75
I FELT THE LOCK GIVE. I pushed open the door. My back was soaked with sweat.
I ran upstairs. I could hear distant shots. The men lay where I’d left them, except for one. He was by the wall.
All of them had bullet holes in their foreheads.
I ran up to the vat room. The guard I’d shot on the catwalk was down by the stairs now. Bullet hole in forehead.
I stumbled up the hallway to the storage room. The spill of cell phones still lay on the floor; the video game had run its course, showing an empty battlefield. The steel door was partly open; I pried it back. The five I’d corralled into the freezer room sat slumped. All of them shot dead at point-blank range.
I felt stunned. Edward had killed his entire team.
Why?
I hurried back up to the loading dock area. It smelled of blood and beer.
I could surrender to Howell, tell him about Lucy.
And hope that he believed me? If Lucy was already gone, I had no proof. And Howell would not let me escape again.
So.
No surrender.
I had to get out without being seen.
I heard the back door crashing open. I ran. Or rather, I half stumbled, half ran. I darted through the wide open rooms, ran past the dead men. A window in the brickwork faced an empty field and a slightly decrepit windmill. First one I’d seen since getting to Holland.
I pulled myself up to the window, worked the lock, shoved it open.
“Stop! Sam Capra!” Howell’s voice rang out like a bolt from the blue. I stopped. I shouldn’t have. But I did. I looked behind me and he had a gun leveled at me, two men behind him, Glocks aimed at me.
“Step away from the window, Sam.”
“She was just here,” I said. “Lucy. She was just here.”
“Step away from the window and we’ll talk about it,” he said. He wanted me alive.
“You don’t believe me,” I said. “I know. She was just here. I came here to rescue a hostage they have and Lucy is with them. You were right. I was wrong.”
Howell’s voice was stone. “Let’s talk about it, Sam. Come tell me what you know and we’ll find her.”
I looked at him, in his pressed, perfect suit and his steel-rimmed glasses and his stage actor’s voice. I hated him. “I’m going to find her myself. She’s alive. She lost the baby.” I didn’t want him asking about my child.
“Just come down, Sam.”
They were going to shoot me; that was my last invitation. “How did you know where I was?”
He nearly laughed. “Our informant in the Ling organization wasn’t happy you robbed their shipment. She called us. We tracked the truck with a GPS device the Lings keep hidden inside the cab. I can guess how you found out about the Lings. August went for a long walk the other night, didn’t he?” He shook his head. “You should be ashamed, ruining your friend’s career. Get down from the window, Sam, or I’ll shoot you in the back.”
I considered my options. Get shot or throw myself through the window or surrender. None were good. He would not let me escape from him again. I’d be bound and tied and kept with a pistol to my temple and not given a mockery of a life in Brooklyn. I’d be back in that prison that wasn’t supposed to exist, the plaything of Howell’s Special Projects group inside the Company.
I got down from the window. I staggered and I put my hands in the air. And the three of them closed in on me, with fists and guns.