Ruthless (20 page)

I stripped the wet winter camo off and tried to come up with a plan. I couldn’t exactly sit around and wait for it to dry around a fire, after all. But I couldn’t go outside naked as the day I was born and expect to survive the crossing, either, especially since my skin was damp from the drenching. It was a long, long run, over open ground. Circling all the way out to the woods would add a considerable amount of exposure to my journey, putting me ever closer to frostbite and hypothermia.

No, I finally decided that the best way to go about this was to take the smartest chances I could. The Russians had to be down to somewhere between 25-50% of their mercenaries, and they were damned sure down half their meta strength. They had hostages, but I couldn’t worry about that right now. Sallying forth to try and rescue them in my current condition was a guaranteed suicide. I mean, I’d have to save them eventually, but that was far off. I’d need to access the armory in HQ for a better weapon first, at least. In a way, the Russians’ inability to communicate with me was a saving grace. They couldn’t issue threats against the hostages to me, and I couldn’t get overpowered by emotions and turn myself in because of it.

I should have had a weapons cache built in the dorms, come to think of it. Live and learn. All I had left over there was probably another pistol or—

Or—

My automatic shotgun with a big box of shells? Yes. Yes, I did have it shipped from Vegas to home, and I had been storing it in the top of my closet. It wouldn’t be perfect, but it would help. Yay for laziness and failing to store the weapon where it should have been stored.

So, back on focus, they were down on manpower, and at least some of their men needed to stay in place to guard the hostages. If they cared about that. Hopefully they did, since they hadn’t sent their full strength out against me yet.

Wait. If they were trying to kill me, why
wouldn’t
they send their full strength after me?

I mean, thus far I’d killed one of their metas that they knew of, and killed a half dozen other men. A smart tactical commander would have gone after me with overwhelming numbers the minute I blew up the science building—
if
I’d been her primary objective.

What if I wasn’t their primary objective?

I mean, Volkov clearly said that someone wanted me dead, but what if that wasn’t all they wanted? I blinked as the thoughts came faster now. What else could they want? High-profile hostages? Well, that certainly fit, because we had senators and congressmen in attendance this evening, along with other political types. That might be an end in and of itself. Because the only other thing they could possibly be interested in that was here was—

Sonofabitch
.

This wasn’t just an assassination attempt on me; this was a jailbreak.

I slammed a hand into a wet segment of drywall and felt it collapse. It stung. I finished taking off my clothes and wrung them out, as hard as I could, before putting them back on. There was no more time to delay, assuming I was right. I was still damp as a sweaty wrestler, but I had no time for the camo to dry. I had to cross the snowfields around the perimeter of the agency right now and get to fresh clothes and another weapon.

Then I had to figure out how to use the tunnel into headquarters in order to stop them. Because if they got away with this …

Every dangerous meta I’d put away over the last three years could come roaring out of the ground to help them hunt me right to my inevitable—and brutal—end.

“You told me you’d be able to access their network,” Natasya said, keeping her tone level as she spoke into the cell phone, pacing in front of the second floor lobby windows of the headquarters building. She’d had to leave the place where Vitalik was working on the vault in order to make the call to the voice, and now she was staring out at the night in front of the windows, under the portico that looked out toward the entry to this massive, opulent campus. “You told me to place the little device on their computer and that you would be able to open the doors, show us the surveillance cameras, and open the prison cells.”

“I am trying,” came the voice, shot through with obvious stress. It ended with a little wheeze. Whoever the woman at the other end of the line was, she was fast approaching her limits. “Someone is blocking me at every turn. Someone is inside their network, putting up roadblocks and—dammit!” The sound of something hitting hard against plastic echoed through the phone. “You have someone on that campus who is thwarting me. Until you stop them, I won’t have unimpeded access. I’ll have to keep fighting my own little war with them over everything.”
And lose
, went the last part, unsaid. Natasya sensed the voice was not used to losing, either.

