The lead operative scowled and brought up his wrist mike. “I’m giving him another prod. Get ready to move in if he still doesn’t take the hint.”
The harsh voice came back with, “Standing by.”
He hit the send button on his cell phone again.
THE WORDS on the screen seared Bellinger’s eyes. He glanced up, his alarmed gaze raking the bar, a tourniquet of dread choking the life out of his heart. Everyone around him suddenly looked suspicious, threatening, dangerous.
Matt noticed.
“What is it?” he asked.
Bellinger blinked repeatedly. He was having trouble focusing. For a confused moment, the faces in the bar all seemed to be staring at him with unbridled malevolence.
Matt’s voice broke through again. “Vince. What is it?”
Bellinger turned to him, his words catching in his throat. “This was a mistake. Forget I said anything.”
“What?”
Bellinger stumbled to his feet. He looked squarely at Matt, his eyes bristling with fear. “Forget I said anything, all right? I’ve got to go.”
Matt shot up to his feet from behind the table and reached out, just managing to grab hold of Bellinger’s arm. “Cut the crap, Vince. What’s going on?”
Bellinger spun around, yanking his arm free with rabid ferocity before pushing Matt back with both hands. His frenzied reaction surprised Matt, who fell back and landed heavily, jarring his head against the booth’s wooden edge and triggering a ripple of commotion that startled the drinkers closest to him and pushed them back a step.
Matt straightened up, his head throbbing from the knock, and staggered to his feet in time to glimpse Bellinger disappearing into the crowd, rushing for the door.
He bolted after him, ducking into his wake, into the clear path that snaked through the drinkers all the way to the bar’s entrance.
He burst out onto the pavement and stopped in his tracks at the sight of Bellinger being manhandled by two bulky men and getting dragged into the back of a van.
Matt shouted, “Hey,” and charged at them, only his feet had barely left the ground when he felt something heavy slam into him from behind, catching him at the base of the neck and across his back, pounding the breath out of him and sending him flying face-first onto the snow-speckled pavement.
He landed badly, his right elbow taking the brunt of his weight and lighting up with pain, and before he could push himself back onto his feet, two sets of strong arms grabbed him, pinned his arms behind his back, and shoved him toward the van before throwing him in through its open doors.
He landed—hard—on the van’s ribbed, bare-metal floor, heard the van’s doors slam shut somewhere behind him, and felt his weight slide back as the van took off. Jarring images and sensations were coming at him thick and fast and assaulting him from all angles. Still facedown, one eye squashed against the floor, he heard muffled shouts and angled his head up to glimpse Bellinger, the two bulky men over him, and the vague outline of—that couldn’t be right—a woman with a shoulder-length bob, seemingly attractive, looking back from the driver’s seat, her head silhouetted against the van’s windshield, backlit by the streaming lights from beyond. One of the men was sitting on Bellinger’s back, pinning him down, one hand covering Bellinger’s mouth and blocking his screams of protest. The other was bent down beside them and loomed over Bellinger. He held something that looked like an oversized electric shaver in his hand.
A vaguely familiar high-pitched whine, something powering up, pricked the edge of Matt’s hearing, but in his frazzled state, he couldn’t quite place it. He turned, trying to shift himself over and onto his back, but one of the men who had grabbed him stomped down heavily on his back and sent him splattering against the van’s floor again. A jolt of nausea rushed through Matt as the whine reached a fevered pitch, and his muscles seized up as he realized what it was.
Straining to raise his head an inch, he caught sight of the second man bringing his hand down onto Bellinger and branding him with what Matt now realized was a pocket Taser. Bellinger screamed out in agony as a faint blue light flickered inside the van. A two-second burst was usually enough to bring a fit man down with major muscle spasms, three seconds was enough to turn most men into the sobbing equivalent of a fish flopping around on a dry dock. Bellinger’s hit lasted well over five seconds, and Matt knew what the effect on the scientist would be. He’d been at the receiving end of those prods. It wasn’t a pleasant sensation, especially not when they were wielded by neolithic prison guards. His skin bristled at the memory, the buzzing noise dredging up the pain of what felt like thousands of needles being shoved simultaneously into every pore of his body.
The van made a left turn, the shift in momentum allowing Matt a brief respite from the weight pinning him down, and he spotted Bellinger’s tormentor finally putting down the Taser and bringing out something much smaller, something that glinted at him in the jagged lights cutting in and out of the van, a syringe, which he swiftly plunged into the stricken man’s back, just below the neck.
Bellinger’s flopping stopped.
“He’s done,” the man announced without a hint of exertion or discomfort in his voice, as if what he’d just accomplished was no more than a routine chore.
The bulldozer sitting on Matt asked, “What about this one?”
The man who’d dealt with Bellinger mulled the question for a moment. “Same deal,” he decided.
Not the answer Matt was hoping for. Then again, none of the likely answers held much appeal.
One thing he knew: He wasn’t about to sit back and let a million volts fry him inside out.
He glimpsed the man moving off Bellinger and making his way over to the back of the van, the pocket Taser in hand, the ominous whine cranking up again.
Just then, the van made another turn, a right one this time.
Time to be a killjoy.
The weight of the bulldozer sitting on top of him shifted slightly from the turn, lightening momentarily. Matt summoned up the furious energy in every corpuscle of his body and suddenly heaved back, as hard as he could. The move caught his captor by surprise, making him lose his balance and sending him flying against the wall of the van. Matt quickly managed to get both hands under him to increase his leverage, then followed through with a full twist, weaving his fingers together and locking them just as he swung around and used his extended arms as a baseball bat.
He caught the bulldozer flat across the nose, a loud, bone-crushing splat erupting in the van. The man’s head ricocheted against the van’s wall before he curled over, writhing with pain.
Matt didn’t pause to watch. There were three other thugs to deal with. The two who’d been busy with Bellinger could wait. The bulldozer’s partner, also at the back of the van, was the more immediate threat, and he was already leaping at Matt. Matt steadied himself on his elbow and bent down as he followed through with his roll, the move adding momentum to his leg which lashed out and hammered the incoming attacker across the neck. As the man’s head bounced heavily off the van’s rear doors, Matt pounced up, grabbed his head with both hands, and pulled it down, connecting it with his knee. Something in the man’s face cracked audibly and he went reeling backward, toward the front of the van, falling over the immobile body of Bellinger and interrupting the other two men’s advance.
Matt saw them clambering over Bellinger and knew he only had a second or two of clear air. He also knew he wasn’t likely to take them out as easily.
There was only one option, really, and he didn’t hesitate.
He grabbed the rear door handle, yanked it open, and despite the micro-glimpse of a car trailing not too far back, flung himself out of the moving van.
He didn’t have far to free-fall before hitting the asphalt. It was beyond brutal. His left shoulder and hip took the brunt of it, a lightning bolt of pain shooting through him as he landed. He rolled on himself several times, a cascade of confusing, alternating glimpses of streetlights and tarmac flooding his senses, every inch of his body getting its share of beating. A sudden, ear-piercing shriek hounded him, bearing down on him alarmingly fast, the sound of rubber scraping deliriously across asphalt, the hard-braking car’s front bumper only a few feet behind him and gaining fast.
They finally came to a rest together, as if in a synchronized performance, Matt inches away from the car that had fishtailed slightly and was now at a slight angle to the road. Through his dazed whiteout from the pain and the
