Severance Package (17 page)

Now she looked at herself, and was stunned by the passage of time.

Ten years ago, a much scrawnier, timid version of herself would have been looking back from the mirror.

A little girl, so eager to please.

Now she was different.

She was a young woman, much stronger, much bolder.

But still, eager to please.

Some things cannot be beaten from your soul.

Girlfriend spoke to herself in Russian. Mumbling, really. Nonsense rhymes. Things she would say to herself when she was a girl.

That was enough now. No more indulgences.

Number three was still missing. He had never shown up to the meeting, yet there was evidence he had arrived at the building.

Number three might still be hiding on the floor.

Or, Ethan had been clever enough to find a way out of David’s traps.

Twenty floors down,
somebody finally spotted him.

Well slap him and call him Susan. Weren’t security guards supposed to keep an especially keen eye on the fire towers? You know, as a potential security risk? Glad to know the Department has been in such safe hands all these years. Then again, that was probably the point. A heavily armed, man-heavy, hard-core, SWAT-style building security team would be kind of a red flag to the enemy. And what was the use of running a cover business if something like that blew the cover?

Still, Ethan knew there were fiber-optic cameras up and down the friggin’ tower. Even the lowest of the low-rent skyscrapers had ’em. He waved, then saluted each with a middle finger, on the way down. Hello, asses. Notice me.

Every couple of concrete staircases, he collapsed. He didn’t know if it was the nerve-agent blast or the pen tube in his throat or the remnants of that friggin’ French martini worming its way through his mind. But Ethan felt like hell.

So he collapsed.

He didn’t feel bad about it. As long as he fell on his back, no worries. If he ever pitched forward, however, they’d find a hung-over twenty-something with a pen tube sticking out through the back of his neck. That would be a tough one to explain to his parents.

Ethan’d told them he was in law school.

For seven years now.

Maybe they didn’t know how long law school took.

By floor sixteen, however, everything changed. Ethan felt an awesome weight on his head and shoulders. His eyes felt heavier than ever. When he started to pitch forward toward a cold slab of landing, it took every last bit of strength to buck himself backwards. Must … land … on … back….

Absurd, wasn’t it, how your most basic needs could change within an hour?

Must … eat … Big … Mac.

Must … land … on … back … so … pen … tube … doesn’t … kill … me.

Ethan’s wish was granted.

He landed on his back.

And gurgled loudly before he passed out.

Maybe it was just his nerve-agent-riddled imagination, but as he drifted into unconsciousness—and Ethan knew this was going to be one of those long-haul blackouts, not one of those wimpy pass-out sessions that lasted only a few seconds—he thought he heard footsteps pounding toward him. A fist on a steel door. Someone saying, Is anyone in there? The faint sound of a metal door latch twisting to one side. Another footstep, fainter still, on the concrete landing above.

And the final bit of sensory input, just before Ethan grabbed the heavy black curtain by the corner, folded it up over himself, and rolled over to one side:

You’d better come down to sixteen, Vincent.

Molly flipped open the compartment on her bracelet that held the ear receiver. She flipped the micro-size
ON
switch, then pushed it into her ear canal. The receiver was pretuned to pick up all internal radio contact. She didn’t expect to hear anything useful, but it was possible that Ethan had made it out of the building and was calling for backup. If so, she’d hear the security chatter. Not a huge worry. She’d just have to speed the assignment up. Hope that her reaction time would impress Boyfriend.

She’d been wearing the ear receiver for only a few minutes when she heard:

You’d better come down to sixteen, Vincent.

Static.

What’s going on?

Static.

I’ve got a guy down here you should see.

Static.

Let me guess. He has cuts all over his hands from pushing through a window.

Static.

No. He’s unconscious and he’s got a pen sticking out of his throat.

Ethan.

The scream made sense. Ethan must have felt something was off, and tried to flee early. Probably had enough sense to avoid the elevators—they were easier to control or sabotage or both. But he didn’t have enough sense to realize that a man who would sabotage an elevator would do the same thing to a fire tower. That miscalculation had earned him a blast of weaponized sarin.

Molly knew the effects of sarin; she’d briefly trafficked on
behalf of an Afghan warlord years ago. And Ethan probably had enough sense to know what was happening. Probably felt his skin burn and his eyes bleed and his throat start to close, and he had been smart enough to attend to his throat first. Bleeding eyes will hurt—but a lack of air will kill you.

Look where that got him. On the sixteenth floor, surrounded by building security.

Ethan Goins was supposed to have been seated in the conference room-with the others. She had arranged everyone in order: Ethan was third. First, David. Then Amy Felton. And then Ethan, the hired muscle. She had even checked to make sure that Ethan was on the floor. His office door was open. His computer on. At the time, Molly had assumed Ethan stepped out to use the men’s room.

And he had.

The men’s room …

… on another floor.

It all clicked into place. The thirty-seventh floor was currently unoccupied. A mayoral candidate based his headquarters there until a dismal showing in the May primary bounced him out of the race. Now there was nothing but office partitions and rented desks that needed to be picked up and restocked. There were also two restrooms—men’s and ladies’—on the thirty-seventh floor. Unlocked. Free to anyone in the building who preferred a little privacy when attending to bodily functions.

Like Ethan.

He must have been on his way back down—the fire tower staircase was the easiest way between two floors—when David had engaged lockdown, as well as the sarin packages. Ethan had opened the doors. Ethan had received a wet surprise.

Poor Ethan.

