Target Response (16 page)

The bandages were a dead giveaway, so he kept the hand buried in his trench coat’s deep left-hand pocket. He’d cut the bottom out of the pocket so that if he had to he could get to the .38 pocketed in his sport coat. He knew he had enough mobility in the wounded hand to work the gun; he’d already tried it out. It hurt like hell but it was doable. If it hurt that meant you weren’t dead.

He missed the feel of the .32 he’d kept hidden at the small of his back, but now that that dodge was known he’d given it up. The gimmick with the .38 was new and might conceivably catch some foe unaware.

A long, slim, flat-bladed throwing knife once more reposed in a sheath strapped to his left forearm. The Morays were on to that dodge, too, but Steve said to hell with them and toted the blade. There were too many circumstances where a silent throwing knife might come in handy.

As Steve hustled across the street in the middle of the traffic flow, an oncoming car’s right front fender brushed the edge of the tail of his open three-quarter-length trench coat streaming after him. The driver was halfway down the block before thinking to angrily honk his horn.

Steve liked weaving on foot through traffic; it tended to discourge shadowers. Not that anybody was following him as far as he was aware, but it was good tradecraft, just in case.

He crossed the pavement to the Gall Building lobby, went inside. It was pretty sad. The floor was covered with dirty linoleum in a faded green and pink checkerboard pattern, the walls were paneled to shoulder height in dark brown wood-looking plastic, and above that the plastered walls were painted mustard yellow.

A glass-fronted directory listed the tenants with white plastic letters on a black background. A glance told Steve that a lot of vacancies had opened up lately in the building. Another sign, as if any were needed, of the stinko economy.

The lobby was empty. No security guard or night watchman was on duty. Such amenities did not fall under the provenance of the Gall Building’s cash-strapped management and owners.

That suited Steve just fine. It meant that there was no register to sign in with, even with a phony name, and no witness to remember his face and visit.

A pair of elevators stood on the right-hand side of the lobby. Steve decided to take the stairs. An elevator could be a confining metal cage; not where he wanted to be when he was on the dodge.

The fire door was on the left-hand side of the lobby. Steve went through it into the empty stairwell and started the long climb.

It was an effort. He was in top shape and ordinarily he could have scaled five floors’ worth of stairs without much accelerating his heart rate. But his Crestfield ordeal and the succeeding days on the run had taken a lot out of him.

By the time he reached the fifth-floor landing he was breathing hard. His wounded hand throbbed fiercely. Each time it throbbed it sent pain waves hammering through him. He paused for a moment to catch his breath.

Steve reached under his sport coat, loosening the .45 in the shoulder sling under his left arm, in case he needed to get at it quickly.

Cracking the door open a hair, he peered into the fifth-floor hall, a long corridor lit by overhead fluorescent lights that were reflected as pale blurs in the linoleum floor. Offices lined the hall on both sides, their doors closed. Most of them had long since closed for the day, their occupants having gone home.

A light shone behind the frosted-glass door of an office at the end of the left-hand side of the corridor as seen from Steve’s vantage point in the stairwell.

That was the office of Holloman Research Institute, the front maintained by Doc Wenzle to cover his covert role as Dog Team handler and case officer.

Steve started to open the fire door, then ducked back when he saw the HRI outer door open. He held the door open a hairline crack so he could see what was happening.

A man came out of the office. He wore a dark narrow-brim hat and a tan raincoat. He was a stranger to Steve.

The stranger left the outer door ajar. Steve’s sight line from the landing would not permit him to see inside the office. The man in the tan raincoat crossed to the elevators, pressing the
DOWN
button.

A moment later, the door of one of the two elevators slid open. The man in the tan raincoat got in. He stood facing the hall, eyeing the HRI office, holding the elevator car in place by pressing its
OPEN DOOR
button.

A second man came out of the office. He wore a soft-fabric fisherman’s hat and a brown leather jacket. He eased the outer door closed and walked briskly across the hall to the elevator and got in.

The door closed and the elevator car started downward.

