CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED NINETEEN
Microwave bursts turned the doorway into fire clouds of burning debris, but I ducked down and fired through the smoke. More by luck than skill I hit two of the Closers in the face; Ghost hit another with such force it drove the others back into the room. Harry Bolt fired his gun but God only knows what he was aiming at. Bullets binged and whanged down the hall, killing two of the overhead lights.
Santoro tried to shoot me but I was too close. I knew I couldn’t kill him, because I needed something from him. That didn’t mean I couldn’t hurt him. I buried the barrel of the pistol against his belly and fired four shots. I figured he’d be wearing the same body armor, but at that range no protective padding in the world is going to keep you from feeling the foot-pounds of impact. It folded him in half. As he bent forward I kneed him in the crotch and then punched him four times in the face, breaking his nose, cracking an eyebrow. He’d beaten me once because someone had been in my head holding me back, keeping the Killer on a leash.
That wasn’t going to happen now. Oh, hell no.
I swept his leg and hammered him to the concrete floor with an overhand knuckle punch to the floating ribs.
“Stay down,” I roared, then I grabbed Harry by the collar and flung him away from me. Inside the room Ghost was rolling around on the floor tearing red chunks out of a guy. A second man sat nearby trying to hold his throat in place, and failing. The other Closers were climbing to their feet, raising their guns, caught in a moment of indecision between killing Ghost and killing me.
One of them swung his gun toward Ghost’s head, but I put two rounds through the man’s face. Then I emptied the magazine into the others. When the slide locked back I used the gun to crush the throat of one of the others. That left two. There was no time to reload, no time to even draw my knife. Fuck it. I’d been training for moments like this since I was fifteen. If the Joe Ledger I’d been as a kid died the day those older teens attacked Helen and me, then the one who was born on that day has no mercy in his soul. Not in moments like these.
I leapt over a dying man and hit one of the two remaining Closers with a leaping palm shot on the point of the jaw that spun him halfway around, but it spun his head farther. Too far. He corkscrewed into the ground, dead or dying. The last man tried to make a fight of it. He lashed out with a short chopping roundhouse. One of those devastating Thai boxing kicks that would have shattered my leg had it landed right. But he put too much hip into it, trying for torque power instead of whipping snap. It should have been a follow-up move, or maybe it’s that he’s used to fighting slower opponents. I shifted right into the path and took his shin on my bent thigh. It hurt, sure. But in the middle of a fight it’s not pain that matters — it’s damage, and he didn’t do any. I did. I punched his forearm muscles hard enough to lame them, chambered, and short-punched him in the chest. That turned him and lifted his chin and I used the open Y of my other hand to smash him in the Adam’s apple. He staggered backward, making dying fish sounds.
“Joe!” cried Harry, and I turned to see Santoro pulling him backward, one arm wrapped around the kid’s throat, the other trying to reverse the grip on the gun he’d just ripped out of Harry’s hand. I grabbed the guy whose throat I’d just crushed, spun him, and used him as a shield as I drove toward Santoro. The assassin fired five shots and each one of them pounded into the dying guy’s back, but the undergarment kept them from passing through to me. The slide locked back just as Harry stamped down on Santoro’s foot. The kid pivoted and drove an elbow into the man’s face. Santoro stumbled back, stared at me as I threw my now-dead shield away, and then he turned and bolted down the hall.
I pelted after him, yelling back at Harry, “Get into the lab! Call Bug. Find the God Machine. Ghost, go with!”
Santoro ran from me and I ran after.
I caught up to him as he fumbled a swipe card through the slot on a reader to open the last door in the hallway. I hit him hard with a flying tackle and we both went crashing into the room.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY
Top staggered out of the armory as Church came hurrying over. The big man’s clothes were spattered with blood, his mouth hard, eyes filled with fire. Church knelt by Sam Imura and placed two fingers against his throat and raised an eyelid.
“He’s alive.”
Top was closer to Brian Botley, but when he felt for a pulse he found nothing at all.
“Where’s Bolton?” demanded Church.
Top licked his lips. “I… haven’t seen him.”
Church half turned to Violin. “Find him. Go.”
She leapt over the dead like a gazelle and vanished down the hall.
Church tapped the helmet he wore. “If you can walk, there’s a duffel bag with more of these. It’s in the hall outside of the conference room. Don’t pick up a weapon until you put one on, understood? Bring me one for Sam, too.”
“Yes, sir.” Top was in no shape to run, but he ran anyway.
Church settled Sam against the wall and applied pressure to his wounds. Top came shambling back with the duffel bag, a helmet pushed down on his own burned scalp. He handed a cap to Church, who fitted it carefully over Sam’s head. Then Church bent and picked up a fallen microwave pistol.
“Stay with him,” he said as he rose.
Top caught a brief glimpse of Church’s face as he turned to continue his hunt. The man’s expression was not the detached and mechanical face he’d worn when fighting the Closers. There was emotion now. There was desperation and there was hate. Few things frightened Top Sims. The look in Church’s eyes did.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWENTY-ONE
The room we entered was one I had been in before. I knew it even as Santoro and I went crashing and thrashing along the floor, rolling among lengths of pipe, knocking over worktables and scattering tools. The chamber was massive, and from the leftover fixtures on the walls I could tell that this used to be the Bolton family bowling alley. A place of fun, a place to relax.
Except now the room was dominated by something huge that gleamed with silver and copper and gold and steel.
The God Machine. Huge, real. Glowing with power. I kicked Santoro away and back-rolled to my feet. It reeked of wrongness. It was as alien a thing as any monstrosity I’d seen in my dreams.
Santoro rose, his face dripping with blood. He stood near the circular mouth of the machine, and behind him were dozens of gemstones. A fortune in cut diamonds, topazes, rubies, emeralds, and sapphires. They were socketed into the copper sheeting, and behind each a bright light flashed in sequence. Santoro saw me gaping at it and he grinned at me with red-streaked teeth. “You’re too late, Ledger. The code has been input and our weapons are already in the sky. Even if you killed me now there’s nothing that can stop this.”
I whipped the rapid-release folding knife from its pocket clip and with a flick of the wrist the blade glittered in my hand. “I’m going to keep cutting parts off of you until you tell me how to shut it down. How’s that sound, motherfucker?”
Santoro beckoned me with little flips of his fingers. “You have to beat me first. We’re one and one, my friend. Let’s see who wins the final round.”