Sweet Mercy (2 page)

Fluke nearly jumped. He’d forgotten the man beside him. He’d forgotten the entire situation for a moment there. But, apparently, he wasn’t the only one. Even the SWAT personnel, while maintaining their positions, had taken more relaxed stances.

Rachel stepped forward, ambling like a woman taking a relaxed

evening stroll, out to enjoy the scenery—although in this case, the scenery consisted of a stretch of sidewalk, some square-pruned shrubbery and the narrow parking lot fronting the building’s main entrance.

Fluke stayed at her side. “You handle a lot of these calls?” he asked.

“I need to focus,” she told him, in tones of infinite compassion. “Talk later.”

“Right.” Of course. Reverse empath, David had said. She needed to keep tight control over what she projected. Took a lot of concentration. What would it feel like to be with her when she wasn’t keeping it all under such tight control? Unbidden images rose.

He was lucky, in more ways than one. He didn’t have to do anything particular to activate his power. It was as autonomic as the pumping of blood through his veins.

They reached the main door without incident. David spoke through the specs. “I’m patching Rachel into the phone line we’ve been using to try to negotiate with the guy. We’ve pegged him as one Rick Longo. He’s been unresponsive, sounded agitated until Rachel got started, but still insists he’ll blow the place up, along with the hostages unless we meet his demands.”

“What’s he want?” Fluke asked.

“The CEO and other board members of the company in there with him.”

He wouldn’t get that. The authorities saw no sense in exchanging one group of hostages for another.

“Hello?” Rachel spoke. Fluke picked it up through the specs as well as first hand. “Will you let us in, please?”

“I don’t know.” A man’s voice—must be Longo’s—sounded hesitant. “The police aren’t supposed to come in.”

“We’re not police. It’s okay for me and my friend to come in,” she said, tones soothing as a balm on heat rash. “We just want to talk.”

Good tack. Longo sounded like someone stumped by anything unexpected, the sort who didn’t know how to come up with alternate plans on his own. Good for her to reassure him about a new option.

“What do we need to know about this guy?” Fluke sub-vocalized, using the specs to open a private channel to David. The reply came through the same channel.

“He’s got some priors for breaking and entering, petty theft. Nothing violent, no known connection to Capital Financing Company—not even as a dissatisfied customer. No one can figure him for doing the mad bomber bit.”

Rachel, meanwhile, made more encouraging and reassuring noises to the bomber. Her words accompanied the growing wash of peace and serenity, soothing all the hearts in her vicinity.

Motion alerted Fluke to the figure approaching the glass door from within the building, a stocky young guy with a blond buzz-cut, dressed in baggy slacks, t-shirt, and a vest of dynamite sticks. Though young, his face showed lines of a habitual sullenness presently softened into a bemused wonder. Fluke could sympathize with that state. One of Longo’s hands clutched what must be the trigger device for the bomb.

“Uh-oh. Dead man’s switch,” Fluke whispered to Rachel. “Don’t let him get
too
relaxed.”

“Thank you.” Rachel beamed at Longo as he opened the door, stepping back to let them in.

“You lock it now.” Longo handed her the key, stepping back, keeping Rachel and Fluke between him and any potential snipers.

“Can my friend do it? I want to talk to
you
.” Rachel smiled at Longo—beaming the gentle regard of a Madonna on the lucky creep.

What would he give to have her look at him that way? Probably not strap a bomb to his chest, Fluke speculated. Probably.

“Sure.” Longo’s lips quirked, making a valiant effort to produce the pleasant expression that must be completely alien to his features.

Fluke took the key ring from Rachel and turned to the door, inserting one in the lock, turning the ring with a jangle, and then silently turning the inserted key back as he withdrew it. He made a show of pushing on the door to prove it locked.

Longo paid no attention. He moved back into a lobby area, Rachel at his side.

“Aren’t you tired of all this nonsense?” she asked the bomber in sympathetic tones and waved a hand to encompass all the people sitting around on the floor, hands tied, backs to the walls and to a massive modern reception desk. Some of the women showed signs of recent weeping—reddened eyes, smeared eyeliner—but everyone seemed calm now, with Rachel there radiating her soothing aura.

“Why don’t you just disarm that old bomb and we can all go home?”

Longo’s face clouded, brows knitting with some inner effort. “I don’t know how,” he said. “I have to stay until it’s done.”

“Why’s that?” she asked in a tone of friendly interest.

“He said.” It appeared to cost Longo some effort to say that much.

“Who said?”

Longo’s face twisted, as if fighting some internal battle. He groaned.

“There, there. It’s okay.” Rachel soothed, turning a bit so that, in order to continue facing her, Longo must turn too, leaving Fluke at his back.

Fluke slipped the wire cutters from his pocket and, on silent feet, moved in. This was why he’d climbed aboard for this ride. He’d had enough instruction in disarming bombs like this that he knew the risks of cutting the wrong wire—but he also knew it had to be one of the two connected to the trigger device in the man’s hand. The rest was up to Lady Luck.

