s most dangerous hunter, not this head-case Bannon.

  ***

  Griffith watched the disaster in Great America unfold from his dais in DC. Most of the dead there belonged to ATS. It was unbelievable. Snow, Reed and the others, shot down like cattle. How could one man do so much damage to such highly trained personnel?

  “Don’t let get it flashy,” the Director had said. This was worse than flashy. The news teams were already arriving at the amusement park. This would be all over the TV and blogs. Shou
ld he plaster Bannon’s face everywhere as the main suspect in the Supreme Court Justice’s murder? No. It was too soon to know that without hard evidence. They had video of Bannon in the Santa Cruz Memorial Hospital, but that would link him to ATS because of Susan Bither.

  Griffith shook his head. They needed the memory stick with the video of Bannon sneaking into the Justice’s vacation house. The idea had been to trickle that onto the blogosphere. Another agency would have killed Bannon, or at least been able to take credit for the kill. Instead, Bannon had obliterated two ATS security teams and taken out some of his best cleanup men. He couldn’t believe it about LeBron. Bannon thrived on the mayhem of mob panic. Maybe they had trained their assassins too well.

  He needed to distance ATS from the Great America debacle.

  “Where is Bannon?” Griffith asked in a loud voice.

  No one answered.

  “We have to find him!” Griffith said. “Keep searching. Use whatever resource you have to. I want this man killed and I want him killed now.”

  His voice stung like a lash, and the personnel intensified their efforts. If there were something out there electronically able to pinpoint Bannon’s location, his people would find it.

  What about Parker? He hadn’t heard anything from his daughter for some time. The disaster in Great America was too near her center of operations and too near…

  His mind shied away from the thought. He had many regrets, many things he would have done differently. But there were some things he would never change.

  Scowling, using the joystick control, Griffith turned his wheelchair and headed up a ramp. A door swished open. The rubber-coated wheels rolled along a short corridor. Another door swished open and Griffith moved into his office. On the right wall hung a large computer screen. It showed angelfish lazily swimming through waving ferns. It was a virtual aquarium, supposed to calm him.

  Griffith dug out his cell phone, using his thumb to speed dial his daughter.

  “Sir,” Parker answered, sounding winded.

  “Where are you?” he asked. “Are you still in the building?”

  “No,” she said. “I evacuated the building.”

  He nodded. Why had he ever worried about her? She was a clever girl. He had helped with that and had a right to be proud of her.

  “Where are you headed?” Griffith asked.

  “I’m in the air detouring north and will go to our station in Reno.”

  “Why so far east?”

  “Bannon has a mental fixation on me,” Parker said. “I have to get out of his range. I’m thinking about heading to DC afterward.”

  There was something about her tone. She was hiding something from him. While biting his lower lip, Griffith watched an angelfish. I’ll test her.

  Clearing his throat, letting worry enter his voice, he said, “I never should have let you be Bannon’s handler. That was a mistake.”

  “Let’s not worry about it now. We have to kill Bannon.”

  He nodded slowly as his eyes shone with intensity. “Apparently that is easier said than done. Do you have any suggestions as to his next move?”

  “I’m setting a trail for him to follow so I can lead him into a trap.”

  “No!” Griffith said. “You’re not trained for fieldwork. I want you to come to DC. Yes, I’m taking you out of play. In fact, I’m going to shut down ATS in the West. This one has turned on us, and we’re going to have to keep our heads down for a time. The political firestorm—things are going to get hot. We have to burrow deep and wait.”

  “Yes, sir,” Parker said.

  Griffith heard deceit in her voice. She had never been able to hide that from him. She liked to believe she was free to do as she pleased, but he kept close tabs on her actions. Still, allowing her the illusion of freedom had been wise. He would let her play whatever game she was involved in now, as long as she was leaving the danger area.

  “Give me your exact position,” he said.

  “I’m in a helicopter,” she said. “I cleared the building of personnel. Now I’m flying over the Bay Area as I head north.”

  He watched the angelfish turn and swim in a different direction. There was so much to coordinate, so much to think about…

  “Good,” he told her. He would check her position himself. There was something strange going on. It made him nervous. “Continue until you reach the Reno Station,” he said.

  “I will, Daddy. Bye.”

  He nodded as a headache began in his frontal lobe.

  -45-

  Bannon blasted down the freeway at one hundred and ten mph, one hundred and fifteen and then one hundred and twenty. The air rushed over him as he crouched on the motorcycle. He wove around cars and semis. At times, his stomach lifted because his speed made the bike fly briefly as he went over flaws on the freeway.

