The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Boxed Set, page 33
part #1 of Stefan Mendoza Trilogy Series
I saw the light and felt the pressure before the heat.
The blast blew out the window at the same time it launched me through. Ravi and the bomb shield took the worst of it. And my arms. But it was a fairly small blast, meant to kill those closest to the bed. It was something the human parts of me could survive.
But the fall…
Chapter 32
Falling was surprisingly peaceful. My eyes were offline, the world gone black. Icy rain pelted me and no doubt smothered the flames that had found purchase on my clothes. My ears rang from the explosion pressure, so I couldn’t really hear the air whistling past as I fell. I was aware of the stench of singed flesh and burning hair—Ravi’s, not mine—and the metallic taste of blood. That was mine by the feel of my lips: numb, puffy.
Time passed, but it felt stretched and knocked wildly askew. Having your feet and back against nothing—feeling nothing but a corpse pulled tight like a lover—played tricks with my mind, especially without visual reference.
I tumbled through the crazy world of my Korean dungeon. Razor claws that shredded flesh from just-stitched stumps. Iron bars that cracked bone. Tears that could no more be shed than surrender or pleas for merciful death given voice.
Dong’s words echoed in my private darkness. “Who do you work for?”
The darkness was long strands of black hair, wrapping around me like a python. Choking the life out of me. Snapping bone. Strangling.
“Who do you work for?”
My world slipping away. My freedom. I couldn’t scream despite the pain and fury.
“Who do you work for?”
“No one, motherfucker.” I was sure I screamed it. I felt it in my chest—rumbling, rasping.
My eyes came back online.
The sky was a gray so dark, it could have been a moonless night. Smoke and fire climbed skyward from a hole in the wall far above. Blue and red flashes—police bar lights—reflected off that wall and smoke. The bomb shield’s blast panels fluttered above, chasing me down. Ravi’s corpse trailed smoked.
I twisted. The man-made lake was blacker than the sky above, closing. Closing.
Impact.
The air went out of me in lazy, fat bubbles. Ravi carried me deeper, still testing me even beyond death. Dark water became thick, black hair that tugged and entangled. Its bone-numbing cold was a pressure against my chest. I shivered, felt the descent stop with a gentle bump.
I needed to swim. Find the bubbles and go where they went.
I pushed Ravi’s body away and tried to orient myself. If I wasn’t so desperate for air, I could blow a few bubbles and follow them up, but my lungs were empty. Or I could relax and hope my body had some sort of buoyancy despite the lack of air and the cybernetic limbs and reinforced bones.
No such luck.
My eyes! Infrared. Ultraviolet. Something had to work!
Something had stopped my descent. The lake bottom! How far away now? I kicked out, flailed with my arms.
Dead vegetation, mud.
I needed to breathe. I needed to get out of the lethal cold.
I got both feet under me, squatted, and kicked off.
Rising. Kicking. Swimming through darkness. Fighting against the urge to breathe.
Light! The fire in Weaver’s room!
I broke the surface, sucked in the wintry air.
More lights off to my left. Red. Blue. White.
Police.
The fire was barely visible now. What had there been to feed it? The curtains, the bedding? Weaver’s body? Gillian? The sprinkler system would work, with or without power.
I spun around and kicked for the opposite side of the lake, then quickly realized I had to get out. Right then. The water would kill me if I wasn’t careful.
The water became shallow, then I was at the shore, hauling myself out, staying low to the ground. I needed a plan. My data device was gone. My cybernetic implant was trashed. There was no way to reach the rest of the team, assuming they were still alive. Had Stovall found them after they’d come out of hiding?
Voices. Lights flashing in the rain.
I had my bearings now, so I crawled for the parking garage as fast as I could. Weaver’s SUVs, Gillian’s car, even a random vehicle—I needed something to get me out of the area.
A couple police in rain slickers stood at lake’s edge maybe thirty-five or forty feet away, running flashlights across the lake surface. Their voices were a muddy jumble that could have come from fifty yards away. They squatted and threw legs over the edge, then climbed down to the slippery lakeside. I scrambled up and out, rolled clear, then low-walked to the nearest car.
Emergency vehicles were everywhere. People huddled at the far end of the parking lot, taking shelter under tarps and umbrellas.
All eyes were on the blown-out window. A team had to be inside the hospital, heading up.
I got up and ran for the parking garage, sliding on the thin film of ice that still remained over frozen pools in the covered areas. I followed the stairs up to the secure floor, then back down one level. Somewhere in there, my hearing started to return. At first it was the dull boom of my steps, but before long, I could make out the scrape of shoe sole on concrete.
The spiral ramp led up to the secure level and stopped at the gate. With power off, the cameras weren’t going to capture my image, and the alarms were offline. I dropped to the concrete, pushed the gate up, and slid under.
Getting back up was harder than dropping down. My abdomen and back cramped up. I was shivering, cramping, and it threatened to leave me immobile. I rubbed my sides and tried again from all fours. That worked, but the cramps still worked at me. I needed to warm up soon.
