stepped in.
Reaper met her gaze. He was locked inside a steel-barred holding cage, each of his limbs double-cuffed to the bars. His mouth was covered to prevent him speaking.
On the front of the cage was an envelope secured in place with gaffer tape. Chance ripped it away with a gloved hand and tore it open. Inside was a single sheet of paper. On it, scrawled in black marker pen, was a message. Good luck getting him out of here, assholes.
It was signed Ryan Lock.
37
For a moment Chance just stood there, staring into the eyes of the man in the cage. He stared back at her. His expression was of a kind no one had seen in ten years. A softness came into his features and his eyes glistened with yearning. Chance felt a rock lodge in her throat, making swallowing painful.
Disregarding the seconds ticking away on her wrist, Chance reached in at the top of the cage and touched his hand in a gesture of comfort. Then she stepped back, freezing the man out and focusing on the task in hand.
She couldn’t use explosives, that was for damn sure. Blow the lock on the door and she’d blow him up too. She sank down on to the floor and checked the bolts that anchored the cage to the floor. She wouldn’t be able to shoot through them without a serious risk of catching a ricochet, but she had to weaken them somehow.
She turned to Trooper, who was gazing at the cage and its occupant with a world-weary ‘What the hell do we do now?’ look of defeat, and pushed his shoulder, snapping him out of it. ‘Get back up on the roof. Get the ropes, all the ropes, and tie them to the skids on the Little Bird. Then get up in the air.’
There was a slow-dawning realization in his eyes. ‘Are you crazy?’ he said to her.
‘Just do it. And tell Cowboy I’m going to need two more minutes.’
As Trooper ran out, Chance fired into the floor, exposing the joists beneath her feet. Then she jogged out of the room, working her way as fast as she could to the floor above.
On the stairs she had to stop to catch her breath, as she felt a fluttering inside her. The embryonic life inside her was urging her on, she told herself, giving her the kick in the pants she needed to finish the job she’d started.
She hauled herself up the stairs and tracked back, counting the same number of paces she’d taken on the floor below. She’d have to get the charge right. Get it wrong on the high side and Reaper would die. Use too little and there would be a mess but no hole.
In the end, the decision was made for her. There was only one charge left. She placed it, and hooked up the detonator. She spooled out several lengths of det cord, her thighs aching as she scuttled back in a permanent crouch. The clock was ticking though, and they were stealing time they didn’t have.
Lock led the way out into the lobby, a marble-floored area with two banks of elevators. All the mayhem seemed to be contained above them. Explosions. Gunfire. A regular riot. He crossed to the smoked-glass windows that led out on to the street where EMS ambulances and cop cars crowded and confusion reigned. Local law enforcement wasn’t trained or prepared for an all-out airborne assault, especially somewhere like Medford.
Looking over his shoulder, Lock glimpsed the Marshal in charge in a heated discussion with a local cop sporting sergeant’s stripes. Lock ignored them and pushed past, out on to the street. Carrie was on his heels, directing her cameraman to snatch some footage of the building as smoke billowed from the upper floors and flames spat from the windows.
Lock could just about glimpse the tail fin of the helicopter rising above the roof. He strained to see how many people were inside the cabin. It looked like someone was getting out of the building — empty-handed, he guessed. He crossed his fingers.
‘Bye bye, assholes,’ he said.
From inside the building there was another massive boom, and the windows that hadn’t already been blown surrendered the glass from their frames. Lock ducked under a car, taking Carrie with him, as crystal splinters rained down on them from above, rendered invisible by the rain.
‘You OK?’ he asked her.
She exhaled, her cheeks flushed with blood, her blonde hair pasted against her face by the downpour. ‘How come Katie Couric never has to deal with this shit?’
Lock smiled. ‘Hey, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies for her either. She had to interview Sarah Palin, remember.’
‘Fair point.’
Lock backed out from under the car. The helicopter was still there. For a second, he thought there must be a problem with it, that maybe it had taken a hit from the couple of sheriff’s deputies who, rather optimistically, were taking aim at it with handguns from the street. Then he noticed the ropes slinking their way down towards the roof.
He backed away from the building, distance giving him a better angle. The ropes were breaking-point tight — tighter, it seemed to Lock, than they would be with someone hanging from them. As the helicopter rose, inches at a time, they strained and twisted round on themselves, rolling the body of the helicopter from one side to the next. Any minute now, thought Lock, those ropes are going to snap and the sudden loss of tension is going to bring the whole thing crashing down.
The helicopter jolted. There was the sound of wood splintering, as if an old sailing ship were being wrenched from a weather-worn dock by the power of an angry sea. Then, rather than free-fall down, the helicopter righted itself and started slowly to descend back on to the roof.
Lock lost sight of it. He clenched his fists, torn between a desire to go back into the building and stay where he could see what was happening. He stayed put, and a few seconds later the blades of the helicopter rose again, more slowly than before. As it rose directly upwards, Lock could see people in the cabin. Three of them. The same number he’d seen when it arrived. No Reaper, then. Not unless he’d switched places with one of them, which was unlikely given that he’d been left in the cage.
The grinding gears of a truck’s engine behind him prompted Lock to turn round. An olive-green canvas- covered military transport truck was rolling down the street. Lock wondered why the hell the Marshals hadn’t handed over this whole operation to the military in the first place. Jalicia might still be here if they had. They were too proud, that was why, and it was institutional pride, which was the worst kind as far as he was concerned.
Despite the mayhem and the local cops’ best efforts, the street was still full of civilians. Their eyes were trained on the roof, on the departing helicopter. No more than twenty feet from Lock stood an overweight woman in a pink housecoat, mouth agape, her yellowing teeth a forceful rebuttal to the usual wonders of American dentistry.
‘Holy shit,’ she said.
Lock spun round, following her gaze. Up above them, the metal cage, complete with Reaper still shackled inside it, dangled twenty feet beneath the chopper, secured by the ropes tied to the helicopter’s skids. The cage inched into the night sky. The four ropes, attached at either corner of the cage, twisted in the wind, but Reaper kept rising into the storm-blackened Oregon sky.
All around, people had stopped whatever they were doing and were staring. Cops. Civilians. Everyone. Lock felt a shiver of defeat run through them as the nose of the helicopter dipped and it started to coast smoothly away from the building.
Lock shielded his eyes against the glare of the Night Sun spotlight mounted on the nose of the helicopter. He could make out Reaper, his arms still spread, Christ-like, as he ascended into the heavens.
A voice crept into Lock’s mind. Reaper’s voice, but not his words. The words belonged to Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese general. They were the words Reaper had recited from memory back in the cell they’d shared in Pelican Bay.
Engage people with what they expect. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate.
Then, like a cassette machine clicking off as it runs out of tape, the voice was gone, along with Reaper and the helicopter, which had travelled far enough that it had become just another distant point of light in a sky full of
