Greene's Calling: Seventeen Book Three (A Supernatural Action Adventure Thriller Series 3) (10 page)

‘Cool,’ said the agent. She smiled. ‘It’s Conrad, right?’

‘Yes.’ He saw the blatant invitation in her blue eyes and looked to where the assassin was disappearing in the midst of a group of agents and state troopers. ‘Shall we head ba—?’ A gasp interrupted him. His gaze shifted to the female agent. He froze.

She stood motionless, her face ashen as she stared blindly past him. She raised a trembling hand to her earpiece.

‘What?’ said Conrad harshly. He took a step toward her and scanned the other agents’ faces. They were similarly pale and stood transfixed as they listened to words he could not hear.

A sudden foreboding made the immortal’s heart accelerate. ‘What’s happening? Talk to me, goddammit!’ he snapped. Conrad grabbed the female agent by the shoulders.

The action jolted her out of her state of shock. ‘The president is down,’ she said shakily. ‘He’s been shot!’

The assassin lowered the custom-made, carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic rifle and scope, dismantled the weapon, and placed it on the ground. She stripped off her FedEx Field usher uniform, slipped on a Redskins jersey over her running shorts, and tucked her long, glossy black curls under a sports cap.

She collected the weapon parts and exited the four-and-a-half-foot-wide, triangular space enclosed by a flexible banner stand advertising the Redskins’ premium club membership. The location was perfectly positioned to target the president’s evacuation path. The fatal strike had been delivered through a small, resealable flap in the vinyl wall facing the exterior of the stadium.

The assassin merged with the hordes of people racing for the exits on the second level concourse and discreetly tossed the pieces of the sniper rifle beneath their panicked, stampeding feet.

The firearm and its ammunition had been specially manufactured in Europe and cost millions of dollars. Along with the rifles and guns that had been successfully delivered to the other assassins, it was never meant to survive more than a few dozen rounds.

The weapons had been made for only two purposes: to evade detection by metal sensors and to be accurate enough to take out the president of the United States and any bodyguards who stood in the way of the bullets.

Soon, the assassin was just another Redskins fan in the rapidly moving crowd.

Conrad sprinted along the concourse, the female agent close on his heels.

‘Where?’ he shouted over his shoulder.

‘To your left!’

He took the corner and pounded down a corridor in the basement of the stadium, anger and self-reproach warring inside his heart.

The enemy had never meant for there to be just three assassins. They had always planned for a fourth one. And it was that last assassin who had delivered the deadly shots that had killed two US Secret Service bodyguards and almost certainly fatally wounded the president just as they extracted him from the north field tunnel to the waiting motorcade.

Conrad scowled. Had the coordinates of the fourth assassin’s position been in the haiku?

There was no more time to think. He saw the crowd of agents and police amassed in front of the mouth of the passage twenty feet ahead and barreled toward the sunlit opening.

The county police Deputy Chief stood outside, her gaze frozen on the two agents lying on the ground a few yards away. The paramedics had stopped working on the men and were sat back on their heels, their expressions as stunned as everyone else’s. The roar of sirens faded to the north.

‘So much blood,’ the Deputy Chief whispered.

Conrad grasped her shoulders. ‘Which hospital are they taking him to?’ he demanded, desperation hardening his voice. For a second, he thought she hadn’t heard him.

‘The—the Prince George’s Hospital Center, in Cheverly,’ the policewoman finally stammered, her gaze shifting from the dead men on the asphalt. Tears brimmed in her eyes. ‘Oh God, there’s so much blood!’

‘Conrad!’ someone shouted from behind.

He spun around and saw Laura racing out of the tunnel.

‘I need to get to him!’ he yelled, his heart hammering painfully against his ribs.

‘I know!’ she replied, her expression grim. ‘I’m already on it!’

The squeal of tires rose from the left. A black Suburban raced down the road and pulled up sharply next to the curb. An agent leapt out from behind the wheel and tossed the car keys to Laura. She snatched them from the air and dashed around the hood to the driver’s side. Conrad yanked the passenger door open and leapt inside a second before she floored the gas pedal.

The Suburban shot down the stadium’s main avenue, lights flashing and siren blaring. The fast lane had been cleared by the passing motorcade, and they rapidly overtook the stationary traffic on the right.

Conrad glanced at Laura. ‘You catch your guy?’ he asked tensely.

A muscle jumped in her jaw. ‘He resisted arrest. He won’t survive the gunshot wounds.’

Conrad frowned. Three miles later, he braced himself against the dashboard and roof of the vehicle as she took a sharp left onto a highway. The tires on the passenger side lifted off the blacktop briefly and dropped back down with a jolt.

‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Laura suddenly shouted. Her fist slammed repeatedly on the wheel, underscoring her cries.

‘What?’ snapped Conrad.

Laura had gone pale. Sweat beaded her forehead as she listened to the stream of communication coming through her earpiece. ‘He’s bleeding out.’ Her lips pressed tightly together. ‘His pulse has slowed right down. He’s about to arrest.’

Conrad stared at the road, his knuckles whitening on the dashboard. Lights flashed in the distance. They were about a minute behind the motorcade.

Twenty seconds later, Laura’s grip slackened on the wheel. Her breath hitched in her throat. Up ahead, the town cars and Suburbans making up the rear of the convoy were coming into view.

‘Laura?’ Conrad asked in a low voice.

‘He’s dead,’ she whispered. Her voice shook. ‘Oh God, he’s dead.’

Fear squeezed Conrad’s chest and contracted the air in his lungs. He inhaled sharply and yelled, ‘Get me to him!’

