Critical Point Page 15

  “Have you or Willow Grace found anything else we can pursue?” I said.

  “I am still looking, but no. And she has retired for the night. She attempted to go to her own home, but I deemed it unwise.”

  That almost made me snicker, despite the ominous feeling that every other damn thing was about to topple on us right now from all directions.

  “Well, we’ve got to do this, then,” I said. “Consider us mostly radio silent, but use your own judgment for urgency. Good luck.”

  “To you as well,” Rio said. “Have a care, Cas, and God bless.”

  I hung up before checking the chamber of my borrowed Vector and muttering, “If there was ever a time, now’s it.”

  seventeen

  PILAR AND I hiked through the night at a half jog. She had her handgun drawn; I had the rifle at low ready on its sling. I’d put the phone in my pocket on vibrate, just in case Rio or Simon called.

  Where the fuck was Simon? I didn’t like the guy, but out of all the things I could call him, flake wasn’t one of them. If he wasn’t picking up, the most likely scenario was that something had happened to him.

  But what? He was an extremely powerful telepath. There weren’t many somethings that could happen to him.

  Maybe he’d been so tired, he’d fallen asleep, and the phone hadn’t woken him.

  Maybe.

  We hurried through the dark. The mission rose up against the washed-out stars, a shadow of negative space in the night. It commanded a good view of the surrounding land, with an empty parking lot sprawled before it and more dry, grassy hills behind. A quick scan through the night-vision scope I’d put on the Vector gave me more depth and texture to the Spanish architecture, but no actionable intel.

  “For future reference,” I said to Pilar, “this is the crappiest possible scenario to approach. Anyone inside has all the high ground, and we have zero advantage.”

  “What can we do?” She breathed the words just above a whisper.

  “If we had a day to plan, we might be able to cook up a more creative approach,” I said. “Come in from below or above, maybe. But we don’t have a day to chase a lead that might not even be a lead.”

  She didn’t argue the point, just nodded very quickly.

  “We’ll sneak in from the back,” I said. “They might not be able to keep a good three-sixty view, and the hills will keep us hidden until we’re closer.”

  Again the quick, silent nod from Pilar.

  The highest point in the building’s silhouette looked like it was probably some sort of bell tower. I kept half an eye up there, straining for the smallest flash of movement or reflected gleam that might indicate a sniper or a lookout. A breeze stirred the night, bringing the quiet rustle of dry grass and a whispering rattle of gravel and dust.

  I briefly considered shooting into the bell tower. If nothing else, it would bring out whatever response to a threat this place had.

  But if there was even the slightest chance Arthur was in here …

  D.J.’s explosive defense systems might be wholly devastating. I wasn’t about to risk it.

  “Could there be, like … motion detectors or something?” Pilar whispered. “That we might trip?”

  Or infrared. There were a thousand ways this could go wrong we wouldn’t see coming.

  “Yes,” I said.

  We didn’t converse anymore. I led the way swiftly across the open space behind the mission, rifle raised with one eye on the scope. We ducked onto the tile of a roofed outside hallway, Spanish arches framing the night between square pillars. I held up a fist to Pilar as we reached the first open archway leading inside. It had no door within it, only pitch blackness beckoning us.

  Fortunately, I had the rifle scope. I’d dialed in on the fly and the flat green-and-black monochrome played across a worn, empty interior. Flaking plaster, cracking walls.

  No people. No bombs. No Arthur.

  I played the sensor wand across the doorway and our immediate surroundings. No sign of explosives.

  Trusting Pilar would follow, I slid into the darkness.

  Inside, the only sounds were my own breathing and Pilar’s, and our footsteps against the loose debris of the flooring. I bore in mind my own warning to Pilar about trying not to step where there might be a trigger or tripwire, but it wasn’t always possible. I did keep the wand out and running, but it stayed dark.

  The remains of the mission flashed out of the black at me through the scope. Church pews. Crosses. Decorative recesses that had probably once held religious iconography. The night-vision scope gave it all the same eerie greenness.

  We paced out the entire ground floor within minutes. Nothing.

  The only place left was the tower.

  Here, a heavy wooden door blocked our way, but the wand gave no sign of explosives, and it was unbarred. I had Pilar stand back as I pushed it open, just in case.

  The bell tower had a square cross section, and a spiral staircase crawled up in short, straight flights against the walls. In the center hung a thick, heavy rope, so long, it coiled on the floor. I scanned the underside of the stairs, but nothing struck me as peculiar or out of place.

  I motioned Pilar to stay against the wall, where we’d have a smaller chance of being spotted by anyone peering down through the center of the staircase from above. Letting the sensor wand and my raised rifle lead the way, I put a cautious foot on the first wooden step.

  It creaked slightly. Nothing exploded.

  By six steps up, I had the additional concern of how much the steps were sagging under us. The mission was closed for restoration, after all—how much did it need? I kept my weight near the wall and tried to keep up approximated force calculations to make sure Pilar would be all right behind me. She was sidling up with her back to the stone, her handgun covering the way we’d come.

  We were halfway up the third shallow flight when the top of the staircase erupted into a fireball that seared my retinas.

