The Protector (2003) (35 page)

"I did it," Jamie said. "I found the right pair." From down the hall, they heard water splashing out of the opened pipe in the bathroom.

Trying to control his emotions, Cavanaugh noticed an outline on the floor where a furnace had been. He focused on hooks projecting from the wall next to the breaker box. The hooks must have had something to do with supporting the furnace ducts, he realized.

Pressured by time, he returned his attention to the wires in the breaker box. "They've got to be longer."

Jamie pulled two wires from a gap in the wall, stretching them as far as they would go. She and Cavanaugh bent them back and forth rapidly to create enough friction to break them.

Meanwhile, the pump kept droning, spewing water from the pipes in the next room.

As Cavanaugh used his teeth to pull the insulation off the tips of each wire, the flame got smaller. Jamie attached another section from Cavanaugh's shirt and pulled the fire into the corridor. "I don't see any water on the floor," she said in alarm. They hurried toward the water splashing into the washroom and found that only the central part of the washroom's floor was covered with it.

"My God, there's a drain," Jamie said. She yanked off her blazer and pushed it onto the drain, trying to create a plug.

Cavanaugh left the burning cloth in the corridor and hurried in next to her, adding his jacket as well, pushing it onto the drain.

Tense, they watched the water collect. Feeling light-headed, Cavanaugh realized he was holding his breath.

The plug worked. The water began to spread. As it reached the entrance to the corridor, Cavanaugh got to the burning cloth and pulled it back to the utility room.

He heard a frenzied splashing sound and realized that Jamie was kicking water along the corridor, trying to make it spread as far and fast as possible. At the breaker box, he grabbed the wires that he'd bent back earlier, the ones that had made a spark. Keeping them separate, he extended them to their maximum length from the box and connected them to the wires that he and Jamie had taken from the gap in the wall, twisting them together.

The tips reached the floor.

Jamie's bare arms flashed in the light from the burning cloth as she appeared at the entrance to the utility room. "The water's spreading."

"We have to get it to here." He ran into the corridor with her and had just enough light to see that the murky floor was covered with a film of water. He helped kick it as far as it would go, guiding it toward the utility room.

Before it got there, he hurried back and raised the wires off the floor, keeping them separate, suspending them over the hooks next to the breaker box.

The water entered the utility room. "Jamie, get your belt."

Simultaneously, Cavanaugh separated the burning cloth from his belt and dipped its buckle in the approaching water, cooling the metal. He put the belt's tip through the buckle and cinched it, making a circle. Jamie did the same with hers. He looped his belt over a hook. So did Jamie.

As the water spread toward the burning cloth near them, they waited in silent tension for the light to be extinguished. Just before the fire made a hissing sound, in the last of the light, Cavanaugh separated the wires that controlled the water pump.

The underfloor droning stopped. So did the splashing. The flame went out.

Plunged into darkness again, they waited.

The chill of the water added to that of the concrete. Cavanaugh shivered harder now that his upper torso was completely exposed. In the blackness, he listened to Jamie's nervous breathing.

He tried to distract her. "When this is over, I'll have to teach you about neuro-linguistic programming."

"What's that?"

"A way of using language to control what you're thinking and feeling."

" 'When this is over'? You're doing it to me again, making me think we'll get out of this."

"We
will
get out of this." Cavanaugh hoped he sounded confident. "Visualize what's going to happen and what you need to do. Don't let yourself get surprised by something you haven't imagined."

"I'm visualizing sunlight."

"Which you'll see very soon."

"The future tense is wonderful."

"Isn't it, though."

A rumble from along the corridor indicated that the concrete door was being opened. The sound of numerous footsteps came down the steps, echoing along the corridor. Flashlights glared, high enough that they didn't reveal the film of water on the floor.

"I've brought your doctor," Grace said.

In the utility room, Cavanaugh and Jamie remained quiet.

"Where
are
you?" Grace demanded. No response.

"Where
are you?
Damn it, get out here! I warned you what would happen if you tried to hide."

No reply.

"Flash-bangs you want, flash-bangs you get," Grace said.

Fabric rustled. Cavanaugh guessed that the team was putting on ear protection. He felt for Jamie's hands, pressed them over her ears, then quickly protected his own ears. That would help against flash-bangs detonated a distance away, but if any were thrown into the utility room, the nonlethal concussions would be so great that hands over ears wouldn't relieve the agony.

In his imagination, Cavanaugh heard the clatter of a flash-bang hitting the floor of one of the rooms.

A muffled blast compressed the air around him. Reverberating off the concrete, the roar was something he felt as much as heard.

Another distant blast shook him.

And another, coming closer.

Cavanaugh pressed his hands harder against his ears. When yet another flash-bang detonated, Jamie leaned against him, trembling. The blasts were in rooms close enough that Cavanaugh could see the fierce glare--the flash of the immobilizing device--reflect off the corridor's walls. He assumed that Grace and her team were shielding their eyes.

The next roar was even closer. The flashlights revealed the shadows of men with submachine guns moving along the corridor. As much as Cavanaugh could tell, Grace and her team were at the water. Their earplugs would prevent them from hearing the faint splash of their footsteps, but any second now, they would look down and notice what they were standing in.

In fact, they already had. When another flash-bang didn't go off within the interval Cavanaugh expected, he eased his hands away from his ears.

