The man just shook his head.
“You don’t understand. The answers are on that computer. I’ve almost figured it out.”
The man’s face registered dismay, but only for a second. “Nothing we can do about that now. We can start over when we’re safely away from here.”
Rainer finally seemed to acknowledge her concerns. He paused at the top of the stairs. “There might be information on that computer that they can use against us.”
Richard shrugged. “It won’t matter. They’re not getting out of here alive.”
He took a phone from his pocket, and after dialing, he held it to his ear. “We’re being attacked,” he said, without preamble. “Turn them loose.”
TWENTY-FIVE
King watched Rainer disappear through the doorway with a cold knot of rage in his gut, but his anger wasn’t directed at the escaping traitor; he was mad at himself.
A litany of his failures ticked off in his head. We moved too soon… Should have gotten more intel… Should’ve planned better.
None of those measures would have really made a difference, and waiting would only have given Rainer a chance to slip away completely. No, this wasn’t a failure of planning or leadership; it was just plain bad luck, but that didn’t lessen the sting.
I should’ve just taken the shot, consequences be damned.
Glowering, he shouldered his weapon and started forward, moving toward the door through which his quarry had vanished.
“Jack?” an anxious voice called from behind him. It was Tremblay. “Talk to us, boss. What’s the plan?”
King ignored him and kept moving. Rainer had to be stopped, no matter what.
“Jack? Sigler? King!”
That stopped him.
King.
He wasn’t just Jack Sigler, pissed-off Delta shooter. He was King; he was their leader.
He pivoted on his heel. He saw, as if for the first time, Zelda leaning against the wall, struggling to breathe. “Legend, are you hit?”
Zelda winced, but there was fire in her eyes. “The vest stopped it. I’ve been hit harder than that.” She managed a grin and added, “Not by you.”
“Then on your feet, soldier. Eastwood, you and Legend head back and bring the van up. Juggernaut, Bob…you’re with me. We’re gonna get what we came for.”
A flicker of disappointment crossed Zelda’s pained visage — she probably thought he was benching her and blamed herself for not having taken out Rainer when she’d had the chance — but she grabbed Somers’s shoulder and pulled herself erect.
Tremblay likewise seemed heartened by King’s decisiveness. He and Silent Bob quickly caught up to their team leader and cautiously followed him through the doorway.
King swept the muzzle of his MP5 up the stairwell and checked for blind spots before heading up the steps. At the second floor landing, he waited for the other two operators to line up behind him before throwing the door open and moving through. His finger was tight against the trigger, ready to shoot, no matter who was on the receiving end or what the ultimate consequences were, but the hallway was vacant.
“Shit.”
He knew Rainer was too smart to retreat to a dead end, but he also knew that the turncoat Delta officer had not come here alone; were his co-conspirators waiting behind one of the closed doors, waiting to ambush them?
Only one way to find out.
Before he could approach the first door, a voice sounded from his radio receiver. “This is Nighteyes. We’ve got activity at Building—”
The transmission broke off in mid sentence, and for a moment, King feared that somehow the sniper had been discovered, but then Shin’s voice came back. “I don’t even know how to describe this. You guys need to get out of there right now.”
King heard the urgency in the man’s voice, but turning back wasn’t an option he was prepared to consider. The mission came first, and the mission was to take down Kevin Rainer and the other traitors; his own survival was a secondary priority.
He advanced to the first door, and as soon as Tremblay and Silent Bob were in place, he threw the door open and moved in. As before, he was poised to fire at the first target of opportunity, but nothing could have prepared him for what he saw in that room.
Unlike the ramshackle interiors they had encountered in every other corner of the compound, this space had been scrupulously maintained. The walls and ceiling, and even the floor, were a brilliant, almost sterile, white. The effect was intensified by the bright overhead lights that blazed down with sun-like intensity. The place looked clean enough to be a surgical operating room.
Which was exactly what it was.
There were four people in the room. Two wore blue surgical scrubs, complete with caps and face masks that hid all clues to their identity. The other two were laid out on gurneys. One of the latter was barely visible; just pale white arms and legs protruding from a tent of blue fabric, transfixed in the glare of the lights; he was the focus of the surgeons’ attention.
The last person in the room was male, a dark-skinned Burmese man in his early twenties or perhaps younger. He lay naked on a stretcher, which had been pushed to one side of the room. He was unmoving, as if unconscious, but it was plainly evident that he wasn’t simply sleeping. His upper torso had been opened like the petals of a rose. King caught only a momentary glimpse into the man’s chest cavity, but it was enough to see that there was a dark bloody void where his heart and lungs ought to have been.
King had seen terrible things in his life — children blown apart by IEDs and American serviceman horribly burned in fuel explosions — but those raw savage experiences were nothing alongside the sanitized, precise and utterly inhuman evil he now beheld.
He brought his gaze back to the surgeon who stood above the patient — the recipient of the organs that had been taken from the body of the unwilling donor. The doctor’s eyes were fixed on King’s gun, but after a moment they flickered up to meet his gaze. He raised his hands in a supplicating gesture, his latex gloves painted with blood.
“I don’t know what you want,” the man said in a voice that was unnaturally calm. “But you have to leave, now.”
“Or what?” The question came from Tremblay, but it had none of his customary humor. He was as shocked as King.
“Or my patient will die,” was the haughty answer.
King took a menacing step forward, close enough to see inside the chest cavity of the patient; the stolen body parts lay flaccid and seemingly lifeless within. Only now was King aware of the complex web of tubes that sprouted from the supine form, connecting the man to IV drips and bypass machines — devices that were keeping the man’s blood oxygenated and flowing while the surgeons methodically spliced in the hijacked organs.
The patient’s face was hidden beneath a shroud of blue cloth, but King didn’t need to make a positive identification to know what sort of person lay on the operating table: a true human predator, someone who bought the organs of another living human to sustain his own miserable life, as casually as someone might order a cheeseburger.
“And why the fuck should I care about him?” King asked.
Parker’s voice abruptly sounded in King’s ear. “Movement on the roof. They’re going for the helo… It’s Sasha! I have eyes on Sasha.”
There seemed to be an unasked question there, but it took King a moment to disengage from the horror unfolding right in front of him. Roof?Helo? Then the picture came into focus; Rainer was about to slip through his fingers again.
For the briefest instant, he considered telling Parker to take out the helicopter. A burst of some 7.62 millimeter rounds into its turbine engines would probably disable it and leave their foe trapped on the roof.