“Now we just dancing. Why you dancing with me, Gibson? You wanting to fuck me?”
Behind him, Gibson heard rising voices. At the other end of the hall, Emerson had come up the front stairs with two of his men. He disappeared inside the presidential suite. Everyone else froze. A momentary, indecisive cease-fire. When it ended, and it would, they would be the meat in a very unhealthy sandwich, cut down in the cross fire. The government man knew it too and eased slowly toward the nearest door. An anguished howl came from the direction of the presidential suite. Gibson knew that sound intimately. The son had discovered his mother. It meant so many different things, but only one of them mattered.
The cease-fire was over.
Gunfire erupted once more in the Wolstenholme Hotel. The man yanked Gibson inside and slammed the door. The battle took on a different tone. Gone were the disciplined, tactical bursts of professionals. Now it was a son avenging his mother, and the gunfire sounded berserk and indiscriminate. The story of this family would end here tonight.
The man hopped on one leg to the bed. A bullet had taken a chunk out of his calf, but he gritted his teeth and used his tie to stanch the flow of blood as best he could.
“Find us an exit.”
Gibson checked the window, confirming what he already knew—five stories down to a concrete alleyway. They weren’t climbing down the side of the hotel, and the fall would kill them. The door to the adjoining room was locked from the other side. Gibson shot the lock out and forced his way into an identical room. It didn’t gain them much more than fifteen feet, and it still left them squarely in the line of fire.
“Anything?”
Gibson came back, shaking his head. “I like the plan where you call in the cavalry, Mr. Government Man.”
“Unless you have a satellite phone, we’re on our own.” The man lowered himself behind the bed for cover.
“Then we may be in last-stand territory.”
The man nodded in grim agreement.
The battle was short and definitive, and the hallway beyond the door fell silent. Gibson wasn’t sure who he preferred to have won. He joined Ogden behind the bed and took aim at the door as a fist hammered on it.
“Time to finish our dance, boy,” Deja shouted. “You and your friend come on out. Only going to tell you once.” Deja put a burst of gunfire through the door when they didn’t answer. “Now.”
Gibson had an idea and whispered to his companion. The man nodded that he understood and stalled for time while Gibson moved quietly into the adjacent room.
“Your friend’s dead.”
“How’s that?” Deja said.
“Caught a bullet in the hall.”
Deja didn’t sound all that broken up at the news. Gibson cracked the adjoining room’s door open. Deja’s man was down in the hall. One more dead for no good reason. Judging by her mood, Deja seemed intent on adding at least another to the list. Gibson opened the door just wide enough to step out, and he closed the distance between them in four fast steps; she felt his shadow at the last moment and turned her face into his fist. He put it through her jaw and spun her like a top. Deja went down in a heap. Shooting someone in the back, even someone as dangerous as Deja Noble, didn’t sit with him. He wasn’t that kind of man. Although, apparently, he was the kind of man who coldcocked women. Still, he figured she’d appreciate it more than a bullet.
“Very charitable of you,” the man said as he limped out into the hall.
They went back down the hall toward the presidential suite and the main staircase. Emerson lay in a tangle of his own limbs, his men both dead. His breathing was shallow, and his face was sallow and bathed in sweat. He didn’t have long. Gibson saw the remote detonator too late. Emerson smiled as he triggered it. A series of dull explosions rattled the floorboards beneath their feet, and a moment later Gibson felt the oxygen in the hall being inhaled greedily down the stairwell.
“I told you I would kill you all,” Emerson said as if the thought were a comfort.
Smoke poured into the hall, and even though they couldn’t see the fire, they could feel it. The temperature spiked twenty degrees in a matter of seconds. Gibson looked up at the sprinkler heads when they didn’t kick on. No alarm either. The dying man laughed at him and cursed them in Spanish. The man tugged Gibson’s arm and dragged him back the other way, and one last time they hobbled down the hallway of the fifth floor of the Wolstenholme Hotel. At Deja Noble, Gibson faltered, stopped, and hoisted her up over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. He wouldn’t be that kind of man either.
The drop from the fifth-floor window to the fire escape below left them bruised but not broken. Even after Gibson lowered the man out the window, it was still a fifteen-foot fall. The man clattered onto the fire escape and came up cursing, holding his wounded calf. Next went Deja, who Gibson dangled by a wrist.
“You’ve got to be kidding me with this,” the man said, but to Gibson’s surprise, he caught her. Maybe the guy wasn’t as much of an asshole as he seemed. Gibson followed, and by the time they reached the safety of the parking lot, the fire roared through the Wolstenholme Hotel like a funeral pyre. Even from fifty yards away, Gibson could feel its angry heat. He laid Deja out on the ground while the man shuffled over against a wall to check his calf. All around, townspeople huddled together in groups to watch the old hotel burn. Bearing witness to the end of an era.
“She would have killed you,” the man said, indicating Deja.
“I’ve stopped holding that against people.”
“There’s a hell of a story making the rounds about you at Langley.”
“You’re CIA?”
“And you’re Gibson Vaughn. Your father was Duke Vaughn.”
“And you would be?”
“Damon,” he replied and paused. “Damon Washburn.”
The man put out a hand. If that was his real name, Gibson would eat his hat, but he took the hand anyway.
“What’s the CIA got to do with Charles Merrick?”
“That’s not germane to this conversation.”
“Germane?” Maybe he was exactly that big an asshole. “So what story?”
“Something about you and the vice president in Atlanta.”
“Former vice president,” Gibson corrected.
“Guess you saw to that.”
“Had nothing to do with it.”
“Just like you had nothing to do with this?” Washburn pointed to the hotel. “Just awkward timing. That what you’re telling me?”
“Good luck with your leg,” Gibson said and walked away toward the Toproll. There was still a chance that Lea or Swonger had made it out, and he wasn’t much in the mood for Agent Damon Washburn or his accusations.
The man called after him. “Got to say, I was surprised to hear your name come out of a Chinese operative’s mouth. Even with your track record, I wouldn’t have seen that coming.”
That stopped Gibson in his tracks. “The hell are you talking about?” But the answer came to him before he finished asking the question. “I had no idea he was Chinese.”
“I’m sure that will fly when they try you for treason.”