The Miranda Contract (9 page)

Another shot rang out.

The man next to him started to sob and shake at the same time, breathing through his mouth, blubbering. Dan turned a little and sat up next to him. The man’s eyes were shut tight, his hands still clutching at his head.

“Dude, it’s okay,” Dan said softly.

The man shook his head violently.

“Seriously, you’re not going to die.” Dan gave him a quick rub on the shoulder. “It’s going to be okay.” He smiled quickly and then shuffled past him to the other end of the van hoping to get a better look at the area. His senses automatically tightened on the surrounding electrical networks despite the growing pain in his head. He had to press his fingers to his temples to really get a good lock on the invisible world around him. He could trace the grid under the road, connecting the airport and the hotel and all the other facilities in the area.

It was amazing what a little adrenalin could do.

From the end of the van he could see the entrance to the hotel. A woman lay on the crossing, her body wrapped around a small child as she tried to move herself out of danger. There was a horrible dark patch on her shoulder and her arm was hanging unnaturally.

The kid would have been about three, Dan thought. He could see its fingers digging into the mother’s useless arm, clinging to her and burying its head into her chest. A frail thing, in danger but unable to do anything except hide its face and wish it all away. Dan looked briefly back to the courier. The man was still shaking but his eyes were now open, giant black eyes, terrified.

“Stay here,” Dan said. “Don’t lose it, okay?”

As Dan lifted himself back to his feet, ready to slip around the edge and into danger, the courier squawked. It was such an unusual sound that Dan hesitated, a small smile playing on his lips.

“What?”

“Y-you can’t go out there,” the man said.

Dan looked around the edge of the van. The woman had given up trying to move.

“I think I can,” Dan said.

“But… but you’re not bulletproof.”

Dan wasn’t really sure that was true, but he gave the man a reassuring smile.

“Neither’s she.”

It was eerily quiet on the road. Dan walked into the open, his eyes scanning the revolving hotel doors and the designer shrubbery either side. He imagined he’d see a man in black, or a shadow, or something; but all he saw was the woman and her child.

There were vague emergency sounds coming from somewhere but Dan’s normal senses were distant now, replaced with the awareness of the electrical world. The buses and taxis lining the streets were an assortment of alarms and automatic transmissions, MP3s and GPS. He pressed the sense down, laying it flat so that he could focus on the woman.

He took another step, and then two more, gaining confidence.

Dan never saw the shooter. The bullet hit him high and he found himself flung backward, his whole body lifting off the ground for a moment. When he collided with the road he was looking upward, at the grey sky.

The clouds skittered across like the world was stuck on fast-forward.

He hadn’t realized the winds had picked up.

And his body seemed to be on fire. All at once.

Another shot rang out. Something to his left exploded into strange grey dust.

The woman. She was still there. Just out of reach.

Dan rolled over and planted his face into the hard road, his nose pressing against the asphalt. He knew he had to move.

His hands pushed himself up and he lifted his body. Sparks of lightning flickered across his vision and he could feel it coursing through his veins, hot and angry. He’d been itching to release the stored charge, even tempted to play havoc with the departures board, but now the energy was invigorating him, allowing him to move even though any other person who had been shot would have stayed crumpled and prone on the road.

As he rolled into a crouch, Dan looked to the hotel doors again. With the adrenalin pumping and the electricity so close to the surface, he managed to catch glimpses of the security cameras’ vision. Sketchy black and white images were lifted from the hotel’s surveillance devices and replayed inside Dan’s head.

A figure stood inside the empty lobby, the lights dimmed so that it couldn’t be easily seen from outside.

But it was enough.

Dan focused the power inside him. The flickering images danced in his mind and as the figure lifted its arm, Dan fed the electrical beast that was hiding inside the hotel. He fed it a banquet.

The lobby’s lights flared beyond their natural capacity. The doors stopped revolving, distorting the shooter’s view. The bank of computers along the reception desk exploded and the lobby was showered in sparks and shards of glass and silicon. In the chaos, Dan sensed an unusual energy, powerful but not connected to the hotel’s systems.

