Too late, Cameron realized why she’d been unable to lose her pursuer.
“Look,” she said. “Clearly, there’s been some kind of misunderstanding.”
“I don’t think there has.”
“Excuse me?”
“We got word from HQ a few hours ago about a potential threat to the Restons, so we’ve been monitoring their son’s room. The third time you walked by, we sent them your picture-and do you know what they found?” Cameron stared blankly at him. “A sheet as long as my arm. Identity theft. Bank fraud. Unlawful possession of prescription narcotics. You name it. What kind of sicko preys on people in a hospital?”
Theft? Fraud? Drugs? What the hell was he talking about? You have to get out of this, she thought. Convince him to let you go. Beg, if need be.
“Listen,” she began, searching his chest for a name tag. But he wasn’t wearing one. The only marking on his uniform shirt was an embroidered corporate logo made to look like a badge: a shield emblazoned with a crenellated tower. And stitched beneath it, in small block type, were the words CITADEL SECURITY: A BELLUM INDUSTRIES COMPANY. “You’ve got this all wrong. I never-”
“Save your breath. You’re caught. Besides, my boss’ll be here soon.”
Cameron heard footfalls approaching, and her heart fluttered in her chest. She tried to squirm free of the security guard’s grip. He shoved her backward into the wall and pinned her there, his forearm to her neck. She couldn’t breathe. An involuntary squeak escaped her throat. He eased off just a hair. She sucked wind and sobbed. Tears and snot poured down her face.
“Please,” she managed. “Please.”
He was so close that she could see the pockmarks on his forehead. His fetid breath was hot against her cheek. “Beg all you want,” he said. “It’s not gonna do you any good.”
Cameron swallowed hard, her eyes wide as silver dollars.
Then she kneed him in the balls with everything she had.
He released her and doubled over, red-faced and sweating. Cameron gripped her laptop with both hands and swung it at his face. A crack of plastic shattering as it connected with his chin, and he went down. Lettered keys scattered across the floor.
Cameron ran. Her pursuer rounded the corner, cursing when he spotted the fallen security guard. He leaped over the kid with ease and raced after Cameron, quickly closing the gap between them. She felt the fingers of his right hand graze her shoulder.
No. Not graze. Take hold of.
He grabbed a fistful of her shirt and yanked, but as he did, he slipped on a loose keyboard letter, and they toppled to the floor.
The man wound up flat on his back with Cameron on top of him. He tried to wrap his arms around her, but she threw fists and elbows wildly, and felt a surge of savage delight when one connected with his nose. It gouted blood, and when he reached instinctively toward it, she clambered free.
He grabbed her by the ankle. Cameron kicked him in the face, and he released her. She launched herself down the hall like a sprinter from the starting blocks, a feral smile parting her lips as she looked back at the bloody mess she’d made of her assailant.
Then the security guard tackled her and drove her to the floor.
She landed facedown, the wind knocked out of her. The linoleum was gritty from foot traffic and smelled of vomit, of bleach. The security guard climbed atop her and drove his knee into her back. Then he yanked her right arm upward in a hammerlock. Cameron’s wristbones ground together in his grasp. The tendons in her shoulder burned white-hot as they overextended.
“You like that, you fucking bitch?”
He tried to cuff her, but she resisted, bucking beneath him with all she had, so he grabbed her by the hair and slammed her face into the floor.
Cameron stopped fighting.
Her world went dark and silent as consciousness abandoned her.
30.
HENDRICKS SPRINTED ACROSS the Presidio’s grounds, vaulting fences, cutting through backyards, pushing through dense stands of trees. His lungs burned. His muscles ached. His stitches tugged uncomfortably. Blood oozed from his wound whenever his midsection flexed.
At least the fog provided cover. It began to blow in, cold and clammy, shortly after he fled the bridge pavilion. Gray-white tendrils reached inland, smelling of low tide and swallowing everything they touched. Shadows vanished as the fog blocked out the setting sun.
The temperature-low seventies when the sky was cloudless-plummeted. Hendricks’s world shrank as the fog narrowed the margins all around. Distant landmarks became ghosts, fading into the swirling mist. Man-made objects dissolved into the scenery as edges dulled and angles softened. Sounds reverberated oddly, sometimes muffled, sometimes accentuated. His own footfalls sounded dull to his ears, like the idle tapping of an eraser against a desk, but more than once he heard a conversation or an engine’s roar so loud that he assumed he was right on top of it, only to discover it was blocks away or more.
He crossed a street and plunged into a forest, branches lashing. A footpath ran parallel to his route, eastward, ever eastward, and he zigged toward it, picking up speed once he left the underbrush behind. Then, at once, the forest fell away and he was running through a rolling field of grass, the blades slickened by the moisture-laden air, the footing treacherous. A cemetery, he realized. Headstones, low and regular, dotted the field, and threatened to take his legs out from under him. Larger monuments loomed in the mist. A soldier. A cross. An angel. Each a blur as Hendricks ran past. Then the cemetery vanished as the woods enveloped him once more.
This time when he emerged, he found himself on a paved road at the edge of the Main Post. In the dim half-light, the place could be confused for a particularly quaint small town-the streets winding, the sidewalks broad, the houses tidy and attractive, the lawns well tended. Residential and commercial buildings mixed, the former Spanish single-family dwellings, the latter everything from clapboard to red brick. The streetlights flickered to life one by one and cast halos in the fog. Since there was no civilian traffic on the streets, the glow of headlights warned him of approaching Park Police patrols and afforded him a chance to hide, to duck behind a building or a parked car or merely linger in an entryway, face averted, pretending he belonged.
At one such stop, outside the old officers’ club, he checked his phone. According to the map, his destination was just around the corner.
He tried not to think too much about what he was walking into or what might happen to Cameron in his absence. The U.S. government had trained Hendricks and his unit to operate autonomously behind enemy lines, and it had trained them well. What he needed now was to trust in his abilities, his instincts, his muscle memory. Overthinking led to distraction, doubt, and failure.
His muscles twitched from the sudden stillness. His breath plumed with every ragged exhalation. Blood roared in his ears. He willed his heart to slow. Felt the wound in his side throb in time. He moved the gun to his right jacket pocket. Thumbed the safety off and kept his hand around the grip.
And then rounded the corner, headed toward Segreti.
31.
REYES GLANCED AT his watch and frowned when he realized the hands had scarcely moved since the last time he’d looked.
“If you’ve got somewhere else to be,” Segreti said, too loud due to the aftereffects of the flash-bang grenade, “don’t let us keep you.”
Reyes eyed the man-whose name Yancey had never divulged to him-with disdain. He looked so thin and frail as he sat zip-tied on the couch, but the fact was, he’d put up one hell of a fight when they’d stormed the place. He’d played possum until the lead team got within striking distance, then attacked, slicing Liman’s forearm open with a folding knife and kicking out McTiernan’s legs. He’d nearly gotten hold of McTiernan’s gun before Stahelski put him down with a rifle butt to the face.