Wordlessly, Mercer took Jordan’s hand again and together they mounted the external ramp, mindful of where the car had smashed through the handrail and window. The floor was littered with glass shards, and a cold wind blew in through the jagged hole. Farther up and around they climbed until they reached the second-floor landing. To their left was a balcony that overlooked the main atrium and afforded a great view of the dangling solar system mobile. From the railing the installation’s details stood out beautifully. Earth’s moon was covered in miniature craters, and Saturn’s rings were rendered in fantastical colors.
To the right was an open space littered with overturned couches and chairs that showed the tire tracks where the Honda had turned around. Leading away was a broad corridor lined with a series of closed doors that Mercer guessed were classrooms. Three-quarters of the way down the long hallway he could see fire-blackened Sheetrock, and he watched the spray of water pouring from the overhead sprinklers. The pressure wave from the initial explosion had blown the covers off most of the fluorescent lights and shattered the bulbs, so the hall was dimly lit but flashed brilliantly every couple of seconds when an emergency strobe light fired off in time with the siren. The effect was like that of a creepy fun house. Mercer yanked out his pistol when a student dashed from the shelter of one of the classrooms and raced past them without as much as a sideways glance.
He watched the student vanish down the ramp, bent low in a naturally defensive crouch, and then Mercer turned back to check the hallway again. He spotted movement — a shadow shifting behind the gray curtain of water pouring down through the fire suppression system. Mercer could understand a reluctant student hiding out in a classroom six doors down from the explosion, but not someone lurking just on the far side of where the blast occurred. The outline paused its pacing of the hallway and seemed to study them through the falling water.
Instinct and experience took over. Jordan was a pace or two ahead of Mercer. He launched himself at her, throwing his left arm around her waist and twisting her to the floor. He rolled over her as they landed, extending his right hand so that her body was covered by his and his pistol was aimed at the mysterious figure. Jordan was just taking in a breath to shout her angered protest at being manhandled when the hallway filled with the mechanical crash and subsonic judder of a silenced auto pistol discharging its deadly load.
The air in the corridor came alive with plaster dust and gunpowder smoke and a heavy mist of water blown sideways by the fusillade fired through the sprinkler cascade. Bullets chewed everything they touched, showering the couple with shredded batting from the ceiling acoustical tiles and bits of plastic from a fluorescent light cover.
Compared with the silenced machine pistol, Mercer’s P-38 roared like a cannon in the hallway’s confines. It was an assault on all the senses and one he tried to repeat, but the pistol jammed after firing just the single bullet, a hasty shot he hadn’t aimed as much as hoped had gone in the direction of the shooter.
The analytical side of his brain knew that the eighty-year-old spring inside the pistol’s magazine no longer had the yield strength it once possessed. In effect the magazine spring had been crushed flat over the years by the bullets Mercer had loaded so long ago, and could no longer bounce back into its original shape. The weapon fired the first round with no problem, but the next bullet in line didn’t rise high enough out of the grip to be caught by the slide and chambered. Mercer would have to pop out the bullet and refeed it manually.
He thought through all this even as he peeled Jordan off the floor and half dragged her into a classroom. They just reached cover when another burst of autofire raked the corridor, some rounds thudding into the classroom’s wooden door and others pinging off its frame. Mercer quickly noted that there were doors connecting this room to the next and, he assumed, to those farther down the hallway. This room was a chemistry lab, with long parallel rows of workstations stacked with beakers, pipette racks, and ceramic crucibles suspended over unlit Bunsen burners. He pressed Jordan flat to the floor behind one of the rows.
“Stay here.”
“Don’t worry,” she panted. “I’m never following you again.”
“Smartest thing you’ve said all day.”
The connecting door was closed but unlocked. Mercer first cleared his pistol’s jammed action and inserted another round into the chamber. He then thumbed all the remaining rounds from the defective magazine and held them ready in his left hand. He gave little thought to the fact he was facing a machine pistol with what amounted to a single-shot gun, and that his adversary knew he was armed. He needed answers, and taking this guy down was the only way he was going to get them.
He checked the next classroom before committing himself. It was a typical schoolroom, with a teacher’s desk and lectern in front of a blackboard that faced about twenty students’ desks. A few posters lined one wall while the other was windows looking out over a quad. Police cars were careening into view, their strobes flashing against the morning snow.
Mercer went on through the next room, and then the next. In this one, a clone of the previous, he could hear the roar of water still sluicing through the overhead pipes and discharging into what was presumably Abe Jacobs’s office. The gunman hadn’t fired again, and Mercer wondered if he was still waiting just beyond the veil of water. He wondered too why the gunmen had left a man behind. The only reason was that he and Jordan were the shooter’s intended quarry. The driver had to have warned the leader that he had been made, and a hasty trap had been set here at Abe’s office to not only destroy the scientist’s work but to take out whoever it was who’d been dogging them since Minnesota. The lone gunman could then escape in the pandemonium.
He had to give it to these guys. It was a good plan that very nearly worked. He was just about to go through to the next room when behind him he heard Jordan Weismann scream.
He’d been flanked!
Mercer whirled and ran back as hard as he could. He streaked through the intervening rooms without seeing them and burst back into the chemistry lab. For a moment it looked like one of the students had taken Jordan hostage. The gunman had a smooth baby face and a thatch of dark hair slicked down to his head by a dousing under the sprinklers. He looked no more than seventeen but was probably twenty or more. A silenced Mini Uzi dangled from a sling off his shoulder while he held a black automatic pistol to Jordan’s temple, his other arm snaked around her neck in a choke hold that barely allowed her toes to touch the floor. He doubtless expected Mercer to stop or at least slow his headlong charge.
The shooter was too young to have learned the lesson that you never play chicken with someone with nothing to lose.
Mercer kept coming at a full sprint. He watched the gunman’s eyes widen when he realized his tactical mistake, and he was just pulling his pistol from Jordan’s temple to aim at Mercer when Mercer brought his own gun to bear and fired the only round he would need. The 9mm bored a hole through the shooter’s forehead and erupted out of the back of his skull in a gout of pink and white and gray that splattered the wall behind them like an obscene imitation of a Rorschach test.
The gunman was punched back by the impact and nearly dragged Jordan to the floor as his body fell. She managed to disengage herself from the crumpling figure, and when she saw the ruin that was the back of his head she screamed into the echoes left in the gunshot’s wake.