While her body continued to thrash in the relentless onslaught of the overwhelming current, Sam surrendered to the blackness.
Merciful and swift in the end, Sam’s death ended her suffering.
Part IV
41
Today
Sam felt Brock’s chest heave with exertion. Her arms were hooked around his neck, and he was still carrying her. Seconds before, Brock had pulled the hospital elevator’s emergency stop, and Brock, Sam, and a sobbing nurse shared an otherwise empty elevator car stopped somewhere between the fourth and third floors.
“That bastard is persistent,” Brock said, setting Sam down on the floor. “Dan shot him yesterday. I didn’t expect him to be on us so quickly.”
“Is that what happened?” Sam asked. “I don’t remember.”
“You were busy,” Brock said. Busy dying, he didn’t say. He shuddered at the thought.
Sam climbed down from Brock’s arms. Her legs were still shaky and rubbery, byproduct of the hundreds of volts that had seared her central nervous system.
Movement was agony. Every muscle in her body was knotted and cramped. The current coursing through her body had caused all of her muscles to contract uncontrollably, and there wasn’t any part of her body that was pain-free.
She was also covered in stitches. The twisted bastard had sliced into her skin, purely to cause pain and suffering. He could have just killed her, but he lacked the modicum of human decency that simple murder would have entailed. Instead, Sam’s killer had relished every shriek of pain and agony he had elicited from her.
And he was just a few feet away from them, gun in hand, trying for the third time to end her life. More precisely, she thought, he was trying to kill her, which would be the third time he’d done so. The doctors said that she had died twice already.
“What now?” Brock asked. He had a black eye and a large cast around his ankle. Sam wore a hospital gown, and nothing else. A stray bullet had killed the orderly accompanying them to the fMRI room, and Sam and Brock were both splattered with gore.
And the nurse wouldn’t stop crying. Loudly.
“Do you mind?” Sam asked her. “Tough to think, with all of that noise in here.”
“We can’t stay here,” Brock observed. “He’ll pry those doors apart on the floor above us and get in here through the elevator car ceiling.”
Sam eyed the nurse, who had an elaborate key ring attached to the lanyard around her neck. “Any of those keys give you access to restricted floors?” Sam asked.
The nurse nodded.
“Make it happen.”
“It’s the tenth floor though. We’ll have to go back up past the floor that guy’s on.”
“Your key doesn’t let you bypass the other floors?”
The nurse shook her head. “A couple of years ago, a patient died while the team waited for an elevator. They took out the override function after that.”
“Okay. Got your phone on you?”
She shook her head. “Not allowed while we’re on duty.”
Sam cursed, then pushed the “call” button on the elevator control panel.
“Who does that call?” Brock asked.
“No idea,” Sam said. “But we can’t risk unstopping the elevator, because we have no clue where it will take us.”
They heard the sound of a phone ringing. It rang a dozen times before someone answered. “Metro Fire Department, state your emergency.”
“Thank God,” Sam said. “Can you override the controls on this elevator from where you sit?”
“Maybe. Are you stuck?”
“We’re stopped between two floors. There’s a gunman on the floor above us.”
“A gunman?”
“Can you make this elevator go directly to the tenth floor, without stopping anywhere else?”
“Why the tenth floor?”
“It’s restricted,” Sam said. “The gunman can’t get there.”
They heard banging above the elevator car, and the groan of metal and machinery.
“Need you to hustle,” Sam said. “He’s prying the door open on the floor above us.”
“Just a sec,” the operator said.
“Hurry!”
“Okay, got it.”
Nothing happened.
They heard more mechanical grinding from above the elevator car, and then the deafening roar of a gun’s report. Several rounds tore into the elevator car, and a ricochet pierced the nurse’s foot. She screamed.
During a pause between howls and gunshots, Sam heard the operator’s voice shouting over the speaker: “Take off the emergency stop!”
Brock pounded the red button, and the elevator lurched to life, driving upwards.
Several loud thumps on the elevator car’s roof told them they were too late. The man had climbed atop the car, and was trying to break in through the ceiling. The nurse’s cries intensified as she realized the situation had taken a deadly turn.
“Can we ram him into the top of the elevator shaft?” Brock asked.
Sam looked at the elevator control panel. The tenth floor was the top floor of the building. “Guess we’ll find out.”
They heard more pounding on the elevator car ceiling, loud and insistent, as the car crawled upward at a glacial pace.
Then more gunfire. Sam and Brock instinctively flattened themselves against the side of the elevator as the rounds ricocheted inside the elevator. The nurse screeched again, a red splotch growing around an entry wound in her shoulder.
The onslaught of flying metal mercifully ended, and they heard a loud thump on the roof of the car, just seconds before the elevator dinged to announce their arrival on the tenth floor. The assassin had apparently flattened himself against the elevator to avoid being crushed between the car and the top of the shaft, Sam thought.
She pulled on the doors to get them to move apart faster.
More gunshots roared, and more screams, but Sam couldn’t tell whether the nurse was hit again. As soon as the doors snuck far enough apart, she squeezed through the opening and moved down the hallway as quickly as her battered limbs would carry her. Her hospital gown flapped in the breeze, failing to conceal her nakedness beneath.
