Limitless (15 page)

“Snipers,” he said, nodding to the buildings to our left, to the bell tower of the church to our right, and then pointing at the building beyond. That had the gallery surrounded on three sides, with coverage of the thin alley around back from the buildings on either side. “SO19 goes in, sorts them out.”

Tactically, it was sound. If you were dealing with humans. “If this is a meta, you’re going to have a mess,” I said.

“The response team is heavily armed,” he said, brushing me off.

“Heavily armed does not equal well prepared,” I said, gritting my teeth in annoyance.

“Yeah, well,” he said, not without a little annoyance of his own, “I’m not in charge, am I? You’re more than welcome to talk to the Commissioner about that, if you’d like—”

I felt the air around me compress with the strength of a shockwave the moment before I heard the explosions. Webster was thrown against his car from the force, and I barely managed to steady myself using my power of flight as a cloud of dust rushed over me, covering the police command post with debris from the buildings on either side of us as they exploded.

Chapter 35

Philip was only peeking around the corner, but he got to witness the entire exchange with the SO19 team. The explosions came right on schedule, of course, the facades of the buildings on either side of the gallery and the church directly opposite disappearing in a blast of flame and force. Antonio had spent the whole night planting and preparing, seeding the explosives in places they would not be immediately obvious to the police, who would quickly canvas the area with bomb-sniffing dogs as they formed their perimeter.

The bomb maker had taken great care sealing each bomb well enough to fool a cursory sniff by a dog. Philip had watched some of it, impressed with the effort it took.

Worth it, now, though, he reckoned, seeing the places where the police had placed their snipers falling to the ground in a cascade of debris.

The front door to the gallery was open, the response team already entering when the bombs started to go off. Philip popped his head out just as they were turning, instinctively, toward the thunderous sound of the buildings collapsing outside.

They did not see Liliana sweep into their midst.

She had buried her blades into the first member of the team before he even knew what was coming at him. A fountain of blood splattered on a canvas placed just inside the hallway, causing Philip to cringe in horror. The black-clad policeman dropped his weapon and clutched at his neck fruitlessly as the blood continued to spurt from his carotid artery.

Liliana did not wait for his body to reach the conclusion that it was dead, though. She had already moved on, spinning and twirling with a grace that would not have been out of place in a ballet—sans the knives, of course. She hit the next two team members and placed the daggers directly in their hearts, piercing their black vests and lifting them off the ground with the force of her impact. She threw them off the tips of her blades as though they were mere refuse bags being thrown upon the pile, heaving them onto the next men in line behind them. They all fell in a jumble and she struck the fallen, blades in their necks before they fired so much as a shot.

There had been noise and chaos as a distraction when she’d begun, but it started to fade even as the cloud of dust from the church across the street blasted into the gallery in a sheer wave. Philip strained, ducking around the corner as a billow of white and brown rushed past him. He closed his eyes and heard the sound of gunshots for the first time. Sharp, barking, earsplitting. A second’s fire, if that, and then they ceased abruptly with the sound of a scream. Another series of shots that came to a quick end, and a gurgling noise.

The noise went on, just for a little while longer, and Philip stood there, back against the wall, listening to the angel of death do her work on the Metropolitan Police. Their finest against his, blood against blood—and he smiled as heard his own cut them apart in triumph, knowing that what she was doing here was a mere fraction of the death he’d just seeded out there.

Maybe even enough to completely destroy the Metropolitan Police Service completely.

Chapter 36

The explosion was loud, was long, was furious and destructive, with force and fire to spare. Most explosions weren’t exactly like those you see in the movies, with the orange flames. That’s movie magic for you, special effects. Most explosions were force and power. If you’ve ever seen a building demolished, you know what I’m talking about. You may see some fire, but it’s behind the cloud of smoke and debris.

This explosion brought the damned fire like it was a volcano. Someone had put some serious pyro into this, like napalm or another combustible designed to wash over the police presence.

