His brain really wasn’t right.
I found a curtained doorway hidden behind a rolling shelf. They always kept the human smuggling out of sight, probably so whoever was guarding the door, answering the phone, or doing paperwork wouldn’t have to listen to all the sobbing. That sort of thing really grated on all but the most psychotic criminals, and your violent nut jobs—though useful—weren’t your best day-to-day operations types.
The next room was divided into a few cells made of chain link, like a dog kennel, only each one held a cot. Each cell had a drain hole in the middle of the floor and a coiled garden hose for “sanitation”. I figured this part would currently be unoccupied, because if any sex slaves were being held in here, there would have been real guards. It was a relief to see I was right and nobody was home, because freeing any captives would have tipped off the Montalbans that I’d been here. If this was where they moved Bob through, there was a possibility he had left me another bread crumb. I started searching the cells.
“There’s something to this . . .” Reaper muttered. I hated when he felt the need to narrate his extremely convoluted thought process to me over the radio. He was hard enough to keep up with him when I was wasn’t in the middle of a burglary. “Most of the stuff they got ordered to steal makes sense, stuff you can move quick for a profit, but . . . no, some of these shipments they took don’t make any sense at all. Industrial goods, chemicals, some medical stuff. What? Yeah. No. Yeah, this shit is too specific to unload . . . Whoa. You’re right. It’s too specific. Right.”
It turned out it was even worse when Reaper was having two simultaneous conversations.
I got on my hands and knees and started checking under the cots for scratches. It was a lot faster going this time, since I wasn’t under water.
“But why steal this stuff when they could just buy it anywhere? Yeah, Katarina’s got billions . . . There has to be something in each of these they needed, something special, and the rest is just junk. What pattern?” I could hear the furious typing. “Okay, you look at that.”
There was nothing in any of the cells except for old blood stains. If Bob had been held here, it hadn’t been for long enough for him to do anything. I wondered how much misery this place held. It filled me with disgust.
“You’re right, buying those parts would raise terror alert flags. But stealing bits and pieces mixed in with a bunch of other stolen goods spread out over months, and nobody catches on. But what could you build out of this junk?”
Reaper was quiet for a long time. Now I was curious.
“Don’t leave us hanging here, Reaper,” Jill said.
“Yeah, suspense is killing me,” I muttered as I left the last cell. Next time the junior think tank could do their brainstorming while I wasn’t trying to be sneaky.
“Dear God . . . No.” Now that wasn’t a very Reaperly exclamation. “No way. No way. Shit. I think you’re right.”
“Right about what? Spill it, man.”
“Sorry. Oracle thinks Katarina has a nuke.”
Suddenly very cold, I stood there amid the empty slave cells as a terrible pain developed in my guts. “Hold on. You’re telling me Kat built a nuclear fucking bomb out of this junk?”
“No. She probably already had the bomb, or maybe she’s planning to get one soon. I don’t know. But mixed in all these tons of stolen cargo, is everything you’d need to deal with an alpha particle emitter.”
“Particle emitter? Like what?”
“Like uranium or plutonium, chief. As in, detection and concealment. Oracle says it’s probably not in good shape or even a complete weapon. She thinks a . . . what? Physics package. She says the physics package could have been clandestinely transported or maybe damaged.”
“What the hell is a physics package?”
“It’s the part of the bomb that actually makes the nuclear reaction. That’s what they call it.”
“Who is they?” Reaper and this Oracle had come up with that insane theory after a few minutes of doing a jigsaw puzzle with cargo manifests. “Bullshit.” I almost never doubted Reaper, but I didn’t know the girl who was working for Valentine. I hoped that they were wrong. I wanted them to be wrong. I didn’t want to think about Kat with a nuclear bomb.
“Lorenzo, there’s some traffic down here.” Jill warned in my ear, snapping me back to the present. “You read?”
“What’ve you got?”
“Headlights heading your way fast. Hang on. They’re turning onto the access road. Definitely headed your way.”
