Gallows Pole, page 16
It looked, he realized, very much like the weapon concealed under a newspaper on the front seat of his vehicle.
Heineman was moving, even as the “officer” fired. He was too late. The dart caught him in the right side of the neck. He felt the sting of the barbed projectile, then an icy cold feeling radiating from the spot where he’d been hit. In seconds, the cold was replaced by a rapidly spreading warmth, and then a delicious feeling of peace and well-being. Part of Heineman’s brain raged and screamed as the Lot Seventeen in the “police officer’s” own dart gun took over his will. But before long, he was beaming happily at the uniformed man advancing on him. What a good joke! he thought. That’s a clever guy who would come up with something like that. And if he had access to Lot Seventeen, then he must be a friendly. He needed to do what the man said. He needed to follow the man’s orders. He must be an officer. There was still a small, howling voice deep within Heineman’s psyche trying to rebel against the control of the powerful drug, and he frowned slightly as he tried to make sense of what it was saying. But the voice was muffled and far away, and there were important things he had to do. He needed to do what the man told him to do.
“Hands down,” a voice said in a heavy British accent. “By your sides.” Heineman complied immediately. How could he not?
“Turn around,” the voice said. “Face me. Keep your hands down. ”
He did as he was told. The man in the shorts and hooded sweatshirt stood in front of him. Heineman’s brain was muddled, but he realized that the man he’d been following wasn’t Dayton. He was bald, with a broken nose. He looked amused. Heineman tried to open his mouth to ask a question, but all that came out was a dry croak, like the cawing of a raven. The man in the sweatshirt smiled at that, a nasty and malicious smile that filled Heineman with a feeling of raw panic, of wrongness, of need to do whatever it took to make the man not be angry with him.
“Come on, mate,” the man with the accent said. “Get in the car. You’ve got an appointment.”
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The car ahead of Melissa moved forward again. She tried to follow and watch the mirrors at the same time. Her divided attention almost caused her to nudge the vehicle ahead and she swore as she slammed on the brakes. It was then that she saw the motorcycle.
She couldn’t tell the make of the motorcycle, but it was large, with a curved fairing on the front like a racing bike. She couldn’t see the rider’s face; it was covered by a helmet with a tinted face shield. As the bike pulled up behind the Suburban, the rider turned towards her car and looked directly at her.
“Bishop?” she whispered.
He raised a hand and waved, as if he’d heard her. Then he reached down and came up with an object in his hand that looked like an oversized tin can with two knobs sticking out of the top of it. As she watched, he twisted one of the knobs, then bent down and rolled the can under the back wheels of the Suburban.
She saw the doors on the side of the vehicle nearest her slam open and people began spilling out of it. Holy shit, she thought, he just rolled a bomb under a car in a crowded parking lot. Her view was obscured when Bishop gunned the bike’s engine, pulled up beside her, and rapped sharply on the window. As he exploded away from where she sat, she pulled out after him. Her lips were set in a thin line. When she caught up with him, she was going to have to put him under arrest. She only hoped no one was killed.
She was behind him at the edge of the parking lot when her car’s speakers emitted an unholy shriek of static, loud enough for her to involuntarily let go of the wheel and cover her ears. What the hell, she thought, the radio wasn’t even on. Then she realized her engine was dead.
She turned the key. Nothing. She looked around.
In the parking lot and the drive-through line, all the taillights on all the cars were out. The expressions on the faces of the drivers ranged from puzzlement to rage. They were all trying to start their vehicles.
She heard the roar of the motorcycle engine as Bishop pulled up beside her, facing the opposite direction from her direction of travel this time. She hit the switch to roll down her passenger side window. There was no response. She saw Bishop take another cylindrical object from beneath the fairing on the motorcycle. It was only then that she looked back.
Four men in dark suits had been heading towards her. They were all large, and they all had guns out. Three pointed pistols, and one was carrying what looked like a hunting rifle. As Bishop drew his arm back to throw the device in his hand, they scattered.