Laura looked at him dazedly, confusion replacing the distress on her face. ‘Didn’t you hear me? He’s dead! There’s nothing you can do!’

‘Yes, there is!’ Conrad barked. His nails dug into his palms. ‘Just get me there, Laura!’

She observed him for a stunned moment, her hazel eyes filled with anguish and uncertainty. She dipped her chin sharply, gripped the steering wheel, and spat out a terse message into her microphone to all the agents, state troopers, and county police officers in the motorcade.

‘Clint, pull over!’ she ordered. ‘I have an urgent package to deliver.’ She broke off for a beat. ‘Yes!’ she shouted. ‘I know he’s dead, but please, just do this, Woods! We have nothing to lose!’

A couple of seconds passed. Laura’s shoulders sagged. She closed her eyes briefly.

‘Thank you,’ she whispered in the mouthpiece. She seemed to recall something and suddenly stiffened. ‘Who else is in the car with you?’ Her face cleared when she heard the answer. ‘Good.’

The Suburban darted past the line of speeding vehicles. The heavily armored presidential limousine came in sight in the middle of the convoy. Laura maneuvered the Suburban behind it and flashed her headlights. The Cadillac responded by pulling off the highway and rolling to a stop in a lay-by overlooking an empty, overgrown field.

Laura followed and braked inches from the vehicle’s bumper. ‘Form a security perimeter around us!’ she instructed through the microphone.

Conrad bolted out of the Suburban and ran toward the limousine. The rest of the motorcade screeched to a halt around them and blocked off the lanes of the highway. He reached the Cadillac and yanked open the armor-plated back door. The fresh, coppery smell of blood hit his nostrils. He lowered his head and looked inside.

‘Shut down all the roads, stations, and airports!’ Woods was bellowing into his radio unit from the front passenger seat. ‘Goddammit, I don’t care what you have to do! I want this state in lockdown! These bastards are not getting away!’

The glass partition that separated the back of the limousine from the driver’s compartment had been lowered. President Westwood lay in a pool of blood on the rear-facing seats below it.

A woman in her forties with shoulder-length blonde hair and what would normally be a charismatic face kneeled next to his head. Scarlet blotches darkened her gray dress suit. She held an oxygen mask between her crimson-stained fingers, her expression numb.

An equally blood-splattered agent sat paralyzed to her right, a used adrenaline pre-filled syringe discarded on his lap. His fingers were still clenched around the blood pack connected to an IV line in Westwood’s right arm. An empty bag floated in the congealing puddles covering the floor of the limo.

A middle-aged man with a receding hairline slouched, slack-jawed, where the president normally sat. The other seat had been pulled down to access the emergency blood bank and resus equipment routinely stored in the trunk of the presidential limo.

Conrad climbed inside the vehicle and gently pushed the shocked agent out of the way. He knelt by Westwood. His presence seemed to bring everyone out of their stupor. The agent looked up sharply and automatically reached for his gun.

‘It’s all right, Harry. He’s with me,’ said Laura.

The agent looked over his shoulder to where she stood in the doorway of the limo. He gulped and nodded shakily. Conrad studied the still, waxen features of the president. He raised his left hand and placed it on the dead man’s chest.

‘What the hell is this?’ barked the middle-aged man in the back. Out of the corner of his eye, Conrad saw the guy’s head turn sharply to Laura and Woods. ‘What’s that man doing?’

‘Shut up, Bill!’ snapped the woman in the gray suit. She ignored the older man’s shocked gasp and scrutinized Conrad. ‘Is he one of you?’ she demanded, glancing briefly at Laura.

Laura hesitated. ‘Yes.’

It was Woods’s turn to gape between Laura and the woman in the suit. ‘One of who?’ His eyes locked onto Conrad’s hand. ‘What the hell
is
he doing?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Laura softly. ‘I really don’t know.’

Conrad closed his eyes and tuned them out. In the seconds since he had laid his fingers on Westwood, he had identified the extensive damage caused by the bullet that had penetrated the man’s left armpit and punched through his lung and aorta before lodging just beneath his fourth rib.

The immortal’s healing powers sparked down his left arm and flashed along the body of the snake birthmark before streaking out of its forked tongue toward his fingertips. He steered the unearthly energy inside the dead man and slowly pushed the bullet back along its path of entry until it plopped out from under his arm.

Conrad opened his eyes and looked at the strange slug lying in the pool of blood. He concentrated on closing the jagged tears in the dead man’s artery. As he moved to the torn tissues of his lung, the immortal’s gaze shifted to the blood pack attached to the IV line.

‘You got any more of those?’ he asked the agent next to him.

The man bobbed his head jerkily. ‘Yes, in the trunk!’

‘Get them,’ Conrad ordered between clenched teeth. ‘And start squeezing!’

The agent scrambled to the back of the limo and grabbed the blood bags. Conrad was aware of Laura’s hot stare on the side of his face. A fine sheen of perspiration coated his brow as tendrils of his power continued to snake through the president’s body. The agent attached the next blood pack to the IV and pumped it with both hands.

The immortal felt the dead man’s heart and vessels slowly fill up. He stopped just shy of fully repairing the entry wound in his chest and took a deep breath to steel himself for what was to come. A moment later, he unleashed the full force of his immortal legacy.

It was like opening the tap on a dam. Within seconds, sweat dripped down Conrad’s face and soaked his back. He curled over, his breath leaving his lips in short, sharp pants as heat exploded inside his chest. Heart racing like a high-speed train and blood thundering in his ears, Conrad reached deep inside himself until he located the source of his ungodly powers. Slowly, carefully, he wrapped the fingers of his consciousness around the shimmering mass and tugged.