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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

40.

Ten seconds after watching Hulk get gunned down, Frank Darmity smiled a little and looked at Red. “Well, they got assault rifles.”

Red was staring into the slowly widening window of shadow into the cavern. “Jesus.”

Darmity congratulated himself. He hadn’t expected Hulk to just run into the fucking space like an asshole, but now he knew what Renicks and Begley were up to, and it wasn’t even half smart. Although posing the corpses was slightly higher on the badass scale for Renicks than he would have expected. It was going to force a complete recalibration of his opinion of the man.

“All right, Red!” he shouted over the rumble of the door, fishing in his pocket. “Shades. We’ll hit ‘em with the Stun, you go in and scout it out, okay? Take your time and be careful. They’ll be blind and disoriented.”

She didn’t react right away. He watched her in his peripheral vision. Studying her body language. He could tell she was thinking about him. Questioning. She’d taken an oath, too, and she’d been vouched for, or she wouldn’t be there. But he didn’t know her. Amesley and his people had been patriots, too. Good people, sure. Fuckups all the same. As he fished in his big flap pocket, he let one hand fall idly on the butt of his sidearm.

He could almost see her walking through it. He’d ordered Hulkaburger to go in, but he hadn’t told him to run in a straight line like an asshole. Hulk had seen bodies over one of the access modules and he’d just gone for them. He could have been smarter about it. There’d been nothing wrong with the order.

Red nodded. “Okay!”

Darmity relaxed slightly. She’d decided she would be smarter about it. Good girl, he thought, admiring the shape he imagined under all that armor.

He pulled the grenade from his pocket. A modified issue. He stepped up to the slowly rolling blast door and glanced at her as she positioned herself just to the left of the widening entryway. Checked her weapon one last time. Pulled her goggles up over her head, strapping them over her eyes. Tiny dark ovals, like swimmer’s goggles, but with black lenses. Looked forward and nodded.

He pulled the ring. Counted to three. Tossed the grenade into the cavern. Counted to three while he slipped his own goggles on.

The bang was loud enough to hear over the noise. Loud enough to feel in his legs. Light poured out of the opening like someone had lit the space on fire, some fuel in the air that burned bright white.

Darmity watched Red sprint into the space. Moving fast, at an angle to her left, turning her head as she ran to scan the area — merely brightly lit to her due to her goggles — to spot Renicks and Begley.

He watched her left leg suddenly jerk behind her as if some invisible man had grabbed onto her ankle. Watched her sail forward, arms whipping outward with unspent momentum. Saw her slap down onto the cavern floor, hard. Saw her head bounce off a rock. Hard. Saw her lying there, unmoving.

Well, he thought, crouching down and stepping forward, scanning the area, they got traps, too.

Then he paused and smiled. Saw Begley plain as day, ducked down in what had been impenetrable shadow, blindly swinging her rifle in a shallow arc.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

39.

Two seconds after settling into position, Renicks began to sweat. In his head, he heard Begley’s hoarse whisper: Jack, we’re going to have to kill them.

It wasn’t the temperature of the cavern, which was pretty low. It was reaction. Adrenaline and terror, the sudden burst of activity followed by sitting in a hole and trying to be as still as possible.

The noise of the blast door opening was so loud and caused so much vibration it ceased to be sound and became, instead, simply part of the fabric of the new reality.

Renicks didn’t have an accurate idea of when the blast door would finally open far enough to admit whoever was coming in, but his sense was they had about twenty seconds. He scanned the cavern. He couldn’t see Begley, but knew she would be across from him, about five feet further from the inner blast door than he was. They’d hastily positioned themselves so they could concentrate fire on the blast door and avoid cross-firing into each other. Assuming he could actually aim the M16. Which he was not certain of.

In the noise, in the gloom, they’d spent the last four minutes preparing for their visitors. Begley had looked at him like he was crazy when he’d told her to take her jacket off. He didn’t know if he was being clever or not. He’d adopted just do something as his personal motto. There was no time for ponderous plans or research. He was just throwing together whatever he could, as quickly as he could.

Dressed in his and Begley’s jackets, the two dead men had been posed as best as they could over the black box, the keypad with its sinuous cable placed delicately in the slack hands of the one Begley had shot. Both were positioned with their backs to the blast door. Neither looked like anything except two corpses that had been dressed and posed, Renicks thought. But in the gloom, in a split second, he thought they might cause hesitation. Assumption. Something they could use.

He’d handled a corpse before.

When your father is a doctor in a small town, he thought, it isn’t surprising that you learn a lot about medicine. In a workmanlike, practical kind of way. It isn’t surprising that you sometimes act as unlicensed nurse or unlicensed anesthesiologist. Or unlicensed coroner.

The sense of dead weight was as he remembered. The lingering warmth. The body surprisingly loose. Not stiff at all. He’d had a woozy moment of familiarity: the feel of the dead skin, the sagging body. The sense that somehow this was now just a heavy sack of material, and not a person, any more.

He’d kept his mind blank while carrying them. The burned-skin smell was overwhelming. He could still smell it, since he was wearing the man’s charred body armor, still warm to the touch. Begley had wordlessly refused to wear the other set, and there was no time to argue with her.

After they’d posed the bodies, he’d felt wired. Amped up. Like any kind of silence, of stillness, would be a mistake. Allow something to occur to him. He needed to keep moving and found himself studying the inner blast door as it ground its way open. He had a minute or so, maybe a minute and a half. He ran over to it, ankle sending friendly spikes of pain up into his leg, and dumped out his bag for what seemed like the fiftieth time. Found the slippery wire of the small game snare and unwound it, threading it between his fingers and getting a sense of its length.

He’d trotted back to the blast door with it. It was a simple piece of work; a thin wire, about ten feet or so long, with a small loop on one end, banded by a brass clip that kept it from slipping. The other end had a bigger loop formed with a noose-like knot, a sliding hitch that allowed the snare to constrict around anything that tugged at it. The idea was, you set the snare up in the forest so that the noose hung over a likely path for a small animal — rabbit, squirrel, or similar. As the critter passed through the space its head would catch the noose, and its own forward momentum would snap the noose tight.

He’d affixed the small end of the snare to a stub of rock where the blast door had been carved out of the wall years ago. Tugged it a few times to be sure of it. Then turned and looked at the floor of the cavern right inside the door. Had tried to decide in five seconds how they would come.

They wouldn’t come in straight down the middle. Too obvious. Plus, they would be impatient for the blast door to open. As soon as it opened wide enough, they would come. They would come at an angle, dashing for the shadows. Since the door was opening, from their perspective, from left to right, he assumed they would angle to his right.

Knelt down with the noose end of the snare and formed a little platform for it, scraping together some dirt and gravel so the noose could lay elevated from the rest of the floor. Not by much. He didn’t want it to be an obvious obstruction to avoid by instinct.

Renicks crouched in the darkness and tried to pick the snare out. Couldn’t. The dark had swallowed it. He knew the odds of anyone stepping on it were very low. The odds of him or Begley stepping on it were somewhat higher. He didn’t know what else to do. He held the rifle in his hands, finger off the trigger, and watched the bright line forming as the blast door opened.

Jack, we’re going to have to kill them.

If they could somehow gun them down before they reached the shadows, they had the advantage. Once they reached the shadows, it evened up, and he didn’t like how square odds ended for him. Trained mercenaries in the dark with automatic weapons … and him.

He watched the bright line get thicker. After living with the new reality of the opening blast door for so long, the line was widening far too quickly. He watched it swelling, counting off the seconds.

He felt his own sweat on the surface of the rifle, chilled to a slimy film.

Jack, we’re going to have to kill them.

He stared at the thick band of light formed by the opening blast door. Cold sweat dripped into his eyes.

Then there was someone running.

Renicks didn’t get a good look at them. They were there, framed in the light, and then they were running. Right towards the two corpses. He swung the rifle clumsily, trying to keep up with them. They moved too fast, and the light was so dim — he turned quickly with the heavy gun and overbalanced. Swinging the gun up to shift his balance, his finger jerked and he spat three rounds into the hidden roof of the cavern.

Then gunfire burst from Begley’s position. He saw the brief flash. Imagined he heard a shriek over the rumble of the door — a strangled cry, instantly swallowed. As he scrambled to regain his balance, heart pounding and head aching, he couldn’t be sure. Which meant the first one through the door could be out there, still. Creeping about.

Keep it together, he told himself. Calm down.

Begley would be displacing. If I fire, I’ll move, she’d said. He wouldn’t know her approximate location any more. He put his eyes on the door again, just in time to see something small and cylindrical sail through the opening, landing softly. Renicks followed it with his eyes, alarm flashing through him.

There was an explosion loud enough to drown out the door, heavy enough for Renicks to be knocked over by its invisible fist. The rifle flew out of his hands and was swallowed by the cavern. And then the whole cavern lit up like the sun in your eyes no matter where you looked, blinding and painful even after he’d shut his eyes tightly. And stayed that way.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

38.

A minute-and-a-half after stepping over the writhing body of the man he’d nicknamed Fugly, Frank Darmity stood in front of the blast door and watched the woman — he’d named her Red — work the keypad. He felt like a thin wire had been run through his whole body, hooked up to a weak battery. A sleepy buzzing.

