He reached the bottom of the stairwell and twisted toward the front wing’s back hall, ready to head for the science wing where Susan Lyle would be preparing his final surprise.
S
usan had gone to work following McCracken’s instructions as soon as the second series of screams had drifted up to the science wing. She had already lowered Josh into a chair with wheels on its bottom to facilitate moving him when the time came. She left him in the storage room and eased back into the lab. This lab, along with the other five on the hall, contained piped-in gas to allow for the proper completion of experiments. The spigots controlling the flow were located in the front of each room near the teacher’s high-top demonstration table. She reached the first one quickly and twisted it fast and hard. The hissing sound of escaping gas started immediately.
Then she headed for the door leading into the corridor. Another lab room with its neatly arrayed black slate tables lay directly across the hall from her, and she darted into it. The lights beyond the windows did a decent job of guiding her to the spigot and she activated its flow of gas as well.
She repeated the same process in three more of the labs and then returned to Josh to prepare him for their coming escape.
“Josh?” She shook him gently. “Josh …”
He moaned, but didn’t stir.
Holding him at the shoulders, she began wheeling the chair forward, out of the storage room and into the lab. The wheels squeaked slightly and she slowed to less than a crawl to silence them when she passed through
the doorway into the hall. There was an exit to the right at the school’s rear where McCracken said he would meet her. She started to wheel the chair down the dimly lit corridor for it as quietly as she could.
“Susan …”
The sound of McCracken softly calling her made Susan turn toward the other end of the hall near the nurse’s office. A smile lit her face in the instant before she felt an arm grip her tightly around the neck and a pistol press against her temple.
B
y the time Blaine saw the man he was too close to Susan Lyle to chance a shot. He froze in his tracks, holding his SIG in one hand and one of his final two pipe bombs in the other.
“Drop it!” the man grasping Susan commanded, and Blaine could see the fear building on her face. She had managed to get Joshua Wolfe into a desk chair that rested just behind her. “I’ll kill her!”
The desk chair seemed to be … moving. No, Blaine realized, it was Joshua Wolfe reaching out with a hand, reaching out for the man holding Susan.
Blaine let a finger dangle through the SIG’s trigger guard and crouched slowly so the man could see him place it on the floor. He had actually touched it down against the tile when Josh’s fingers closed on a strap on the man’s flak jacket and pulled.
In the same instant, Blaine snatched the SIG back up from the floor and steadied it on the figure of the man struggling to regain his grasp on Susan Lyle.
Susan ducked.
Blaine fired.
The bullet snapped the captor’s head back and spilled him atop Joshua Wolfe, toppling both of them to the floor.
“Josh!” Susan screamed.
McCracken lurched to his feet at the same time another phalanx of Group Six men appeared at the other end of the first-floor hall near the ruined lobby. He lit the fuse on the pipe bomb and hurled it toward them.
Under cover of the resulting explosion, Blaine ran toward Josh and Susan, covering the last stretch in a sideways burst of motion that allowed him to keep the head of the science wing hallway covered with the SIG. He caught the faint, sickly stench of gas seeping into the air, his plan carried out just as he had instructed. His eyes had barely met Susan Lyle’s when a sound from the head of the hall led him to twist back that way. A gunman spared by his most recent pipe bomb had risen into firing position behind the wall’s cover and opened up. Blaine snapped off four shots from the SIG to hold him and any others behind him at bay.
“In there
now
!” he ordered, gesturing toward the nearest lab on the side of the school bordered by woods.
McCracken fired five shots more to cover Susan’s short dash and then drained the rest of the clip while dragging the once-more unconscious Josh after him. Blaine slammed the door shut and pushed in the lock. He snapped home his last clip in the SIG and accepted Susan’s help in getting Josh across the room to the window overlooking the school’s playing fields. He hurled a chair through the window just as a barrage of fire cut through the door behind him.
“Get outside!” he ordered Susan, returning the fire with a quick series of shots to hold Group Six’s men at bay. “I’ll hand him to you!”
