SURVIVORS: a gripping thriller full of suspense (Titan Trilogy Book 2) (26 page)

But then Argon had died. Goddammit, then everything had changed. She had changed things. That smart young woman with her boiling rage and her huge heart, who’d been disposed of in a storm drain.

Dammit
.

He loved her. He wanted to live.

CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE / Monday, 4:35 PM

The police sirens sank into the distance. They weren’t coming for her.

Jennifer’s hopes collapsed. For a moment, she was transported to Cotuit where she’d spent the summers of her youth; on a clear day you could see Martha’s Vineyard across the water. She needed to be there now, far away from the madness around her.

He was standing over her again, and she was on her knees. If he was enjoying himself in some psychopathic way, Apollo didn’t show it. His dark skin was smooth and taut, with a constellation of blemishes high on each cheek, almost like war paint.

“Don’t kill me,” she said. Some silly part of her had always wondered what a person really said in a life-or-death situation like this, but it had been in the way earthbound people thought about walking on the moon. There was no way to envisage the experience or the visceral reaction. She was reduced to a few basic survival instincts. There was no shame in begging; it was a necessity, a matter of course. “Please. I will do anything. Don’t shoot. Just let me die? Let me die. I’m already toxic. All you have to do is walk out the door. Just leave me here.”

A ripple of something might have crossed his features, or she might have imagined it. Over the past few minutes, the effects of the poison were intensifying. Her breathing was becoming constricted. And she was terrified to reach up and run her fingers through her hair – there was an unkind tingle to her scalp as the hair follicles died and were rejected by the skin.

“You don’t want that,” Apollo said.

Time had melted. It felt like she had been there for days. How long had it been, really? Six hours? She tried to wrap her mind around something reasonable, something sane, like the ticking of a clock, the passage of time. Her mental grip was slippery. She decided she had been there for days. Maybe a week. Even a week made no sense. What was a week? Days named for the Moon, the Sun, Norse deities, and then Saturn – the Roman god. How did people go about their everyday lives in a world with such arbitrary structures? Unquestioning, uncaring. Jennifer had always marveled at the units of time, the calendar, the names of the months and days of the week. Why twenty-four hours in a day? Why not ten? Why not one-hundred-second minutes? Who had determined the beat of a second? The human heart? She’d studied it all; she’d sought answers for countless questions. In the years before Google, she’d spent an inordinate amount of time at the library, or so her mother said, when she should have been playing with other girls, thinking about boys. Her mother, wringing her hands together, in her apron, always wearing that same flower-print shirt, it seemed. And then there had been John Rascher, who left her hollow, alone – and alone she had stayed.

“I do want that,” she said. “Just leave me. Please.”

Who determined the duration of the first second? Heart beats sent waves, like those hitting shore along Dead Neck Island, the water flushing into the Cotuit bay. The waves traveled throughout the body, to all the organs, to the brain. Then the heart’s energy commingled with the energy of other people, other hearts. We were all entwined with one another, each of us emanating this protean aura of electromagnetic energy. There were reasons why lovers had the same thoughts at the same time, found each other’s keys, finished each other’s sentences. Some of it was familiarity and the learning of habits, the aggregation of the minutiae of everyday life, all stored in the brain. That’s what the brain was, storage and access. And hers was deteriorating. Under siege from the thallium. Turning to hot, chaotic pulp. But the heart, the heart did not forget.

“Leave me here and go. Let me be alone to die. Let me come to peace.”

“This is more humane.”

Humane.
Humane? He was crazy, that’s all there was to it. Crazier than she was in this moment.

In training, they had made her watch a twelve-minute video compilation of senseless acts of violence the world over, a standard video used to shock new members in many different types of law enforcement – probably Brendan Healy had seen it too. Car wrecks, improvised exploding devices, people beating the shit out of each other in convenience stores, shooting one another in the head on the street. It was nothing new – graphic images had filtered in even through the mainstream media since the Second World War. Now there was simply more, and it came in easy-to-access media. The audio-clip of a gunner on a helicopter gunship talking to the pilot about the crowd of innocent people his artillery had just sliced through – that had been one of the first WikiLeaks. The gunner had sounded as though he were describing sheep that had gotten in the way of a tractor-trailer. Or playing a video game at home. And the whistleblower had described hundreds or even thousands of gunship videos out there depicting similar destruction of innocents.

