Book of Souls by Glenn Cooper (35 page)

They’d have all the exits covered. At least he had a small edge on them. He could
see
them. Was there a way onto the roof? The warehouse was probably on a slab, but if there was a sublevel, he’d better find out.

He ran around the building, looking for escape routes, figuring the angles, returning to the office with each circuit to check on the lobby crew.

There weren’t any attractive options. He thought quickly and steeled himself for violence. He was BTH, but for all he knew, the next time Nancy saw him, he’d look like Shackleton. Fear left a coppery taste in his mouth.

DeCorso heard Frazier in his earpiece demanding a status report. He started to whisper back, “It’s quiet, no signs of…” when all hell broke loose.

The office lights went blazing on and an ear-piercing siren started blaring, almost too loud to stand without clamping hands over ears.

“The fire alarm!” DeCorso shouted, loud enough for Frazier to hear above the din.

“It’s got to be central-alarmed!” Frazier screamed back. “The fire department’ll be here any minute! Go in now! Take him! My team—maintain your positions at the exits.”

“I copy!” DeCorso shouted. “We’re going in!”

DeCorso ordered his man to unlock the door, and the three of them flew into the warehouse and immediately spread out.

They almost stopped dead at the sight before them.

The entire row of robots was dancing in a conga line of animation. Robot arms were turning pages. Flashes of blinding light illuminated pages. Digitized images of text appeared on computer displays.

DeCorso saw something. Through the scanning box of one of the middle robots he thought he picked up a glimpse of black steel. He shouted over the pulsating blare of the fire alarms, “Gun!” and raised his own to fire.

Will was in firing position behind a robot. He squeezed off two shots and placed both of them in the center of DeCorso’s chest. The man blinked once, fell straight to his knees, then pitched forward hard. The two other watchers were very good, probably ex–special ops guys, and in the next few seconds, Will was conscious of their coolness under fire.

Neither was distracted by their team leader going down. The man on Will’s left dove behind a metal cart and began spraying fire at all the middle robots. It was clear he didn’t know exactly where Will was. Paper shredded, glass shattered, but the robot arms kept looking for pages to turn.

Will concentrated on the man to his right, who was in a low crouch, searching for a target, more exposed. He aimed for central mass and let loose a three-shot volley. The man grunted and slumped, blood spreading from under his jacket.

Will’s muzzle flash was an unavoidable beacon, and the third man fired into his robot. Will ducked behind the machine and felt a searing pain in his inner left thigh, as if someone had laid a red-hot branding iron across his flesh. His pant leg quickly soaked with blood. He couldn’t deal with it now. If his femoral artery were hit, it was over. He’d know soon enough. Things would go gray, then black.

The robots were closely enough spaced to form almost a solid wall. Will dragged himself to his left until he was behind the farthest one. He no longer knew where the last watcher was positioned. His leg was bleeding heavily, but his senses were all operating. If it were arterial, he’d be struggling by now.

Then the last watcher mistakenly obeyed an order.

Frazier was shouting into his earpiece like a lunatic. “What’s your status! Give me your goddamn status! Now!”

The man shouted back. “Two men down! Under fire! Front of the building!”

Will put his weight on his good leg and popped up through the robot’s scanning box like a whack-a-mole at a fairground. He aimed at the direction of the voice and put six rounds into the metal cart. The last watcher tried to rise but fell over, leaking blood from his abdomen.

Will quickly pulled his own belt from its loops and wrapped it around his thigh, cinching it as tightly as he could stand. He could just about bear weight. He made a mad dash over the bleeding men, limped through the lobby, and emerged into the moonless night.

There were fire-engine sirens in the distance, getting louder.

He didn’t know how many more watchers were out there, but he knew they’d have to cover the other exits at least for a while.

His car was only yards away.

He was going to make it.

THE BLOOD OOZED from Will’s thigh onto the car seat. He was buffeted by ripples of light-headedness, then slammed by a wave of nausea that forced him to pull over. He leaned out the open driver’s door and vomited onto the side of the road.

He had to deal with his wound quickly. He needed his mind to keep working crisply. Without that, he was lost.

