“Gunslinger! Answer up.”
Venice said, “She’s not moving, but appears to be okay.”
“Gunslinger, Gunslinger. Can you hear me?” Now the stress in the voice—it was definitely Jonathan’s—was obvious. She could hear the impact of his running footsteps in his words.
Her body felt leaden, paralyzed. By any reasonable standard, she had just committed murder. Jonathan would tell her otherwise—that the larger cause justified the sacrifice—but that wouldn’t change the facts. She knew the elements of the law, and if presented with these facts—an armed trespasser kills the owner of the trespassed property—the most junior prosecutor in the most backward jurisdiction in the country would walk away with a conviction without even breaking a sweat.
“Gail! Are you all right?”
She slapped her transmit button. “I’m fine. He’s dead.”
And Ryan Nasbe would die if she didn’t get her ass in gear and do something. There’d be plenty of time to beat herself up later. The sentry would be dead forever, after all.
She took off at a run again, her GPS taking her directly to the spot where they’d cut the wire. She scaled the fence, vaulted to the other side, and then headed for the truck.
“Mother Hen, this is Gail.” She couldn’t bring herself to use her Gunslinger handle. Not now. “Are the cars all gone?”
“Negative, but I saw the Nasbe boy get loaded into a white pickup truck. He appears to be hurting badly. His truck has left.”
“Any obvious response to the gunshots?” Jonathan asked.
“Nothing I can see,” Venice said.
“Gunslinger, hold your position at the vehicle. We’ll be with you in three minutes.”
I don’t have three minutes
, she didn’t say. In fact, she didn’t say anything. She had a job to do. Doing it right, she decided, meant not waiting for anyone.
She found the truck right where they’d left it along the side of the narrow road, its doors unlocked, keys in the ignition.
“Gunslinger, Scorpion. Did you copy?”
She hesitated for an instant, and then pressed the transmit button. “I copied,” she said. “But I’m not waiting. They’re leaving now. I’m following. I’ll report back what I find.”
The engine turned on the first crank, and two seconds later, she was on her way to somewhere.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SIX
“How’s that plan working for you now, Boss?” Boxers poked as they arrived at their parking spot to find the truck gone. His chest heaved for air.
“Well, what do you expect?” Jonathan poked back. “As slow as you run, they could’ve gotten to Ohio before you got to the fence.” In addition to the limitations brought by size and girth, Boxers had adopted a titanium rod for a femur after some unpleasantness while in the employ of Uncle Sam.
Without discussing a plan, they started walking down the road in the direction of the Dodge’s skid marks. “God had to make you fast to compensate for bein’ so small.”
Jonathan laughed.
They kept to the middle of the road as they walked because it was faster. On a bright night like this, out in the open, it was in many ways easier to see without night vision than with it, so Jonathan lifted the lenses out of the way. He’d have done it a minute ago, but Boxers beat him to it, and it was never a good idea to let the Big Guy think that you were imitating him.
“So, do you think she bolted on us?” Boxers asked. His tone was light, but Jonathan knew it was a serious question.
“No, she’s following them.”
They walked in silence. Their years together had imbued Jonathan with the ability to read his friend’s mind. He knew what was coming, and he knew that Boxers was twitchy as hell just thinking the thoughts.
“Hey, Boss, I’ve got a question for you,” he said at last.
Jonathan glanced over at him.
“It’s about Gail.”
“What about her?”
Boxers cleared his throat, readjusted his M4 against his vest. “Look, I know you two are close. I think you think that other people don’t know, but it’s pretty obvious—”
“Get to the question, Box.”
“Yeah, well.” He cleared his throat again. “Do you think she’s really up to all this?”
“Which ‘all this’ are you talking about?” Jonathan knew the answer, but there was something enticing about prolonging the discomfort.
“Look, I know she’s great at door crashing, and she can track down evidence like nobody’s business.”
“But?”
Another throat clearing. “Well, she’s, you know, a cop.”
“Not anymore.”
“I mean in her blood,” Boxers said. “I mean at the same level where you and I are soldiers. First and last.”
“You’re asking if she’s trustworthy? If she’ll do her job?”
“If she’ll do her job without hesitating.”
Jonathan craned his neck to look at the Big Guy. “She killed the sentry a few minutes ago.”
