Cutting Edge pp-6 Page 6

  “Guess I don’t need to worry about your experience,” he said.

  She smiled. “Guess not.”

  Howell was silent a moment.

  “You want to know the hardest thing about running this show?” he said at length. “For me and Cyn, anyway?”

  She nodded again.

  “It’s letting go of the dogs once we’ve gotten them healthy,” he said. “We find that handling more than fifteen or twenty stretches us thin, though we’ve boarded as many as thirty at a time. Every grey we save arrives with a whole set of problems and needs lots of attention. Some are here months, even years, before we find a suitable home, and they can grow on you. One-on-one. But you have to be able to keep a certain distance, almost a doctor-patient relationship, and that takes a strong kind of person. You invest too much of yourself in a particular animal, you’re going to have your heart broken more than a little when it’s placed.”

  Julia looked at him.

  “Or wind up living with the whole cast of Friends,” she said, thinking she’d managed to survive her disastrous seven-year investment in a marriage that had been liquidated when Craig decided to take a sudden hike on her — talk about having to let go and learn to cope with heartbreak.

  The room was quiet. Howell leaned against the counter, a thoughtful expression on his face. Julia heard the distinctive throaty woofing of a grey somewhere out back of the building, followed by that of a second dog. Then the overlapping, explosive barks of what sounded like at least three or four more of them.

  “Rolling thunder,” Howell said. “They’ve been stuck in their kennels all day, and are letting me know they want to be let out to do their business.” He pushed himself off the counter. “You have time to help with that right now?”

  Julia smiled.

  “Sure,” she said. “Whatever dirty job you ask of me.”

  Howell motioned toward the door.

  “C’mon,” he said. “We’ll work out your schedule while we walk.”

  THREE

  SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA MADRID, SPAIN GABON, AFRICA

  Wearing protective goggles and earmuffs, the two men stood ready, their knees bent, hands wrapped around the butts of their weapons.

  Then they heard the double beeps in their electronic muffs, a cue that their timed session had started.

  They sighted down the shooting range’s raceway lanes. Now, or maybe an instant from now, their targets would begin moving at changing speeds and angles in computer-generated, randomized tactical scenarios.

  In Nimec’s lane, inconspicuous lights dimmed to simulate crepuscular conditions. It was dawn or twilight, and the big bad wolves were out on the prowl.

  Nimec saw a metal practice figure shaped like a male head and torso swing up at a firing point in front of him, snapped the muzzle of his Beretta 92 toward it, and squeezed the trigger. The exposed target turned edgewise on its pneumatic actuator stand, avoiding the first 9-mm round. Then it began to duck down. But Nimec’s second shot tagged its flank before it could reach concealment.

  He had no chance to congratulate himself. Another target had emerged from the left side of his raceway lane and charged. Nimec shifted his aim as Metal Man reversed and started to retreat, covering ten feet in about a second. One shot, two, and then the third stopped Metal Man dead in his tracks.

  Fast SOB, Nimec thought. He drew a breath, sliced his gaze this way and that. Another target leaned out from against the wall — a shoulder, a head. His gun crashed, good-bye Charlie.

  In the next lane of the newly overhauled indoor course, Tom Ricci stared into different lighting conditions. Diffuse, full. It could have been the artificial illumination of an office building, a warehouse. Or—

  No, not there, he didn’t want to go there.

  Ricci held his FN Five-Seven by its stippled grip, waited, his nose stinging from the nitrate smell of propellent powder. He’d aced a pair of badguys that had sprung into sight back at the end of the lane and expected more of them, knew there’d be more, wanted more.

  Ricci kept waiting, concentrating, eyes hard for the kill. He tasted acid at the root of his tongue and liked it.

  Then, about forty feet down, here was pop-up badguy number three. Dead center in the lane, cutout gun in hand, got himself some balls, this one. Okay. Okay. Ricci aimed, eager to take him.

  And suddenly his mind turned the hated, unwilling loop. Could be it was the preprogrammed lighting. Or maybe that was groping for a reason. Ricci wouldn’t think about it until later. Office building, warehouse… germ factory. Right now he was back. He was there.

