Predator One (15 page)

Then Circe’s grip tightened to crushing force.

She cried out so sharp and loud that it sounded like a seagull.

Junie and Irene turned and lunged forward as Circe O’Tree-Sanchez’s eyes rolled back in her head, and then her
knees buckled and she pitched forward. Her swollen belly hit the metal rail, but Donna caught her before she could fall over and down.

Chapter Twenty-three

The Bluffs

Del Mar, California

March 29, 12:55
P.M.

The animal stood in the shadows beneath a twisted eucalyptus tree.

Watching the figures a hundred yards away. Listening to the cries of fear and panic.

Eating the pain in their voices.

Savoring the separate flavors.

It stood unmoving for many minutes and only turned away when the air was split by the wail of an
ambulance siren.

Another delicious sound.

The animal’s eyes swirled with colors. Browns and greens and grays that had no correlation to things that grew and prospered in sunlight.

Then with a small bark that might have sounded like a grunt of satisfaction had anyone heard it, the jackal turned and trotted along the bluffs.

Chapter Twenty-four

National League Baseball Opening Day

Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia

March 29, 12:59
P.M.

If a giant had reared back and then punched the stadium with all of his strength, it would feel like this.

A single massive
WHUMP!

The concrete floor beneath my feet shuddered, and I felt myself falling sideways. Ghost began barking hysterically. People everywhere were screaming
the kinds of screams that were torn from deep places in the chest. Raw, ragged, absolutely terrified.

I staggered out of the tunnel as the whole building continued to tremble from the rebounding shock waves. As I emerged, I turned and looked up to see a cloud of fire expanding outward from where the control box had been. Then I turned and covered my head with my arms as debris showered down.

The crowd went insane.

There’s no other word to describe it.

Insane.

They panicked, recoiling from the blast. Pieces of masonry, pieces of melted chairs, pieces of burning plaster fell onto the seats below. Pieces of people, some of them still screaming, flew as far as home plate. The crowd slammed into the entrance ways, and I could actually hear bones break as thousands crushed dozens. People
fell, and the crowd surged over them, everyone becoming savage in their terror. I saw a mother punched in the face so that she fell away from her screaming six-year-old. I waded into the crowd to try and help and was immediately shoved and clubbed and kicked from every possible direction. Ghost leaped and barked, but then I heard him yelp as someone kicked him in the ribs. An instant later, I
heard a very human shriek buried beneath a canine snarl of reciprocal fury.

Something hit me on the temple, and I pitched sideways, and before I could regain my balance the human tide carried me halfway into the tunnel. I tried everything I could to fight against the current, but, tough as I am, there’s no amount of martial arts or military or police training that offers an adequate response
to thousands of people moving in blind panic.

I lost all track of Ghost.

The crowd spun me and turned me and pummeled me. Then I was falling backward through an open door into a small service corridor. I landed badly but scrambled instantly to my feet, calling for Ghost. There was no sign of him as a torrent of screaming people rushed past the open doorway.

There was another bang. Smaller,
hollow, and in my disorientation I could not at first understand what it was. Then I saw one of the panicking people in the hallway go down, the side of her face blooming with bright red blood.

Then I understood.

I whirled and saw that the hallway behind me wasn’t empty.

There were two men there.

One of them had a big wooden crate on a hand truck.

The other was pointing a gun.

At me.

His
first shot had missed me and hit a woman trying to run to safety.

The hall was sixty feet long and ended at a T junction. A service corridor for event staff. These guys were in the kind of nondescript coveralls you’d expect of maintenance staff or equipment handlers.

Except that they both had ski masks pulled down over their faces.

Oh shit.

The guy with the gun fired again. And again.

He
emptied a whole clip at me.

I dove through the doorway of a broom closet, but the rounds passed me and punched into the people in the main corridor. I couldn’t see the hits, but I heard the screams.

Rage ignited inside my chest.

I spun as I drew my off-duty piece, knelt, reached around the doorjamb, and fired blind. Most rounds fired in any firefight do not hit a useful target. Ask any soldier.
Especially when firing from cover. You can slant the odds in your favor by aiming center mass at average height.

I heard the scream as at least one of my rounds found something meaty.

The gunfire paused.

Then I was up and out, swapping magazines, bringing my gun up into a two-hand grip as I broke from the broom closet and ran toward the guys in ski masks. I saw one guy down on his knees, both
hands pressed to his lower abdomen in a vain attempt to stop blood from pouring onto the floor. His gun lay in a spreading pool.

The other guy had abandoned the hand truck and was unzipping his coveralls to get at his pistol.

I ran at them full speed. Powered by rage and fear.

I shot him in the chest. Twice.

I shot the other guy in the face.

Fuck it.

As he pitched back, I jumped over him,
skidded to a stop at the T juncture, and looked up and down the hall.

There were more of them.

Five more, pushing two more big crates on hand trucks. All of them in coveralls and ski masks.

Technically, I should have used the edge of the juncture as cover, identified myself as a federal agent, pointed my gun at them, and told them all to give up.

I didn’t.

I opened up on them.

Why? Because
fuck it, that’s why.

People were still screaming, running, hurting, dying. The echo of that explosion was burned into my eyes. My father was here. So was my best friend. And so were a lot of innocent people, some of whom were now dead or wounded.

So, yeah. Fuck it.

They were thirty-five feet away. We were in a concrete corridor. Missing the target was harder than hitting it.

I hit what I aimed
at.

Body shots. I wanted them hurt. I wanted them to scream. But later I would want them to talk. I would want them to give me some goddamn answers.

Two of them returned fire, but I had the advantage.

They all went down.

And, yeah, they screamed, too.

Suddenly, bullets whipped down the hall and chipped the wall a foot above my head. I threw myself backward, but my mind was replaying the flash
image of two more men coming out of another door. Same kind of guys.