And at last she found the piece of information, the one that they wanted really, the thing that made Lebenslüge what it was, no doubt – a word that described the ability to live despite the guilt and shame of human atrocity. It floated up from the depths to the top of the tower of Babel. And wasn’t that where she was?

“It’s my request, my final request, as a human being. Please, Ewon, just give me these last few hours.”

He stepped back when she spoke his name.

She had no choice now. It would blow her cover, it could blow everything she’d been working on, everything that the Agent Petrinos of the world didn’t even want to know, that most anyone wouldn’t want to know, because behind it was fear, behind it was a kind of end to things.

Apollo stared at her. “How do you know my name?”

“I know who you are, Ewon Parnell. I know who all of you are.”

CHAPTER FORTY / Monday, 4:44 PM

Staryles pulled into the underground parking lot at Roosevelt Hospital and quickly exited the Cutlass. As he moved through the shadows of the concrete space, his footfalls echoing, the smell of exhaust and tires filled his lungs. He pulled his phone out and made a few quick movements with his fingers over the screen. He was calling in the rest of his team.

The risk of exposure was high, and beyond what he would have wagered by killing Healy and Dewan before.

The mainstream media was rarely a concern – he personally knew as many media stockholders as guys he’d served with in the Middle East – but there were more leaks happening every day. Still, he was confident. You could always count on the average American to plug up the dyke. Revelations caused fear; fear bred denial, which engendered ignorance, which led to passivity. It didn’t even matter how much information was out there. Milton Friedman monetarists considered the wealth gap motivation for the lower classes, pointing to China’s emulation of the United States. If BP’s own scientists declared Peak Oil was upon us? It didn’t matter. The United States was a world power for one reason, and one reason alone – the resilient, unshakeable state of denial that its citizens maintained. So powerful were the memes of limitless growth, “freedom” and all the rest, that any information that contested the American Dream was quickly labeled deviant, false, part of a Left Wing conspiracy, an agenda to bloat the government, tax the people to death, and control their lives.

The irony, of course, was that their lives were already controlled. Left, Right, it didn’t matter. Three hundred million people, helpless, afraid, unable to cope with the seemingly insurmountable problems of the day. No, bringing out his team wouldn’t set off any alarms. The denial was too strong. The fear was too powerful. What bigger government was there than the one who listened to your phone calls, censored your textbooks, put itself in charge of your pregnancies, tried to dictate who you could marry, what you could eat, and could detain you indefinitely without charge?

Staryles was on the correct side of things. There was no other play than to be on board with the monumental power surging now around the globe, dominating all.

Feeling better, he slipped into the stairwell along the edge of the parking garage. Within a few minutes, he would have Roosevelt hospital surrounded.

For one fleeting moment as he passed into the cool stairwell, he thought of his father – almost wished his father were still alive to see him. But then something passed over his heart, as it often did whenever his father’s ghost found his way into his thoughts, and Staryles decided it was better that the man was in the ground, rotting there with the maggots boring through his flesh.

* * *

She came through the door of Heilshorn’s office like some kind of banshee. Brendan’s whole body had been vibrating with the fear, the nerves and exhaustion of the past few hours, days, weeks, months. When she burst in she was like a wild animal. It was the manifestation of something he had glimpsed in her before.

She had something over her head, only suspended there for a brief instant, then a red blur as she hurled it through the air, over the desk, towards Heilshorn’s head. Or at least, that was where she was aiming. It struck him square in the chest.

There was a heavy
thud
as it connected with Heilshorn, and then it bounced away, producing a different, hollow metal sound, metal clanging off of metal as it impacted a file cabinet, and the red object – a fire extinguisher, Brendan realized – hit the ground beside Heilshorn’s desk where it gushed white foam in a frantic spray.

Brendan felt fresh, burning air penetrate his lungs. It was as if the lights had suddenly snapped on inside his head. He realized that the bodyguard had let him go, and Brendan fell forward onto the side of Heilshorn’s desk.

Heilshorn had been driven back by the airborne fire extinguisher and into his large desk chair. The chair rocked backward, then forward, and dumped him onto his desk. The two men were both momentarily sprawled across the burnished oak, their heads inches apart from each other.

