The Hatching (The Hatching #1)(5)

“Hey, Daddy.”

“Hey, beautiful. I’m going to have to meet you at the field, okay?”

“Okay.”

“How was school?”

“Good.”

“Anything exciting happen?”

“Not really.”

That’s what talking with her on the phone was like. When they were together, he couldn’t get Annie to stop talking, but there was something about the invisibility of talking to each other over the telephone that made it so she rarely said more than a couple of words at a time. It was like she thought there was some sort of evil magic at work, and if she told the telephone too much information, it was going to steal her soul. The thought made Mike smile. It sounded like a book Stephen King would write.

He was about to ask her what she’d had for lunch when he saw the car. It was a red Ford truck, big tires, tinted windows, and it was turning into the alley. “Beautiful, I’ve got to go.”

“Okay. I love you, Daddy.”

“I love you too, baby.” He felt his stomach churning. He let his free hand reach up again to finger the badge hanging around his neck. “I love you so, so much. You remember that, okay? No matter what happens, you remember that.”

The truck stopped. Mike put the phone in his pocket. He felt the car move as Leshaun opened the door and slid out. Mike moved his hand from his badge to his hip, until he could wrap his fingers around the handle of his gun. The metal was cool against his hand. He took a moment to look over his shoulder for Leshaun. His partner was starting to stand up straight, and Mike looked back toward the red truck. He realized too late that Two-Two had already seen him standing outside the car, had seen the bulletproof vest, had seen the badge hanging around his neck. Mike shouldn’t have been standing outside the car, talking on the phone. He shouldn’t have looked back at Leshaun. Mike should have been in the car with his partner, should have been paying attention, should have been a lot of things.

Two-Two’s passenger, an undershirt-wearing dipshit with a shaved head who looked like he was barely twenty, came out firing a handgun. Mike wasn’t even sure he heard the bang of the man’s pistol, but he heard the plink of a bullet hitting the door of the car, heard the glass of the windshield shattering. He heard a grunt, and then the heavy drop of Leshaun’s body hitting the ground. All this before Two-Two even got out of the truck.

Mike’s mind went blank, and he watched the man from the passenger side of the truck pop the emptied magazine out of his gun, reach into the pocket of his baggy pants, and pull out another clip. Meanwhile, Two-Two’s door opened, and Mike saw that he was also carrying a pistol. Two men, two guns, Leshaun hit, though Mike didn’t know how bad, and he hadn’t even pulled his own gun out yet. He knew he was supposed to be doing something, but he was just standing there as if he didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what to do.

And then he did.

He put the kid on the passenger side down first. Three shots clustered in his chest. Two-Two and his buddy weren’t wearing vests. He’d heard some of the agents who were gun nerds bitching about the stopping power of the service-issued Glock 22, but judging by the way the kid went down like a bag of chicken parts, the .40 cartridges seemed to work just fine. He’d never actually shot anybody before, had fired his gun only once in the line of duty—it had been one bullet, one time, barely a year on the job, and he’d missed—and he was surprised at how easy and normal it felt. All three bullets went home, and as the kid left his feet, Mike pivoted so that he could aim at Two-Two.

Two-Two had the same idea, though, and Two-Two was pointing back.

Mike wasn’t sure who fired first, or if they fired at the same time, because the push of the pistol in his hand was matched by a tug on his sleeve. But he was entirely sure whose aim was better. Two-Two’s head snapped back in a mist of blood. When Mike looked at his arm, there was a hole in the sleeve of his T-shirt, but not in his flesh.

The kid from the passenger side wasn’t moving, and neither was Two-Two. Mike holstered his gun and hustled around the car to check on Leshaun. There were two holes in Leshaun’s shirt: one hole a bloody mess on his upper arm, the other on the chest, clean and clear, the vest doing its job. Leshaun’s eyes were open, and Mike had never been happier to see that big black motherf*cker staring at him, but as he called for help he realized he was also going to have to call his ex-wife again.

He was going to be really, really late.





National Information Centre of Earthquake Engineering,

Kanpur, India


It didn’t matter what Dr. Basu did; the numbers kept coming back strange. She had rebooted her computer twice, even called Nadal in New Delhi and made him manually check the sensor in the basement of his building, but she kept getting the same results: something was shaking New Delhi with a consistency that was puzzling. Whatever it was, Dr. Basu thought, it wasn’t an earthquake. At least, it didn’t act like an earthquake.

“Faiz,” she called. “Can you please check this for me?”

Faiz wasn’t exactly quick to respond. He’d gone to Germany the previous month for a conference and had apparently spent most of his time in Düsseldorf in the hotel room of an Italian seismologist. Her colleague’s focus, since coming back, was on e-mailing dirty pictures back and forth with his new girlfriend and trying to find employment in Italy.