up and sighted instantly, but the picture presented meant I did not fire. Neither of us did.
The lab was mostly white, lined with cupboards and workbenches, with half a dozen clearly delineated workstations. No clutter. Just mundane, like a particularly large kitchen that happens to have no appliances. It smelled of something sharp and acidic that I couldn’t place.
My mother was perched on one of the high stools that were slotted into each workstation. It had been dragged out into the center of the tiled floor and she sat very upright, with her knees together and, from the awkward set of her shoulders, her hands bound behind her back.
The man I’d christened Buzz-cut was standing to her right, which made him mine. He had a large-caliber silvered semiautomatic with the hammer back and the muzzle jammed into my mother’s ear, where it wasn’t going to come off target easily.
As soon as we’d come in, my mother’s eyes flew to mine and stayed there. She was terrified, but I saw the relief creep into them at the sight of us—at the sight of me. The situation was hopeless, impossible, but she saw us and for some reason I didn’t think I’d ever be able to fathom, it gave her hope.
The pickup driver was far right, splitting our field of fire. Sean’s Glock seemed to lock onto him of its own accord. The pickup driver also held a Glock. Without hesitation, he pointed it right back.
“Looks like we have a standoff,” Sean said. “Are you prepared to die here, gentlemen?”
“If we have to,” Buzz-cut said calmly.
“You must see this is not a winnable situation,” I said evenly. “From either side. You shoot, we shoot. People will die. What’s the point?”
He shrugged. “Surrender is not an option,” he said, and I saw the fierce pride in him. He skimmed eyes over me that were cold and flat. “You should know that, ma’am.”
So, he’d been a soldier, recognized like for like.
“O-kay, so, what happens now?” I said, allowing a hint of impatience to show. “We all wait here till we die of old age?”
Buzz-cut didn’t answer. Time bunched up around us, slow and heavy, as we waited for the first nerves to fail.
Then, suddenly, the door behind us punched open. Sean and I darted sideways, ready to meet a new threat, but it didn’t take a fraction of a second to know we were outgunned.
The six-man team that entered were dressed in SWAT black, armed with Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine guns, utterly focused, and completely multilateral when it came to taking sides. They pointed weapons at all of us.
I tuned out the yell of commands to give ourselves up and get down on the ground, and kept the sights of the Glock lined up steady on Buzz-cut’s face. Until he lowered his weapon, I was damned if I was going to lower mine.
The pickup driver was the first to fold. But then, I suppose he had the freshest memory of what it meant to be shot. He came off target, letting the barrel rise as he brought both hands up. Very slowly, using only his finger and thumb, he laid the gun on the ground. When he straightened, his hands were already linked behind his head.
As soon as the pickup driver surrendered his gun, Sean snapped his aim across to Buzz-cut, nearly giving the two guys who were covering him heart failure. If they’d been any less well trained, less experienced, they probably would have taken him out right there and then.
The shouting died away. They must have known they were wasting their breath. I wondered how long it would be before the shooting started.
Then I heard more footsteps slightly behind me, to my right. Two sets. Not the harsh dull clatter of boots on tile, but the lighter tread of good shoes with leather soles. I didn’t take my eyes away from Buzz-cut, even when I saw the way he stiffened at the new arrivals.
“Sean, Charlie,” Parker Armstrong said in a calm and reasonable voice. “Please lower your weapons.”
The surprise was such that, for a moment, neither of us moved.
“In case it’s escaped your attention, Parker,” I said, without turning, talking through gritted teeth to avoid moving my jaw and unsettling my aim, “the guy over there has a gun to the head of a hostage.”
I had to think of her in those terms. Depersonalize it. It was the only way I could function.
“It hadn’t,” Parker said, and his voice was dry now, “but I need you to trust me on this.”
There came a silence into which I swear I could hear the beat of my own heart.
“If he pulls the trigger,” Sean said in that pleasantly lethal tone I knew so well, “I will kill him, regardless.”
“And if you don’t, I’ll kill him for you,” Parker said, diamond hard and just as polished. “But it won’t come to that. We
Sean let out his breath on a long hiss, then relaxed out of a shooter’s stance. With a feeling of hollow regret, I did the same. The nearest man in black held out his hand for the Glock. I stared him down and kept it in my hand, letting it hang alongside my leg with my finger outside the guard. He saw the blood in my eye, shrugged, and didn’t make an issue of it.
Across the room, my mother’s lids fluttered closed, like she was praying. I couldn’t bear to watch, glanced towards Parker instead and saw my boss was back in his usual sobersuited office attire. He looked tired, the lines on his face more deeply etched than when I’d last seen him in the rest stop south of Boston, only days ago.
He acknowledged our capitulation with no more than the twitch of his facial muscles, but a little of the tension went out of his shoulders. He’d staked his reputation on being able to control us, I realized, and more besides.
Parker threw a look to the man who was standing silently alongside him.
The other man was older, someone I’d never seen before, with a silver mustache and cold, cold eyes. He, too, was wearing a somber suit, with a bland tie and spit-polished shoes, but he was military through to his bones. He accepted Parker’s unspoken challenge without a flicker, and lifted his chin, letting his voice carry over to Buzz- cut.
“You too, son,” he said, low and slow like tires on a gravel road. “Stand down, now.”
Buzz-cut braced, like he had to force himself not to come to attention.
“Sir, I am acting under direct orders from Mr. Collingwood—”
“Mr. Collingwood is no longer … fit for duty,” the man said, slicing him off. He let his eyes trail briefly over me and there was nothing in them. It was like being gazed at by a snake. “He has been relieved.”
A faint flush appeared across Buzz-cut’s cheeks. “I’m sorry, sir, but my orders still stand. Mr. Collingwood was very clear on that.”
You had to admire his guts, if nothing else. Six men pointing guns at him and he never flinched, never wavered. Easy to see why Collingwood had chosen this man to do his dirty work.
My mother’s eyes were still closed. As I watched, a single tear broke loose from the confines of her right eye and trickled slowly down her cheek.
“Son,” the man with the gray mustache said, with ominous quiet that was more effective than any parade- ground bark, “you know who I am, don’t you?”
Buzz-cut paled visibly. “Yessir!” he said. And still he didn’t lift the gun away from my mother’s head.
I caught a slight movement behind Parker. My father and Terry O’Loughlin had moved into the doorway of the lab. They would have been told to stay back, I knew, but could no more obey that command than voluntarily stop breathing. The man with the mustache ignored them both.
“I don’t know what Mr. Collingwood told you, son,” he said. He took a step forwards, speaking each word clearly, so there would be no mistakes, “but I can tell you, right now, that you have been involved in an unsanctioned operation. Do you understand what that means?”
“Sir?”
For the first time, his gun lightened a fraction. To my left, one of the SWAT team rolled his shoulders a little and settled more fully into the stock of his own weapon.
The man with the mustache sighed, took another step. “Mr. Collingwood took it upon himself to encourage Storax to investigate the side effects of one of their drugs without withdrawing it from testing. In order to do this, he lied, falsified his reports, and misused the resources placed at his disposal by the federal government. He may
