David Ellis
In the Company of Liars
JUNE
McCoy is first through the door. She hears the man runningthrough the house, his bare feet slapping across the hardwood floor. “Backbedroom,” she is told via her earpiece by a member of the team at the rear ofthe house, looking through the kitchen window, blocking an escape route.
They flood in behind her, a team of eight agents, but she isfirst down the hallway. Her back against the wall, both hands on the Glock ather side, she shuffles up to the bedroom door and listens. Over the sound ofher team’s shoes on the hardwood, she can hear sobbing. She reaches across thewidth of the door and tries the knob. The door opens slightly, then McCoypushes it open wider with her foot and pivots, her Glock trained inside theroom, and she sees what she expects.
He is standing at the opposite end of the bedroom, near whatappears to be a walk-in closet and then a bathroom. A large bed separates theman and McCoy.
McCoy holds a hand up behind her, freezing the other agentsin place, before returning her hand to the Glock trained on the suspect.
“Put the gun down, Doctor,” she says.
Doctor Lomas, she knows, is a broken man, nothing like theproud figure she has seen in the company brochures. She stifles the instinct tothink of him as a victim, though a victim, in many ways, is precisely what heis. It is hard to look at this man, barefoot in boxer shorts and a rumpledwhite T-shirt with stained armpits, with flyaway hair and an emaciated frame,and see the promising scientist he once was.
The doctor is crying uncontrollably, his chest heaving andtears flowing. Part of her job is seeing the worst in people, watching themfeel, firsthand, the collapse of their lives. But she doesn’t often confront aman holding a revolver to his temple.
Behind her, McCoy hears one of the agents on his radio,calling for paramedics. Others are searching the remainder of the house,kicking open doors to rooms and closets.
“I didn’t know,” Lomas manages through halting breaths, butof course that statement itself means that he did know, or at least suspected.“I didn’t. I didn’t know, I didn’t-”
“I believe you, Doctor,” she says calmly. “Put the gun onthe bed and let’s just talk.”
“They’ll kill me,” he says.
He’s not talking about the federal agents swarming outsidethe bedroom. She knows it. Doctor Lomas seems to assume she knows it.
“There’s no ‘they’ anymore, Doctor. ‘They’ are all incustody. You’re the last one.”
He doesn’t seem to be listening. Fear of death does not seemto be foremost in his mind. No, what’s causing the heaving of his chest, thetrembling of the arm that tries to keep the gun pressed against his skull, isnot what will happen now but what has already taken place.
The television, resting in a dark oak armoire, is on a cablenews station. The headline blaring across the bottom of the screen is “Muhsinal-Bakhari Captured.” Reporters are live from northern Sudan, the cameras onthe assault that took place last night on a convoy of terrorists resulting inthe capture of the Liberation Front’s number- two man.
“You know why you’re the last one we picked up?” McCoy saysto Doctor Lomas, as evenly as she can. “Because we know you’re not a threat. Weknow you’re not a bad person. Because we know you were tricked.” McCoy motionsto the television set. “You see that, Doctor? You see we caught Mushi?”
Doctor Lomas blinks, as if surprised by the change of topic.Suicides, in these instances, often go down a single track on their way topulling the trigger or slitting their wrists. The key is to pull them away fromtheir tunnel vision, to make them think about anything at all that might soberthem up.
“So what?” His voice breaks, trembles. His trigger fingertwitches.
She is ten feet from the doctor, but the bed prevents anyinterception she might attempt. If this guy wants to die, she won’t be able tostop him.
“So,” McCoy says, “you helped make that happen. This,” shesays, nodding to him, then gesturing toward the TV set, “was aboutthat.”
“That-” Lomas’s face contorts, a hideous, trembling snarl ofa mouth struggling with the words. “That’swhere it went? To-tothem?Toterrorists?”
“We intercepted it,” McCoy says quickly. “We have theformula in our possession. It’s over, Doctor. No one was hurt.”
“Allison Pagone,” he whimpers. “She’s dead because of me. Iknew she didn’t kill herself,” he adds, more to himself. “Iknew they killedher.” He starts to quiver again, his whole body like a shot of electricity hashit him.
“Listen to me, Doctor, Allison Pagone-”
“No closer.”Lomas takes another step back and brushes thewall. With the jerk in his movement, his right elbow drops, and the gun slidesoff his temple, pointing upward.
McCoy fires once, into the brachial nerve near thecollarbone on the doctor’s gun side. The doctor’s hand immediately releases thegun, which falls to the floor and bounces into the closet. Two reasons forsevering the brachial nerve-he can’t hold the weapon and he can recover, forthe most part, from a shoulder injury; had she gone for his hand, he’d never beable to use it again.
She is on him immediately, as he slides to the floor. Lomasmakes no effort to reach the gun. He doesn’t even seem to notice the wound, ared, widening stain on his T-shirt, dark at the center.
McCoy finds the nearest piece of laundry, a pair ofunderwear, balls it up and applies pressure to the wound. Doctor Lomas stareswide-eyed, a deep, consistent moan coming from his throat.
McCoy talks to him. She tells him to hang on, everything isgoing to be okay. She looks up and sees the bullet mark in the wall, whichmeans it went through cleanly, no ricochet down to a major organ. He was lucky.Luckier than some.
The paramedics arrive and take over. In the bathroom McCoysplashes some water on her face and lets out a groan. Her partner, OwenHarrick, is behind her, smiling at her in the mirror.
“It’s over, Janey,” he says. “This is the end.”
“Yeah.” She shakes the water off her hands.
“What you have to do,” Harrick advises, “is forget about thebeginning.”
ONE DAY EARLIER…
He knows immediately that no one will escape, and that fewwill survive. He knows it the moment he is blasted out of his drowsiness in theback of the dark truck by a deafening boom, the explosion of what he assumes tobe the lead truck in the convoy. He knows it as the truck in which he istraveling screeches to a halt over the uneven terrain, as the men seated onbenches on each side of the darkened cargo area fall into each other, and asthe truck behind them slams into their rear, sending the men sprawling to thefloor.
