I turned and raced back down the hall in the general direction of the front door. I flung open door after door, finding closets and bedrooms and bathrooms.
And finally the right one. The basement. I dropped the empty Glock and descended the stairs.
The air felt cooler. I smelled a dank odor as I descended the dimly lit wooden stairway. Lights were on downstairs. I heard low voices.
The basement appeared, on first glance, to have roughly the same footprint as the floor above. Bare concrete walls segmented it into a number of open rooms. It seemed to go on forever. It was, for a basement, relatively high-ceilinged: around nine feet. On the ceiling were soundproofing tiles.
The voices were a little louder, and I could tell they were coming from a TV in one of the open rooms. In the closest alcove were steel shelves that held white boxes marked with dates and letters. The Centurions’ client files, probably. All along one wall were garden tools, neatly hanging from hooks on a long expanse of pegboard.
I sidled along the wall of tools toward the source of the TV noise, which seemed to be coming from the next alcove. There I saw what at first looked like chain-link fence. When I got closer — though still about twenty-five feet away — I realized I was looking at a holding cell. A twelve-by-twelve-foot standalone cell whose walls and ceiling were made of welded wire mesh. The sort of cage you might see in a small police detention unit. In one corner, a bare steel commode. In another, a sleeping bag on the floor and a steel bench.
And on that bench sat Mandy Seeger.
She was slumped, in a hooded sweatshirt, and looked weary and alone. She didn’t see me.
About ten feet from the holding cell sat a very large guy in a chair staring dully at a TV mounted on the ceiling. He wore a white short-sleeved polo shirt and a shoulder holster. He looked to be around three hundred pounds, much of it fat.
He didn’t see me either. He was watching some reality show about deep-sea fishing.
The basement was soundproofed, and he was watching TV, but he still must have heard the bomb. And the shot I’d taken at Vogel. But he must have been ordered not to leave his post. He had a prisoner to watch.
“Yo!” I shouted, walking toward the fat guy. “Vogel sent me down here.”
The fat guy turned to look at me, a guy in a brown UPS uniform. He whipped a Glock out of his shoulder holster and aimed it in my direction. “Who the hell are you?”
“Man, there’s eighteen feds with windbreakers upstairs. You want to get out of this, follow me.” I came closer. “Get her out of there and let’s go.”
“Huh? Feds? Where?”
Then a cell phone began ringing.
His.
With his free left hand he pulled out a phone. Then, with the thumb of his gun hand, he hit the answer button, a neat little move. He must have done it before.
He answered it. “Yes, sir.”
I knew who it was.
Slowly I drew the Ruger out from under my shirt and held it at my side.
As he listened, his eyes roamed the basement.
“Yes, sir. Yes, sir.”
Mandy, in the cage, was watching me, frightened.
“Got it,” he said.
Then he pocketed the phone.
“Stop right where you are,” he said. His gun was trained on me. “Don’t come any closer.”
“Okay.” I took another step.
“I said, freeze,” the fat guy said.
In one fluid motion I pulled the Glock up directly in front of my chest.
But the fat guy leveled his Glock and fired first.
Directly at me, from around twelve feet away.
Mandy screamed.
It felt like someone had slammed me in the gut with a baseball bat. I doubled over. The pain was immense. The wind was knocked out of me. I tumbled backward, against the wall of tools, grabbing my chest, gasping, as the Ruger flew out of my hands and went skittering across the floor toward the fat guy. All around me tools clattered to the floor. Something had gashed my neck.
The light body armor I was wearing was only 6.5 millimeters thick, weighing less than two kilograms, and it had saved my life. But it sure felt like I’d broken a few ribs.
I sprung to my feet, and I saw the fat man reaching down to grab the Ruger.
A stupid move. Maybe he thought I’d been seriously wounded or was even dead. But it gave me a couple of seconds that I needed.
I reached for the closest tool at hand, a long-handled pair of garden shears with its jaws open. Grabbing it by one handle, I hurled it at the fat man like some ninja hurling a throwing star.
He yelped as one blade of the shears sank into the side of his neck. He fell to his knees, reaching for the shears, and I grabbed a large garden spade.
The fat guy fired at me again, but the round clanged against the steel blade. I pulled it back and swung it at the guy, hard. Though I was intending to land the blow on his chest, hoping to knock him to the floor, he had suddenly tipped forward and the shovel blade slammed into his ear.
There was a geyser of blood and I knew it had sunk in deep. The man collapsed onto the floor, the blood pulsing from an opening in his skull.
I grabbed the key from the retractable reel on the left side of his belt and yanked it off. I felt the spray of hot blood.
Mandy was screaming, and my ears were ringing, and I staggered toward the cage.
Even with the soundproofing, I could hear the faint distant warble of police sirens.
81
The beaten-earth yard around Vogel’s compound was crowded with a fleet of police vehicles, mostly from the local Maryland force. Kombucha was standing next to his unmarked car in a black overcoat. He waved when he saw us emerge from the compound.
I was glad to see him. I never thought I would be.
“You look like you need medical assistance,” he said, approaching.
I shook my head. “I’m good,” I said. “Thanks.”
I was in a lot of pain, but only when I breathed. I knew the wise course of action was to get to a hospital and get checked out and make sure I hadn’t also injured my spleen or my lungs. I’d been shot while wearing a ballistic vest before. I knew what could happen.
The wise course of action wasn’t what I chose, and Mandy couldn’t persuade me otherwise.
She was okay, she insisted. She hadn’t been injured or abused, beyond the discomfort of having to sleep on the floor in what was, after all, a cage, and the degradation of being forced to use a commode in front of a guard. I noticed Vogel’s backup hadn’t arrived after all. Maybe they were scared off by the police presence.
“Rasmussen?” I asked Kombucha.
He nodded. “Giving us the probable cause we need to search the compound.”
“I think client files are in the basement,” I said. “Will you excuse me a minute?”
Merlin was in the back of the UPS truck, and he looked antsy. “Nick,” he said, “I need to return this thing.”
“The truck?”
“The stingray. And the truck.”
“Hold on. Help me up.”
He extended a hand, and helped me up into the cargo bay of the truck. I was gritting my teeth and moaning as I climbed up.
“You get shot?” Merlin said, noticing the hole in the shirt of my uniform.
I nodded.
“Shit,” he said. “I can’t return it with a hole in it.”
“How about, ‘You okay, Nick?’”
“You okay, Nick?”
I nodded my head. I was still amped from all the adrenaline. But that was all right. It was probably keeping me from feeling much of the pain from the bruised ribs.
Merlin had been closely monitoring the stingray. I’d given him Vogel’s mobile number, so he knew which of the many numbers the stingray had logged — including even distant neighbors — to lock onto. Once he did, he watched the list of numbers Vogel called grow.