Smokescreen (21 page)

“You’re Enhanced, Special Agent Chace,” the man went on. “But you’re going to have to decide if you can handle what you’re about to face.”

“I can get a team—”

“And they’ll kill Dalton and the boy.”

Christie thought frantically. She was at her best when she was thinking on her feet. “It doesn’t have to be a team from here. I can get another team.”

“By the time you convince your superiors you know what’s going on, it’ll be too late.”

He’s right,
Christie realized grimly. Even if she’d left at the same time that Dalton had, she might be too late.

“You waited too long. They’ve probably already killed Dalton.”

“No,” the man said calmly. “Dalton has an ace up his
sleeve. He walked into the meeting with the prototype and a bomb. If he has to, he’ll negotiate Michael’s safety—”

“And sacrifice himself,” Christie said, knowing Dalton would do exactly that.

“He said you had a choice to make, Special Agent Chace.”

“What choice?”

“He said to tell you that you’re the clutch hitter. You can wait outside till he sends Michael to you for safekeeping, or you can swing for the fences.”

“Do you know where Dalton is?”

“On the move at the present. He’s already gotten through his initial meeting.”

“How are you tracking him?”

“Satellite link on his heartbeat signature. We scanned him into the recognition system. Visual tracking backing that up.”

Christie was familiar with the tracking ops. She’d used them before. “You’ve got some high-end tech.”

“I’m all about the tech.”

“Me, too,” Christie said. “And when I’ve had the chance, I’ve always swung for the fences.”

S
ammy Bao was not a happy man.

Dalton stood in front of the Bronze Tiger lieutenant and listened to the barrage of Chinese invective Bao unleashed over the Enhanced communication link the Triad man carried inside his head. Whoever was on the other end of the connection wasn’t happy either.

Standing in the center of a circle of armed men felt alien and strange to Dalton. Enemies actively seeking his life had surrounded him on the battlefield before, but there had always been terrain to work with, other Rangers he could count on. Now, there was nothing, only the empty expanse of the fifth floor of the building presently under construction near Washington, D.C.’s downtown area.

Dalton stood with the suitcase he’d carried from the lab compound. His left hand felt almost numb with the weight, but he felt better for it. The Seek-n-Fire prototype didn’t weigh all that much, but the plastic explosives he’d filled the rest of the suitcase around the device did.

The building’s fifth floor, where he stood, was just a shell. Interior work to subdivide the floor into quadrants with an intersection of hallways had begun, but skeletal walls occupied the space under the rooftop. The
building was on a tight deadline for completion. This morning, however, the construction crews had been kept away to give the Bronze Tigers a chance to complete their transaction.

But time was working against Dalton and he knew it. He spoke over the rapid-fire Chinese. “Bao.”

One of the nearest Triad members hit Dalton for daring to interrupt his boss on the phone. It was a conditioned response, one brought about by years of showing similar instant punishment for demonstrations of disrespect. Instantly, Dalton captured the man’s wrist in his free hand, then rolled sideways and delivered three stunning sidekicks to the man’s head, breaking his nose and driving him backward.

In a heartbeat that was carefully measured by the monitoring device that Kirk Brandt, the cybercafé owner in Roanoke, had designed, half the Triad members had their weapons trained on Dalton, who stopped in his tracks and released the man who’d attacked him. But the other half of the gun-toting Chinese Mafia enforcers aimed their weapons at the man Dalton dropped nearly unconscious to the ground. All of them had seen the electronic trigger chemically adhered to Dalton’s flesh over his chest. He was shirtless, and the movement had shifted his jacket to reveal the surprise that he carried. They obviously had experience with them, judging from the sudden unease they showed.

Dalton wiped blood from his mouth. “Bao,” he said again.

Bao glared at him. “What?”

“I’m not going to wait much longer.”

“The deal goes down when I say it does.”

“It goes down,” Dalton said, keeping his tone neutral
through years of experience even when he felt naked and vulnerable and was worried about Michael, “when whoever is at the other end of that connection says it goes down. Tell whoever that is that I’m not going to wait.”

Bao stared at Dalton from behind the wraparound sunglasses. “And instead of waiting, what do you think you’re going to do?”

Dalton walked toward the man. “I wouldn’t shoot me,” he said. “The explosive inside the suitcase with the prototype is set to detonate if my beats per minute drop below anything that allowed me to remain conscious.” As long as he could remain conscious, there was also a manual detonation switch. The autodetonator precluded getting killed as well as getting tranquilized out of his mind.

The guards, having no choice, went with him. Bao, wanting to save face, stood his ground.

