Limitless (23 page)

“Och, you’re a smug thing, aren’t you.” Not even a whiff of suggestion, just a flat statement. “Do you have any idea how many officers I lost today?”

“Less than you would have lost if I hadn’t been here,” I said, no sugar added. “Do you have any idea how many pints of blood and pounds of flesh I’ve parted with since
I’ve
been here?”

“Well, then walk away, why don’t you?” she sneered. It fit the moment.

“I don’t cut and run,” I said, “and I damned sure don’t
get
cut and then run.”

“I don’t want you anywhere near this case,” she said.

“Well, that’s brilliant,” I said. “Got anyone else who stands a chance against these maniacs? Or is your strategy to just keep overwhelming this guy with dead cops until he cracks under the strain of stepping over their bodies?”

Her relative calm shattered and her mask deteriorated into shock as her jaw fell. She said nothing for ten seconds, then twenty. After a minute I stopped counting, and she just continued to stare at me in mute shock.

“Well, shit,” I said, “looks like I broke her.”

“I’m not broken,” she said, voice back at normal volume, though slightly brittle. “Though it occurs to me to make mention of the fact that you’ve yet to make much of a dent in these conspirators yourself when you’ve gone up against them. Why do you think that would change if you were to face them again? Perhaps this time they’d actually finish the job proper and leave you dead—and me explaining to your ambassador how I got you killed.”

“Try and pretend he wouldn’t be overjoyed at the news,” I said and thumped my knuckles down on her desk. “If they can do that to me, imagine what they’ll do to all those poor, unarmed police officers you’ve got out on the streets.”

“We have armed response teams standing by,” she said, a little iron in her spine causing her to straighten, “they’re ready and eager to get their own back.”

“I hope they kill this guy, I truly do,” I said. “But trust me when I tell you that I’m a better than fair shot with a pistol and he sidestepped my bullets like I’d lobbed a slow, underhand softball at him. Whoever he is, your villain is not playing by amateur rules. He’s a pro. He’s big league, not bush league. He’s shown you that he’s serious and willing, and I would submit to you that the only thing scarier than a man like that is the fact that he’s got two accomplices that seem to cover his every weakness.” He had to have weaknesses. Everyone did.

She walked to the window behind her. It looked like she was dragging her way over, she moved so slowly. “Wexford came in before you got back to explain the political situation to me.” She glanced over her shoulder. “They’re going to vote metahumans right out of the country in line with the rest of the European Union. After what happened today, we have no enforcement, and the politicians have no tolerance. They’re going to start expelling every one of you within the next few days.” Her expression softened.

“Well, I hope your bad guy follows that law,” I said dryly, “but his past history leads me to believe that much like every other bad guy, he’s going to continue to hang around until he either gets what he wants or you catch him.”

“Or kill him?” Marshwin asked.

“Or kill him,” I said, but I did not meet her eyes.

She started to say something else, but the door burst open to reveal Webster standing there, hanging on the knob. I could see Marshwin ready to unload on him but she held back long enough for him to silence her burgeoning critique. “Someone just called 999 claiming they’d escaped a captor that was torturing them.”

I straightened, my knuckles coming off the desk so fast they left indentations in the wood. “Janus?”

Webster shook his head slowly. “It’s a she. Said her name is Angela Tewkesbury.”

Chapter 53

We rolled up next to a warehouse in South London, the red brick crumbling and fading. There were other cop cars filling the street, their lights off and their sirens silent. I counted three SWAT vans, and I knew they weren’t empty just by looking at how low they rested on the shocks. There was another warehouse behind us, deep blue corrugated sides showing in the light of a dim street lamp. It was the only one working in view.

I took one look at Angela Tewkesbury and knew she was the real deal. I suck with names but I’m pretty decent with faces, and I knew her right off. Brunette, scared, one of the secretarial pool at old Omega in the days when they’d been the only game in town for protecting metas. She’d been a secretary at the Agency back home for a few months, too, and done some decent work if I recalled correctly.

Now she was missing chunks of flesh. She had a hand raised, pointing down a nearby street, and her fingers were shaking as she made the gesture.

