“Two, actually,” I said.
“Bullshit,” he said. “We only issue one in the weapon and one on the side.”
“Tell me, Colonel,” I said, while I tried to think about position. It was comforting to be next to the trunk, but I was completely blind, and, in fact, a shotgun blast straight down the trunk had a better chance of getting a hit than I did through all those branches. I started to move. “What was all this really about?”
“My contribution to the war effort, like I told you before,” he said. He was speaking amiably enough, but there was strain in his voice. He knew this was endgame.
“Won’t work, you know,” I said, gaining another few inches of distance from the trunk. It was hard, moving on my back while keeping that weapon pointed up in the direction of potential business. Pine needles were dropping into my eyes as I moved, and that wasn’t helping.
“That siren said otherwise,” he said. Was he moving, too? Could he hear any changes in the location of my voice? How high was he?
“No, I didn’t mean that you didn’t scare ’em,” I said, “but they’ll never admit it.”
“They’ll have to,” he said. “I spun up too many different agencies before we hit the pool itself. They’ll tell on each other just to cover their asses, and that’s how it’ll come out.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. I was about one-third of the way from the trunk to where the branches began to thin out. “That’s one of the benefits of all this new coordination and cooperation. And it’s the one situation where bureaucracies always cooperate: to cover their collective asses.”
“Where you trying to go, Lieutenant?” he asked. “You move out there in the open, me and Mr. Greener here will have your ass.”
“We got each other, then, Colonel,” I said, but I stopped moving. “As I remember, the branches thin out up there in the air.”
“Depends on which tree I’m in, smart-ass.”
Now, that hadn’t occurred to me. Pine trees came in groves, didn’t they. He could well be up another tree. Except for that gash in the tree trunk. Keep him talking, see if you can locate him.
“Tell me something else, then, Coloneclass="underline" What’d you have on Thomason?”
“He murdered his sister,” Trask said. “I found out.”
“How’d he do that?” I asked. Should I come all the way out from under those big branches, or perhaps change sector? He’d get a shot if I was in the open, unless, of course, it was a dense grove and there was no open.
“With a bottle of water,” Trask said.
What did he just say? I felt my brain blink.
I heard him bark a short laugh. “That get your attention, Lieutenant?”
It certainly had. “Allie Gardner?”
“The one and only,” he said. “I correlated a key card swipe with a radiation hit on a hall monitor. Had him cold, so to speak.”
Then I finally made the connection. Allie’s unmarried sister’s name was Thomason. If she had never been married, then that was Allie’s maiden name. I remembered that visitor log entry: Thomason visiting Thomason.
“Why’d he do that?”
“It involves family money, Lieutenant. That’s all he’d tell me. I got the impression he took her share. I didn’t push any further, because I needed him, not his back story. How ’bout it: You ready to rumble?”
“What, you coming down to join me?” I asked, tightening my grip on the Colt and anchoring the butt. God, I wished the shepherds were here. Even now, a piece of my brain heard them coming through the woods at high speed to rescue my ass one more time. But they weren’t.
Then Trask made his move, and it was impressive. Turned out, he was in my tree. Our tree, I guess. He was all the way at the top, and he did what you can only do in a big pine tree: He jumped away from the trunk, arms and legs out like a spider, fell through the first tier of branches, and grabbed one. As it bent under his weight, it slowed him down just a little, and then he let go and dropped through the next tier, and so on, each time braking his descent just enough to be able to drop damn near right on top of me in a hail of needles and broken branches. I heard him coming all the way down, and it didn’t do me one bit of good. I didn’t even have time to fire the Colt, because my weary brain just wasn’t working fast enough to understand what he was doing before there he was in a whoosh of air, pine needles, and a black mass of shadow, his angry face twisted into a murderous rictus and his hands reaching for my throat.
The Colt saved me, after all.
I’d had it pointed straight up the whole time, the stock wedged on the ground, my finger near, but not on, the trigger. Trask landed right on it and drove the barrel and even some of the action through his solar plexus and right out his back. My left hand, trapped under his body, felt a sudden warm flood. Trask screamed.
There we lay for a moment, in a truly grotesque embrace. Trask didn’t make a sound except for one ghastly inhale, and then he sagged against me, insane eyes wide open, the fingers of both of his hands curling and uncurling, as if he still wanted to choke the life out of me. My sight line was directly over his shoulder, and I could see the muzzle of the Colt tenting the back of his shirt, even as a really big blood vessel emptied itself all over my left side.
I wanted to roll out from under him, but I was suddenly exhausted, so I just lay there and let him bleed. He was still breathing, sort of, and then I realized he was actually looking at me. His eyes were a hundred years old.
“What the fuck were you thinking?” I said. “With all of this?”
“Duty,” he gasped. “Duty to warn.”
“I’m sorry, man, but all they’re gonna think is that you were just nuts.”
“No,” he wheezed. “You don’t understand.” He was going fast, but determined to tell me something. “Moira came to me.”
My brain, even befuddled as it was, did a double take. “This wasn’t your idea?”
“No,” he said, whispering now as his life drained out of him. “Listen. Important. Moonpool. Diversion.”
He coughed some blood, which must have hurt like hell. I saw the muzzle of the Colt throbbing under the shirt with what was left of his heartbeat. One of his hands suddenly tightened on my neck, but he was trying to get my attention, not hurt me. “The reactors,” he said. “She wants the reactors.”
His eyes rolled back in his head and he went limp.
I rolled free with a shudder and wiped off my hands in the pine needles.
The moonpool was a diversion after all? Obviously Trask had given Moira access to the plant’s security computers. Was he telling me she might have access to the main reactor control system as well?
I tried to remember what Ari had said about that-same system, or were they split? Now that the moonpool was stabilized, they’d stand down from the emergency-and then she’d strike.
I looked over at that canal; the current was still running, and I thought I could smell diesel fuel now. Would the Helios people be expecting a second attack? I remembered the utter confusion at that university in Virginia, when they thought the shooting in the dorm was the main event and stopped looking.
I saw something moving through the upper branches of the trees. It looked like a blue ghost. I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and looked again. Then it penetrated: blue strobe lights from a police car, reflecting off the tree trunks. Then there were headlights pointing down the towpath. I waited until the lights were shining right over my head and raised one bloody arm. The cop car dipped to a stop and two sets of doors clunked open. I kept the arm in the air until I knew they could see me, or rather us. I heard one of them say, “Holy shit,” and then there was lots of excited radio conversation.
“Goddamn, bud-what the hell happened here?” one of them asked, approaching warily with his weapon in hand but held down by his leg. Trask lay facedown on the ground, the barrel of the M4 still pinning him.
I didn’t know if they were county or Southport, but I told him to contact Sergeant McMichaels at Southport and tell him they’d found Trask and Richter. Then I lay back in the needles to rest as they played flashlights around the scene. They obviously thought I was wounded, based on the fact that my entire left side was glistening with all that blood, and I wasn’t going to clarify that right now because they’d put their weapons away. Then I remembered Billy.