“If I get tired of waiting,” Dalton said, “I’m going to believe that you’ve already killed the boy and that you’re stalling, trying to figure out a way around that. And I’m going to detonate the bomb to kill you as well as the men up here. When the metro police find out who I am through DNA and that I brought the prototype here, which someone will recognize from the pieces, Dr. Reynolds will be pulled from her lab immediately whether she wants to be or not. You won’t get another chance at this technology. Your boss won’t get another chance at this technology.”

Bao took a deep breath, his face hardening with anger. “You’re in no position to give demands—”

“I’m in no position,” Dalton said, “to do anything else.” He paused, locking eyes with the man. “You put me there.”

“You would do this? Even if it means the boy’s life is forfeit?”

“For all I know,” Dalton said in a wintry voice, “Michael’s already dead and you’re treading water trying to come up with an alternative plan.”

Bao was quiet for a time. “The boy is alive. He is just now arrived.”

“Then show him to me.”

Speaking quickly, Bao ordered that Michael be brought up. A moment later, the elevator dinged its arrival. Turning slightly, keeping Bao in his vision, Dalton watched Michael, herded between two enforcers with machine pistols from the elevator cage.

Michael looked terrified. Big tears leaked from his eyes and down into the cloth gag that kept him from talking. Disposable plastic handcuffs bound his thin wrists. He wore jeans, sneakers and his Atlanta Braves jersey.

“It’s going to be all right, Michael,” Dalton said, and hoped he sounded convincing. “I’m going to get you out of here.”

“All right,” Bao said, “let’s deal.” He took the pistol from his shoulder rig and pointed it at Michael’s head. “Or I kill him and you get to watch before you blow us up.” He smiled mirthlessly. “I’ve seen very few men willing to commit suicide the way you plan to, Sergeant Geller.”

Christie stood in the cargo area of the small utility helicopter and peered down at the ten-story building under construction that Dalton Geller’s unknown partner had identified as the place where the kidnap ransom was staged to take place.

The helicopter bore the identification markings of one of the large number of taxi-helos that handled ar
rivals and departures to and from Dulles Airport as well as outlying areas. Important political figures and corporate lobbyists didn’t want to deal with the Washington, D.C. traffic.

Dalton’s mystery partner had arranged a phone call from the Georgetown hospital that informed the lab security people that her father had been admitted for chest pains. A quick phone call to her father had set that up, and he actually was in the hospital at that point undergoing stress evaluation. The ruse had gotten Christie clear of the compound in minutes.

The taxi-helo had picked her up in Roanoke. She’d thought she’d get to see Dalton’s partner, but the aircraft was remote-controlled. The cargo area had also been filled with enough firepower to outfit a small special forces unit.

Christie had skinned down to underwear on the twenty-minute trip to Washington, D.C. and replaced her outerwear with combat BDUs and Kevlar armor that protected her chest, midsection and hips down to her thighs, boots encased her feet. A Kevlar helmet with a full faceshield that would deflect everything but a full-on shot protected her head.

The combat harness supported six S&W forty-caliber pistols. Two were snugged in shoulder leather, two more at her thighs in counterterrorist drop holsters just above her knees at the sides, and the final two behind her back in pancake holsters. She’d never been loaded with this much gear before, but with her Enhanced strength, the weight was no problem to carry.

Extra magazines for the pistols, all of them in the extended thirty-round sizes currently in the pistols she carried, rested in the pockets of the combat harness.
She also had a few flash-bang grenades designed to create smoke to foil normal and night vision, and red-hot embers to throw off thermographic capability. Kevlar boots just her size encased her feet.

“Everything fit?” the man asked over her comm-link.

“Yeah.” Suited up now, knowing that she was about to step into a whipsaw, Christie felt nervous. She blew her breath out and tried to relax a little. That was a joke.

“It’s not too late to back out,” the man told her.

Christie used her Enhanced vision to scan the target building. A huge crane hung beside the structure and hills of dirt and piles of steel girders occupied the broken land around it.

“I’m not backing out,” she told him. Somewhere in that building, Dalton and Michael were negotiating for their lives.

“Your heart rate and respiration are up,” the man said.

Christie damned the Kevlar armor’s built-in system read-out. Those features had been layered in to help special forces teams monitor their members in case of injury.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Bring me in.”

The helo banked slightly and zipped toward the building. The rotor strained overhead and the pitch in the thunder filling the cargo space changed.

“What’s the maximum drop you can take?” the man asked. “Fifty, sixty feet?”

“Closer to one hundred,” Christie said.

“Never fully geared, though.”

“No.”

