Prime (17 page)

TWENTY-FOUR

Sasha was only vaguely aware of the intrusion, at least up until
Rainer’s pistol thundered right beside her.

The noise was so loud it hurt her ears, and
she jerked involuntarily in her seat. The blonde woman standing in the doorway
jerked as well, stumbling backward as Rainer’s bullet punched into her chest.
Rainer yanked Sasha to her feet and dragged her away from the table…away from
her laptop.

Panic flashed through her, but it
wasn’t fear for her life that set her heart pounding. “No!” she shrieked. “Not
now. Let me finish!”

She couldn’t tell if she said it
out loud; all she could hear was a ringing in her ears. Rainer gave no
indication that he heard her. Holding her in front of him like a shield, he
began advancing toward the doorway. The fingers of his left hand were curled
around her biceps, but his right hand, which rested on her shoulder, no longer
held a pistol. Instead, he clutched a round green object, about the size of a
baseball—a hand grenade with the safety pin already removed.

No…let me finish
.

This time there were no words.
Sasha tried to look back, to reach out for the laptop, but her captor gave her
a rough shake, asserting his dominance.

I was so close
.

The variables swirled out of
control in her head, screaming like white noise.

A large man dragged the
blonde—Sasha couldn’t tell if the woman was still alive—out of the doorway,
retreating from before Rainer, who advanced relentlessly behind his human
shield. Rainer thrust her out into the open, staying behind cover. Sasha saw
the large man and the blonde woman, as well as three other men, one of whom she
recognized from Iraq. The woman was struggling free of the big man’s
grip—evidently, she was not seriously injured, but the others had their guns
aimed at the doorway…at her.

“Bravo, Jack,” Rainer called out
from behind her. “You made it. I’m impressed. And you got yourself some new
Mouseketeers. I guess there were some openings on the team.”

When no one answered his taunt, he
continued, “I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that you’ve got orders to keep
this one alive, right? Otherwise, this place would already be a smoking crater.
I’m right, aren’t I? Let’s test it and see.”

Sasha was nudged forward again,
out into the open.

One of the men spoke. He was the
one Sasha recognized. “Kevin, I want to keep her alive only a little bit more
than I want you dead, so I guess it’s your lucky day. Let her go, and that will
be the end of it.”

Rainer laughed mirthlessly. “You
know, I almost believe you, Jack. You’ve got this whole ‘honor’ thing going on;
it’s why I didn’t even think about asking you to join me for this paycheck. No,
I think I’ll do this my way.” He waggled the hand grenade. “You might want to
stand back.”

Sasha was abruptly yanked
backward, down the hallway, deeper into the building’s interior. She caught a
last glimpse of the five commandos before Rainer pulled her through another
doorway and into a stairwell leading up. His earlier deliberate stride now gave
way to a haste that seemed to verge on panic. He darted up the stairs, two at a
time, nearly dragging Sasha along, but she barely noticed. The only thing that
mattered to her was the ever-increasing distance between
herself
and the answer she had been so close to uncovering.

“You have to let me go back,” she
managed to say.
“My computer.”

“I’ll get you a new one.” Rainer
didn’t slow. He reached the second-story landing and burst through the door
into a hallway that was nearly identical to the one below. He pulled her to the
second door on the right and threw it open. Sasha couldn’t see past him, but
she heard him say: “Richard! Company’s here.”

“Who?”

Sasha recognized the voice of
Rainer’s employer.

“Does it matter? We need to get
out of here.” Rainer dragged Sasha to another door and barked commands to his
two co-conspirators, ordering them to join him. Then he hastened back into the
stairwell, hauling her up the next flight, with the other men close behind.

“Where are we going?” Richard
demanded.

Rainer answered without looking
back.
“The helicopter.
They’ll probably be covering it
with snipers, but they won’t do anything to jeopardize her.” Then he added, “I
hope.”

Sasha’s eyes found Richard’s. “I
have to go back,” she pleaded. “My computer is down there.”

The man just shook his head.