Steve emerged from the landing and went down the hall to the HRI office. The outer door was open a few inches. Reaching for it, Steve smelled the reek of gasoline fumes.

He reached under his jacket, snaking out the .45. He opened the door wider, holding the gun leveled as he stepped inside.

The smell of gasoline was stronger now, choking, almost overpowering.

Beyond the outer door lay a small anteroom with a couple of plastic chairs and a side table with some magazines lined up alongside one of the walls. At the far end of the anteroom stood Wenzle’s suite of offices.

Wenzle’s office door was open. Inside, the lights were on.

Doc Wenzle was in. But he was out, too—permanently.

Steve had gotten there a little too late.

Wenzle sat slumped behind his desk, leaning forward, head and shoulders sprawled flat across the desktop. A bullet hole in his forehead had spilled a large quantity of blood on the desk.

The smell of blood was an undertone in the stink of gas fumes permeating the office. The reek of gas was so strong there that it stung Steve’s eyes and burned his nostrils and the back of his throat.

The carpeted floor was stained dark with the stuff, saturated; visible fumes rose from it. It smelled like someone had emptied several gallons of gas in the room.

Steve started forward, stepping through the inner door. As soon as he crossed the threshold, a click sounded.

He jumped back behind the wall on one side of the doorway.

A spot of blue flame appeared on the carpet, spreading outward in a circle toward the edges of the room.

A whoomping noise followed, cueing the floor to suddenly burst into flame. Within seconds the inner office was an inferno, a fiery furnace.

Steve realized that upon entering the room he must have tripped some sort of electric-eye triggering device, causing it to detonate into flames that torched the gas-saturated space.

Heat from the conflagration poured out of the doorway. The inner office was a mass of yellow-red flames, blurring the image of the desk and Doc Wenzle’s dead body slumped across it.

Nothing Steve could do for Doc now, the poor old bastard.

Greedy arms of flame reached beyond the door frame, seeking to make inroads on the outer office.

Steve scurried back into the hall. He was too late to help Wenzle but maybe not too late to stop Doc’s killers.

No taking the elevators, not now when there was a fire. But he pressed the elevator’s
UP
button anyway, as a kind of safety precaution.

Steve rushed to the fire door, hammered the palm heel of his right hand against the wall-mounted fire alarm, breaking the glass and triggering the alert. Shrill fire bells jangled throughout the building, filling it with noise.

Steve hurried down the stairs, all five flights. It was a nightmare sequence, one that seemed like it would never end. Down one flight of stairs, then another, then hit the next landing below to resume the process all over again.

No matter how good shape you’re in, you can go down a staircase only so fast without running the risk of falling and maybe breaking an ankle or a leg.

The descent seemed interminable, but in reality it couldn’t have taken a moment or more before Steve reached the ground-floor landing.

He reached for the knob of the fire door with his left hand, pain screaming along the nerves of the injured hand and arm as he un-sealed it. He had to use his left—in his right was the .45, ready for action.

Steve kicked the fire door wide open, so that it swung back on its hinges and slammed into the outer wall.

Sure enough, just as he’d suspected, one of Doc Wenzle’s killers lurked in the hall, waiting for him.

It was the guy in the brown leather jacket. He stood facing the elevator doors, gun in hand. He’d fallen for Steve’s little trick of pressing the elevator button as if summoning the car to the fifth floor.

The guy turned around when the fire door crashed open but he was way behind the curve; Steve already had his gun in action and blasting.

Steve pumped a couple of slugs in the gunman, chopping him in the middle. The gunman spun and fell crashing to the floor.

It was a setup, Steve realized. The killers had come not only to eliminate Doc Wenzle but also Steve, a two-for-one play. They must have known Steve was coming up and gimmicked the scene to entrap him, too.

Too bad for them that Steve was shooting their ambush to pieces.

Gunfire boomed as a couple of slugs tore into the wall near Steve, missing him.

The second killer, the one in the tan raincoat, stood at the front of the lobby, throwing lead in Steve’s direction. The gunfire was meant to cover the shooter’s exit as he threw open the street door and exited the building.

