The Collective (54 page)

She heard Josh on the radio.
“Mr. Lynch, please just listen. Tell Cait it’s Josh Hart from the ICD.”

Things were about to get hot up there, but she could barely make out the words because of all the growing chatter around her. Irritated, she glanced about and saw more and more officers and agents checking their phones, watching something on the tiny screens. Captain Koh stood perhaps ten feet away, with a junior officer holding a cell phone up for him to view.

Revulsion and amazement competed for control of Koh’s expression. He glanced up at the top floor of the Black Pine building as though he wanted it to explode.

What the hell?
Voss thought, unclipping her phone. She had one message, and she opened it. Immediately, video began to play, the sound crackling but the words mostly audible. The grainy image showed a man seated behind a desk, and beneath the picture a single line of copy
—Leonard Shelby, CEO, Black Pine Worldwide
.

She understood immediately, and couldn’t believe McCandless had pulled it off. But another grim certainty seized her and she knew she had to act. Voss saw Norris out in front of his muster-line of stormtroopers, staring at his cell phone, clutching the side of his head with one hand and looking like he wanted to run six directions at once.

She slid her arm out of the sling and plucked her radio from the hood of the patrol car in front of her.
Quickly
, she thought, watching as Norris pulled out his own radio—knowing that it no longer mattered if Leonard Shelby lived or died. In fact, it would be better for Black Pine if he did not survive the day.

Holding her cell in her right hand, she lifted the radio. “This is Agent Voss to positions thirteen and fourteen. On my signal, take out the windows on either side of the seventh-floor corridor.”

“Position thirteen, ready.”

“Position fourteen, ready.”

She saw Norris barking an order even as she glanced at her cell phone, scanned through to Josh’s name, and hit the button to call him. Voss counted to three, pushing her phone into her pocket, then lifted the radio again.

“Thirteen. Fourteen. Go.”

Shots from sniper rifles cracked the air in a brief volley. Norris started shouting at the Black Pine men lining the sidewalk, startling them all. Voss ran toward Captain Koh and a group of FBI agents, speaking into her radio.

“Go! Go! Take them!” she shouted, drawing her gun.

Josh and Chang stood in the little alcove that led from the corridor into the executive suite, their backs to the door. Half a dozen Black Pine guards glared at them. The one who’d aimed his gun at Josh a few seconds ago—his name tag identified him as Hewitt—seemed to be in charge, so Josh focused on him.

“If Mr. Lynch opens the door for us, we’ll go in and talk to them,” Josh said. “Mr. Hewitt, remember that the FBI and local police are monitoring this conversation and will be able to hear whatever transpires here. Homeland Security is officially guaranteeing that if Sergeant McCandless and her associates surrender to me, personally, they will be taken into custody without any harm befalling them.”

Hewitt’s upper lip curled in disgust, but he radioed for instructions. Josh looked at the uniformed goons along the corridor to the left. They were adjusting black hoses on canisters full of some kind of gas that would knock everyone in the executive suite unconscious, but probably not fast enough to prevent bloodshed.

Then Hewitt’s orders came back, and it was very clear that he did not like them.

Josh blinked. “Are we clear on this now?”

“Just do your job, asshole,” Hewitt sneered.

Josh rapped loudly at the door behind him. “Mr. Lynch, go ahead and open the door. We’ve settled our differences out here.”

For a moment, there was no reply. Josh and Chang brushed shoulders. He breathed in her scent and wondered if there was any way to avoid this whole thing blowing up in their faces. Then he felt the door jerk against his back. The thumbprint scanner had been destroyed, making it impossible to open the door from the outside without breaking it down. But it could be unlocked from within.

The door clicked, slid open two inches. Josh watched the eyes of the men and women from Black Pine, worried that one of them might not care that the FBI were listening in.

“Mr. Lynch?” Chang said.

Music filled the alcove, Josh’s cell phone playing Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.” Everyone in the corridor froze, staring at him. Josh stopped breathing. Hewitt actually started to smile, but not Josh. The ringtone was personalized—it meant Voss was calling him. And he could only think of one reason for that.

Hewitt’s radio crackled, someone shouting his name. Josh heard the word
kill
in there somewhere, but he was already in motion.

The windows at either end of the hallway shattered, thick glass flying. Operatives turned away to protect themselves from the shards. Josh shot Hewitt in the side of the head, knocking the man back against the wall in a spray of blood. Before Hewitt even began to fall, Josh shot a second man, in the shoulder, and a blond woman in the leg. Still, her finger clenched on the trigger and bullets punched the carpeted floor before Chang shot her in the face.

Josh felt a bullet clip his right shoulder and he slammed himself back against the door behind him. It swung inward. Black Pine guards stepped over their fallen comrades in a fury. Chang took a bullet in her right thigh and staggered to
the right, blocking Josh’s view of the shooters, and he had a split-second nightmare of her body dancing with the impact of a hundred bullets.

Then Chang aimed to the left, right at the tanks of pressurized gas, and pulled the trigger. The explosion blew both of them through the door into the executive suite, where they landed in a tumble of bloody limbs and guns as a cloud of gas filled the corridor and ballooned into the suite after them.

Josh looked up into the grim face of a white-haired man he knew must be Lynch.

“What the hell did you just do?” Lynch asked.