Susan climbed hurriedly through the jagged glass, tempting the shards. Her feet had barely touched the ground when McCracken hoisted Josh out and lowered his frame toward her.
“S
niper Red to Ground Leader. I have three targets in scope. Two clear. I don’t have McCracken.”
“Sniper Blue to Ground Leader. I have three targets in scope. Also two clear. No McCracken yet.”
Sinclair could scarcely believe his ears. Out of this disaster, hope for a successful finish had blossomed.
“When all three are clear, you have a go. Make sure you have McCracken locked on.
Make sure!”
“Roger that,” from Sniper Red.
“Acknowledged,” from Sniper Blue.
“G
et him away from here!”
Susan started dragging Josh across the first in a series of fields separating the school from the woods. Satisfied she was safely away, Blaine swung from the window and watched the lab door burst open.
He emptied the remainder of his SIG’s clip, scattering the gunmen back into the hall, then heaved himself through the hole in the window glass. As he hit the ground, he flicked on a lighter and touched the flame to the fuse of his final pipe bomb. McCracken had to rise to hurl it for the shattered window and never saw the red line trace his way from a concealed position in the woods beyond.
“S
niper Blue to Ground Leader. I have McCracken in the grid.”
“Roger that, Blue,” Sinclair responded. “Red, do you still have the woman and the boy?”
“Affirma—”
“Sniper Red, please say again … . Ground Leader to Sniper Red, please say again. Do you have the woman and the boy in your grid?”
No response.
“Sniper Blue, this is Ground Leader.”
“Waiting, Ground Leader.”
“Take him out.”
S
niper Blue had positioned himself in a tree providing clear view of the windows overlooking the field side of the school. He watched McCracken fly out of the window through his Zeupold night scope. McCracken stopped to hurl something back through the glass, then turned and fled.
Sniper Blue tightened his finger on the trigger and waited for the red laser beam to steady on his target before pulling. It locked on McCracken’s chest and he started to pull, intending to fire at the end point of his exhale.
The piercing bolt of pain between his shoulder blades forced the rifle barrel upward and sent the red light spinning into the overcast night. A single crack rang out before he lost his grip on the rifle and flailed for the pain in his back. His hands locked and spasmed halfway there and he dropped from the tree branch, death overtaking him before he struck the ground.
Johnny Wareagle met him there seconds later and yanked his knife from the man’s back. This was the fourth and final sniper Johnny had found and dispatched since exiting the school building. The first two had been poised on the ground, safely hidden, they thought, amidst thickets of bushes and shrubs. Eliminating the men had been as simple as finding them. The elevated positions of the third and fourth had allowed them each seventy-degree-angle sweeps of potential exit points from the front of the school building. Right where Johnny expected them to be as well.
“Sniper Blue, report,” a walkie-talkie on the final sniper’s belt whined.
“Sniper Blue, come in. Sniper Blue, do you read me?”
Johnny had just turned to look for McCracken when a horrific explosion reverberated in the stillness of the night.
A
hundred yards from the school building, Blaine felt the ear-shattering blast scorch the air, the freed gas ignited by his final pipe bomb. The pressure caught him in its grasp and hurled him forward. The ground cushioned his fall and he braced himself to withstand the blanket of heat that surged outward.
Another hundred feet away, it seemed to Susan Lyle as though someone had torn her feet out from under her. The explosion had swallowed the entire main wing of the building in a blazing orange fireball that belched black smoke in all directions. Debris leaped into the air and rained down in shards and hunks that left blackened etchings on the summer-thick grass. Secondary fires caught one after the other, forming a dull afterglow that made for insane contrast with the orange waves still lapping at the remnants of the building.
Susan felt herself to make sure she was whole. She was hot and singed, but there seemed to be no damage, just a ringing pain in her ears and the aftermath of the bright flash behind her eyeballs. The light of the flames showed Josh lying motionless on his stomach nearby.
