heavily to the ground. Matt stormed in, keeping Ogilvy in front of him like a shield. His eyes registered two other guys in there, in addition to the guy on the ground. They were waiting for him and had silenced handguns trained on the door. Matt didn’t slow down. He kept charging forward, holding Ogilvy in front of him, flying across the room in five long strides. Ogilvy jerked and flailed as several rounds cut into him, but the shooters didn’t have that much time to fire before Matt was right on top of them. He launched Ogilvy at the one dead ahead of him and leapt across at the other shooter, catching his firing arm with his hands and pushing his gun away while landing a heavy elbow across his jaw. He heard it snap as he spun around, still gripping the guy’s gun wrist with both hands and tracking it around through ninety degrees until it was facing the other shooter, who was busy pushing Ogilvy’s bloodied body off of him. The two silenced handguns pirouetted around in unison to face each other, only the one under Matt’s control got there a split second earlier and he squeezed hard against the guy’s trigger finger. The handgun belched a round that caught the opposing shooter squarely in the neck. The guy recoiled as a burst of blood geysered between his shoulder blades, just as he let off a round of his own that whizzed by Matt and buried itself somewhere in the wall behind him.
Matt felt the shooter behind him squirm. He slammed his elbow back into him, mashing his throat. He felt the shooter’s body go rigid as the man convulsed in a pained gurgle—then Gracie yelled, “Matt,” again. He spun his gaze back toward the entrance to the suite and to the guy who’d taken the door in the face. Half his face was glowing an angry purply-red. It had to hurt. He was on his knees, straightening up, looking across at Matt. He’d just recovered his gun when Gracie screamed and just hurled herself at him, tackling him from the side. The shooter reacted fast—he just whipped up his arm and deflected her, sending her crashing against the wall behind him, but it bought Matt the precious seconds he needed to play puppet master again and raise the arm of the shooter behind him and fire off a couple of rounds into purple-face.
He took a second to catch his breath and let his heartbeat go back to something that vaguely resembled normal, then wrenched the handgun out of the shooter’s hand, kicked him aside, and pushed himself to his feet. Gracie stood up, her face locked in shock, and stepped over to join him.
He cast his eyes around the suite, and a grim realization hit him. There was no transmitter in the room. No control master board. And no Danny either. He thought back to Ogilvy wandering around the stadium, to the shooters’ position when he’d come through the door. It had been a trap. They were waiting for him, using Ogilvy to draw him in. The transmitter had to be nearby—the signal had come from that general area—but it didn’t matter anymore. He was sure they wouldn’t have risked having Danny inside the stadium. He had to be outside somewhere. That is, if he wasn’t controlling the transmitter from across the state, or the whole country, for that matter.
Matt’s heart sank. He frowned as Gracie took a couple of steps and looked out through the suite’s floor-to- ceiling glass pane, into the heart of the arena. He edged over and joined her. The sign had risen through the open roof. Its bottom edge was just beyond the tangent to the roofline, dipping into the cube of empty air over the stadium floor. Father Jerome was still on the stage, his arms outstretched, mumbling a prayer. And every single person in the stadium was still standing.
A warble snapped his attention. It was Dalton’s cell phone. Rydell was calling.
He picked it up.
“We think we’ve got them,” Rydell blurted out breathlessly. “Get your ass out here. They’re here.”
Chapter 77
“Where? What’s going on?” Matt asked, his voice racing. “There’s a tall building that backs up against the entrance of the red lot on the north side,” Rydell said. “Might be a hotel, I’m not sure. It’s got a pool on one side and a parking lot all around it. There are four guys on the roof. They’ve got the launchers.”
The words were like an afterburner to his senses. He glanced out the glass wall. The sign was hovering over the stadium now. His mind rocketed back to Rydell telling him it could stay up around fifteen minutes before it burned out. He knew it wasn’t long before it would vanish, and once that happened, the crew with the launchers would also be gone. Taking Danny—if he was there—with them.
“Where are you?” Matt asked.
“At the east end of the lot, by the Center.”
Matt was recalling the park’s layout from the website they’d studied the night before. “So if I come out the north gate—”
Rydell jumped in. “Just head straight up across the lot and you’ll hit it, it’s about five hundred yards away.”
“I’m on my way. Keep this line open and keep me posted.” He turned to Gracie, his face alight with hope. “They’ve got a fix on the launchers. I’m going after them.” He stepped over to the downed shooters, retrieved two of their handguns, and stuffed them under his belt. He pulled his shirt out and let it hang down to cover them. “Come on. You get back to the car and wait with the guys.”
“You can’t go after them alone,” she protested.
“Don’t really have a choice,” he told her. “We’ve got to go.”
OUT IN THE RED LOT, Rydell and Dalton stood transfixed before the laptop’s screen. The Draganflyer was in a holding pattern about two hundred and fifty feet over the target, its night-vision lens on full zoom. They were probably the only people for miles not to be staring at the blazing sign that had now cleared the stadium’s roof and was hovering in the night sky above it. It was a mesmerizing, awesome sight, visible for miles around. The thousands of onlookers in the parking lots and on the jammed freeways were just rooted in place, utterly enthralled by the otherworldly apparition.
Rydell checked his watch. He knew what was coming, and sure enough, it happened almost on cue. The sign pulsed slightly, like a beating heart, then just faded out like a snuffed-out candle. The crowd reacted with an audible collective intake of breath and scattered cries of “Praise the Lord” and “Amen.”
He glanced at the screen. The guys on the roof were moving fast now, packing their gear. He knew how efficient they’d be. They didn’t surprise him. Within a minute, they’d stowed the launch tubes and the rest of their gear and disappeared into the building.
“Come on,” he mumbled, almost to himself, and craned his neck, angling to get a better view of the stadium’s north entrance, as if he could spot Matt, but the entrance was too far and his sight line was blocked by all kinds of tall vehicles. He glanced across at the north end of the lot and the big building that loomed over it, behind a row of trees. He shook his head ruefully, and made a quick decision.
“The guns are in the glove box, right?” he asked Dalton.
Before Dalton could answer, he’d already scurried over and pulled out the Para-Ordnance.
“What are you doing?” Dalton felt a stab of fear at the sight of Rydell holding the silver handgun.
Rydell flicked his eyes across at the stadium, then up at the building, then back at Dalton. He handed him his phone. “I’ve got to help Matt. Stay with the car.” And before he could object, Rydell was gone.
MATT EXPLODED out of the stadium’s north entrance and just plowed on, with Gracie close behind. He reached the lot and stopped, shot a quick glance across the cars to get his bearings, and pointed Gracie in the direction Rydell had said the big SUV was parked.
“They should be around there somewhere, at the back.”
She nodded, and he was gone.
He sprinted through the rows of cars, SUVs, and pickup trucks, cutting around the clusters of revellers, twisting and ducking and weaving like a wide receiver charging the end zone and looking for his own Hail Mary pass. One and a half minutes later, he saw the last row of cars and the low perimeter fence of the lot. He threaded his way through a couple of camper vans and reached the fence, then stopped in his tracks at the sight of Rydell,