He dropped his arm, switched the cylinder to his other hand, and yanked the door open. “Get on!” he yelled at her.
“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled back.
“No time!” he shouted. “Come with me!” There was the report of a gunshot and a bullet smacked into the fairing of the bike. She grabbed her sidearm from her purse and opened her door partway. She didn’t dare fire back; there were too many civilians around, but she pointed the gun back towards the men anyway.
“FBI!” she shouted. “DROP YOUR WEAPONS!”
The only answer was another shot that shattered her rear window. People were bailing out of vehicles, running and screaming. The parking lot was turning into utter chaos. “Get on the goddamn bike!” Bishop yelled. He hefted the cylinder in his right hand again.
She ran around the front of the car, crouched down to avoid further gunfire. As she reached the bike, she straightened up and pointed the gun at Bishop. “Put the grenade down!’” she ordered. “There are civilians….” she was interrupted by a sharp pain in her right shoulder. She looked down. What looked like a small feathered dart was embedded in her shoulder, piercing through the cotton of her blouse. As a feeling of cold spread from the site where the dart had struck her, she saw Bishop heave the cylinder. There was a blinding flash and a hollow boom from a few feet ahead. She looked up. A thick cloud of smoke was billowing up a few feet away.
“Get. On. The. Bike!” Bishop snapped out every word.
There was no way to argue with him, she thought fuzzily. She needed to do what he said. She climbed on the bike behind him. She had a distant thought that it was a good thing she’d decided to wear pants today, instead of the skirt she’d been considering. If she’d worn the skirt, it would have been harder for her to do what Bishop said. And it was suddenly very important to her to do as Bishop told her.
“Hang on,” he barked back at her. She wrapped her arms around him, still holding her pistol, and hung on. He gunned the bike so hard the front wheel came up off the ground. He blasted through the cloud of smoke, nearly running down one of the suited men, the one with the rifle.
“Don’t let go,” he told her.
She didn’t.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
“Idiots.” Campbell‘s voice was controlled, but there was no mistaking the fury behind the words. He followed it with others. “Morons. Imbeciles.”
“Now wait a minute,” Dayton tried to interrupt. He was sitting in the front parlor of Campbell‘s house, perched on the edge of an eighteenth-century couch that probably cost as much as a luxury car. “My men…”
“Your men were supposed to follow and observe Saxon,” Campbell snapped. “Report on the progress of her investigation. Not get into a goddamned firefight in a crowded parking lot!”
“They were attacked,” Dayton said, his face set. “They had to respond.” He was getting a lot of money, in cash, for this off-the-books op of Campbell‘s, but he was damned if he was going to take this. He was already stressed out from the fallout at home. How the hell had his wife gotten hold of those e-mails to his mistress in California? He knew he should have deleted them. But Sonia had a gift for both recapping their recent trysts and describing her plans for their next one that belied her poor command of spoken English. And besides, they were supposed to have been in a secured computer file. He shook his head to clear those thoughts. One problem at a time.
“What they had to do was what any reconnaissance unit is supposed to do when confronted. Withdraw and report. But I suppose that wasn’t macho enough for your boys.”
“He’d disabled their vehicle,” Dayton said. He paused. “What the hell was that thing he used, anyway?”
“Electromagnetic pulse grenade,” Campbell said.
Dayton shook his head. “Those don’t exist.”
“Obviously,” Campbell grated, “they do. Unless you have another explanation for how the electronics of every car in the lot were fried at once. Not to mention every cell phone and all of the cash registers in the restaurant.”
“Where the hell did he get something like that?”