She’d fucked up the first two tries, getting a flat unhappy noise and a red light each time. One more fuckup and the blast doors would lock down for fifteen minutes, sending an alarm to the deserted, half-destroyed Security Office where no one would see it. Fifteen fucking minutes would be disaster. He held his handgun loosely down by his thigh, ready to teach her a lesson if that happened.

He glanced over at the other man. Darmity hadn’t named him yet. He studied the man’s dark skin and tight curly hair. His huge build. A weightlifter. Darmity wasn’t a racist. He realized there were examples of greatness in every ethnicity. It was just harder to find anywhere but in the white races. He distrusted the black man instinctively.

Red punched in the code a third time, and finally got a tiny green light, and then the blast door began its ponderous journey to being open. The tiny space filled with noise and vibration. Darmity glanced down at his shoe and noticed some of Fugly’s blood on the toe. He stared at it for a moment, then decided to just leave it. He’d have more blood to deal with before this endless fucking day was over.

They had five minutes or so to burn.

Red shrugged off her pack and dropped her Herstal on the floor. Darmity watched her snap open the hardshell pack and inspect it. He turned to look at … at Hulk, he decided. Hulk was doing the same thing, a fast field inspection. He’d started with the rifle. Darmity smirked. Fucking professionals. They always dug in deep to the goddamn procedure. The ritual. Like knowing shit made them better at their jobs, which was bullshit.

He didn’t move. Kept Hulk and Red in his peripheral vision. His breathing was slow and heavy. He felt weak and off-balance. He stood watching the door move in almost invisible increments, just more and more steel door sliding past him. They all had their jobs. Three in the lobby to prevent exfiltration. Two in the cavern to set the charges in motion. Four in the complex to erase any survivors. He and Red had been organizing for a sweeping of the complex, the idea being to herd Renicks and his bitch agent ahead of them, trap them, and get rid of them. Then, one of the vital signs alarms on Red’s people had triggered: One of the cavern team, dead.

They’d headed for Level Fourteen at a run. Fugly in the lead because he was fast. On Level Thirteen they’d gotten the second vitals alarm: Man two in the cavern, dead. Fugly had taken the ladder at a slide, pissed off. It hadn’t worked out too well for Fugs.

“You feel a draft?” Hulk suddenly said. Darmity scrubbed his voice for an accent. There wasn’t one he could detect.

Red stopped and was still for a moment. “Maybe,” she finally said.

Darmity ran his eyes over her. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. Skin like milk and red hair out of a bottle. Pretty enough. A little angular in the face. The body armor made them all look the same, but he thought she must have a tight little body under there. Fit.

“It’s the door,” he said tiredly. “Voids inside the rock, a vacuum effect when it starts extracting.”

Fucking professionals.

After a second Hulk and Red shared a look and went back to their field tear-down. Darmity kept them both in his conscious thoughts. He’d never met them before. None of them knew each other’s name or anything about each other. Police? Military? Mercenary? He didn’t know. They didn’t know him, either. He was nominally the commander of the operation — he’d been given that code. So they were under his command. But Darmity knew his orders were to leave no one alive at this facility even before it was set to blow. No chances. No assuming anyone would just burn up in the explosion. Everyone.

He glanced at Red. Everyone. Including these two.

Darmity figured they’d both been given the same orders. Kill everyone, including him. When Fugly had slid down the ladder and ended up with half his face on the floor like a piece of fucking hamburger, Red had put a bullet in his head without too much hesitation. One more man down, which was no good, but better than hauling some screaming, bleeding asshole behind them, especially when he was going to die anyway.

Darmity had no intention of letting that happen. His orders were sparse: Kill everyone. Blow the complex. Kill yourself. He’d been solemnly handed a paper packet of cyanide pills in case he objected to being torn apart by an explosion or the feel of warm gunmetal against his head. Even as he’d taken his oath and acknowledged his orders — he had a quick memory of the room, dark and hot, fires burning in the sconces, the heavy, sweet smell in the air — he knew he’d been lying. Just about that last part. He served his country. He believed in this mission. He’d served it honestly and to the best of his abilities and he’d been truly willing to sacrifice his life if that’s what it took. But the mission had failed. The mission was fucking borked, there was no reason he had to go down with the ship.

Red and Hulk, on the other hand, and their two other people in the cavern, the three upstairs — they would go. Darmity would make sure of that. Security would be maintained. He glanced at each of them casually. Assumed they were both thinking the same thing. Darmity had seen this before. You order people to go down with the ship, half the people in the room start clocking where all the fucking life preservers were.

He did nothing. For now he needed these people until he’d put bullets in Renicks and Begley’s heads, make sure the charges were set. Then he would handle them.

“Pack it up,” he said quietly. “Both of you. Be ready when the fucking door opens.”

They didn’t say anything, but both started quickly re-packing their gear. He waited, listening to himself breathe through his nose, biting the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Forced himself to stand very still. He hated being in charge of people. He liked working alone. There was always this attitude.

He told himself he was going to enjoy slitting their throats. Then told himself he had to be patient.

In short increments, he forced himself to relax. Muscle by muscle he unclenched. Took deeper breaths. Slowed his heart rate. It was all conscious acts of will, orders from his brain. He knew if he charged in there pissed off, he would make poor decisions. He couldn’t afford to make poor decisions.

He checked his watch. Sixty seconds.

He chewed over the problem. Renicks and Begley were in there. It was dark. Unfamiliar. They’d had time to scout it. Time to set up a defense. Traps. Tricks. They knew exactly where he would be coming from, and would try to be ready for him.

He paused. It occurred to him that one of his goals was to get rid of these two shitheads.

“They may be trying to disable the charges,” Red said, standing up and slipping her pack back on.

Anger flared. “No shit,” he snapped. “You figured that out all by yourself? Jesus fucked.” He took a deep breath. “Cover the door as it opens, wait for some light. Manage your exposure — don’t stand there like a pair of knuckleheads. Wait for the door to be fully open, get a good look. Once we have access, I want Hulkaburger here in first.” He ignored the look the big guy shot him. “Don’t be stingy. Shoot first. We got no collateral damage to worry about. Just hit anything that moves as hard as you can. Then hit it again.”

Darmity felt satisfied with himself. He had two pawns. He would use them.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

37.

One minute and forty-three seconds after Begley missed her shot, Renicks was crawling through the darkness towards the inner blast door.

They’d landed in a slight depression in the floor of a huge cavern. He judged its size by the hollow sound of the air in the gloom. His eyes were adjusting as best they could; he could see but beyond a few feet things became grainy and blurry. The floor felt sandy and shifting, like standing on a deep pour of fine gravel. Begley had led him to the lip of the depression and he’d climbed up a few feet to peer over the edge.

The outer blast door was open. He could see a sliver of it, a pale glow in the distance, reflecting back every bit of light. A soft gray glow poured from beyond it — the old mine shaft, worming up through the mountain to the surface. An experimental shaft, never intended for actual mining.

Beyond the little depression he and Begley had spilled out onto, the cavern floor was relatively flat, an irregular oval shape, the size of a baseball diamond. Thick metal conduits emerged from the rock floor just past the blast door, sprouting up from the ground like the roots of some monstrous gray metal tree. They spread out immediately, dividing into smaller and smaller pipes, bolted directly into the soft rock, running in straight lines in the direction of the inner blast door, where the conduits dove back down into the earth.

Here and there black boxes with softly glowing LED screens and a single, nonstandard-looking multi-pin jack, wide and thin. Renicks had never seen a cable that would fit the connection.

The two men crouching around one of the boxes obviously had: They had a flat, wide cable plugged into the box. The cable led to a small handheld keyboard. Both men were dressed similarly to the others they’d seen on the security screens: Black body armor, hardshell backpacks, the strange, melted-looking rifles. One was laboriously typing into the keyboard while the other read softly from a small, palm-sized book.

Begley pulled softly at his shirt and he climbed back down behind the lip of the depression to sit next to her, their backs against the rock.

She took the rifle in her hands and looked at him. Renicks nodded and put up his hands: Shooting people in the dark with an automatic weapon was, he thought, pretty clearly Begley’s department.

He watched her as she prepared, choosing a spot where she could lean forward against the slope and have her shoulders up over the edge. She steadied the gun against her shoulder and sighted. Turned slightly and sighted again. Then back again. He saw her take a deep breath, lean back slightly.

She fired.

The noise was there and gone, louder than he’d expected. The gun danced a little in her hands, and a yellow-orange flash lit up the muzzle for a second. He saw the man kneeling over the keyboard spin and drop, transformed into a ragdoll. The other rolled away almost instantly, disappearing into the shadows.

“Fuck!” Begley hissed, sliding down to join him again. “I can disable the hook up if I can get up there, but I need you to draw him off.”

Renicks nodded. His heart pounded in his chest, and dread filled every space between his thoughts. The man in the darkness was a professional. Trained in weapons, in combat. In killing. Renicks was an amateur.

He paused, thinking that he had shown a certain dumb talent for killing people. Hated himself immediately.

He nodded and leaned forward again. “Wait for my signal!”

He gave a thumb’s up, hoping he was projecting a confidence he didn’t feel, and got up into a crouch. Ran along the lip of rock as far as he could; fifteen or twenty feet away from the blast door the depression rose up to meet the rest of the floor and he lost his cover. He dropped into a crawl and moved as quickly as he could, trusting in the gloom to cover him.

He’d thrown himself into motion without allowing himself to hesitate. He knew if he stopped to think, he’d freeze up. As he moved he raced through what needed to be done. He had to distract and engage the surviving man. Keep him off of Begley. Kill him if he could.