  Debris rained down, black silhouettes of wood and stone backlit momentarily by the brightness. I’d barely started to react when another explosion took out the stairs just below the top. Then another. Then another. A domino of fireworks dissolving the stairway from the top down in a brilliant chain of sound and light.

  Distance over rate equaled time before the explosions reached us and the stairs went out from under us. Distance over rate equaled time before we could get down off the stairs, before we could jump without breaking something.

  Time-sub-two exceeded time-sub-one by a split second that might as well have been an infinity.

  I reached for Pilar, swinging around so I half-tackled her on the way to leaping off the stairs. I threw my whole body weight against the arm I had around her, shouting, “Jump!” in her ear as I took us over the edge.

  Fortunately, she reacted fast enough to help push us off. In the brief moment when we left the floor behind, the steps behind us destroyed themselves with a concussion that smacked us across the back with the strength of a two-by-four.

  The heavy bell rope hit me in the face, and I latched on to it with the hand that wasn’t clenched up around Pilar. I had one moment of jarring pain in my hand and tendons as the change in momentum tried to wrench them apart, and then gravity yanked down, and I was dropping Pilar.

  I couldn’t keep a grip on her, not with a bad one-armed hold when I was only dangling by clenched fingers with the other. I tried to whip a foot around to help support her, but my body’s momentum was swinging in the wrong direction. Tooth-jarring clangs sounded from above us and the bell rope jerked in my hand. At the same time I lost Pilar completely, the bottom of the staircase went up in a spectacular fountain of flame below us.

  But the instant’s delay had given Pilar the reaction window she needed to let go of her gun and get her own hands around the rope. She slid a good six inches before she got her feet around too, probably taking all the skin off her palms, but then she clung. Her gun clattered on the floor below us in the echoing silence.
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  By that time, I’d used my free hand to pull my Colt and aim it upward, as the rifle was dangling off the wrong side of my neck. But though afterimages of the explosions flickered in my vision, the dimness above us was quiet and inert.

  Only the stairs had gone, in very controlled explosions that had left charred shadows against the stone but had touched nothing else.

  “Slide down if you need to,” I called softly to Pilar.

  “I’m okay,” she answered.

  I started up the rope. Pilar’s weight below me kept it taut, so I climbed by clenching my boots on either side and skidding my hand up slide by slide, the other hand keeping my gun above us. Pilar swung below me, shimmying up more conventionally, but she made it up behind me without slowing. She had been training.

  As I came past the lip of the landing at the top of the bell tower, right under the clapper of the huge bell, I tried to rotate and sight my pistol everywhere at once. But the top of the tower was a maze of timbers and dark, and my vision still had afterimages dancing in it.

  “Hang tight,” I said. “I’m going to jump.” Without Pilar below me, I would have had to climb out and over the bell itself, but with the rope held taut with tension, I had the leverage to leap off.

  I landed lightly on dusty boards. The starlight filtering into the top of the bell tower showed some sort of restoration had been begun, but it had clearly been given up many months ago. I slid a board off some makeshift scaffolding and across the opening in the floor where Pilar dangled. It took her some effort to disengage herself from the rope and climb onto the board—her hands were shaking slightly, and dark with blood from when she’d caught the rope—but she managed, and she crawled down the makeshift bridge to join me on the floor. “Thanks.”

  “Anytime,” I said. I handed her my Colt and raised the Vector again.

  I pointed a finger below us and then at the closest of the arching, open-air windows into the night. Keep an eye on anywhere someone might be approaching while I look around, I was telling her.

  She got it. I put my eye to the scope and began picking my way through the forest of timbers and scaffolding.

  A third of the way around, the green-black outlines swept across a form lying limp on the floor, back against the outside wall behind a ripped, half-draped tarp.

  A human form.

  “Arthur,” I said.

  eighteen

  ARTHUR DIDN’T respond. Unconscious. He had to be unconscious.

  I didn’t let myself consider any other possibility.

  The stupid sensor wand hadn’t helped us on the stairs, but it had been looped to my belt and I reflexively had it held out in front of me as I hastened over. Two feet from Arthur, it lit up like a Christmas tree.

  I stopped short. “We’ve got more kaboom over here.”

  “Is he all right?” Pilar hadn’t left her post by the window.

  I didn’t answer.

  I ran the night-vision scope over him. Rough rope knotted itself far more times than necessary around his wrists and ankles. A blindfold covered half his face, and what looked like blood crusted the cloth.

  It was too dark to see, but I had the sudden visceral certainty someone had worked him over. Thoroughly.

  Fuck. Focus.

  It took some careful examination, but I finally made out the wires stringing behind and around him. I tracked their configuration warily with my eyes as I edged closer.

  “I’m going to disarm this,” I said aloud. I didn’t want to admit that I said it more for my own benefit than for Pilar’s.

  Considering the stairs hadn’t brought any defenders down on us, I dropped the rifle to dangle from its sling and pulled out an LED flashlight. Better to see what I was doing than try to fight the slim chance anyone watching wouldn’t know we’d survived.

