Dark Time: Mortal Path (18 page)

He followed a zigzag path on legs that shook but held him up. The noise of automatic-weapons fire and shells impacting in the field, throwing up fountains of dirt, the slaughterhouse smell of blood and burst abdomens, all of it made him want to flee. Made him want to be back in bed at home with the covers pulled up over his face. Courage of the purest sort kept him moving forward.

Goddamned stupid thing to do.

A bullet licked the skin of his upper arm.

Hound slid like he’d done on the baseball diamond at home, stealing second on summer nights when the air was so humid-thick that running through it was like parting the Red Sea. His boots tore up the grass as he slid, and he thumped into Rod’s side, opposite his wound. Hound grabbed the man’s wrist and felt a pulse. It wasn’t too late.

He tried to shut out what was going on around him and get to the quiet place at his center where he could think. Still lying on the ground, he reached over and felt the area of Rod’s wound with his hand. His fingers sank into a ragged, bloody hole. He grimaced as he felt bone.

Bad, real bad, but not enough to kill if I can get him out of here, unless he’s ripped up inside, too.

Maybe he’ll even keep the leg.

Internal bleeding was the bane of medics. Hound could try to keep the outside from bleeding with everything from the palm of his hand to a pressure bandage to a tourniquet. The inside was the realm of surgeons.

Hound pulled his kit around where he could reach it, took out handfuls of 4 x 4’s, and stuffed them onto the wound. They reddened immediately, and he piled more on top of them. He slapped a large adhesive patch over his handiwork.

Best I can do, buddy. The docs’ll patch you up better.

Hound heard shouting, and out of the corner of his eye, he saw VC threading their way through the grass, crouched low. He had to move now and get this soldier out of here, or they’d both die. It was a wonder they hadn’t already. There were shouts to fall back, which meant air support was on the way. He didn’t have long before he’d hear the
thwack-thwack
sounds of Cobras that preceded their arrival over the trees, their painted shark eyes and teeth the last sight Charlie would see.

Hound inched around to the injured man’s head. He grabbed the back of Rod’s shirt behind the neck and tugged, sliding him across the ground a foot. At this rate, he wouldn’t make it out of the clearing in time. Hound was steeling himself to stand up, pull the man over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry, and make a run for it when a grunt came toward him, hurrying for cover. Two men could do the crawl-and-drag much faster.

“Hey!” Hound shouted. “Help here!”

The man didn’t hear him or didn’t want to hear him and ran past toward the woods.

Fuck. C’mon, then, Rod, it’s just you and me.

He got to his knees, and that’s when the blast came. A mortar round exploded on the edge of the clearing, near the edge of the woods the soldiers were falling back to. Hound saw the man who’d run past him cut in half by bomb fragments spinning through his body like a buzz saw.

No flak jacket gonna stop that.

Some of the fragments reached Hound, carved his body like eager knives attacking a block of cheese, and threw him backward. Before he slipped into unconsciousness, he thought he felt his wife’s hair slide across his ruined face. With tremendous effort, he reached up and touched her cheek.

“Angel,” he croaked.

Love you, Angel.

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2009-08-25 02:50

M
aliha sped into the firefight and crouched over Hound to make sure he was still alive. To her astonishment, the man was conscious enough to react to her, and lifted his arm to her face, touching her tenderly. His fingers left a trail of blood across her cheek.

He must think I am the angel of death come to claim him, yet he reaches out for me.

Then his head lolled to the side. She gathered him up and took him to his platoon, leaving him on the ground so that one of the men tripped over him. She went back to the clearing, but the man Hound had been working on was dead.

S
haleTech had its headquarters in Chicagoland’s Technology Corridor, which flanked Interstate 88 in DuPage and Kane Counties. It shared the general area with the likes of Argonne National Laboratory and Fermilab.