Susan was crawling toward him when a figure emerged from the flames’ shadows, silhouetted by the smoke, appearing more as specter than substance. The figure stopped briefly to let a larger shape draw even with it. Susan watched both shadows become solid as Wareagle and McCracken approached her. In the distance a chorus of sirens wailed, drawing closer to the school.
“You get her, Indian,” Susan heard McCracken say. “I’ll get the boy.” She felt herself hoisted effortlessly to her feet and supported there by Johnny Wareagle. Seconds later Blaine stopped next to her, Joshua Wolfe cradled in his arms and his eyes gesturing toward the woods dead ahead.
“Come on, Doc. We’re getting out of here.”
GROUP SIX, FRIDAY, 1:00 A.M.
“T
ell me this night wasn’t a total loss, Doctor,” Fuchs said, disturbing Haslanger’s work at the computer.”Tell me the information on that chip we found inside the candy dish in the boy’s room was what we were hoping for.”
“Our computers are analyzing the formula now,” Haslanger told him, angling his chair the colonel’s way.
“But it is the original formula for CLAIR. You’ve confirmed that much, anyway.”
“Everything points to that fact, yes.”
Fuchs felt himself to relax. His eyes wandered to Haslanger’s monitor screen. “I assume that is what you’re analyzing now.”
“No, it’s not,” Haslanger said, and turned the screen so Fuchs could have a look. “This is what Joshua Wolfe was working on during his lengthy stay in our labs this afternoon. He thought he erased the data but our computers were too smart for him.”
“I should think, Doctor, that you would be better advised to concern yourself with the CLAIR formula.”
“This is all a part of it. He wanted to fix what went wrong with CLAIR in Cambridge.”
“We found the vial he produced when we captured him in the garage,” Fuchs recalled. “It was on the table during his interrogation.”
“But we searched the room following his escape and failed to find it. That means it left here when he did.”
“I fail to see—”
“I’ll tell you what I see,” Haslanger interrupted, pointing at the monitor. “What I see in these theorems and equations has absolutely
nothing
to do with reworking the CLAIR formula to assure there are no more tragedies.” Haslanger paused and the computer continued to whir softly. “In other words, Joshua Wolfe lied. I don’t know what was in that vial he took out of here, Colonel, but it doesn’t do what he told us it did.”
A
fter a twenty-minute walk through the woods, McCracken and the others found themselves in a tangle of residential streets in Middle Island. Johnny Wareagle had taken Joshua Wolfe from Blaine and carried him the whole way, not even breathing hard for the effort when he at last lowered him in the shadow of a backyard fence. At that time of night, any vehicle left outdoors was ripe for the taking. Given the circumstances, Blaine selected a minivan for the ample room it provided for the boy. He also pried three additional sets of license plates off other cars to change at regular intervals along the way.
“How’s he doing?” Blaine asked Susan Lyle.
“His vitals are still stable. Beyond that, I can’t tell.” She looked up. “We need to get him to a hospital.”
Blaine shook his head. “Sorry, Doc. Our friend Colonel Fuchs will have alerted every hospital within five hundred of miles of here by now, expecting us to do exactly that.”
“You talk like Fuchs is in charge of an army.”
“It’s the country’s army and he’s got access to it. Oh, not the country you know; it’s the country the Indian and I have learned to survive in. More like the underbelly where it’s always so dark nobody can tell what’s really going on.”
“You can.”
“I know the territory.”
Susan looked down at Josh. “We’ve still got to get him to a hospital.” This time Blaine nodded. “I’m gonna make a phone call soon, see if I can set a few things straight. Then when we get to a hospital, the same army will be on
our
side.”
Susan accepted the proposal with a shrug.
The first leg of the journey lasted forty minutes and brought them to a pay phone outside a closed convenience store that advertised it was open twenty-four hours a day.
“Morning, Sal,” Blaine said to Belamo.
“How’d it go at Group Six?”
“Different than expected. No Haslanger to show for my efforts. Two others in his place.”
“Par for the course.”
“Not this time. One of them’s Harry Lime’s nonexistent son in the flesh.”
“Wow!”
