by Blake Banner
To my left was the reception area. To my right there was a T-junction. Coming from that general direction I could hear the soft murmur of voices with the occasional burst of canned laughter. It was the unmistakable sound of a common room or a night watchman’s room.
I moved silently to the corner and peered around. I saw what I had hoped I would see. A door ajar, and through it the ape who’d knocked me down in Banks’ office. I wondered if his three pals were there. I hoped they were.
I crossed the passage, went in and closed the door behind me. They were there, all four of them. It was like when you were a kid and you got that battery operated machine gun, and they remembered to include the batteries.
I smiled nicely. “Hello, boys.”
The big Russian-looking guy was on the left, by the coffee machine, in the kitchen area. The other three were sitting around a coffee table. A small, portable TV was playing reruns of sitcoms. The Aryan guy was reading Guns’n’Ammo and the other two, the black guy with the mustache and the lobotomized Stallone, were playing cards. The lobotomy had his back to me. He looked around and said, “Huh?”
I reached him in two strides, grabbed his hair in my left hand, shoved forward, and smashed my knuckles into the base of his skull. I felt the vertebra dislodge and knew he wouldn’t be a problem. I let go and he slumped across the table, drooling.
Then the other three were moving. Logically, I should have disposed of the big Russian-looking guy first while the other two negotiated the coffee table, but I wanted him last. So I took a step to my left and kicked the table hard into the Aryan’s shins. I know it hurt because he screamed and cursed. It also destabilized the black guy with the moustache. He stood for a moment, waving his arms. I knew Ivan the Terrible was moving at me across the room, so I took another step, grabbed the black guy’s wrist in both my hands, moved under his arm and twisted savagely. He had to bend forward to avoid dislocating his shoulder, but when he did that, I kicked him hard in the forehead. Twice. I let go and he fell forward, to join his Stallone-Clone pal on the table. That was about four hundred and forty pounds the Aryan had to dislodge before he could get out.
By now the Russian Bear was upon me, calling me names my mother would not have approved of, and grabbing my head in both his hands. Grabbing is always a mistake because it opens your guard to your opponent, and occupies at least two of your most lethal weapons. While he held me I delivered three crosses to his jaw. He was tough and didn’t go down. But he was human and he let go and staggered back. While he was still dazed, I kicked him hard in the nuts and he went down on his knees. I figured that was a good place for him and left him there.
I turned. The Aryan had managed to extricate himself from the coffee table and his two pals, and was coming at me like a Valkyrie on steroids. He wanted to grab me too. Everybody wanted to grab me that day. As he lunged, I stepped inside his guard and rammed the heel of my right hand up into the tip of his jaw. It stopped him dead and his eye rolled. As he began to fall, I took his neck in an arm lock and twisted savagely. It broke his neck and I knew he wouldn’t be giving anybody a kicking ever again. That was one good thing that happened that day.
I turned back to Ivan, the Russian Bear, who was probably from Idaho or Detroit for all I knew. I signaled him to get to his feet. He stared at me. He had murder in his eyes. I said, “You’re pretty good when there are four of you and you catch a guy buy surprise. Let’s see how good you are on a level playing field.”
He wasn’t very good. He roared and charged me, with his arms outstretched, to grab hold of me and take me down. I stepped to the left, my right hand went to his right wrist and my left to the elbow. I pulled on the wrist and pushed on the elbow and he sprawled on the floor. I didn’t waste any more time. I slammed the blade of my foot into the back of his neck and broke it.
The debt was paid in full, with interest. I reached in his pocket and found a large bunch of keys. I figured he would probably have one to the main entrance, otherwise I would have to resort to more primitive methods. On the way, I stopped at Banks’ office and kicked in the door. I found a notepad and a pen and wrote a message for her. It just said, “I’ll be back for you.”
