Fire With Fire

Nolan frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Well, if we were being optimistic, and if we stick with your pattern of Homeric sobriquets, we should assign her the code name ‘Penelope.’”

“And if we’re not so optimistic?”

“‘Calypso,’ of course.”

Nolan’s eyes seemed very tired, then he turned away. “We name her Calypso. Of course.”

CALYPSO

She tore out the tubes and the catheter, tried vaulting the side of the cell: she half fell, half collapsed onto the floor. Damn: legs wobbly as a boiled chicken neck, everything else stiff and too cold to move or even feel things reliably. Her fingers were particularly bad: almost no strength or sensation.

More shouting, again abruptly terminated by the weapons fire: closer now. Tactical training kicked in: since the hallway beyond the open door was as dark as this room, how were the gunmen moving, aiming? Had to be equipped with night-vision gear. That and suppressed weapons added up to covert ops or special forces. Yes, time to leave.

But how? Frozen, weak, apparently still wounded, and lost in the dark of an unfamiliar facility, she was as good as already dead.

But not if they couldn’t see her: that was the key tactical variable. Night vision-how could she defeat that? And then she knew.

Using the rim of the cell to hoist herself up, she hastily inspected its exterior. Yes, as expected: hard-copy status reports clipped to its side. Would have been interesting to read them, but she had far more important plans for the paper.

She tore off the sheets, rolled them into a long, composite taper, scanned the room for heating vents. She found one, scuttled feebly over to it, fumbled for the cover-release as the sounds came closer-which now included curt, muted exchanges she could not make out, occasionally broken by a few seconds of silence. But she knew what those exchanges were, just by the cadence of them: commo chatter on a tactical command net. Staccato-paced sitreps as the search-and-destroy team went room to room, objective to objective.

She bloodied her fingers getting the cover off the vent, discovered the dim reddish glow she had expected to find: battery-driven electric backup heaters that would take over for a few hours in the event of general power loss. She shoved one end of the crumpled rod of papers against the heating elements, waited for several interminable seconds.

A wisp of smoke, a glowing ember, and then a sudden yellow flare: they were burning. She crawled back to her tanning cell, holding the paper upright to extend the burn time, looked overhead: there was a smoke and heat sensor, just a foot behind her unit. She pushed the leg of the gurney: it resisted, then rolled half a meter. She locked the wheels, grabbed the edge of the cell with her free hand, took a deep breath, and pulled with her arm as she pushed with her legs.

Her muscles were obviously reawakening, because hoisting herself into the cell was not as difficult a task as she anticipated. But evidently her nervous system was becoming more responsive as well: the ache in her back became a knot of searing pain-so sharp and sudden that her lungs froze in mid-inhale.

Can’t yell, can’t even gasp: they’re too close. And it’s going to get worse-right now. She doubled her legs under her so that she was crouched and then stood slowly.

She might have blacked out for an instant-from the persistent dizziness or the crushing pain, she wasn’t sure. But there was no time to wonder. As she lifted the half-burned taper up to the smoke sensor, she heard distant footfalls-the sliding, sibilant gait of trained killers advancing in a double-time leapfrog pattern along the corridor. She looked up: the taper was burning directly under the sensor. Damnit, why don’t you work? Why don’t you-

The sudden downpour of water blinded her, soaked her, re-froze her-but it meant a fighting chance. Neither infrared nor light-amplification goggles liked precipitation much-and she had just called up a nonstop monsoon. She looked down, hesitated, daunted by the probable pain, but had no time to waste: she jumped down to the floor. She fell awkwardly, too nauseous and agonized to breathe, but she kept moving, hobbling to the door. She heard a break in the commo chatter and a muttered curse off to the left. Staying low, she tucked around the corner into the hallway, heading to the right. A 12-and-6-o’clock snap check: the corridor-what little she could see of it through the deluge of spraying water-was all clear. Clutching the sodden, flapping hospital smock close to her with one arm, she continued to the right at the fastest lope that she could sustain.

Chapter Thirteen

ODYSSEUS

The knob turned; the door swung inward. Caine was surprised by the casual confidence of the intruder: no low dodge to either side of the door. He came straight in, the muzzle of his assault rifle poking ahead. Caine waited a split second-until the intruder’s black-sleeved arms cleared the door jamb-before grabbing the muzzle with his left hand and yanking, hard.

As he had hoped, this good soldier reflexively hung on to his gun-which brought him spinning around the corner, blind. Caine planted his left leg across the intruder’s path, still pulling the barrel of the assault rifle while holding its muzzle wide of his own body. The soldier, struggling to keep balance, tried a skittering sidestep and tripped over Caine’s left leg. Caine followed him down, and-shocked at how calm he was-cocked back his knife hand to finish the job with a single overhand attack-

That he never completed. Strong fingers locked around Caine’s right wrist, one of them digging expertly into the nerve cluster just south of the base of his thumb. A sudden numbing spasm and his thumb popped away from the handle of the knife, which was immediately knocked out of his hand. Caine tried to spin out of the grip, found his arm already twisted behind him, then a knee in his back, pushing him forward and down. Caine belly-flopped on the floor of the kitchenette, the second assailant’s knee like a pile driver in his back: the air went out of Caine with a noise like a full bellows suddenly squashed flat. He was dimly aware of the first intruder scrambling back to his feet: “Son of a bitch! Who-?”

“It’s him,” said a voice behind Caine. “Livelier than we were told. Mr. Riordan, don’t give us any more trouble: we’re here to help you.”

Caine’s first response was flat disbelief-it’s just a ploy-but then he reconsidered: if they had wanted him dead, they wouldn’t be talking with him now. And it would also explain their casual entry. “Okay-but it’s customary for guests to knock before they come in. Particularly when they’re uninvited, the door is locked, and they arrive in the middle of the night. With big guns.”

“Fair enough,” said the voice as the knee came out of the small of Caine’s back and the hand came away from his wrist. Rolling over, Caine found the same hand now extended to help him up: at the other end of that arm was a surprisingly small, wiry man in black-and-gray urban camos. “Sorry about all this. We thought you’d be asleep; never expected you’d be up and”-he looked at the knife on the floor-“ready.”

“Yeah, well, I was. Now what the hell is-?”

“No time for questions. We’re here to get you out. Put on these goggles: they’ll help you see in the dark. Stay between us and follow our orders exactly. Meyerson, check the hall.”

Caine adjusted the goggles-light amplification augmented by thermal imaging-and let the larger one lead him out into the corridor after he had given it a quick duck-around check. “How’d you guys get here so quickly?”

“We were already here.”

“You’re site security?”

“No.”

“Then-?”

“This is special duty for us. We were assigned to stay here round the clock as security. For you. In case something like this happened.”

Downing had remarked that someone might still want Caine dead. Obviously, he had been correct. “Okay, so what do we-?”