I’ve been told it doesn’t take much to piss me off, but something about seeing Angela Tewkesbury partially skinned alive, sitting in front of me… well… it just put me right into the red zone.

I didn’t remember opening the door and getting out, but I was standing in front of her before I knew it, and she let out a low gasp. “Ms. Nealon!”

“Angela,” I said. I looked down at her arm and saw one-inch squares of skin missing up and down both arms. She should have been in shock. “You’re going to be all right.”

“They’ve got Janus,” she said, nearly breathless. “They’re… they’re torturing him.” Her lips became a thin line and her eyes scrunched up. “It’s terrible.”

“We’re going to get him back,” I promised. We were. I was going to do what was colloquially referred to as “laying an ass whooping” on this scheming, torturing clown. “How far?”

“Three blocks, big warehouse windows up high,” she said, her lip quivering. “I just ran when I got out.” Her hand landed on my sleeve, tugging it like a weight. “He helped me get out—Janus did. My powers are… they’re weak. He boosted my emotion, helped me use my luck to sway my odds to unlock the chains they had me in…”

“Janus did that?” I stared down at her.

“He told me to just go when I tried to unlock his.” She wasn’t crying, but I suspected it was only because she’d probably lost every tear in her body while she’d been screaming in pain. “I had nothing left, and he knew it. He told me to get out, and I did.”

“Smart move,” I said, gently tugging my hand free of hers. “You did the right thing, getting the police here.” I felt the lines of my face harden. “Now it’s time for me to do what I do best.”

She blinked at me. “What’s that?”

I stared down at her arm. “Make these bastards bleed a gallon for every drop they cost you.”

Chapter 54

Philip was having such a pleasant dream. He knew it was a dream, of course, by that all-too-pleasant way that dreams have of commanding your attention through the most unusual things. It surely wouldn’t hang together in any logical way once he was awake, but he was enjoying it while he was in it, submerged like it was a bath of warm feelings.

Then, rather unexpectedly, he was shaken awake.

“She’s gone,” Liliana announced as Philip tried and failed to fight off the bleary feelings that clouded his mind.

“Who—?” Philip asked, his head in a fog. He was dimly aware that Liliana was still shaking him, damn the woman, and if she didn’t stop soon he’d feel compelled to slap her damned head right off her shoulders. The irritation rose.

“The girl,” Liliana said in her hard, flat way. “Angela. She’s gone.”

Philip felt the stirs of the world’s pieces falling back together around him. Some of what she said had started to make sense. “Gone where? She was bound in chains and hung from the ceiling.”

“She’s
gone
,” Liliana said with a final shake that jolted Philip into full consciousness. “Not in the warehouse.”

Philip sprang up from his cot with a rattle of the metal links that kept the light mattress in the frame. He walked past Liliana to the door and opened it, looking out. He reached out and got a sense of the place, felt for what lay out there, sure that it was the same, dull, boring future that had existed for this place the last time he’d felt for it, just as he was about to go to bed—

A feeling slammed into his gut like a spear and jabbed right into his middle. Cold and sharp, it bled him of his warmth. How—?

“As I said, she’s gone,” Liliana said. “Antonio is preparing to go after her—”

“The police are already on their way,” Philip said. “So is Sienna Nealon.” He could see the spectral figure of her drifting through the warehouse. The ghost of Christmas future. “She’ll be here in moments.”

“Fight or flight?” Liliana asked. She had a way of boiling it down.

“Flight,” Philip said in an instant. He could see the police response even now, and it involved dozens of men with weapons, firing happily into the dark of the warehouse and filling the air with far too many bullets for even him to dodge. Assuming he could have seen his own future in there anywhere.

Liliana bristled. “We’ve hurt them once today already.”

“And we shall again,” Philip said and touched her shoulder just briefly. “But we’re not going to do it by standing toe to toe with them in some crass, pugilistic contest. Our encounters must be neatly structured to our advantage.” He met her eyes, those soulless pools, and repressed his shudder. “Antonio!” he called. “We’re leaving. Now.”

