“Get down!” she called out to Toro as she launched herself toward the ground and squeezed the trigger, praying that thousands of hours of repetitive firing drills had honed her skills enough for the nearly impossible shot.
The Colonel staggered backward. The round had hit him square in the chest. As he began to crumple, his hand reflexively clenched with his index finger on his trigger. The cacophonous boom of the gun’s report in the empty space rivaled the noise of the weapon she had just fired.
Everything seemed to happen in slow motion as she hit the floor on her stomach and rolled onto her back, weapon now aimed in the opposite direction toward Guapo and Jock, who had emerged from the corridors behind them in a sneak attack.
Jock was already down, motionless. As she had hoped, they had all gotten caught in a cross fire. The Colonel had shot his own man, and she wasted no time acquiring her next target, ending Guapo’s wild shooting with a single round to his forehead.
The haze of smoke curling from her Glock’s muzzle cleared enough for her to see Toro, who was off to her right, double over and collapse. She jumped to her feet and rushed to neutralize all threats before aiding her fallen partner.
She secured each weapon as she went to check on the Colonel, Jock, and Guapo, finding each man lying motionless in a widening pool of blood.
She ran back and fell to her knees beside Toro. A hole in his upper abdomen oozed crimson.
His eyes fluttered open when she pressed her hand against the open wound. “No good.” The words came out in a hoarse rasp.
She had experience with field dressings but had no med kit handy. She picked up his hand and placed it where hers had been.
“Press hard,” she commanded.
She fished the butterfly knife from his boot and cut a section of spandex from his sleeve into a long strip, then shoved it under his hand, stanching the flow.
“I’m a lost cause,” he said on a groan. “Remember what I said before?” When she didn’t answer, he grabbed her arm with his free hand. “Find Nemesis. Take the bastard down.”
She could tell by the red bubbles frothing at the corners of his mouth that the bullet had perforated a lung. The hollow-point round would have expanded to ping-pong around inside his body, causing massive internal damage. The rounds had been designed for law enforcement to avoid the bullet passing through the intended target and striking innocent bystanders.
“Promise me,” Toro said. “Now.”
His gaze locked on hers. She knew what would happen if she agreed. But she did it anyway.
“I promise,” she said quietly.
He coughed up a thin trickle of blood. “There’s something you should know.” His eyes drifted closed.
“What is it?”
This time, his eyes opened only halfway. “That kid in front of the subway,” he said. “I was bluffing. There was only one dose in the umbrella.”
She recalled chasing him through Federal Plaza, when he had pointed the end of his folded umbrella at a young girl standing in front of the subway entrance. After he’d been caught, he had claimed the umbrella was loaded with three lethal doses of frog poison.
In his final moments, Toro wanted her to know he was not the monster she had thought him. For whatever reason, he could no longer bear the idea that she would think of him as someone who would take the life of an innocent child. Why did he care what she thought?
His mouth worked, forming words she could not hear. She bent down closer and turned her ear toward his lips.
“I wish . . .” He coughed again. “Wish I was different. Maybe we could have . . .”
She felt him squeeze her arm one more time before it dropped to his side. Throat tightening with emotion, she laid two fingers across his neck and found no pulse. His heart had stopped pumping.
The heart that had finally come to terms with everything he had done, everything he had been, everything he had given and taken in this life. He had declared himself ready to die earlier, and she had believed he cheated death. But death had merely been waiting for the moment when neither of them was prepared.
She wanted to scream, wanted to shout at the uncaring walls around her. Instead, she forced herself to her feet.
She had a promise to keep.
CHAPTER 50
Wu continued to watch the wall screen, unable to tear his eyes from the spectacle playing out before him. They had all watched Athena lead the Minotaur, followed by Ares, Deimos, Phobos, and another mythological figure Johnson had identified as Hermes around a minefield of electrified pressure plates, and then around the body of Zelos, whom Hermes had killed at the beginning of the scene. After Phobos pushed Hermes to his death, the field of avatars in the game had dwindled to five.
Vega had been brilliant, and his admiration for her had grown with each obstacle she overcame. He could not step inside the game and help her, but he could damn well make sure he did everything possible to find her.
“Where the hell is Johnson with that report?” he asked Patel, who was hunched over his computer at the far end of the table.
Patel’s head popped up. “She went to the bathroom, sir.”
Wu turned away, unwilling to let others see how annoyed he was becoming with himself. People had to go to the bathroom now and then. It wouldn’t help for him to snap at his team because of his own frustration at their lack of progress.
They had researched scores of fallout shelters going back decades, but none had panned out. Doubt had crept in, and he was concerned they were spinning their wheels while Vega battled for her life.
Meanwhile Patel and his team had chased the cyber bread crumbs down too many false trails to count. The money they had spent upvoting Vega had disappeared into a black hole, never to be seen again. They had not been able to bait the game’s creator into a dialogue, and the so-called fairy dust Patel had attempted to sprinkle had vanished.
“It happened again,” Patel said, cutting into his thoughts.
Wu picked up on a note of excitement he hadn’t heard in a long time in the cybercrime specialist’s voice. “What happened?”
“More glitches.” Patel froze an image on the secondary screen that linked directly to the dedicated laptop he used to access the game on the dark web. “Each time someone fell onto the pressure plates, it must have overloaded the system for a split second. You can’t see it with the naked eye, but I had a hunch based on last time, so I went back through the recorded video of that scenario frame by frame. Took me an hour, but this is what I found.”
Wu leaned forward. “Expand it.”
Patel zoomed in on the section with pixilated edges around a clear section of background. The undisguised space was far larger than the first portion he had found.
“Right there,” Wu said, leaping to his feet to rush toward the monitor mounted to the wall. “Make this part as big as you can without distorting it.” He tapped the screen with his index finger.
When Patel expanded the rift, a wide section of one concrete wall filled most of the viewing area. “See that in the corner?” he said.
Wu saw it too. “The same black-and-yellow trefoil,” he said. “Only this time there’s enough to know what it is.”
Now he knew why they hadn’t had any luck chasing down fallout shelters.
Flint, who had been on the phone with the ERT leader at the scene of Colonel Treadway’s DC apartment, muttered something and disconnected. “That looks like a symbol for nukes,” he said. “And you can see the last three letters of the word above it are I-O-N.”
“It’s a radiation warning symbol,” Wu said. “And you’re right . . . it’s used at nuclear sites. The I-O-N could be the end of either ‘radiation’ or ‘caution.’ Both have been used on signs like these in the past.”
“Then it wouldn’t be at a fallout shelter,” Flint said.
Wu shook his head. “Just the opposite. A shelter is the last place you’d see a warning sign like that. They’re designed to keep radiation out.”
Johnson, who had come back from the bathroom during the discussion, weighed in. “You said nuclear sites were heavily regulated, so I excluded them from my search parameters.” She wore a pained expression. “We’ve been looking at the wrong set of data.”
He didn’t need the reminder that his remark—although well intentioned and accurate—had delayed their progress. “That was my call,” he told her. “And we still can’t be sure that sign is anything other than decoration.”
“I don’t think so,” Patel said. “Why decorate something you plan to cover up with a computer-generated background?”
Wu heaved a sigh. “You wouldn’t.” Before he gave a new order, he scanned the screen again, looking for more information. He revisited his earlier thoughts about who would build such an elaborate structure. The space was massive, yet paradoxically confined and claustrophobic.
“You think if you stare at it long enough something will click?” Flint asked him.
“None of it makes sense,” he admitted. “This must have cost millions to build, especially when you consider the electricity, climate control, and security features.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Flint said.