Ruthless (28 page)

Unfortunately, if they kept throwing these obstacles in my way, it was going to be later rather than sooner that I’d get to make good with my threat.

I threw open the door to the lobby and headed straight for the tunnel. I was seeing red, crimson, maroon, chartreuse, and every other color of the spectrum related to rage and fury. I had my shotgun in hand, my Glock reloaded in my holster, and I was striding with a purpose toward the security room when Reed hauled on my arm and stopped me cold.

“What the hell are you doing, Sienna?” His voice was whisper-quiet, a hush, urgent and fearful all at once. “There are like twenty people down there who would love to get their hands on you, and you’ve got no powers, in case you forgot.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” I said and ripped my arm free.

“You could die!” Reed said, doing a yelling whisper. I didn’t think that was possible, but he managed it. “They’re not gonna go light on you just because you’re chemically under the weather!”

“They’re not gonna do jack to me,” I said and ripped open the door. I was heading down into the tunnel with my shotgun raised and a sneer on my lips.

“What the hell makes you say that?” Reed asked, following behind me like he knew, for a fact, that I’d lost my damned mind.

“Because of what they
haven’t
forgotten,” I said.

I walked into the Cube to find the doors sliding open to every single cell. Men were stepping out with that cocky look on their faces, but still a little hesitantly, peeking to see what was up, how this significant change to their interminable daily routine was going to work out.

“Hey there, Lady Warden,” Crow Vincent said, stepping out of the cell nearest me. He had a wicked grin on his face, and was doing this little shoulder bob walk as he stepped outside. I guess he thought it looked cool. “Looks like you’re out of guards. Saw a couple of your detainees go walking out the door.” He grinned. “Looks like you ain’t having a great day.”

“It’s night, actually,” I said and looked at him, hard. I saw Timothy Logan peeking out of the cell just behind him, like he wasn’t sure whether he should come out or not. “You hear any of what those guys were discussing?”

Crow just laughed. “Didn’t need to hear anything. School’s out, baby.” He swept an arm around. “Looks like a weekend pass, huh?”

“Get back in your cells,” I said, raising my voice and using that hard edge voice I can summon up on command.

“I figured you were dead,” Crow said, taking a step closer to me. “Figured no one would get one over on the Lady Warden.” He made a hiss of a laugh. “But you’re weak, girl. You must be slipping, to let them fools in here, let them walk out of here, let them open all the doors.”

“It’s a technical glitch,” I said, staring him down. “You’ll want to be getting back in your cells now.” I didn’t feel a need to attach a threat, because a threat at this point would probably be less effective. Let their imaginations run wild, I figured.

Crow turned his head sideways, and I remembered why they called him Crow. “I don’t think I need to be—”

I raised the barrel of the shotgun and blew his head clean off. Blood and all else splattered on the wall behind him as 00 buckshot did its thing to skin and bone.

I waited for the thunder of the gunfire to clear from the air and then spoke into the shocked silence. “Thinking is not a good idea for you all. Your thinking and decision-making have carried every last one of you into these cells, and it’s highly unlikely that it’s going to get you out again any time soon, at least not any way but feet first.” I studied my charges. “Back in the cells, or start rushing me. Maybe if you’re lucky and you all come fast, you can overwhelm me.” I didn’t rack the shotgun, because it was an automatic, but I gave it a subtle flourish. “Who wants to go first? I don’t favor your odds, but if you want to die, let’s get to it. I’ve got other places to be, and some other people to be killing.”

I saw movement across the catwalk, on the far side. Thunder Hayes, his dark eyes staring me down. He was considering it. I would have flattened him, but the shotgun’s reach wasn’t quite far enough for me to do to him what I’d done to Crow, not at this distance. I was bluffing all the way, but I was counting on the fact that every last one of them had a painful, fearful memory of me etched into their deepest neurons. However bad they wanted to kill me and walk free, they had to remember that the last time they’d come up against me, I’d whipped their asses and thrown them down here. For most of them, it was the first defeat of their meta lives.

Which is something they were unlikely to forget.

