Two days. Surely that was understandable.
“His calendar is going to have to be full,” Todd said finally. “And I’ll find something for him to do for the next day. Then he can go before them. If I haven’t fired him by then.”
“They may subpoena him. Cause a big stir.”
“We’ll quash it.”
“Ernst would love that,” said Bozzone. A subpoena would only be for show — but in Washington, the show was as important, if not more so, than the substance.
“Too bad Raven didn’t target him,” said Blitz.
“Don’t even joke,” said Todd.
Chapter 16
Nuri led them to a group of dilapidated brick buildings tucked into the side of a rolling hill. Even though they didn’t stop, it took nearly forty minutes to get there, weaving across the fields and down a pair of narrow, crooked paths. The fighting remained behind them. While the sun had pushed below the horizon, a glow could be seen from the center of town; MY-PID said much of it was on fire.
The only good news was that neither Li Han nor his people had moved since the battle had begun. Hera, in charge of the assault team waiting with the Osprey, reported that they were ready to move whenever Danny gave the order.
Even though MY-PID declared the cluster of buildings clear, Danny decided he wasn’t going to take any chances with the women and the children. He had Flash run ahead and make sure there were no lookouts hiding in the brush. Then he went to check the buildings.
There wasn’t much left of four of the five. Their roofs were collapsed, and in one case two sides had been completely removed, the clay bricks salvaged for some other project in town. Hiding in the ruins would be better than nothing — but only just.
The fifth building was two stories tall, with a large, boarded-up window on the second floor facing the direction of the railroad tracks. The door at the front was boarded as well; there were no other openings.
The wood blocking the door was nailed tight. Flash took his knife and began prying out nails, sliding the blade in and then working the edge near the hilt under the heads until he could get them with his fingers. Getting the first board was slow, tedious work, but once it was off, he found he could pry out the board directly below it, and then the next, making a space large enough to crawl through. Flash hit a button on his uniform sleeve, activating an LED flashlight sewn into his cuff.
“Looks clear,” he told Danny from inside.
Dropping to his knees, he pulled down the visor on his helmet and slipped into the building. Danny turned around, making sure no one was following them.
“Jesus,” Flash muttered over the radio.
“What’s up?” said Danny.
“Looks like a torture chamber in here. Damn.”
“What?”
“Take a look.”
Danny slipped his visor down as Flash shared his image over the Whiplash circuit. A small window opened in the lower left-hand corner of Danny’s screen. Instantly it filled with images from Flash’s helmet infrared sensor, giving him a hazy view of the interior of the building.
There were rings in the walls. Chains hung from various points, including two beams that ran across the ceiling.
“Is the place clear?” Danny asked.
“Of people, yeah,” said Flash. “Probably filled with ghosts. There’s a trench in the floor, and a drain. Shit.”
“It’s a slaughterhouse,” Danny told him. “For animals. Food.”
“Oh.”
Flash swept the interior. Besides the large main room, there was a corridor and a set of smaller rooms on the west side of the building. All were empty.
Danny signaled to the others to come up. In the failing daylight they seemed to take forever.
“Let’s get them inside the building,” Danny told Nuri. “Get them safe and figure out what we’re going to do.”
“They don’t want to go inside,” said Melissa.
“What?”
“Marie says they think it’s unclean. It was a slaughterhouse.”
“Tell them it’s the only safe place for them.”
“They want to go back to their homes.”
“No way,” said Danny. “There’s fighting all through the city.”
Melissa nodded and went over to talk to Bloom. The two women huddled with the patients they’d rescued from the clinic for several minutes, trying to persuade them that the building was the only safe place for them.
Danny looked at the overhead images of the city. Much of the downtown was either on fire or destroyed. There was a running gun battle in the cluster of huts at the western end of Duka. The two sides were slowly being drawn to each other, converging in the residential area. There must have been at least a hundred dead by now; he avoided asking MY-PID for an estimate.
The pregnant woman was in shock, staring blankly into the distance while clutching her baby. Melissa didn’t entirely understand what the other two women were telling Bloom — the slaughterhouse was unclean or haunted or both — but the gist of it was obvious: they weren’t going inside the building under any circumstances, including gunpoint.
“They won’t go inside,” Bloom told her. “They just won’t. It’s taboo. They want to go back to their families.”
“It’s impossible. The city’s in flames.”
Bloom argued with the women some more, but it was no use.
“They want to go back and get their families,” added Bloom. “They’re insisting.”
“They’ll be killed,” said Melissa.
“I’m trying to tell them that. I suggested a camp — they won’t even go there.”
Melissa gave up.
“I can’t get them to budge,” she told Danny. “They want to go back to their houses. Despite everything.”
“Look, we’re just going to leave them here,” he told her. “There’s a jeep heading for the building where Li Han was holed up. The Russian’s in it. We have to go.”
“All right.”
“You can stay with them if you want, but—”
“I’m not staying,” she told him. “I’ve helped them as much as I can. Now I have to take care of business.”
“Osprey will be here in two minutes.” Danny spun around. “Nuri! Take my rifle. You and Boston stay with the women. We’re going to go get the Russian at their meeting place.”
