Greaves has reached the bridge, and now he starts to climb the steep bank that leads up to the parapet. He picks his way one-handed, the cooling weight of the corpse pressed hard against his chest.
He has to find a way back into Rosie, before the rest of the field team arrive there. He has to stow the body where it can’t be found. And he has to make sure that no questions are asked about his own absence, because if they are asked he will have to answer them.
Right then is when the stone wall of the bridge starts to vibrate under his hand. He takes a step back and looks across the river.
He won’t need to go to Rosie. Rosie is coming to him, with her airlock and extensor wings drawn in and her guns elevated.
She roars down the narrow, overgrown road and out onto the bridge, which is barely wide enough to take her. The weeds are trampled and torn up by her treads, rise again behind her in a column of green confetti. An angle of the parapet wall, struck by the edge of her front-end ram, explodes. Chunks of stone as big as clenched fists fly over Greaves’ head as he ducks and covers.
Rosie is level with him, then she’s past him, then she’s gone. She didn’t even slow.
It seems his problem has just become part of a wider problem.
20
After Lutes has been gone for twenty minutes, McQueen tries to raise him on the walkie-talkie. When that fails, he calls a halt to the sampling and orders a search.
There is no question of splitting the team up. If there is an enemy out here who is picking them off one by one, the lieutenant is damned if he’s going to make their job easier for them. They search the main streets first, then the side streets. They stay clear of the buildings, where anyone so inclined could mount an ambush in the time it takes to blink. Searching the interiors will be a last resort.
The scientists have put their sampling gear away and have rifles at the ready. McQueen only hopes they remember which end of the bastard things to point with.
They don’t find either Lutes or Greaves at first, but on one of the side streets they pick up a trail. Dr. Khan sees it first. She has the sense not to shout. She touches McQueen’s shoulder and points in silence. Her face is pale. Most likely she is thinking about Greaves, who is her protégé, pampered pet and just possibly (he’s only a kid but you have to wonder) the one who knocked her up.
What Khan has seen is blood, which as far as bad news goes is the first but not the worst. There’s a broad pool of the stuff out in the middle of the street, fresh enough that it’s still tacky to the touch. A set of booted footprints leads from it into the nearest building. It looks as though Lutes hit something here, and brought it down. But maybe he didn’t hit it hard enough, because whatever it was it’s not here any more. It looks to the lieutenant as though it took off towards the river. There’s a second, fainter trail of dark red smears and spatter patterns that leads off in that direction.
“Oh my God!” Sealey mutters. And Penny, who is no shrinking violet, shakes her head violently as if she’s refusing to admit that any of this is happening.
Whatever went down and didn’t die is still a potential threat. They would be stupid to turn their backs on that. But Lutes is the priority, and he should be easier to find now they’ve got a vector. Most of all, McQueen thinks, he’s got to get this done before the civilians start to fall apart.
“Foss, on my six,” he raps out. “Phillips, Sixsmith, stay out here. Cover both ends of the street, and the river. Anything happens, even if it’s a cloud in the sky, you squawk me.”
“Yes, sir,” Phillips says.
“Can I come with you?” Khan asks. “If Stephen is in there—”
“I’ll call out if I need you,” the lieutenant says. It doesn’t mean anything but it shuts her up.
He walks into the building, with Foss stalking silent at his back. She has left her M407 in its canvas sheath-holster across her shoulders: it’s a liability in a narrow space. In its place she holds a Glock 22 (whose magazine, McQueen knows, is filled with bespoke rounds that Kat makes herself using the .40 Smith & Wesson case as a starting point) and a .357 powerhead contact shooter. Good choices. He’s bringing Sixsmith’s SCAR-H to the party, so they’ve got both ends covered—the surgical and the indiscriminate.
But they don’t need either, because the party is over. Lutes lies on his back staring one-eyed at the ceiling. The eye that looks as though it’s winking has in fact been permanently closed by a smooth grey stone that has embedded itself in the socket. The blood welling up around it has already begun to scab. The private’s throat has been slit so deeply that the top of his spine has been severed. Nubs of bone glisten in the blackness of the wound. There are a number of other wounds distributed widely across his limbs and torso, incised and abraded and any damn flavour you can think of.
Whoever killed him brought a lot of energy to the task, and a lot of implements. One of the implements lies on the ground beside him. A knife, but not a knife that was designed to be a weapon. It has a short blade and a sculpted plastic handle. The Kitchen Devil logo adorns it.
“Where are you, you bastards?” Foss whispers. She turns a quick circle, looking for a target. She already has a round in the chamber and her finger is tight on the Glock’s finely balanced trigger, where half a foot-pound of extra energy will push the bullet down the slipway.
“Stand down,” McQueen orders her. In case that’s not enough, he grips her wrist and points it at the ground.
His own instincts are the same as hers. He was playing poker with Lutes less than twelve hours ago. He has spent a lot of the last seven months listening to the man’s bad jokes and untenable claims about how good he is at the nearly extinct game of table football. So yeah, he wants to find who did this and teach them the going rate for eyes and teeth.
But it’s a luxury he can’t afford. He doesn’t know the ground, and he is heading up a force that balances three actual soldiers against four armed liabilities. You can’t churn butter with a toothpick, no matter how much you might want to.
Go to ground, then, and get their licks in later. But as a fortress, this place doesn’t thrill him. Too wide. Too open. Too many doors. Walls too thin to stop a sneeze. Lines of sight fuck-awful in every direction.
He throws Foss the signal to retreat in good order, and she knows better than to argue. They back out the way they came, leaving Lutes’ thoroughly tenderised remains where they lie. It hurts like hell but it’s the only thing to do.
Out on the street McQueen rounds up the geeks, who predictably are full of questions he doesn’t have time to answer.
“Lutes is dead?” Sealey keeps repeating, as if he can scrape the unpalatable fact away by abrasive repetition.
Dr. Khan grabs McQueen’s arm, which he doesn’t like overmuch. “What about Stephen?” she demands. “Did you find him?”