She could not help but stare up at the body, even as Kealey pulled her around it. Riddled with bullets, one leg dangling loosely over the edge of the landing, it belonged to a young man about Colin’s age. Kealey had noticed the momentary dread that passed over Allison’s face before she focused on the bloodied clothes plastering him. They weren’t Colin’s. There would have been no way to tell his identity from his features; the shots that had torn into his skull had left the victim badly disfigured.
Kealey squeezed her hand as they hurried up the remaining stairs to the third-floor hallway.
On the wall to Kealey’s right were signs for the conference rooms, and past them the large glass door to the corridor. He raised his weapon slightly as they drew closer, and that was when he saw the masked man in the slight recess leading toward the door, guarding it there on the mezzanine. The man saw them, too, and his submachine gun came up quickly.
Kealey caught him with a 3-round burst at close to point-blank range, then instantly triggered a second burst. The man dropped without firing a single round, blood erupting from his chest, hitting the floor with a soft smack as his weapon went twirling from his grasp like a flung baton.
“Come on,” Kealey grunted, leaping over the man’s body and pushing through the door into the corridor. He immediately saw four black-clad men outside a room up ahead to the left, maybe 20 feet up the corridor. They had started turning toward him, toward the sound of the gunfire. Kealey cut them down as he simultaneously pulled Allison directly behind him. It was an easy strike; the masked men were all in a row, one behind the other, all but the first man blocked from firing at him by the man in front of him. And that first man never got a chance to do anything but die.
The fact that the men were clustered around the door, not fully turned toward the corridor, showed that his plan had worked. They had been facing the room, waiting to see who had managed to get a cell phone inside. That had bought him the seconds he needed to cross the walkway after shooting the guard.
As soon as the four men went down, Kealey stiff-armed Allison across the chest, pushing her back toward the wall and following her up against it. He waited. He did not think that whoever was inside the room would strafe the corridor without first making sure the four guards were down.
A masked forehead poked out, one eye looking down the corridor. The side of the man’s face evaporated in blood. The head dropped.
“ Down! ” Kealey hissed to Allison, simultaneously pulling her and dropping. He held his firearm in front of him, arms extended, hands cradling the weapon. He might have only a second to fire.
Someone else inside stuck his automatic out and fired chest high down the corridor-just as Kealey had expected. He saw the black glove and ignored the flashing gunfire, which chewed ceramic projectiles from the wall and painfully peppered his head and cheek. He found the hand with the nub on the barrel and destroyed it with a three-shot burst. The man yelped, dropped the gun, and withdrew his hand.
Though his ears were singing from the gunfire, Kealey had long ago trained himself to filter sounds through the hum. It was like listening underwater: the activity was there, but at a different pitch and volume. Fortunately, the enemy usually suffered from the same disability without Kealey’s training.
There were no sounds from inside the room. The hostages hadn’t been emboldened to take him out, which meant he had another weapon or there were still other gunmen inside. The fact that killers had not emerged from any other locations suggested they assumed this was just another mass murder of hostages. Still, it wouldn’t be long before some centralized control checked in. There had to be a unit leader. The room had to be taken before then.
He turned to Allison. She was breathing like a rabbit.
“As soon as I take off, I want you to count to thirty Mississippi,” Kealey said. “When you’re done, call Colin’s number.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t seen his cell phone anywhere,” Kealey told her. “One or two thugs may still be among the hostages. I’ll try and use my target as a shield, tag whoever’s left. But if more of these guys come down the hall from ahead, get out the way we came. Fast.”
She was processing the information, nodding numbly.
“Stay strong,” he said. “I think reinforcements are on the way.”
She shot him a questioning look, but he did not elaborate.
Kealey let his weapon hang from its strap. He got his feet under him, reached into his jacket, and withdrew his balisong. A flick of his wrist and the double-handled knife snapped open, its six-inch stainless-steel blade locking with a soft click, coldly mirroring Kealey’s eyes as they stared ahead.
Taking a breath and exhaling, he took three charging steps forward. Kealey swung into the open door like a bull, low with his hands in front like horns. He saw the man with the wounded hand kneeling. He was snarling in the ear of a blond woman, his gun at her head. Her hands were raised, and she was sobbing, shaking her head, but she was rising just the same. The gunman was getting up with her. He obviously intended to use her as a human shield. The wounded man turned just in time to be hit, full on, by Kealey.
The American locked his left hand around the wrist with the gun, pointing the weapon up. With his right hand he sank the blade into the hollow of the man’s throat, a quarter inch above the collarbone. The blonde shrieked and dropped and covered her head with her fingers, still screaming. The man gurgled and thrashed, hot blood brewing from the wound, his hands clutching at Kealey’s, trying to pull it away from him, pull the knife from his throat. But Kealey thrust it in deeper, angling the blade up toward the subclavian and giving it a hard, sharp twist to completely sever the artery and finish him.
All the while Kealey held the man up by his forearm and the blade, keeping him between himself and the hostages-and any potential attacker.
His knuckles wet and slick around the knife, he felt the man go limp. Kealey was carrying his deadweight now and went to his knees. It was quiet enough for Kealey to hear the splash of the man’s blood as it hit the floor around him.
No one fired at him, but that didn’t mean anything. Kealey had a dead man for protection and an assault rifle on his shoulder. He was still a formidable enemy.
The phone sounded. Someone barked with surprise, threw it with a grunt. The phone cracked on the floor.
The voice had come from the corner ahead and to Kealey’s left. Kealey glanced under the dead man’s armpit. He saw a gunman rise from the back of the crowd, pulling Colin Dearborn with him. He had the young man by the collar, the bore of his assault rifle pushing into the soft flesh under his chin. Kealey guessed the man had heard him talking to Allison or had simply assumed there were others out there, possibly an entire unit. He couldn’t know for sure, and there had been enough shooting to create that impression.
Which is probably the reason no one from the other rooms has attacked, Kealey thought. He had a good idea the bad guys hadn’t been able to confirm anything with video surveillance. Someone on the outside had seen Allison’s tweet. Somewhere, someone had either cut the trunk line that ran the system or had gotten into the security center. That could also have fueled the idea that they were under siege.
This ape was supposed to find that out. He had a Bluetooth in his ear, like the others. He was going to try to hostage his way into the corridor, see what was up, let the others know. Kealey hadn’t slipped on one of the headsets he’d confiscated, because he hadn’t wanted to be distracted.
The man stood behind Colin, his back to the floor-to-ceiling window, one arm locked around Colin’s throat. The rest of the frightened, wide-eyed hostages had begun sliding to the other side of the room, creating a clear path between the man and Kealey.