Actually, screw Ethan. He was to have been third. This was not the way it was supposed to have unfolded.

Now building security had discovered him.

There was a good chance he was already dead. Sarin is nasty. Hard to shake the effects, even if you are tough enough to perform a self-serve tracheotomy.

But what if he were alive?

Ethan knew a lot. If he regained consciousness, he could ask for a pen and paper. Another pen, that is. Then he could make the remainder of the morning considerably more difficult.

Molly needed to make it to the sixteenth floor as quickly as possible.

Vincent waited for the elevator. He was more than a little relieved. Rickards had the culprit, who was unconscious. Vincent wasn’t sure what this “pen in his throat” stuff was all about. Rickards wasn’t a confrontational guard, and even if he was, he wouldn’t attack somebody with a friggin’ Bic.

Whatever. He knew this guy he caught had to be responsible for blowing out a window on the north side. Mystery solved. He and Rickards could escort the guy down to the lobby, call the Philly PD, ask for an incident report, then boom. Back to the world of
Center Strike,
where there were bigger problems than a blown-out window and a dude with a pen in his throat.

Molly flipped open another compartment on her bracelet. She removed a pair of plastic wraparound safety glasses. She unfolded the arms, and then the bridge, separating the two lenses from each other. The hinge in the middle snapped in place with a hollow click. She aimed the lenses at her face, holding them a few feet away. It was
Hamlet,
minus Yorick’s skull. If Yorick wore plastic wraparound safety glasses.

She waited for the camera buried in the frame and lenses to come online. Then she held up her free hand and showed the lenses three fingers.

Always have backup technology.

Straight out of Murphy’s beloved Moscow Rules.

“Hey, mate,” Keene said. “She’s back.”

McCoy had ducked out to take a leak or throw up or just stare at himself in the bathroom mirror. You never knew with McCoy. Once, Keene had caught him rubbing an issue of
Vanity Fair
around his neck and under his chin. Free cologne, he explained. Then he’d gone out and blown an absurd amount on a bottle of single malt.

“And I know you’ll want to see this.”

Keene heard the toilet flush.

Ah, taking a piss.

“McCoy! Your girl is back online!”

A meaty head popped out of the door.

“What?”

Molly placed the glasses on her face and then made her way to the north fire tower. Had to be that one. It was the closest to the active side of the office. No reason for Ethan to select the other. He’d be going out of his way to visit a bathroom.

Now it was time to outrun a sarin bomb, perched over a doorway.

Molly had faked a marriage to an actuary for three years. She figured she could pretty much handle anything.

It was all about the speed. Blast through the door, make it down the first concrete staircase, then vault to the left, hands on
the landing, and flip down the next staircase. And so on. Hope she made it clear of the dispersal cloud fast enough. Even a little bit in her lungs could slow her down. Take root there. Potentially ruin the operation.

The door latch. That was the problem. She couldn’t hold it down and flip through the door at top speed at the same time.

She ran through the gear in her wrist bracelets. Wire. Blade. Hooks. Heroin. USB key. Poison.

Wait.

Wire. Hooks.

She fished out the gear, tied off the hook, looped the wire around the flat door latch, pulled it to the right, freeing the bolt from the strike plate, then sank the hook into the drywall to the right of the door. She let go. The wire held. All she needed was for it to hold for five seconds.

Five seconds was a generous amount of time.

Molly leaned up against the opposite wall, then launched herself through the doorway. Steel banged against the cinder block. As she sailed through the air, hands outstretched in front of her, she heard a
beep beep
and a pneumatic
hisssssssss.

The device had been placed above the doorway, some kind of delivery nozzle pointed down—just as she thought it might be. She imagined the nerve agent coating the backs of her bare legs, her heels … but no, that wasn’t possible, she’d moved too fast. She was fine. She was
fine.
Her palms slapped the concrete landing below and she regained her balance and immediately twisted to the left, planted both feet on the ground, then flipped backwards down the flight of stairs, her outstretched palms waiting for the harsh slap of concrete so she could twist her body to the right this time, and then feel the concrete beneath her feet again, and flip backwards again….

This was just a vault and floor routine, she told herself. Just like 1988.

Only, no rubber foam or plywood or springs. No music. No padding on the perimeters. No choreography.

Simply cold, unforgiving concrete.

She could do this.

And her glasses were going to stay on her face the whole routine.

Because she wanted them to see
everything.

McCoy, who was finally out of the bathroom, squinted at one of the laptop monitors. He settled into his chair.

“She’s stunning, isn’t she?” McCoy said, pulling the zipper up on his jeans and trying to find the buckle to his black leather belt.

“I’m dizzy,” Keene said.

“How is she taping this?”

The image on the monitor was a Steadicam nightmare: a shaky, floor-over-ceiling-over-floor blur of motion, with a cinder block wall doing a violent 180 every so often.

“Cameras in her spectacles. I saw her put them on. She showed us three fingers before proceeding.”

“Three fingers,” McCoy repeated.

“But what is she doing? She came blasting through that door like someone was after her with a gun. Now she’s trying to qualify for the Olympics by flipping down a bloody fire tower. Strange way to make a getaway. She’s not even finished her operation.”

McCoy wasn’t paying attention, though. He kept his eyes on the monitor and searched the table for the thick file Girlfriend had sent him. “Number three, number three,” he said. “Yeah, that’s Goins.”

“Odd thing was, she took time to set up the door handle before going berserk.”