Chapter Sixteen #3
I recognized the photograph clipped to my board. One of the two women he had asked me to find. I started toward them but a steel door slammed somewhere behind Keller.
He turned.
Kade came through the opening.
The long hair and freckles were the same ones I had studied across a cabana table in Stuttgart, except now his hair had come loose around his face and a compact black submachine gun hung low in his right hand.
The squared receiver registered a second later.
MAC-10. A hard-sided black briefcase was in his left hand.
Keller saw the gun. “Stop!”
His hand moved toward his holster.
Kade turned and brought the MAC-10 up sideways.
I saw his face before he fired, clear enough that I searched for hesitation and found none.
The burst tore through the corridor and the sound inside the concrete was colossal. Keller’s body jerked backward. One round hit the wall beside him and threw powdered concrete into the air. Another burst caught him before his pistol cleared leather.
He went down. The woman beside him screamed and dropped against the wall.
The burst left my ears ringing so hard that the next few seconds came through muffled. Keller was on his back, blood spreading beneath his jacket while the female officer dragged Ana down and fired toward the doorway.
Kade disappeared behind the steel frame as voices flooded my headset.
“Shots rear medical corridor,” Raven said in a panic.
Wolf’s voice cut over him. “Fuck. Mercer!”
I looked toward the doorway Kade had vanished through.
“Mercer, stay where you are.”
I moved before I answered Wolf and dropped beside Keller.
His eyes were open, but there was nothing in them that recognized me.
Blood covered the front of his shirt and ran beneath his shoulder onto the concrete.
I put both hands where the worst of it seemed to be because training had taught me to do something, anything, even while the rest of my brain stalled.
“Keller!”
He did not answer. A paramedic reached us and shoved my hands aside.
“Move. Move!”
I had been reading about Kade’s violence since my flight over here. Watching him turn the gun on Keller and fire erased whatever distance the reports had left between me and it.
“Mercer.”
Wolf again. I looked down the corridor and caught Kade at the far end, moving through another door toward the rear lot with the black case still in his hand.
I stood.
“Mercer, do not move.”
I started after him.
Raven shouted, “Mia!”
I ran past the line Bear had cleared anyway and went through the steel door.
The rear loading floor opened wide around me, twice the size of the front corridor and cluttered with abandoned pallet racks, old refrigeration equipment and two parked vans.
Sunlight cut through broken sections of high glass along the roof, turning dust into pale columns above the concrete.
Kade was already across the room.
“Stop!”
I shouted without knowing what I expected him to do. He looked back and found me immediately as Wolf swore through my headset.
“Viper, cover Mercer. Jackal east. Bear, medical corridor stays yours.”
I realized Wolf just had to move people because of me. Jackal left the southern road he was supposed to hold, and Viper broke from the east route Wolf had given him. I heard both redirects over comms and knew exactly what my decision was costing them, but Kade was still in sight and I kept going.
Viper appeared through a side doorway and crossed behind a stack of pallets to get an angle on me.
“Mercer, back!” Viper shouted.
Kade moved through the rear exit and I followed. Cold air hit my face as I came into the open lot, followed by rotor noise rolling over the warehouse.
A helicopter was descending beyond the east edge of the property, dark against the low sun, its wash already kicking dust and loose debris across an old concrete freight apron. The private fuel window Keller had called about made sense now. The aircraft had been waiting to pull Kade out.
He ran toward it with the black case banging against his leg.
“Stop!” I repeated.
He turned near the freight apron with the MAC-10 low in his right hand as the helicopter dropped behind him.
The wind from the blades whipped his hair across his face and jacket while he stared at me a short distance away.
Keller was bleeding inside because of him, and I was still running toward him.
Wolf’s voice came through my headset hard enough to cut through the rotors.
“Mercer, back the fuck away from him. Now. That is a direct fucking order!”
Kade’s attention flicked toward the sound in my ear, then back to me.
I took another step.
“Don’t!” Viper yelled from somewhere behind me.
Kade lifted the black case and started toward me. I should have backed up the moment he turned with a gun in his right hand. I knew that, and I stayed where I was. Keller’s blood was still on my hands when Kade stopped close enough that I could see the tension in his jaw.
