Recoil (23 page)

Chapter 28

Lights Out

Bruce’s tranquilized body was a dead weight crushing me to the
floor.

“What the hell is going on here?” Quinn said.

With a grunt and a shove, I managed to roll Bruce off me. The
upper-body strength training had come in useful after all. Gasping, I snatched
Bruce’s handgun from where it had fallen from his nerveless hands, and placed
it on the desk. I kicked aside the dart gun. It was empty of darts now — no
point in hanging on to it. Then I grabbed the rifle.

“Are you going to shoot me now?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, pushing past him and stalking into
the bathroom.

I grabbed his phone, tossed it onto the hard tile floor and
smashed it to smithereens with the rifle butt.

“What are you doing?” He sounded bewildered.

“Destroying evidence,” I said, kicking the flusher repeatedly
with my foot as I dropped the pieces into the toilet. “Besides, you can’t take
it with you. They’ll use it to track you. Here, take over with this.”

Quinn gathered up the few remaining fragments from the floor and
studied them. “That’s why I didn’t take my phone with me t
oday. I left it behind. So they couldn’t track
where I went.”

He unrolled a massive length
of toilet paper, stuffed it in the toilet bowl and flushed the remaining pieces
of plastic and glass, while I walked back into the bedroom and bent down to
snag the Leatherman multi-tool Bruce always wore on his belt.

“Honestly, Quinn, you don’t
think they can use your microchipped bracelet to track you outside the compound
as well as inside?”

“I wrote and inserted some
code to block it on the surveillance system before I left. But maybe the hack
didn’t work.”

“Or maybe they had a spook
follow you.” They might be trained on many things in Intel, but how to spot
when you’re being tailed obviously wasn’t one of them.

“Yeah, or maybe you told them
where to expect Connor and me!”

“I didn’t rat on you,” I said,
enunciating each word, but I could tell he didn’t believe me.

I flipped open the wire-cutter
attachment and severed the ID bracelet. Quinn’s hand felt warm, even through my
latex gloves. As I tossed the thin metal band aside, I asked the question that
refused to be silenced.

“What did you mean, earlier,
about ‘the truth’?”

He looked at me as if weighing
up some decision, then said, “About how your father died.”

That was unexpected.

“I already know what happened.
He was killed by terrorists, in a civilian plague attack.”

“Yes, but that’s not how he
died.”

“What do you mean? I saw
footage of it. Roth showed me.” My fingers fiddled with the tool, opening and
closing it.

“Did she show you all of it?
All the way to the end? Or did she stop before the climax?”

I remembered the final
freeze-frame of my father’s twisted grimace. Had there been more footage? Had
something happened after that moment?

“He died of the plague.” I
didn’t know who I was trying hardest to convince — Quinn, or myself.

“He didn’t. He would’ve, sure,
but he didn’t. He didn’t even die inside the bank. He died outside on the
sidewalk. The terrorists sent him out, as a virus bomb, and he kneeled down and
started rocking back and forth, saying, ‘Help me,’ over and over.”

My throat choked tight with
grief and panic as I saw again the images of him pulling at his hair,
scratching at his skin, rocking and keening, “Help me, help me.”

“And then they shot him. Shot
him in the street like a rabid dog. That’s who they really are — the government
you think is here to protect its citizens. That’s what they do to a sick man.
They shoot him.”

“How do you know?” I demanded,
my voice a low, tight rasp.

“I saw the rest of the
footage. Not very reassuring, that — to see police killing sick people,
innocent US civilians, at close range. I guess that’s why they confiscated all
the footage and banned the news stations and websites from showing it.”

I was battling to catch my
breath, battling to make sense of what he’d just told me. I couldn’t believe it
was true.

“Roth said the media embargoes
were to protect public morale.”

Quinn rolled his eyes at that.
“I guess it’s also when they came up with the idea of using snipers to take
down M&Ms, so they could be removed from the scene quickly and quietly in
ambulances. And also using snipers to dart suspects who could be hauled off to
detention centers. And who better than snipers who look more like teens or” —
he cast a contemptuous look at my girly-pink dress — “like little kids. No one
would suspect them. Plus, they’re not government agents, right? Not directly.
And deniability is important if word gets out. So you” — he pointed a finger at
me — “are defending the people who killed your father.”

If Bruce were awake, he’d say
this was a lie, pure BS. But it wasn’t. My shocked and sluggish brain was
picking up speed again, making connections.

It was the truth. It had to
be, because I’d never told Quinn that my father was killed in a bank. How could
he know that if he hadn’t seen the footage?

I cursed. I couldn’t deal with
this now. My immediate priority was to get us both out of here. I returned the
multi-tool to Bruce’s belt, then I snatched Quinn’s sneaker off the bed and
tossed it pointedly on the carpet beside his bare foot.

“We need to get moving. They
know, alright? They know everything — about you, about your brother, obviously.
And we’re running out of time. Any minute now they’ll realize the fire alarm is
a hoax, and they’ll come to haul your ass into lockup. And then your
interrogation will begin. Then they’ll want to know what I know. We’ve got to
run, get out of here, now. You heard me tell Bruce —
Leya
has been spying on us the whole time.”

“Are you sure it was her, and
not you?”

“Quinn, there isn’t time for
this. Even now they’ll be taking your brother to wherever it is they do those
interrogations.”

“Do you know where that is?”
he asked, his wary eyes studying me with lie-detector intensity.

“How the hell would I know?
You’re more likely to have found something in your
intel
work.”

He shook his head. “Not yet. I
was still working on trying to find out. That’s when I found the interrogation
videos. I thought maybe you snipers would know where your victims get taken.”

“All I know is that we need to
get out of here before we find out firsthand. Try and help your brother.
Contact his associates.”