Brock followed, the clump of his unwieldy foot cast announcing every other footfall. The nurse staggered behind them, then collapsed just a few feet beyond the elevator. She’d been hit again, but Sam couldn’t tell where.
The elevator doors closed, and the car retreated back down the building. Sam had no idea where the attacker had gone, but she hoped he was still on top of the elevator, gliding down to a lower floor.
Sam stopped the first medical-looking person she could find, and pointed to the nurse lying on the floor amidst a growing pool of red. “Help her!” she commanded.
Then she took Brock’s hand and continued down the hallway in her halting, pain-wracked dash, looking for an unlocked door to duck into. Twenty paces later, she found one, charged through, and surprised a half-dozen doctors and nurses in a small break room.
“Special Agent Jameson, Homeland,” she said. “I need your lab coat,” she said to a medium-sized male doctor.
It took some cajoling, but the doctor finally relented, and Sam donned his white doctor’s garb. “Thanks,” she said. “Which way to the stairs?”
A stunned nurse pointed in the direction opposite the elevator lobby. “I’m not sure what’s going on, but should we call the police?” she asked.
“Those are the last people on earth you should call right now,” Brock said as they rounded the corner and resumed their dash down the hallway.
“There’s an active shooter. Stay here and lock the door,” Sam instructed, calling over her shoulder as she shuffled painfully down the hall. “And don’t open it until someone lets you out!”
They charged through the stairwell door, and made their way down one flight of stairs as quickly as their injuries permitted. Brock’s painkillers had started to wear off, and he winced with every step.
“What’s the plan, baby?” he asked.
“Hang on,” she said. She peered through the glass window on the door leading into the ninth floor, looking for signs of shooter-induced chaos, but the hallway appeared serene. She opened the door and led Brock into the first unoccupied hospital room she could find, then closed and locked the door behind them.
“We obviously need to get out of here, but we need to be smart about it,” Sam said. “Wouldn’t do us any good to make it out of the building, just to be gunned down on the street.”
She picked up the phone, dialed nine to bypass the hospital switchboard, and rejoiced when her guess was rewarded with a dial tone. She dialed all sevens. She had no idea which cab company she was calling, but one taxi service or another had laid claim to that telephone number since the dawn of civilization.
Five minutes, the dispatcher said. That’s how long it would take for the cab to meet them at the hospital’s service entrance.
It wasn’t much time to make their way through the hospital as carefully as they would need to in order to remain undetected. They were certainly concerned about running across the assassin on their way out, but those were long odds. He wasn’t likely to remain in the vicinity for very long.
They were more concerned about being discovered by a Metro policeman. Someone would certainly have called in the emergency to the police department, and the hospital would be swarming with cops in a matter of minutes.
A few of those cops would undoubtedly be on the VSS payroll – just like the assassin, if Sam’s hunch was correct.
Brock’s foot was throbbing, and the pain was becoming a serious impediment. The surgeons had spent two hours reassembling the bones in his foot, and his cast featured shiny reinforcement bars protruding grotesquely in various spots from his foot. Sweat poured from his face as he fought the pain.
“Elevator,” Sam said after just a few steps down the hallway. “It’s our only hope of making it out of here.”
Brock reluctantly agreed. In the time it would take them to descend the remaining nine floors, the cops would surely have sealed off the stairwells.
Sam pushed the “down” button, and they held their breath as a car approached from one of the floors below.
It finally arrived, full of panicked passengers, who poured out of the car. “Don’t go!” one of them shouted. “He’s still down there!”
“Which floor?” Sam asked.
“First floor lobby!” someone yelled. “Stay up here where it’s safe!”
Sam and Brock looked at each other. “I don’t think we have that option,” she said.
Brock nodded. “Place will be buzzing with Metro guys.”
They stepped into the elevator. “Which floor?” Brock asked.
“Good question,” Sam said. They could try their luck on the second floor, but they would still have to get past the first floor on foot. The cops and the shooter would potentially stand in their way.
Brock pushed the button for the underground parking garage, and they waited anxiously as the floor numbers slowly clicked by.
Third floor.
Second.
First.
The elevator stopped.
“Balls,” Brock whispered. The doors opened. Sam and Brock flattened themselves against the side of the car, expecting an onslaught of gunfire.
Several eternal seconds passed, and then a few more. But nothing happened. And there were no sounds. The first floor seemed deserted.
The elevator doors closed, and they descended to the subterranean parking garage.
“Let’s stay sharp,” Sam said. “He might’ve tried to escape through here.”
Brock nodded grimly as the doors glided apart. Sam held down the button to hold the doors open while they peered out into the dim parking garage. Detecting no motion in front of them, Sam cautiously moved her head from the safety of the elevator enclosure to glance on either side of the elevator.
Nothing.
They listened for a few more seconds to be sure. Satisfied, they made their way slowly and deliberately to the up-ramp leading out of the garage, the pain evident on Brock’s face with each step.
“I have no idea where we’re supposed to meet the cab,” Brock said.
