Release Me (Stark Trilogy, #1)(103)
Not this. Not again. The fear. The familiar fear from the plane. Calcifying his arms, palsying his legs, choking his breath. Every part of him a tangled mess of nerves that he cannot control. He crouches frozen behind the Humvee even as he despairs of his inaction. His body seems to be caught on hooks.
He hears a dripping and looks down to see the blood pooling from the open door. The blood of Trevor, uncorked by a bullet. It melts the snow into a red slushy pattern that reminds him of those Rorschach inkblot tests. What does he see? The fate that awaits him if he does not act.
Abruptly, like a cracked knuckle, he feels relieved of the tension that seized him—and he loops the sling of the M4 high on his arm and snaps off his safety and forces the butt against his shoulder and swings up and rattles off twenty rounds in the general direction of the rockslide before dropping behind the Humvee again and reminding himself to breathe, breathe, the big gulps of air he takes now hot and sullied by smoke.
He can feel a grenade shake the canyon walls and reverberate through his bones. He can hear a spray of rounds, from one side, and then another, like thunderclouds calling to each other. He can hear the whang of bullets ricocheting off metal. He can hear Decker calling his name, telling him to assemble forward. He waits until his breathing settles and then bursts from behind the Humvee. He moves his legs as fast as he can, but he cannot sprint in the snow, every step a sliding uncertainty.
At the top of the canyon, near the blue cutout of the sky, he observes what looks like a lightning bolt. He takes three more steps before the thunder catches up with him. The ground opens up—a volcanic burst of flame that makes snow into steam. Patrick feels like a child picked up and hurled through the air. The strength of the explosion rips off his helmet and one of his boots. The world jars black when he hits the ground ten feet away and then fades back to white.
For a long time he lies there, loose limbed, unable to move. He sees the sky and he sees a snow-mantled cliff and he sees upon it what he first believes to be a tree, the inky spill of it against all that blue. He wonders vaguely how it has survived on such a barren purchase.
Then the tree moves. It lifts not a branch, but an arm, signaling to those below—and then draws away from its vantage point, vanishing from sight, the tree that is not a tree, a lycan clad in black, a smear of darkness on a sunlit day.
The gunfire continues—for how long, Patrick doesn’t know. He does know that it will all be over soon. He knows, too, that if he is still alive in a few minutes, and if the lycans choose to survey the bodies and rummage through their pockets and salvage equipment, then he will be dead. His rifle is nearby but he cannot reach for it, cannot even feel his hands, cannot muster the energy or the will to flop his arms in the direction of the weapon. Something is wrong with his shoulder. He feels something hot and red there and imagines it as a planet, a spinning ball of toxic gas.
He registers in flits and flashes the cold creeping into his skin and the smell of blood and gun smoke all around him. Shock. That’s what this is called, but recognizing the word does not antidote him. His vision wobbles. He believes he might have a concussion, though the letters won’t come together properly in his head and he thinks, concession, commotion, conception? He has a conception?
His mind grows blurrier by the minute, like a window frosting over. He wants to tell someone, anyone, see, see, not such a miracle anymore, am I? But he has no audience. At one point, he realizes the canyon is encased in shadow, the sun lower in the sky. Getting close to night. Night is when he sleeps. At the threshold of waking and dreaming, his last thought is how pillowy the snow feels and how much he would like to have a little rest.
Chapter 43
EVERYTHING IN western Washington is draped in moss and smells of earthworms. Rain falls more often than not. Cars are rust flecked from the salt breeze coming off the ocean. In September, Miriam found a motel outside Tacoma that didn’t ask questions and let her pay by the week in cash. The walls were paneled with pine and the carpeting stained and the overhead lamps darkened with dead moths. Smoking was permitted. Lawn chairs and Old Smokey grills sat outside of three of the seven rooms. This was a place people lived, among them a toothless man she suspected of cooking meth and a whore with dishwater-blond hair who wore the same purple miniskirt every day.
The federal detention center is located twelve miles south of Seattle. No fencing surrounds it. No guard towers loom along its perimeter. Because the inmates remain indoors, in total isolation. It is located in an oddly public place, nearby a Rent-A-Wreck and the Bull Pen Pub and an All Star Grocery where she regularly parks her Ramcharger and sits looking at the FDC, an institutional gray building that resembles nothing so much as a medieval castle that could not be stormed.
There is a Starbucks on every corner of the city and she taps into their free Wi-Fi and does her research. The facility was built in 1997 and meant to accommodate 677 prisoners. Some are sentenced and some are awaiting sentences. Their crimes range from crypto-anarchy to wire fraud to aircraft theft to bank robbery to domestic terrorism. A phone call from a pay phone revealed that Jeremy was not listed as an inmate, but that means nothing.
She does not trust and does not have the patience for the red tape she will have to go through to request blueprints, so she researches the architect and finds him easily through a Google search and one night breaks into his firm and steals the plans along with three computers to make it look like a proper robbery.