She washed her hair and rinsed the soap from her now-bright red skin. She then sat for several minutes on the shower floor, tears mixing with the water and swirling down the drain.
How appropriate, she thought, as she watched the soapy water disappear beyond the metal sieve. My life has long since washed away, stolen by Hellerman. But she didn’t blame him, only herself. If she had been strong enough, she could have resisted and possibly even cracked the Predator case earlier, or figured out what was going on before thousands of Americans died. Now was as good a time as any to blame herself for everything that had happened in the past week.
Strangely, she was at peace. Somehow she had gained some momentum in at least absolving herself of her sins. She figured that nailing Hellerman to the wall with those pictures would at least pull her out of hell and put her somewhere in between there and heaven.
Yes, taking those pictures to her boss, Palmer, or even the president, would be some form of sweet justice, bringing Hellerman to his knees. She had already hoped that Rampert had the good sense to preserve as much of the Fong Hou as possible so that things such as radio frequencies could be retrieved and matched with those in Hellerman’s basement.
She stood and twisted off the faucet, letting the steam boil around her. Her skin felt rejuvenated. She reached a long, slender arm from the shower into the foggy steam and felt around for the towels that Jacob had pointed out earlier. Grabbing one, she patted down her skin and dried off.
She stepped from the shower into the steam, unable to see the mirror. She used the towel to wipe off a few streaks. She could barely make out her face in the haze, the worry lines soothed a bit, a fatalistic form of recognition coloring her countenance.
She pulled her jeans and sweatshirt back on and stepped into her shoes, the steam still swirling around the bathroom. And then something didn’t seem right.
She heard a noise from the hallway or the bedroom, she wasn’t sure which. It was a thud of sorts, perhaps Jacob closing his door, but more like the sound of something large dropping on something hard.
She opened the bedroom door, moving quickly, but then she stopped suddenly and moved back to the bathroom, remembering the pictures.
She reached into the dissipating steam, eyeing the toilet lid, and saw that there was nothing there. The manila envelope was gone.
A shiver crawled up her spine like a rattlesnake slithering toward its prey.
This is it, she thought. I’m going to die right here, right now, and get blamed for being involved in Hellerman’s conspiracy. She steeled her resolve so she could step from her frozen state of fear.
She walked slowly into the bedroom and could see the door was slightly ajar. She looked around the room for some sort of weapon and remembered her mace, but even her purse was missing.
She opened a few drawers until she found a pair of scissors, which she clutched in her hand as if it was a Ginsu sword. More boldly, she moved toward the door, hearing another small thud coming from Jacob’s room. Her quick mind raced with possibilities, the most logical being that Hellerman’s hit man had found her using CallScan, searched a few houses, and found her car in Jacob’s garage. Because the scan system would only give a grid coordinate and could not provide a precise address, it had taken some time.
Poor Jacob.
She peered from the bedroom door down the long, dark hallway and saw that Jacob’s door was open and his room was dark. She tip-toed towards his room when she heard a noise behind her.
Blasting from the steam-filled bathroom was a man dressed in black with a ski mask covering his face and a glint of steel in his hand.
She bolted down the hallway and into Jacob’s room, slamming the door behind her. The attacker’s knife came piercing through the six-paneled, fiberglass door, inches from her face as she held the knob in place.
She locked the door and walked backward, holding the scissors with one hand, feeling her way in the darkness with the other. She found a wall and followed it away from the door until she found the back wall and a window. She frantically clawed at the window latch as a shot blew off the door handle. She hadn’t seen the gun.
She was raising the window as the light came on in the room. Stepping through the window and looking over her shoulder, she saw Jacob lying on the floor next to her, a bullet hole in his forehead.
What else can I do wrong?
A bullet smacked into her shoulder, knocking her through the open window, her head smashing into the window frame. She fell into the bushes below, barely conscious. She mustered the resolve to move away from the window and stand alongside the brick exterior of the house. She had lost her scissors in the fall but saw a jagged piece of glass about ten inches long. She retrieved it, careful not to cut herself.
She watched as a dark head protruded from the window no more than two feet from her position. She gripped the glass and brought it up hard toward the neck but found instead the shoulder of her assailant. The glass cut deep into the bone of her hands, causing her to scream a long, anguished wail, more from the pain of so many bad decisions over the past year than from the present moment.
Her attacker instinctively recoiled and fled back into the bedroom.
Meredith slid down the brick wall, bleeding heavily from the glass shards embedded in her hands.
“Come get me, you bastard. I don’t care,” she muttered.
Then she passed out in Jacob’s back yard.
CHAPTER 58
“Why were you expecting me, Ballantine?” Peyton O’Hara said, leveling her rifle at the men in the darkness. She could see the two of them, but they were too close together for her to have a clear shot.
“My sources tell me that you and Mr. Garrett here have become quite an item, and my research on you tells me that you’re quite the aggressive one. So it only makes sense.”
Ballantine continued backing toward the door until he found the latch for the galley stair that would lead them down to the Sherpa, where Zachary Garrett was waiting for them. As he turned the handle, the light from the stairwell silhouetted him and Matt Garrett.
The light gave her an instant where she thought she could pierce Ballantine’s eyes with one shot, but they were moving too fast for her to be safe, so she deliberately shot wide, but close, squeezing off multiple shots, suppressing Ballantine as he dragged Matt down the steps. The door closed, but not before she could get a knife wedged in between the door and the frame. She pried the knife back, opening a small slit in the door. She heard a door below her open, shut, and then lock. She waited and then backed away from the stairwell, moving to the top of the containers and stopping to think.
What is he doing? She needed to move fast. She scampered over the top of the containers, feeling the wind and salt water spray across her face before she entered the stairwell on the opposite side from where Ballantine had taken Matt. She went up the stairs and found the door to the communications center. As she rounded the corner, she was confronted by two Chinese sailors with AK-47s.
Clean, well placed shots from Blake’s silenced AR-15 cleared them out of her way. She stopped for a brief moment before she turned the knob to the control center and saw an elderly Chinese man wearing a white naval uniform standing in the center of a communications node with televisions and radios all around him.