  Northern Ontario. The Earthglow facility. Déjà vu all over and over and over again—

  Together they move down the hall. Ricci in the lead, followed by Nichols, Rosander, and Simmons, three members of the Sword rapid deployment team assembled at Ricci’s unrelenting insistence. This is their first mission as a unit, and it is one hell of a nasty biscuit: They have penetrated the heavily guarded facility seeking a cure— or information that might lead to a cure — for the lab-engineered virus with which Roger Gordian has been deliberately infected. Around them are austere gray walls, doors with plain institutional signs. Ricci slows before each sign to read it, then trots forward, seeking the one they need.

  The corridor bends to the right, runs straight for twenty feet, hangs another right, then goes straight again for a short hitch and angles left. The men sprint around this last elbow and see a bottleneck elevator. An arrow below its single call button points downward — a sublevel. On the wall next to the button is a glass plate, what Ricci believes to be an electronic eye, hand, or facial geometry scanner. There is a biohazard trefoil above the elevator’s shiny convex door. The sign beneath it reads:

  RESTRICTED

  BSL-4 LABORATORIES

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  Ricci feels a cold tack push into his heart. While no medical expert, he’s done his homework in preparation for the raid, and knows that BSL-4 is the highest level of safeguard for personnel working with dangerous pathogens. It occurs to him that this may well be the birthplace of the mutant virus that is turning Gordian’s internal organs to bloody sludge in a San Jose hospital bed. He also realizes that the killer, who Rollie Thibodeau — Ricci’s co-supervisor of field security operations — calls the Wildcat, is likely one of the authorized. Ricci detests the name Thibodeau has attached to him, thinks it sounds too much like a badge of honor. But then, he and Thibodeau are on very different pages about almost everything.

  Ricci lets these thoughts have their unpleasant moment, then he looks at Rosander and Simmons.

  “We have to separate,” he says. “Somebody could come up this elevator, surprise us from the rear. It’s got to be watched while I scope out the rest of the hall.”

  The two men accept his orders in silence. Then a thumbs-up from Rosander, his eyes fastened on Ricci’s.

  “Good luck,” he says. “Chief.”

  There is pride and respect in Rosander’s voice as he addresses Ricci with that informal designation of rank. Chief. Even if there were time, Ricci knows he could never express how much it means to him. He is not the share-and-bare-it-all type. Not by a hobbled man’s mile.

  He nods, claps Rosander’s shoulder, shifts his gaze to Nichols, who is young, green, and has made mistakes in training that might have gotten someone else dismissed from the team. In fact, the kid had been prepared to lay his head on the chopping block afterward. But Ricci had seen some of his own fire in Nichols’s eyes — only a cleaner, brighter, untainted flame — and convinced him to stay on.

  “Ready?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Ricci nods again.

  “Come on, it’s you and me,” he says, and they hurry on along the corridor, leaving the other two men behind to guard their rear.

  Though Ricci cannot know it, the next time he sees them they will be dead on the floor near the elevator, Simmons bleeding out from multiple bullet wounds to the side of his rib cage, Rosander with a cru
shed windpipe, and his brains oozing from a point-blank gunshot to the head meant to finish him off like an animal in a slaughterhouse pen.

  And that will not be the worst of it. Unbelievably, unbearably, not the worst…

  Ricci heard the flat, electronically baffled report of his gun through his earmuffs — a sound that tugged him from the sinkhole of memory with his finger still tight on the trigger. He took in the present like a drowning man starved for air as the third firing-range badguy went down, caught by a single clean shot. The Five-Seven raised level with his chest, Ricci stood waiting, ready, wanting to stay fluid as the tac sequence progressed. To keep his mind on the controllable here and now, and resist the desirous undertow of the past.

  A second ticked by. Ricci breathed, exhaled. Ready. Steady. A crouched figure appeared from the right side of the course, the computerized lights dimming around it for a little added mischief and chaos. Go! Ricci swiveled his extended arms, sighted over the nub of his gun barrel, and bang. Crouching badguy was no more.

