Текст книги "Adrenaline"

Автор книги: Jeff Abbott

Соавторы: Jeff Abbott
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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

69

I HURRIED INTO THE VAN, crawled to the back. The gear was there, where he’d tossed it. I pulled out the two Glocks, one mounted with a silencer, the explosive charge, the cell phone.

I heard footsteps skittering on the pavement. At least two people. I wished it were more.

“Piet?” a man’s voice called. Then in Dutch, “Hurry up. Edward’s pissed, we’re going to be behind schedule.”

They stepped into my range, in the intermittent light of the moon. One of them saw Piet lying on the black of the pavement. He rushed forward; the second man was smarter, stopping, then falling into a protective crouch, gun at the ready.

Through the barely open back door of the van, I shot the first one in the knee. I have always heard that the pain is excruciating. The silencer made a quiet hiss. He fell with a raging howl, clutching at his leg. I shot the other one, standing over Piet, in both knees. He dropped, his knees hit the pavement. I slammed a fist into his throat and he went silent. I kicked the first guy hard and he went quiet, too.

Two down.

I ducked out of the van and ran for the door. It had been propped open. Oddly—and I didn’t like anything that suggested oddity right now—the large bay doors to the brewery remained closed. With the truck here, I expected them to be opening in greeting. I didn’t want to be caught in the open.

I hung at the lip of the parking lot door. No sound, no voices—only a distant murmur.

I risked a glance. The old brewery’s entryway was empty, dimly lit by fluorescent lighting. Concrete floor, brick walls, high, grimy windows. I smelled the soft waft of sausage and pizza. I rushed the door. Beyond that was a brick hallway of old offices, most of the doors shut, one door open, faint light gleaming from inside.

I could hear voices, speaking in Dutch: “You’re cheating.” A man’s voice, young, rough.

“You cannot cheat on a computer game.” A woman’s voice.

“You know a trick.”

“Knowing a trick isn’t cheating, whiner,” the woman said. Laughter from more people.

I stepped into the doorway. Five of them, four men and a woman, sat with their backs to me, hands holding video game controllers, a fictional bloodbath erupting on the screen. They were killing Nazis in the computer-generated rubble of Berlin. The room wasn’t so much an office as a big storage room, and I saw a large heavy metal door.

“Hey, assholes,” I said. “Game over.” Not a brilliant line but I wasn’t thinking witty.

They all did this little jerky dance of surprise: jerk, freeze, stay frozen. The woman, Demi—I recognized her from the house Piet had taken me to—was closest to me and I pulled her close. She stiffened with terror. They dropped the game controls and behind them on the screen I could see their players immediately fragged by an SS squadron.

I put the gun against Demi’s head. “Drop the weapons… slowly.” Three of the guys had guns in the back of their pants; I’d seen them when they stood up. Two of them obeyed. The third, a muscular youth with a hateful glint in his eye, took his out and hesitated.

“You won’t get away with this,” he said. I remembered his name. Freddy.

“Do you want to die? Seriously? Drop the gun.”

He didn’t, and I needed an example, so I shot him in the knee, too. All his bravado evaporated as he screamed and fell. He also dropped his gun.

“Okay, then,” I said. I kept my voice steady. “I want Yasmin Zaid and Edward. Where are they?”

None of them answered.

“If you don’t know, you’re useless to me.” I let the gun’s aim go to the next guy.

“Past the vat room,” Demi said in a hoarse whisper. “Down to your left. There’s an old wing of offices. She’s guarded.”

“How many others here?”

Her lips tightened.

“Do you think I won’t shoot you because you’re a woman? Get over yourself,” I said. “How many others here?”

I knew they weren’t pros when Demi said, “Five,” and Freddy gasped, “Twelve, and more coming,” at the same time. I believed Demi. God, I hoped she was right.

“That metal door,” I said. “Open it.”

One of the men obeyed. Freddy yelled, “Don’t help him, don’t.”

“Do you want to dance again?” I said. “Shut up.” He went quiet.

I could see inside—it was a cold room, like a giant refrigerator.

“Cell phones on the floor. Empty out your pockets.” They obeyed: five cell phones hit the floor.

I gestured them inside with the gun then slammed the door and locked it. Five more, and I didn’t know if that included Edward.

I continued down the hall. The main brewery floor was dark. Thin light gleamed from up high. I could see the squat bulks of six old copper vats; concrete flooring separated them. A catwalk encircled the square of the floor up high, a few rooms and offices above the catwalk. The walls were white tile.