  I stepped around Arthur with care, forcing myself to ignore his injuries. I did let my fingers brush his throat—a pulse fluttered against them under the warmth of living skin. My legs almost went liquid with relief, but I forcibly ignored all that too.

  I played the flashlight carefully along the wires, following the logic of the device. Trigger, detonation, explosion, lined up in unfailing conditional progression. But …

  I ran it backward. Explosion, and before that the detonation, and before that the trigger. I ran it forward again, then back, then forward.

  What the hell?

  “This is put together wrong,” I said. As I said it, I was positive.

  “What do you mean?” Pilar’s voice carried across to me, wired with tension.

  “It’s active, but it’s not set,” I said. “There’s no way it can go off. Well, not from moving him away from it, at least.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  But I stood for a moment longer, because this didn’t make sense. I was missing something.

  And I’d missed something on the stairs too. My mind rewound, backfilled, and I knew what it was.

  “Cas?” Pilar ventured.

  I shook myself. Get out, then analyze.

  Unless all the missing pieces were hiding what would kill us …

  But that didn’t make sense either.

  “Come here. I’m going to need your help,” I ordered Pilar, and suiting actions to words, I knelt and pulled my knife. I worked as delicately as I could, cutting the ropes minimally to unwind them from Arthur’s hands and feet. Next came the wires and duct tape, peeling them gingerly from bruises and crusted blood.

  “How are we going to get him down?” Pilar asked in a hushed voice.

  “Gently,” I answered. “He’s probably got—internal injuries, and—” I had to pause to concentrate on what I was doing for a moment. “He’s going to need a hospital. We’ll have to figure out what to tell the police; we can probably give them this place, and say you found him—we’ll make up how—and get Checker cleared—”

  “Cas.” Pilar put a hand on my shoulder. “Is anything else here going to go off?”

  “No. Not unless there’s something we missed. We can take him out of here. I’m sure.” And then I’d figure out why the hell we could.

  “Then why don’t we call the ambulance now?” Pilar asked gently. “If we’re telling the cops we found him here, and he’s this injured—Cas, there are no more stairs.”

  I knew that. But we’d be able to rig it so he was tied onto me, or lower him by …

  Fuck. Pilar was right. I was good, but EMS would be better.

  My hands hesitated, hovering, already sticky with what was probably Arthur’s blood, and I didn’t want to think about that—“They’ll want to call the bomb squad. They’ll see all this and delay.”

  “We could just move him closer to the middle. So it’s clear they can take him out.”

  “Right. Right.” And come to that, if I wanted to, I could take the rest of the explosives out of here instead of Arthur.

  Because of course I had to disappear if police and EMS were coming. They’d have questions, questions I wasn’t good enough at lying to answer, not when I was the center of scrutiny like we would be here.

  Pilar read my mind. “Help me move him,” she said. “Then you go; I’ll make the call.”

  She didn’t mean to hurt me by it. It was what she knew I’d want, what I did want.

  Arthur had kept all the most important parts of his life from me for exactly this reason. I was the type of person who would leave him bleeding and unconscious in enemy territory so I could hide my face from the cops.

  I found another loose scaffolding board and pulled it down so we could carefully shift Arthur onto it, then carefully lift him toward the hole in the floor, one of us on each end.

  “Don’t wait,” I said, with a harshness that scraped my throat. “Make the call now.” Even if response times were fast, I could be faster. No reason to delay. I handed Pilar back the burner phone we’d originally pulled from her car.

  “I’ll ride with him to the hospital,” she said.
“Don’t worry about us.”

  “Call,” I answered.

  While Pilar calmly answered the 911 dispatcher’s questions, I slipped through the rest of the top of the bell tower, running the wand over everything, but I found no more explosives. At least, I p-equals-eighty-five-percent found no explosives every place I looked.

  I bundled up the active device very carefully, making sure none of the wires touched, and took my Colt back from Pilar. After all, I was more than skilled enough to throw her CZ back up to her from the bottom, and the Colt wasn’t registered to her, and … cops.

  The dispatcher had stopped asking questions by then, but apparently told her to stay on the line. We nodded to each other silently.

  Then I ran lightly back over our board bridge and swung down onto the rope to slide to the ground.

  * * *

  I RAN hard back to Pilar’s car. None of this made sense.

  Rio had told me it felt too easy. Too contrived, the intelligence we’d stumbled across that had led us here. Then we’d encountered no defenses until the stairs, and …

  The sequence kept replaying itself in my head. The flashes blowing the steps off their brackets, out of the wall, collapsing each flight from the top down.

  If the steps had blown out from underneath us, we’d probably have fallen and broken our legs, maybe suffered some burns and internal bleeding, but not died.

  But the stairs hadn’t blown from beneath us. They’d given us warning by starting at the top.

  Who did that? Who set up their triggering mechanism so its victims had warning?

  If we’d turned and run toward the bottom, we’d still have been injured, but not too badly. Broken bones, perhaps. I knew how to fall, so I may have been able to land with no more than some bruises and jarring. Heck, maybe I even would have been able to help Pilar land gently enough too.