The helo shifted to a steeper decline. “Today we’ll go for forty. Remember—when you hit, they’re going to be gunning for you.”

Christie pushed her breath out and gripped the sides of the cargo door. The wind shot by her, cool and crisp. The helo had a direct line to the building now, closing fast. Its distinct shadow fell onto the building as they came out of the sun to give her a small but precious edge because the men looking into the brightness wouldn’t be able to see her and might impair their vision for just a few precious seconds.

“Ready…” the man said, “…and—go!”

Without hesitation, even though it looked like she was going to miss the building, Christie jumped from the cargo door. There was an instant of free fall, then she was dropping like a rock.

She hit the roof in a parachutist’s roll, hands up to protect her head and control the direction. She pushed off the rooftop, charging into an all-out sprint, her Enhanced speed making her fleet as a deer despite the weight of the gear she carried. She ran back in the direction she’d come, knowing the men inside would have heard her hit.

Reaching the building’s eastern side, she pulled a piton from the combat rigging and slammed the tip down through the metal with a shrill impact. She flipped the climbing rope from her shoulder, affixed the D-ring at one end to the piton, and threw the coil of rope down the side of the building.

She rappelled down, facing the ground below as she ran along the building’s side. The rope burned along her gloves as she slid down it. At the fifth floor, she paused and took out the specially shaped plastic explosive she’d been given, affixed it to the wall, set the electronic detonator, and kicked back from the wall.

At the apex of her swing, made even wider by her En
hanced strength, Christie detonated the plastic explosive. Constructed as it was, the explosive blew inward, taking out a five-foot section of the wall. Christie swung toward the wall, aiming for the opening, then released her hold on the rope and shot inside.

She skidded across the floor, riding a wave of debris torn free from the wall, getting a knee folded up under her like she was stealing second base clean and free. She spotted Triad gang members all around her inside the big area. Dalton and Michael were to her left.

Reaching into the combat harness, Christie took out the WAM-ball—Wide Area Matrix—and threw it toward the nearest walls. Coated in superimpact-resistant rubber so that it bounced immediately and propelled by her Enhanced strength, the WAM-ball ricocheted from the wall and bounced at crazy angles around the room. Outfitted with a miniature digital video camera, the WAM-ball fed images of the room directly into Christie’s onboard computer. As soon as the feed began, her vision split into two inside her head, giving her a whirling view of the room from the WAM-ball’s perspective as well as her own vision.

Even before she skidded to a stop, Christie raked the forty-caliber pistols from her back and extended them in two separate directions. She started firing as she got to her feet, putting two rounds through the head of one Bronze Tiger and three rounds into the chest of another.

Through the video connection in the WAM-ball, Christie saw Dalton lunge toward Michael, taking the boy to the ground in a bear hug and covering him protectively.

“The bomb’s shut down,” the male voice said inside Christie’s head. “It’s all up to you whether the three of you walk out of there alive. I’ve called the police.”

One of the Bronze Tigers lifted an assault rifle as Christie ran at him with both pistols blazing, aiming at him as well as other nearby targets. The shotgun blast caught her in the chest and knocked her backward. Although the Kevlar stopped the double-aught pellets from penetrating, the armor didn’t stop the blunt trauma. Her breath left her lungs in a rush that left spots in her vision.

Throwing away the empty pistols, she stayed on her feet, then leaped up and flipped as more Bronze Tigers fired at her. She gripped the pistols snugged in shoulder leather and yanked them free even as she turned upside down. She started firing at once, hitting targets she saw as well as ones identified by the WAM-ball. When she came down, she landed flat and didn’t try to stand. With both arms extended before her, she rolled toward the wall where the door to the hallway was.

Bronze Tigers fell all around her. Some of them were Enhanced and some were not. None of them were expecting the moves that she was showing them. It was one thing to get Enhanced, to have greater strength and speed, but training to use those things was a different matter. She’d worked diligently in her martial arts classes as well as on the shooting range holographs to get the most from her abilities.

By the time she reached the door, her second set of pistols had blown back empty. But three-quarters of the Bronze Tigers inside the room were down and out of the play.

Christie got to her feet and dashed into the hallway. She dropped into a crouch with her back to the wall, then threw away the second set of pistols. She took a deep breath, feeling her lungs scream with the agony of
the unconscious movement for the first time since she’d been shot point-blank with the shotgun.

She stripped two flash-bang grenades from the combat harness, pulled the rings and tossed one into the door she’d just come through. She lobbed the other grenade ahead, getting it through the door at that end of the hallway like a shortstop picking off a runner going for first on a red-hot grounder. The grenade hit the wall inside the room, then ricocheted into the room.