“Well,” Boxers hedged.
“She killed him. Shot him dead.”
It was Boxers’ turn to look incredulous. “Were you listening to the same radio traffic I was?”
“She shot him.”
“Right. About thirty seconds after you would have.”
“We weren’t there,” Jonathan said. “It’s not for us to judge.”
“Oh, really? Seems to me that I’m one of the first to get drilled if she screws up.”
Jonathan felt his blood pressure rising. “Careful, Box.” “Careful about what? I’m not talking about Gail the person, I’m talking about Gail the operative.”
Jonathan let silence reign for a minute or more. “I have the same concerns, okay?” he said, finally. “Warrants and probable cause are part of her DNA, and that’s a potential hazard to us. Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“Don’t treat me like I’m the bad guy here, Dig. We live and die as a team. This ain’t personal. Not toward anyone.”
Jonathan let it go.
“They’ve headed into the compound,” Gail announced on the radio. “The whole parade of cars went in there.”
Jonathan keyed his mike. “Where are you?”
“On my way to pick you up.”
Eight minutes later, they were outside the gate where Gail had seen the tail end of the motorcade disappear into the night. They sat in the Dodge, engine and lights off, watching.
“These guys love their fences,” Boxers said. As before, this one was chain link with barbed wire.
All three of them peered through digitally enhanced night optics. Jonathan concentrated on the construction of the gate leading to the interior of the compound. “Did you see them open the gate?” he asked Gail.
“It was already open when I got here,” she said. “Looked to me like it opened outward.”
“As any well-designed security gate should,” Jonathan mused aloud. He was becoming more impressed with the sophistication of the operation up here, and being impressed was not good. “Any blockades or blocks on the far side?”
“None that I saw. Traffic was flowing through at the time, though, so if they had any, they would have been down or disabled.”
Of course they would
, Jonathan thought. It had been a stupid question.
“I count three sentries at the gate ,” Boxers said. He looked at his watch. “It’s ten till eight. How do you want to handle this?”
“Without a lot of subtlety,” he said. Then he gave them the details.
Christyne no longer felt human. Consumed by grief and crushed under the weight of total exhaustion, she felt drained not only of energy and will, but of life. When the hands finally fell upon her and sat her up, she barely felt them.
“Stand for us,” a female voice said.
She stood. If they’d told her to fly, she’d have flown.
They supported her—braced her, really—as the bonds on her ankles and knees were sheared.
“Spread your feet apart, please,” the female said. “We need you to find your balance.” Clearly to someone else, she said, “Get the blindfold off.”
More manhandling. This time, everything was made more complicated by Christyne’s hair, which apparently was tangled in whatever they were removing from her eyes.
“She’s tall,” a second voice said. This one was male, and he seemed to be explaining his difficulty in removing the tape from her eyes. It was definitely tape. She could tell by the tearing sound.
They’d killed her son. These terrible, terrible people had killed the sweetest boy in the world, and Christyne had done nothing to stop them. Nothing they could do from this point on—literally
nothing
, including burning her at the stake— could possibly hurt more than that. And all because of . . .
what
?
What had she done—what could anyone do—to justify this level of cruelty?
The last strip of tape pulled painfully at her eyebrows and eyelashes. She yelped, but no one cared. When she opened her eyes, she tried to focus anywhere else, but there was no fighting the temptation to see that which she dreaded seeing. Almost involuntarily, she shifted her eyes to the floor, where she fully expected to see Ryan’s remains.
Instead, she saw only a blood smear. On an altar, it seemed. Truly, this terrible place was a church. What level of blasphemy must that speak to?
“How can you do this to us?” she asked the woman who stood closest to her.
“I don’t expect you to understand,” the woman said.
“Do not speak to her!” a voice boomed from the back of the room. Christyne jumped at the noise, but so did her captor, whose eyes snapped away from Christyne’s face and down to the business of removing the rest of her bonds. The man who had just boomed his command stood in the middle of the center aisle, his hands on his hips. He wore a black robe that covered his entire body, from shoulders to floor.
When her hands were free, Christyne brought them around to the front, and she was aghast at how much they had swollen.
“You there,” the robed man said. “Stand tall.”