“Neither do I. Hope is my strategy.”
It worked. They emerged at the top of the car ramp just as a bright yellow taxi pulled up, with seven sevens emblazoned on its side.
“Mr. and Mrs., uh, Entwhistle?” the cabbie asked, holding the rear door open.
“That’s right,” Brock said, climbing in gingerly. “Nice to see you. We’re in a bit of a rush.”
42
Peter Kittredge slumped in his window seat, staring out at the ocean, his eyes bloodshot from a night of vengeful power-drinking, and glazed from a morning filled with the same activity.
He couldn’t get the images out of his mind. El Grande, Rojo, Alejandro, all dead.
And Maria. My Maria.
He tortured himself by recalling the details of her last pose, her beautiful, blood-stained face wearing an improbably placid expression.
It was an image that would haunt him for the rest of his life, he was sure.
After Quinn left, Kittredge had polished off the better part of a liter of vodka. He woke up on the floor, stomach acid and bile in his mouth, his apartment reeking of alcohol-induced sickness.
As the morning sunlight blazed through his apartment windows, Kittredge had found another bottle and managed to choke down a few swallows between heaves. Not all of it stayed down, but in time, the shaking in his hands had stopped, and the pounding in his head subsided.
Disease and cure, in the same bottle.
He had made a quick but deliberate decision to fly back to DC. There would certainly be Venezuelan reprisals for the VSS members’ slaughter at the hands of the CIA, he figured, and he wanted to be nowhere near Caracas when the blowback started. The same-day tickets had cost a small fortune, but he would have bought them at any cost.
His head swum as he leaned against the side of the airplane, keeping his eyes open to avoid succumbing to the incipient nausea, but too exhausted and too sick to remain completely upright.
One desire reverberated through his mind despite the self-inflicted misery. Revenge. He didn’t know how or when, but he resolved to find an avenue to unleash his smoldering anger at the Agency for invading, and then completely destroying, his entire life.
A steady, comfortable buzz filled Kittredge’s head. A couple more drinks on the airplane had chased away a few more demons and further enlivened him. He drank more vodka with lunch, which had painted a pleasant patina over the world.
It was through this chemically-enhanced, nostalgic verdigris that Kittredge viewed the piercing blue eyes that had so captivated him for all these months. And they still held magic, Kittredge realized, feeling the familiar stirrings within him that had bound him inexorably to Charley Arlinghaus.
“Just south of a miracle, they’re saying.” Charley sounded every bit like himself. Almost mundanely so, Kittredge thought, given all that had transpired in the last nine days.
“You had us all good and worried,” Kittredge said, noticing that he wasn’t quite able to maintain the sharp edges on his consonants.
Charley noticed, too. “It’s early. Drinking already?”
“Drinking still.”
“Stress?”
“You could say that.”
“What’s going on?”
Kittredge laughed, a harsh, angry, sarcastic bark. “Has Quinn been here yet?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Or Martinson?”
“Peter, who are you talking about?”
But Charley’s eyes gave him away. They looked too closely at him, Kittredge thought, searching for information. It was a simple deception he could easily have pulled off under normal circumstances, but the weeklong coma had evidently taken away some of the facile smoothness that normally characterized Charley’s deceptions.
An
ger flared, but Kittredge restrained himself. He had made a decision. He would certainly let Charley know that he knew the deep, dark secrets, but he would also make nice, to see where Charley led, to see what he could learn.
“Sorry, I just thought you might have known them,” Kittredge said.
Charley shook his head.
“I finally met Arturo,” Kittredge said.
“Dibiaso?” Charley asked. Kittredge noticed the spark of interest in his eyes and voice.
“Yeah. He’s CIA, too.” Kittredge said with as much nonchalance as he could pull off.
“Like, the CIA?” Charley asked.
“Of course.” Kittredge looked at Charley, feeling a potent mixture of affection and anger, but doing his best to appear relaxed and detached.
Charley affected a surprised look, but Kittredge waved it off. “No need for that, Charley. I’ve known for a little while now.”
Charley nodded thoughtfully, the look in his eyes intensifying the way it always did when he was concentrating on something difficult. “What is it that you know, Peter?” he asked, speaking slowly and evenly.
“You’re not just an executive assistant for Exel Oil. In fact, Exel Oil may not be a real company at all. I think it might be an Agency thing. But anyway, I know you’re a CIA agent, and you’re helping pave the way for US oil companies to start drilling Venezuelan crude. And in addition to a vicious comb-over, Arturo Dibiaso has a few other names.”
“Who attacked me?” Charley asked.
“Any guesses?”
Charley shook his head. A little too coyly, Kittredge thought. I know you too well to fall for that.
He reached up to stroke Charley’s cheek, but Charley pulled away, a look of mild aversion on his face.
So that’s how it is.
He regarded Charley a moment. “I know you were playing me,” he said. “But were you just playing me?” he asked.
Charley’s eyes hardened. “Of course not.”
“The two of us. What were we, to you?”
Charley paused, a puzzled look crossing his face. “We were always us,” he said. “You know that, don’t you?”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 48
