Those sixteen miserable floors of hauling Ethan Goins up the fire tower were suddenly worth every step.
Look at her suffer.
Ania fixed her blouse the best she could, then walked over to Amy’s desk and snatched a pile of Kleenex from a box that was adorned with sunflowers. Stopping the bleeding was key. Lose too much and she’d become light- headed. She needed to finish off Amy, then David, then talk to Jamie. It was almost over.
But Amy was up a lot faster than Ania had predicted.
“I’m going to hurt you,” she said, spitting blood from her lips.
Quickly, Ania ran through her mental repertoire. What hadn’t she used yet? What could she do to impress the men at the other end of the fiber-optic camera? How could she save this abortion of a morning?
Amy lunged forward.
Nichole had only one idea in her head: Crawl back to the conference room and do something indescribably nasty to David to force him to reveal the lockdown code. Ideally she needed a torture she could accomplish with little strength, because she didn’t know how long she was going to last. And something she could do with no hands. Maybe she could crush his face with her heels.
She couldn’t bring herself to look at her severed wrists. She could feel her remaining hand there, hanging by what felt like the thinnest strand of flesh. She knew it wasn’t good. Knew she was losing more blood than she should.
Didn’t matter. She would crawl with two good knees. Crawl faster than she was losing blood.
No, she couldn’t.
She was being stupid. She needed to tie off her wrists. Then continue crawling.
But how?
You can’t tie off anything without hands, can you?
She’d try anyway.
Nichole would be damned if she would pass out from blood loss before a final encounter with her nemesis.
Her boss.
She rolled over onto her back, then angrily ripped at her shirt with her teeth. Fine. Let him see me in my bra. As I squeeze my blood into his face. Let that be the last thing he ever sees.
Tastes.
Then the solution came to her:
Kitchen.
Electric range.
A dial that could be turned with her teeth.
Keene needed to stop with the orange juice. He was drinking it compulsively now, and the acid was tearing up his stomach. The old habits were slowly creeping back. Only now with Florida’s best, rather than the smoky nectar of the Scottish highlands.
But what he was reading … well, it would have driven anyone to drink.
Keene had worked another source.
Keene’s second source was high-placed; it was rumored that she was the one who currently acted as a director of CI-6, or whatever you wanted to call their
If this intel could be trusted, then “Murphy, Knox” was not what his good buddy McCoy had claimed it was:
A cover for CI-6 operatives. Fixers. Sleepers. Black baggers. Accident men. Killers. Professionals, mixed in with civilian support, to complete the illusion of a working financial services company.
Nope.
It
Granted, it was a financial services company that was designed to infiltrate and destroy terrorist financial networks. Or for that matter, anyone whose finances needed destroying, international or domestic.
According to Keene’s second source, the funding worked both ways. Money poured out of Murphy, Knox, too. Funding training. Weapons. Research. Operations. Anything that you didn’t want attached to an official budget line? Simply run it through a guy like Murphy.
So why had McCoy lied to him? He clearly had to know this. He acted like he knew every intimate detail of that office.
And for God’s sake—why were more than a half dozen people going to die there this morning?
Jamie stared at the back of the chair he’d been sitting in about … oh, what was it? An hour? Two hours? Jamie was bad at noting the passage of time. Whenever he poured himself into his writing, it was as if the digital clock on his computer played tricks on him. He had an arrangement with Andrea during his parental leave: Every morning, he could devote some time to his freelance career, pitching stories to men’s magazines.
It was the only way, Jamie had explained, he’d ever be able to quit Murphy, Knox. Leave the Clique behind.
But by the time Jamie felt like real work was being accomplished, time was up. Chase needed his attention. Andrea needed a break. He was glad to give it to them. They were his family. His everything. But every minute away from his desk felt like another minute the dream was delayed.
And now this, stuck in the conference room with his half-dead boss, was like that. Being in that strange place where the clock seemed to be actively working against you.
“Jamie,” a voice said. “Are you there?”
God.
It was David.
Amy and Nichole had left clear instructions about what to do if someone—who was not Amy or Nichole—tried to enter the conference room: Aim for the head.
“I’m not going to kill anybody,” he’d told them.
“You want to see your kid again?” Nichole had asked.
“You can’t make me,” he said, feeling like a third-grader the moment the words left his mouth.
Nichole stuffed the third gun in his waistband.
“Do it for your family,” she said.
And then they’d left.
They had not told him what to do if David started talking to him. David, the man who started all of this when he tried to force everyone to drink poisoned champagne.
“Jamie … please.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Could I ask a favor?”
“What?”
“May I have a cookie? I’m starving.”
As much as he wanted to ignore him, Jamie couldn’t. This was a man who’d been shot in the head, asking for a cookie.
Never mind that a man who’d been shot in the head shouldn’t be asking for a cookie.
A few weeks before Chase was born, Andrea purchased a children’s book from a store near work. “To start his library,” she’d said. It was called
Okay, maybe that wasn’t exactly the point of the book. But that’s what it felt like now. David would ask for a cookie. Then a gallon of milk. Then a gun. And then …