I heard footsteps approaching above me on the catwalk. A man with an assault rifle buckled across his chest. You walk on a catwalk, you tend to look down through the metal mesh. He saw me.

He opened fire. I ducked low behind a rounded vat and the shots drumming the copper sounded like a jangling of cymbals.

I could see in the distance, on a half-lower level, a long wall with a metal rectangle. The bay doors. That was where most of them would have been, I thought, when the fight began, waiting to do the work of the loading. If I stayed pinned down here they’d rush me.

I climbed inside the vat. It was low and dark and the singing of the bullets made it sound like crawling into a gong. The catwalk formed an L shape over the opening. I waited.

The rifleman stopped shooting. He was looking for me, not wanting to waste bullets, and he had thought I would just hide behind the vat. I listened for the soft scrape of his feet above me and threw myself into the opening, firing into the space between the flooring and the railing. He jerked and then he fell to the catwalk. I didn’t know if he was alive or dead, but he was down and not shooting at me.

But all surprise was gone now.

I ran into the loading bay area, jumping over a railing, dropping to the concrete floor. I saw a man running toward me, raising a pistol. Two more men following him. Old pallets of bottles sat to my right and I dodged behind them. Gunfire exploded the tops and shattered sprays of glass, splinters, and stale beer fountained above my head.

Three to fight. I went still. I had a Glock in each hand, Piet’s wakizashi tucked in my back belt, and an explosive charge in my jacket pocket.

The gunfire stopped.

An awful echoing silence filled the room, the smell of cordite, of old beer.

I could hear a hissed argument in Dutch. “You go,” “No, you go,” cowards daring each other to find some courage. I thought of the people they’d helped kill at the train station. I tried to calm my mind, think of efficiency, like running along the edge of the building in parkour, find the line.

One called out in Dutch, “Throw down your guns, you can’t get out.”

I moved as quietly as I could to the corner of the large pallet I’d hidden behind. I raised the Glocks, aiming down each corner from the beer pallet.

No sign that anyone was coming.

Behind me, on the far side of the huge room, I heard a muffled scream from a woman.

70

YASMIN.

I didn’t have time to wait the three stooges out. The old pallets of beer were stacked in five long rectangles at one end of the dock space. Maybe forty feet between me and the external doors. I could hear at least two voices two pallets away. Like a run to make. Break it down into steps then commit each action as part of a more fluid movement.

My mind shifted to a gear it hadn’t been in since I tried to save Lucy in London. Overhead a bay of fluorescents loomed. I gunned the lights. The room plunged into semidarkness; the only light now came from the glow of the vat room.

Yasmin screamed again.

I studied the room with a traceur’s eye. Pallets to leap on, railing to jump, walls to bounce off. I could try to use parkour to outflank them. I wasn’t sure how steady the pallets were and usually I ran with hands free, not holding guns.

I saw movement to my left and I risked standing and firing a shot, then fell back to the floor. A babbling scream rose from the other side of the pallet.

I hurried down the passageway formed by the pallets. Suddenly glass crunched under my heels.

Gunfire exploded around me from three sides. In front, behind me, to my right.

Surrounded.

I retreated left, in the direction of the man I’d shot. I could hear feet scrabbling around, two closing behind me to cut off my retreat back to the vat room.

But I wasn’t retreating. They were only looking for me between the pallets. If I wasn’t where they expected, I could gain a momentary advantage.

I did a standing jump and yank onto the fifteen-foot-high pallets and ran along the edge. I saw movement to my right, another guy rounding a corner where I’d been crouching twenty seconds before, and I fired. Missed him. He fired at the same time I did and I felt the bullet tear up through my jacket and score along the flesh of my back. Then heat hit my shoulder, a sting that rose into agony.

Below my feet, bottles broke, the pallet coming apart at the top. The stack gave way. Beer flooded my shoes. I knew if I tumbled into the mess I’d be cut by the jagged glass and an easy mark.

I jumped to the roof of a forklift, looking down to see a surprised face hiding behind its bulk. I fired wildly and the surprised guy went down, bullets punching into his shoulders. I jumped to the next pallet, hit the wood and didn’t look back. The pain in my shoulder seared. A warm throb of blood coursed down my back. I was hurt.

I couldn’t be hurt. I couldn’t. I jumped off the stack and landed on concrete.

And one of the two had doubled back on his run. I landed three feet in front of him.

He raised an assault rifle but he didn’t fire. “Drop your weapons!” he screamed.

I dropped both the Glocks.

“On the floor!”

I went to my knees. My hand twisted behind me for the wakizashi.

