Runner (Sam Dryden Novel) (25 page)

No further knowledge would come out of that room.

In the darkness beside Audrey, Sandra’s breath rushed out. “Are you shitting me?”

Audrey heard fear in her voice. Felt it in herself, too. In the years since escaping confinement, she’d never once faced an enemy whose thoughts were hidden from her. She could not think of the last time she’d been reduced to guessing in a moment like this, and realized wearily that she didn’t even know how to do it. Her grip tightened on the heavy rifle in her hands.

She turned to Sandra and tried to be steady. “Someone upstairs or down will have called security about the gunshots. They’ll be in the anteroom any minute, so we won’t be leaving by elevator.”

“I’ll get the parachutes,” Sandra said.

“Bring the tandem harness for me.”

Sandra understood. She sprinted off down the dark hallway.

*   *   *

Rachel crossed the bedroom to the attached bath. She stopped in the doorway and looked back at Sam, standing with his back to her and the gun steady on the barricaded door. She wished she could tell him what it meant to her that he trusted her this completely—trusted her not to do something stupid.

She hoped she wasn’t about to.

Quietly taking the cordless phone from its cradle on her study desk, she stepped inside the bathroom and closed the door. In the silence, she stifled her own thoughts and focused on Sam’s. The message from the flashing light on the Willis Tower, visible to him even now as it pulsed on the walls of her bedroom, ran unbroken in the background of his mind.

COME - TO - GAULS - PEOPLE - AT - WILLIS - TOWER - SECURITY - OFFICE - OR - CALL - THEM - 062-585-0184 - HIS - PEOPLE - WILL - NOT - KILL - YOU

The message was for Sam, and no one else. Her, they would kill. No question of that.

She stared at her dark reflection above the vanity. “Whoever you are,” she whispered, “you’re not coming back.”

She pressed the
TALK
button, and the phone’s keypad lit up. This was the only solution. It offered at least some chance Sam would live, and all but guaranteed Audrey and Sandra would die.

Rachel dialed the number. A man answered on the first ring. She set the phone on the counter with the line open, and slid down the door to sit on the cold stone tiles.

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Dryden waited for it to happen, whatever it might be. There was no reason to even wonder what Rachel was doing—in fact, there was every reason not to.

The bathroom door opened, and she emerged, having been inside for perhaps three minutes. She came to him and for a moment said nothing.

“I won’t ask,” Dryden said.

“It won’t be much longer.”

Her tone chilled him like a night breeze in a cemetery.

*   *   *

Gaul finished pulling on his shirt as he entered his den. The telepresence screens were already up and running, showing him the computer room at his office in Santa Monica. The techs there were too busy to sit; they darted like bees among the workstations, configuring them for incoming data. The Mirandas were tasked and running feeds of Chicago, with the software drawing on street cameras to fill in the gaps—the deep steel canyons among the towers, where satellites couldn’t see.

The master frame was five miles wide, rendering the city as a thermal spiderweb against the cool span of Lake Michigan. Gaul could see both of the AH-6 Little Bird helicopters that had been staged on rooftops. The first had just lifted off, and the second, white hot on its pad, would rise any moment.

Lowry paced along the computer room’s south wall, near the heavy-gauge plastic sheet that had been stretched in place of the old window. Through his headset he fed instructions to both chopper pilots.

“The highest row of windows is the hundredth floor,” Lowry said. “Count down from there to the eighty-third. You’re weapons-free to engage any warm body on that entire level.”

*   *   *

“Thank you,” Rachel said.

She took Dryden’s hand, and he felt hers tremble in the moment before she tightened her hold.

“For what?”

“You love me,” she said. “It’s all you think, when you think about me. Even right now, you’re thinking how it’ll be okay if you can get me out of here, even if you die. You just … love me. Thank you.”

Against all instinct Dryden took his attention from the bedroom door. He turned to meet her eyes. He saw fear in them, but alongside it was something worse: resignation.

“Honey, what is it?” he asked. “What did you do?”

“I’m so sorry.” She put her arms around him and held on.