When he reached the blast door, he pushed himself into the deepest shadow available and gave himself ten seconds to look around. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest like it was trying to break free, adrenaline soaking into everything. He tried to fix the geography in his head. The outer blast door was not directly across from the inner blast door. The inner door was also set lower; from where he lay panting in the dark, Renicks could only see the top of the other opening. A pale gray rectangle. Begley was in the depression, hidden completely by shadows. As was the surviving man, hiding somewhere else in the gloom.

He let the rifle drop. Pulled his bag around so it sat on his belly. Tore it open and dug into the contents. The Kimber. The survival kit. The bottle of Scotch, forgotten deep down on the bottom. Found Uncle Richie’s Zippo.

He went back to the survival kit: A couple of fishhooks, the water purification tablets — turned to powder in their little plastic bag — a small game snare. He put it all back into his bag.

Looked around again. He took a breath and nodded to himself. He didn’t have time for a plan. He needed to just do whatever came to mind. He reached down and took hold of his own shirt. Tore a big swatch of the fabric free with both hands. About five inches of the material. He dug the bottle of whiskey out of his bag again, took the cork between his teeth and yanked it free, spitting it out into the darkness. Took a swig. Regretted the swig immediately as his heart lurched and his head swam. He poured some of the liquor onto the torn piece of his shirt, then a bit more right onto the gritty floor of the cavern. Stuffed the fabric into the neck of the bottle until it filled it like a plug, a plume of white spilling out of the glass.

Carefully set the bottle down on the floor. Slipped the Zippo into his pocket. Getting back into a crouch, he took the Kimber from the bag and placed it in a shadowed nook right next to the blast door.

He crept back to where he’d left the bottle and rifle and picked both up. Slowly straightened up. Heart pounding, he counted to ten, wondering, far too late, if Darmity’s people had brought night vision with them.

Then he figured if they had, he would have been shot two minutes ago.

He held the rifle exactly the way you weren’t supposed to: One handed, arm outstretched. He pointed it off to the side. Tried to brace himself.

Well, so much for my marksmanship merit badge, he thought.

Squeezed the trigger.

The rifle roared for a split second, the muzzle flashing in the gloom. The rifle bucked and jumped out of his hand, straining his wrist. Biting back a cry, he stumbled a little but forced himself to watch the darkness. Just as he steadied himself, he saw it: A similar flash, then the noise of return rifle fire, aimed a few feet to his right.

He started running.

Fixing the location of the flash in his mind, he ran as fast as he could push himself, holding the improvised bomb in one hand while he dug the Zippo out of his pocket with the other. He approached at an angle, coming around in a loop so he would pass in front of the spot from the left side, from the shadows across from the open blast door.

Lungs burning, he forced himself to wait until he started the approach, looping inwards. Then he snapped the lighter open and flicked it into life, the tiny yellow flame dancing immediately. He touched it to the piece of white cloth and it flared into bright life. Without pausing to think, he threw it as he ran.

The tiny flame traced an arc across the distant, black ceiling of the cavern and smashed into dancing flames. For a moment they swirled on the floor, liquid, rising up in tongues. A second later they seemed to reach out like an arm reaching into the darkness and grabbing onto a man’s form, revealed next to the pyre as if he’d formed out of the new light itself. Then there was a man outlined in flames, running. Running. Falling to his knees. A burst of gunfire from the darkness of the downslope, and he fell backwards as if kicked.

Triumph surged through Renicks. He resisted the urge to throw his arms up in the air as he made out the dim form of Begley scrambling onto the maze of conduits. Continued to run out of sheer exhilaration. As the triumph faded into a vague, rotten horror, he passed close to where the first man had fallen, shot by Begley. He slowed to a walk, all the energy draining from him. He’d killed two people directly. Murdered them. Self-defense, maybe, but they were still dead. He’d aided in other deaths, too.

He stopped and stood for a moment. Pictured the woman up in the TV studio again. His kids were going to ask him to tell them how this all happened. He was going to have to tell them the story.

“Jack!”

He blinked in the darkness and snapped his head up. Pray for forgiveness on your own time, Jack, he told himself, and pushed himself back into motion, back towards Begley. She was crouched over the tiny handheld LED screen and keyboard, attached via the thin, broad cable to the black box on the cavern floor.

“This will take me about ten minutes,” she said without looking up.

Renicks shook off the last clinging horror and self-disgust, clearing his head. “Maybe we should go find an ax. Just cut the lines.”

She shook her head without pausing or looking up. “Can’t. Interrupt the signal improperly, the charges blow. It’s designed to prevent people from taking possession of this facility when it’s online as the new Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters.” She tapped something into the keyboard and studied the stream of data that spilled out after it. Shook her head. Finally looked up at him.

She was exhausted, and Renicks felt immediately guilty. She was in worse shape than he was. She was still focused and working to save lives — to save their lives. “I need ten minutes.”

He nodded. “What about the mine shaft?” he said. “Just making a run for it?”

She looked back down at the screen. “Aside from the potential deaths of civilians? We’re not alone in this facility yet, Jack. We walk away, Darmity gets in here five minutes later and sets the charges, we’re half a mile up that shaft when a fireball comes through, burning us alive, and then the whole damn thing just collapses. We don’t even know how many people they’ve sent. We’ve seen nine, including our friend Mr. Darmity. There could be dozens more we just haven’t seen.”

Renicks nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m not thinking. I’m — ”

Somewhere behind them, a red flashing light sparked into life. A klaxon split the silence. And a deep rumbling noise he could feel in the stone under him lurched into life. The Blast door, being opened.

In his head, Renicks heard Begley again. We’re not alone in this facility yet.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

36.

One minute after their decision, Renicks trotted unsteadily behind Begley, wondering how in the world she managed to almost run with a broken leg while carrying a heavy automatic rifle. He wanted to draw some blood when they were finally done with this and win a Nobel Prize analyzing her genetic code. They were retracing their steps back to the service tunnel. They passed a series of unmarked doors along the damp, finished hallway that Renicks remembered. He knew the door that led to the tunnels was rusted. There was water flowing nearby, deep underground. He could smell damp in the air and wondered how often they had to tear out the carpet and moldy drywall, replace everything dry. Every few years, he thought.

When the rusted door came into view, Begley attacked it. Tore it open with a grunt. Her own momentum carried her back into Renicks. He steadied her and pushed her gently back into forward motion.

He felt the energy. The necessity. They had, for the first time, an advantage. They were some minutes ahead of Darmity, and for the first time knew exactly where all the other players were: Above them. Everyone was above them, heading down. Heading down fast, and coming armed. But simply knowing something concrete was energizing. He hadn’t realized how long they’d been running blind, scampering from one faulty hiding place to the next, always worried about turning a corner and finding an enemy.

Running felt perfectly natural.

Three steps into the service tunnel. There was the butt end of the ladder leading up to the thirteenth level; Renicks stared at it and skidded to a halt. Stood for a second, an image of Begley sliding down the last few feet of a ladder flashing through his thoughts.

Begley skidded to a halt on the gritty, irregular floor and twisted around. “Jack!”

“Go!” he shouted back. “I’ll catch up in a second!”

She hesitated, then spun and hobbled off. He watched her for a second, knowing how much pain she had to be in. Then he tore open his bag and started riffling through its contents. Pulled the little mini-survival kit out and dug into it, extracting the fishing line. Dropping the rest of the kit back into the bag, he freed the fishing line from the plastic clip that kept it looped up and let it dangle free: About four feet of thin, shining wire.

He looked back at the ladder. Saw Begley sliding down. Wondered, for just a second, if that was a common trick. Decided it probably was.

When the ladder emerged from the channel a few feet above him, metal pieces had been welded into place, jutting back to the walls where they were attached with big, rusted bolts. To stabilize the last section of ladder. He stepped up close to the ladder. Put his face where it would be if he was sliding down, terminal velocity from above. Lined up the bolts on the sides above him. Concluded that any wire strung between those bolts would slice up through the chin.

Thought about that for a second.

Thought about Frank Darmity. Saw his flat, squinty stare. Remembered his voice on the PA, making Begley scream. Thought about the guns. These people, he reminded himself, had tried to murder millions, and had come to make sure he and Begley were dead. Would kill thousands as collateral damage if the complex was destroyed before a complete evacuation had been effected.

Keeping his weight on his good ankle, he climbed up a few feet. The silence was almost perfect again, and for a second he imagined he could feel the ladder vibrating under his hands. Someone up above in the darkness, riding down. Then he hooked one arm through the rungs and hung on, looping the fishing line around the bolt on the left. Three, four times, twisted. Looped it again. Twisted. Made a knot. Pulled it over to the other side and looped it around the other bolt. Pulled it taut, as tight as he could manage. Looped and twisted until it was secure. He plucked it with one finger and climbed down to the floor.

It was invisible. Anyone sliding down the ladder would have no warning. He thought it would probably clear their body and catch the face.

Hesitated for one more second. Then turned and moved as quickly as he could after Begley.

He pushed all thoughts out of his head. Blocked out any chance of imagining someone slicing through that wire. Told himself this was war. Told himself that anyone coming down that ladder was coming to set off the charges and kill Begley and himself. Told himself a lot of things, quickly and loudly, shouting to distract himself.