“You don’t understand. The answers
are on that computer. I’ve almost figured it out.”

The man’s face registered dismay,
but only for a second. “Nothing we can do about that now. We can start over
when we’re safely away from here.”

Rainer finally seemed to
acknowledge her concerns. He paused at the top of the stairs. “There might be
information on that computer that they can use against us.”

Richard shrugged. “It won’t
matter. They’re not getting out of here alive.”

He took a phone from his pocket,
and after dialing, he held it to his ear. “We’re being attacked,” he said,
without preamble. “Turn them loose.”

TWENTY-FIVE

King watched Rainer disappear through the doorway with a cold knot of
rage in his gut, but his anger wasn’t directed at the escaping traitor; he was
mad at himself.

A litany of his failures ticked off in his
head.
We moved too soon… Should have
gotten more
intel
…
Should’ve planned
better
.

None of those measures would have really made
a difference, and waiting would only have given Rainer a chance to slip away
completely. No, this wasn’t a failure of planning or leadership; it was just
plain bad luck, but that didn’t lessen the sting.

I
should’ve just taken the shot, consequences be damned.

Glowering, he shouldered his weapon and
started forward, moving toward the door through which his quarry had vanished.

“Jack?” an anxious voice called from behind
him. It was Tremblay. “Talk to us, boss. What’s the plan?”

King ignored him and kept moving. Rainer had
to be stopped, no matter what.

“Jack?
Sigler?
King!”

That stopped him.

King.

He wasn’t just Jack Sigler, pissed-off Delta
shooter. He was King; he was their leader.

He pivoted on his heel. He saw, as if for the
first time, Zelda leaning against the wall, struggling to breathe. “Legend, are
you hit?”

Zelda winced, but there was fire in her eyes.
“The vest stopped it. I’ve been hit harder than that.” She managed a grin and
added, “Not by you.”

“Then on your feet,
soldier.
Eastwood, you
and Legend head back and bring the van up. Juggernaut, Bob…you’re with me.
We’re gonna get what we came for.”

A flicker of disappointment crossed Zelda’s
pained visage—she probably thought he was benching her and blamed herself for
not having taken out Rainer when she’d had the chance—but she grabbed Somers’s
shoulder and pulled herself erect.

Tremblay likewise seemed heartened by King’s
decisiveness. He and Silent Bob quickly caught up to their team leader and
cautiously followed him through the doorway.

King swept the muzzle of his MP5 up the
stairwell and checked for blind spots before heading up the steps. At the
second floor landing, he waited for the other two operators to line up behind
him before throwing the door open and moving through. His finger was tight
against the trigger, ready to shoot, no matter who was on the receiving end or
what the ultimate consequences were, but the hallway was vacant.

“Shit.”

He knew Rainer was too smart to retreat to a
dead end, but he also knew that the turncoat Delta officer had not come here
alone; were his co-conspirators waiting behind one of the closed doors, waiting
to ambush them?

Only one way to find out
.

Before he could approach the first door, a
voice sounded from his radio receiver. “This is Nighteyes. We’ve got activity
at Building—”

The transmission broke off in mid sentence,
and for a moment, King feared that somehow the sniper had been discovered, but
then Shin’s voice came back. “I don’t even know how to describe this. You guys
need to get out of there right now.”

King heard the urgency in the man’s voice,
but turning back wasn’t an option he was prepared to consider. The mission came
first, and the mission was to take down Kevin Rainer and the other traitors;
his own survival was a secondary priority.

He advanced to the first door, and as soon as
Tremblay and Silent Bob were in place, he threw the door open and moved in. As
before, he was poised to fire at the first target of opportunity, but nothing
could have prepared him for what he saw in that room.

Unlike the ramshackle interiors they had
encountered in every other corner of the compound, this space had been
scrupulously maintained. The walls and ceiling, and even the floor, were a
brilliant, almost sterile, white. The effect was intensified by the bright
overhead lights that blazed down with sun-like intensity. The place looked
clean enough to be a surgical operating room.