It was a splendid fall afternoon. Maliha retrieved her car from the private garage she’d had built inside the building’s main garage. She drove a black McLaren F1, until recently the fastest street-legal car in the world with a top speed of 250 miles per hour. Although she knew the car’s speed record had been surpassed, she loved everything about it, from its elegant butterfly-wing doors to its center driver’s position. She’d had a number of customizations made by the British manufacturer. Several of them had to do with theft prevention, since the car was worth over a million dollars. The rest had served her well during pursuits.

She tossed her high heels on one of the passenger seats and slipped on the worn pair of athletic shoes she left on the floor. Driving a stick shift in heels wasn’t practical, and she didn’t do it if it was avoidable.

Getting into the center seat shouldn’t have been easy in a dress, but Maliha made it look easy. Traffic on I–88 kept her from taking the McLaren on a real romp, but the time behind the wheel was enjoyable anyway.

She wore a long-sleeved black dress that ended modestly at the knee, but that was all that was modest about it. The silky material clung to her curves and the dress dipped low in front and back. Her red high heels would set her ass in motion with every step she took. Her black hair curled into luxurious waves that framed her face. Subtle makeup highlighted her great cheekbones and green eyes. It was an evening outfit, but she didn’t mind surprising Greg and putting him off balance. She was as much dressed to kill as when she went out with her black outfit and knives.

Maliha arrived early for her 1 P.M. appointment. The ShaleTech building didn’t go for aesthetics. It was a brick cube nine stories high, sparingly decorated with tall, slitlike windows. It looked like a Borg spaceship that had fallen to Earth. She pulled off the road and took a good look through binoculars. There was a double set of peripheral fences about thirty feet apart, with the land in between patrolled by pairs of guards with dogs.

Definitely a tougher nut to crack than PharmBots.

At the first gate, her car was checked by a bomb-sniffing dog and examined underneath with a mirror. She had the distinct impression that the guard wanted to examine underneath her with a mirror, too. At the second gate, her fingerprints were taken on a hand scanner and checked, along with her photo, against law-enforcement databases and against ShaleTech’s private list of personae non grata.

Maliha had accessorized her clothing with her Marsha Winters fingerprints today, collected from an unclaimed corpse eighty years ago. She had a large supply of prints from an era before their widespread use for identification that Amaro used to set up her identities.

Inside, her purse was hand-searched as she went through a metal detector under the watchful eye of the chief of security, an emotionless man whose badge simply said CHIEF CLARK. He looked like a man who, in other circumstances, would have been a torturer. Had probably been a torturer in his military stint.

She knew the type.

Her cell phone was placed in a small wire basket and a tag was wired to it with the number from her 61 z 138

2009-08-25 02:50

visitor badge. If she wanted to make any calls, she’d have to use a company phone, and snapping photos was out of the question—at least, using the phone.

The slim purse Maliha carried had a tiny camera in its lining, and she was snapping away by squeezing a certain spot near the clasp. The camera showed up on X-rays in the shape of a cough drop, and she carried several real ones in her purse to confuse the issue. Her escort took her to the seventh floor. Greg met her outside his office, preventing her from getting a look at his workspace. He appraised her frankly with his eyes, and appeared to like what he saw.

“I’m glad you could come. It’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“The pleasure’s mutual. Shall we get settled in your office to talk?”

“I thought we’d talk over lunch.”

“How about we go out for lunch, then?” What she’d wanted was a good, long look at his office. A restaurant would be second choice, to get him out of the comfort zone of his home territory. “I’m in the mood for Italian.”

They walked a couple of doors down the hall to a small dining area with expansive views of the grounds.

There were a few late-lunch stragglers in the dining room, executives talking to their counterparts, one table of white-coated scientists in a vigorous, hand-waving conversation.

“Let’s sit with them,” Maliha said, indicating the scientists. “They look lively.”

Greg smiled and waved her ahead of him into a private room with a door that closed out the voices from the main room. There were no windows. The lighting was dramatic, pinpointing works of art on the walls and statuary on pedestals. On a table topped with black marble was a stand containing a traditional display of Samurai swords—the tanto, wakizashi, and katana—in their sheaths. Maliha wandered over to them. They were old, authentic.