Months and years of solitary was a lot of time to dwell on the past. I had to guess that the specter of defeat was probably high up on their list of revisited memories. All that time to think, to plan—though most of them weren’t even half-capable planners—and the number one thing they’d be thinking about was how I’d whooped them. That and how I kept bringing more and more whoopees to join the party. An unbroken succession of reminders that they were not nearly so badass as I was. All that time to think, and no chance to prove to themselves that I was anything less than a goddess of wrathful vengeance, the meanest, most vicious release of hell-on-earth that most of them had ever laid eyes on.

Not a bad atmosphere to breed fear.

“You know she’ll do it,” Timothy Logan said, giving the air just the right injection of piss to put out their growing campfire. I could almost hear the hiss as the enthusiasm for revolt guttered out.

“I’ve got control of the doors!” J.J. shouted in my ear. “I got it!”

“Man …” Thunder Hayes said, shaking his head. “It ain’t worth it. We’ll get you some other day, lady. When you ain’t holding a shotty.” He walked back into his cell, trying to keep his head high for pride. But I saw the slump of his shoulders. I saw it in every one of them as J.J. started shutting the doors as they went back inside, one by one giving up on their dream of freedom.

“NO NO NO!” J.J. shouted as I stared at the last three, already turning to go back inside. They were savoring their moment of freedom, I guess.

“I don’t like it when you say that,” I muttered.

“They’re in the PA system! They’re gonna—!”

He didn’t even finish before I heard the snap hiss of the overhead speaker, followed by a female voice.

“You shouldn’t give up so easily,” she said low, almost breathless. “Sienna Nealon is powerl—”

I blasted the speaker with my shotgun, a shot sixteen feet straight up that shattered plastic and drew sparks. “This isn’t your party,” I said, irritable. “So get the hell out.” I covered the last three with my shotgun, stock against my shoulder. “Back inside,” I said, reaffirming my control over the situation. They dawdled, but they went back in, and J.J. shut the doors with a clank. “Are we clear here?” I asked.

“I’m trying to purge it out of the system—”

“Her,” I said, thinking about that voice. “The brain is a her.” I looked up at the ceiling. “And she should know that I’m coming for her. I don’t care if it takes an hour, a year, ten decades or a thousand years …” I hardened my voice and stared into the nearest surveillance camera with all my furious fortitude, sure she was still watching. “I am coming for you, lady.”

“Wow,” Reed said, “I think I just crapped myself in fear a little.”

“Chopper just took off from the roof with the escapees,” J.J. said.

“Get the Air National Guard on the phone,” I said. “Shoot ’em down.”

“That could take a while, this time of night,” J.J. said, and I turned to walk back up the ramp. Reed and Scott fell in beside me, exchanging a look between them that was somewhere in the neighborhood of
So, that just happened, right?
and a
Yeah, brah
, in return.

I liked it.

The lady has brass
. I heard a faint whisper in the back of my head, like someone talking outside a door. I listened closer but heard nothing more. Did that mean …?

“FBI’s HRT is here,” J.J. interrupted my train of thought, “and they’ve got a chopper of their own with a bunch of sweaty, angry guys who just had to wake up in the middle of the night and fly in from Chicago.” He almost sounded like he was smiling. “They want to know if you’d like to go on an evening ride with them, maybe to the Eden Prairie airport? Because based on the flight vector, that looks like where our escapees are heading, and it sounds like these guys would like to throw a party of some sort for them there.”

I felt a smile break through my look of harsh, leaden fury as I entered the stairwell, listening to the buzzing of the fluorescent lights as I ascended the steps two at a time. It sounded strangely louder than it had earlier. “Tell them I would love to attend their party,” I said. “And that I’ll meet them on the roof in sixty seconds.”

“Whoooooo-eeeeeeeeeee!” Simmons was a child in Natasya’s eyes, a baby she had to sit for, an infant who needed to be burped and taken care of. His requests were unreasonable at best, those of an adolescent at worst. She listened to the voice, now piped through her headset, though, and watched him warily.

“There’s an FBI chopper that’s going to be coming up behind you, and soon,” the voice said. “It swung back to pick up Sienna Nealon, and it’s turning around to pursue you.”

Natasya tried to fill her veins with a sense of ice. This confrontation was edging ever closer to inevitable, this moment between her and Sienna Nealon. “Can we outrun it?”

