The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (19 page)

A better man would answer
yes
.

“I was just going to ask if you’d consider going to the ends of the Earth with me.”

She cocks her head. “And where exactly would that be?”

I forward Shima’s e-mail to her. “Northern Wyoming.”

“That’s a long way.” Her gaze scans back and forth across the screen of her tablet before she looks again at me. “We’re going to need a car.”

“That’s your way of saying yes?”

“Yes.”

We trade a smile.

Elliot called her my partner in war and that’s true. Me and Delphi have been together a long time. I think I’ve come to know her pretty well and she knows everything there is to know about me—who I am, what I’ve been through—she’s gone through a lot of it with me. We know how to operate together.

She goes to work on a plan that will get us out of the city; I work on reconnecting with the squad. The only number I have is Flynn’s, so I link to that. I’m caught off guard when Jaynie picks up.

No greeting; Shima must have messaged her, because she gets straight to business. “Shelley, you made up your mind? You’re going to Wyoming?”

“Yes.”

“Have you had any trouble?”

“A sniper—”

“
Shit.
You’re not hit?”

“No.”

“Was the Red looking out for you?”

“No. There was no warning.” I look at Delphi. “Just got lucky.” She bares her teeth at me. To Jaynie I say, “What about you? Anything happen on your side?”

“Small-time stuff compared to you.”

“Trust me to grab all the dramatic scenes.”

“I’ve noticed. Are you safe where you are?”

“For now. But—”

“No ‘buts.’ Just stay where you are. Stay under cover. We’re coming to get you.”

My relief is real. No matter how smart our next move, Delphi and I are vulnerable on our own. I hold my hand out to her and she takes it, giving me a questioning look. “We need to get you armor,” I tell her.

“I’ve got armor,” Jaynie says, unaware Delphi is there. “I’ve got our angel too. Chudhuri pried it out of storage somewhere and turned it over.”

Our squad drone—I wish I had that here. “So who’s in?”

“Everybody.”

“Even Moon? I thought he was smarter than the rest of you.”

“It didn’t last. He reverted to type. I’ve got a stop scheduled to pick up weapons—”

“Jaynie, you can’t bring weapons into the city.”

“I don’t give a shit, Shelley. I’m bringing weapons.”

Right. I hope the police drones don’t give a shit either.

She says, “Send your address. I’m putting our ETA at ninety minutes.”

That takes me by surprise. “Ninety minutes? It takes almost four hours to drive here from DC.”

“We left early.”

“What if I said I wasn’t coming?”

I swear I can hear her smile. “You’re predictable, Shelley. Shima’s got you modeled. She knew what your decision would be.”

Shima is not the first to pull that off. “Jaynie, Delphi’s with me. She’s coming to Wyoming with us.”

Two seconds of silence go by, then, “Wait . . .
Delphi
? Your handler?”

“Yeah. She quit Guidance.”

“And came to New York to look you up?”

I hear the suspicion in her voice, and I don’t like it. “I trust her, Jaynie. All the way.”

The suspicion is still there when she tells me, “Glad to hear it, but it’s going to take me some time to catch up with you on that one. We’re at the gun shop. I’ve got to go. Send the address.” She breaks the link.

Delphi is watching me.

“They’re coming,” I tell her.

“I worked that one out. If you’re having any doubts about me coming along—”

“
No.
No, I am not, and you’re part of the squad anyway, even if Jaynie doesn’t know you.” I reach for her. She puts aside her tablet and her farsights, and then she comes into my arms. “But I have to ask you, why would you want to do this?”

She leans against my chest and thinks about it. “I don’t have a good reason, except that you’re alive and I’d like to see you stay that way. And besides, I’ve been out of work for months, and I’m bored out of my mind.”

This is flattering. “So you’re going to go rogue with me and turn into a merc because you’re bored?”

“Who said anything about being a merc? I haven’t heard there’s a job on offer for me.”

“There’s a job.
I’m
offering.”

“You?” She looks up; her eyebrows arch. “And what kind of job would that be?”

Those blue eyes, daring me.

I have to look away. “There’s a surveillance camera in here.”