“Hands where I can see them!”

My hand closed on the wakizashi’s handle. I turned the sword and it sliced through the thin leather belt I wore. Thank you, Piet, for being bored, for sharpening the sword while we waited in the rain outside the sweatshop for the Lings’ truck. If I’d pulled it free he would have seen it, but I made my right hand dangle. “I’m shot in the arm,” I said. “I can’t lift it.”

He took a single step toward me. “Who are you? Police?”

“Yeah, because the police come in one guy at a time,” I said. “Don’t be an idiot. I’m not police.”

I heard the crunch of glass behind me. My feet were in shadow; the only light coming from the vat room. Whoever was behind me would see the wakizashi any second.

“Who are you?” the first man yelled again.

Two more steps from behind me. The guy coming up behind me would see the blade. In three. Two. One…

I fell backward into the scattering of glass and rolled, my jacket protecting me from the floor full of sharp edges. The wakizashi swung through flesh down to bone on the leg of the guy behind me. He screamed, and the guy with the rifle froze in surprise. I yanked the sword free from its mooring of flesh and swung the wakizashi back, twisting to put the edge forward, and slashed through the thigh of the man before me. He bellowed and staggered back, bullets spraying into the floor as he fell. Seriously, are any of us prepared to be slashed with a sword? No. For an instant, the pain must have been so hot and fresh in the man’s mind that he forgot to shoot me.

That’s the key. You must ignore the pain.

I could hear someone else approaching. God, how many were there? I kicked both the men unconscious. I yanked the flash charge from my jacket, activated it, and tucked it under one man’s arm.

I hurried on the other side of the pallet, moving as quietly as I could, ignoring the pain.

C’mon, I thought. I heard footsteps. One set, closing fast, spraying a panicky round of fire down the passageway formed by the pallets. Bottles shattered and beer gushed.

I heard someone kneel on the glass-covered floor, murmur a name, and then the light and sound burst like a little bright warhead. A howl. I hurried around the corner, saw a man—but only one—writhing in the glass, blinded and deafened by the flash bomb. I picked up a beer bottle and smashed it on the back of his head and he went groggy. A second kick to the face left him cold; my shoulders hurt too much to try and punch.

A dozen. I’d taken out a dozen. I was barely on my feet. Still one. Still one more. Edward. I checked my Glocks. Empty. One of the men had a gun with a full clip and I took it.

I crept out of the space between the pallets. The glass from the beer bottles was like a signal; every movement producing an audible crunch under my feet, a terrible telegraphing of my position. I moved as carefully as I could. My ears rang from the concussive blast and I was bleeding freely. Everything hurt.

Lucy. The Bundle. Yasmin, the girl I’d been sent to save, the key to the man who had stolen my family and my life. Focus. Don’t give up now.

I heard nothing except the distant sobbing of the young woman.

She was valuable to Edward. Maybe the orders were to guard her at all costs.

Then I heard her voice rise into a scream. I could hear the echo coming from a hallway to the right.

Maybe Edward had gone after her, decided to make his stand close to his prize.

71

I TORE DOWN A SMALL HALLWAY, gun extended, ready to shoot any shadow.

Yasmin’s screaming stopped. I skidded into an old circular chamber, lined with stone. It smelled of wood and spilled beer and a more recent tang of gunfire. The darkness was gray and blue, and a sputtering light flickered at one side of the chamber. Three side doors, the farthest one half open. I heard a hushed voice inside, murmuring. I strained to hear the words.

Don’t be afraid. Just do as I say and all will be well. A man’s voice, a low growl, full of impatience and hate.

My father has sent someone else… Yasmin’s voice, wavering. Please.

I inched closer to the door.

Be quiet. And it was Edward’s voice, the voice on the tape, the voice of the man who had stolen my wife. He’ll come here soon enough.

Damn straight. Anger and hate roared up into my head and I kicked in the door. In the guttering light behind me I saw them, him crouching over Yasmin, her mouth twisted in fear. She sat on a bed and Edward had positioned himself between me and her. The scar—like a little question mark—gleamed by his eye. He held a gun in his hands.

He started to raise it.

I needed him alive. “Drop the weapon!” I fired and the bullet went just wide of his head. He dropped the gun. I didn’t see fear in his eyes. I saw a raw calculation.

“Kick it over here!”

He obeyed. He was a big guy, broad-shouldered, muscled, bigger looking than in the videos.

I stepped on his gun. “On the floor, now. Hands on your head.”

Yasmin was crying. Edward obeyed, scowling.