The words triggered a memory in Christyne how Ryan would have popped off to someone who had spoken to him like that. God bless Ryan, ever prideful. Forever dead. Christyne started to cry.
And she stood tall.
“Take off your clothes,” the man said.
“No way,” Ryan said. “I’m not taking off my clothes for you, you perv.”
Even as he said the words, though, he was already shrugging out of what was left of his sweater and shirt. “Why are we doing this?” he asked.
“Soon enough, it will be very clear,” Brother Zebediah said. They’d driven back into the compound, but stopped at a different little house from the one in which he and his mom had been imprisoned. It was the same design, but this one looked more lived-in than theirs. It had well-worn furniture, and there appeared to be books on the shelves along the walls. It was hard to tell in the dim light of the kerosene lamps.
“Where is my mother?” he asked. “Is she all right? She had nothing to do with the killing.”
Brother Zebediah remained focused on the wall just beyond Ryan. He and Sister Colleen appeared none too comfortable with their assigned duties. They both made a show of not watching him while in fact they watched him carefully.
Bare-chested now, he sat on the sofa to unlace his shoes. His hands were trembling, and tears spilled from his lids. This was wrong. This was so terribly, terribly wrong. If he hadn’t messed up his escape, they’d be away from this god-awful place. Instead, he’d made everything worse.
With the laces undone, he pulled his Nikes off with his opposite feet. Trembling miserably, he stood and unfastened his jeans, letting them drop as a puddle of fabric to the floor. Cold and exposed, he stood there before his captors in his boxers and socks, covering himself as best he could, his left arm supporting his throbbing right.
“Good thing I wore clean underwear,” he joked. Anything to preserve a little dignity.
“Those, too,” Sister Colleen said.
C
HAPTER
T
WENTY-SEVEN
Gail drove the Dodge pickup to the front gate with Jonathan in the shotgun seat and Boxers coiled out of sight in the flatbed. She pulled to a stop just outside the gate. The wheels had barely stopped turning when Jonathan had his door open and was stepping out.
A sentry hit them in the eyes with a supernova of a flashlight beam. “Stay in the vehicle, please,” the sentry said.
“Get that thing out of my face,” Jonathan barked. He’d learned long ago that the right tone of voice caused people to obey. It was instinctive.
The light dropped away. The guard approached him, while another walked up to Gail’s door.
“You know the protocol,” Jonathan’s sentry said. “You stay—”
“Now,” Jonathan said. In unison, he and Gail leveled their sidearms at the foreheads of their respective prey. In the same instant, Boxers rose to his full height in the flatbed and leveled his M4 at the startled guard on the far side of the fence.
“Don’t move!” Boxers yelled. The command carried the tacit promise to kill if he was not obeyed.
“Listen to the man,” Jonathan said to his guard. “You twitch, you die. Gunslinger?”
“He’s frozen,” she said.
He didn’t bother to ask Boxers. The absence of a gunshot spoke for itself.
“Thank you,” Jonathan said to the guard closest to him. Like sentries everywhere, this one was a kid, maybe twenty-three. His eyes were one-hundred-percent focused on the muzzle of Jonathan’s .45. “What’s your name, son?” He kept his tone commanding yet understanding.
“You shouldn’t be here,” the kid said.
“Well, sometimes shit happens. I asked your name.”
“Put your hands down!” Boxers yelled to his guy on the other side of the fence. “Just let ’em dangle, and don’t move.”
Jonathan’s kid darted his eyes up to the sound.
“Look at me, son,” Jonathan said. “What’s your name?”
“I am Brother Jonah.”
“Gunslinger?”
“Mine is Brother James,” Gail said.
“Lots of brothers and sisters,” Jonathan said. “Must be a big family.” He gave a rueful smile that was intended to intimidate. The kid took a step back. “Don’t bolt on me, Brother Jonah. You have a very good chance of living tonight. That’s not so true of your colleagues. You should count your blessings.”
Brother Jonah nodded. “I do, sir. Every day.” He seemed to be stating a fact, not being flippant.
“Here’s what I want you to do,” Jonathan said. He talked him through the process of taking two giant steps back and then lying face down on the ground so that Jonathan could zip-tie his hands behind his back, and his ankles together.