Natasya stared out into the night, the portico lights a blinding fluorescent. This entire establishment reeked of waste, of money spent pointlessly. She was hardly a stranger to that, but it bothered her on a strictly ideological level. “I’ve sent Miksa out to kill Nealon. He should have reported back by now.”

There was a rasp at the other end of the phone before the reply came. “You think she killed him?”

“She is quickly convincing me that you misjudged her when you said that without her powers, she was nothing.” Natasya straightened, leaning against the bannister rail that separated her from the open air and the granite floor of the lobby below. “She has been trained by someone. This girl is no helpless mouse without her powers.”

“I can’t help you with that,” the voice said. “All I had was a thermal imaging satellite meant to track volcanoes and nuclear launches, and it passed out of range twenty minutes ago. Anything better, anything with real-time imaging would take too long to crack from
here
.” The emphasis on
here
imbued it with a certain disdain that told Natasya a few subtle things about where this woman was hiding. It was somewhere she loathed.

“I can’t send out Vitalik,” Natasya said. “He’s busy with the vault. I could go, but if this girl has killed Miksa, she’d be well-positioned to ambush me with a rifle shot—”

“Don’t go yourself,” the voice said. “Either send minions, and hope they get lucky, or leave her be for a while. Cracking that vault is priority one, and keeping the hostages intact in case the exfiltration goes hairy is priority two.” There was a sense of resignation in the voice. “Sienna Nealon will keep. I’ll hire someone with a rifle to kill her at a distance in a month, a year, sometime in the future if we miss. Splatter her brains all over the nearest wall.” There was a subtle adjustment in the voice’s stress level. “But we cannot let Eric sit in that prison another day, do you understand me? You have to get him out.”

“I understand,” Natasya said. “When the vault opens, I think we’ll find more than a few willing allies who’d be happy to help fulfill the last objective.”

“Probably,” the voice said, seemingly unconcerned. “And I wouldn’t mind seeing some of her greatest hits getting a chance to have a go at her, but it’s not as important as—”

“I hear you and understand,” Natasya said. This woman did like to go on and on.

“What are you going to do about Nealon?” the voice asked. Tentative. She’d surrendered control of the mission to Natasya, but she was still an interested party.

Natasya thought about it for a moment before answering. “I do not like ceding ground to an enemy. I do not like letting this girl wander around unimpeded. Let her work without distraction, given what she’s done so far when we are breathing down her neck every moment, and I shudder to think what she will come up with.” Natasya shook her head. “No, I will peel off a detail of six more men—all I can spare—and send them after her. They will probably die, but if we’re lucky, they’ll at least keep her occupied until I can open that prison up and send her a whole host of new friends to hound her to death.”

I looked out the side door of the training building, my boots squishing in the puddled water, and plotted out my insane, idiotic path. My shoulder hurt where Volkov had driven me through a glass window, my throat hurt where Fenes had choked me, I ached all over from a variety of injuries, and now I was about to have to run—I dunno, five or six football fields over snowy ground in damp clothes?

Like I said before, not my best night ever.

There was no point in delaying, so I started off at a trot, my backpack swaying on my shoulders where I’d tightened it. I had my Glock clenched in my hands as I ran. I’d put the Smith & Wesson with its five remaining shots into my breast pocket, hoping it wouldn’t be needed. It probably would, though, knowing my luck.

I jogged across the packed snow, noticing that some fresh flakes were drifting down from above. There were massive lighting poles placed strategically at various points around the campus, enough to break the darkness but not light the place up like the new football stadium in Minneapolis. They didn’t help me much right now, providing enough illumination that a sharp eye could pick me out running across the featureless expanses, but I couldn’t worry about that.

Because I had a frozen-ass run to make.

By the time I crossed the main driveway I was frigging cold. It was a U-shaped loop, the bottom edge of which ran right up under the headquarters portico, and so I crossed it twice as I threaded my way around the campus. I passed the open-air helicopter pad on my left, giving it and its mighty ground lights a wide berth.

