Dog Warrior (9 page)

“Cub?”
Rennie's thoughts pushed through the pain.
“What happened?”

Good question. Ukiah tried to lever himself up and discovered with an explosion of new pain that his left arm was shattered.

“Cub?”

“A . . . a . . . a truck. A truck hit me.”

Cars were stopping on the highway; people were getting out. For a moment it seemed like a normal accident. Then Ukiah recognized one of the cars: Goodman's dark blue Honda. The cult had taken the car after dismembering their rogue kidnapper.

“Rennie! Rennie!”
He could only think of the bonfire victim, chopped up and burned to ash. He fought to stay conscious, to try to crawl away. They were certain to do worse than kill him.

Ice swung down out of the truck's cab and headed toward
him, in long, determined strides. “He's probably not alone. We have to act quickly. Kill him.”

“But if we're right about him—” a female cultist started to protest.

“Then he'll only be dead a little while.” Ice handed her a pistol. “And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword . . .”

Ukiah bolted awake. Even with his eyes open, though, he could see the muzzle flash suddenly brilliant in the rain-cloaked night, feel the bullets hit him with a force that nearly matched that of the truck.

He looked around the room, trying to fill his vision with something else. He was safe. He was with his brother. He was safe.

Then he realized he was alone in the house, his panting the only sound except the rumble of the surf and the wind buffeting the walls of glass.

Atticus left?

Implications of the dream dawned on him. He had his memories back. Atticus must have put the mice in bed with him. That skunk!

Wondering what time it was, he checked the waistband of his boxer shorts. Yes, Ru's phone was still where he'd slipped it during the Iron Horse's arrival. Eleven-thirty—Atticus and Ru had done their drug deal, and probably were on their way back. The call log indicated eight missed phone calls.

Working through the phone's unfamiliar menu system, he discovered that most of the calls were from Max, but the latest was from Indigo. The display showed that the battery was low and the phone was picking up only a weak signal from the carrier.

He left Indigo's number showing and hit the talk button.

“Special Agent Zheng,” Indigo answered.

“It's me. I just woke up.”

“Good, you're still with the phone,” Indigo said cryptically.

“The battery is low, so it might cut out at any point,” he told her.

“Are you safe?”

“Yeah.”

“Hang up then. Save the power.”

Trusting her, he did.

Ukiah sat up and took inventory of his newly healed arm, bending and flexing the fingers, wrist, and elbow. The knitted bones were still weak, but he could use it if he was careful. Under the bandages, the bullet wounds had healed to scabs. It would be another couple of days before the skin was unmarked, but he was strong enough to leave.

The door, though, was locked.

They certainly didn't want him leaving.

He rested his head on the door. Was he strong enough to break the dead bolt?

Outside, a vehicle pulled up to the house. Was Atticus back? His sleeping memories marked the departure of a Ford Explorer and the snarl of a sports car. This engine didn't sound like either. Someone else had found him.

 

The Jaguar's navigation system said that they had an exit coming up on the right. A proliferation of signs, though, stated that the road was closed and suggested they use unfamiliar roads.

“Figures,” Atticus muttered. “Our luck is running true lately. All bad.”

The navigation system also seemed decidedly annoyed by the detour, insisting that they take the exit as they flashed past the barricaded roadway. Beyond the heavy fortifications, the pavement came to an abrupt halt at a vast pit, seemingly a mile square—a forest of cranes and a jumble of structures, none of them linked, that refused to take any logical form.

“What the hell are they building there?”

Ru made a noise to indicate he was clueless.

“It's probably the Big Dig,” Kyle said over the radio.

“The what?”

“The largest urban construction project in the history of the modern world. Forty-two miles of underground highway in a path over two hundred feet wide.”

“Oh, yeah. I guess I've heard of it,” Atticus said. “Mostly that it's overbudget and way behind schedule.”

“Well, they're basically building the Panama Canal through the heart of Boston.”

“I heard that in some places they'll have, like, four tunnels stacked on top of themselves,” Ru said.

“Four? What the hell for?”

“One for cars, one for buses, the subway system, and the last . . .” Ru searched his memory. “Oh, yeah, the subway station itself.”

The detour sent them off on a newly constructed road that the navigation system didn't acknowledge existed, and minutes later they were lost in a maze of small one-way side streets. Atticus cursed softly under his breath as the navigation system struggled to plot a new course. Hopefully finding their way back to the beach house wouldn't be as complicated and time-consuming; he wanted to see for himself that Ukiah was safe.

 

The Iron Horses had described the Boston Harbor Hotel as “hard to miss,” and they were right. The street in front of the hotel was an obstacle course as the old elevated freeway was being dismantled. The hotel itself, though, was surprisingly beautiful: crowned like a princess with an elegant rotunda and a four-story archway through the heart of the building to a harborside courtyard and yacht-lined wharf.

They parked in the hotel's underground parking lot and rode the elevator up to the lobby. There it stopped and Kyle stepped off.

Atticus stuck his hand out to catch the doors before they could close. “What are you doing?”

“There's a business center here. I'm going to connect to the Internet and do some searches on the cult.”

“You can do that after we talk to Sumpter.”

Kyle fidgeted in place. “I don't want to talk to Sumpter.”

“I don't want to talk to him either,” Ru said.

Atticus gave Ru a hard look. “Neither do I, but we have to.”

“You two talk to him. I don't need to be there. I'm just backup.”

“Yeah, we're a team,” Atticus said. “Come on.”

Kyle shook his head, getting his mulish look. “No.”

Atticus sighed. “Fine, fine, we'll talk to him. We're going to make this quick, twenty minutes tops.”