He shuffled across to the woman, still keeping low. Mysteries could wait.

She looked up at him, her face smudged with tears and gravel. The kid seemed to be asleep, not moving; breathing but in shock. He tried to smile at her, but it wasn’t done yet. He looked to the lobby and knew he could talk with her, console her, later. If he wasn’t dead.

When he crossed onto the red carpet outside the hotel, Dan blasted the revolving doors, cutting loose with his stored energy. They flew backward so well that Dan grinned, enjoying himself even though he had already been shot once and probably had a few more bullets to take that morning. He crossed the threshold and the lights dimmed again allowing him to draw back the remaining electricity. Wisps of blue and white snaked out from the walls and the floor, merging with his body, charging his unique cells.

The shooter stood in the center of the empty room, a pistol clearly visible, held out to the side. It was a man. Dark, shoulder-length hair, expensive but damaged sunglasses and a coat, burnt at the edges.

Dan wasn’t much better. He was bleeding and a bit ripped. He noticed the growing red patch on his t-shirt. It was the one he’d bought at the Gyroscope concert, one of his favorites. Dan sensed something else, a distraction. His eyes darted to the side, dismissing the shooter for a second as he honed in on the strange energy. It seemed familiar, like a pattern, but it was obscured, somewhere behind him near the entrance.

The shooter cocked the pistol. Dan turned back and watched as he raised the gun.

And shot himself.

In the middle of the lobby.

Dead.

Dan stumbled backward, stunned, his eyes dancing with lights and disbelief. Behind him the sirens came into sharper focus, but they were still too far away. The shooter fell to the carpet.

The pattern suddenly began to unfold itself. Dan’s eyes stayed on the dead man, but his mind was thrust back to another time and place. His grandfather’s face loomed in his mind, the Mad Russian and his veiled tutorials on explosives and terror.

Dan recognized the pattern clearly then. It was there in the deceptive signal, the muted pulse, the engineered madness.

But it was too late. Again.

And the hidden cache of explosives detonated.

Chapter 13

Miranda

S
he had seen
the effects of explosions on the television news, but seeing the collapsed hotel right in her personal space made Miranda hesitate. She stood in front of Sully, the sun somewhere behind him, hidden from her by his enormous frame.

She had been furious.

She had been storming over to find the pizza boy freak and demand to know why people were trying to kill her, why snipers had taken shots – real shots – at her car.

But now she just stood there, her trainers mere inches from the rubble. Her people managed to get her close enough but now she didn’t know what to do. An entire building lay demolished in front of her, like children’s blocks smashed to dust and jagged remnants.

While Miranda didn’t know what to do, Sully did. His hand was on her shoulder, he’d had it there for a long time – probably since they’d been attacked in the car. A bomb blast on the side of the road followed by a hail of something metal which skittered off the windows and bodywork of their car. Bullets. Lots of them, from both sides of the road.

It all seemed so intense and lethal at the time, but looking at the hotel site shunted her own experience into perspective. And the pizza boy was under there.

Sully squeezed her shoulder gently and then stepped forward, his boots resting on the blocks of cement or wall, testing the resistance. He moved upward, two, then three steps. Behind them, the police muttered into radios and waited for construction trucks to arrive. Miranda blocked out their noise and focused on Sully. He crouched down, placing his palm against the almost-flat surface. And then he jack-hammered his other hand: up, then down, so fast that it was a blur.

She stumbled back, her hands lifting to shield her eyes from the dust as Sully smashed his fists into the rock. A police woman waved her hands at Sully, looking panicked. Two more officers moved towards Miranda.

Sully plunged both his hands into the surface, right up to the biceps on each arm. His back arched, impossible muscles pushed against the fibers of his suit. He didn’t look like an ordinary man anymore, and as he lurched upward, bringing a huge chunk of concrete with him, up over his head, Miranda remembered the way he had first been introduced to her: Suleyman the Great.

“Oh my god,” the police woman said, and stepped back, holding Miranda’s sleeve, guiding her away as well. “That’s impossible.”

