Predator One (45 page)

He didn’t like it, but he was half gone, so he staggered past me through the leather flap doors.

As I ran, I yelled, “Get us some damn backup.”

“Hooah.”

He vanished inside.

I began running along
the hall, bent low, weapon ready. No idea what I would find around the far corner. No idea what horrors would be waiting.

On the other hand, they had no idea what was coming for them.

Chapter One Hundred and Three

Sharp Chula Vista Medical Center

Medical Center Court, Chula Vista, California

March 31, 9:20
P.M.

As I raced toward the end of the hall, my mind tried to assemble this into a shape that made sense.

Why kill the doctor investigating the case? Surely if they were smart enough to concoct a superstrain of NF and cook up the idea of delivering it in takeout food
brought by a UAV, then they were smart enough to know that killing the doctor would not end the investigation. Or even stall it. Ambushing the ambulance might have done that. This was too late in the process.

On the other hand, their choice of weapons was significant. Shotguns. Except when using certain solid loads, shotguns typically fired pellets of varying size. Once the round leaves the barrel,
the pellets disperse into a wide spray.

I wonder what would have happened had I not attacked? Would the gunman have fired a second shell? If so, would he have tried to kill or wound? Alur had been unlucky enough to be the closest, but a second blast would have wounded the rest of us. The pellets would have punched through the thin hazmat material.

They would have actually killed us.

Not in
a room that might have some of the NF bacteria. All they’d have to do was damage the seals.

I skidded to a stop at the end of the hall, then crouched and listened to what was happening around the corner.

There were three separate sounds.

Voices pleading.

Voices weeping.

Voices yelling.

No gunshots at the moment.

I hunkered low and did a quick look around the corner and pulled back, letting
what I’d seen in that flash assemble itself into useful details in my head.

Nine people.

All of them in identical white hazmat suits.

Three of them lay on the floor. Bloody and torn. Impossible to tell how badly injured they were.

Three men stood near them, each of them armed with a shotgun.

Three cowering people, who had to be hospital staff.

One of the shooters was yelling orders. “Get
a gurney. Bring the bodies outside. Do it now or I will kill you. Do you understand?”

The cadence of the voice and the clarity of the instructions had a military feel. Not surprising. This hit was military in its form, though not the highest grade. Not what I’d call special ops.

Not Kingsmen-level, though that wasn’t much of a comfort. Top-of-the-line special operators could sometimes be reasoned
with. They were professionals, and, when presented with a no-win situation, they often put a higher premium on their own asses than on their employer’s agendas. Second stringers were either zealots of one species or another, or they were amateurs. Both are unpredictable, and each tended to jump at the wrong time and in the wrong direction. And if they worked for the Kings, then they were likely
as bug-nuts fanatical as the Kingsmen.

I was stepping into something that was bad and could only get worse.

I didn’t know if the air was rife with NF, or if it was even an airborne pathogen. We hadn’t gotten that far in our discussions before Alur was killed.

I tried tapping my earbud to get Nikki on the line, but all I got was a whistling buzz.

Jammer?

That was weird as shit, because an
active jammer would almost certainly cut off the signal for the intrusion team as well. Unless they had some spooky toys I didn’t have.

Rat balls.

I took a second look, noting how the bodies had shifted. I had clear shots at two of the men. I’d have to move in order to safely take the third without spraying the civilians with pellets. I needed to save the innocent and stop the bad guys, but
also have someone with a pulse I could interrogate.

So, I decided to take a gamble.

I stood, turned toward the empty hallway behind me, and began firing my shotgun as I backed around the corner.

“They’re coming!” I bellowed.

“How many?” demanded one of the shooters, assuming—as I’d intended—that I was one of the other team.

“There’s a whole team down there.”

One of the shooters ran up to
stand beside me, our guns pointed at the bend in the corridor, waiting for the rush that would never come.

I didn’t wait for him to realize his mistake.

I pivoted in place and, from a distance of three feet, fired at his midsection.

At that distance, he caught the whole spray, and it scythed him in half.