She crawls into my lap anyway, kisses me on the mouth. We need to be getting ready to go, but we spend a few minutes at it anyway. We break off only when the building shudders. Delphi pulls back, looks around. A second later we hear the rumble of an explosion.

I propel myself off the couch, sliding to the floor, carrying Delphi with me. Her eyes flare in surprise, and then she’s lying on the carpet beneath me, her hand gentle against my cheek. “Hey, take it easy. That was far away.”

“Not that far,” I growl.

A faint wail of sirens and angry car horns seeps through the apartment’s insulation. Delphi tilts her head back to look at the window. I follow her gaze. Blocks away, a fat plume of black smoke is churning into the sky. We get up to look, standing carefully to the side of the window. The smoke is from somewhere near Penn Station. I turn on the recording function in my overlay because I want to remember this. Delphi grabs her farsights and does the same thing.

“This isn’t uncommon,” she says in a low voice. “Bombs go off somewhere in the country almost every day—although that’s a big one.”

“I thought the country was recovering.”

“You didn’t get much news when you were in custody, did you?”

“No.”

“The official line, and what most of the mediots preach, is that the Red isn’t real. But the paranoid types know that’s a lie. Thelma Sheridan is their hero. They want to get rid of
the Red, and they don’t care about the cost. Critical targets like the remaining data exchanges and undersea cables have massive security now, so terrorists go for smaller targets like cell towers, and server farms when they can get to them. But more and more it’s just random.”

“Like a nuke in DC?”

“That isn’t hard for me to believe. Not at all.”

On the street below the window, traffic is stopped, generating a faint chorus of bleating horns. One vehicle at the end of the block isn’t willing to wait: A shoddy old van with rust stains on the roof surges up onto the sidewalk, startling two pedestrians, who jump clear. With two wheels still in the gutter, the van guns down the sidewalk—and I know a slam is coming. I grab Delphi’s arm, dragging her from the window as the van stops right below us. “Get away! Get into the hall!”

I wish I could scream a warning to the other residents and to all the people stuck in traffic.

Delphi’s a handler and a damn good one. She doesn’t waste time with questions or protests as we fall back across the living room, through the foyer. I open the door and shove her ahead of me into the hall, yanking the door closed behind us just at the moment of the explosion.

The blast wave hurls me across the hallway. The pressure is like a glass spike in my ears. I can’t breathe. I’m down on the floor and it’s vibrating under me, unnatural motion accompanied by an avalanche of noise. Dust everywhere, so thick I can’t see. Concrete dust, a cold wind, muffled screaming beyond the deafening ringing in my ears.

The floor stops quivering and the dust begins to clear, some of it sifting out of the air, more carried away by the wind.

Both walls of the hallway are intact, but the apartment door is hanging open on broken hinges, with torn black
wiring protruding from the frame. Past the door, the apartment glows with spring sunlight softened by a glittering haze of dust settling out across the tumbled furniture. The outer wall is gone, and in the building across the street the windows I can see are shattered.

I turn to look for Delphi. She’s on the floor, a fallen statue molded of gray dust, coming slowly to life, raising her head, pulling off her farsights, coughing hard as she pushes up to hands and knees.

Why the fuck did I bring her here?
I should never have gone near her. I should never have come home at all. I should have broken with my dad first thing Saturday night and headed straight for Anne Shima, armed myself with every piece of firepower she could give me, and gone hunting for Carl Vanda.

I’m going after him now. I swear it.

Fuck me, anyway.

I get up—at least the legs still work—and help Delphi to her feet. She has all her limbs; nothing looks broken; I don’t see blood.

I put my arm around her shoulders. I need to get her out of the building—“Come on”—my own voice sounding muffled in my shocked ears.

As we head for the stairs, a door opens in the hallway. A woman staggers out, covered in gray dust so I can’t tell her age. An older man emerges from another apartment. “My God,” he wails. “My God.” We all get to the stairs and join an exodus heading down. “The gas lines,” a woman calls out. “What if they catch on fire?”

We get to the street. It’s chaos. Cars are still jammed bumper to bumper. Some of them are burning. People are screaming for help. Where the front of my building used to be, there’s a slope of debris: broken concrete, drywall, wood paneling, shattered furniture, and pipes, with water
spraying over all of it. God knows who’s crushed beneath. What’s left of the sidewalk is paved in shards of glass.