As I put down the pen, something caught my eye. It was a small, highly polished walnut box with business cards in it. I took one out and examined it. Lara Banks MD, Director of the Richard John Erickson Institute for Research in Psycho-Social Dynamics. Beneath it was the address of the clinic, and then her private address, 2501 Pennsylvania Avenue, in D.C.
I put the card in my pocket, let myself out, found Nurse Rogers’ car, and set off for Echo Bay.
But I had underestimated the security at the Institute. I had assumed that they relied on the four male nurses to keep the drugged, pliant inmates quiet during the night. Obviously that wasn’t the case, or maybe they had laid on special security because I was there. I would never know. The fact was that as I moved along County Road 56, through the dense forest in the pitch black, within a couple of minutes I became aware of headlamps in my rearview mirror, and they were gaining on me fast.
I yanked on the hand brake and spun the wheel, then floored the pedal and accelerated into the oncoming lights. It was a gamble, but I had no time to waste. I was on the wrong side of the road, and he was not on a suicide mission. Sooner or later he was going to veer to his left. When he did, we were going to dance.
He was chicken. He moved to the left when he was twenty feet away. I moved to the middle of the road, yanked on the brake again and spun the wheel left. My trunk arced around and smashed into the side of the oncoming car. I could see now it was a black, foreign SUV.
There was a screaming of brakes on blacktop and the second car, a Q5, smashed into the back of the first one. I already had the door open and jumped out as the Focus skidded to a halt. I ran to the front car and wrenched open the driver’s door. The airbag was deflating and the driver looked stunned. He looked more stunned when I smashed my fist into his temple. His pal was gaping at me from the passenger seat as I reached under his jacket and found his weapon. The penny dropped too late and he started fumbling for his own piece. I put a single round through his head and it was all over for him.
Meanwhile, the two guys in the Q5 had staggered out with their automatics drawn. There was no contest. They were badly shaken and concussed. I shot each one in the head. Then I approached their bodies and knelt to take their guns and one of their watches. I checked the time. It was nine PM, Thursday the 17th of May. I had fifteen hours.
I returned to the Focus. The trunk was dented and scratched, but other than that, it was undamaged.
I climbed in, fired her up, and started again for the town of Maplecrest. From there, I figured it would be south toward the Hudson, where I’d pick up the I-87. I’d make Echo Bay by eleven-thirty, with maybe thirteen hours to go.
Maplecrest was a tiny collection of houses and large lawns along a riverbank with a crossroads at the far end. At the crossroads, I turned left onto County Road 40 and burned rubber south like I had all the hounds of hell biting at my ass. Most of the way I was in thick forest. There was no moon and the only light was from my headlamps, which cast bizarre and wild shadows from the trees into the dense undergrowth. As I drove, I tried to figure out what had happened to me. Ben—Omega—wanted Marni alive, because they needed her father’s research. They believed their best chance of getting hold of Marni was through me, and they needed me to do that before twelve noon the next day, because she and Gibbons were going to blow the whistle on Omega in front of the UN—and the whole world—in the General Assembly Hall.
That much was clear. What was not clear, what was giving me a headache, was why the hell he had drugged me and put me in that crazy institute. Clearly the big thing for Omega was to turn people into ants. The one theme that ran through all their research and experimentation was the minimizing of individuality to make people obedient and pliant. The sun beetles, the Biosphere 3 research, and the Richard John Erickson Institute were all abou
t the same thing.
But with less than a week to go before she presented her paper at the conference, why the hell did he drug me and send me there when he needed me to get hold of Marni? It didn’t make sense.
My mind went back to that night. I had been tired. We had been drinking whiskey and he kept repeating the same thing, “You are a problem, Lacklan…”
I was a problem, sure, but I always had been. What had made me more of a problem then? What had made him say that? My mind was still foggy, but I struggled to rememeber. I had killed Ali, Hassan, and Aatifa. Why would that be a problem for him? Why the hell would that be a problem for Omega? What had he said? I struggled to recover the conversation. He’d said they had a part to play.
A part to play in what? Obviously in Omega’s master plan.