“It’s a military Black Hawk and you’re in a civilian Huey,” the voice said. “The engine specifications say no.”

Natasya caught the sense of satisfaction in the answer. “But …?”

The voice was smiling on the other end of the connection, of that Natasya was sure. “Stay on course and you’ll be fine.”

Natasya heard that certainty and stared at Simmons, headset on, hanging out of the chopper, and watched his disposition change suddenly. It was like he’d heard something. She watched him turn, slowly, and look at her. He said nothing, just stared for a second, then said, “Yeah,” like he was talking to himself.

The voice. Was she … talking to him individually now? Natasya felt her eyes narrow as she considered it. Was it a casual conversation or some form of instruction? She’d trusted the voice to deliver what had been promised, and what had been promised was a plan that sounded so slick in its execution that she was certain it would go off with only a minor hitch, like the depot heist.

Instead, she was sitting in a helicopter with two of her people lost and a trail of bodies left behind. She sniffed, and the smell of burnt flesh filled her nose.

There was no changing it, now. She knew what the voice wanted her to do, but she had no intention of being a sacrifice in the name of Eric Simmons. She stared out into the night as the helicopter swept over woods and fields, toward city lights in the distance. If all else failed, she still had her own powers to fall back on.

And those might be just what she’d need before this was all over.

“Where’s Harper?” I asked as the FBI chopper blew my hair back, roaring as it came in for a landing. I should have been wearing ear protection, but I wasn’t working in a training environment and I used to be able to heal from whatever happened to me, including hearing loss.

Used to. Hopefully would again, and the sooner, the better.

I swallowed that fear, saving it for later as J.J. answered. “I’m patching her in now.”

“Hello?” Harper sounded sleepy. Part of me wanted to remonstrate J.J. for not calling her earlier, but it wasn’t like this was something he had a ton of experience with. Plus, I could have had him call her earlier if I’d really been thinking about it.

“Harper, I need you on site now,” I said, “unless you’ve got access to a drone control at your house?”

“At my house?” she asked with a measure of incredulity. “Oh, yeah, Nealon, I always bring highly classified military hardware to an unsecured location. Because I love the idea of a court martial, it sounds like fun.”

“Doesn’t the military have some kind of prohibition on insubordination and smartassery to your higher-ups?” I asked as the chopper started to settle on the pad.

“One, you’re not in my chain of command,” she said, still sounding pretty sleepy, “and two, I’ve just been following your lead—sir.” She snarked with a smile on that one, and I had to smile in return.

“Fair enough,” I said. “We’ve got a situation here, and I need eyes on. How soon can you be there?”

“I live in Chanhassen,” she said, and I could faintly hear her moving around. “Be there in twenty.” She hung up without another word.

“She must drive like the wind,” J.J. remarked. “Or else she’s coming in in her PJ’s.”

“Maybe she sleeps naked,” Scott mused, causing me to turn and look at him. He just shrugged. “What?”

I just ran for the chopper. The door was already open when I got there, and I saw two seats available. A young guy, a little older than me, was standing there with the black tactical vest on, holding the door. What a gentleman. Handsome, too, I saw from the brief look I gave him as I stepped up.

“Jeremy Hampton, ma’am,” he said, with a tip of the finger from his forehead that looked like a salute. “FBI Hostage Rescue Team.”

“Good thing you told me that, Hampton,” I said over the roar of the helicopter rotors, “because I was sure that this was a Boy Scout party bus.”

He smiled and settled back on his seat, quickly glancing from me to Scott and Reed, then back again. His eyes then shuffled to the empty seats and back to me. I got his meaning.

“Reed, you stay here and start buttoning up the campus,” I said, looking back at him for only a second. “Scott, you’re with me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Scott said, shrugging as he stepped into the chopper and sat down next to me. I saw Reed’s look of betrayal disappear as the chopper took off without him, bucking and shaking as we lifted into the air. I settled back in my seat. It was quasi-military, not built for comfort. The pilot certainly didn’t take easy turns. He spun us about and headed us back in the opposite direction as soon as we were marginally clear of headquarters, and we shook as the helo started to climb.