People come running in from nearby streets, wide eyed, looking to help; others are fleeing. Sirens scream in the distance, but the police can’t get here because traffic on the cross streets is at a standstill. A single motorcycle cop appears at the end of the block, rolling in along the opposite sidewalk.

Across the street, all the lower windows in a thirty-eight-story condominium are shattered, the front doors reduced to warped steel frames. A man in a gray business suit is making his way out past the wreckage, moving carefully but calmly. I watch him past the smoke, the flames, the dust settling out of the air.

My overlay can’t identify him because of his headgear: an old-fashioned fedora, tinted farsights, and an iridescent mask like the one Major Ogawa showed me.

But I don’t need to see his face. I know him anyway. His brief appearance in the courtroom made a lasting impression on me. I know him by his biometrics—his height, his gaunt build, his severely straight posture. And by his kinetics—the particular way he walks, favoring his right hip.

Carl Vanda.

He’s clutching a hard-walled, dull-gray case, one that’s just long enough to hold a sniper rifle if the weapon is broken down to stock and barrel. He gets past the broken door and pauses, showing no concern for the risk of falling glass as his masked face looks across the street—right at me.

I grab Delphi as Vanda uses his free hand to reach inside his coat. I drag her down with me behind the cover of the burning cars just as a gun goes off. Silver bees—the payload of a fléchette shell—whine through the air we just occupied, throwing themselves in suicidal rage against the wreckage of my building.

Delphi struggles in my arms. She tries to get free. “Stay down!” I plead as someone—it has to be the motorcycle cop—shouts,
“Drop the weapon!”
It sounds just like a movie.

I can’t see what happens next, but I hear a second shot from Vanda’s gun. Someone starts screaming: an adrenaline-fueled howl of pain. The hair on my arms stands on end as I remember other times and other wounded, screaming just like that.

I get up on my knees, lifting my head just high enough to peer over the hood of the nearest car. Heat from the fires fans shimmering ripples of air that distort but don’t disguise Vanda’s gray-suited figure as he trots away down the sidewalk.

Past him, at the corner, a man stands waiting: a still point in the chaos of the street.

I duck back down, trying to decide what I just saw. The man on the corner was a stranger, too far away for my overlay to identify. He looked to be six feet tall, an athletic figure dressed in a crewneck shirt, slacks, and a casual brown jacket. Gray hair in a military cut. Was he watching me? No. He was watching Vanda—and he was holding a gray case like the one Vanda is carrying. That’s what caught my eye.

I look again. The man in brown is gone from the corner— I think I see him farther down the street—while Vanda is moving in the same direction, weaving through gridlocked traffic to reach the next block.

“Is the shooter still there?” Delphi asks, a high edge to her voice.

“No, he’s moving out. It was Vanda—”

“
Carl Vanda?
You know that?”

“Yes.”

“He had a mask on.”

“It was him. Are you injured? Can you stand up?”

“I’m okay.”

We get up together, look across the street.

“Did Vanda shoot that police officer?”

“Yeah.”

And the cop isn’t screaming anymore.

I cut between the burning cars with Delphi right behind me.

We find the cop on the opposite sidewalk. He’s on his side, moaning, clutching at the bloody pulp of his face that’s been shredded by steel fléchettes. Beside him is his police-issue sidearm. I stoop to pick it up. “Delphi, do what you can for him.”

She gives me a look of searing blue fury, knowing as well as I do that he’ll be dead in another minute—but I take off before she can say,
Stay
.

This is my chance. Carl Vanda is not alone, but he is on foot and he’s a broken man. I know I can outrun him.

•   •   •   •

Sirens wail. Helicopters turn and swoop in manic paths above the buildings. Microdrones shoot past me, racing toward the blast site to harvest digital footage. I’m going the opposite way.

All along the street, people are emptying out of the buildings. They stand in small groups on the sidewalks and in the gridlocked traffic, watching smoke rise, relating their experiences, debating the danger. A bold few rush toward the disaster. I weave past, holding the gun close to my side. No one notices it. There is just too much to look at, too much going on.