They repeated the procedure for the guard on Gail’s side, and then together Jonathan and Gail approached the guard on the far side of the gate, taking care to leave a clear fire lane for Boxers’ rifle if it came to that.
“And what’s your name, son?” Jonathan asked. Taking a look at the guard’s face, he had to suppress a laugh. Standing there in the wash of the pickup’s lights, with Boxers’ muzzle light bathing his face, the kid gave a whole new meaning to the expression “deer caught in the headlights.”
“I am Brother David,” he said. “Please don’t shoot me.”
“Don’t make me and I won’t,” Jonathan said. “That’s a promise. Now, I want you to approach very slowly and unlock the gate.”
“The man out there says he’ll shoot me if I move.”
“Not now. Not that I’m here.”
“Does he know that?”
Jonathan sighed. “Big Guy!” he called, louder than a whisper, but not quite a shout. “Tell Brother David that it’s okay to move.”
“As long as he’s careful, he’ll be okay,” Boxers replied. From behind the lights, and filtered through his fear, he must have sounded like the voice of God to the kid.
“You heard him,” Jonathan said. “Move smartly, please.”
Brother David did as he was told. He produced a key from the pocket of his coat, slipped it into the massive padlock, and slipped the loop out of the hasp.
“Throw that away,” Jonathan said. “Into the woods.”
He heaved the heavy lock in an underhand arc that made it disappear into the night. After that, they zipped him up like the others, disarmed him, and dragged him to safety on the far side of the gate’s swing arc. He laid the guard face-first in the mulch, and then planted his knee between his shoulder blades.
“I haven’t hurt you yet, have I?” Jonathan asked.
Brother David shook his head. “No, sir. Well, your knee hurts some, sir.”
“I guess I’m making a point,” Jonathan said. “You need to know that I am capable of hurting you a great deal. Do believe that, son?”
His emphatic nod looked more like a spasm.
“Okay, then the way to avoid pain is to answer one question.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And if you lie to me, I will come back here and cripple you.”
“They’re assembling in the parade field, sir,” Brother David said. “That’s where the executions will happen.”
They made Christyne strip naked before they gave her a white gown to wear. Gown overstated it, actually; it was more like a muumuu, with slots for her head and her arms. Sleeveless and stark white, the cover reached to her ankles. A cluster of people watched her—men, mostly, but a couple of women, as well. Christyne wondered if the women were there just to keep the men from hurting her. One of the women, herself dressed in black garb with her face covered in the manner of an Arab peasant, actually helped her don the simple garment, holding the openings wide so that it would slide easily over her body.
“She is ready,” the dresser said.
Christyne realized that the garment wasn’t a gown or a muumuu. It was a burial shroud.
Her stomach knotted, and she started to cry. “Why are you doing this?” she whispered to her dresser. Part of her believed that after nonviolent physical contact as mundane as helping another person dress, there might be a vein of kindness to be tapped.
“Very well,” said the man from the aisle. “Tie her hands. It’s time to proceed.”
Christyne felt panic boil in her core. She tried to focus on options she might have, but nothing materialized for her. All she saw was bleakness and death. This was the payback for showing kindness to a girl on a cold winter night. How could that possibly be right?
If it’s possible to tie someone’s hands gently, that’s what they did. Christyne stood unmoving. She didn’t fight and she didn’t squirm. They took her arms one at a time, brought them behind her back, and wrapped them with what felt like nylon rope, smooth against her skin.
What would Boomer do?
she thought. He probably had nowhere near the superhuman capabilities that she had dreamed up for him as she imagined his exploits overseas. He’d be devastated when he heard about what happened to his family. When he did, the people responsible for this misery had better plan for short futures.
Boomer had his faults and he had his weaknesses, but his sense of loyalty was second to none. Ditto his sense of vengeance.
She just wished that she would be around to see it all unfold.
When Ryan’s face crystallized in her mind, it arrived without preamble or even active thought. She saw him climbing out the window of their terrible little cell and looking back at her, wishing that there were a way to take her along.
He’d always been a protective boy. A happy boy, but with his dark side. When she realized that she was already thinking of him in the past tense, misery washed over her and she began to cry.
Outside, a motor cranked and caught. An instant later, the night burned white.