I kept my eye on the headquarters as I made my run. It was probably three hundred feet away from me now, because I’d had to detour to avoid the helipad, and I could see figures in the lobby. They weren’t clear, but they were there. I wondered what they were up to, if they were just patrolling.

I kept running, and my breath burned in my lungs. I’d been doing cardio regularly ever since I got back from London the last time. Then, I’d gone face to face with some enemies who had challenged me for the first time in years, made me realize that there were still some tough bad guys out there; now it looked like my training was paying off. Before London, I probably would have collapsed in a heap from a run like this.

As it was, I just
wanted
to collapse in a heap. Or die. Maybe not that last one, not really.

I could see the parking garage ahead, and my skin was tingling from the cold. My uniform was stiff and growing stiffer by the moment, the residual water in it gradually freezing. I could feel ice forming, and it felt like a slow burn, minus the slow part. My bones felt a strange ache, and I wondered if that was from the cold as well.

I huffed onward, planning to pass the parking garage on the far side. It was a massive structure, sprawling, multiple stories, heated inside so as to keep employees’ cars—and our government automobiles—out of the elements. Minnesota, she’s a harsh mistress, and not so kind to vehicles.

I was practically gasping for breath as I drew near the garage. I chanced a look back and did a double take.

Crap.

I felt the first bullets whiz past to hit the snow a second later. The sound of the shots followed, a sharp series of cracks. Then came another, then another. I didn’t bother to unsling my HK to return fire; the range was improbable, if not impossible. They were using the same guns and were aiming really high. Still not having much luck, fortunately for me.

But my legs felt like concrete and my lungs felt like they’d been poured full of water, so their luck wasn’t going to stay bad forever.

There were six guys behind me. They were running full out, and I had to guess that they had longer legs than I did. A pack-a-day smoker could probably run me down if he were six feet tall. Just a matter of time.

So I did the only thing I could. I bolted for the garage.

The garage wasn’t locked with biometrics, fortunately. It was still a hundred feet off, easily, and I was dragging ass. I fired the Glock blind over my shoulder, in their general direction, and listened to the deafening roar of the gun going off. I added another bullet to the chorus and listened as they returned fire. Bullets slapped wet snow, flakes falling down around me, as I closed on the garage. The shots got closer as I drew closer, and I fired again, hoping to make them weave or something, anything to buy me a few seconds.

I ripped the door open with what felt like my last breath, and slammed it shut behind me. I had my backpack off and unzipped after a moment’s fumble, setting up a tripwire and a claymore in seconds. I faced the helpful “Front Toward Enemy” side toward—yep, you guessed it—the door. Thank you, Glen Parks, for making me practice the setup and defusing of mines until I could do it in my sleep.

I retreated behind the nearest car at a crouch, ducking down and unslinging the HK as I holstered my pistol. I needed to move as far from the door as possible before—

It wasn’t the loudest explosion I’d heard tonight, but it was pretty damned loud in a confined space. The sound of the charge followed by pellets beyond number ripping through the open door into legs and feet was a nice sound. I was getting used to agonized screams being the soundtrack of my life, thank you very much.

Every single thing I was doing was thinning their numbers, but they kept throwing more at me. In the long term, that was a losing strategy for them, right? I mean, eventually they were going to run out of numbers. For crying out loud, these idiots had just run straight into an ambush, after all.

That was probably a mark in favor of my prison break theory. It was feeling more and more possible all the time.

There was also the distinct possibility that all my pursuers weren’t dead, which was … well, likely. If they’d had any training at all, they should flank me from multiple sides.

Which meant that whoever had just seen the tragic end of their ballet career was probably not the only point of attack.

I cursed into the quiet air and listened as I scrambled back toward the far end of the row and crossed further into the garage. If they’d had six guys and lost—conservatively—two, then that meant they had four left to try and run me down with.

But I had five floors in which to hide. To hide …