Brendan assumed the bodyguard was going for his gun. The extinguisher poured out, hissing, spattering the bookshelves and framed diplomas with white foam. Sloane stood in the corner, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and her dirty blond hair wild around her head. Brendan saw her look at the bodyguard, who was directly behind Brendan, surely moments from firing a round into her, this girl who had escaped death as an infant, who had self-medicated her way through a painful adolescence, who made regular trips to visit an aging woman in a nursing home and was all of twenty-eight years old.

Brendan kicked out with his legs. One foot hit nothing – the other made contact with the bodyguard’s calf. It wasn’t enough to do any damage, but might at least redirect the big bastard’s attention for a moment.

Brendan pushed himself off the desk. His vision was cloudy; he could still feel himself rising up through the layers of consciousness as the blood returned to his brain. He spun around and struck out blindly, aiming high. He felt his fist connect with something hard, but fleshy enough to be human – the bodyguard’s neck. The large man cried out and returned the blow with one of his own. His giant fist connected squarely with Brendan’s nose, sending bright bolts of pain upwards toward his eyes, radiating out to his ears, making his jaw rattle like a shuddering, slammed door nearly knocked off its hinges. The force of it sent Brendan backwards, the back of his thighs hitting the desk’s edge, and he toppled over backwards. As he fell, instinct, perhaps, and nothing more, told him to bring his right foot up, and bring it up hard. Despite the pain blasting through his skull like he’d stuck his face in a furnace, Brendan felt a thrill zip through him when he felt his foot connect with something in a direct hit, something soft and vulnerable.

The bodyguard shrieked. For a big man he cried like a girl, Brendan thought, as his own head hit oak.

It was a good kick, dead center to the groin. Brendan thought he heard something clunk to the floor and hoped it was the gun the bodyguard had been holding. Then Brendan blacked out.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE / Monday, 4:59 PM

She heard footsteps. A moment later, a voice outside of the door.

“You inside, we know you have a woman with you. She is an agent for the Department of Justice. We have the building surrounded. Don’t hurt her. Put down any weapons you’re carrying; we’re going to knock down this door. If you don’t resist, if you don’t hurt her, you’ll live. Anything else, and you’ll die. Miss Aiken? You in there?”

Electricity all through her body. Her pulse accelerating. Relief suffusing her being.

The sirens might have faded away, but help was here. They’d managed to gain entry to the building and sneak up to this floor. Her people. Outside of the room. Here to save her.

Apollo thrust the gun in her face, the cold tip of the barrel just touching the flesh between her eyes. His expression was inscrutable. No fear, no remorse, no anything. His blank eyes regarded her like she was a mere object in the room.

For a moment – something. The hint of recognition in his eyes. Then it was gone, and he was wooden again.

She closed her eyes, feeling the elation subside, a coldness filling her.

“Miss Aiken? Speak if you can. Whoever else is in there – don’t hurt her. We can take you alive. This can end well for everybody.”

Her eyes shut, in the blackness, Jennifer thought she saw a dark face. She’d been looking at it for the past few hours, and had come to know it. Apollo’s face there, just a phantom painted against the backs of her eyelids, and he spoke.

No, it can’t.

The gun went off.

* * *

He watched the caravan of police vehicles stream down 10
th
Avenue. Staryles figured Healy and the girl had raised some ruckus, and someone had dialed 911. He had all the intel if he needed it – who called and from where; in a minute or less he could have the name of the caller, the color of their eyes, what they liked for lunch. Now wasn’t the time. The cops wouldn’t be a problem – in fact, he’d counted on them as the necessary smokescreen for his team to get in and out unnoticed.

The squad cars pulled up in front of John Jay College across the street. There were four NYPD cruisers, and an unmarked one. Staryles smirked as he peered through the window on the fourth floor. More detectives, he thought. Just what the world needed.

He left the windows. The fourth floor was the birthing center at the hospital. A long, softly lit hallway fed into rooms replete with hardwood floors, double beds, and Jacuzzi birthing tubs. No stirrups for the women here; Staryles’ mother had described in horrifying detail the anguish of each of their births to her sons. Times had changed. This was a great place to give birth. A place that Sloane Dewan’s natural mother might have come to, had the circumstances been different.