I found Gillian’s car. It was a basic enough model that I knew several methods for overcoming its security. I went with the crudest, popping the biometrics module from the undercarriage beneath the driver’s door. That rendered the vehicle security-free, which would have to do.
Without security, the door opened easily enough. I climbed in and turned the seat heater on; the quick wave of heat along the length of my back was ecstasy.
Just as I reached for the car’s start button, I spotted the beam of a flashlight. I dropped down so that only one eye was above the bottom of the window. Two police officers came into view, a man and a woman, both of them large in their rain slickers. A woman trailed them—black, late thirties or early forties, round cheeks, full lips with red lipstick.
Lyndsey. She wore a sand-colored coat over another brown pantsuit.
They moved toward the SUVs, running flashlights along the windows and leaning in to search the interior, then they moved to the other vehicles.
No way could I avoid detection.
There were only three of them, but they all had guns, and I was unarmed.
They separated as they came to the row of vehicles the car was in, and began calling out updates. Names. They were identifying who might be missing. It didn’t seem likely they had found the bodies already.
Lyndsey circled the car next to the one I was in. Could I trust her? I couldn’t see any other choice.
I rapped the window with a knuckle.
She spun, reached for her gun, then stopped. She turned toward the two cops and set her gun hand on the car roof. “All right,” she said. “I’ll get the last few. If you could get me an update on the limo up on the roof, that would be wonderful.”
The cops glanced at each other, then headed back the way they’d come.
Lyndsey waited a minute, then she walked to the other side of the car. I opened the door. Without the shades, I could see that her eyes were a brown the shade of a washed-out teakwood, and there were puffy bags beneath them. As she dropped into the seat, those eyes stayed locked with mine.
“Pretty ugly ride for an Agency man,” she said.
“Former Agency man.”
“Got your gift.” She snorted when my eyebrows went up. “Maribel Clavel. You sure know how to treat a lady nice.”
“She wasn’t a lady.”
Lyndsey leaned closer and sniffed at me. “You in that explosion?”
“Outer edge of it.” I held up my hands, examining them for the first time. Mud stained the creases. Sections of skin had been burned. My coat was darkened the length of my forearms.
“You want to tell me what happened?”
“I guessed wrong. You’re going to find Ravi Lingam’s body in the lake.”
“And Senator Weaver?”
“Dead, up in the hospital room. Along with Gillian McFarland, the senator’s daughter.”
She rocked in the seat for a moment. “How’d you guess wrong?”
“I thought Ravi was…the mole. It’s complicated.”
“So it was Weaver’s kid? I told you she was a dangerous kid.”
“Yeah.” The shakes hit me again. I could tell myself it was Dong’s doing, that I would’ve seen through Gillian’s manipulation without the interference. Maybe I would have.
“Police say the fire department just radioed about finding a lot of charred bodies about seventy miles north of here. A big mansion, blown up and burned to the ground. Two more bodies with multiple bullet wounds out on the lawn, sprawled out near a couple air limos like the one sitting up on the hospital roof. Are they going to find your fingerprints anywhere?”
“No. You’ll find Dong Jianjun inside the mansion. The others were members of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. And a big Greek guy I don’t know. Nikos. Their muscle.”
She shook her head. “You get out of bed wrong today?”
“Self-defense. They hired me for a job. I refused.”
Those teakwood-colored eyes tracked across my face. “What now?”
“I need to disappear. Stovall’s still out there. I don’t know where my team is, but if they’re alive they know to hide.”
She pulled her shades out of the interior pocket of her coat and slipped them on. “You could always turn state’s evidence, testify against him. Folks find out the Agency’s up to illegal activities, lots of things would change.”
I started the car and turned the heat on full. “I would never live long enough to testify. Neither would Stovall.”
“You be careful out there, Mendoza.” She popped the door open and got out. “Lots of people’re going to be gunning for you.”
I squeezed the steering wheel. “I’ll be waiting.”
* * *
THE END
Gone Dark
Book 2 of The Stefan Mendoza Trilogy
P R Adams
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise, without written permission from the author.
GONE DARK
Copyright © 2018 P R Adams
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.
Cover by Justin Adams
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For Josh. Thanks for the encouragement. Keep creating.
Chapter 1
They found me somewhere east of Denver, in the dead of a silent night. It was a freakish whiteout blizzard, the sort where the sky becomes a white mass in your headlights, and black specks are all you know of the darkness. Each time I crested a rise, there should have been a grid of sparkling towers to guide me into the city, and to the south a flickering blanket where the common folk huddled inside lesser buildings.
In the storm, the only light was my own.
I had swapped out Gillian’s car in Hays, Kansas. Maybe that had bought me time. The SUV I’d taken could have passed for a hunter’s stand on wheels—flat camouflage paint and matching crude-sewn upholstery and cargo webbing, winter tires, sports suspension. It was old and probably close to illegal for city driving, and I had no doubt the owner would find the swap inadequate. Life sucks like that sometimes.
When a scoped rifle had slid out from under the front seat, I christened the vehicle Huntergasma. Under the dome light, the rifle looked like a civil war relic, older than the SUV but better maintained: polished walnut-brown wood, even more polished barrel.