The man in the aisle reached behind his neck and lifted a hood over his face, covering everything but his eyes. He looked like an executioner.
“Bring her to me,” he said.
In the distance, the horizon erupted in light.
“What the hell is that?” Jonathan said, pointing.
“Looks like they found themselves a generator,” Boxers said from behind the wheel. He’d relieved Gail of her driving duties for a lot of reasons, but mostly because Boxers
always
drove. He was extremely good at it, and he got a little whiny when someone else was behind the wheel. Throw in the lack of legroom in the crew cab’s backseat, and it only made sense.
“Scorpion, this is Mother Hen. Be advised, the Web page is up and broadcasting. At this point, all I see is an empty stage, but something clearly is about to happen. The tracer now shows that the transmission is originating in Islamabad.”
“Which means nothing,” Jonathan radioed back. This explained the blast of light in the distance. “Definitely a generator,” he said to the team.
“I think we should take that away from them,” Boxers said.
“Mother Hen, Scorpion. Is there any chance we can get support from SkysEye? A little satellite imagery would go a long way.”
“I’ve spoken to the powers that be, and I’m told they’re moving heaven and earth, but that it’s a major retasking. He is not hopeful.”
A new voice boomed on the channel, “The generator is located on the northern perimeter of the parade ground. In front but slightly to the east of the stairs leading to the main assembly hall.”
“Who the hell is that?” Boxers asked the truck, not on the radio.
Jonathan smiled. He recognized the voice of the scared kid from last night’s wake-up call. “He’s a friend from the NSA,” Jonathan said.
“A friend from the NSA,” Boxers mocked. “I believe they call that an oxymoron.”
The role of American intelligence services in special operations has always been tenuous, at best. The intel you received from State was generally skewed toward pacifism, and that from the CIA tended toward hawkishness. Jonathan had learned to depend most heavily on intel from the Defense Intelligence Agency, which had a tactical bent. DIA was all about the good guys kicking the bad guys’ asses.
The stuff from NSA was always . . . careful. That this kid with the rod up his ass was still hanging in there made Jonathan proud.
“Who is that on the channel?” Venice said, pouncing on the interruption.
“Let it go, Mother Hen,” Jonathan said. He turned in his seat and asked Gail, “How long do you need to take out the generator?”
“Once we find it, it’ll be the absolute distance divided by two thousand feet per second.”
Boxers asked, “Is the plan changing?”
“Nope. The plan is to get the Nasbes out alive,” Jonathan replied. “No matter what the cost.”
“That sounds like a goal, not a plan,” Gail said from the back.
“It’s the best I can do. Rescue, evade, and adapt, and not necessarily in that order.” Even as he said the words, he heard their emptiness, and he dialed back. “Once you take out the generator, we’ll have darkness on our side. We’ll also have the element of surprise.”
“Scorpion, Mother Hen. I’ve got video of Christyne Nasbe being led out of the main building—the assembly hall, or church, or whatever. It’s now designated Building Alpha. She’s in some kind of ceremonial garb, looks like nothing underneath. Barefoot. Nothing good can possibly come from this. How close are you to being in position?”
Boxers’ foot leaned more heavily on the accelerator.
The sudden noise and light startled Ryan. He wondered where it was coming from when the whole town—or whatever you call this place—had no electricity, but then he recognized the unique sound of a generator, probably like the one that Coach Jackson brought in for track practices after dark.
After they’d made him strip naked, Sister Colleen had helped him pull this piece-of-shit tunic over his head—he refused to think of it as a dress—and thread his arms through the corresponding holes.
As far as he could tell, this was all about humiliation and discomfort. The former was obvious, but the latter, the discomfort, was all about making sure that he stayed cold all the time. His bare feet felt like ice blocks against the floor, despite the heat from the wood stove, and the rest was breezy as hell.
“Why are you doing this?” When they didn’t answer—
again
—he promised himself never to ask the question again.
When he was finally ensconced in his ridiculous outfit, two guards took turns holding him at gunpoint while the other walked to a closet and donned black KKK robes with a weird facial twist to the hoods. They looked like Arab terrorists. The fact that their faces were covered told him that there was going to be another ceremony of some sort, maybe for another television camera, and the fact that he was wearing this . . . thing, told him that it was not going to go well for him.