Designed to burn a hell of a lot of people to death.

I didn’t even think before I started to react, and all I had was the space of a second.
Gavrikov
, I called into my head, slowing time as I withdrew into my mind, summoning forth the Russian master of fire whom I had made my ally years before.

I felt myself rise into the air, born not by conscious thought but by impulse, my mind carrying me up where I could best help. I stretched out both hands and called to the flames, the rich, burning heat that coursed toward me from the church on one side and the office building on the other.

I called it forth, and it changed its very course like a stream blocked in the bed. The fire twisted and drew off the ground like it was composed of snakes of ember. I ripped it from its path and brought it toward me like a magnet pulling metal. It writhed like a living thing as it surged to my hands and I pulled it in, devoured it.

I don’t know how you could measure a volume of flame like that, but there was a hell of a lot of it.

I pulled it in, all of it, hovering ten feet off the ground like a demon of fire, like a flaming angel taking it into my hands. I could feel the heat but only barely, like I was sitting around a campfire somewhere about to tell a ghost story and roast a marshmallow with chocolate and graham crackers.

The smoke remained as I took in the last of the heat, and I sank to the ground. The blood felt like it drained out of my brain, and I sagged against the car. I looked down and the sleeves of my blouse and coat were singed and blackened, flaking off as the smoke closed in around me.

“What the actual eff?” Webster said, his head buried in the car. I looked back to see him fallen to a knee.

“Bombs,” I said, panting. What I’d just done was more control of flame than I’d ever exercised. It was like trying to take in a breath that was far, far too big for me. I felt like I’d lost all control of my limbs, I was weak, my head telling me I needed to pass out. My hands just burned and throbbed like they were ready to explode, and I could feel my pulse racing, fire threatening to fountain out of me with every beat of my heart. “Someone meant to wipe out the Met.”

Chapter 37

The flames were not as bright as Philip had thought they’d be. He frowned as he stared out the front door, the clouds of smoke and dust obscuring everything. He thought he’d seen flames, the pyrotechnics that Antonio had specially designed and placed to burn alive the police springing into action. It had been meant to shower them with a fire hot enough to reduce their vehicles to flaming wrecks, to leave their bones scorched and their flesh turned to ash.

He stared into the cloud and supposed he might have missed it. He had been stuck inside because of the response team, after all, while the explosions were going off. Still, there should have been fires burning…

“We need to move,” Liliana said from beside him. He looked back and saw her blades dripping with blood. She hadn’t bothered to clean them, apparently. A quick look over her prey found several pieces missing that hadn’t been part of her original attack—ears, noses. His eyes tipped downward and saw a bloody cloth bag on her belt, dripping on the floor.

“What the hell is that?” He pointed to it.

She had a thin smile of satisfaction as she bumped it with her fist. “Trophies.”

Philip shuddered as he brushed past her. The woman was a psychopath, but she had her uses. For now, that necessitated keeping her around.

Still, he knew what her future held, in all probability, and he had a sense that when it came time for her to exit the plan, she would go in a messy fashion. A fitting end for her, he thought.

“Time to go,” he said as he breezed back into the gallery’s main room and looked up to see Antonio descending the ladder with a rolled cylinder. Presumably the painting he’d wanted more than anything in the world was inside, since that had been his price when Philip had come to him to acquire his services. “Are we ready?”

“I have it,” Antonio said with a smile that was uncharacteristic of the bomb maker, a sense of deep-seated satisfaction that went far below the surface-level brutality he had been so quick to exhibit in the past. “Finally, I have it.”

“Our exit, then,” Philip said and gestured toward the storage room. The gallery was filled with dust, the air looking smoky. Philip wanted to squint through the mask but kept from doing so. “Two police, just outside the door on either side. They’ll attack the moment we step through. Well within range of your toys.”

