Overfall (39 page)

Twenty yards from the sandbags they stopped.

“We go in shooting,” Sam said.

“For Shohei,” Yodo said, and with one hand on his automatic he charged the bunker, Sam immediately behind.

As they neared the sandbags they heard a radioed voice in the bunker—Sam thought it Gaudet’s. After a clipped response the man rose to shoot, his outline green and ghostly through Sam’s goggles. Sam and Yodo both fired, and the man’s body jerked as the rounds worked their way up his torso.

Sam vaulted the sandbags and hoisted a rocket launcher, nodded at Yodo, and left as quickly as they’d entered.

“What are you doing, Sam? I’d whittle on Anna’s face but I have a lot of men that want her.”

“Me too,” Sam said.

Gaudet laughed.

“Getting back to the house might not be easy,” Sam said to Yodo.

“I go first,” Yodo said.

Yodo ran and Sam followed. They both shot at muzzle blasts on the way in. Yodo went down, hit after about twenty yards. Sam dropped and crawled to him, the rocket launcher slung on his back. Yodo was trying to use his belt to tie off his leg, but it was a struggle with his already injured arms and hands.

“You go,” Yodo said. “I cover.”

Yodo shot and reloaded as Sam crawled frantically for the side porch.

He climbed through the ruined doorway and ran down the hall without incident.

Anna was crying.

“Here I am,” he said on the radio.

“Good. The drill is going through the steel quickly. Would you like to know how we’re going to get them out?”

Sam looked up at the holes in the ceiling. “I imagine you’ll tell me.”

Huge pockmarks in the walls would make climbing easy. Keeping the rocket launcher tied over his back, he began climbing. He hauled himself up through the hole and into the second story.

“We
have a special form of mustard gas we will drip in through the hole a bit at a time. It sticks to the skin and peels it like you might peel an orange. They’ll be out in no time. What do you think, Sam?”

“Hell of a plan.”

A bathroom stood above the safe room. The floor consisted of bare marble and carpet over marble.

“The beauty is that even while it doesn’t kill them, nobody could stand to remain inside. Look, we are almost through the steel. This was a real cheap installation. The owner should seek a refund.”

“I’ll make a note of that.”

“Tell me, do you prefer Anna’s breasts or her thighs? I want to know what to leave you.”

“Frankly I was always partial to her smile.”

Sam knew that in the end he would have to guess. Right now he wanted so much to believe in magic. Outside he heard a flurry of shots and the occasional rocket concussion.

“Sam, I am warning you, you need to be careful about charging in here. With the gas canisters out, you could have us all with no skin. Anna has beautiful skin—I don’t think she’d like that.”

Sam suspected that the gas wasn’t in the safe room yet. Maybe it didn’t exist at all. Something about the tone of Gaudet’s voice told him. Now he heard Gaudet talking on his radio, but couldn’t discern the words.

Sam closed his eyes and leaned against a wall near the tub. He had to know the unknowable. He concentrated on the safe and the utility room below him, remembering every detail. The top of the safe extended up between the floors; its rear wall lay directly against the utility room’s. But there had to be two or three meters of space between the safe’s sides and the utility room’s side walls.

Given that those walls were reinforced, a blast at the back of the room would funnel both shock waves and debris around the sides of the safe and toward the hallway door, following the path of least resistance.

Gaudet would have his men arranged to provide the greatest cover from a conventional attack. Anna would be in the utility room’s doorway, facing the hall and farthest from the safe—a human shield against any hallway assault. Between her and the safe would stand T.J., Gaudet, and the others, with T.J. and Gaudet nearest Anna. This meant that Anna would be partially shielded from the blast by her captors’ bodies—perhaps enough to save her life, perhaps not.

A direct hit to the top of the safe could kill Grady and Jason inside, so Sam would fire the rocket to strike a glancing blow at the top of the box. He could scarcely believe he was considering doing this. But what else
could
he do?