Huntergasma was more amenable to my frame—six foot, thick chest, and cybernetic limbs that felt a little long after more than a day driving Gillian’s little car. Maybe that’s why I almost didn't notice the wash of ultraviolet through the windows at first. When I did, I stuck my head out the passenger side window. Snow clung to my face, ghostly against the pale copper of my skin and black of my hair.
Despite the hyper-masculine smells of sweat and beer that permeated the cab, Gillian’s scent clung to my clothes as tenaciously as the memories of our time together—condensed now, frantic groping and thrusting. She had reduced me to an animal, and that was all that remained now. The car managed the slushy road with a hypnotizing hum intermittently shattered by the thud of snow clumps breaking free from the wheel well and undercarriage. It was just enough to drown out the voices in my head. Voices that told me I'd gone too far, taken too big a risk, kicked the wrong hornet's nest.
The ultraviolet beam swept through the snow again, brighter than my lights.
I leaned out again, and sniffed, as if my prominent nose—the pride of the Mendelsohn side of my mother’s family, despite mine being crooked—might be able to pick out something in the blizzard that my cybernetic eyes couldn’t.
The thermal outline glowed: a helicopter. A powerful one, with a fearless pilot.
Or remote-piloted.
Whichever one, the aircraft was at its limits, and the pilot knew it. It was gone as quickly as it appeared.
Which meant they had people in the area already.
On the ground.
I accelerated. Plowing through heavy, wet snow made the SUV sluggish and sloppy, but as I accelerated, the feeling became closer to hydroplaning. There was no sense of control, only a marginal connection to the road. It was more like aiming than driving. An exit notice flashed off to the right, blurry in the whiteout. I pulled a map up on the data device I’d taken from one of my caches—a hidey-hole on the West Virginia border—and spotted what might be trees, and took my foot off the accelerator. I went from feeling a loss of control to a trapped feeling.
I swung wide to turn onto the exit road, slipped into the oncoming lane, then tried to use the piled snow to drop some speed. About twenty feet down the exit road, I had everything under control again.
No worries. No one else would be out in this weather.
Just me and the Agency's assassins.
Dark shapes rose on either side of the highway: trees. I accelerated and pulled off the road, plowing through the snow until I was at the edge of the trees. It was a nice, obvious trail. I pulled the rifle out from beneath the seat, searched around until I found an empty magazine and a box of rounds. Those went into my jacket pockets as I hopped out of the SUV and headed north, staying close to the trees and minimizing my tracks. After the foul smell of the vehicle, the air was fresh and sweet. About eighty steps from the SUV, I squatted and covered myself with snow, flipping from thermographic to normal vision while watching the road.
And waited.
They arrived about an hour after the helicopter spotted me. Two cars, black against the snow, heat rolling off them as they crawled to a stop along the side of the road, about a hundred feet east of the SUV’s position. I counted three per car, glowing like miniature suns in my thermo-optics, trailing yellow waves of heat from the warm interior. They fanned out, two high-stepping through the snow to the north, two to the south, two heading for the SUV. Boots, a flash of jeans, and dark pants beneath long trench coats.
No hand signals, which meant they were connected over some sort of radio. Then again, there were no high-end optics if they hadn’t spotted me, and it didn’t seem like I was being tracked through biometric signals.
That said two things: not high-end agency operators, and almost certainly a rushed gathering. Mercenaries.
I stayed still other than the occasional shiver and watched for my opportunity.
The two approaching the SUV finally pulled out weapons: compact submachine guns. When they pulled the guns, the wind puffed out their trench coats, revealing tight shirts. Covered by body armor. They screwed something over the barrels: suppressors. Long magazines were slapped into place.
That changed things.
I brought the rifle up slowly, got another feel for it. Remington, 30.06, semiautomatic. It was the sort of gun my Uncle Martin would’ve liked. The magazine could hold twenty, but there had only been eight in the ammo box. Not a lot of margin for error. There rarely was when the Agency hired a crew to clean up a mess, and that’s exactly what this looked to be.
My first targets would need to be the pair moving north. They were almost parallel to my position and still hadn’t moved west much. Drop them, then the two approaching the SUV, then the two farther south.
Easy.
I sighted on the closest—long, pale hair floating like a halo. Smaller than the other, who seemed bulky, like a bodybuilder. Not just smaller than the bodybuilder, smallest of the six, actually. Slender, but I’d noticed a modest flare at the hips when the trench coat had whipped open.
Female. Smaller head. Tougher shot.
The rifle cracked, deafening in the silence.
She crumpled, misting a bright flare of gore over the dark snow.
Her partner dropped flat.
I spun around, but the two approaching the SUV were low, keeping the frame between us. To the south, one of the assassins had already dropped as well. The other seemed confused, weapon raised, swiveling, scanning my area.
Some sort of optics? Modifications? A device to triangulate sound?
I sighted on the lower part of the head, which widened out. Lantern-jawed, perhaps. Or comms gear. The rifle crack was followed almost immediately by him tottering, then falling sideways.
