Bio-Strike

heavily down into a clump of shrubbery.

Ricci didn’t pause to think. You didn’t pause at these moments, didn’t think; at these moments you were the tip of an arrow.

Leading with his Five-Seven, he swiveled to the right, where another slugger had advanced from the bushes, his pistol a blur as he brought it up toward Glenn. Ricci took a quick breath, sighted, pulled the trigger on his exhalation. Glenn’s Beretta spurted flame at the same instant. The slugger did a grotesque shimmy on his feet, then pitched over sideways.

Ricci sought more movement, listened for more rattling in the hedges. There, over to the left, a third man raised his gun. A fourth beside him.

And then from farther back in the darkness, a female voice called out, “Don’t try it! Toss your weapons, hands up in the air. Now!”

Ricci focused on the spot from which the command had been shouted and saw a woman in a rigger’s outfit with a semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. The luminescent Sword ID on her breast identified her as one of his own.

A moment ticked by.

Two more figures had rushed out of the night to either side of the woman and formed up in a semicircle around the hedges. Men in dark civvies, firearms held out, glow-in-the-dark Sword insignias seeming to float over their chests.

Ricci kept his Five-Seven on the sluggers, saw Glenn doing the same with his Beretta from the corner of his eye.

Both men waited to see if the sluggers would pick smart or dead, their choice here, no lifelines, no polling the audience.

They dropped their pieces, raised their hands.

Smart.

Ricci sprang out of his crouch toward Glenn, leaving the frisk-and-cuff to their foot team.

“The green,” he said. His hand on Glenn’s arm. “Take me over there.”

* * *

Ricci had known Quiros was down but had hoped to a God he’d never been sure existed that Quiros wasn’t out. What he found on the lawn would not make a religious man out of him.

One brief glance at the body on the grass was all it took to establish there wasn’t a spark of life remaining in it. Whatever part of the head hadn’t gotten scattered aross the lawn was a gaping, bloody mess. Ricci guessed it should have seemed odd to him that Quiros’s glasses had stayed on his face, that they weren’t even askew, but he’d been around violent death enough to know it often had a sardonic touch.

He knelt over the body, searched through its pockets, and found nothing of use. Then he just knelt there feeling numb.

Far across the lawn, he could see Glenn looking up at the tops of the buildings around them, standing with his gun loosely at rest against his leg. The roofs looked empty. The monster tree looked empty. Not much risk to being here, the snipers were probably gone by now. If they were still in place, they weren’t a threat. Their work showed they’d been top-tier pros, and the job they’d been hired to perform was finished.

Glenn raised a hand to catch Ricci’s eye and signaled that he wanted to do a walkaround, pointing toward the front of the museum. Ricci waved for him to go ahead and watched him turn the building’s corner, leaving him alone with the body.

Ricci knelt over it, looked down at it, the night feeling very deep around him, its chill penetrating his clothes.

“You got away from me,” he said to Quiros’s un-hearing ears, his voice flat and husky. “Got away, you son of a bitch. And I don’t know what to do.”

He never heard anyone slipping up on him. Never heard a sound. Despite his natural alertness, his finely keyed senses, not a sound until the voice spoke out of the darkness mere inches behind his back.

“Shazam,” it said.

“Jesus Christ, what’d your guys think they were doing?” Lucio Salazar barked into his cellular.

Shaken and baffled, still clueless about why his hired triggers had opened fire, he was speeding from the park in his Caddy, unaware he’d just passed the spot where Sword’s roadblock for Enrique Quiros had been lifted moments earlier.

* * *

“They fulfilled their assignment,” the little man in the control station replied over their connection. “The proof is that you’re alive right now.”

“Are you out of your mind? I was handling things with Enrique. Talking to him. I never gave you the goddamned word—”

“It would be better if you could give me some respect. Quiros had people in the bushes ahead of you. I saw at least one of them holding a gun.”

Salazar’s brow wrinkled.

“Hold it a second,” he said. “Are you sure?”

“I know my job. Should I have waited until you reached those men? Let them make their move? If I’d done that, you’d be the one laying in your own blood right now.”

Not quite knowing how to respond, Salazar got off the phone and sat quietly as his driver turned toward the highway. In a way, the brief conversation had left him more confused than before. Looking back upon everything that had happened in the past half hour, remembering Quiros’s words to him, he had to admit that Quiros had seemed to genuinely believe it was the Salazar family that off’ed his bastardo nephew. And then there were his comments about making amends, which in hindsight also had sounded like they might have been sincere. On the other hand, Quiros had set a trap for him along the path, assuming the sniper boss had been on the level… and what would he have to gain from bullshitting about that?

The lines on Salazar’s forehead grew deeper. He supposed it didn’t pay to start entertaining second thoughts at this late stage. The best thing for him was probably to be thankful he was still in one piece, and move on. But questions of what Quiros had or hadn’t known — or done — kept gnawing at him. Because if there was even a speck of truth in the words he’d spoken before he was killed, it would cast serious doubt upon the reliability of Lathrop’s information. And then you’d have to start asking how Lathrop could have gotten it so wrong, and wondering about his motivations, his intentions…

The Cadillac was swinging onto the entrance ramp to I-5, heading north to Del Mar, where the timed explosive charge beneath its fuel tank suddenly detonated with a crumping blast, sending a burst of flame through its interior, its force punching out metal, blowing out both windshields and three of its four side windows, instantly killing Lucio Salazar, his driver, and the bodyguards who had been riding inside with them — leaving Salazar’s questions to vaporize in the smoke and superheated air.

But then, in matters of life and death, one could very rarely expect to receive all the answers.

* * *

Ricci’s hand went to his Five-Seven, drew the pistol from its holster even as he turned fast at the hip and looked behind him.

The man standing there was dressed entirely in black, regarding him with sharp, intelligent eyes. His hands were straight down at his sides. One was empty. The other held a square, flat object that Ricci would have immediately recognized as a CD gem case had the setting been different. In the context of his present situation, it took him a second or two.

He studied the man’s face. If the gun Ricci was pointing at him gave him any fear, he showed no sign of it.

“Who are you?” Ricci said.

The man tilted his head up a little, his lips parting, seeming for the briefest of moments to gaze past Ricci into the night sky. Then he locked eyes with him. “One Who Knows,” he said. “But I’ll bet you already have that figured out.”

Ricci’s gun was steady in his grip. But it felt suddenly cold. “Tell me what the hell you want.”

The man shook his head. “It’s what you want that’s important, and I’ve got it right in my hand.” He lifted the