His feet moved silently across the floor. Keeping the first-floor layout in his mind, he stepped into the bathtub and aimed the rocket at an angle to the floor toward the rear wall, the point of entry where the carpet met marble. It was a huge risk for Anna, but Sam did not expect to be around to see the result.

“Are you still there?” asked Gaudet over the radio.

“Guess.”

Sam pulled the trigger, launching the rocket.

Sam awoke in the bathtub. He had no idea how much time had passed. Probably only a minute or two. His arm felt broken and was clearly bloody. Likewise his shoulder was torn up, but probably not broken. Hardly any floor remained in the bathroom; the wall next to the bathtub was mostly gone and the tub itself rested next to a giant hole where the rocket had blown away a series of floor joists.

Below him he saw Clint bending over a bloodied Anna, who lay facedown on the floor, the blast having come from behind her. Clint was telling her not to move—that the medics would come. T.J. looked to have been broken in the back since he V’d the wrong direction. His body had sheltered Anna’s from the blast, as had the three other men lying motionless on the floor. None at first glance appeared to be Gaudet.

Gaudet had left a calling card. Sanford was hanging, tied to the hot water heater. His face had been mutilated and rags stuffed in his mouth. Gaudet had cut a small hole in Sanford’s belly and pulled out his entrails. That would explain Anna’s hysterical screaming. Gaudet had kept Anna unblemished but still had genuine sound effects.

The safe room appeared intact but for a giant black spot across the top of the box. As Sam intended, the back wall of the utility room was blown out having received the brunt of the shock wave. The concussion forward toward the hallway had killed those in the utility room nearest the back wall and farthest from the hallway entrance. The occupants of the utility room had been between Anna and the blast wave.

“Is she going to live?” Sam said, his voice so weak that it surprised him.

“I think so. She has a nasty cut on the head.”

Sam struggled out of the tub, nearly screaming at the pain in his arm.

There was enough left of the stairs that he could walk to the first floor.

Clint used a couple of belts to stop the bleeding in Sam’s arm.

“You okay?” Sam asked Anna.

“Head hurts, bottom hurts.”

“What happened to Gaudet?”

“He left the room just before you blew it up. The radio silence seemed to scare him off.”

“Where’d he go?”

“Turned right toward what used to be the living room.”

“Out the windows,” Clint said.

Medics were coming and two of them approached Sam; one a young wide-eyed fellow with a sincere intensity worthy of a brain surgeon. His partner with a cowboy belt was more laid-back.

“Please get right down here on the stretcher, sir.” It was Mr. Intensity.

“Just a minute,” he said.

“Do what they say,” Anna said from the floor as two more medics prepared to slide her onto a stretcher.

“I’ll stay here,” Clint said. “I’m not leaving until Grady and Jason come out of there.”

Ignoring the medics, Sam looked at the bullet wound to Clint’s arm and the one to the leg. They appeared to go just through the meat and were being patched with big gel-covered plastic bandages.

“Those are gonna hurt like hell, and an Excedrin won’t cut it,” Sam said. “Grady will be all right without you.”

“I’m staying.”

“Look, Clint, she’s not coming out for another ten hours. The Mounties will be here. I’ll send more people. She’ll be fine.”

Clint looked doubtful.

“I cut the intercom,” Sam said. “She won’t be coming out early. Unless they run low on air they’re staying put for the duration. I think Grady has learned to follow instructions.”

“You think that’s true in her love life?”

“You’re on your own there. She’s as stubborn as her aunt. Now let’s get you in an ambulance. Hell, if they sew fast you may make it back before they come out.”

Sam then turned and walked beside Anna as his medics carried their stretcher empty, still imploring him to lie down.

They rode in an old ambulance, Sam sitting on the bench with the attendants working on Anna. A couple of the new rescue vehicles had been blown to tiny pieces by rockets, the result of being parked too near the Mounties. In addition to the one remaining new ambulance, they were using station wagons, vans, and cars to meet the ambulances coming from Victoria and Vancouver. Helicopters from Victoria and Vancouver were taking out the worst cases.