“Oh, so now you want to save
Connor? Why the hell did you take him down, then? You know what they’ll do to
him, and you helped them capture him.”

“I was trying to save your
hide.”

Quinn made a dismissive noise
and bent over to put on his shoe. I had known, even as I sent the dart into
Connor, that I was putting a lethal round into any trust or respect Quinn might
have for me. But knowing it didn’t stop it hurting.

“Believe what you like,” I
snapped. I knew that from Quinn’s perspective, it must seem like I’d betrayed
him, snitched on his brother, and darted them both. But there just wasn’t time
now to go into the details of how I’d had my hand forced, how I’d darted each
of them rather than risk having them shot. Explanations would have to wait
until we were out of here. “But I’m leaving. And you need to decide now: you
want to wait for them to come get you, or do you want to get out of here?”

“Are we simply going to stroll
out the front door?” said Quinn.

I peered out of the sealed
window. There was no one in the floodlit area below — everyone would be
gathered at the assembly point under the flagpole in front of the main
building. I grabbed Bruce’s rifle. It was a long-range, medium caliber bolt-action
rifle, mounted with a telescopic scope and a silencing suppressor. Now I was
pleased that Bruce had kept his weapon. I checked the small internal magazine.
Five rounds were loaded.

I sent two quick rounds at an
angle through the window, shattering it into pieces which rained out from the
frame. A few shards bounced back into the room, and one clipped me on the
cheek. Ignoring the sharp pinch of pain and Quinn’s startled yelp, I bashed the
dangling fragments free of the window frame with the rifle-butt, stuck my head
out to scan the area and then pulled back inside.

“It’s a full floor down, can
you make it?”

“Of course, but what about the
guards? The security floodlights and the electric fence?”

“Someone once told me that
there’s a weak spot, an exposed bit of flesh, on every target. You just have to
find it and hit it,” I said, peering out through my eyepiece.

I swept the scope slowly
across the area, looking for a way, searching for a target. I had only three
rounds left. I would have to make each of them count. My scope’s reticles
rested on a guard standing in the closest watchtowers. No, not going to happen.
I wasn’t killing anyone tonight. I wasn’t killing anyone ever, if I could help
it.

I glanced at the banks of
brilliant floodlights, keeping it brief so as not to blind myself. But it was
enough to tell me that shooting at them wouldn’t be much help. Each floodlight
consisted of several rows of dazzlingly bright rectangular globes. I had only
three rounds left, and knocking out a trio of globes wouldn’t give us enough
darkness to make our escape. The lights were too powerful. Powerful … power …
there! The main power line which connected the compound to the electricity grid
was about one inch thick and about 200 meters away.

It would have been a relatively
easy shot with an automatic weapon — I could easily have strafed across the
line several times, sure of hitting it. With a rifle, it would be a
million-dollar shot. Still, this was a sniper’s rifle, and I was the best damn
sniper in our unit.
Failure is not an option
.

I sat on a clear section of
the sill, wedged myself against the window frame, braced the rifle against my
knee, slid off the safety catch and chambered a round.

“What’re you —”

“
Shh
!”

I had to get it right. I
couldn’t afford to miss. I did my best to estimate elevation and distance, and
I scanned for signs of wind. I ran through my mil-dot calculations and doped my
scope. Then I locked the stock against my cheek, and eased my finger onto the
trigger.

Focus. Aim. Breathe.

Squeeze.

The rifle recoiled into my
shoulder with a muted crack. A small burst of sparks shot up off the power
cord. One of the banks of floodlights flickered, but the compound ground
remained brightly lit. I trained my scope on the power line and saw that it was
fizzing and sparking at one spot. I had just nicked the top of the line.

Only two rounds left.

One of the guards lifted his
binoculars to study the power line. We had mere seconds before we were
discovered.

I cleared the spent casing and
reloaded. Aimed a fraction lower. Fired.

This time I missed completely.
I glanced at Quinn, saw my panic reflected in his eyes.

“Only one round left,” I said.

I could hardly get the words
past the knot in my throat. My mind was racing, my heart pounding against my
ribs. My dope-scoping calculations wouldn’t compute in the frantic agitation of
my mind.

Stop!

Just stop and breathe. Breathe
again.

Somewhere inside of me, in the
muscle memory of my arms and fingers, I knew how to take this shot. I didn’t
need the math — I had the muscle memory of a thousand shots. This was a rat’s
eye, a corner of the letter on a cheerleader’s vest, a small square inch of
flesh on
Sarge’s
neck.

I relaxed into the rifle. My
shoulders dropped. My cheek caressed the stock. My breath sighed, paused. My finger
embraced the trigger. And hugged.

A shower of sparks erupted
from the cord as it split and spooled down, sparking and crackling, thrashing
on the ground like a giant electric snake. All around was the sound of a
hundred computers, lights and machines losing power. And then all was dark.

“Quickly! There’ll be backup
generators. They’ll fire up soon,” I urged Quinn, who was standing, still with
shock.

I tossed the empty rifle aside
and grabbed Bruce’s sidearm. “
Go
,” I said, pushing Quinn towards the window.

Quinn hesitated, clearly
reluctant to turn his back on me when I was armed. I sighed. He really didn’t
trust me at all. I checked the safety was on, then turned the weapon around and
handed it to Quinn. He took it automatically, but held it wrong and eyed it
like it was a live, poisonous scorpion.

“I don’t want it.”

“Then ditch it somewhere as a
false trail. And try not to shoot yourself.”

I moved to the window and
clambered over the frame, bracing first one then the other foot on the ledge
outside. Then I jumped, landing hard on one knee. I’d have a bruise there to
match the one on my shin. I stood up and faced Quinn, who had landed with a
soft thump in the dirt beside me.