He caught up with Begley quickly. The hallway seemed to be devolving. The floor had become uneven and the walls were rougher. The regular hanging lights had given way to bare bulbs sprouting from a single electrical conduit. He had the impression of coming to the edges of the complex. Everything blurry. Unfinished. It was palpably colder and damper.

Begley turned her head as he fell into step behind her.

“The charges are throughout the complex,” she said breathlessly, turning back. “Every level. Deep inside the concrete. Designed to pancake the whole goddamn place. Which will destabilize the whole mountain. Rockslides, mudslides in addition to the fireball and gas venting. You can’t get to the charges. You’d have to drill into the pour on every level, each one would take a fucking hour to get to, and they’re pressure-locked, so the minute the air hit them from a bore-hole they’d trip individually. They’re linked to the outside via dedicated satellite hookup. Designed to be separate from the Security Office, because the whole idea is to blow it out from under someone seizing the complex illegally.”

She took a few steps in silence, catching her breath.

“They ran the satellite hookup through the old mine shafts. If you want to disarm the system, you have to disconnect the hookup from the complex. If you want to set the charges off manually, you have to simulate a signal from the hookup!”

They came to a right-angle in the corridor. Renicks watched Begley limp around the corner. Lungs burning, he raced after her. His ankle shooting shards of glass up into his calf with every step.

He turned the corner and slowed just a fraction of a step. The corridor widened out into a small room. On his right was a huge steel blast door. A single sheet of steel set into the rock. A small keypad — for a moment Renicks was stupidly amused at the tiny scale of the keypad compared to the door itself, which was about ten feet high and twelve or fifteen feet wide. It was unmarked. The metal reflected the weak light back and appeared to glow a soft orange-yellow.

He turned and saw Begley continuing down the corridor, which narrowed down again, disappearing into near blackness. The electrical conduit on the ceiling ended at a junction box a few feet past the corner.

“Isn’t that the access door?” he shouted, lumbering after her.

The blue light of her tiny flashlight sprang into being ahead of him. “Yes — two sets of blast doors, one leading to the old mine shaft itself and one into here. They take time to open. Five minutes or so before a single person can squeeze through, ten minutes to full aperture. It’s a production.”

He could barely make out her outline as he closed in again. He could feel the walls narrowing down. Reached up and found he could touch the ceiling. Their sounds were muffled back at them. The corridor was shrinking.

“This,” Begley said, breathing hard as she came to a stop, “is the shortcut.”

Renicks squeezed in next to her. With his shoulder jammed into what felt like rough, raw rock, he was pressed against her tightly. He could feel her struggling for breath. Could feel her body heat. She was exhausted. He was exhausted, he realized. Heart pounding, head pounding, legs shaking. They were both close to their physical limits.

He squinted, following the weak pale light of her flashlight. The space tapered off sharply from where they were — the ceiling crashing down, the walls sucking in, until there was just a black shadow, perhaps two feet high, a foot and a half wide. If that.

“What is it?”

Begley turned to face him, giving him a sudden sense of release as he was no longer being pressed into the wall. “Just a void. I had hours to myself in this goddamn tomb, so I wandered. I read specs and old manuals. I explored. I don’t think this was here when they built the place. I think something gave way and this opened up. No one ever noticed. It’s a hole, basically. It’s wet. Water erosion, I guess, caused it.”

Renicks strained his eyes at it. It was just darkness. Shadow. “A hole.”

“It’s tight. For me. For you, it’ll be really tight. It drops you into the cavern beyond, what the old mineshaft opens into. Where the hookup is.”

“You climbed into that,” he said. He tried to imagine the frame of mind that would lead Begley to shrug and climb into it. The level of boredom required. He didn’t think he had a suitable experience with which to compare it. The idea of pushing himself into that hole, with the weight of rock around him was horrifying. He knew immediately that the only thing that would ever convince him to do so was something like Frank Darmity with an automatic weapon creeping up behind him.

He felt rather than saw her preparing. Pulling off her jacket. Leaning the rifle against the wall.

“No way to carry the guns in. But we can use the straps to pull them in after us,” she said. “Give me yours.”

He slung it off his shoulder and held it out blindly until he felt her grab it. “How come you didn’t report this? It’s a pretty major breach of security.”

She removed the strap from his rifle and hers. “I don’t know. You can’t get into the cavern from the outside except through another blast door, and getting up into the void from in there is not nearly as easy as dropping down into the cavern from here.” She tied the straps together into one, then set the safeties and looped it around the rear sights, binding them together. “It was a serious breach of protocol, I admit it, Jack. When we’re topside you can file a complaint.”

He managed a ghost of a smile. “I will. I already have to file one against Darmity, so it will be no trouble.”

“I go first. When the rifles drop in, come in after me. I’ll talk you through if you get disoriented.”

Renicks swallowed. “Jesus,” he said.

Begley paused. After a second he felt her hand on his. “You gonna be able to do this, Jack?”

He swallowed again. Felt his heart lurching in his chest, a crazy non-rhythm. He thought if his heart were doing that under any other circumstances he’d be in the car already, headed for the Emergency Room. He nodded. “I’ll be okay.”

She squeezed his hand. Then let go. Went back to work.

“We’ll be inside in thirty seconds,” she said. “It’ll take them, minimum, five minutes once they get here. That’s our window. If we can trash the hookup in five minutes, they can’t blow the place.”

He shook himself. “But can still shoot us.”

He heard her small, cute laugh. “Well, sure.” She paused. “Here, take the light. I know what I’m doing here. You’ll need it more.”

He took the flashlight from her. Watched her sit on the floor, push her legs into the shadow. He wondered if her splint was going to cause her trouble, but she made smooth progress, and he figured it was a sloping fall, a straight shot. She pushed herself forward with her hands, the straps of the guns looped around one fist, dragging them behind her. Her feet disappeared, then her legs, then her midsection, and finally her head. The rifles rattled on the stone right behind her, then were sucked into the darkness behind her. It was as if the darkness was eating her.

He waited. Realized he was waiting to hear her say she was okay, or that he should come through now. Felt stupid.

Far off, he heard a sudden shriek. There and gone.

He dropped onto the floor and pushed his feet forward until they were swallowed by the darkness. Felt no resistance. Took two quick, deep breaths. Began pushing himself into the void. He watched his legs disappear, eaten by darkness. Felt a change in temperature; it was colder once you crossed the threshold. He felt the top of the void and leaned back, getting onto his elbows. When his shoulders were slipping under, he could just see the rough line of the top of the hole. Just enough room for him to slide into. His feet were suddenly dangling over an edge, and he could see that he’d be able to just barely push himself along until gravity took over and sucked him down.

He pushed with his arms until he couldn’t go any further that way, then used his legs. His calves were bent over the unseen edge; he pulled with his hamstrings, letting his head and shoulders lie on the floor as he pulled himself further in. The dim glow of the flashlight showed him rough gray stone, droplets of milky water hanging half an inch from his eyes.

Then he stopped.

He kicked his legs but was unable to get any more purchase; they were extended out too far. He stopped breathing. He could twist his arms but they were wedged between his body and the rock and for a moment he couldn’t get them free. A black, swallowing terror welled up inside him. He thrashed for a second, kicking his legs uselessly and twisting his torso violently. One arm squeezed free, and he quickly found the inner edge of the slot with his free hand. With just his fingers he managed to slide himself another inch or so, and that was enough. His other arm squeezed free and then he was able to pull himself the rest of the way through. Just before his head cleared, gravity finally noticed him and yanked him down. He scraped his forehead on the rough stone and tumbled a few feet down a sharp, rocky incline, biting his tongue and knocking his head a few times.

He lay for a moment on a wet, sharp surface. It was painful, but he didn’t want to move again. Perhaps ever.

“Jack,” Begley whispered, almost in his ear. “You okay?”

He nodded. Felt foolish. “I’ll live,” he whispered back. He wondered why they were whispering. He didn’t see the flashlight; there was a thin film of weak, gray light that nudged the edges of things and left them indistinct. He could barely see Begley, a foot away. She looked spectral and immaterial, like a ghost come to haunt him. She held out one of the M16s.

“Good,” she said. “Because we’re not alone in here. Someone beat us to it.”

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35.

Thirty seconds after watching the woman salute Frank Darmity, Begley turned to Renicks and said “What the hell was that?”

Renicks finished his third water bottle in the last few minutes. He was feeling almost okay, though every muscle and ligament still ached. There was a thick core of exhaustion deep inside him, spreading outward, but he didn’t feel like he was going to fall over any more. “La flava regxo,” he said, hearing the tinny voices patched in from the studio. “A pass phrase. Esperanto. It means The Yellow King.”

Begley pursed her lips. “Looks like our Mr. Darmity is more highly placed in this than we thought.”

“Looks like our Mr. Darmity might be running this.”

There was a moment of silence. Renicks thought its flavor would accurately be described as horrified.

Their odds, he thought, had actually just gotten worse. The plan had been simple. Neither of them were in any shape to take on a fresh group of heavily armed, trained people. If they were here to “clean up”, lure them to a room with Mr. Darmity and let them sort each other out—he’d thought their worst-case scenario was just one of them dead. Instead of weakening or eliminating one of their enemies, they’d combined them into one more effective unit. And they still had to make it out of the complex alive.

“There were six of them when I saw the first poor bastard get gunned down,” Begley said. “Where are the other three?”

Begley leaned forward and pointed at one of the screens. “Lobby.”