“I wish you were a better shot,” Anna said as the sedation kicked in. “That was a rocket?”

“We’re taking over her airway when she’s completely out,” the attendant said. “Just to be sure she doesn’t get sick and aspirate.”

Anna had already nodded off.

“It isn’t bad, is it?” Sam asked.

“She’s the luckiest woman in the world. Another thirty-secondths of an inch and the shrapnel or whatever might have pierced the skull and there would be a lot more issues—like bone fragments in the brain. As it is, I think she’ll just have a hell of a headache and a scar under her hair. You won’t see it unless you look close.”

“She’s gonna be pissed. Her hair’s pretty burned.”

“They’ll cut it anyway to sew the cut. But there’s always a wig.”

“You don’t have a smoke, do you?”

“No. You can’t smoke in here. Do you smoke?”

“No. No. I quit a long time ago.”

Sam waited at the Executive Air Hangar for Anna at the Orange County Airport. It was a better-than-average lobby with tile floors and great furniture, mostly leather. It had a good selection of magazines, but Sam carried plenty of his own. Next to Sam’s chair grew a ficus so perfect that it looked like plastic. Harry sniffed it vigorously; Sam figured some other dog must have peed on it. Harry was just starting to get back to weight, but he’d lost none of his spunk. Island life had not been kind to him. If the people at the oyster farm hadn’t found Harry, he’d have died. They told Nutka about Harry, and it’d been she who figured it all out.

Aside from enjoying his dog again, Sam thought he might pull out a copy of
Computer Weekly
and see what was going on with the latest processors.

“Sit down, Harry,” he said. “You know she’s usually exactly on time, and we’re a whole ten minutes early.” Sam flipped open the magazine. Harry lay at his feet.

Now that he was back in business, he was thinking over the upgrade to Big Brain that Grogg had been suggesting. Always something better.

It was a balmy warm day for the end of December. Today his cast didn’t itch much. There were six jets on the ramp. A Falcon 50, a couple of G-IVs, some Hawkers, and a Citation X. No doubt Anna had been on the phone to her agent, her mother, her publicist, and the studio all the while having the last-minute pedicure she’d insisted on. Apparently she was planning on spending a lot of time with no shoes on.

He decided to call Paul. “Any word on Gaudet?”

“Still the same. No trace. Canadians are mad as hell. And stumped.”

“Well, he didn’t leave happy.”

“Granted, he isn’t happy.”

“How’s Grady?”

“Haven’t seen much of her. She’s spending a lot of her time with her dad. The rest of it with Clint. Doesn’t seem quite as intent on work as before, but I trust that’ll change after the novelty wears off.”

“If we’re going to pay her a real wage, it will.”

“Give her a little more time; then we’ll work her butt off. In fact, assign her to me.”

Paul had a good laugh at that.

“Did they come out this morning with the final charges against Benoit Moreau?” Sam asked, thinking that he wished he had taken the time to read his e-mail. Anna had wanted to meet him for an early breakfast to celebrate their trip. She started hinting about seriously dating, but he was staying very clear of that idea. Although since they seemed to be seeing each other, he wasn’t sure what it would mean to be seriously dating.

“You didn’t read your e-mail? What were you so busy with this morning?” Paul interrupted his momentary reverie.

“What do you think?”

“When you get around to it you’ll find an e-mail from Typhony. Officially they haven’t charged Benoit. But she’ll be up for murder and everything on down.”

“It’s kind of ironic the way Gaudet left her holding the bag like you wouldn’t believe. She was, after all, the grand manipulator.”

“Same for Chellis and their lead scientist, when they’re fit to stand trial. This morning in your e-mail you’ll find another missive from Typhony. I guess Samir, or whoever it was, really messed with old Jacques Boudreaux. So far they can’t fix him with the bug juice, apparently because he was given Raging Soldier, a version of the vector that they were going to sell to terrorist organizations and third-world dictators. Imagine those out-of-control reactions you’ve seen on video of looters or violent crowds. Raging Soldier is that times ten. No discipline. No thought; just violent hysteria. Right now they’re keeping Jacques toned down with every tranquilizer known to man.”