  Ricci held a motionless shooter’s stance. Took another breath. Kept trying not to think but to be. Here, now. In the moment, as the movie stars liked to say. Then a fifth badguy sprang out at him, standing at full height, facing Ricci from the middle of the corridor—

  No, no. The firing lane.

  Ricci swore to himself. Just what moment had he been in?

  He got that biting, bitter taste in his mouth again, his gun swinging into position, his finger starting its deadly squeeze… and stopping.

  Another figure had sprung up out of nowhere directly in front of the badguy. A woman, her painted-on eyes wide, her painted-on mouth gaping in a silent scream, the expression a cartoon facsimile of terror. Ricci held his fire. This was goddamned unexpected. Sure, why not? Unexpected was the whole point of this exercise.

  Clever fucking software.

  Practice badguy, practice hostage.

  Ricci hesitated. Tick-tick-tick. Decision time. Now thought had to reenter the process. And with thought came a backslide into the choking memories of Ontario, and his dash through that final passage with Nichols, deep in the hornet’s nest, desperate to find what he needed to save Gordian’s life, uncertain whether he’d even know how to recognize it, or the place where it would be stored. Ricci’s helmet gear had provided wireless audiovisual contact with Eric Oh, an epidemiologist who was coaching him from three time zones away in California, and who Ricci had been told might know if they were very lucky—

  On his right, behind a thick plate-glass inset, Ricci sees a large room filled with equipment that seems to indicate he’s getting hot. Tanks, ducting, air feed, and intake pumps.

  “Doc? You with me?” he says into his helmet mike.

  “Yes. You’re looking at the microencapsulation lab. This can’t be far from where they’d keep the cure.”

  “Right. Assuming there is one.”

  Silence to that remark.

  Ricci looks at the solid concrete wall ahead of him with a stitch of apprehension, hustles along at a trot. The problem is he’s running out of hallway. Three, four more office doors on either side, and that’s it. Dead end. If he doesn’t find what he needs here, it’s doubtful he can shift the hunt to another part of the facility without turning all his men into casualties. He can almost feel the weight of their lives on his shoulders.

  “Ricci, wait, slow down!” Eric’s voice is loud, excited in his comlink’s earpiece. “Over on your left, that door!”

  He stops, turns, scans the sign above it:

  POLYMERASE ACTIVATORS/ANTIVIRALS

  “Tom, listen—”

  “You don’t have to translate,” Ricci says. “We’re going in.”

  He quickly moves to the left of the door, waves Nichols to the opposite side, tries the knob. Locked. Stepping back, Ricci aims his weapon — it is a compact variable velocity rifle system subgun with adjustable lethal or nonlethal settings — at the spot below the knob, squeezes off a staccato burst, then kicks out at the door. It flings inward without resistance, the lock mechanism in fragments from his shots.

  They scramble into the room, Ricci fanning his outthrust gun to the left, Nichols buttonhooking to the right of the doorway, looking sharp, his technique perfect.

  The office is unoccupied, its lights off. Ricci finds the wall switch and they come on.

  He is seconds from a decision that he will always wish he could unmake.

  The mid-size room is windowless, partitioned into four central soundproof cubicles that enclose counters and computer workstations. The double-depth multimedia filing /storage units built into the walls are six feet high, with slide-out drawers and rotating shelves in steel housings. Quick access systems, no doors, no locks. It doesn’t surprise Ricci. The staffers allowed into this office, this entire wing of the building, would have wide clearance anyway.

  He moves deeper into the room, turns to Nichols.

  “You better stand outside in the hall, watch my back,” he says, forking two fingers at his own eyes. “Keep alert.”

  It seems a fundamentally obvious and sensible call for Ricci. He does not know how long he will be in the room. He doesn’t even know exactly what he’s looking for. But he does know he’ll be vulnerable and distracted while he forages around in here. Watch my back, keep alert. Obvious.

  Nichols looks at him with an expression that Ricci notes without quite being able to characterize it. In months to come, on the countless nights of poisoned sleep when that moment replays itself in his thoughts, he will understand it is plain and simple gratitude — for the second chance Nichols has been given, and the confidence being placed in him.

