The Collective (30 page)

Jarman didn’t have a police radio in the car. He grabbed his cell phone off of the passenger seat and called for backup. It took three rings, and when the line was picked up, he did not wait for the voice on the other end to identify itself. He snapped off his name and badge number and Cait McCandless’s address.

“Shots fired!” he snapped.

“All right, Detective. Backup’s on the way.”

“Good. And someone call my partner.”

Protocol demanded that he observe and report before taking any action. Screw that. He hung up the phone, jammed it into his pocket, and climbed out of the Saturn, closing the door as quietly as he could.

Jarman hustled into the cover of a pair of trees, trying to get a view of McCandless’s apartment house, but he was too far away. In a house up ahead, a couple of stoner-looking college guys came out on their front stoop, apparently curious about the gunshots, maybe not really understanding what they had heard or too stupid to keep their heads down.

“Get your asses back inside,” Jarman hissed.

They jerked back inside, probably more at the sight of his gun than because he’d ordered them to, but when he reached into his open collar and yanked out his badge—which hung from a chain around his neck—they stepped out again. They figured a cop wouldn’t shoot them, too stupid or too high to realize he hadn’t fired the shots they’d already heard.

More gunshots punctured the darkness. Jarman darted toward the front of the nearest house and raced across the yards, keeping close to cover. When he was two houses away from Cait McCandless’s apartment, he ran low across the grass to take cover behind a car parked in the driveway, which would give him a better view.

A skinny little guy in a dark suit went up the stairs and through the front door, gun at the ready. Gunfire cracked in the air like fireworks—Jarman could feel the sounds echoing in his chest.

Two others stood outside the house, ducked down so they couldn’t be sighted through the well-lit apartment windows. Jarman listened to the shots being fired inside and felt himself torn by indecision. The numbers were against him. At least three people were involved in a gun battle inside the house, and the two apes in the yard were obviously armed. Protocol and wisdom said he should wait for backup. They couldn’t be far. He’d called it in at least a full minute ago. Any second he’d hear sirens.

Any second.

But he didn’t hear them, and now the gunfire had fallen silent in the house. He cursed himself for waiting, hated the way his stomach churned—though he blamed Sparky’s wings for that—and despised the little ball of cowardice that had curled up like a whimpering dog in his gut.

Cait McCandless had a baby.

“Screw it,” Jarman whispered, and he started to run.

The guy was Iraqi. Maybe they all were, or maybe they were a hodgepodge of Arabic extremists. What the hell had she heard about terrorists killing a family? Something on the news, but she couldn’t remember now.

Iraqi, okay. But what the hell that meant and how all the pieces fit together, she had no idea. The detectives—Monteforte and Jarman—had asked about Nizam’s family, and if they might try to get custody of Leyla. That alone had been difficult for her to imagine, but this? Cold-blooded murder? Gunfire in her apartment—

Miranda. Oh, God, Miranda
.

“Fuck you,” Cait sneered, her aim not wavering. “One step and you’re dead.”

She had the gun pointed directly into the face of the man who’d spoken. Leyla went silent and still, but Cait could feel the baby’s heart beating against her chest. A deathly calm had come over Cait. The war had given her the ability to kill when necessary. She had never wanted to learn that skill or to lose the part of her soul that it had cost her, but she had. Her government had demanded it.

“They’ll kill you anyway, after you’ve shot me,” said the one who gave the orders.

“But you’ll be dead.”

The man lifted his chin. “So be it.”

Fuck. She hated martyrs. There was no way to get a fair fight with someone who didn’t mind dying for their cause.

She shot him in the face. Even as the bullet snapped his head back, she swung the gun toward the third man, who still had his own gun out, but she knew she would not be fast enough. He had the drop on her. He would pull the trigger. This close he couldn’t possibly miss. And then the other
would stab her to death and they would take Leyla. They would …

These thoughts filled the space between two heartbeats. Her finger started to squeeze the trigger a second time, tracking the two survivors, the knife, and the gun, but knowing the bullet that would end her was on the way.

The gunshot made her flinch, resounding across the night sky. He had fired first, or so she thought until his gun hand drooped and he staggered aside, then crumbled to the grass and sprawled there, a bloody hole in the back of his shirt.

Leyla started wailing again.

Cait and the knife-man turned at the same time to see a pair of men in dark suits coming around from the front of the house. Only seconds had passed since she’d come out the back door. These two must have been on standby in front, but the gunshots had drawn them around back.

The knife-man dropped his blade, reaching for his gun.

Enemies
. They were enemies.

Cait leveled her weapon at the men in suits, hoping the knife-man would shoot them before he’d try putting a bullet in her.
They want Leyla. Why do they want to hurt my baby?

Her finger tightened on the trigger, but then she saw a third man coming around from the front yard—a black man in shirt and tie, no jacket. Him she knew.

Detective Jarman planted his feet and took aim, shouting.

“Police! Drop your—”

Three shots rang out in quick succession and Detective Jarman spun around and fell, and only then did Cait see the skinny blond weasel hanging halfway out the broken apartment window, gun clasped in both hands.

Knife-man took aim at him, put a bullet in the window frame, and then the two who’d come from the front shot him dead, there in the yard, and the gunshots echoed into silence. The sounds drifted away like smoke.