I didn’t think I’d set off any alarms, but it was possible that this was just regular seedy middle of the night Montalban business. Either way, it was time to go. “Understood. Heading for the front. Reaper, get ready to pick me up.”
“Hang on, chief. Two big, black cars just blew past me. They’re . . . shit, they’re stopping at the front gate!”
I must have tipped them off somehow, but there were a lot of them, and they’d gotten here fast. There was no way three cars were going to simultaneously roll up on a random alarm, so they must have been expecting an intrusion and staged nearby.
“Both of you stay put. I’ll evade, and once I’m past I’ll call for a pickup.” I ran for the front of the garage. It would still take a minute for those cars to get here, and by then I’d be in the wind. There were plenty of places to hide around—
The front door was open. I was sure that I’d closed it.
A cardboard box next to my head exploded.
I hit the floor rolling, and then scrambled forward on my hands and knees between the shelves. A crate went flying, a pattern of holes torn through the wood. A box just above my head violently flew into pieces. Buckshot. Motivated by that thought, I ducked even lower, and made it around the corner as a dozen holes appeared in the shelf behind me.
The gunfire had barely made a sound.
The shooter didn’t have a bead on me, so I crept along behind the shelves, looking for better cover. Whoever was firing at me was using some sort of suppressed shotgun. He wanted to keep this quiet. I pulled a Hungarian FEG pistol, one Jill had bought from the local hoodlums, out from beneath my hoody. I was about to make this loud.
I heard footsteps on concrete. The first shooter had moved behind one of the parked cars. “Come out,” he ordered in rough French. It was a deep, commanding voice. “The place is surrounded.” He sounded really familiar.
Son of a bitch. It was Anders.
I gave my radio three rapid taps. The signal for oh shit everything has gone to hell. I was pinned down by one of the best killers alive. We fought together in the Crossroads, and I watched him drop dozens of Jihan’s men. He was ruthless, calculating, and supremely skilled. I had come a long damned way to find him, but this was not how I wanted it to go down.
Mind racing, I looked at the pistol in my hand. It was a clunky knockoff of a Browning Hi-Power, not my first choice for getting into a gunfight against one of the baddest motherfuckers I’d ever met. For Anders? That would have been an RPG or a Carl Gustav. I kicked myself for not bringing something bigger. I’d wanted to be discreet, though, and you aren’t very discrete with an antitank weapon strapped to your back.
Anders switched to English. “When Diego bought it, I got nervous. The way he’d been cut, it told me somebody interrogated him. I wondered what that little freak might have said before he died. Then Varga shattered his skull on the sidewalk? No way that was a coincidence. It got me thinking, what could he have given up before taking the plunge? You probably knew about all his places at least.”
I risked a peek past the edge of the desk, but I couldn’t see Anders. I didn’t want to stick my head any further out, because I had no doubt he was ready to blow it off. My best defense was that he probably didn’t know exactly where I was. If he did, I’d already have extra holes in my body.
He spoke again, a little to the side from where he’d been a moment before. Anders was searching for an angle, trying to spot me. “Then after that shit-show the o
ther night, I knew whatever you fuckers wanted, you weren’t going to let up. You’re operating in our hometown. You know who you’re coming after. It’s ballsy. Stupid, but ballsy. Figured I’d get ahead of you, have a talk face-to-face.”
Anders was talking because he knew time was on his side. He had reinforcements on the way, no doubt. He’d said the place was surrounded, but I figured that was a bluff. I needed to get the hell out of here now. Preferably, right after I put a bullet in his brain.
Leaning out, I cranked off a quick shot into the side of the car he was behind, hoping to make him jump, but Anders wasn’t the flinching type. The little 9mm was a whole lot louder than his suppressed big gun. He retaliated by quietly blowing a massive hole through the side of the desk next to me. Firing wildly to make him keep his head down, I leapt up and ran behind another set of shelves.
Taking cover in one of the doorways, I waited in the shadows, listening. My good ear was ringing now. My bad ear was always ringing, thanks to Valentine, but I couldn’t tell where Anders was now. Had I got lucky and hit him? Fat chance.