The obvious conclusion for any conspiracy theorist was that Omega was behind the bombing plot. But if that was the case, why? Why use me to get Marni if they were planning to kill her at the conference? Whichever way I turned it and twisted it, it didn’t make sense.
Then my mind moved on to Mclean and Jones. I could be pretty sure that I was not their favorite person in the world right then, but I had managed to send them the audio files, and I was wondering what, if anything, they would make of them. You don’t get to be a Fed by being stupid, so I could only hope they would start to investigate. But if they did, how much weight did Omega carry within the Bureau? That was an unknown quantity. They were questions I could not answer, so in the end I settled down to driving.
At Saugerties I finally merged onto the I-87 and floored the pedal. It was a hundred miles to Echo Bay. I wanted to make it within the hour.
Thirteen
I sat in the small parking lot looking across the darkened green at the large, iron gates set in the fifteen-foot wall. To add to my problems, I had jut seen a couple of guys stroll past the gates, and I was willing to bet they were armed. I was thinking about my original plan, with the rubber dingy, and muttered to myself, in a Scots accent that Rabbie Burns would probably have sneered at, “The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men, gang aft agley.”
I had missed my chance. I should have taken her that night, but I hadn’t and now I’d have to make the best of what there was. The difficulty I was having was that the easiest approach was going to be from the river, as it had been the other night, but two got you twenty that they had the area floodlit and at least two guards on the back terrace covering the sweep of lawn down to the shore. On the other hand, approaching via the gate or the wall was going to involve a fifteen-foot climb and another fifteen-foot drop, right into the arms of the patrolling guards.
To complicate things further, these were probably just rent-a-cops, and I did not want to kill them. I sighed and took the two automatics I’d taken from the apes at Maplecrest and made my way toward the shore. This time, before wading into the water, I decided to examine the small cliff where the wall ended and the river began. It was maybe twenty or twenty-five feet high, and had enough holes and ledges to offer a way up, which would bring me above the wall and maybe offer a way down. I decided it would not be an easy climb, but neither would it be impossible.
I began to pick my way up. In less than a minute, I was lying flat on the top, trying not to make a silhouette against the faint glow from across the river, and peering down into the grounds of the house. From where I lay, I could see the back terrace. They had the spots on, as I had suspected, and the lawn was floodlit. There were two guys sitting at a table, smoking and playing cards. It was a balmy night and they seemed to be comfortable and un-preoccupied. That much was good. Down the side of the house, I could see a couple more guys walking, chatting to each other in low murmurs. I lay and timed them. It took them a full five minutes to go and return. As they moved away, back toward the front of the house and the gate, I crawled down to the wall, lowered myself halfway, and jumped. I landed in a crouch and waited. Nothing happened, so I sprinted to the back terrace and walked up the sidesteps like I owned the place. The two guards looked up in surprise. I showed them one of my automatics, and put a finger to my lips. They opened their mouths and went to stand, then closed them again and sat.
I moved without hesitation and without breaking my stride. I pistol-whipped the nearest and knocked him cold, put the muzzle of the pistol in the other guy’s face to keep him quiet and delivered a left cross to his jaw that put him to sleep, too. I still had three minutes. I figured the French windows would be open to give the guards free and rapid access to the house if there was an emergency. I tried the handle and it was unlocked. But I needed the other two guards out of action before I did anything, so I moved quickly down the steps and ran after the other two. I made no attempt to be silent or to conceal myself. They came into view as I rounded the corner of the house. They were about level with the front door and about thirty feet ahead of me. Beyond them, I could see three cars parked in the driveway. As I ran, I called to them, “Hey, hold up, which one of you guys is Frank?”
They stopped and turned to face me as I drew level. There was an older guy in his fifties and a younger one in his thirties. They were frowning and the older one said, “Neither of us. Who the hell are you?”
I pulled my piece and said, “The guy who is going to blow your head off if you don’t do exactly what I say. Give me your weapons.”