Renicks followed her pointing finger and studied the screen. In the large, useless lobby, grainy and grayscaled, three men in similar body-armor were visible. One appeared to be walking the perimeter, his futuristic-looking rifle aimed down at the floor in casual competence. The other two were working together on the floor, back towards the unused desk. A large black bag lay next to them.

“Bolting down tripods for heavier guns. They’re planning to defend against an assault.”

Renicks frowned. Watched the screen intently. His head throbbed like his brain was trying to squeeze out through his eyes and ears. “They’re going to try and hold the complex? Jesus.”

Begley leaned back, letting out an explosive sigh. Renicks looked at her. She was dirty. Bloodied. Her crisp, tailored suit had been torn and sagged off of her in unfortunate ways. She stood there with her arms crossed under her breasts fiercely, chewing her lip. Her posture, he noticed, was still perfect. For a moment, he wanted to reach out and touch her. Just her shoulder, or upper arm. Just friendly contact.

He didn’t move. Looked back at the security screens.

He watched the tiny figures in the lobby for a moment. Conscious of the silence. He glanced back at the TV studio. Darmity and the other three were gone.

Suddenly it felt like they could be right outside the door. This huge underground space, he thought. Everywhere they went there could be someone with an automatic weapon waiting to kill them.

He leaned forward. “Wait. Look.”

Begley leaned in next to him. Their shoulders touched. He was aware of her physical presence suddenly. Warm. Solid. Comforting.

“What?”

He hesitated, trying to make the grainy security signal clearer. Trying to will it into better resolution. At the pace this complex was updated, he figured the Federal Government would get around to installing high-definition video feeds by the next century.

Then one of the three figures moved, and he had a clear view of what they were doing again. He nodded. “The tripods. Look at them.”

Begley sucked in breath. “What the hell.” She turned to look at him. “They’re oriented inward.”

Renicks nodded, leaning back. “They’re not holding the complex against an assault. They’re just making sure we don’t get out.”

Begley stepped back, turned, and began the ridiculous process of pacing in the tiny office. Three steps up, three steps back. Three steps, three steps. Then she stopped and grabbed his arm.

“Jesus, Jack, it’s the same playbook. The charges. Underneath the facility.”

Renicks blinked. Head pounding. “What?”

“They planned to blow the place. I think if they failed to pull this off, the President was supposed to blow the place and erase all evidence. But he didn’t — he killed himself. That wasn’t part of the plan. I think the idea was that Grant would be able to walk away untouched, maybe even a hero, the strong leader who guided us through a crisis. Win-win — either they launch their attack and manage their Soft Coup or whatever, or they get out of it with his image burnished and no one any wiser about whoever these crazy bastards are.”

“But then Grant goes loses his nerve. He takes the easy way out.”

“So, the backup plan. Blow this place. Destroy every single scrap of evidence.”

Renicks nodded. “There’s a lot, right? A lot of fingerprints. They re-wired the place. There’s surveillance video, access logs. The cut magnetic locks on the suite. The Brick, too.”

“Us.”

“Fucking hell.”

“This was the plan from the beginning. If they fail, blow the whole complex, make sure no one knows what’s happened here.”

Renicks nodded. “That animal wasn’t killing the other agents to keep them silent. He was killing them so they wouldn’t get in the way.”

He turned and stared at the screens again, searching for movement. The tiny office suddenly felt small. Hot.

“So what do we do?”

“We can’t go up,” Begley said immediately. “Even assuming we can slip past Darmity and his three little helpers, we hit the lobby and there’s a choke point. No other way out except the elevators. We’d be cut to ribbons. I’m willing to bet those three are ordered to fire at anything that comes up. Even their own people. No one is supposed to come out of this alive.”

“And those three? In the lobby?”

She shrugged. “Suicide. Or suicide by cop, if need be. Won’t be hard to get themselves shot once the FBI and the Marines arrive.”

Renicks suddenly shook his head. Remember, suddenly, the news feed they’d seen earlier: Bluemont being evacuated. “Doesn’t matter. Think about it. This place is rigged to be destroyed. That’s a lot of force. Even if we could teleport to the surface right now and start running — ”

Begley finished the sentence. “We’d never get clear of the blast radius.”

They stood for another few seconds in silence. Renicks swallowed, something hard and choking. All this, he thought. And then he’d thought maybe they were going to get out alive. He thought of Stan. At least someone had some idea of what had really happened. He knew Stan well enough; he would investigate. Was probably already getting into trouble over it.

He looked back at Begley. She was staring at the monitors without focus, just staring. Lost in her thoughts too.

“The charges,” he said suddenly. “They’re not designed to be set off locally, right?”

She turned to him and blinked. once. Twice. Clearing her head. “Right. They’re in place for remote detonation by order of the President.”

“So there’s no button or anything in place here, right? They can’t have a box or something, a remote detonator?”

Begley nodded slowly. “Sure, Jack, they have to … holy shit, Renicks.” She looked back at him with sudden energy. “They have to get down there. They have to set the charges manually.” She paused. “Jesus. That’s a hard suicide mission.”

It took Renicks a second or two to realize she was talking about themselves. When he looked up, she was looking right at him. He held her gaze for a moment and nodded.

“I already died once,” he said, forcing a grin he didn’t feel. His heart thudded erratically in his chest. He felt like puking. But he smiled at Begley. “What do we do?”

She smiled back. He had the impression they were both programming expressions on their faces like feeding a program into a computer: Just mechanical reactions to conscious commands. Both of them acting for the other’s benefit. He wondered if this was how his father’s patients had acted: Forced cheer, everyone in on it. Everyone smiling and saying the right things, everyone terrified and cringing underneath.

“We go down,” she said. Then her smile changed. Became more natural. He blinked and found himself smiling back, mysteriously excited.

“They’re on seven,” he said. They were buried, fourteen levels down, deep inside the mountain. “We’re ahead of them.”

She winked. Renicks thought that wink was the most remarkable thing he’d ever seen anyone do under any circumstances. “I know a shortcut,” she said.

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34.

Thirty-three seconds before he heard Marianne Begley’s voice, Frank Darmity was strapping his body armor back on, wincing a little as the blowback pushed into the wound in his abdomen, as the straps dug into his bloody shoulder. He was sweating and felt a little lightheaded. Shock, he thought. And exhaustion. He’d lost blood, suffered injury, and hadn’t eaten or drunk anything in hours. This was not professional behavior, he chastised himself. A professional keeps himself in top condition at all times. He repeated the mantra his commanders had almost literally beaten into him: There is always time to eat. There is always time to hydrate. A hungry, thirsty operative is sloppy and weak.

Except, there literally had not been time.

He adjusted the vest so the indentation where the Begley Bitch had shot him didn’t slip right into the hot, painful wound like a peg into a hole. It felt uncomfortable, out of sync, but he felt better with it on.

He hefted his rifle and checked it over, blinking sweat out of his eyes.

Amesley’s Assholes had dropped his equipment one office over from where they’d try to imprison him. It hadn’t been hard to find.

What had been hard to find was Doctor Jack Renicks’ dead body.

Renicks was another one. Sitting behind a desk. A button-pusher. He’d been looking forward to teaching the Secretary a lesson about the difference between them. But then the motherfucker had gotten all slippery and he’d wasted a lot of time chasing him, and then he’d killed himself. A coward. A bitch. He’d bitched out. And that had been an unsatisfying way for it all to go down. But Darmity was a soldier. He knew mission creep when he saw it. Once everything had gone to hell, his mission had shifted. So he’d let it go. He had to find the Begley and smother that fire.

Start with Renicks. She’d been with him, maybe planning to follow suit. He didn’t think he’d find her weeping over the corpse, but it was a starting place. So he’d gone back to the office. And found it empty. A syringe on the floor. He’d picked it up and stared at it. Then at the empty spot on the floor.

Thought he should have told Amesley to fuck off and gone for Renicks with both barrels, right away. Fuck the subtle shit. That’s where it had all gone wrong.

Just as he was slinging the rifle over his shoulder and trying to decide where to look for Begley, her voice suddenly crackled from the complex PA system.

“ … — ever we do, Jack, we have to be smart. We can ride this out.”

He blinked, staring up at the ceiling. The tiny speaker, like thousands of others throughout the complex, made her voice tinny and thin. But clear.

“We should keep moving. Hiding out someplace is just waiting to be killed.”

Renicks’ voice. Darmity straightened up and cursed. An involuntary vocalization.

“We keep moving, we actually increase our chances of just running into them, Jack. This studio is our best — ”

Darmity was out the door. Their voices were in the air. The second he stopped concentrating on them, they stopped forming into coherent words in his head. They were bird songs. Just tinny noises fluttering in the air. All they meant was that Renicks — miraculously alive — and the Begley Bitch were in the TV Studio on Level Seven, accidentally hitting the PA.

He could see how it happened. He’d been in the studio, and the PA patch-in button was right on the console in the office portion. Someone had leaned on it. Or sat on it. Or put something on top of it, and the microphone was patched through to the PA. And the studio was insulated and soundproofed and wired so that the PA didn’t cut in there, just in case the President was making an address to the nation from the Secure Facility. You didn’t want security announcements stepping on the Commander-in-Chief.

So they didn’t know they were transmitting. Announcing their location.