  Yeah, he risked having the police chasing him. He risked a wreck or a misjudgment that would cause him to skid and crash. In the sky, the helicopter had become a small object on the horizon. Yet he still saw it.

  Jocelyn, I’m coming, honey.

  His wife was alive! The thought pulsated through him. He moved onto the breakdown lane on a long downward slope and opened the throttle. By the time he reached the bottom, the speedometer showed 142. The bike’s vibration shook his bones. He clenched his teeth to keep them from rattling.

  He still had the 9mm and a magazine and a half of bullets. He had killed ATS personnel, and because of that, he had picked up information that Parker was headed to Berkley, to the Pacific Heights Sanatorium. Questions tumbled through his mind. Jocelyn in a sanatorium and—

  Bannon snarled and his gaze riveted onto the freeway. It was so close that all he had to do was reach out to touch the hot concrete. He leaned right and blew past a Toyota Camry. He tilted to the left and zoomed past a Honda 900. Speed and brazen assault: those would be his assets now.

  I’m coming, Jocelyn. I’m not going to let them take you away from me again. Never again, my love.

  ***

  “There!” Parker shouted, pointing out of the bay door. “You need to go down!”

  Max nodded. The Pacific Heights Sanatorium wasn’t in Berkeley exactly. It was a hilltop mansion. An incredible garden surrounded the three-story “palace.” There were giant bush mazes, fields of flowers, perfectly sculptured trees and a bewildering number of water fountains. A winding road twisted up the hill.

  “There’s a helipad down there,” Parker shouted.

  Max spoke into a microphone, instructing the pilot.

  The helicopter veered and they headed down toward the circular pad.

  “What’s the plan exactly?” Max shouted.

  “If you think that Bannon is near, set an ambush and kill him. But know this: as soon as I have Jocelyn and make it to the helicopter, I’m lifting off with or without you.”

  “You’re scared,” Max said. “Yeah, I got that.”

  “You’re scared of him, too,” she said.

  Max shook his head angrily. “I almost had him in Great America. A chance slip is all that saved his sorry ass.”

  “What makes you think it was chance?” Parker asked, with a lilt in her voice.

  “I was on the ATS Building. Bannon was in the amusement park. I know he didn’t hear my shot. And there’s no way he felt the bullet coming.”

  “Oh, I get it. You almost had him from the safety of the building.”

  “Boss, it doesn’t matter how you kill someone, just that it’s done. A freak piece of luck saved your assassin. It won’t save him next time.”

  “For both our sakes, I hope you’re right.”

  Max scowled. “He ain’t Superman.”

  “No, but he’s the next best thing.”

  Max clutched his rifle. That’s it. He was killing the bastard on this hilltop. If Parker thought she could taunt him about Bannon… If he had to, Max was going to plug the pilot if he tried to lift off without him. They were going to stay until he had Bannon in the crosshairs and he watched Supe
rman go down with a bullet through the head. Then he would walk over to the corpse, unzip his fly, pull out his shlong and piss all over the mighty Superman.

  “This might take me a few minutes,” Parker said.

  “Red tape?” Max managed to ask.

  Parker gave him a lopsided grin. “No, the sanatorium director isn’t stupid. I have too much on—” She cleared her throat. “I have to prepare Jocelyn for travel.”

  “That’s her name?” Max asked.

  “It may take me fifteen minutes, but no more than twenty-five.”

  “Got it,” Max said.

  “If you see Bannon—”

  “Boss, not even the assassin can beat a helicopter here, not even if he knew where to go.”

  “Don’t underestimate him,” Parker said. “That’s the biggest mistake when dealing with Bannon. He’s coming. I can assure you of that.”

  “Did you see him?”

  “I’m his target,” Parker said. “We may have enough time to get away. We may not. You have to be ready.”

  She’s freaking out. “Don’t worry about a thing, boss. I’m here. I’m going to take care of everything.” Today, we’re going to do things my way.

  ***

  Griffith sat at his desk, staring at a screen. In shock, he saw the chopper’s location: the Pacific Heights Sanatorium near Berkeley.

  The low-grade headache throbbed into agonizing life. What was Parker doing there? Griffith blinked several times, each one scratchy and painful.

  She…she must have gone there to—

  Griffith fumbled out his cellphone and went down his contact list. Here it was, Director William Frances. He speed dialed. What would be the best way to proceed? If Bannon had somehow followed Parker there...

  No! He could not allow the murderous assassin to gain what Bannon cherished above all else. Not after what the man had taken from him. He had to move fast.

  “Mr. Griffith?” William Frances answered.

  The headache put splotches in Griffith’s gaze, making it nearly impossible to see. This was so hard to do. But he began speaking in a low and ruthless voice. He was going to have to start over with her.