“You’ve been a real pain in my ass,” Anders called out. He wasn’t wounded. Hell, he didn’t even sound flustered, just mildly annoyed. There was the roar of an engine outside and tires on gravel. “Those are my associates. You got nowhere to go. I don’t want to kill you. I only want to talk.” He managed to say that while sounding perfectly calm and rational. Of course, he wanted to know what I knew first, and then kill me. “You don’t need to stay quiet. I know who you are, Jill DelToro.”
Huh?
“I didn’t know you’d gotten out of the Crossroads until that bomb in London. You’ve got to be a pretty careful bomb maker nowadays because it’s amazing the forensic evidence they can lift off of an IED, especially one that fails to detonate. Your signal got through, but your detonator was faulty. It was just blind luck you didn’t get Kat that day.”
That was bullshit. Jill had told me she’d not set that bomb off on purpose. Anders was trying to goad the wrong person. There wasn’t time for this. I peeked around the side of a crate. There were shadows moving in the doorway. More shadows went bounding past the closest window. I was cut off.
“If it makes you feel better, it wouldn’t have mattered. Even if had killed her, her plans would’ve kept going. She’s more stubborn than you are. How many of my guys have you killed over the last year? Ten? Twelve?”
Jill must have been busier than she’d let on.
“That’s dedication. Seriously, young lady, I’m impressed. If I’d known how much potential you had, I wouldn’t have tried to kill you in Zubara. I would’ve told Gordon to hire you. But right now? You’re out of your element. I don’t know how the fuck you managed to do the things you’ve done, but no clever tricks are going to save your ass now. Stop being stupid and come out.”
One of the men at the door asked Anders something.
“Form the perimeter. I’ve got this.” He raised his voice again. “We’re just having a little conversation, right, Jill?”
It was time to put Anders off his game. “Guess again, fucker.”
Buckshot slammed into the crate in front of me, but I saw the tiny flicker of suppressed muzzle blast, and opened fire. I put out the passenger side window of a new Mercedes, but Anders had already ducked back down. He was big, but he was fast, too.
Someone darkened the doorway. It was too dark to see the front sight, but I pointed it, yanked the trigger, and was rewarded with a surprised yelp. The shadow disappeared.
“I said stay the fuck out!” Anders roared at his men. They did as they were told. “Well, holy shit. I’ve never talked to a ghost before. How you been, Lorenzo?”
“Rotting in Sala Jihan’s hellhole prison because of you.”
“You escaped the Pale Man?” Anders had been a Navy SEAL, HRT sniper, and Majestic hitman, but even then I think mentioning Sala Jihan freaked him out a little. “Bullshit. Nobody escapes from there.”
“You’re right about that: I didn’t escape. He sent me to kill you.”
The silence dragged on too long. Anders laughed, but it was forced. “Heh. How’s that working out for you, killer?”
Quietly as possible, I reloaded. It was too dark to get a bead on Anders. Sooner or later he was going to get tired of talking, and then a whole bunch of assholes were just going to start shooting in this direction until there was nothing left for me to hide behind. Someone shined a flashlight through the closest window, searching for me. I needed to think of something fast.
“Lorenzo, stay away from the west wall,” Jill warned through my ear piece.
I couldn’t risk responding to her out loud. I was ten feet away from the westernmost wall of the shop, couldn’t risk moving again, and had no idea what she was planning on doing. So I clicked the radio once for negative.
“Shit . . . Okay, in sixty seconds I’m going to make a new door in the middle of the west wall. If you’re close to that, you’re going to want to move.”
She didn’t specify the definition of close, but my options were pretty limited just then. I clicked the radio twice. Affirmative. Now I just needed to stay alive for a minute. “Hey, Anders, I know about Project Blue.”
“The fuck you do.”
I still hoped Reaper was wrong. “I know about the nuke.”
The silence was damning.