“That,” Campbell said, “is an excellent question.” He walked over to a cabinet at one side of the room and took out a bottle of bourbon and a single glass. He poured himself a finger of the dark amber liquid and swallowed it in one quick gulp, like an angry bird. He didn’t offer any to Dayton. “Mr. Rusk tells me that one of Bishop’s old associates, a Dr. Felix, formerly a member of Iron Horse, has gone missing from his civilian job at DARPA. I suspect Colonel Bishop has re-established his relationship with the elf who makes the toys.” He turned back to Dayton. “We might have been able to cover up the incident, you know. Blamed it on a freak lightning strike. If , that is, your goons hadn’t started shooting. The fallout from this is going to be ugly, Mr. Dayton. And I suspect most of it’s going to fall on you.”
“Not all of it,” Dayton said grimly.
“Yes,” Campbell said. “All of it. You will accept all the blame and keep me out of this. Unless you want someone else in my employ to pay a visit to your girlfriend in San Diego. A visit that will end up being both lengthy and painful.”
Dayton‘s face mottled with rage. “You fucking…”
“I intend to maintain my anonymity, Mr. Dayton. If you want your little Serbian whore to keep those pretty green eyes and that talented tongue of hers in their accustomed places inside her head, you’ll do everything you can to make that happen.”
Dayton stood up. “Okay,” he said, “We’re done.”
“Not quite,” Campbell said. “I’ve just been informed that Heineman has been taken. By some of my own men who know what they’re doing. You’ll stay here until he’s delivered. And then I’ll need some more of your men to provide security.”
“I thought they were morons,” Dayton sneered.
“They’re what we have on hand,” Campbell said, “And they’re adequate for sentry duty. Barely.”
“It’s going to cost you,” Dayton said. “Double.”
Campbell made a dismissive gesture. “Whatever,” he said. “Work it out with Mr. Rusk. After all,” he smiled, “It’s not as if it were my own money.”
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
She kept her arms wrapped around Bishop, hanging on for dear life as the big motorcycle roared down the highway, weaving in and out of traffic, occasionally going up onto the steeply banked right shoulder to avoid snarls. Cars honked angrily at them as they shot past.
Don’t let go, he’d said, and the need to obey him had overridden everything: wonder about what had happened, fear of the people following her, concern over how fast they were going. She had to hold on, because that’s what she’d been told to do. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she had the vague feeling that there was something terribly wrong with that need to obey, that there was something wrong with her.
She felt him lean into a turn and looked up. He was headed down an off-ramp at a speed that terrified her despite the thick cotton-wool feeling in her brain. She clutched him tighter, buried her face against his leather-clad back, and shut her eyes tightly. Her senses were filled with the smell of the leather, the roaring of the engine and the vibration that seemed to envelop the world. She felt the bike slow and pulled her head away with a gasp, opening her eyes.
They were pulling into a small, thickly wooded park. The big white truck she’d driven with Sims sat at one end of the gravel parking lot. It bore a logo identifying it as belonging to TED’S LANDSCAPING.
Bishop pulled the bike up next to the truck. A man dressed in a khaki coverall swung down from the driver’s side as Bishop pulled his helmet off. The man was slender, with olive skin and dark black hair brushed back. He looked like an old fashioned Latin matinée idol, except for the coverall.
“How’d it work?” he asked Bishop.
“A little too well,” Bishop answered. “It took out every vehicle in…” as he spoke, he tried to dismount the bike, but Melissa still had her arms wrapped tightly around him, holding him on the bike. “Hey,” he said. “You can let go now.”
She tried to process that. Was he actually ordering her to let go? “Hey,” he said again. “Let go.”
She let go. He got off the motorcycle and turned to face her, still straddling the passenger seat. Her arms were by her sides, her gaze fixed straight ahead. “What was…oh, shit.” He turned to the man in the coverall. “Felix, get the medical kit.”
“On it,” the man said, already halfway inside the vehicle. Bishop stepped over and took her by the hand. “Melissa,” he said urgently. “Can you hear me?”
She looked at him and tried to speak, but the words came out as a tangled mumble. A cold fear began rising in her. Had she suffered some sort of injury to her brain?
The man came back with an olive drab knapsack and handed it to Bishop. “Looks like she took a round in the shoulder.”
“Yeah. But look.”
