But Burns had a book in his hand. A well-worn book that he opened. He began reading from it, his voice low, hard to understand. Gently, Neeley grasped the lever to open the door. There was no click and she edged the door open. No squeak on hinges.
She could hear the words now. Burns was reading in German and it took her a moment to access that rusty part of her brain that had learned German while living in Berlin. Burns was reading from Siddhartha in the original language.
She brought the pistol up, aiming at the base of his skull.
But she didn’t pull the trigger, instead listening to the rhythm of the words. She’d forgotten the harsh lyricism of the original language. She took a step closer.
It was jarring when Burns switched to English and abandoned the words of the book. “I knew you would come.”
He shut the book but didn’t turn.
Neeley pressed the muzzle of the suppressor against the base of his skull. A violation of Protocol as she was negating the gun’s standoff capability by getting within arm’s reach. A slight shock ran through the gun and tingled her hand. She sensed, more than felt, the shock rush through her body, then there was nothing.
“I was also drawn to this place,” Burns said. “Can you feel it?”
“Feel what?” Getting in a discussion with a Sanction: definitely a violation not only of Protocol but also of Gant’s rules. And just plain stupid. Neeley felt it all unraveling, every rule, every Protocol, every piece of common sense.
“The regrets,” Burns said. He nodded toward the old man. “He regrets he spent more time at work than he needed to, trying to get that position he never got, getting that extra percentage of pension that his wife did not get to enjoy. So he never really knew his children, even his wife. And then it was gone all so soon. It’s a deep pool that rests over this entire place. Regret.”
“What do you regret?” Neeley said. “Going rogue?”
“Am I rogue now?” Burns asked. “And I can feel your regrets.”
The lights in the room flickered and then went out. At the same time, the ventilator stopped.
Down the hallway alerts were going off as other life-sustaining machines ground to a halt. In the distance, Neeley could hear a generator coughing, trying futilely to come to life and restore power. Voices were shouting as nurses responded to the emergencies.
“Is he your father?” Neeley asked, taking a step back, regaining her standoff distance.
“No.” Burns stood and turned. His face didn’t shock Neeley. She’d seen the images and worse in battle. “I did a search en route for someone like this. Amazing that there are so many Schmidts. Sort of like there are so many Smiths in English. This was convenient.” He glanced over this shoulder at the old man who was now struggling to breathe. “I have no clue who he is. He might well be a distant relative. But then we all are related, aren’t we? Some say a good percentage of the population is related to Genghis Khan. Apparently he liked to spread his seed as he conquered the world.”
Neeley’s finger was on the trigger, but she was hesitating.
Violating Protocol.
“My father,” Burns said, as if searching for a memory. “He was a weak man. But my grandfather. He was a very special man.”
“You didn’t follow in his footsteps,” Neeley said.
“You think you know what you don’t know,” Burns said, his eyes beginning to flicker in color. “But I know what you know.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Why did I draw you in?” Burns asked.
Neeley’s finger began to pull on the trigger but then Burns’s face rippled, as if the structure underneath were alive. The skin smoothed out, then shifted, and—
“Gant?” Neeley knew it wasn’t Gant. It couldn’t be. He was dead. But that’s who she was looking at. Her finger left the trigger.
Gant’s eyes began to glow, a slight golden tint easily visible in the darkened room. “The same reason you are here with that gun. Trying to do what we believe is the right thing.”
The voice wasn’t Gant’s and her finger went back on the trigger, pulling, but the light leaping from those eyes was faster, hitting her in the chest and knocking her back. The gun fired, but the aim was off, the bullet thudding into the ceiling as Neeley fell backward.
She had a protective vest on, but she hadn’t been shot. Whatever it was that had hit her wrapped tight around her heart and squeezed. She felt pain like she’d never experienced before, an elephant sitting on her chest. Someone was leaning over her. Gant’s face dissolved, back to Burns’s scarred one. Then everything went black.
Burns didn’t even look back at the old man, whose chest was no longer rising and falling. He tucked the book into his coat, knelt next to Neeley, and removed the car keys and the radio and the cell phone from her pocket. He stood, stepped over Neeley, and walked out of the room.
As he did so, the power came back on.
He went into the parking lot. Her car was easy to find. Burns keyed the radio and spoke in an excited voice: “Hello? Hello? This woman has been hurt! She needs help.”
As he waited, he walked around the car, head cocked as if listening, and then reached under the right front wheel panel and grabbed the tracker. He removed it and stomped on it. He heard a helicopter inbound.
The Nighthawk came racing in just above the tree line when the golden light flashed from Burns’s eyes and hit it, shutting everything on board down.
The pilots never had a chance to react; they were too low. The helicopter hit like a rock, tumbling, ripping apart, blades churning, breaking, flying through the air, and then the chopper exploded.
Burns got in the car and drove off.
Back inside the facility, Nurse Washington threw open the door to room 116. She immediately saw that the old man in the bed was dead; she’d seen a lot of dead old people from the doorway of rooms in this place and she knew dead.
The woman, the FBI special agent, confirmed as legitimate by the local field office, wasn’t breathing either. But she was fresh dead. Nurse Washington had seen that enough also.
Washington yelled, a voice that carried throughout the entire facility. “Crash cart to one-one-six!” She knelt next to Neeley. “Knew that man was a servant of the devil the minute he came through the door. And knew you were trouble, too, the moment you walked in. And I still don’t believe you are what you say you are.”
Then she began to perform CPR.
CHAPTER 7
Iris Watkins was five feet tall if she really stretched and dripping wet didn’t break three figures on the scale. And she had twenty pounds of baby in a halter on her chest and two kids under five fighting her for control of the grocery cart. She tried to grab some 2 percent milk without banging the baby’s head into the cooler door when one of those grandmother types stopped her and started going on about how cute the kids were. And then, of course: “My! What a big baby for such a teeny little thing like you.”
Why don’t you hand me some milk or hold the door for me? Iris thought. As if she didn’t hear that all the time. Of course, they’d never seen the father, and he hadn’t been a tiny little thing. He hadn’t even been a normal thing. He’d been huge, thus the large baby, but that also probably contributed to him being such a large target and getting hit fourteen times covering his team’s withdrawal in Afghanistan last year.
But he’d kept firing, up until the last bullet hit him just under the left eye.
Watkins had asked for every single detail from the SEAL teammates who’d accompanied the body back to the States. She had to know and it gave her comfort to understand he’d died fighting, doing what he was trained to, and he died on the battlefield, not in a medevac or in surgery.