A ripple of gunshots came from the corridor and tore up the receptionist’s desk, shattering the computer and framed family photos. Lynch, Josh, and Chang all returned fire into the blossoming fog of knockout gas.

“Not me,” Josh said, firing as he nodded toward Chang. “Her. And what she did is buy us another sixty seconds.”

Shelby used the chaos in the executive suite to make a move for Monteforte’s gun. Cait caught the motion in her peripheral vision, and she ran at them both, holstering her gun. If she shot Shelby, no one would believe that she had not come here to kill him.

Shelby had Monteforte’s wrist and they struggled for control of her gun. The detective showed grit, headbutting Shelby and trying to knee his crotch, but Shelby had been someone’s Special Ops bastard once upon a time. Keeping Monteforte between himself and Cait, he twisted the gun in her hand and started punching her in the armpit and breast.

The gun came free. A look of triumph lit up his face before Cait yanked Monteforte out of the way and launched a kick at Shelby’s chest that knocked him back against the wall hard
enough to shake a painting off its hook. As the frame crashed to the ground, Shelby brought the gun up, aimed at her face, but Cait had already moved. She slid to one side, grabbed his gun hand, and broke the wrist even as she drove her other elbow into his chest.

Twisting the gun from his hand, she tossed it back to Monteforte, who barely managed to catch it as she stared at Cait in grim wonder. Cait bounced Shelby off the wall and started raining blows on his face and chest and gut.

“Cait!” Monteforte yelled.

Cait spun to face her, breathing heavily, feeling the flush of blood in her cheeks. Then she nodded and backed away, willing her pulse to slow down.

“I guess you’ve lost a few steps after spending all this time killing people from behind a desk,” she said to Shelby, who had slid down the wall and now sat nursing his face.

Another burst of gunfire came from the executive suite and she turned, seeing just how large the cloud of gas swirling toward them had become. She could make out the dim forms of Lynch and two others in the fog.

“Look!” Monteforte shouted, pointing at the window.

Cait spun in time to see black forms swinging toward the glass. She dove to the floor even as gunshots boomed and the windows spiderwebbed with a million tiny cracks, then shattered as Black Pine operatives swung into the glass, crashing into the room. Three of them landed on their feet, but two lost their footing on the glass and stumbled to the carpet.

Cait drew her Sig Sauer, slammed in a fresh clip, and started firing. There were so many now that it would take too long to try to disarm them. Kill-shots were all that counted now. She shot one operative on the floor to her left in the narrow opening between his helmet and armored vest, put four shots into the vest and legs of the one farthest to the right, then reached out with her free hand and grabbed his assault rifle by the barrel, dragging it forward—and him with it, since it was looped around his neck. She jammed her gun against the visor of his helmet and pulled the trigger twice.

The second of the two who’d landed on the ground fired, strafing her with gunfire that slammed into her back and sent
her staggering forward, but her vest kept her alive. Cait started to turn, aware in the space between heartbeats that she was about to die, if not by the hand of the man on the ground then by one of the other two operatives still drawing breath.

Then a single shot rang out above the others. Monteforte had put a bullet through the helmet of the man who’d been firing at Cait. The only operative still standing swept his gun around and fired at Monteforte, but his aim was off.

Cait launched a chest-high kick that sent the Black Pine killer pinwheeling backward through the shattered window. He tried to reach for a handhold on the window frame, but the strap of his gun got in the way. His scream was muffled by his helmet as he tumbled through and fell.

Fresh air had thinned the cloud of gas, but Cait felt disoriented. She saw Shelby, propped against the wall and smiling at her in spite of his bloody face and broken wrist. Monteforte covered him with her weapon. Gunfire popped in the diminishing mist in the executive suite, but then it ceased, the echoes of the last few shots then dying away.

Something wasn’t right. Cait wracked her brain, running the whole thing through her head, wondering if any more of them were going to come down from the roof and swing through the shattered windows. Were there really only five?

Five
. Blinking away her daze she turned to see one of the operatives inching across the carpet. When she’d shot him, he had somehow lost his weapon. His legs were bloody and the left looked broken, but his vest had taken the other shots. She put a bullet in his arm as he reached for the gun and he screamed, cradling the bleeding, now useless arm against his chest.

“You don’t have to die,” Cait told him.

The man took a shuddering breath and closed his eyes, though whether in surrender or unconsciousness, she didn’t know.

“Cait, you all right?” Lynch called from out in the suite.

“We’re good.”

Only traces of the gas remained, but Lynch looked very unsteady on his feet. He blinked as though he could barely stay awake.

“Thank you for your help, Agent Hart,” Lynch said, glancing back into the suite.

The federal agent who appeared behind Lynch might have been handsome another day. This afternoon, he looked a wreck.

“That’s what they pay us for,” he said, pulling out his radio. Static squealed from it but he started talking, telling someone on the other end that the executive suite was clear and they should send a team into the building. “And tell them to put cuffs on any sorry Black Pine motherfucker they run into on the way up.”

Agent Hart turned away, and now Cait saw a third person in the suite—a beautiful Asian woman he seemed to be helping to stand. At first Cait thought the woman had just succumbed to the gas but then she saw the blood soaking the right leg of her trousers.

“Just a graze,” Agent Hart said when he saw her watching. “Agent Chang will be all right.”