Chain of Evidence

“What a fucking windbag,” the blond man said. He looked about twenty-one. He, too, held a weapon on Dart. “I say we tap him right here.”

“No,” came a recognizable voice from behind. “You’re in a bad situation here, Officer Dartelli,” Proctor said, confirming to his subordinates that Dart was in fact a cop. It struck Dart as a curious move. “Don’t do anything stupid. Anything we’ll all regret.”

Proctor showed himself then, stepping past his uniformed guards, his hands in the air. “I’m unarmed and defenseless,” He took another tentative step forward. “Are you going to shoot me?” His eyes wandered over Dart’s shoulder, and he gave away that he had spotted the green button. He knew more about the computer system than Dart would have given him credit for.

“Back!” Dart challenged, waving the barrel of the weapon slightly.

Two minutes, he thought.

“Are you really going to shoot me?” Proctor asked, hands still out away from his body. His forehead was beaded with sweat, his suit pitted below the arms.

Dart felt a dizzying drain to his system as he paled and felt cold. His shoulder was losing blood badly.

“I’m not armed,” the man reminded. He smiled, as if to calm Dart. He kept walking, sliding one foot tentatively ahead of the other. He wasn’t interested in reaching Dart, he wanted the mainframe.

Dart’s dulled mind could barely think. The man took another step forward and Dart said overly loudly, “Yes, I copy,” into the room.

The words startled Proctor, who stopped in his tracks. His eyes swept over Dart, looking but not finding the microphone.

“Video and audio,” Dart lied, unsure if either was working any longer. He watched as the color drained from the man’s face. “Anything that you’d like to say to the command van?”

“If that were true,” Proctor said, taking another step forward, “they would have long since come to your help. Nice try.”

Dart couldn’t tell him why they couldn’t come, so instead he said, “I haven’t given them the signal.”

“I don’t think so,” Proctor said, taking yet another step.

“Don’t,” Dart warned.

“Put the gun down,” the unsteady guard cautioned. His arms were tiring from holding the weapon, Dart noted. His aim would be off because of this.

Three minutes … How much longer?

All the lights failed at once, leaving only the computer’s tiny lights ablaze.

Dart saw a white flash as the guard fired and missed. Through ringing ears he heard the unmistakable sound of glass breaking and metal ripping as the ERT team set off explosive charges at five entrances.

They’ve ruined it! he thought, angry that Haite had authorized the raid, knowing as he did that this would jeopardize their evidence.

Not knowing where the strength or reserve came from, Dart lunged in the dark to block Proctor from reaching the computer, every muscle, every tendon screaming. He collided with the man and went down hard just as the first glow of the emergency lighting seeped into the room from the wall sconces. Proctor pushed away hard and struggled to his feet.

Dart raised the weapon and slipped his finger inside the trigger guard.

The blond security man trained his weapon on Dart.

There was a loud pop that occurred just before Dart went blind with pain. His face seemed to explode at the same time as his ears failed him, and he wailed into the room along with the others. He screamed for Zeller, and lost friends; for his mother, and lost souls. Consumed by an overpowering white light, and deprived of his hearing, he folded into a ball and fell away from the world, as would a man thrown from a cliff. Weightless, and sublime.

CHAPTER 45

A dusty image of Haite loomed above Dart wearing a look of concern, and Dart wondered why his first experience of death should be an image of his former sergeant, a man with whom he had never been particularly close. He would have preferred an image of Abby. A conversation with Zeller. A bronzed and naked body, perhaps. Anything but Haite.

He felt as if he were at sea, rocking in a light chop. He found the sensation comforting and pleasant.

“Can you hear me yet?” the sergeant asked loudly.

He remained cloudy, a vaporous apparition.

“Go away,” Dart said, wanting a dream, not a nightmare. “Leave me alone.”

“Stun bombs and phosphorus grenades,” the sergeant explained in an apologetic voice. “ERT toys,” he said.

The rocking, Dart realized, was the stretcher being carried up the stairs by a couple of paramedics with buzz cuts. He still couldn’t see very well.

“Your hearing will come back,” Haite said loudly.

And then the pain hit, a headache like a ton of bricks.

“Your head may hurt,” he heard a voice suggest from behind him.

“No shit,” said Joe Dart. He blinked away some of the pain and tried to identify which orb was the sergeant. He picked the one leaning over him. “Why? Why after all that did you abort? Jesus….” His thoughts trailed off with his voice. Rage surged through him, but without any physical energy to support it, it dried up, defeated. He felt on the verge of tears. Exhaustion. Self-pity.

“No, no,” Haite said.

“For me? You did it to save me? You’ve wrecked me,” Dart said. He wanted Haite to hurt for this; he wanted someone to pay. He wanted to be left alone to cry.

“Ginny solved it,” Haite said.

“She couldn’t download the file as long as it was in the buffer,” a techie’s young voice explained from behind him. It took Dart a moment to identify it as the voice of the command van technician. “When you cut the text, it was captured in RAM. You had to do this to keep the other person attempting access from deleting the files. There it was, this chunk of text, floating in the computer’s memory-but in a buffer, not on disk, not somewhere that Ginny could grab it.”

Haite said, “He should rest.”

The techie added excitedly, “The mainframe was set up to save all buffers to disk in the event of a power failure. Ginny realized this-realized the only thing to do at that point was to cut the power.”

They cleared the stairs, and Dart felt the legs of the stretcher released, and suddenly found himself being wheeled. The bumps hurt every inch of him.

“Later,” one of the paramedics complained to Haite. “Let him rest.”

Ignoring him, the technician continued. “The machine itself is protected by a backup power supply, so once we cut the juice, it dumped its buffers to disk, and Ginny, waiting for it, grabbed the file. It took her a couple of seconds is all.”

Seconds? Dart thought.

“After that,” Haite said, “it was all ERT. We’d lost you on the radio. We weren’t happy campers.”

“We got the file?”

“We got everything,” Haite confirmed. “Ginny’s a fucking genius.”

CHAPTER 46

Arielle Martinson looked much smaller, much older in the CAPers interrogation room, even with her high-