“That’s not all. Lots more to tell, but no sense wasting time you could better spend getting me safe haven in Washington. It’s time to pull the plug on Group Six, end this here and now.”
“You start the process already?”
“Their facility’s looked better and they lost some people tonight.”
“A shame.”
“Lots
of people. Combat freelance types.”
“Certain to cause some complications.”
“Just wanted you to know.”
“Call me back in an hour. I’ll have your reservations by then.”
“R
eservations canceled,” Belamo greeted an hour later.
“You’re a lousy travel agent, Sal,” Blaine replied.
“And you’re a lousy storyteller, ’cording to certain parties in the D. of C. Seems they got you pinned for wasting a whole mess of dudes and doing several million dollars of damage to Group Six. Makes you persona non grata in the worst way. People down here figure you’re on one of your crusades.”
“In other words, no help from the inside.”
“Shit, boss, right now the only ticket I could book is to your own hanging. They got you pegged bad this time. Lots of people are out looking already. Wouldn’t be surprised to see you on a wanted poster at this rate.”
“Or a milk carton, Sal, the way these men operate.”
“Was me, I’d drop the whole thing.”
“No, you wouldn’t.”
“You’re right,” Sal followed quickly, his smile easy to picture. “Just thought I’d try it out.”
Blaine thought of Joshua Wolfe. “What about hospitals, Sal? We still need one.”
“Big problem there. Case you didn’t catch my drift before, you’re a wanted man. They got a description of your lady friend and the kid—sketches, too—distributed to every hospital and clinic with a published address. You walk into any one of them with a red flag around your neck, and you might as well hoist yourself up the pole.”
“Doesn’t leave me a lot of choices.”
“Let me work on it, boss. Meanwhile, you keep yourself moving and call in when you get somewhere.”
S
usan didn’t take the news well, especially that going to a hospital was out of the question.
“I can’t do anything more for him without the proper diagnostic equipment.”
“You’d be able to do even less if Group Six gets their hands on him again, Doc. I’ve got a bad reputation in some quarters, and Fuchs and those above him are using that to their full advantage. They’ve got half the people that matter thinking I’m on a crusade against Group Six and the other half figuring someone hired the Indian and me to trash the place. That means no safe haven until things get sorted out. That means we keep playing by my rules.”
“I have a suggestion, Blainey,” said Johnny Wareagle.
T
he fat man was already on his usual bench when Thurman arrived at the park. It was too early in the morning for the pigeons, only a few strays gathering at the promise of food dangling from the fat man’s lap. As Thurman approached, he could see the fat man was eating picnic-style out of a wicker basket, an ample napkin tucked neatly across the front of his jacket.
“I knew you’d be late,” the fat man greeted. “Thought I’d make myself some sandwiches to while away the time.” At that he slid a neatly wrapped package out toward Thurman. “May I tempt you?”
“No, thanks.”
“A shame. I have quite a selection. Not sandwiches exactly, but
smorrebrod
: just a bottom slice of bread, no top, but well garnished, I assure you. Originated in Denmark. There is much we can learn from those beyond the borders of this country we are so determined to preserve.” He probed his hand through the basket. “Let’s see, I still have a roast chicken, a Danish cheese; here’s lumpfish caviar.” The fat man looked up at Thurman almost sadly. “I suppose a ham and egg might have been more to your liking.”
“You’ve heard the news.”
“Word of Group Six’s mishap is all over Washington,” the fat man said happily, raising a fresh
smorrebrod
toward his mouth. “That’s why I’m celebrating. Perhaps McCracken deserves a bonus for his efforts.”
“Fuchs isn’t giving up. I just got a call myself,” Thurman told him,
“looking for specialists to take up the chase. That’s why I’m late.”
“What did you tell them?”
“That I was already employed.”
The fat man chomped off a hefty bite, chewed quickly and swallowed. “A pity I can’t interest you in the fringe benefits.”
“McCracken’s isolated. We couldn’t have asked for more.”
“Not quite.” The fat man dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “The trick now is to find him.”