“What about Rebecca? Is she alive?”
“They have her. They beat her,” the man choked, “bad. So bad. Her face is…” He closed his eyes and shook his head. He grabbed at Smith’s arm. “The large picture near the safe swings open. There’s a two-way mirror. You can see into the office. My bodyguards would watch while I made transactions.”
“Are the bodyguards here?”
“No,” he said.
“How did the skinny one reach the roof?”
“Drop-down stairs. In the safe room.” The man inhaled. “My son is Malik. You give him the gold. You tell him I love him.” Bilal’s head lolled and the rattling sound came from his throat. Smith watched the man die.
Smith swallowed and immediately regretted it. His throat flared in pain as he did, and his arms continued to burn as if heated. His eyes blurred and watered. He glanced across the room, and the cabinet that Bilal had pointed to swam in his vision. He looked to the rug to find his gun and was horrified to realize that he was unable to see it. He ran his hand along the industrial carpet till the cold metal hit his knuckles.
The cabinet sat on the opposite wall. Smith’s vision readjusted again. It was as if his eyes were warring with the effects of the gas. He grasped the gun and headed across the room. Once he reached the cabinet, his vision again blurred. As the mustard gas symptoms progressed, they would cause blisters to erupt on his corneas. He presumed that they were forming now and that his eyes were reacting.
He opened the panels and ran his hands along the cool wooden shelf. Encountering a mesh strap, he followed it to the Uzi’s handle, collecting the gun and feeling for a magazine. An elongated one, already loaded, jutted from the handle.
He moved back to the doorway, peered down the hall toward the front door, and froze. Khalil stood there, with the door slightly cracked open, watching outside.
The burning on Smith’s arms spread to his torso, and he felt as though he were a walking torch. If this is what burn victims experienced, he couldn’t understand how they could bear the pain. His skin started to crawl and for a brief moment he thought he heard it crackle as though cooking to a crisp. His eyes kept up their crazy wavering, first focusing, then failing.
The safe room was opposite the one he was in, directly across the hall. The floor was carpeted and Smith gauged how quickly he could cross the distance. Khalil stayed where he was, staring out. Smith took a breath and stepped across to the next room, immediately moving against the wall near the doorway, and waited. No sound came from the hall.
There were two five-foot-tall metal safes on the opposite wall. Next to them, drop-down stairs led to the roof. Smith wrapped the Uzi’s strap over his shoulder and headed toward it. An electronic keypad glowed on the front panel. He punched in the combination and was rewarded with a clicking noise as the door disengaged. It swung open on well-oiled hinges.
In the safe was an arsenal. Several pistols, two AK-47s, a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and three shelves of ammunition, several grenades designed both for the launcher and to be thrown, along with two small canisters of fuel attached to a flamethrower. Straps allowed the canisters to be carried on one’s back. Smith once again put his weapons on the floor while he ran his arms through the flamethrower’s straps. The flamethrower hose and nozzle were attached to the canister’s side with a clip. Smith left it there. He wanted his hands free to use the Uzi and the pistol first. He left the safe door open.
Loud thuds came from the back office. Smith heard a woman’s voice cry out. Above his head he heard someone walking on the roof. From the office came the unmistakable sound of a fist against flesh, and Nolan cried out. Smith fought the urge to leap in there with the Uzi firing full bore. His duty was clear; first he needed to stop the man on the roof from spreading the bacteria. The solar panels would feed it directly to the main grid and from there into every home in the northeast region. He needed to get to it quickly before it colonized and while the heat from the flamethrower could still kill it.
He lowered to a crouch and nearly groaned as the burnt skin on his legs stretched. His vision was fluctuating in an erratic pattern, and he could feel his index finger sweating around the gun’s trigger. Through it all he felt the beginnings of a fever, but he couldn’t tell if it was a reaction from being gassed or if he had contracted the virus. A large landscape painting with a frame that was easily three feet square hung on the wall near the safe. Smith pulled on the frame’s edge. It swung away, revealing the two-way mirror into the office. Bilal’s paranoia had paid off. Smith was watching the participants in the office.
Nolan sat in front of the second of Bilal’s computers on the credenza, typing furiously. Her face was a mass of bruises and contusions, and it appeared that her nose was broken. Finger marks imprinted on her neck gave testament to the fact that she’d been strangled, and her bare right arm bled from long slashes of a knife.
Around her stood Harcourt, Dattar, and Manderi. Smith’s rage flared at the sight of Manderi. If he was the “officer on the scene,” it was clear that no others would be appearing. All the men peered at the computer screen. Three black bags sat on the desk behind Nolan. One was unzipped, revealing bars of gold. Dattar was leaning over Nolan’s shoulder with a bloody knife in his hand. He held the knife to her neck and a line of blood ran from the place of contact with her skin.
Smith turned away and started toward the stairs, climbing them slowly. When his head became level with the roof, he glanced around. He saw a slender man kneeling in front of the solar panels’ conversion box. A cooler sat open next to him. The man was using a scoop and a painter’s brush to apply a gel-like substance to sections of the panels, moving fast.
Smith heard the sound of his phone announcing a text message and froze. His location at the top of the roof must have enabled a signal. The man, though, didn’t hear it. Smith pulled the phone out of his pocket and did his best to read the text, hoping that it would be Klein telling him that the NYPD was on its way.
It was Marty. The text read, Erasing her keystrokes as she types. Buying you more time.
Smith swiped the phone face, set it to vibrate, and replied, Where the hell is my backup?
Smith angled the pistol over the roof’s edge and took aim, but paused. Once he fired, he would reveal his position, and he fully expected both Khalil and Manderi to come after him. The silence of a knife would be ideal, but he would have to crawl back down the stairs, into the weapons safe, find a knife, and retrace his steps. He would have done it, but he didn’t recall seeing any knives in the stash. His phone vibrated. Smith looked at the text.
Brand and Beckmann here silent approach there are no windows to shoot through if we storm the building will they kill the hostage?
Smith typed back, Yes.
His phone vibrated and Brand wrote, High angle view of building await your instructions.
Smith’s vision began to blur, his eyes were watering. He blinked, but it didn’t clear his vision this time. It was now or never. He put the keypad up to his eyes and squinted at the lit screen. He typed, Shoot the guy on the roof.
Beckmann’s gunshot wasn’t as loud as Smith’s would have been, but it wasn’t as quiet as Smith had hoped, either. He heard a group of voices raised as the crew in the office reacted to the shot. Smith watched the man slump, then collapse backward. Smith vaulted up the rest of the stairs and ran to the coolers. The dead man lay sprawled over them and Smith rolled the body off. Inside he saw a tub of the gelatinous substance that the man had been working with, as well as several capped test tubes. Smith grabbed a test tube, shoved it in his pocket, and stepped back. He unclipped the flamethrower’s nozzle and opened the ignition valve. He felt around for a button to engage the spark plug, finding it on the gun’s side. A small flame appeared at the end of the thrower. He aimed it at the coolers and pressed the fuel-release trigger.