They glanced at each other, and as they did that, I smacked the younger guy in the jaw with the butt of the automatic. A straight left to the chin took care of the older guy. I used their boot-laces to tie them up and their socks to gag them, and returned to the terrace, where I did the same for those two.
So far it had gone without a hitch. The next stage would not be so easy. I didn’t know if Gibbons was with there or whether she was alone. I stepped inside and closed the French windows behind me.
I was in a large drawing room. It was dark, but there was a warped checkerboard of light and shadow across the Persian rug from the glass panes in the doors. I could see a fireplace, a sofa, and a couple of big chairs. Behind them there was deep shadows. On the left there was a credenza and beyond it a door stood closed.
I crossed the room, waited, listening, and then opened the door in a single, swift movement. It didn’t creak. I moved into a passage. On my left the passage was lost in shadows and I assumed it led toward the kitchen at the back of the house. On my right there was a broad entrance hall, a large door with a fan of faintly glowing stained glass at the top, and a central wooden staircase leading to the upper floors.
Wooden stairs creak, and there is no effective technique for avoiding it, even if you’re a ninja, unless you can memorize in advance which ones creak, and where. The only way to minimize it is to keep your weight near the edge of the steps and take two or three stairs at a stride. By the time I had reached the first floor landing, the stairs had creaked half a dozen times, not loud, but not silent. I stood motionless for a full five minutes, listening, but there was nothing to hear. It seemed nobody had heard me.
I was at the center of a long corridor that ran from east to west. On my right, the stairs continued to an upper floor. Beyond them, I could make out a dog-leg which led into a further wing of the house. To my left, the passage ended with a gabled window through which dim light from the spots in the garden filtered in.
I couldn’t think of a logical reason for her to be in one place or another, and listening was telling me nothing, so I opted for the nearest rooms and decided to work through them systematically.
The first three I tried were dark, silent, and musty, and what light came in through the closed drapes showed beds and furniture covered in dust sheets. The fourth room was different. It faced the front of the house. The drapes were open and a diffuse, blue light, which I guessed was from the parking lot where I had left my car, cast dappled shadows of leaves on the glass, and on the bed. Opposite the bed there was a large wardrobe and against the far wall an armchair was angled into the corner. They were darker objects within the shadows.
; The bed was occupied. The breathing was deep and slow, but it wasn’t the labored breath of a corpulent, middle-aged man. It was the light breath of a young woman. All I could see of her was a mound of quilt, and a dark patch of hair against the pillows. I knew it was Marni, but I had to confirm it. Thinking about her breathing, I was aware that I could not hear any snoring in the house. I would have expected a man like Gibbons to snore.
Maybe I’d got lucky. Maybe he wasn’t there.
If he was there, he wasn’t asleep.
I closed the door and moved around the bed to where I could see her face. It was her. I reached down and switched on her bedside lamp. I saw her brow furrow. I hunkered down where she could see my face when she opened her eyes, and spoke softly.
“Marni, it’s me, Lacklan. I need you to open your eyes and be very quiet.”
Her eyelids fluttered and opened, and she lay staring at me. She spoke without any particular emphasis. “Lacklan…you can’t be here.”
“And yet, here I am.” I smiled and she smiled back. But after a moment, the smile faded.
“You scare me. You’re out of control. You threatened to kill Gibbons. He’s a good man. He didn’t deserve that.”
“There is so much you don’t understand, Marni, that I need to explain to you. And we haven’t got the time right now. I really need you to trust me.”
We stayed like that for a long moment, looking at each other. Then she reached out and touched my face with her fingers. “Were you really going to kill him?”
I shook my head. “I had no time to explain to him, and even if I had, he would not have listened. Right now, we have to go, Marni. There’s a bomb…”
She frowned. “Here? In this house?”
“No, tomorrow afternoon, at the UN, at noon…”
“That’s during our talk.”
“I know, baby. Will you please get up and come with me?”