Over her shoulder, Dryden saw the lights of an aircraft cresting the skyline less than a mile to the south, coming in fast. Just audible, the blade rate faded in, familiar to him as an old ringtone. It was an AH-6 or a close variant; Dryden could picture the snipers belted in above its skids as easily as if the chopper were just outside the windows. Which it would be in forty seconds.

Through the open bathroom door he saw the cordless phone, its display glowing green, and understood.

*   *   *

Audrey’s fingers halted on the final clasp of the tandem parachute harness. She locked eyes with Sandra, who had also gone still, picking up the same thought from Dryden.

“She couldn’t,” Sandra said.

“She did,” Audrey said. “Watch the door.” She grabbed the rifle, threw it to Sandra, and left at a dead run.

Past Rachel’s bedroom she took the hallway corner and crossed the sitting room to the southern windows, slamming to a stop with her palms against the glass.

The helicopter was already north of the river, following a line up Michigan Avenue. Behind it, a second chopper lifted off from the rooftop of the RMC Plaza.

A soft
ding
announced the arrival of the elevator car, no doubt full of security and police. Beyond blocking the easy way out, they were meaningless; they could no more open the heavy door than they could morph through it.

The helicopters, however, would have to be dealt with. Audrey ran to the nearest closet, opened it, and pushed hard on the shelving unit inside, swinging it inward to reveal the cavity beyond the closet’s back wall.

*   *   *

Dryden had never felt this immobilized. For ten seconds, a stack of eternities under these conditions, he simply held on to Rachel and had no idea what to do. He kept the gun leveled on the door, and his eyes on the incoming helicopters—executioners to the scaffold.

“I’m sorry,” Rachel whispered again.

Dryden regained his composure and turned the girl’s face up toward his.

“You can’t do this,” he said. “You can’t give up. You’d be giving up for both of us, do you understand that?”

“If we get away,” Rachel said, “and if I turn into the other me … you might wish you had this moment back. That you hadn’t saved me.”

“Not a chance.”

He held her gaze a moment longer, hoping to see a glimmer of resolve there. She took a deep breath and nodded, looking stronger, if only by degrees.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Dryden said.

The lead chopper was twenty seconds out.

In the hall, one of the two women was still standing guard—Dryden had heard the other run past to verify the helicopters for herself. Whoever was in the hall would make a move on this room in the final seconds before the Little Birds reached sniper range. She would have no choice, by then, if she intended to keep Rachel alive.

That move would come any moment now.

Dryden’s eyes took in a long vertical split in the bedroom door, from the impact of the dresser. It followed the wood grain from the bottom of the door all the way to the top.

Don’t think. Do it. Now.

He turned his eyes on the south windows. He visualized himself shooting out the glass and plunging into open space.

Rachel jerked as if stung, reacting to the thought. By reflex she reached to stop him from doing it.

Dryden pushed her away and, keeping his mind focused on the plan to exit through the window, turned and sprinted for the cracked door instead. There was just enough room to get up to speed. He vaulted the dresser, brought his leg up, and pistoned it forward to exploit his body’s momentum. His foot connected with the door and broke it like a sheet of ice as he went through. The movement was awkward as hell. He ignored his balance—ignored everything but the SIG and the direction it had to be pointed.

The corridor was pitch black. He fired, even as he fell, and in the instant of the muzzle flash he saw Sandra ten feet away holding the rifle—a G-36. She wasn’t aiming it. She looked deeply confused. The distraction, rough as it had been, must’ve worked—she’d gotten the image of him diving out the window, the same as Rachel had.

Dryden landed in a crouch, retargeted on the darkness where Sandra’s face had been, and squeezed off three shots as fast as he could.

It was death by strobe light. Three snapshots within the deep black, Sandra taking the bullets to the neck, cheekbone, forehead. Crumpling like a dropped marionette.

Dryden heard screaming, somewhere. Not Rachel. Audrey. Along the south side of the apartment. Dryden scrambled for the heavy machine gun, groped for it in the darkness, and took it from Sandra’s hands. He raised it to a firing position facing the south end of the hall, where enough city light bled past the corner to show that there was no one there.