Instead, the infant had been delivered prematurely in the wet, dark alley behind a Laundromat in White Plains. There was no shock in this for Staryles. Smartly dressed in his suit, he walked along the hallway, smiling pleasantly at the nurses and mothers softly milling about in their scrubs and gowns. He thought of all that he had seen in the world in just twenty-eight years. Surprisingly, the worst of it wasn’t even during wartime. War was hell; everyone knew that. People went on their lame-ass marches and protests, they elected a president who promised to bring the troops home, they lamented the senseless violence, blamed their leaders for wild goose chases like the hunt for WMDs, created scapegoats, and suspected something even more subsurface and nefarious, something they might hesitantly approach, but were terrified to really know. Because it might look like them.

And yet these babies were born. Born into a country where the fertility rate had dropped dramatically since his parents’ day and was still dropping, dipping below what anthropologists knew was the number that civilizations never returned from. Anglo-Saxon Christians were dying faster than if they were being poisoned by thallium – thallium, his father’s favorite chemical. Muslims were the fastest growing religious group on the planet. Within a few short years, they would dominate Europe and America.

He passed silently by the rooms where women gave birth, and another room where a newborn was bundled against its mother’s chest.

Heilshorn’s hospital. Heilshorn, who would preserve the race, the culture, the ethos of America at all costs. A man who would save the children if only for their induction into a tightly controlled world ruled by a politico-military elite. He wanted more children born; poor, middle, upper class – it didn’t matter. He funded poorer hospitals throughout the city, free clinics, and volunteer-based programs. Women and children were commodities to him, built for pleasure, or built for breeding. If the two intersected, Heilshorn patched the gap.

At the end of the hallway, Staryles came to a door which read
employees only
. The door looked like it led to a dingy break-room, or storage. Staryles knew better.

It was locked, but Staryles was prepared. He inserted two bent rods in the lock that disengaged the tumblers, and then he turned the knob.

It was dark in there, but his eyes detected the screens, his pupils dilated and took in the light.

“Hey,” said a shape coming toward him. As his eyes adjusted, Staryles made out the security uniform. The guy wearing it wasn’t much older than he was.

Heilshorn’s bodyguard hadn’t been responding to his texts. There was every chance he had the situation wrapped up, and all Staryles was going to have to do was clean up – take Healy’s body and the girl’s body from Heilshorn’s office and dispose of them – but he had underestimated the detective before, and wasn’t going to again.

He slashed upwards and to the side, a perfect incision along the security guard’s carotid artery. Knowing what would come next, Staryles ducked, grabbed the guard by the waist and twisted him around, in one graceful motion. The guard’s neck was spraying blood, and it fanned out across the room, but not a drop touched Staryles. The blood splattered on the second guard in the room, a woman, who was on her way over, her hand on the butt of her holstered Glock. She cried out as the other guard, exsanguinating from his neck, dropped in a heap on the floor.

Staryles sprung from his crouching position, and cut her throat. She gasped and stumbled back – he was unable to reach her and twist her away in the same fashion as the first guard, so he just jumped back. She took a couple of steps, clawing at her throat, the blood fountaining. A few drops landed on Staryles’ jacket – he could hear them pitter-patter like soft raindrops.

He cursed and looked down at his suit as the female guard fell to the floor, pulling a chair down with her.

He shouldn’t wipe the blood – he knew that – the stain would only get rubbed in more. He pinched the fabric and pulled the soiled spot away from his body as if it were diseased. He stepped carefully over the first guard and sat himself in the one upright chair. He peered at the bank of monitors in the dark room, the sepia glare making his face yellow, his eyes reflecting the images as he searched them.

He scanned the nine screens, six of which were quad screens. There was another security station, but this was where the real surveillance and recording went on.

And then he saw them.

A camera mounted in the hallway on the top floor showed Healy and the girl were just leaving Heilshorn’s office.

Staryles had to deal with his suit jacket. He looked around and saw a crumpled napkin sitting next to the remnants of a McDonald’s meal, a few fries still in their cardboard container. No. Instead he found a piece of scrap paper in his pocket. He glanced at it to make sure it didn’t bear any sensitive information. He used it to blot the blood on his jacket, then wadded it up carefully, and stuck it back in his pocket. From his suit pocket he took out his transmitter. Cell phone texting was done. He pulled out the small BTE microphone and receiver unit and hooked it in place over the hard cartilage of his right ear. His team was on the same frequency.

“This is Hades. Top floor, headed for the elevator. No, wait, the stairs. West stairwell.”

He looked down at his jacket again. He’d managed to blot most of the blood but the stain was black in the wash of the monitor light. That really pissed him off.