~ * ~

Rachel might have lost her focus in the next instant if Fluke’s heads-up hadn’t come through her specs’ link. “Stay cool. I’m moving now.”

She lowered her eyes to keep from starting at Fluke’s sudden motion, exerting all her focus to maintain the placid serenity flowing from her to the hostages and bomber. “Who said you have to stay here?” She kept talking, keeping Longo’s attention on her.

By the time Longo or anyone else could react, Fluke dove under the bomber’s guard, clipping a wire in passing and rolling through a summersault and back to his feet.

Longo’s thumb jabbed at his trigger device. When nothing happened, he jabbed it again, and again. The bomb vest remained inert. Thank God. Apparently Fluke knew his business.

“What did you do?” Longo shouted.

Rachel’s concentration broke as the hostages exclaimed and clambered up or helped each other to their feet, most running for the door. She relaxed her control, feeling only relief now the danger had past.

David spoke at the same moment, his voice clear and loud through her earpiece connection. “What’s going on?”

“I disarmed the bomb,” Fluke answered aloud, and her earpiece picked it up too.

“No.” Longo’s face twisted with distress. “No, no, no, no.” He continued vainly punching at his trigger.

“What’s wrong with him?” Fluke asked.

“I don’t know.” Something seemed more than strange about the man’s reactions, but bombers were strange by definition, right?

The hostages left the lobby while police entered, spreading out, surrounding Longo. David entered on their heels.

“Flat on the floor, arms spread.” A tall, burly man wearing a buzz-cut and SWAT jacket shouted, approaching Longo.

Longo stood oblivious to everyone and everything else, punching his device and muttering to himself.

The SWAT guy kicked Longo’s feet out from under him. Longo never let go of his device, not even to catch himself, and his elbows hit the marble tile flooring with a crack that made Rachel—and everyone around her—wince. Oops. She’d better shield herself now she’d completed her part in the operation.

Within minutes, police had wrestled the bomb-vest off Longo and secured his wrists behind him in cuffs. He only fought when they pulled the useless trigger device from his fist, at which point he began banging his head against the floor.

Rachel couldn’t prevent her distress at that and no one else could tolerate her broadcast of it. Several donated jackets soon pillowed his head.

“This guy’s even more damaged than your ordinary suicide bomber,” Fluke commented.

“Yeah.” Rachel turned from the distressing sight. “I don’t see how he could even have managed to create the bomb and take the hostages in the first place.” That took at least the ability to persevere through setbacks without disintegrating this way. She felt half-inclined to pat him on the shoulder and encourage the guy to get back on that horse…

She looked back as a pair of men in flak vests got him on his feet, hoisting him up, each taking an arm. They dragged him, while he hung like a dead weight, moaning and incoherent, to the back of a police van parked directly outside the main doors to the building.

She’d dealt with other hostage situations before, successfully derailed them, and never seen a hostage-taker fall apart like this.

Fluke stayed beside her. “That man’s not right. Like one of those wind-up toys keeps banging into a wall over and over again—can’t change directions when it hits an obstacle.”

“Yeah. That’s it.” Rachel turned toward him. “He said something about doing this because somebody told him to. And if it had been his own idea, he’d have reacted to me differently. The question is, who wound him up and pointed him at this wall?”

Two

Mesmero
. That’s what he’d call himself. Great name. Better than Albert Johnson, which was a nothing name, an anonymous, lost-in-the-crowd name. Like he’d been lost in the crowd as a salesman for Farmland Dairy Distributers. He’d been good enough at his job for twenty years. Never made Salesman of the Year, but he brought in clients and kept existing customers happy. Then that new crop of baby-cheeked sprats started in with their e-sales and web presences—bugling and twitting and what all.

Bastards. Speaking of which, he should have heard something by now. Mesmero checked the device on the passenger seat beside him. Damn. The signal had gone dead. A glance over at the neighboring building, across from the back lot where he’d parked his ten-year-old Camaro, told him there’d been no explosion. All he could see from this distance was the police van pulled up to the main doors. Something had screwed up his plans. Or someone.

He turned up the volume on his scanner, tuned to the police band. Annoying chatter and static, and then, “suspect apprehended.” They had his meat puppet.

Grinding his teeth, he flicked the device off again. It should have worked. He should have those board members by now. But you didn’t work as long as he had in sales without learning a little lesson called persistence. He’d have to find another way to get the bastards. He’d lost his job, his wife, and his home. They had to pay. Everybody had to pay.

~ * ~

Fluke remained close enough beside Rachel to distract her. Not only with his palpable nearness, but she caught a scent like deep woodlands where the smoke of a distant fire lingered on the air, primal and faintly alarming. It distracted her so much she had to work at keeping her feelings on an even keel.

“Where do you go from here?” he asked.

“Good question.” She’d come by teleport and now couldn’t spot Tom anywhere around.
Danged teleporters, always disappearing on a person.
She turned, scanning the area. David stood by the police van, talking

with an older man wearing a neat brown suit.

“I’d better catch up with my brother,” she said, “and cadge a ride home. I left without filling the cats’ bowls.”

“Connolly is your brother?”