“I'm just downloading stuff to my laptop for later.” Kyle patted his shoulder bag.

“Ten minutes.” Atticus let the door shut.

“I don't blame him,” Ru murmured as the elevator started up again.

“Sumpter is an asshole,” Atticus agreed.

He and Ru rode the elevator to the top floor and found Sumpter's room.

“Yes?” Sumpter called from within the room when Atticus rapped on the door.

“It's Steele and Takahashi.”

Footsteps neared the door, there was a pause to use the spyhole, and then the door opened. The wave of air brought out the reek of Sumpter's cologne, Old Spice put on heavy.

“Come in!” Sumpter murmured. He glanced beyond them. “Where's Rainman?”

“Who?” Ru chose to misunderstand him.

“Johnston,” Sumpter said.

“Kyle isn't autistic,” Atticus stated as calmly as he could.

“Well, there's something wrong with the dweeb.”

Atticus stepped close to Sumpter. “Don't . . . insult . . . my . . . backup.”

“Did you make the deal?” Sumpter ignored him, heading back into the hotel room. It was a large suite, with windows overlooking Boston Harbor. The door they came through opened to a living room with a sofa, desk, easy chair, and coffee table. A door into a second room revealed a king-size bed, slightly rumpled.

“Yes.” Atticus examined the plastic bag containing the backpack a second time, looking for the drug's telltale glitter. He'd checked it downstairs in the garage while writing his name on the tape sealing it shut, but he was feeling paranoid. “We've got some information on the drug. It's a lot more dangerous than we've been led to believe. It's possible that it's lethal with one dose.”

“And it's transparent—nearly invisible,” Ru said.

“Invisible?” Sumpter frowned, eyes narrowing. “Are you sure you weren't gypped?”

“This is the real stuff.” Atticus held out the bag. “It should be handled only while wearing plastic gloves.”

“Check.” Sumpter took the bag and added his name to the seal.

“We set up another buy on Saturday, but we changed the location to here.”

“Here?” Sumpter asked.

“Lasker's beach house is too exposed. Also the sellers won't deal out there.”

“You've made contact with them; that's all that matters.” Sumpter disappeared into the bedroom with the bag. The closet door slid open, and a moment later slid closed. He returned with a DVD in hand. “The case and circuitry of the digital video recorder's hard drive were trashed, but the platters were salvageable. A few hours in a clean room and the boys in the lab managed to recover most of the drive. They burned about ten days of data onto this DVD for us.” He loaded the DVD into the laptop set up on the desk. “I've
scanned through the disk, and it looks like the last few minutes is the only thing worthwhile.”

The Buffalo team had used a standard eight-camera system, recording the last minutes of their lives. One camera focused on the desolate parking lot in a mostly abandoned industrial park, carefully set to pick up license plates and faces of people sitting inside the cars. Four others covered different angles of the staged “office” area, well lit and painted a sharp white for better contrast. The last three cameras had been scattered through the shadowy warehouse with motion sensors and silent alarm systems attached.

Sumpter started the video with the team waiting for the buyers as caught by camera four.

The kid, Jason German, juggled while telling a joke; he arced four small cloth sacks through a continuous graceful loop. Tracy Scroggins sat on a battered desk, still and patient, quirking his mouth into a smile at Jason's nervous antics. Walt Boyes, the backup, wasn't visible, most likely stationed at the monitors in the concealed room, judging by how the camera zoomed in and out on the kid. The time stamp ticked off the seconds until they died.

“. . . and she says, ‘Whatever you gave me, Doctor, didn't work.' ” Jason was midjoke as the video started. “ ‘While my farts are still perfectly silent, they now smell awful. Thank goodness that no one can tell it's me farting, because they could peel the paint off walls!' ‘Good,' shouts the doctor, ‘now that we cleared up your sinuses, we can start to work on your hearing!' ”

There was an odd noise from off camera.

“I think you just killed Walt,” Scroggins said. “You okay back there, Walt?” A muffled laugh was the only answer. “You've heard that one before, haven't you?”

“It's funnier this time,” Walt Boyes called from his concealed room.

“I don't know whether to be complimented or insulted.”
Jason sent one of the balls looping over his shoulder and deftly caught it.

“Heads up!” Boyes announced the buyers' arrival.

Jason caught the cloth bags he'd been juggling and put them aside, saying, “It's about time.”

Tracy nervously checked the draw on his pistol.

The door opened. Four men entered dripping slightly from rain, just as the Iron Horses had claimed. Atticus had seen the bodies of the other three bikers, so he focused on the missing man. He was a big black man with a sleepy look to him. He leaned against the back wall, tucked between two support columns. Nothing about him suggested that he knew what was coming. While Jason and the lead biker exchanged presale banter about the heavy rain outside, Toback literally picked his nose out of boredom.

“Who gives a fuck about the rain?” Scroggins gave the banter a shove toward real business. “Are we going to do this, or talk ourselves to death?”

“Tracy! Jason! Incoming!” Boyes shouted. “Incoming!”

Sumpter reached down and slowed the playback, murmuring, “This goes too fast to see otherwise.”

The door flew open and a man walked in, shotgun at his shoulder. He fired as he walked, shooting the bikers even as they turned. Others filed in after him, six in all, faces set and emotionless as they fired. The bullets slammed the bikers' bodies around like puppets with their strings randomly jerked. In the slowed replay, the blood splattered gruesomely. Scroggins and German had flung themselves behind the steel desk. The camera showed only the tops of their heads as they returned fire, pinned behind the desk. Two of the shooters went down, but the other four rounded the sides of the desk and fired point-blank. The police would find later that Scroggins had tried to shield German with his own body.