* * *

Brendan remembered a discussion from school about waking up in the morning. It was, in a sense, the closest you were to death all day. Your heart rate and breathing had slowed down, your circulation had decreased in speed and volume, and in order to get out of bed and go take that much needed piss, you took this huge blast of cortisol from your adrenal gland, waking everything up so you could walk, talk, think, with blood feeding your brain.

His father had died one morning. Thanksgiving morning, Gerard Healy had risen from his bed, seventy-two years old, and had a massive stroke. Eleven years ago. His parents had been separated, and Brendan was planning to make the rounds and visit them both with Angie, the woman he’d just married and had a baby with. He remembered that time so clearly – he remembered the high blush of Angie’s cheeks, the perfect round redness to them, matching the tip of her nose. The way she reacted to the cold reminded him of a singer he’d once seen on a Macy’s Parade float coming up Sixth Avenue. Her face daubed with color, eyes glistening as she had sung “Gloria,” his daughter’s name. He never told Angie that the reason he pushed so hard for that name was because of a boyhood crush on that singer in the parade, or that that singer was partly responsible for the way he felt about Angie on cold days, so deeply in love with her, infatuated and satisfied.

Of course there was far more than just a resemblance to a boyhood crush. Angie could be tough, but she was incredibly generous. Tolerant, patient, kind. Perhaps, he had sometimes thought over the years with a bright sting of guilt, too patient. By rights she could have – maybe she
should
have left him right then and there, on that Thanksgiving, when he found out his father had died.

Brendan had been three-sheets to the wind by late afternoon and by evening he had been drunk enough to vomit on himself, something he rarely did. And Angie had been patient, and she had been kind, and she had cleaned him up. Even after Gloria was born, Angie still tended to Brendan, still showed him her motherly side – it wasn’t all for the baby. And he knew it, and it made him feel guilty for being so needy, for needing this twenty-five-year-old woman to take care of him as much as the infant they shared. But he had been in school, and his career had been promising. It didn’t matter that his father had pulled the strings to get him into Langone. It didn’t matter that his father had, in fact, just about always been pulling the strings, talking to the right people, sending the money, getting Brendan back together when he got out of shape. That was what you did for your only child, Brendan figured.

And yet his mother had raised him. She had fed him. She had taught him about women, and penitence, and God. He remembered her with a book in her hands. She was serious, not always quick to smile, though when she did it was as if she were sharing a secret. She was earthy, yet spiritual.

His father hadn’t lived a flashy life – there was almost something proletariat, drab, about the way Gerard Healy had lived, as if he’d been a doctor in a third world country in a former life, walking around in a creased white lab coat with a stethoscope swinging from his neck, ducking through the flaps of a hospital tent in the dusty heat. But now he worked in New York City, the place John Lennon called the new Rome. He was classy, he attended parties and events and dinners where he wore his gold watches and slicked his dark black hair back and looked around with smiling eyes decorated with fans of wrinkles.

When Gerard had died, Katherine Healy had wept with the news, and Brendan had always the impression that she cried not so much for the man that had been lost, but for some life that had been running unfulfilled, and was finally neutered completely, lost to time.

During the funeral she had been the picture of composure, watching the faces of the distinguished men and women that attended. Gerard Healy’s memorial service had been well attended. One after the other they took her small hand and whispered their condolences. Doctors and lawyers and businessmen and politicians. Some faces he’d recognized, most faces he hadn’t.

A young Philip Largo had been among them.

He suddenly remembered the man now, standing just inside the narthex of the church; his eyes with dark circles round them, like a raccoon, and the way his mouth turned up at the corners, as if he was in on some secret. As if he knew he was going to change the world for the better.

And later that day, too, Angie being patient with him as Brendan drank straight vodka, falling over – she had bent over him on the living room floor and put her arms around him and tried to pull him up. It was so close, the memory, that he could feel her hands around him now, pulling on him, trying to drag him back into the land of the living.

“Brendan, Brendan get up.”

Only this Angie sounded more frantic than he remembered. This Angie had ice in her voice.

“Brendan, we have to go.”

He opened his eyes. He saw the back of a man’s head. He could smell the sharp, chemical odor of the fire-extinguisher foam. He felt the hands tugging at him, trying to lift him off the oak desk.

He pushed himself up and away from the desk, and rose unsteadily to his feet and looked at Sloane. Her eyes were hard and calculating. “We have to get out of here. Right now.”