“Yasmin, it’s okay. Your father sent me. I’m getting you out of here. Come here.”

She slowly inched away from Edward. He seemed to shackle her with his stare, directed fully at her, not at me.

“I know you,” Edward said, as she slowly made her way toward me.

“I know you, too.”

“London.” His voice was a snake moving across stone. He had a soft British accent. The bastard smiled. “You ran very fast. It was almost funny to watch. You made me think of a spider with its web burning. No place to go.”

“My wife. Where is she?” Yasmin was halfway between us, wiping tears from her eyes.

“That’s my sole value to you, yes? Information?”

“Where is my wife?”

He laughed. “Worth something to you, I see, knowing her final resting place. Are you afraid of knowing how she suffered?”

My skin prickled cold. No. “You tell me and you get to live.”

“Even if I’ve killed Lucy? I still get to live?” Edward laughed again. I didn’t like the laughter. A man only laughs when he holds the upper hand.

“Do you mean the American woman?” Yasmin stopped two feet short of me, her hands clutching her elbows, shivering. In real life her voice was a bit higher than on the tape. “The American woman with the baby? Lucy, yes?”

My gaze jerked to her. “Where is she?” I hollered.

“I don’t know where she is now…” She seemed to fight for control of her voice. “I don’t know…”

Edward said, “You want to know where your wife is? You let me and Yasmin leave. It’s the best deal you’re going to get today, Sam.”

I heard a footstep behind me, in the doorway. I’d missed one.

I turned and fired.

And the voltage hit me like a steam train slamming into my bones. I fought to keep the grip on my gun but the shocks, coursing along bones and tendons and spine like lightning, made it drop from my grasp. I fell to my knees. I stared at the black leather boots in front of me.

I looked up.

Lucy. Holding a Taser. Every sound was a blasting roar in my brain. Every sight a nightmare. I tried to slap the Taser needles from my body but then I saw, as if in slow motion, her thumb work and the shattering surge hit me again.

Her boot came back, rocketed toward my head.

Darkness.

PART THREE

APRIL 14–21

“Systems do collapse, and are replaced by others. The state is only here because people choose to believe in it—because they trust its systems…. This, then, is the threat of crime to modern society: not that it will overcome civilization with violence, but that it will undermine trust in, and thus the viability of, the system.”

–Carolyn Nordstrom, Global Outlaws

72

PIET TANAKA OPENED HIS EYES and blinked away blood. He took a hard, shuddering breath. The hiss of air over ruined teeth hurt so sharply he jerked up. A weight lay atop him. He shoved the form away. A man. One of Edward’s thugs, shot, unconscious.

Piet pulled himself up from the concrete. He could hear the shattering sounds of gunshots inside the brewery.

It was time to leave. The job had gone very wrong. He didn’t care who was winning on the inside: that fool who’d tricked him so badly or Edward’s people.

He saw the van’s keys, stuck in the driver’s-side door. He lurched into the van, started the engine, and accelerated into the night. When he realized his sword was gone, he felt a feverish rage take hold of his heart. Sam, you rotten bastard.

Two kilometers down the road he had an idea. He needed a safety net. Sam worked for someone. Fine. Sam’s bosses would want information. They could hide him. It was time to defect.

It had been a bar in Brussels where the manager got Sam his gear; well, Sam had used another bar manager in Amsterdam to establish his bona fides. De Rode Prins. The bars must be connected, and there he could look for Sam’s bosses to make a deal. He blinked through the pain—his tongue kept probing where his front teeth once were and his gums gave off a hard throb—and he headed for the Prinsengracht. The bar would be closed. But he could break in, find out who Peter Samson worked for.

73

PAIN—FROM MY HEAD to my shoulder to my back—forced open my eyes. I slowly sat up. Everything hurt. Dried blood on my head, my cheek, drool stuck to my lips. I was in a small stone room. No bed; file cabinets. My shirt and jacket were hiked up.

Then I saw Lucy, sitting across the room from me.

I blinked at her.

“Hello, Sam.”

“You cut your hair,” I said. My voice sounded thick, heavy, broken.

“I’m supposed to kill you,” she said. Five words to end a conversation before it started. I could hear a truck’s engine rumbling in the distance. The plonking sounds of crates being moved. I heard those sounds and I couldn’t wrap my head around the words she had just spoken to me.

“Lucy—”

“I told Edward I would take care of you, but take care has a whole range of meanings.”

“Lucy. Where is the baby?” My mind swirled with a thousand questions, but that was the one that knifed through the shock.