Steve stopped long enough to put a bullet in the fallen gunman’s head, splashing his face into wet redness—just in case he wasn’t dead but still had enough life left in him to work the gun still clutched in his hand.

Steve crossed the lobby, throwing open the street door. He hesitated a beat before exiting.

Bullets ripped through the glass door, starring it in several places.

They’d been fired by the guy in the tan raincoat, who stood to the left on the sidewalk about twenty feet away.

A couple of paces away from him stood a passerby, a middle-aged woman in a brown topcoat who’d apparently happened by at the moment of the shooting. Wide, startled eyes were black buttons pasted on her doughy-white, double-chinned face.

Steve stepped outside, angling for a shot at the gunman, but the latter dashed behind the matron, sending her sprawling to the pavement in the process.

He ran, turning left and ducking into an alley between the Gall Building and a neighboring structure.

The matron recovered from her temporary paralysis from fear to open her mouth and set to shrieking. She had a hell of a set of lungs on her and unleashed an operatic aria of screams.

Ignoring her, Steve rushed past her along the sidewalk, stopping just short of the alley mouth. Ducking low, he stuck his head and gun hand around the corner of the wall at about waist height.

The guy in the tan raincoat fired at him, blasting several shots.

He jumped back, hiding behind the cover of a Dumpster an instant before Steve returned fire.

A booming blast sounded high overhead.

The fifth floor of the Gall Building, already a mass of flames, suddenly erupted in a massive explosion.

Had the killers planted an explosive device as well as a firebomb in Wenzle’s office? Or had the blaze touched off some built-in fail-safe device designed to protect the Dog Team’s secret files from exposure by obliterating them?

Steve didn’t know, and in either case the result would have been the same. The concussive bomb blast blew out all the windows on the fifth floor, raining flaming debris on the street scene below.

Chunks of fiery wreckage and glass shards pelted the sidewalk, none of them hitting Steve.

The terrified matron had stopped screaming long enough to crawl into a doorway and huddle there while the debris came falling down.

A few fireballs plummeted into the alley, lighting it up.

Above, oily black smoke poured out of empty window frames on the fifth floor of the Gall Building.

The debris stopped falling.

Footfalls sounded in the alley, the sound of the guy in the tan raincoat running away.

Steve ducked into the alley after him.

The alley was ten feet wide and sixty feet long, connecting to a parking lot in back of the building. It was lit by a few wall-mounted lights that left much of it in shadow.

Steve wanted to take the gunman alive. He was the only link available to the Morays and the hidden hand that lay behind them.

He blasted a shot at the fleeing man, who was at the midpoint of the alley. The guy flung himself to one side, swallowed up by a broad patch of darkness.

Steve didn’t know whether he’d tagged the other or whether the guy was playing possum, lying low to lure Steve into his gunsights.

The shooter had used the Dumpster for cover earlier; two could play at that game. Crouched low, Steve entered the alley, using the blocky bulk of the Dumpster to stand between him and the shooter.

Black shadow engulfed the stretch of alley where the shooter had disappeared. No motion or sound came from it as Steve advanced soft-footed.

The scuff of shoe leather on concrete pavement sounded nearby behind Steve, raising the hairs on his neck.

Before he could turn around something punched him in the back between his shoulders, hard. Stabbing him.

Someone flipped a switch, zapping him with a massive charge of electricity. The jolt knocked Steve flat onto the paved alley floor.

The crackling charge ripped through him, paralyzing him. He couldn’t move a muscle on his own will, not even to draw a breath!

He writhed in spasms on the pavement, helpless. The gun that had fallen from his hand had skittered across the concrete.

Electrified torment continued for a timeless, endless interval.

Footsteps approached, two figures nearing him, each coming from different directions.

One belonged to the guy in the tan raincoat.

The other?!

The guy in the tan raincoat stooped, picked up Steve’s fallen .45. He held his own gun pointed downward at Steve’s head.

“He’s tamed,” he said.

The electric current was suddenly switched off.