Severance Package (27 page)

“Europe? Molly, I’m married. And you’re …”

Insane.

She reached out her hand to touch his cheek and he flinched.

“Shhhh,” she said, more quietly now. “Molly Lewis was married, yes. But I am not Molly Lewis. My name is Ania Kuczun.”

Anya
who?

“You can be whoever you want, too. As easy as a snake shedding skin.”

Jamie had watched Molly survive a beating at the hands of Nichole. Watched her shoot David in the head. Felt the agony as she paralyzed him with just one simple move, then cut his fingers apart. Who was this woman? And what was she capable of? What did she really want?

Europe?

Wash away the blood, brush her hair, put it back in a conservative ponytail, get her dressed, and Jamie could almost see the old Molly. His office spouse. A quiet, thoughtful, pretty woman who was Andrea’s polar opposite.

Sometimes, though, it’s the opposites that get you. Draw you in, when you least expect it.

Like a few months ago.

On a walk home from an after-work happy hour.

Hey, I’ll walk you to your car. Well, here it is. Nice SUV. Guess I’ll be going. Yeah, good hanging with you, too …
and that’s when it gets you, when you find yourself leaning forward to give her a kiss on the cheek but really you’re aiming for her lips, and she pulls back, a little startled. And you console yourself by saying, Hey, that would have been stupid. I have a pregnant wife at home.

Still, in that drunken moment, you really wanted that kiss.

The look on her face slides from puzzlement to embarrassment, and then she climbs into her car, and you walk home, and it’s really not that far away. The humid night air gives you time to think about what you narrowly avoided.

It’s not different in work the next day, or any other day, except maybe she sometimes looks at you oddly or warmly or knowingly. You forget about it. You’re about to have a kid.

You have a kid. You come back to work.

On a hot Saturday morning in August.

Those lips you momentarily wanted to kiss are now spotted with blood.

And she’s talking about shedding your skin.

“There’s something you need to leave behind,” Molly said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jamie said. “This building is burning. We need to leave.
Now.”

She moved closer to him. Her lips. Smiling a little. “I have another way out. If you come with me.”

“How?”

“It won’t hurt much.”

Did she really know another way?

It didn’t matter. Jamie had trusted her before, and she’d ended up slicing his hand open like a roasted chicken. He wasn’t going to fall for the same ploy twice. He might be a public relations flack, but he wasn’t brain-dead.

Molly was closer now. Even with the spraying water, he could smell her. The copper penny scent of blood.

So Jamie did the only thing he could think of. He pushed her. Hard. Like they were schoolchildren in a playground.

She stumbled back to the ground.

Jamie bolted.

Keene opened the hall cupboard and lifted the false plywood bottom. Beneath it was his backup gun. A silver Ruger, Speed Six .38 Special. He never thought he’d need one here in Porty. Went through a lot of trouble to get one. Bought it from a fat guy from Haddington named Joe-Bob, as unlikely as that sounded. But he’d planted it months ago, nonetheless. It was hard to shake the Moscow Rules, even though he hadn’t been CIA in many, many years.

Build in opportunity but use it sparingly.

He stuffed the gun in his waistband, near the base of his spine. And as he headed up the stairs he recalled another old espionage chestnut:

Everyone is potentially under control of the opposition.

And as he put his hand on the doorknob and thought about killing McCoy …

There is no limit to a human being’s ability to rationalize the truth.

It wasn’t an entirely bad trip down; Vincent fell only once and dropped Rickards twice. If Rickards asked later, Vincent planned on shrugging his shoulders.
I don’t know how you got those bruises, man.
His muscles were trembling and it was hard to breathe. But there was no sitting down and taking a breather. The longer they stayed in this tower, the more likely they were going to die.

The guys from the Philadelphia Fire Department had begun to arrive by the time Vincent hit the ground floor. They were scurrying in the lobby and on the sidewalk outside the building. Crap. Two guys in full gear with pickhead axes and Nomex hoods came up to them, tried to take Rickards off his hands.

Vincent pulled back and warned them: “We’ve been dosed with chemical agents. We need a hazmat team or Homeland Security or whatever you guys are supposed to call out for this stuff.”

“Where?”

“I was up on sixteen, the north fire tower. Tell your guys now before they go charging up.”

“What about the other one?”

“No idea. And hey—there are people up there. I heard someone yell.”

“What floor?”

“I don’t know. Up higher than I was. Could be anywhere.”

“All right, let’s go, move, move!”

There, warning done … now he had to get Rickards back to the washup room and find that goddamned
Terrorism
manual. No telling how long it would take for the scientists to show up and analyze this stuff. If he lived through this—if it wasn’t blood he felt streaming down his cheeks, though Vincent kind of suspected it was—he was sure he was looking at weeks and weeks of blood tests and cheek swabs and anal pokes. His son would be fascinated. Ask all about it. Question is, does a dad tell his kid about stuff like this? Is it educational?

Vincent Marella was going to do two things after all this was over.

He was seriously going to quit.

And he was going to put
Center Strike
in a garbage can, piss on it, then light it on fire.

Jamie keyed the door code with his good hand, then yanked open the door. He ran down the short hallway and was immediately confused. Why was it dark outside? He couldn’t open the nearest office door—it was locked—but he looked through the slats of the window to the outer windows.

That wasn’t darkness. It was smoke.

And that was because
the building was on fire.

He could see the flashes of red in the sky. Fire trucks.

Goddamn David Murphy.

Hang on now. Worry about that later. Jamie needed somewhere else to be, away from Molly. If he could circumvent her, he could make it to the other fire tower. Maybe it was rigged to explode, too. Maybe not. But it was his only option.