I dropped my magazine and fished for a replacement.

Which I did not have.

This was my day off. One loaded magazine in the gun, one spare. Both spent.

I heard the men running.

I took a risk and bent low to sneak a peek. They’d stopped beside the tangle of their bleeding comrades, but they weren’t offering first aid. Instead,
they were tearing at the fastenings on the crates.

One of them saw me looking, and he whipped his gun up and fired. I ducked back with no time to spare as bullets tore the corner of the wall to gravel. Stone chips chased me backward. Then I got to fingers and toes and launched myself the way I’d come. The gun from the first guy I shot was useless. It was soaked with blood. I pulled the other
guy’s coveralls open and stole the gun he’d failed to pull. A Glock 26. Two spare magazines. Nice.

As I turned back to the T junction, I saw something that made no sense at all.

A pigeon flew around the corner.

Then another.

And another.

Gray pigeons. Like you see everywhere in Baltimore and Philly and New York.

They flapped at full speed right past me, and I ducked backward out of the way.
Three of them.

And then nine more.

I said, “What the fuck—?”

Four more flew past, rounding the corner from where the last two guys had been.

Raising the new pistol, I raced back and dropped to a crouch, leaned out, and pointed the barrel.

At nothing.

The two men were gone.

The two crates lay open and empty.

The men I’d wounded lay there, but none of them moved. Or ever would.

Each of
them had been silenced with shots to the head. Cold, efficient, brutal.

It made no sense.

I tapped the earbud I always wore and tried to get Bug, but all I heard was static. Damn it. Probably damaged in the struggle outside. So, I pulled my cell and tried to call my office, the Warehouse.

I got no signal at all.

Nothing.

There was no way a professional stadium would have cell-phone dead spots,
so this had to be something else. It had to be deliberate. Someone jamming the cell signals. Ditto for my DMS transmitter.

Shit.

Far behind me, nearly lost in the roar of the frenzied crowd, I heard a dog barking in wild panic.

Ghost.

I whirled and ran.

Chapter Twenty-five

Tanglewood Island

Pierce County, Washington

March 29, 1:01
P.M.

The Gentleman hung like a spider in a web.

Sickly but venomous. Consumed by hate, but fed by it as well.

Diseased. Burned. Wasted. Repulsive even to his own eye.

The Gentleman. A joke that he had come to appreciate as much as Pharos and the rest of the staff did.

Gentleman. A shared absurdity.

He was
neither gentle nor still a man. Not anymore.

He knew that he was a dead man. A pernicious ghost that would not fade until the blackest desires of his heart were fulfilled. It was melodrama, certainly, but it was a glorious melodrama. Operatic. The only thing he had left. The one thing he had to live for.

His bedroom was silent except for the screams that came from the television speakers. The
wall in front of him was lined with HD screens, each turned to a video feed from a separate tiny camera. The images jumped and shook as the drones in which they were mounted flew, wheeled, turned. Exploded.

Some of the screens had already gone dark, their feeds terminated in just the right way.

Others kept running with real-time images.

People running.

People screaming.

People flying apart
into crimson nothingness.

And there, running along a corridor, gun clutched in a bloody fist, was a man.

Big and blond. Healthy and whole. Cold eyes and a brutal mouth.

Running toward the sound of screams.

The burned man raised a withered arm and extended one skeletal finger. “You
see
? That’s
him
.”

Beside him, his only companion leaned forward, elbows on knees.

“Oh, yes,” said Doctor Michael
Pharos. “I see him.”

Chapter Twenty-six

National League Baseball Opening Day

Citizens Bank Park, Philadelphia

March 29, 1:03
P.M.

The crowd hadn’t thinned much when I reached the doorway to the main corridor. The stadium had been packed, and there were thousands of people fighting their way from the stands through the halls that led to the parking lot.

As I pushed my way out of the corridor, I saw that many
people were bleeding and bruised. How much of that was because of the blast and how much was because of panic was anyone’s guess.

Then I spotted Ghost. He was on the far side of the hallway, crouched down beside a pretzel cart that had been toppled onto its side. Ghost was barking at everyone and everything. There were some smears of red on his shoulders and muzzle. He saw me and became hysterical,
snapping at people as he tried several times to enter the flow. Each time he shied back. Several people took swings at him. Nobody got near to his teeth. Ghost had lost several teeth during a mission in Iran. They’d been replaced by gleaming titanium fangs, and his broken jawbone had been surgically reinforced and strengthened. People couldn’t know that, but a hundred-plus pounds of shepherd
with metal teeth wasn’t something to mess with. Not even when running for your life.

Getting to him would be like trying to cross a raging river.

I tried to yell at him to stay there, to hide in the shelter formed by the fallen cart and the wall, but he was too deep inside his own wildness. He lunged into the crowd in a mad attempt to get to me. Immediately, people collided with him and accidentally
kicked him and fell over him. Ghost instantly turned and bit, more out of reflex and fear than anything. I saw blood.

I saw Ghost go down under the feet of the crowd.

I very nearly fired into the crowd.

No joke. I’m not proud of it, but I almost shot the people who were trampling my dog. He means that much to me. Brother in arms. Pet. A member of my family.

So, instead of committing wholesale
murder, I flung myself into the throng and began fighting my way to him.

Within seconds, I was beaten down to the ground.

Kicked. Stepped on. Stomped. But I reached Ghost and wrapped myself around him to keep him from being stomped. And to keep him from killing anyone, because he was as far out on the ragged edge of panic as I was. We folded down, and the crowd crammed us into a cleft of wall
and floor.

It was like being caught in a riptide and dragged through a rocky reef.

I screamed.

And I could not do a fucking thing about it.

The tide roared as it surged past.