Rachel appeared at her doorway. Dryden took a step toward her and stopped—something metal had rattled at his feet. He realized he’d heard the same sound when Sandra had fallen, but had missed it for more pressing details. He felt a barrel-mounted flashlight on the G-36 and switched it on.

Sandra was wearing a parachute.

He killed the light beam and checked the south corner again. Still clear. Audrey apparently knew better than to approach from that way; she didn’t have to read his mind to know he had the machine gun now. With vague amusement, Dryden realized Audrey’s mind reading gave him a small tactical advantage: For the moment he felt only Rachel prodding his thoughts, and he would sense the change as soon as Audrey got close enough to round the corner.

He turned the other way, toward the north end of the hall. Skyline glow shone there as well, from the library’s windows. It was likely Audrey would circle the apartment to attack from that direction, but that would take her a minute or more. Her scream had placed her at the south side only seconds ago.

Rachel’s bedroom windows began to hum as the nearer of the two choppers closed in. Dryden glanced through the doorway and saw the lead aircraft pass over the roof of the white marble building one block to the south.

“Take this,” Dryden said, handing Rachel the SIG. It had two shots left in it. He nodded over his shoulder at the north end of the hall. “You see anything move up there, shoot at it.”

She nodded and raised the weapon. Dryden crouched over Sandra, keeping both the G-36 and his eyes on the south corner. By touch, he set to work removing the parachute harness from Sandra’s body.

*   *   *

Two monitors in the computer room showed helmet camera feeds from the snipers on Sparrow-Four-One, the first inbound chopper, which had just gone stationary near the south face of the tower. Gaul watched the viewpoints pan across the glass and steel edifice.

The pilot’s voice came over a speaker. “No movement on the target level.”

Above and below eighty-three, the occupants of nearly every residence were at their windows, woken by the hovering chopper. The pilot directed a spotlight into the seemingly deserted floor, sweeping most of the southern stretch in a few seconds. Nobody there.

“Sparrow-Four-One, make a slow orbit of the building,” Lowry said. “They’re in there somewhere. Neighbors called in gunshots. Sparrow-Four-Two, deploy your men.”

“Acknowledged, out.”

On a tightened Miranda frame, the second chopper arrived on-site. Gaul watched it settle into position above the southwest corner of the roof. The Little Bird didn’t need a proper landing pad; it was designed to off-load men onto rooftops in parts of the world where building codes weren’t exactly strict.

In the satellite image, it was impossible to tell exactly when the chopper touched down, but suddenly the four-man specialist team bailed from the troop bay and sprinted across the building’s roof. They reached a stairwell access and halted for a moment. Bright light flared as they torched out a lock, and then they were in.

*   *   *

Dryden released the final clasp and pulled the harness free from Sandra. Rising, he kept the machine gun trained on the near corner. Still no sign of Audrey, in his view or in his head.

He could hear both choppers now. The first was circling the building clockwise, moving up the west face. The second, having settled onto the rooftop moments earlier—its turbines sending vibrations down through the building’s core—now powered up and lifted off again. The team it must’ve put on the roof would be inside this apartment in no more than four minutes. They would cut through the ceiling from upstairs if need be.

They’d be three and a half minutes late.

Dryden slipped the chute harness on with automatic ease, adjusting for the tightness. He nodded to Rachel; reluctantly, she lowered the pistol and stepped into the bedroom. Dryden followed.

“All you have to do is hold on,” he said. “You’re going to put your arms around my neck and grab your wrists with your hands as tight as you can. Don’t focus on anything but holding on, okay?”

She nodded, already scared to death.

At that moment intense cold pressed at Dryden’s temples, like the touch of icicles. Audrey. Close now, coming fast. Determined and reckless.

Rachel understood. She threw her arms around him, lifting her feet off the floor. Dryden raised the G-36, thumbed the selector switch to autofire, and raked the south windows. The panes disintegrated into a curtain of shards, raining out of the frames even as Dryden sprinted toward them. Wind surged in like water, plastering Rachel’s hair across his face and spraying glass against them both. Two steps from the window he let go of the gun, locked his arms around Rachel, and dove.