That’s not true, DeBroux. Molly told you that she has a way out.

Yeah, and she also said it wouldn’t “hurt much.”

Uh-uh.

But if Molly knew a way out, then there was another way out. Maybe he could hide long enough to find it. Watch Molly take it, then take it himself. Or do both.

Point was, keep moving.

Jamie moved to the right. If he could make it to the abandoned offices and cubicles, he could duck in and out of those, listening for her footsteps (bare feet on carpet, good luck) and eventually make his way around to the other door, then to the elevator bank, then to the other fire tower.

Besides, the other way—toward David’s office—was a dead end.

There was nothing else he could do except move to the other side of the floor. That, and try to control his breathing. His lungs were pumping too hard. He had to slow it down. In through the nose, out through the mouth. In through the nose, out through the mouth.

On the other side of the office, Jamie saw the white box with the little cartoon heart on it.

Wait. There
was
something else he could do.

He opened the front panel. Read the instructions quickly. Took the paddles in his hands, even his sore one—he could deal with it for a little while—and used his good thumb to hit the charging button. There was a high-pitched whine.

Sixty seconds to go.

Jamie put his back to the panel, paddles behind his back.

Molly was standing in the hallway.

“You never answered my question,” she said.

Keene opened the door and fired the Ruger.

There was no need to play it cute. Keene had a feeling that McCoy would spot a ruse in a microsecond.

But the bullet struck bare wall. Something sliced at his forearm, ripping through skin and muscle. A butcher knife.

“Ah, you cunt.”

The gun tumbled from Keene’s hand. Keene threw his weight into the door. It slammed into McCoy. Keene pivoted, then booted McCoy in the testicles so hard, it sent him staggering backwards. He smashed his head into the corner of an oak bureau.

Keene, the pain in his forearm overpowering, fell backwards. Landed on his ass. A simple slash across the arm shouldn’t hurt so much.

McCoy either had braced himself or didn’t actually have testicles, because he recovered quickly. He opened the bottom drawer next to him. Reached below a stack of six T-shirts. Always with his T-shirts. The one on the top said the bad plus.

He’d hidden a gun under there. It was a Ruger, too.

Build in opportunity but use it sparingly.

They were both students of the old school.

“Have a nice walk?” McCoy said, then shot Keene in the chest.

“Come with me,” she said.

“No,” Jamie said. Trying to keep his breathing under control.

“You don’t have to pretend,” she said. “I can give you everything you want.”

How many seconds had elasped? Ten? At most?

Keep yourself calm.

Keep her talking.

Molly started walking toward him. “Come with me and we can leave this building. Right now.”

“No,” Jamie said. “Not until you tell me what this is about. Why everyone on this floor had to die.”

“What does it matter? You going to write a book about it?” She smiled.

Jamie could hear the high-pitched whine. Could she?

“I want to know.”

Molly was just a few feet away. Jamie pretended to lean back against the wall, frightened. Which was not too difficult to pretend.

Had a half a minute gone by yet?

“This is just a company. We’re just employees. I’m going for a promotion. Not just for me. For both of us. And now I want to know if you’ll come with me.”

“How can I just leave my life behind?”

“Is it really a life you’ll miss?”

Behind him, something clicked.

She touched his chest.

Smiled.

Jamie pressed the defibrillator paddles against Molly’s chest and squeezed the plastic handles. Prayed it had been enough time.

It had.

There was a loud
pop.

She yelped. The shock blew her body back across the hall. Down there on the floor, she looked like a puppet with her strings cut.

Jamie droppped the paddles. God bless OSHA, which had started to require these devices in buildings over twenty stories in downtown Philadelphia. Even the abandoned floors of buildings.

The shock wouldn’t be enough to kill her. Even from this distance, he could see her chest moving. But it would buy him time until he figured a way off this floor.

Even if he had to lift a desk and hurl it through the glass. Let the firemen below know that there were people up here in need of rescue.

The conference room was his best bet. Maybe he could use that gun to shoot out the glass. Ah, damn it! He kicked himself for not thinking about that before. Shoot the glass and start heaving office furniture out. A chair first, to get their attention. Then the conference room table itself, if he had to.

Jamie started down the hallway but stopped when he felt something on his pant leg.

Fingers.

Yanking the material downward.

“You,” Molly said, “never answered my question.”

The wound was mortal; Keene knew that. There wasn’t much time. The bullet must have nicked quite a few arteries. He could imagine the inside of his chest with miniature leaking hoses, and an imaginary coronary engineer throwing his hands up, exasperated.
What am I supposed to do now? I can’t fix this.

He also had a pain in his arse.

Literally. Something hard, jabbing him in the soft, fleshy part of his cheek.

“You just find out, or have you known for a while? I’m thinking you just found out.”

Keene looked at McCoy. His lover had a smirk on his face. Ordinarily, Keene took great pleasure in that smirk. It made him horny.

“I’m not going to sit here and explain it all to you,” McCoy said. “I hate that.”

“Yeah,” Keene said. At least, he thought he said it. It might have been in his mind.

“I will tell you this, though. And this is more of a personal note, though it does cross over slightly into the business end of things.”

“Yeah?”

McCoy. Always drawing things out. Forcing you to ask “what?” or “yeah?” or something. Even as he sat here, dying.

“I’m not even gay.”

Keene’s fingers found the Ruger, under his arse. He had the strength to lift it. So of course he had the strength to squeeze the trigger. Repeatedly. He blasted off the five remaining shots.

Most of the bullets hit McCoy. There was just one miss, making for a grand total of two bullets the next occupant of this flat would have to pry out of the walls.