Sully moved back down the slope of rubble and placed the solid section he carried down by the side of the road. He lay it down neatly and then took off his jacket, tossing it to the side, already forgotten. His face was only a little flushed, and he moved smoothly back up to where he had begun excavation and reached down for more collapsed walls to pile down at the roadside.

After a half hour of digging, Sully’s body was covered in sweat and concrete dust, but he never paused, never tired. Down in the crater he carved out of the debris, Sully pressed his bare fingers into a thick sheet of metal, spreading the surface enough to gain purchase. He tore the metal apart like unwrapping a present, bending it back in jagged strips. Miranda was in the car, hidden behind the tinted windows and out of the dusty disaster zone. While the driver listened to the radio in the front seat, Miranda looked out on the silent scene, watching Sully toss the layers of metal out of his hole to crash around him. The rest of the site was untouched. She didn’t know how he knew where to dig, or why he focused on that particular place. There was a lot about the big man she didn’t know.

And then he pulled out the boy.

She could tell it was him because he was still wearing the same clothes he had been wearing the night before, and there was a thin shiny chain hanging from his wrist, sparkling in the sunlight. It had been attached to a suitcase but there was no sign of it now, and Miranda didn’t really care. Sully supported the boy, almost carrying him down to the edge of the rubble. Both faces were covered in grey dust. The boy’s shirt was ripped and there were red marks there, raked across his skin.

For the first time she didn’t feel like hating him. Because of her, she realized, this boy nearly died. He was lucky, she knew, but not because of anything she’d done. The boy in Jakarta had been younger, fourteen perhaps, and he hadn’t been able to survive his brush with Miranda Brody’s celebrity.

She opened the door and slid out before the driver could say anything in protest. Sully saw her coming but he didn’t reprimand her. He crouched down with the boy and let the paramedics come close. Miranda slid in beside Sully, his arm holding her against his reassuring body.

The boy’s face was bruised already. There was a cut across his eyebrow and his torso was bleeding too. He winced as the paramedics removed his shirt and began stabilizing him, but no matter what they did, he remained as alert as he could after being buried under a hotel.

“You have our thanks,” Sully said, touching the boy’s knee.

Miranda had no idea what he meant. She wondered how getting himself blown up could be of any use to her. But her anger quickly fled. Sully was worried about the boy. It wasn’t anything to do with her this time.

“Are you…” she asked, but her voice vanished.

He looked at her. Green eyes, somehow still bright, surrounded by the grey dust. He squinted a little, probably in pain, and then lifted his hand to touch his shoulder. It was bruised with a dark red mark there, a dark disk.

“Got shot,” he mumbled to her, his lips swollen with the effort.

Miranda nodded. She couldn’t see any entry wound, just the bruise. She wondered whether it bounced off him.

“Got buried.”

He smiled then, and the paramedics helped him to his feet. An Indian woman wearing a skirt and jacket stood just to the side, flanked by two police officers. She looked furious.

“Is he going to live?” the woman asked.

The boy’s smile widened and he turned his head painfully to look at her.

“Alsana, you made it…” he mumbled.

“All his vitals are fine,” a paramedic said. “Blood loss was a concern but it seems to have stabilized itself.”

“Yes,” Alsana said. “Well, Danny here is a most interesting boy. If that’s all, we need him to come to the police station. Parole violation,” she said, looking at Miranda.

“What?” Miranda asked. “How did he break parole?”

“Hotel fell on me,” the boy said. “That’ll do it.”

“We’ll have him back to you if he is viable, Miss Brody,” Alsana said. “In the meantime we need to make sure this isn’t all his fault.”

“Seriously? This boy gets blown up and you think it’s his fault?”

“Miss, you really don’t know anything about this boy. He is dangerous, even if he doesn’t look it.” Alsana made sure she didn’t actually touch Dan as he moved with the police towards the waiting patrol car.

Miranda stood with Sully and watched. Part of her wanted to scream at the woman, but part of her wondered how much of what she alluded to was true. As Dan reached the car, one of the officers opened the front passenger door for him.

He looked over the car’s roof towards Miranda, the smile still on his beaten face.

“This is great,” he called out. “I’ve never been in the front seat before.” And then he was gone.