“You don’t want to do this.” I had no idea what this actually was. “Innocents are going to die. Eddie was nuts. Kat is worse. You spent your life preventing this sort of thing—”
“You don’t know shit about my life, Lorenzo.” There was a bitterness in Anders’ voice. “I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve killed for them, and it didn’t make a bit of difference. Majestic had me, Gordon, and Hunter prepping to level cities on a whim. On a fucking contingency. It’s one big game to these people.”
“We’ve both worked for some truly evil bastards,” I agreed.
This time Anders’ laugh was sincere. “Yeah, well, when this is all over, Majestic will be ruined, and the Illuminati will be unopposed on the world stage, under new management. I never could stand those stick up their ass, snooty Eurotrash cocksuckers. I’m done working for anybody but myself.”
“You’re working for a psychopath right now!”
“Katarina is more of a strategic partnership. She needs me and I need her. She’s got clout and vision, but you get one guess who really calls the shots in our organization. She’s not exactly the management type. Trust me, Lorenzo. The world will be a lot nicer place with me running it behind the scenes.”
“So the mighty Project Blue, the doomsday plan for one shadowy conspiracy to destroy another shadowy conspiracy, has become nothing but a power play?” I shouted back at him. “A coup, and you assholes are willing to kill millions of innocent people to pull it off?”
“You think this is unique? Like some special event in the grand scheme of things? Jesus, Lorenzo, the whole history of the world, the real history, has been like this forever, games within games. Powerful screwing the powerful, while the guys like us bleed. I’m done being a pawn, and I’m done with you.”
Anders opened fire. Buckshot slammed into the boxes around me.
A truck crashed through the wall.
The corrugated steel wall barely even slowed the big Renault. Shelves and crates were tossed aside as I was pelted with debris. I got a brief glimpse of Jill in the cab, practically standing on the brakes, but the truck still flew past me, smashing into the Mercedes and sending it spinning across the shop before the truck screeched to a stop.
Anders’ man with the flashlight moved in front of the window, probably surprised he’d almost been hit by a truck, but I shot him in the head. Then I leapt up and ran through the swirling dust and the bright yellow headlights. This was my chance to take Anders out. Gears ground as Jill tried to get the stolen truck into reverse. I moved around the back of the crumpled luxury car.
Anders was gone. He must have gotten out of the way. �
�Shit!”
Men were piling through the doorway, shooting wildly at the truck. I opened fire, trying to drive them back. Windows shattered as other gunmen opened up from outside.
“Lorenzo, come on!” Jill shouted. The big truck made a beep beep warning noise as she backed it through the wreckage of the shop. I ran to the passenger side of the truck, hopped onto the lowest step, and held on with one hand, pistol extended in the other. A thug in a suit rushed through the doorway, firing a subgun from the hip, but I clipped him and he went to his knees, rolling beneath the Mercedes.
I got the door open and climbed up into the cab. “Drive!” But the encouragement was unnecessary, because Jill had already put the hammer down. These things were built for torque and had surprisingly quick acceleration. Bullets were striking the truck. Holes appeared in our windshield.
“Hang on,” Jill warned as she backed the truck through the improvised door. There was a sudden clang. Jill screamed, a combination of pain and surprise.
I looked over. A circle of holes had appeared in the driver’s side door. Stuffing had been blown out of the seat and was floating between us. There was blood on her arm. Blood on her chest. “Jill!”
Anders had flanked us and shot her right through the door. But then we were outside. “I’m hit. I’m hit!” She had one hand on the wheel and one pressed against her side. Eyes wide, teeth clenched, she was too focused on trying to drive us backwards through the junkers to think about the pain just then. If she struck something solid enough to stop us, we were dead. “I’m fine.”
They shot Jill. “Motherfuckers!” It must have been the adrenalin because I didn’t even remember kicking out the window. Then I started shooting at anything that moved. Anders’ men were running into the lot after us, firing. I picked out each muzzle flash, aimed, and popped off a couple of rounds at each one. We were lurching and bouncing, so I probably missed a lot. These things were pretty damned fast when they weren’t attached to a trailer.
Alliance of Shadows (Dead Six Series Book 3) Page 22
