“Hang in there. Backup’s on its way.”
Gundersson wasn’t sure he wanted backup. If the double cross was coming from within, then he wouldn’t be able to trust anybody who arrived on the scene.
Including Harding.
But he didn’t know anything definite, and he hadn’t discovered the pills that were the supposed purpose of the mission. Harding was right: he hadn’t done the job.
But it would have helped if he knew what the right thing was.
“You’ve got a warrior’s heart,” Wendy said, and he wasn’t sure if she was talking to him, her husband, or the painting.
Gundersson bent low, blood splotching his thigh, his ankle screaming a reminder of its sprain. He scuttled across the floor until he retrieved Roland’s fallen revolver. He thumbed open the chamber. No bullets.
The idiot was playing?
“Roland wanted to destroy it,” Wendy said. “Sebastian wanted it to live.”
Gundersson knew the feeling. But his gaze crawled to the canvas despite himself. The figure drawing was different from his last view of it yesterday. It was shot through with jagged lines and geometric shapes, and the whole aspect of it had changed. The huddled, shadowy figure was obscured by lighter gashes of color.
Shake out of it, Ace. So she’s gone cubist or something. This isn’t the Met Museum. This is a war zone.
He considered mounting the stairs for a more commanding view, but the loft was situated so he would only be able to watch two sides of the cabin. One of the attackers could have sprinted from the woods and even now be creeping along the foundation. The front door was locked but it wouldn’t stand up to a couple of determined kicks, and a gunman also had the stealth option of breaking a window and firing inside.
And if there are three of them, and they all charge at once “Why would they want you dead?” Gundersson asked Wendy, bothered by the fact that it had been several minutes since the last round was fired. At least shooting would reveal their locations. Silence was even more stressful.
“What you told me last night,” she said. “We have something somebody wants, and somebody else doesn’t want that other somebody to have it.”
Gundersson nodded. As screwy as it sounded, that was the simplest truth. And the “something” wasn’t a pill, it was a secret carried inside them.
Gundersson glanced at the painting again. “What’s that?”
“What Sebastian taught me. The key.”
“The key to what?” Gundersson limped to the door, making a recon sweep of the yard through the tiny shattered window, but he only stayed long enough to make sure it was clear. The Glock held seventeen rounds, and he had another magazine in his vest, but he wasn’t about to play Dirty Harry against marksmen with automatic rifles.
Even if he made a hobbled run for it and somehow reached the woods, his SUV was parked a mile away, on the far edge of the wilderness area. They could hunt him down easily even if he wasn’t running on one leg.
Plus, despite his distaste for them, he felt compelled to protect Wendy and Roland and whatever secret they harbored. The fact that someone wanted them dead meant they knew something important, and the government had a right to any information that could threaten its interests. And Gundersson had sworn to uphold those interests.
Okay, Dudley Do-Right? Do you have the balls to back up what you believe? Even when your own government might be trying to kill you?
He was at the kitchen window, peeking through the curtains, when the meaning of the painting’s symbols struck him. What he’d taken for abstract postmodernism was a formula of some kind, a cryptic code.
The key.
Roland stirred, letting out another moan. He wasn’t bleeding, but a welt the size of a robin’s egg rose above his left ear, rapidly becoming purple. Gundersson wondered if Wendy eventually turned on every man she slept with, a black widow in lovely skin.
A shot rang out, and it was of a different caliber and volume than the rifles.
Has one of them switched to small arms? That would be dumb, since they have the advantage.
A cluster of shots followed, the muffled rattle of automatic weaponry, followed by the louder gun. Somebody gave a high-pitched squeal that quickly trailed away. It was followed by a whoop of deranged and bloodthirsty triumph, like that of a boy taking down his first deer.
Either they’re shooting each other, or the cavalry has arrived. But Harding said backup would take two hours. Who, then?
“Stay down,” he barked at Wendy. She slouched from her sitting position on the sofa, still studying her painting. Smiling.
Someone shouted from the forest. “Roland! Wendy! Are you in there?”
Wendy looked up, snapping from her blissful stupor. “Mark.”
Mark? The guy training to be a cop? Then his doctor wife couldn’t be far behind.
So the Morgans had walked into Armageddon and had apparently managed to survive, at least to this point. Gundersson wondered how much they knew, and whether somebody wanted them dead as well.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Mark had always wondered about that phrase “seeing red.”
Red was the color of blood and passion and fire, the strongest impulses of the human mind, the devil’s color. But this red that consumed him was beyond the mind, seeping from some hidden ancestral fountain. He felt simultaneously more and less human, a stack of stupid clay sparked to life by a lurid puppet master.
Slinking through the woods at dawn had stirred primal hunting instincts, and as he approached the gunfire, his anxiety and excitement grew. Common sense should be begging him to flee, but he knew sense had been burned out of him more than a year ago. He’d entered law-enforcement training partly out of a desire to protect Alexis from the unknown future, but the deeper truth was he craved the adrenaline high of that night in the Monkey House, the cat-and-mouse game of survival, and the simplest challenge of defeating pain, madness, and death itself.
Now the fucking monkey is locked and loaded.
The last gunshot had been a good hundred yards to the north, where lush oak trees dotted the ridge, so he felt relatively secure. But maybe the seeping, creeping redness had already clouded his judgment, because when he came around the moss-mottled stand of granite boulders to discover a man in a green jumpsuit, turned away and holding a blunt rifle, his first instinct wasn’t to question the man, or yell “Police! Drop your weapon!” like that old bastard Frady Cat had taught him.
No, the red filled him up and became him, and the Glock was up and working, pah pah pah, just like he was shooting at a cardboard cutout on the range.
The man jerked in surprise, his sunglasses dropping away to reveal eyes turned up to heaven. Then he squealed and slumped to the ground, the rifle tumbling away into last winter’s leaves.
The redness swelled until it burst from his lungs, and when he heard the triumphant roar echo off the rocks and trees, he mistook it for some rampaging wild animal. But the raw pain in his throat made him realize he’d been the one releasing that inhuman noise.
And just as suddenly, the red dimmed, and he was standing over the warm corpse, realizing he’d given away his position to the other gunmen.
And killed a man. Oh, yes, Mark, you certainly diddle-diddly-did. And don’t even pretend you have any remorse. Because you loved it. This is how you were made, and the rest was just for show.
The cabin was below, and Roland’s white Jeep was parked nearby, on the uneven, scruffy lawn. From this vantage point, the gunman could have picked off anyone running from the cabin to the Jeep. They were probably holed up inside, if they were lucky. Mark called to them while taking cover between two thick hardwoods.
There was no answer at first, and Mark knew he couldn’t stay in one place. He didn’t know how many gunmen there were, but the origins of the shots suggested at least two.