“No problem,” Antonio said, fingering a small remote that looked like a car key fob. It hung from his belt, dangling like a lucky rabbit’s foot. He pressed one of the buttons, and there was a popping noise just ahead, outside. Twin screams followed, higher pitched.

Philip breezed out the door with a sense of relief. The dust was thicker here, a heavy veil that closed the air around them, made it impossible to see very far. Screams and cries echoed down the alley, and Philip gave only a perfunctory look to the downed police officers on either side of the door. They’d been waiting in ambush, not noticing the improvised explosive devices that Antonio had left in the form of a wine bottle and a discarded coffee cup on either side of the door. After all, who would care about trash when they were waiting to ensure that criminal terrorists didn’t escape out the back of the gallery?

“That it?” Antonio asked as they headed toward the van. The dust was so thick it was nearly impossible to see more than a few feet.

“Follow the course and we’ll be fine,” he said. The police had been counting entirely too much on their snipers—overwatch, they were called. Well, that and the helicopter that was now blinded somewhere above them. “Straight down the alleys to the escape car. Five more minutes and we’ll be clear of these fools.” He smiled. “Or at least what remains of them.”

Chapter 38

I fought my way to my feet, struggling against the sweet pull of gravity. It would have felt so good to just drop into the passenger seat of Webster’s car and stay there, letting sleep take over. Using the powers at my command was exhausting, and doing what I’d just done, swallowing a sky’s worth of fire, had run through all the stamina I had left. I felt like curling up for a nap was the single best idea I’d ever had, and I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted anything.

Except to put a hurting on whoever was pulling the strings here. A rage flared in me, heating my stomach, and it had nothing to do with the fire I’d just absorbed.

Yeah. I wanted to do violence to the person who’d set those explosives more than I wanted to sleep. It was close, but for now, sleep lost.

I felt like I’d taken a shot of adrenaline right to the heart, and my blood was pumping hotly as I stared into the smoke and dust that swirled around the police encampment. I couldn’t see the gallery in the distance, but I knew it was there. I took off at a run, not chancing my power of flight both out of respect for the pact I’d struck with the commissioner and also out of fear that I’d drain myself even drier of whatever energy I had left in the process.

I had a nasty feeling about what I was up against here, and I didn’t want to be powerless when I came face to face with the big bad.

I ran pretty quickly, though, and had sprinted across the street in seconds. I took the stairs in front of the gallery a few at a time, hurtling up them like I was vaulting nothing of consequence. I saw the bodies inside the door just before I entered and leapt to avoid them. My jump carried me over them and into the smoky entry to the gallery. I squinted in the dust and looked for tripwires. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, and I’ll put a whole magazine of bullets in your skull.

I had my pistol drawn and slid my back along the wall as I moved down the main hallway in the gallery. I could see an enormous arch to my left and a massive room beyond. I slid right to the edge and entered the room with my pistol outstretched, ready to fire.

There were people everywhere, on their knees, heads turned away. I could see them in the haze, and at least a few of them saw me. It took me less than a second to assess them and realize that none of them was a threat. Their faces glowed with pure, visceral fear, and the one guy who had gotten to his knees threw his hands in the air in a blatant display of surrender.

I scanned the gallery quickly and saw a ladder on the wall behind me, a frame emptied of its contents hanging up above it. I frowned. One painting? Someone created a hostage situation and a freaking ambush outside that had caused the death of a SWAT team and who knew how many snipers and spotters for
one damned painting
?

No.

Not just the painting, I realized.

It wasn’t even half the goal.

“Where’d they go?” I asked the guy who was waving his hands like white flags at me.

“Out the back,” he said in a breathless British accent, nodding his head like he could use it to push me in that direction by sheer force of fearful will. “Just a minute ago.”

I studied him quickly, just to be sure in my own mind that he wasn’t lying, that he wasn’t actually the enemy in some sort of disguise. If he was, Matthew McConaughey had nothing on this guy in terms of acting ability. I made for the back of the building.