  The moment passes. Then the kid gives Ricci a crisp little nod that has about it the quality of a salute, turns, and goes back through the door toward his encounter with the Killer, and the hail of bullets that will rip the life out of his body…

  Ricci was jolted back to the reality of the firing range, this time by his heart’s heavy beating. He’d gotten caught somewhere between past and present again, as if they had converged around him in a kind of dizzying overlap — the dashed, rudimentary lines of the target figure’s face becoming the sharply defined features of the Killer as Ricci first saw them years ago. He had never gotten his chance at that savage monster inside Earthglow, but there had been a time long before that, when they had grappled hand to hand in yet another faraway place, fighting to an impasse at the Russian Cosmodrome. There, as in Ontario, the Killer had escaped him, vanishing into the benighted Kazakhstan mountains amid the fierce, final combat of what would be logged in Sword’s mission files as Operation: Shadow Watch.

  Now Ricci stood with his hands wrapped around the butt of his gun. The Killer had started to retreat, backing slowly away down the lane, using the hostage figure as a shield, keeping her in front of his body. He was about a foot taller than Screaming Woman, easily a foot, and Ricci was convinced he could take him down nice and clean, do it without so much as ruffling her hair. One shot to the head, over and out. But there would be an undeniable risk to Screaming Woman. Say the Killer was holding her at gunpoint, the weapon’s snout pressing into her back. Say he had a knife against her throat. Ricci knew her situation was chancy even if his marksmanship was true. A slight jerk of the Killer’s hand, an automatic dying spasm, could result in Screaming Woman becoming what Ricci had called a civilian casualty when he wore a detective’s badge. On the force, protection of the innocents overrode your pursuit of the guilty. When losses occurred it was despite every intent and effort to avert them. But would a loss in this case be unintentional or incidental?

  Ricci stood there with his hands around the gun, its trigger a tease to his finger. The finger moving slightly back, increasing its pressure—

  “Tough choice. Good thing you don’t have to make it.”

  Ricci turned his head toward the sound of Nimec’s voice. He had stepped over from his firing lane, the earmuffs off, goggles down around his neck, his Beretta already holstered at his side.
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br />   Ricci looked at him but didn’t say anything. His features were blank.

  “Didn’t you hear the beeps?” Nimec said. He was tapping his unprotected ear. “We’re done.”

  Ricci stared at him in silence a while longer, his Five-Seven still held out, the pupils contracted to black pinpoints in his ice blue eyes.

  Then he looked back down the firing lane.

  The lane had gone completely dark, its target and hostage figures fixed in position. A lighted red sign high on the back wall was blinking the words:

  AUTO TIMEOUT

  Ricci slowly lowered the gun and slid it into his leather.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Done.”

  Quiet hung over the room, as rife in the air as the smell of discharged ammunition.

  “Tom, we need to talk,” Nimec said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Here’s fine.”

  “It might be better to do our old usual tonight. Sit down in my pool room over a couple of Cokes.”

  “Here’s fine,” Ricci repeated, his tone no more expressive than his features.

  Nimec almost felt as if he’d phoned one of those automated customer service lines and gotten stuck on the starting option. He studied the rough, jutting angles of Ricci’s face and shrugged.

  “There’s some general stuff I’d like to cover,” he said. “With me going to Africa, it’ll be you in charge—”

  “And Thibodeau,” Ricci said. “He’ll make sure I remember to pull the store gate at night.”

  Nimec inhaled, exhaled.

  “Thought I rated better than that sort of comment,” he said. “You were gone a long time. I know what it took for you to leave. How much it took out of you to come back without finding our man. But we have to put it away for now. Move on.”

  Ricci nodded, seeming to look straight past Nimec at some point several feet behind him.

  “Sure,” he said in his null, automatic tone. “Got anything to mention besides?”

  Nimec considered whether to push ahead. Though Ricci had returned from his alligator hunt three months ago, it mostly felt as if he were still elsewhere. And that sense of his continued absence just intensified when you tried stepping close to him.