Which was exactly what it
was.

There were four people in the room. Two wore
blue surgical scrubs, complete with caps and face masks that hid all clues to
their identity. The other two were laid out on gurneys. One of the latter was
barely visible; just pale white arms and legs protruding from a tent of blue
fabric, transfixed in the glare of the lights; he was the focus of the
surgeons’ attention.

The last person in the room was male, a
dark-skinned Burmese man in his early twenties or perhaps younger. He lay naked
on a stretcher, which had been pushed to one side of the room. He was unmoving,
as if unconscious, but it was plainly evident that he wasn’t simply sleeping.
His upper torso had been opened like the petals of a rose. King caught only a
momentary glimpse into the man’s chest cavity, but it was enough to see that
there was a dark bloody void where his heart and lungs ought to have been.

King had seen terrible things in his life—children
blown apart by IEDs and American serviceman horribly burned in fuel
explosions—but those raw savage experiences were nothing alongside the
sanitized, precise and utterly inhuman evil he now beheld.

He brought his gaze back to the surgeon who
stood above the patient—the recipient of the organs that had been taken from the
body of the unwilling donor. The doctor’s eyes were fixed on King’s gun, but
after a moment they flickered up to meet his gaze. He raised his hands in a
supplicating gesture, his latex gloves painted with blood.

“I don’t know what you want,” the man said in
a voice that was unnaturally calm. “But you have to leave, now.”

“Or what?”
The question came from Tremblay, but it had
none of his customary humor. He was as shocked as King.

“Or my patient will die,” was the haughty
answer.

King took a menacing step forward, close
enough to see inside the chest cavity of the patient; the stolen body parts lay
flaccid and seemingly lifeless within. Only now was King aware of the complex
web of tubes that sprouted from the supine form, connecting the man to IV drips
and bypass machines—devices that were keeping the man’s blood oxygenated and
flowing while the surgeons methodically spliced in the hijacked organs.

The patient’s face was hidden beneath a
shroud of blue cloth, but King didn’t need to make a positive identification to
know what sort of person lay on the operating table: a true human predator,
someone who bought the organs of another living human to sustain his own
miserable life, as casually as someone might order a cheeseburger.

“And why the fuck should I care about him?” King
asked.

Parker’s voice abruptly sounded in King’s
ear.
“Movement on the roof.
They’re going for the
helo… It’s Sasha! I have eyes on Sasha.”

There seemed to be an unasked question there,
but it took King a moment to disengage from the horror unfolding right in front
of him.
Roof?
Helo
?
Then the picture came into focus;
Rainer was about to slip through his fingers again.

For the briefest instant, he considered
telling Parker to take out the helicopter. A burst of some 7.62 millimeter
rounds into its turbine engines would probably disable it and leave their foe
trapped on the roof.

Trapped… Backed into a corner… There was no
telling what Rainer might do if that happened.

King keyed his mic. “Deep
Blue
,
this is King. Will you be able to track that helicopter?”

There was a brief delay before the mystery
figure answered, with no small measure of urgency: “Affirmative, King. You’ve
done all you can there. Abort the mission and exfil immediately.”

Done
all you can… Abort…
King
felt his earlier self-directed rage rising again, but he fought it back.
“Roger. Irish, hold your fire. Let them go.”

On the other side of the operating table, the
surgeon relaxed visibly, as if sensing that King’s radio transmission signaled
the end of the incursion. “What we’re doing has nothing to do with whatever it
is you want. Please, just go, so I can get back to saving this man.”

King adjusted his aim ever so slightly, and
squeezed off a single shot. The only noise from the suppressed MP5 was a faint
metallic click as the internal mechanism ejected the spent brass casing and
ratcheted another round into the firing chamber. The sound of the surgeon,
screaming in pain and disbelief, as the nine-millimeter bullet punched through
the palm of his right hand, was much more satisfying.

King threw a mock salute with the smoking
muzzle of the weapon. “Good luck with that.”