Frazier knelt over DeCorso’s body, checking for the carotid pulse he knew would be absent. Piper two—DeCorso zero, Frazier thought. Shot twice by the same guy, the second time fatal. Guess who was the better man? DeCorso’s wife was friendly with his. She’d get a good payout for a death in action, so it wasn’t a complete loss.

He’d have to get Piper himself.

The other two men were alive but not by a lot. He had his team call for an ambulance. There wasn’t anything they could do for them. He knew one of them was going to die. He knew the DODs for all his men, an operational imperative as far as he was concerned.

He didn’t know his own.

He could have broken the rules and found out, but he was always by the book. And besides, in his marrow, he was sure he was BTH.

The fire sirens were almost on top of them. On his way out, he noticed a blood trail back through the lobby. Good, he thought. I hope it hurts.

He drove away with his two able-bodied men before the fire department arrived. Piper could be anywhere.

At a red light, Will readjusted his tourniquet and kept driving. He was on Vernon Avenue, heading east, looking for open stores. He needed a drugstore. He needed a new pair of pants. He needed a computer. He needed to find Dane. He needed to ditch his car. He needed to talk to Nancy. He needed more bullets; he only had seven left in the mag. He needed a lot of things in a little time.

He called Dane’s cell phone again and got voice mail one more time. There was no pickup at his motel room, and when Will pushed the front desk, someone ran over to pound on his door and open it with a pass key. It was empty. Finally, he called the general aviation terminal and was told that Dane’s plane hadn’t been touched since midday. The pilot hadn’t been back.

That’s that, Will thought. The watchers got to him. He was on his own. He looked at the phone in his hand and swore at himself in disgust.

If they had Dane, they had his phone, and they had his prepaid phone number. If they had that, they had him. He opened his window, dropped the phone onto the street, and said good-bye to his lifeline.

Frazier was in constant contact with the Area 51 Ops Center. He was driving east on Vernon, being guided by the location of Piper’s mobile signal. The tech shouted into Frazier’s earpiece, “The signal’s gone!”

“What do you mean, gone?”

“It’s gone dead. He must’ve turned it off or pulled the battery.”

Frazier banged the dashboard in frustration. “We were less than a mile behind him!”

His driver asked, “What do you want me to do?”

“Keep driving. Let me think.”

Will was on Crenshaw, aimlessly driving north through the dark urban sprawl. The pain was making him crazy, and the dizziness was getting hazardous. In the distance, there was a sign for Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza, and he pressed on until he got there. When he saw there was a Wal-Mart, he pulled into the covered parking garage and grabbed a space as close to the entrance as he could find.

He painfully pulled himself out of the car and clamped his hands onto the first shopping cart he could find, to give him support and to hide his bloody trousers leg as much as possible. Grimacing, he hobbled into the store, passed an elderly man in a smock, the Wal-Mart greeter, who immediately saw his red-stained pants and red footprints but minded his own business, something you did in that neighborhood.

Will wheeled his cart straight to the pharmacy section and dropped sterile gauze, bandages, tweezers, and antiseptic into the cart plus a bottle of acetaminophen, as if that were going to make a dent in his pain. He needed narcotics, but that wasn’t in the cards.

Then he headed to men’s wear and picked up a pair of thirty-four-waist dark slacks and a fresh pack of underwear and socks. In the dressing room, he went to the back stall and peeled off his bloody pants. Standing shakily in front of the mirror he inspected his wound. There was a quarter-inch purplish hole in the inner thigh, about five inches from his groin fold, steadily oozing dark red blood. He’d attended enough autopsies to know he was lucky. The adductor muscle was a good distance from the femoral artery. But he wasn’t completely lucky. There was no exit wound. The robot must have decelerated the bullet enough to make it lose some of its energy. The bullet was lodged. Within a day or so, his leg would be infected. Without surgery and antibiotics, he’d be septic.