She didn’t know if he was talking to her, but she looked down anyway. There was a red stain, about the size of a fifty cent piece, soaked into the white cotton of her blouse.
“That’s not enough blood for a bullet wound,” Bishop said.
“Nope,” the other man agreed. “Off hand, I’d say that’s a wound from a dart.”
“Melissa,” Bishop said. “Get off the motorcycle, please.”
She swung her leg over the seat and dismounted. When she was done, she didn’t know what to do next, so she stood there, silently awaiting further instruction.
“Lot Seventeen,” the man in the coverall said.
“Looks like it,” Bishop said grimly.
“Now where did they get their hands on that?”
“I don’t know,” Bishop said. “But it’s not good news.”
“Roger that.”
She half-heard the exchange of words, the meaning slowly percolating into her brain. She knew she recognized what they were talking about, but it took her a moment…
Suddenly, she remembered. Lot Seventeen. The chemical they called “Zombie Juice.” You gave someone some of that stuff, Lanier had told her, he’d do anything you told him, for about an hour. She’d been drugged, with a substance designed to rob her of her will. The thought caused her to feel violated. What they had done to her, she thought with a shudder, was akin to rape. No, she thought, it was worse than rape. They’d taken not just control of her body. They’d stolen her very mind from her.
The cold lump of baffled fear in her stomach began to slowly transform into a hot ball of rage. How dare they, she thought. How fucking DARE they? Whoever they were, she was going to track them down. She was going to get some goddamn payback for this. She was going to make someone…
“Hey,” the man in the coverall said. “What’s she doing?”
Bishop smiled. “She’s trying to fight it off,” he said admiringly. He gently took her hand. “Melissa,” he said. “If you feel yourself coming out of it, you need to sit down. Some people get some dizziness as it wears off. Maybe a mild feeling of…”
She bent over at the waist, folding her hands across her suddenly roiling stomach, and threw up onto the ground. He leaped away, just in time to avoid being splashed.
“Nausea,” Bishop finished. She felt her knees buckling, and then he was there, his arm around her shoulder, holding her up. She was shaking, either with the side effects of the drug or with anger, she couldn’t tell which. He led her over to a picnic table at the edge of the parking lot and guided her down. “It’s okay,” he said soothingly, “It’s okay.”
She bent over and put her head down for a moment to catch her breath, then sat up. “Like hell it’s okay,” she croaked. “Who the hell were those people? And how did they get their hands on Lot Seventeen?”
“Excellent questions, both,” the man in the coverall said. He stuck out a hand. “Armando Felix,” he said.
She took it. “Melissa Saxon.”
He took her hand and bent over it in a courtly gesture. “My compliments, Melissa Saxon.” he said. “Never seen anyone fight off the Zombie Juice that fast.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“I’m interested in talking to you about it,” he said. “Lot Seventeen seems to have rare idiosyncratic reactions in some people. Lanier, for example, seems almost immune to it, except it makes him violently ill. And you seem to bounce back from it very quickly.”
“It probably helped that I was pissed off.”
He scratched his chin. “Interesting.”
A thought occurred to her. “My car!” she said. “What happened to my car?”
Felix looked embarrassed. “Yeah. Well. That.”
“Dr. Felix’s toy was a little more powerful than advertised,” Bishop said
“Hey,” Felix said, “It was hard enough getting it down to man-portable size. We’re working on the fine-tuning.”
“That thing you threw under the truck,” Melissa said. “What was it?”
“That was a SREMP,” Felix said. “A little something I’ve been working on.”
She looked puzzled. “Shrimp?”
“S-R-E-M-P,” Felix spelled out. “Short Range Electromagnetic Pulse weapon.”
“Not short range enough,” Bishop observed.
Felix looked exasperated. “You want to try making one?” He turned to Melissa. “The SREMP sets off a burst of high-energy electromagnetic radiation. Harmless to humans, but it fries electronics. And since the engines of most cars these days are managed by computers…”