Sam hadn’t responded, so Paul checked to make sure he was there. “You won’t believe this, but Jacques Boudreaux killed Centaur, a big male macaque that had shared the cage. Killed the damn monkey with a club. Jacques was bit to hell but he got the monkey. I guess Samir pitted Jacques against the monkey. Raging Soldier profile against Soldier profile.”

Sam obliged Paul with a long, low whistle.

“I hate to think what they would have done with this technology.”

“It’s pretty easy,” Sam said. “If you want to destabilize a government you begin by infecting as much of the leadership as you can with Nervous Flyer profile. All it takes is a couple of good inhales and they’ll be scared of their own shadow. If you’re the government, you give a bunch of enlisted men Soldier profile; if you’re the opposition and you have some people you don’t like and you figure they’re expendable, you give them Raging Soldier and make suicide bombers by the hundred. Then you get your rebels to inhale Soldier profile, feed them the hormones, and stage a coup. Hell of a deal.”

“Yep.”

“Do you think Samir Aziz is the one who got Jacques Boudreaux as payback? You were gonna check on what the Malaysians are saying.”

“I guess the Malaysian authorities are looking for a guy named Claude Balford. Head of Chellis’s security team. Their theory is that Gaudet actually ordered Balford to turn Jacques Boudreaux into a nutcase killer. Not to mention locking him in a cage with a crazy monkey. According to their theory Balford would have assumed the order came from Benoit, who would have gotten it from Chellis. Balford denies it, and I, for one, believe him. It was Aziz.”

Sam grunted his agreement. “Where is Aziz?”

“Off in the desert of Quatram with a lifetime supply of blue oil and a mistress by the name of Michelle. He doesn’t take calls.”

“Are you finding me Gaudet?”

“We’re looking. He’s a shadow among shadows.”

“I’m going to find him. First I’m going to Hawaii. On a lighter subject, do one thing more for me. Have somebody pick up the book
Where Did He Go? Where Did She Go?

“You’re not gonna read one of those dumb chick books?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s a gift for one of Anna’s chick friends, I have to buy something, and that’s what I was told to buy. I don’t know why Anna picked it. She doesn’t normally read that pablum.”

At that moment Anna drove up in her Volvo. Sam signed off and walked out on the ramp to meet her.

She was already giving him a look.

“I’m telling you, the wig looks completely natural.”

“I still wish you had been a better shot.”

They started helping the pilots load the baggage while they waited for the mechanics to fix some fuse in the Falcon 50. Sam worked one-handed keeping his cast clear of the fray.

“I like the damn Hawker Seven-hundred.”

“Well, it won’t fly to Hawaii. And I offered to go commercial.”

“I could see you wanting to kiss in first class.”

“Only if the
Enquirer
was
there. Otherwise I’d go for the water closet.”

“Who needs Hawaii? We’re from LA, for God’s sake.”

“Manhattan.”

“Yeah, well, that’s you.”

She grinned and kissed him on the cheek, and then insisted on a lip-smacker right in front of the pilots.

“You haven’t set me up on this trip, have you? Are there going to be reporters?”

“Are you slipping? You should be monitoring my calls.”

“I knew it. You’ve probably ruined my cover.”

“Sam, relax. A little trip to Hawaii is the least you can do after shooting me.”

“You’ll use anything. Guilt, whatever it takes.”

“You of all people, Sam. All’s fair in love and war. You should know that.” She patted his cheek and stroked his back.

He could feel his engines warming despite himself.

“Well, at least we understand the ground rules.”

“Damn straight. You’re taking me to the Oscars.”

“No way. I said Hawaii.”

Now it was his turn to smile.

“You’ll see,” she said.

THE END