The studio. He trotted down the hallway with the rifle in his hands, safety off, pointed down and to the side. It made sense. The Fax line had been yanked out of the wall, but if there was a place aside from the Security Office you might be able to communicate with the outside world, that would be it. And he liked the psychology of it: They might assume he wouldn’t come back there because there had already been a close call for them there. It was the sort of half-smart thing a Softy like Renicks would think of.

As he approached the elevators, He smiled. Half smart. The studio would have been his next stop. There was an unconscious agent there that needed to be tended to.

He keyed in the call code. The indicator light blurred red for a moment, then went out. He frowned. Keyed it in again, more slowly. Sweat dripped off his nose. He felt shivery. He wondered if his wound was souring.

The indicator blurred red again. Then went off.

For a second, Darmity stood there glowering at the keypad. Renicks and Begley’s voices were still sizzling in the air around him. Had he misremembered the code? After a second, he keyed in the previous code, for when the complex had been online. It didn’t work either.

“Mother-fucker!” he spat, leaning back and kicking at the keypad. Nothing happened.

He turned away and started trotting unsteadily back the way he came. Renicks and Begley weren’t the only people who knew how to use the Access Corridors.

The voices were still in the air. “ … increase our chances … ”

By the time he crashed through the unmarked door leading to the service corridors, he was sweating freely and had given up holding his rifle carefully; he held it loosely by the barrel as he ran. Mouth open. Lungs burning.

In the service corridors there were no speakers. He could still hear their voices on the PA for a few seconds, and then they were swallowed by the walls. Then he was in the tube, sliding down the access ladder with his hands loose on the railing. He hit the landing and almost fell, staggering backwards and catching himself.

He raced down the next three ladders the same way, ran for the access door on Level Seven and burst into the hallway.

“ … can ride this … ”

Their voices, still in the air. He didn’t listen. All that mattered was that they had not yet realized their danger. They were unaware. He was creeping up behind them, and he was going to enjoy putting his foot up their ass.

He looped the rifle’s strap around his forearm and held it carefully, pointed down at an angle. The door to the studio had a big red light mounted right above it to indicate when it was in use. The bulb glowed brightly. He knew they would be in the office section; if they had moved into the set their voices would be muffled and distant.

He kept his eyes on the door as he approached. He felt tensed and ready. Limber. Oiled. Sweat dripped into his eyes and he blinked them feverishly. But didn’t stop. Didn’t hesitate.

He took the last two steps quickly and kicked the door open. The lock shattered. It was just a privacy lock, had never been intended to resist a determined Frank Darmity.

The tiny control room was the mess he remembered it from earlier.

Renicks and Begley were nowhere to be seen.

Standing amidst the chaos, arms up in the air over his head, was the agent he’d left in the studio after capturing Begley. He was filthy. He didn’t even turn to look in Darmity’s direction.

Renicks and Begley were still talking.

“ … just waiting to be killed.”

“We keep moving, we actually increase our chances of just running into them, Jack.”

A recording. Darmity stared at the agent — Simmons, he remembered — and considered. The studio control panel could digitally record sound and play it back; they had recorded a short conversation, patched through to the PA, and started a looped playback. Renicks and Begley were on set. Out of his line of sight. He saw their train of thought: He hears them, comes in guns blazing, they cut him down from an oblique angle before he even knows what’s happening.

A second before the man behind him spoke, Darmity heard the shift of fabric behind him.

“Drop the rifle,” a male voice said. Just a few feet behind him. Far enough to be out of reach. Close enough to not have to aim anything. “Just relax your hands and drop it. Do anything else, and I will shoot you dead. Don’t say a word. Don’t move anything but your hands.”

Darmity sighed and released the rifle. There were protocols.

“Good. Step into the room.”

Darmity stepped into the room. Simmons stared at him. Darmity didn’t acknowledge him in any way. He turned, and found two more people: A woman with short, red hair pulled back into a severe ponytail, her angular features terse and composed, and a burly man with a shaved head, scars on his scalp like Martian canals. They both held the same model of assault rifle. They both looked, to him, like people who would not hesitate to kill him the moment he gave a wrong answer.

This was proven a moment later. The woman turned to Simmons, studied him for a moment, and then said “Kiu estas la flava regxo?”

Darmity nodded to himself. He didn’t know what the words meant, but he’d heard them before.

In the corner of his eye, Darmity saw Simmons look at him. Then back at the woman. “I don’t kn — ”

She squeezed the trigger. Four, five shots, one second. Simmons jigged and exploded, fell to the floor like a sack of corn.

She swung the rifle towards Darmity. He looked back at her.

“Kiu estas la flava regxo?” she said softly.

He nodded. Didn’t waste any time. “Trovi li en la strato de la kvar tordi.”

He didn’t know what those words meant either. He’d been taught them, and he remembered.

The woman nodded and put up her gun. The other man did as well. Darmity imagined the man behind him did the same.

The woman snapped a salute. “Sir!”

Darmity smiled and saluted back.

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33.

Five minutes before making a plan, Jack Renicks was trying to remain standing. The very slight vibration of the elevator made him feel like he was standing on a piece of plywood riding a giant wave to the beach. Sweat poured down his back at a steady rate. His heart thudded against his ribcage like it was trying to escape his chest. Waves of dizziness swept through him, making him have little gray moments, near-blackouts.

He supposed being dead for nine minutes or so would knock anyone on their ass.

“Isn’t riding the elevator dangerous? What if the doors open and there are six people with assault weapons waiting for us?”

“They can’t have beaten us down here. There’s only one elevator — if they were going to surprise us it would have been on Level Three when we got on. They’re going to follow a protocol, Jack. First step is, make sure the top level is clear. That we’re not hiding in a bathroom or something. Step two, probably, secure the elevator on the top level so we can’t use it.”

The elevator stopped. The doors split open. There was no one there.

“Jack,” Begley said. “Go grab a waste basket or something we can hold these doors open with.”

He stepped into the hall. Turned as Begley stepped forward and held the doors open. “What for?” he asked as he moved off.

“So we can secure the elevator before they do.”

He rounded the corner and headed towards the Executive Suite again. Had a gray moment, and a strange feeling of deja-vu settled over him. It was like a terrible dream, repeating over and over again. He kept heading to the Executive Suite and awful things kept happening.

He stepped around the equipment Amesley’s people had abandoned in the hall and stepped into the suite. It was exactly as they’d left it. He went into the office and grabbed the plastic trash bin, breathing harder than should have been necessary, and carried it back to the elevator.

“Jack,” Begley said briskly, “this is what the best training in the world gets you: High-tech solutions to problems.” She stepped out into the hall and released the doors. Jammed the garbage basket between them. They bounced open and stayed open.

“If we hit the emergency button, or put it into fire mode,” she said, turning and leading him back towards the suite, “that can be reversed remotely if you have the codes. Which we have to assume these people do. The doors will read someone blocking the doors and will not close under any circumstances. And the elevator won’t move if the doors are open. So if they’re sitting up on the top level calling the elevator, they’re going to have a long wait.”

Renicks smiled. “They’re going to find another way in.”

“Of course they are.”

They entered the suite again. Begley limped through the living area and headed back towards the bedrooms. When he caught up with her, she had the closet open and one of the rifles in her hands.

“This is an M16A2 Rifle,” she said. “I’m going to give you one and as many magazines as you can carry, Jack, but I don’t have time to give you any training, and you’re going to be goddamn dangerous with it.” She looked at him. “I know you’ve had some experience with small arms, Jack, and the M16 is pretty idiot-proof, but until you fire it live you don’t know it, and if you don’t know it you won’t hit anything you want to hit with it, and probably hit plenty you don’t want to hit. Like me. Okay?”

He nodded, fighting to remain standing. “So you’re saying me squeezing that trigger is a last resort.”

“That is exactly what I’m saying. I’m going to set it to a three-round burst. Not full auto. That should help you retain control and keep you from spraying the ceiling with bullets.”

She checked the rifle in her hands again, slapped a magazine into place, and handed it to him. He took it and had to catch himself.

“Heavy,” he said.

“It’s a pig,” Begley agreed. “Here.”

She pushed five magazines at him. “Put these in your bag. Did you see how I released the magazine?”

He nodded. “I think so.”

“Try it,” she said without looking at him, reaching in to select another rifle from the stock.

He tried it. The magazine slid into his hand. He slapped it back into place and felt the satisfying catch.

“There’ll be noise and smoke and a kick if you fire it,” she said, looking down at the rifle she’d chosen. “Never try to fire it without bracing it. Your shoulder will hurt like hell. It’ll get hot after a few sustained bursts.” She bent and came up with four more magazines and handed them to him as he slid the tough-looking fabric belt over his shoulder. “Here ends the instruction on the weapon. Your takeaways?”

He smiled. “Don’t fire it, but if I have to don’t fire it at you.”

“Congratulations,” she said, slamming the closet shut. “You graduate.”

He followed her back out into the living area and on to the kitchen, where they pulled some lukewarm bottles of water from the unplugged fridge. He was shivering.

“So what’s our plan?”

She closed her eyes and leaned back against the wall. Renicks thought she looked as tired as he felt, which was terrible. “They’ll spend some time trying to override the elevator. Not long; they’ll figure out we’ve manually disabled them quick enough. Say, ten minutes. They’re here to clean this mess up. Make sure no one knows exactly what’s happened here. And now that we’re offline and the crisis is over, they have a very short window before legitimate authorities show up. FBI. Marines. Hell, everyone’s on their way here right now.”