"What's all this water?" Grace demanded. "Where the hell did it come from?"

Cavanaugh tapped Jamie's shoulder, feeling her respond to the signal they'd agreed on. She shoved an arm through where her belt was looped over the hook above her. Hanging, she lifted her shoes out of the water.

"Check these last two rooms," Grace ordered.

In a rush, Cavanaugh shoved his right arm through where his belt was looped over a hook. He raised his knees, hoisting himself off the water.

The next instant, he lifted the wires from the hook where they'd been suspended and dropped them into the water.

If this doesn't work

... he thought. He'd expected to see sparks when the wires struck the water, but he saw nothing and immediately knew that he and Jamie were doomed. I'm sorry,
Jamie,
he thought.

An eerie noise made him frown.

Uuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhh.

It came from the corridor. Low, wavering, guttural. Several similar sounds joined it.

Uuuuuuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhh.

Cavanaugh abruptly understood that he was hearing men groan as electricity shot through them.
Crack. Bang.
Then a clatter. Submachine guns dropped, echoing harshly. Flashlights fell, their glare rolling across the water-covered floor, their tight seals preventing them from taking in water and being extinguished.

Uuuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

In the grotesque shadows created by the lights pointing along the floor, men collapsed, their silhouettes twitching in the water. The stuttering roar of a submachine gun tortured Cavanaugh's ears, but he couldn't cup his hands over them, had to keep his right arm through the belt, holding himself above the water. As the weapons kept firing, bullets ricocheted along the corridor. Men screamed. Cavanaugh couldn't tell if a gunman was aiming at an imagined threat or if the electricity jolting through the man had caused him to convulse, his finger squeezing the trigger. Empty cartridge casings hit the water, some jangling on top of one another. Then the submachine gun clicked on empty, and another loud clatter indicated that it, too, had fallen to the floor.

Uuuuuhhhhh.

The thrashing shadows in the corridor began to subside.

Uh.

The corridor became eerily quiet. Dangling by his right hand, Cavanaugh used his left to raise one of the wires from the water and twist it around the hook, interrupting the electrical circuit.

"Now," he told Jamie.

Chapter 6.

They dropped to the water. When they rushed into the corridor, the glare of the lights on the floor revealed ten bodies. Cavanaugh grabbed a submachine gun and prepared to shoot in case anyone was faking. He saw the contorted body of a man in a business suit, a doctor's valise next to him. He saw Edgar lying facedown in the water and reached into the man's baggy pants pockets, removing the Emerson knife and the Sig Sauer he'd expected to find there. He gave the handgun to Jamie and shoved the knife in his own pocket.

Grace. Damn it, where was Grace?

Hurried footsteps directed Cavanaugh's attention toward the end of the corridor. Silhouetted by sunlight, a figure darted up the steps toward the entrance.

Cavanaugh fired.

Bullets struck the steps, but Grace had already vanished through the opening, ducking to the left. Evidently, she had pressed the remote control on her belt. The concrete door began to descend.

Cavanaugh raced toward the steps, wondering how the hell Grace had survived. She must have been standing away from the water. Perhaps she'd been wearing rubber-soled shoes.

The concrete door sank lower. Cavanaugh heard Jamie charging behind him, but all he concentrated on was reaching the steps and lunging up them.

The gap of light was only two feet high now. He dove sideways, scraping his bare shoulders and back when he rolled. His body and then his shoes cleared the door a moment before it thudded into place.

In eye-stabbing light, he caught a glimpse of four startled men as he rolled upward and pulled the trigger, muscle memory controlling the length of time he pressed his finger against it. Tap. Tap. Tap. Three and four rounds at a time burst from the MP-5.

One man lurched back, blood spurting from his unarmored chest before he could raise his weapon. Another man did manage to raise his weapon, the wallop of bullets into his face deflecting his aim toward the sky as he fired and then dropped.

The third and fourth men scurried toward the rubble of the collapsed barn.

At the same time, Cavanaugh raced toward what remained of the burned mansion.

He dove behind the remnants of a stone wall just before the two men opened fire, bullets ricocheting. He hurt his bare chest when he landed on stones, but he didn't care--all that mattered was surviving, killing whoever blocked his way, and getting Jamie out of there.

But to open the door, he needed the remote control on Grace's belt. Where was she? Cavanaugh hadn't noticed her when he'd shot and run for cover. She'd disappeared to the left of the entrance, which was now on Cavanaugh's right. Her Ford Explorer was in that direction. Was she using it to hide?

A dark green station wagon, presumably the doctor's, was in front of the Explorer. Grace might be inching along them, trying to outflank me, Cavanaugh thought. Peering through a gap in the stones, he didn't have a vantage point that allowed him to see under the vehicles, where the movement of Grace's shoes might tell him what she was doing.

Likewise, the ringing in his ears prevented him from hearing faint sounds that might have warned him of what Grace or the two men were up to. His heart pounded furiously as he realized that he'd landed in a trough that one of the gunmen had made when the assault team had hidden among the rubble. To his left were similar troughs where wreckage had been removed. He crawled through them, over rubble, following the length of the collapsed stone wall. Trying to make as little noise as possible, he searched for a gap in the stones, a place through which he could study the ruins of the barn and perhaps get a better view of the vehicles to his right.