“Yuri!” screamed someone behind me, and I whirled as the second shooter darted forward,
his gun coming up fast. I shot by reflex, and the buckshot caught him in the thighs and groin. His legs and pelvis were yanked out behind him, and he flopped onto his chest.

The cowering staff shrieked in terror and horror as blood splashed the floor and walls. It was lucky for them that gore was the only thing splashing them.

If even one pellet had hit them and punctured their suits …

The
third gunman was frozen into a moment of bad decision. He could fire, but I was coming fast, and he didn’t have his gun up yet. He could surrender. Or he could take a damn prisoner.

I saw his eyes cut toward a staff member. The smallest of the three. A woman.

“Don’t do it!” I bellowed.

He did it anyway. The killer bounded sideways, hooked one arm around a slim waist, and jerked her in front
of him as a shield. He jammed the shotgun barrel up under the woman’s chin.

“I’ll kill her,” he declared.

I pointed my gun at his head. “I believe you.”

“Put your gun down.”

“Or, how about—fuck you?”

“I mean it.”

“I know. Me too.”

He stammered. The conversation had started badly and already begun to slide down an icy hill.

“Listen to me, Sparky,” I said. “Your friends are dead. The two
bozos here and the Three Stooges out there. All of them. Dead. You, on the other hand, have the Willy Wonka golden ticket. That means you get the chance to walk out of here alive and in one piece. Now—look at me. I just killed five people. Do you think I’m going to let you walk just because you’re hiding behind a hostage? Ever heard the phrase ‘collateral damage’?”

The woman’s eyes opened wider
and filled with even more terror at my words.

“Bullshit,” he fired back. “Cops don’t risk civilians.”

“Not a cop, sorry. Try again.”

He jammed the gun harder into the woman’s soft chin.

“Please—!” she begged. “Oh God, please.”

“Shut up,” he growled, jabbing her again.

I moved closer to him. He backed away, but I kept pace with him. We both knew that there were very few options left to anyone.
He’d kill her, and we’d fight. He’d let her go, and we’d fight.

He went for option number 3.

With a sudden grunt, he shoved her at me and then leveled the shotgun to try and catch us both.

That was the move I was expecting. The one I wanted him to try. I’d been watching his body language, waiting for the shift of weight he’d need to make in order to push her. As soon as I saw it, I was moving.
The girl had time for one staggering step before I snaked out a hand and caught her arm, whipped my hips around for torque, and flung her roughly into the other two civilians. They all went down. That left the gunman free and clear. I swung the stock of my shotgun to try and knock the weapon out of his hands. I liked my chances in a hand-to-hand fight and really did want to have that meaningful
chat with him.

But, damn it, he was too fast for his own good.

He evaded my swing, brought his shotgun up, and fired.

I spun out of the way and felt pellets tug at the loose fabric around my middle.

Shit, shit, shit!

Terrified as well as desperate, I used my turn to corkscrew myself down into a kneeling position, shotgun snugged against my chest as I fired.

The blast caught him in the side,
and the pellets opened his hazmat suit like an envelope. He toppled backward, geysering blood for torn arteries. I immediately dropped my weapon and scrambled over to him, trying to staunch the arterial bleeding. Needing him alive.

Needing him not to be dead.

Not yet.

“Goddamn it, Sparky,” I muttered as I worked, using gloves to staunch wounds that were truly dreadful, “now see what you’ve
gone and made me do.”

He tried to tell me to go fuck myself, but he couldn’t manage it. His voice was already faint, receding like a train whispering its way down a tunnel. Blood bubbled between his lips and misted the inside of his hood.

“You got one chance to change things for you,” I said. “Don’t end the game on the wrong team. Tell me something I can use. Who sent you here? Do you work for
the Seven Kings?”

“Say good-bye to your world,” he gurgled. “Because your world is going to burn.”

Then he spat a mouthful of blood at me. While still wearing the hazmat hood. Dumb fuck. It struck the plastic and obscured his face. I couldn’t risk taking my hands away from the torn arteries to remove his mask.

Soon, however, I realized that I didn’t need to.