“Sam. You’ll die if you don’t listen to me.”

I looked at the flat of her stomach. Her dark blouse was neatly tucked into blue jeans. “Where is our son?”

“He’s not your concern, Sam.”

“He’s my only concern. Now that I know what you are.” Hello, anger, boiling up in my chest.

“Will you please listen, monkey? I am trying to save you.”

Her use of her old term of endearment made my stomach twist. But I kept my voice steady. “You. I don’t even have the words for what you are.”

“You’d rather argue with me than live?”

“What you are. I know what you are now,” I said.

“Smarter. Quicker. Stronger. Richer. You could try those on for size.”

The woman I loved. I thought I loved. She sat there, wearing the face and the body that I knew so well, that I’d treasured; she spoke with the voice that had murmured love into my ear; she regarded me with the intelligence that sealed the deal to spend my life with her. But she was a stranger. I hadn’t known her.

Let me say that again: I hadn’t known her.

She had been a complete and utter lie and she had stolen far more than three years of my life. The scale of the lie staggered me. She had stolen my sense of who I was, and what I knew in the world. The marriage was done and I didn’t even have time to grieve for it. All this flashed through my head in a second, not even in words, just a coldness that covered me.

“All right, smart and rich,” I said. “Where is our child?”

“Don’t you want to know why?”

“No. I’ll ask and you’ll lie, or you won’t tell me. You’ve done what you’ve done and that’s it,” I said. “I don’t understand it but I don’t need to understand it. I only need to stop you.”

“Well, that’s not going to happen.” Now she showed me a half smile, the one when I used to tease her and she’d tease back.

“Fine. We’ll play it your way. Tell me why. You’re clearly dying to,” I said. “You seem to have a reason for keeping me alive. Just to taunt me?”

“I’m not heartless, Sam. I do have… feelings for you. You were a good cook. Good in bed. Thoughtful company. You were a good husband.”

“I was good camouflage,” I said. “I was a good pawn.”

“I’ll bet you insisted to the Company that I was innocent. Very chivalrous.”

“Very naïve.”

“No. I’m just very good at fooling people,” she said. An emptiness seemed to hollow out her words.

I got to unsteady feet, my head rocking. “What is going on here, Lucy? Who are these people, what are you doing?”

“Sweet mystery,” she said. “I’m supposed to find out what you know and shoot you. But I can’t. I can’t just shoot you in cold blood, Sam. I think…”

I took a shambling step toward her and she raised the gun. “It’s not cold blood if you attack me. Then I do what I have to, Sam. And I assume you don’t want to die.”

I stopped. “Yes.”

“I’m glad I didn’t wreck your will to live, then.” I couldn’t read the emotion in her face. She wasn’t smug, despite her earlier words about being smarter and richer. She looked unsure. Like she wasn’t used to seeing consequences staring back at her.

“I want to know where our son is.”

“You say nothing to the police, to the Company, that I’m alive. You don’t mention me and, in a week or so, I’ll be in touch with you. I’ll tell you what you need to know to find the baby. You can have him. Just say you never saw me, okay?”

“Is the baby all right?”

“He’s safe, Sam.” She glanced up at me. “A healthy, beautiful boy. We made us a good one.” She stood and I saw a swallow work her throat. A silencer capped her gun. “I really need to go. Now. So here’s what we’re going to do. I am going to leave. You are going to be quiet and not make a sound. Edward and I will be on our way. Eventually the police will come and you will have to answer questions. You keep my name out of it—and I’ll know if you do or not—and then I’ll let you know where the baby is. Mention me and you’ll never, ever see him.”

“Why would you let me live?”

“I stole three years of your life. This is restitution.” Her voice was unsteady. The spouse always knows. August had said that, so had Howell. The spouse always knows when treason is in the house. I hadn’t.

“That’s not reason enough. Why?” She had to have another motivation. One based on her own advantage.

“Don’t be an ingrate,” Lucy said.

I thought of our three years together, how every word, every action, had been choreographed to protect her.

“Did you ever love me?” I asked. I hated asking; it didn’t matter. She didn’t love me now. Any question was sentiment. I’d lost years of my life as surely as if I’d been stranded on an island or walled in a prison. The only thing that could matter was my child, not my ego.

“I must have. You’re still breathing.”

She looked past my shoulder. Out the window. And I heard the blast of gunfire. She slammed the door, locked it. I staggered to the door. I started kicking the lock, trying to break it.

The gunfire stopped. I looked out the window. A van roared into the parking lot, spilling three men out onto the pavement.

One of them was Howell.