No, no. The firing lane.
Ricci swore to himself. Just what moment had he been in?
He got that biting, bitter taste in his mouth again, his gun swinging into position, his finger starting its deadly squeeze… and stopping.
Another figure had sprung up out of nowhere directly in front of the badguy. A woman, her painted-on eyes wide, her painted-on mouth gaping in a silent scream, the expression a cartoon facsimile of terror. Ricci held his fire. This was goddamned unexpected. Sure, why not? Unexpected was the whole point of this exercise.
Clever fucking software.
Practice badguy, practice hostage.
Ricci hesitated. Tick-tick-tick. Decision time. Now thought had to reenter the process. And with thought came a backslide into the choking memories of Ontario, and his dash through that final passage with Nichols, deep in the hornet’s nest, desperate to find what he needed to save Gordian’s life, uncertain whether he’d even know how to recognize it, or the place where it would be stored. Ricci’s helmet gear had provided wireless audiovisual contact with Eric Oh, an epidemiologist who was coaching him from three time zones away in California, and who Ricci had been told might know if they were very lucky—
On his right, behind a thick plate-glass inset, Ricci sees a large room filled with equipment that seems to indicate he’s getting hot. Tanks, ducting, air feed, and intake pumps.
“Doc? You with me?” he says into his helmet mike.
“Yes. You’re looking at the microencapsulation lab. This can’t be far from where they’d keep the cure.”
“Right. Assuming there is one.”
Silence to that remark.
Ricci looks at the solid concrete wall ahead of him with a stitch of apprehension, hustles along at a trot. The problem is he’s running out of hallway. Three, four more office doors on either side, and that’s it. Dead end. If he doesn’t find what he needs here, it’s doubtful he can shift the hunt to another part of the facility without turning all his men into casualties. He can almost feel the weight of their lives on his shoulders.
“Ricci, wait, slow down!” Eric’s voice is loud, excited in his comlink’s earpiece. “Over on your left, that door!”
He stops, turns, scans the sign above it:
POLYMERASE ACTIVATORS/ANTIVIRALS
“Tom, listen—”
“You don’t have to translate,” Ricci says. “We’re going in.”
He quickly moves to the left of the door, waves Nichols to the opposite side, tries the knob. Locked. Stepping back, Ricci aims his weapon — it is a compact variable velocity rifle system subgun with adjustable lethal or nonlethal settings — at the spot below the knob, squeezes off a staccato burst, then kicks out at the door. It flings inward without resistance, the lock mechanism in fragments from his shots.
They scramble into the room, Ricci fanning his outthrust gun to the left, Nichols buttonhooking to the right of the doorway, looking sharp, his technique perfect.
The office is unoccupied, its lights off. Ricci finds the wall switch and they come on.
He is seconds from a decision that he will always wish he could unmake.
The mid-size room is windowless, partitioned into four central soundproof cubicles that enclose counters and computer workstations. The double-depth multimedia filing /storage units built into the walls are six feet high, with slide-out drawers and rotating shelves in steel housings. Quick access systems, no doors, no locks. It doesn’t surprise Ricci. The staffers allowed into this office, this entire wing of the building, would have wide clearance anyway.
He moves deeper into the room, turns to Nichols.
“You better stand outside in the hall, watch my back,” he says, forking two fingers at his own eyes. “Keep alert.”
It seems a fundamentally obvious and sensible call for Ricci. He does not know how long he will be in the room. He doesn’t even know exactly what he’s looking for. But he does know he’ll be vulnerable and distracted while he forages around in here. Watch my back, keep alert. Obvious.
Nichols looks at him with an expression that Ricci notes without quite being able to characterize it. In months to come, on the countless nights of poisoned sleep when that moment replays itself in his thoughts, he will understand it is plain and simple gratitude — for the second chance Nichols has been given, and the confidence being placed in him.
The moment passes. Then the kid gives Ricci a crisp little nod that has about it the quality of a salute, turns, and goes back through the door toward his encounter with the Killer, and the hail of bullets that will rip the life out of his body…
Ricci was jolted back to the reality of the firing range, this time by his heart’s heavy beating. He’d gotten caught somewhere between past and present again, as if they had converged around him in a kind of dizzying overlap — the dashed, rudimentary lines of the target figure’s face becoming the sharply defined features of the Killer as Ricci first saw them years ago. He had never gotten his chance at that savage monster inside Earthglow, but there had been a time long before that, when they had grappled hand to hand in yet another faraway place, fighting to an impasse at the Russian Cosmodrome. There, as in Ontario, the Killer had escaped him, vanishing into the benighted Kazakhstan mountains amid the fierce, final combat of what would be logged in Sword’s mission files as Operation: Shadow Watch.
Now Ricci stood with his hands wrapped around the butt of his gun. The Killer had started to retreat, backing slowly away down the lane, using the hostage figure as a shield, keeping her in front of his body. He was about a foot taller than Screaming Woman, easily a foot, and Ricci was convinced he could take him down nice and clean, do it without so much as ruffling her hair. One shot to the head, over and out. But there would be an undeniable risk to Screaming Woman. Say the Killer was holding her at gunpoint, the weapon’s snout pressing into her back. Say he had a knife against her throat. Ricci knew her situation was chancy even if his marksmanship was true. A slight jerk of the Killer’s hand, an automatic dying spasm, could result in Screaming Woman becoming what Ricci had called a civilian casualty when he wore a detective’s badge. On the force, protection of the innocents overrode your pursuit of the guilty. When losses occurred it was despite every intent and effort to avert them. But would a loss in this case be unintentional or incidental?
Ricci stood there with his hands around the gun, its trigger a tease to his finger. The finger moving slightly back, increasing its pressure—
“Tough choice. Good thing you don’t have to make it.”
Ricci turned his head toward the sound of Nimec’s voice. He had stepped over from his firing lane, the earmuffs off, goggles down around his neck, his Beretta already holstered at his side.
Ricci looked at him but didn’t say anything. His features were blank.
“Didn’t you hear the beeps?” Nimec said. He was tapping his unprotected ear. “We’re done.”
Ricci stared at him in silence a while longer, his Five-Seven still held out, the pupils contracted to black pinpoints in his ice blue eyes.
Then he looked back down the firing lane.