Then he shoved the case hard into my chest.
I caught it automatically. The weight nearly pulled it out of my hands.
“What the fuck are you doing?” The question came out rough beneath the rotors.
Kade looked at me. A little while ago, we had been standing across from each other at a pool party, and I found myself wondering if he remembered me as clearly as I remembered him.
Up close again, he was still unfairly handsome, freckles scattered across the bridge of his nose and a strong jaw softened by green eyes catching gold in the late light.
I tightened both hands around the handle.
Wolf’s boots hit the concrete behind me. Kade stepped backward and I moved after him. Wolf caught the back of my vest and hauled me hard enough that my boots skidded.
“That’s fucking enough!”
His words blasted against my ear. Kade ran and I fought Wolf’s grip on instinct.
“Let me go!”
“No.”
“Look at this!” I shouted, holding the case up.
“I can fucking see that.”
The helicopter touched down on the freight apron for barely more than a breath. Its side door was already open. A man inside leaned out, one arm braced against the frame.
Kade climbed in.
Viper reached the edge of the lot with his rifle up but did not fire. Hawk had the aircraft in his angle somewhere beyond us, but shooting into a departing helicopter with an unknown crew and industrial buildings behind it was not a clean shot anyone wanted to take.
Wolf pressed his transmit key.
“Hawk, hold.”
A pause.
“Holding.”
The helicopter lifted. Dust and grit slammed into my face. I turned my head against Wolf’s shoulder and held onto the case with both hands while the aircraft climbed above the warehouse roof.
Kade was visible through the open door for another second. He looked down, then the door slid shut and the helicopter banked east. Raven was already shouting coordinates to German aviation control.
Wolf released the back of my vest only to take my upper arm and turn me toward him. The mask covered most of his face, but I had never needed to see his mouth to know when he was furious.
“What did I tell you?”
My ears were still ringing.
“I got the case.”
Wolf stared at me.
“What the fuck did I tell you, Mercer?!”
Keller was still on the floor inside. The handle dug into my palms as I looked back toward the warehouse.
“I know.”
“No. You clearly don’t. Get the fuck back inside.”
“Wolf.”
“Inside. Now.”
I went. Viper fell into step beside me, staying on the outside edge of the lot until we reached the door. He kept his attention on the doors and said nothing to me. I would have preferred the lecture.
Inside, the building had become a rescue operation again.
Bear was in the rear corridor kneeling beside Keller while paramedics worked around him. The female officer who had been with Ana stood against the wall with blood across one sleeve, staring at nothing. Ana sat several meters away wrapped in the emergency blanket, both hands pressed over her ears.
I slowed.
Bear looked up, and the paramedic stopped compressions before anyone had to tell me.
Keller was dead.
I stood there with the black case in both hands while another officer pulled a sheet over his body.
Viper touched the back of my shoulder once as he passed, then moved to help secure the far door.
I looked down at Keller’s blood drying in the creases of my knuckles and swallowed hard against the urge to vomit.
Bear stood and came toward me.
“You hurt?”
“No,” I whispered.
He looked at my face, then my arms. “You sure?”
“I’m fine.”
His attention dropped to the case.
“That his?”
I nodded.
“Yeah.”
Bear’s eyes stayed on the case for another second before returning to my face.
“Raven needs it.”
“I know.”
He looked back toward Keller and then toward me. “Get it to him. Stay out of the rear lot.”
I nodded again. On the way back through the loading corridor, I passed the third room.
The door stood open now. There were fourteen women inside.
Some were already wrapped in warming blankets.
Others sat along the walls waiting while medical worked through the rooms in order of severity.
One woman had a plastic hospital bracelet around her wrist with a name that did not match the missing-person file held by the German officer beside her.
Another clutched a pair of shoes to her chest as though someone might take them again if she set them down.
The cheap dresses, bags of makeup, forged passports and cut-down photographs made the room’s purpose obvious.
Cerberus was preparing the women for another move, changing names and appearances before sending them somewhere else.
The rooms behind me had shown what happened while they were held here.
This one showed how they were turned back into cargo.
A woman entered one room with her own clothes and name. By the time she left the last one, somebody else had chosen what she wore, what passport she carried and where she would be sent.