Soul of the Samurai. I wonder whose soul this is in front of us.

Greg had followed, and was standing too close behind her. Any closer and his groin would be on a first-name basis with her ass.

She ran her hand over the curved sheath of the katana, doing her best to make it seem sensual. The catch in Greg’s breathing told her she’d succeeded.

“You’re a collector. Twelfth century?”

“Thirteenth. I never would have taken you for a sword expert.”

She turned around to face him, and Greg remained where he was, putting them very close together.

“I dabble in the martial arts,” she said.

Greg put his hand on her shoulder. “I’m a practitioner, too. I’ve been told I’m pretty good.”

She swiveled her hips slightly. “Really? Maybe you’d like to show me a few of your moves after lunch.” She almost winked at the innuendo, but refrained.

“I’d like nothing better. I have a dojo right in the building. I’m a strong believer in the mind-body connection, and I do my best work when my body’s needs are attended to.”

There was just a touch of a leer in the last part of what he said.

You’ll have to drink at another trough, Mr. Horny Stallion.

She filed the thought away to use as a line in
A Lust for Murder.

A waiter entered. Greg told him to have the chef do something Italian, and asked for wine to start.

“I’ll send out the sommelier,” the waiter said. The word rolled off his tongue beautifully.

“I guess this isn’t the usual company cafeteria,” Maliha said, when the waiter had gone. “Not many of them have chefs, much less sommeliers.”

Greg made a gesture of dismissal with his hand. “I need a place like this. A lot of high-powered people come through here.”

“Is that what you consider me? A high-powered person to wine and dine and get concessions from?”

“I like the sound of that last part. We could put some offers on the table, so to speak.”

I think he’s saying we should do it on the table before the sommelier arrives.

A quick check of Greg’s aura revealed sharp spikes of dark crimson, representing sexual passion.

She looked away to let the aura fade.

“Offers for the foundation?” She decided to play it straight. “I’m eager to hear what you have in mind.”

Mild disappointment showed in his eyes, but then they hardened, business-style.

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“To put it simply, I have a public-relations problem. I need to soften the corporation’s image. You look around, everybody’s into philanthropy like it’s the flavor of the month. Your Vitality for Life Foundation fits the bill. It isn’t oversold in the market. Others are going for photo ops with sweet-faced kids. I’m going to do those photos with Grandma and Grandpa. A lot of folks out there are dealing with care of their elderly parents. It should strike a chord.”

“We don’t talk about it in such mercenary terms. But, yes, ‘striking a chord’ is an apt description.

Caring for elderly parents is a common experience, and as more of the baby boomers come on line, thinking about aging issues is very popular. I think you’re making a forward-thinking decision to go with the old folks over the sweet-faced kids.”

She hadn’t been able to keep the sarcastic tone out of her voice entirely, but Greg didn’t pick it up.

“Forward-thinking. Good sell. I’ll use that with the board. That’s enough business for the day, don’t you think?”

She excused herself to freshen up before lunch. In the swanky restroom, she reached into her purse and took out a large compact. While powdering her nose, she pressed a button to take a reading on the GPS device built into the compact. She might not know where Greg’s office was, but at least she’d be able to find the restroom.

Lunch was delicious. Maliha ate lightly, remembering her appointment to do a little sparring after the meal. She asked for and received a tour of the seventh floor, which housed busy executive offices, with Greg showing off but keeping his own office off-limits. She took pictures, filed away her impressions and memorized the floor plan. Maliha turned heads wherever she went, but when the men saw she was with Greg, they turned back to their work. It wasn’t part of the corporate culture to lust after the boss’s new toy.

Outside the dojo, Greg sent her into a dressing room where she changed into a karate
gi
. An assortment of belts was available. She picked black and went to the dojo, where she bowed and entered.

Greg was already inside, wearing a black belt. She gave him a courtesy bow.