Renicks nodded. “Everybody involved so far seems to have walked into this with suicide as an option.” He thought of Grant. Smiling, smooth President Grant.

Begley nodded, eyes still closed. “They won’t waste time, and they won’t worry about someone coming in after them. I saw only six. They’ll leave one up top, in the lobby, just in case someone slips past the others. They’ll be aggressive.”

Renicks swayed on his feet. The rifle was heavy. It pulled at his shoulder like someone was pushing down from above, making him strain to remain upright. Every muscle ached like he’d been beaten up three or four times. He was nauseous and worried what vomiting all over Agent Begley might do to her opinion of him.

“That assumes you saw everything. Just six. There might be more. They might be crowding in up there.”

Begley frowned. “Sure. They might have tanks, or laser guns. But if I’m running this show from their end, it’s a small team. The legitimate authorities can’t be more than half an hour out. Marines. Secret Service. FBI. Racing here, now that the danger’s over. They don’t have time for a huge operation.”

“So — they’re here to clean this up, to stick with that charming phrase,” he said slowly. “Based on the actions of our resident psychopath Frank Darmity, that appears to be a really, really bad code for kill everybody.” He paused, working through his thick, slippery thoughts. “I can’t imagine six professionals in body armor are here to escort Mr. Darmity to freedom.”

Begley’s eyes popped open.

Renicks nodded. “We’ve got two problems. We’ve got Darmity hunting us, and we’ve got, I don’t know, Ninjas? Mercenaries? Hunting us.”

Begley stared at him. “Ninjas?”

He waved it aside. “Let’s put them in the same room.”

Begley nodded slowly. “Worse case scenario: Only Darmity gets killed.”

“Best case scenario? They all kill each other.”

She pushed off from the wall. “Or, we stick to the access corridors again, work our way up. Maybe we skip all of them, end up with just one person to deal with.”

He thought of climbing. Climbing and climbing in those tight, hot shafts. He shook his head. “And if you’re wrong — maybe you turned away from that video screen just before five hundred more showed up. We show up in the lobby and there’s an army waiting. Or they’re already in the access corridors.” He took a deep, shuddering breath.

She thought about that. “How do we get them in the same place?”

“They’re both looking for us, no matter what else they’re doing,” he said. Each word took individual effort. “Let’s make some noise.”

She studied him for a moment. Then nodded. “All right. Let’s make some noise.” She pushed off from the wall and didn’t ask him if he was okay, if she could rely on him not to pass out or stumble. He was grateful for that. Grateful she didn’t make him say that he didn’t know. That he felt weak.

“Come on, Jack,” she said, limping out of the kitchen. “Between us we have three legs, multiple contusions, and one near-death experience. I’d say we’re due some fucking luck.”

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32.

Three minutes before watching the agent be killed, Marianne Begley was trying to get Renicks to stand.

The silence oppressed her. The door hung open in exactly the way she’d found it, exactly the way Darmity had left it. The air seemed to sizzle with unused acoustics. She kept imagining she could hear someone out in the hall. A soft step outside the door. Heavy breathing. And everything she and Renicks did seemed incredibly loud to her. Every whisper a shout, every movement like boulders rolling across the floor.

She had no gun. Every few seconds she thought back to the gun she’d left on the floor of the clinic. Longed for it like a lost love.

“Can you stand? Jack, you have to be able to move. I can’t drag you.”

She whispered. Her throat hurt. Like she’d been smoking cigarettes. She hadn’t smoked since high school.

Renicks nodded. He looked awful, she thought. Pale. Dark bags under his red, swollen eyes. A film of sweat covered his forehead. “I can walk, I think. I’m gonna slow us down, though. You should go on without me. Get topside, send down help.”

She shook her head. Cleanup, the agents had said. “Darmity’s still out there. I leave you here, you’re dead. Come on, up.”

Renicks smiled. “If Darmity’s out there, what are we going to do if he comes out of the bathroom while we’re awkwardly limping down the hall? Karate moves?”

She paused. He was right, she thought. For a goddamn academic, Renicks had a sense for survival she had to admire. She thought again of the gun she’d left on the floor. It wasn’t worth it. Two rounds. If she knew where to get more ammunition … her thoughts shifted to the Security Office. She saw herself gathering up guns and radios. Darmity was out looking for her. There was a chance he was nowhere near the Security Office.

She looked down at Renicks again. “Stay here. Be quiet. Gather your strength and be ready to stand up and move,” she said briskly, turning for the door. “I’m going to get us some weapons.”

“Get big ones,” Renicks said tiredly after her. “We already shot that bastard with a normal gun.”

She slipped through the busted doorway without touching the door, leaving it in exactly the same position as before. If Darmity trawled down the hall again, she hoped he would psychologically discount that room because he’d already checked it. That he would assume they would be on the move immediately, running from him. Bullies, she thought, always assumed you were terrified of them. Always assumed you would run like a scared rabbit when you heard them coming.

The hall was empty.

She started moving towards the junction; the Security Office right around the corner. She moved slowly, listening carefully and marking the busted-open doors Darmity had left in his wake. Every few steps she paused and turned her head to make sure nothing was creeping up behind her. The silence made her skin crawl. The pain in her leg had become commonplace, though, as if her threshold for suffering had been buoyed up by the constant agony. It hurt like hell but she didn’t mind too much.

When she turned the corner, she stopped for a second in shock, staring at the bodies.

She recognized Square Jaw. He was slumped against the wall. Hands clasped weakly over his torn-open belly. Blood splattered all over him, all over the wall behind him. His eyes were open, his mouth was open. The top of his head had been blown open by a bullet and a flap of skin and hair stood up from his scalp like a cowlick.

Begley stood for a moment. Listening. Her gut told her there was no one nearby, but the bodies strewn in the entrance of the Security Office confused her. Who’d killed them? Darmity? But weren’t they on the same damn side?

Cleanup, she thought. The word was pretty generic. Might encompass anything. And Renicks had made it clear from the memo he’d deciphered on The Brick that Darmity was not part of the team here in the complex. He’d been dropped in. Inserted by the President himself. It stood to reason he might have a whole set of cleanup instructions separate from everyone else.

Slowly, she walked up to the Security Office. The bodies were warm. The blood was still fresh — already sticky, but it hadn’t been more than a few minutes. She remembered the gunshots she’d heard. Pictured it. Darmity in the office. Probably trying to figure out what had happened to the Football, why the lights had flickered. The other agents come to report in … Darmity has complete surprise. Takes them down. Comes to find her and Renicks.

She pushed herself against the wall across from Square Jaw and leaned slowly forward to peek into the office. Froze again. Director Amesley lay slumped against the wall, looking small and dry, like a puppet. Something you would prop on your lap and throw your voice with. He was a bloody mess. Anger boiled up inside her. Martin Amesley was a traitor, yes, but Begley had been proud to work with him up until a few hours ago. Whatever he had done, he had dedicated his life to the Service. He had ensured the safety of countless people, run countless investigations and run them well.

He did not deserve to be left like this.

The office appeared empty aside from Amesley and the bodies of other agents. Biting her lip, she took the risk and stepped around the empty frame where the glass doors had once been. Shattered glass crunched under her feet. She stopped just inside, near enough to the hall to dive at an angle out of the line of sight.

Nothing happened.

She stepped inside briskly, then. The chair with guns and radios piled on the seat was still there. Right where she’d left it. She checked them over — all P229s. She selected two and dropped the magazines from the other two, pushing it all into her pockets. The quiet clashed with the state of the room — shot up, screens smashed, blood on the walls. Most of the equipment had gone into maintenance mode when the complex had reset. Screen savers. Generic login screens. A few of the screens displayed some of the same security cam feeds she and Renicks had seen in the auxiliary Security Office down below. She took a moment to examine them, on the off chance they might show her where Darmity was.

They all displayed static, unmoving stilllifes from all levels of the complex, most flashing from one scene to another every few seconds in a pre-programmed cycle, others showed just one room endlessly. One showed the exterior of the Executive Suite, the cutting equipment abandoned, the double doors now hanging slack after the reset. She let her eyes sit on each screen for a moment. The last one was turned off. After a second’s hesitation, she reached out and turned it on.

It sprang to life immediately. It was the same news feed they’d seen earlier, down below. There was no sound, again. It showed an aerial view of the White House, marked FILE FOOTAGE. A nifty graphic of a map of the USA with the word emergency imprinted on it blazed in the corner. Begley spared a moment’s thought on the absurdity of the graphic, of putting thought into that graphic. She looked at the picture on the screen in tired incomprehension for a moment, then remembered to focus on the crawl at the bottom of the screen.

Stared in shock.

unsubstantiated reports from the emergency bunker beneath the White House say President Charles Grant has committed suicide … no word yet from official sources … there are reports of increased Secret Service activity in the

Suicide. She’d never been introduced to Grant, though she’d been in the same room a few times. He’d been tall and thin, unnaturally tan. His white hair a perfect, gauzy coif. An easy manner, but weightless, like there was nothing behind anything he said or did. He didn’t seem the type.