“Get her, damn it!” the weasel in the window shouted.

Over the cries and choking sobs of her baby, she heard the distant banshee wail of police sirens, but by the time the cops came, this would all be over. She shot the one closest to her
and ran, headed for the shed at the back of the yard. Shouts followed her, and so did bullets, one shattering the window in the shed, but though she braced for impact, none of the shots hit her.

A glance over her shoulder showed her the weasel using his gun to smash the rest of the glass out of the living room window. He crouched on the sill and jumped down, but the other guy had a twenty-foot lead on him, sprinting.

Cait knew then that they would catch her. The shed would block bullets, but offered no hiding place, and she would never make it through the backyards to the next street before they caught up with her. This wasn’t going to work, which left her only one option—to be the last one standing.

She rounded the corner of the shed and stopped. Using it for cover, with Leyla’s terrified shrieks filling her ears, she took aim at the black-suited gunman who was closing in on her. The weasel sprinted to catch up to him.

An engine revved, out on the street. Headlights swept the darkness of the yard and then the car’s growl turned into a roar. The two men in suits spun around, silhouetted in the headlights as a silver, mid-’90s Cadillac El Dorado tore across the lawn, ancient Rolling Stones blaring on the radio. Weasel bounced off the front grill with a sickeningly wet crunch of bone and vanished underneath the car. The other guy lifted his gun, ready to fire at the Caddy’s windshield, but the driver leaned out the window and shot him twice in the chest.

As the guy fell, she got her first clear view of the grim-faced old man behind the wheel, his hair as silver as the El Dorado’s finish. He lowered his gun the moment he saw her—a comforting change of pace. But she wasn’t in a trusting mood, and kept her own weapon trained on his face.

“Caitlin McCandless,” he called, over the growing song of police sirens and Leyla’s diminishing cries. “My name is Matthew Lynch. If you want your daughter to live through the night, you’d better get in.”

“The police are coming,” she said.

“They’ll buy you a few hours, no more,” Lynch said quickly. “You’ve got dead Feds and terrorists in your yard,
honey. This is bigger than the Podunk P.D. Please, get in. For your daughter’s sake, if not your own.” The sirens grew louder.

Lynch put his car in reverse, staring at her. “Decide!”

“Shit!” Cait snapped, and ran around to the passenger side.

As she climbed in, she kept her gun trained on Lynch, but he ignored her. She hadn’t even closed the passenger door when he floored the car in reverse, tearing up the grass. He bumped over the sidewalk and into the street, jammed on the brakes, threw the car in Drive, and took off so fast the door slammed shut on its own.

Cait had made her choice. She put her gun on the floor and grabbed the seat belt, strapping it across her chest, holding Leyla in her lap. As she adjusted the belt, she caught sight of an empty car seat in the back, like Lynch had come ready to take the baby with him, and she turned to stare at him, wondering how different he was, really, from the other men.

Silent now, Leyla stared up at her, eyes wide with shock and probably exhausted from all of the crying.

Lynch reached Powder House Circle at the same time four police cars poured into it from three different directions. He slowed down, just an old guy in his well-preserved Caddy, and went around the rotary, headed for Route 16, or maybe Route 93.

As she stared at him, Lynch wrinkled his nose.

“Jesus, your baby smells like piss.”

Cait laughed in disbelief. “I didn’t have time to grab her diaper bag.”

Lynch tapped the accelerator and shot through a yellow light. “I’ve got one in the trunk.”

A terrible chill, growing too familiar by now, spread up Cait’s spine. What the hell had she gotten them into now?

“I could do without the fucking entourage.”

Josh Hart ran a hand through his hair—a nervous habit that showed up whenever he was in a crowd. Not that there were actually that many people in the baggage compartment of the plane. Him, Voss, Turcotte, a woman named Aria who was the mouthpiece for Massport security, and Special Agent Ben Coogan out of the FBI’s Boston field office. The guy must have asked to be posted there because he was a local boy, South Boston Irish born and bred, with squared-off boxer’s shoulders and a nose crooked from being broken in a bar fight. And that wasn’t Josh stereotyping. Coogan had slipped the story into conversation within the first four minutes of their introduction on the tarmac.

“There’s not much I can do about it, Agent Hart,” Aria said, crouching down to glance out at the group gathered around the rear of the plane. “It’s my people, your people, and the Boston P.D. It isn’t like there are any media or civilians out there.”

Josh and Voss exchanged a glance. Her eyes crinkled with amusement but she didn’t quite smile. She didn’t have to. They knew each other well enough that communication might as well have been telepathic. Aria worked airport security, and as much as she and her employees were a vital part of protecting the nation, for her to refer to
others
as civilians—as if scanning suitcases and patting down old ladies was the same thing as hunting terrorists and serial killers—made them both want to choke.

“I’m sorry, Ms.…?”

“Fernandez.”

“Ms. Fernandez,” Josh continued. “I’m mostly referring to the various departments and agencies that we’re accumulating
on this case. It’s snowballing, and you know what they say about too many cooks. Plus, I have some issues with crowds.”

Aria smiled. “Everybody’s got an issue with something.”

Josh glanced around the compartment. The crime-scene team had been in hours ago. The body had already been removed and there was no blood, but the signs of a struggle were evident everywhere they looked.