He unwrapped the three-pack of undershorts, rolled one of them into a tight cylinder, and bit down on it to keep himself quiet. He bathed the wound in a dark brown iodine solution, then got down to the painful business. With the tweezers, he pushed a ribbon of gauze into the bullet hole. He clamped down on the cloth, and his eyes watered in torment. He had no choice. The wound had to be packed to staunch the flow. If he didn’t clot, he’d bleed out. He subjected himself to repeated thrusts of the tweezers and pushed gauze through the skin and subcutaneous tissues, deep into the pulpy muscle.

When he had done as much as he could bear, he drenched the gauze in iodine and wrapped a bandage tightly over the wad. Then he spat out the cloth and sank to the floor, breathing heavily. In a minute, he was ready to put on fresh clothes. On the way out of the dressing room he trash-canned his bloody garments.

The pain was blinding but he had to suck it up to ask a clerk at the electronics department for help. “What’s your cheapest laptop with a USB port and a wireless card?”

The kid replied, “They all have USB ports and wireless cards.”

“Then what’s your cheapest laptop?”

“We’ve got an Acer for 498.”

“I’ll take it. And give me a shoulder bag too. Will the battery have any charge?”

“Should have. Why?”

“Because I want to use it out of the box.”

There was a taxi stand near the Wal-Mart. Will had all his provisions stuffed into his new shoulder bag and folded himself stiffly into the backseat of a cab. He touched his new pants and was relieved they were still dry.

“Where to?” the cabbie asked.

“Greyhound station. But stop at a liquor store first.”

Frazier got tired of driving around looking for a needle in a haystack. He had his man pull over into a diner. They had Piper’s info circulated to LAPD, including his rental-car tag number. He was suspected of murdering federal agents. He was armed and dangerous, possibly wounded. The police would take this seriously. The hospitals were on alert. All Frazier could do now was outthink him. What was he going to do with the database, assuming he had it? Where was he going to go? He wasn’t going to be able to fly back to New York without getting picked up. Then it hit him.

Spence. Tomorrow was Spence’s DOD.

He lived in Las Vegas. It only made sense that Will was going to meet Spence there to hand off the database. That was probably going to be Bentley’s next stop.

He didn’t have to chase after Piper. All he had to do was go to Las Vegas and wait for him to arrive.

The Ops Center was in his ear. “Piper used his VISA card twenty minutes ago at a Wal-Mart on Crenshaw.”

“What did he buy?” Frazier asked.

“A computer, a bag, some clothes and a shitload of gauze and bandages.”

“All right. We’re heading back to Nevada. I know where he’s going.”

Will purchased his one-way ticket to Las Vegas at the Greyhound station and paid cash. He had a few hours until the departure time but didn’t feel comfortable waiting around the terminal. There was a donut shop across the street. He limped into a booth, with a coffee and an extra paper cup. Under the table he poured himself a half a glass of Johnnie Walker, put six acetaminophens into his mouth, and drank them down in a series of fiery gulps.

The alcohol helped dull the pain or at least distracted him enough to get the new computer out of the box and booted up. There were no wireless networks detected.

“You got WiFi?” he called over to the dull Mexican girl behind the counter, but he might as well have asked her to explain quantum mechanics to him. She stared through him and shrugged.

He plugged in the memory stick and downloaded Shackleton’s database. In a minute, he was prompted for the password and he instantly recalled it: Pythagoras. It had significance to Shackleton, he imagined, but he’d never know what it was.

The searchable database was ready for his queries. There was a God-like feeling to be able to type a name, some identifying information, and find out, in an instant, that person’s date of death. He began with Joe and Mary Lipinski, just to pay them a moment of respect. There they were. October 20.

Then he did a double check on Henry Spence. It was confirmed: October 23rd. Tomorrow.

He typed in a couple of more names and stared at the screen.

He had some idea of what was going to happen tomorrow.

It was after midnight in New Hampshire, but he had to talk to Nancy, even if it meant waking her up and worrying her to distraction. He had no choice. For all he knew, it would be their last conversation.

There were pay phones by the bathrooms. He got a bunch of quarters from the girl and dialed Zeckendorf’s Alton landline. The watchers probably had a complete log of all the prepaids he’d called and would be tapping them all. They wouldn’t have this number. Yet. As the phone rang, he noticed fresh blood seeping through his new pants.

Nancy answered, surprisingly alert.