He heard the movement of the bomb maker in the darkness near the torture room. “I can be ready in less than five.”

Philip mentally blessed a man who lived his life so much like a rolling stone. “Exit plan one.” He looked from the darkness where the bomb maker stood to the darkness that filled Liliana’s eyes. “No reason not to give them a few rounded slaps to the face while we’re fleeing, is there?”

Chapter 55

The bomb squad was on the scene, trying to help by planning things out, but after about twenty minutes of listening to all the various jurisdictions whipping their junk out and peeing for distance and to mark territory, I got bored of it and went smashing through the upper windows of the warehouse.

Yes, it was probably dumb. I did not care.

At home, backed by the power and support of my own agency, I would have waited and planned out an assault that hit all the appropriate entrances while minimizing the risk to everyone involved.

The problem was that I was on foreign soil, the people I was working with didn’t realize how powerless they were, and the bomb squad was intelligently tentative but insanely slow. I could read the writing on the wall for this one, and I predicted that Mr. Ski Mask and his crazy cohorts were going to have plenty of time to wake up to a nice, leisurely breakfast of bacon and beans—in North London, if they were so disposed, with enough time to wander back and take a luxuriant afternoon nap followed by a late dinner downtown before the boys in blue were comfortable with moving.

It wasn’t like I could blame them; they’d lost their sniper teams to explosives they hadn’t even seen. Being cautious was prudent.

As I went crashing through the spray-painted windows at the top of the warehouse, I had to concede that prudence was a suit I was extremely short in.

I didn’t land on the concrete floor, figuring I’d be safer not wandering anywhere Antonio Ruelle might have placed a tripwire. Once the glass finished shattering and falling, I listened as I hovered in the air.

Not a sound. Not a drip, not the hum of a fluorescent light, not the tick of a ventilation system, nothing.

I almost thought I’d smashed into the wrong warehouse, but then I smelled the blood.

It hit me in a wave, heavy and thick, like the time I’d been with federal agents when they’d raided a slaughterhouse thinking a suspected meta was hiding out among the crew that worked the killing floor. It had turned out to be a guy who’d done a little too much cocaine and made a few errors of judgment while on the stuff. Like parking his car in a fashion that had led an overly jumpy police department to believe he’d thrown it through a local shop’s front edifice rather than judiciously applying the handbrake and sliding through the plate glass window sideways. I didn’t blame them for that, and I’d even told him how much I’d admired his non-sober driving skills. With a fist to the head. He didn’t shake that off, the menace to society.

But I digress. The place smelled of blood, and I followed my nose to a square-shaped room with thick walls. I drifted down and pushed open the steel door that was barely cracked open, almost afraid of what I would find.

It was not pretty, not one little bit of it. There was beauty in the human body, wonder in the blood vessels that pumped oxygenated liquid from the lungs to the heart, down to the extremities and up once more for trip after trip. I had long admired the curves and lines, the muscles and tendons that made us work as we did.

But I admired them when they were all together, in working order.

What I found in that room looked like a jigsaw puzzle that had been taken asunder and would never fit back together, no matter how many medical examiners stood by with their books debating the placement of the pieces that remained.

I heard something, in the far distance, and strained my ears as I drifted out the door of the slaughtering room. There was no reason to remain, no other entrances or exits, and the only thing left to keep me there was a sickening sense of revulsion. I left. Left and closed the door behind me in the faint and foolish hope that I could leave what I’d seen behind the door.

I moved toward the sound. An office was raised above the floor, a series of metal stairs leading up to it. I drifted slowly toward it, as though I was too afraid that rushing would set something off. I could hear police sirens just outside now, and I knew my hasty action had prompted them to move. And probably to curse me. I was pretty sure of that last one, anyway.

I entered the office, its wood door and glass window propped open like it was waiting for me. From within I could see into the other side of the warehouse. There were a few vehicles parked there and little else of note. Garage doors that stretched to the ceiling were closed firm, and I stood there in the silence, waiting for my senses to give me a clue of where to go next.