The blood stopped pumping.

A last
breath exited from him in a bubbling, directionless sigh, and he settled back. Gone.

I sagged back from him.

“Goddamn it,” I breathed

Your world is going to burn.

What the hell did that mean?

The three civilians had climbed to their feet and stood in a tight, deeply frightened cluster. I heaved a sigh and stood. However, when I took a step toward them, they all but leaped back, squealing
in fear.

“Hey!” I said. “I’m a federal agent. I’m one of the good guys.”

But it turned out that wasn’t what they were afraid of.

Then I remembered about the spray of buckshot I’d dodged.

I plucked out the loose fabric and stared blankly at a dozen small holes that had been punched through my hazmat suit.

Chapter One Hundred and Four

Warren County, Washington

March 31, 6:22
P.M.

Aaron Davidovich knew that he was a dead man.

Apart from wishing he were dead, and wishing even more that he possessed the courage to kill himself, he assumed that he was being hunted. They had to know he was gone. He’d left enough of a mess.

They would be hunting him. Maybe Boy would be hunting him. Not an agent
of the Kings, but her. In the flesh.

Not to bring him back. That ship had sailed. The Kings’ project was rolling forward, grinding its way into the history books. All they needed to do now was to cut his throat. They wouldn’t even bother to torture him. What would be the point? They didn’t need anything from him except his silence.

That would be the thing.

Kill him and silence any possible
threat he could pose.

Davidovich stood in the shadows behind a billboard advertising premium real estate. He had no idea how long or how far he’d walked since leaving the house he’d broken into. There was no foot traffic, which meant that on foot a pedestrian would be noticed, so he stayed in the shadows and hid when cars passed. The sun had just tumbled over the nearest clumps of pines, and
it felt much later than it was.

He needed something, though. He needed a car. More urgently, though, he needed a phone or a computer with Internet access. He tried to find a pay phone, but if such a thing existed on Fox Island, he couldn’t find one. And, looking as he did in ill-fitting clothes and bedroom slippers, no one was going to let him borrow a phone or laptop. No one was likely to float
him the money to use a pay phone, providing he could even
find
a relic like that.

Across the two-lane was a small roadside restaurant. Dilley’s Classic Roadside Caf
é
. A retro-trendy place with expensive cars in the lot. The exceptions were two medium-sized movers’ vans. Davidovich figured they had just moved someone into one of the fancy homes and were refueling before driving back to their home
base. Dilley’s exterior looked like a carhop diner from the fifties, with bright red Coke signs and tin cutouts of burgers piled high with tomatoes and pickles.

His stomach clenched, and he realized that he was hungry. The three cans of tuna he’d eaten earlier seemed to have done nothing for him. He wanted one of those burgers …

“Focus, you moron,” he told himself, and flinched at the sound
of his own voice. He hadn’t meant to say it aloud.

Headlights flared as a late-model Ford pickup rattled around the curve and angled toward Dilley’s. The truck bed was piled high with bagged grass cuttings and lawn equipment. It rolled to a stop at the far end of a line of parked vehicles and tucked into a slot between the moving vans. Two men got out. A small man with skinny legs and a bulky
Seahawks hoodie and a fat man in a thermal vest.

“You going to get something to go?” asked the skinny man.

“I don’t know. Need to take a wicked whiz first. If I get something, you want anything?”

“Coffee and a couple of those almond rolls. I’ll wait for you. Got to call Gary to tell him we need to go back tomorrow to finish. And we still need to put the mulch down on the Carsons’ flowerbeds.
Probably need all morning.”

“’K,” said the fat man as he hurried inside, prancing the way men do who have an urgent need. It made him look like he was walking on fragile glass.

Davidovich was moving out of the shadows and across the street before the door banged shut behind the fat man. The skinny guy had removed a cell phone and leaned his right shoulder against the closed driver’s door while
he dialed.

Most of the way across the street and over the cracked macadam of the parking lot, Davidovich told himself that he was just going to ask. That was all. Just ask to use the phone. He’d say that he had an accident and needed to call the police. Something like that.