Movement on one of the other screens caught her eye. It was showing the lobby way up on the surface, where she’d met Amesley, Renicks, and Darmity that afternoon. A man — she recognized him as one of the agents who’d been with Amesley in the Security Office earlier, a pudgy, disheveled boy of a man — was standing with his arms in the air. He was standing with his arms in the air because he wasn’t alone in the lobby. There were six other people, five men and one woman. They were wearing what looked to Begley like military-grade body armor. They had night-vision goggles propped on their heads. They each had a sidearm holstered on one hip and a compact hunting knife on the other, and slim, hardshell backpacks. They each had what looked to Begley like a variation on the Herstal F2000 assault rifle, though she couldn’t be sure.

They didn’t look like US military to her. They didn’t look military to her.

The woman was out in front, pointing her rifle at Amesley’s man and shouting something. The agent shouted back, waving his hands in the air as if to stress his compliance. She kept yelling at him.

Then she gunned him down.

It was eerily silent. The woman, who looked pretty on the blurry security monitor, rocked on her feet, absorbing the recoil. Amesley’s agent jigged in place for a second, his shirt and chest tearing themselves open, and then fell to the floor. The five other troops stepped forward, fanning out and eventually moving out of the camera’s field of view. The woman stepped forward slowly. As she passed the dead agent’s body she casually drew her sidearm, fired once into his head, and re-holstered the weapon.

Then she too was out of the camera’s range.

Cleanup, Begley thought again. The word had come to terrify her. Whoever had almost — but for a heart attack and a car accident — nuked the United States with its own missiles in order to engineer a Presidential coup had clearly planned for failure just as they’d planned for everything else.

Moving as fast as her leg allowed, she retraced her steps. The silence crowding her was balanced by the sudden roaring in her head. Too many things had gone sideways. Several dozen things she’d believed her entire life had proved false within the last few hours. She was relieved to slip back into the office and find Renicks standing. Leaning with his hands on the desk, gasping for air, but on his feet. So far she’d been able to rely on Jack Renicks all day, and it steadied her.

She held a gun out to him, holding it by the barrel. “Safety’s off,” she said as he took it, standing up from the desk and wobbling a little. “Come on.”

She turned and limped back towards the door. “Where are we going?” he called after her.

“To get bigger guns.”

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31.

Five minutes before finding Renicks in one of the empty offices, Frank Darmity stared at the suddenly dim Remote Launch Interface. A second before, it had been lit up green, accepting his keyed-in data. He’d been frustrated at how slow entering the codes by hand was proving to be. But at least it was progress. Then the tiny screen had flickered, gone blank for a second, and was now displaying the bright-red OFFLINE graphic, the Presidential Seal in the background.

One second after that, the lights had gone off. The emergencies had flickered on for one baleful, yellow moment, and then the regular lights had come back on again.

He sat back and let out his breath. Stared at the RLI. Then leaned forward, took it in both hands, stood up, and dashed it against the floor. It bounced. A single piece of plastic broke free and flew off into the shadows of the ruined Security Office. The box-shaped RLI bounced again and rolled a few more feet, then stopped on its side. Still lit up. Still, he thought sourly, completely functional. American-built, no doubt.

He could hear his own breath whistling in and out of his nose. He could feel his heart pounding. So close. So fucking close. And that stupid cunt and his pet agent had fucked it up.

He only indulged himself for a few seconds. A few seconds of rage. He wanted to tear all the consoles from their bolts and hurl them around the room. He wanted to set the place on fire. He wanted to break bones and inflict some goddamn suffering. Instead he took a deep breath, wincing slightly at the pinch in his side. Then he exhaled and relaxed. Worked through each muscle in his body and consciously relaxed them until he was standing at ease.

Then he picked up the automatic on the console in front of him and started walking through the debris. The overall mission had failed. But his mission had one last component.

So did everyone else’s, he reminded himself.

He stepped slowly through the wreckage and around one of the console banks. Martin Amesley sat on the floor with his back against the wall, a few feet away from the shattered front doors. He’d been shot twice in the same leg, which was stretched out in front of him like a burst sausage. Darmity could tell at a glance that the bullets had somehow missed the arteries — else Amesley would have bled out by then — but he’d lost a lot of blood in any event. The old man was surprisingly calm, though, and Darmity gave him some grudging points for that. He’d imagined Amesley as the type to cry like a baby if he got a scratch.

The old man was watching him as he turned the corner and approached. His watery eyes behind the thick lenses flicked to the gun in Darmity’s hand, and then back to his face.

“Mr. Darmity,” he said with a curt nod.

Darmity stood for a second, then knelt down on one knee right in front of the Director. Stared at him.

“You know what just happened,” he finally said.

Amesley nodded again. “We’ve failed.”

Darmity nodded, keeping his temper. “You failed, Mr. Amesley. I could have run the shit out of this operation. You tippy-toed it. You fucked it up. You should have stood aside and let a Field Man run a Field Operation.”

Amesley smiled. Darmity didn’t like it. It was a soft smile. A secret smile. A fucking Cheshire Cat. The old man thought he was smarter than everyone else.

“As you say, Mr. Darmity.”

Darmity leaned forward. “You thought you were my boss.” He tried to mimic Amesley’s subtle smile.

The older man’s face remained exactly the same: Slight smile, blank eyes. “As you say.”

Darmity felt his control slip. As you fucking say, he thought. Fucking talks like an asshole. He mastered himself. Just to show he could. There was no reason to. But he wanted Amesley to know that he was a man you had to pay attention to.

Outside, in the hall, he heard the elevator’s light ring as it arrived. Heard the doors split open. He paused, turning his head, and listened. Heard the voices of Amesley’s people. Turned back to Amesley, who was still staring back at him with that still life of an expression. Like nothing bothered him. It made Darmity want to bother him. Just to see his face change.

He stood up and pointed the gun at the old man. Amesley looked back at him. No flinch. No expression. Darmity felt anger rising in him. He wanted to think of something to say. Something devastating. Something that would make Amesley collapse.

“Well, Mr. Darmity?” Amesley said without moving. “Clean up your mess, son.”

Rage filled him. He shook with it. You pressed the button, he thought, and took one step forward. Squeezed the trigger. Again. Once more. Stood over the body. His breathing like sandpaper.

“What the fuck!”

He spun. The three of them outside the office. All of them looking haggard. Sweaty and defeated. He’d thought about them all. Nothing in-depth. He hadn’t had time to do any research, any social engineering. He’d had to observe them in tiny bursts and form assessments based on very little data — the way they took orders. The way they interacted with each other. The way they carried themselves. The way they responded to a mild insult.

That was Darmity’s favorite tactic. You learned so much from the ten seconds after you pushed someone just a little.

In any group of three or more, there was a leader. Unspoken, usually. Darmity knew without hesitation the leader was the one he thought of as the other Frat Boy. The only one left, now. Frat Boy had the easy build and good hair of the youngster who’d never been in a situation he couldn’t charm or fuck or fight his way out of. His body had never failed him, had never failed to respond to his needs.

Darmity shot him first.

Nothing fancy. He wanted to put them down; he could make sure of a kill later. So he aimed for the torso. The biggest target on the body. Frat Boy tumbled backwards, belly exploding into a geyser of blood.

The other male agent Darmity had dubbed The Monk. A ring of dark hair on his head. Should have just shaved it, accepted his fate, but was clinging to his hair like it was a life preserver. He was staring at Frat Boy. Mouth open. Frozen. A fucking moron. Darmity swung the gun in his general direction and fired. The Monk dropped.

The female agent he’d named Plumper. When he spun to put the gun on her, she shot him in the left shoulder.

He was spun around and tripped over Amesley’s outstretched legs. He hit the wall and went down onto his back. There was no pain. His left arm was numb, but there was no pain.

He propped the gun on his chest and lay still. Thinking, stupid cunt shot me, over and over. But he didn’t move. He waited. Heard the pop and scrape of glass being stepped on. Waited. When she appeared around the edge of the nearest console, gun held out in front of her in a way she probably thought was professional and badass, her free hand wrapped around her wrist, he squeezed the trigger and sent her flying backwards.

He sat up, and the pain hit all at once. He grit his teeth and examined his arm. He couldn’t see the wound through the fabric, but it was soaked through with blood. He moved the arm experimentally and found it flexible enough, checked the fabric on the back and found the exit hole. A through-and-through. The bullet had busted right through his shoulder and missed everything vital. Painful, but not immediately worrying.

He stood up. Felt dizzy for a moment, then steadied. Blood loss, he thought. He stepped over Plumper, who stared up at the ceiling with yellow, filmy eyes. He could hear someone gurgling pathetically in the near distance. Stepping back out into the hall, he found Frat Boy trying to hold his intestines in with his arms. His face was white as marble and his arms were bright red. He’d pushed himself up against the wall and kept opening his mouth and swallowing air.

Darmity felt hot and slow. Weak. He stood for a moment in the hall looking down at Frat Boy and watching him open his mouth and make this weird sucking noise, then shut it. A bloody spit balloon had formed on his lips. Darmity sympathized. Frat Boy, Amesley, all of them had been told that Cleanup meant making sure witnesses like Renicks were dead. But he had been ordered to make sure everyone was dead.

He knelt down on one knee and put the barrel of his gun against Frat Boy’s forehead and tilted his head back. The agent swiveled his eyes slowly, finally focusing on Darmity.

“Renicks,” Frat Boy managed to wheeze. “Renicks and Begley.”

Darmity nodded. “In one of the offices?”

Frat Boy nodded back. A slow, deliberate up and down.

Darmity glanced down at the floor. Blew out a little breath. Squeezed the trigger.

It was time to clean this shit up. But he wasn’t going to have to do it alone.

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