At the bottom of the stairs he looked around as she set the brain down on a counter to the left. The floor was made up of strips of wood that looked to be teak. There were small gaps between each row. Oddly enough, there was a garden hose coiled up on a holder on the wall.
Angela opened doors on the lower cabinet and pulled out a pair of suede boots like the ones he usually saw her wearing. After putting them on, she opened a box from that same cabinet and took out a new knife, in a sheath. She checked the sharpness of the blade by shaving off some hairs on her arm, then slid the sheath with the knife into her boot.
When she opened the upper cabinet doors, he saw stacks of boxes, most of them brand-new boxes of Walther P22s. There were some Glock 19 cases as well. Next to the boxes was a row of suppressors standing on end.
She took a Walther out of one of the boxes and locked back the slide. With a little wrench from the counter she removed the ring that protected the threads at the end of the barrel. Once that was removed, she screwed a suppressor onto the end of the barrel. She laid the weapon on the counter.
“I have Walther P22s and nine-millimeter Glocks,” she said. “The Glocks have better stopping power, but I only have suppressors for the Walthers. Since the object is stealth and surprise, I think we should both use Walthers with suppressors. Suppressors keep the sound down, which makes it less nerve-racking shooting indoors, and you can hear someone coming for you. They also keep people from hearing us so easily. Also, if something goes wrong, if we both carry a Walther our magazines will be interchangeable.”
He was a little surprised at how tactically levelheaded she was. “I’d have to agree with you. Walthers it is.”
She took three new guns out of boxes, prepared two with suppressors, and handed them both to Jack. She added a suppressor to a second one for herself.
“If anything goes wrong with one of our guns, a backup gun could save our lives.”
“You’ll get no argument from me,” he said. He still had trouble believing that he was going along with this whole plan. “Besides that, we both have knives. They may come in handy.”
Eliminating people with knives was good in that if you did it right it could be silent. That provided a stealth approach. But it took precious seconds. If there were multiple targets and little time, a small-caliber gun with a suppressor was a good choice—as long as you were a damn good shot. With a .22, shot placement was critical. If you missed even a little, you would only piss off the enemy and they could be all over you in no time at all, to say nothing of them shooting back.
Angela took magazines out of the boxes and pulled out more from the cabinet.
“They hold ten rounds, but don’t load ten rounds,” she said. “I’ve found that they don’t always feed reliably if they have ten rounds in the magazine.”
Jack was a little surprised that she knew enough to be aware of that. But he was beginning not to be surprised by anything she said.
They loaded several dozen magazines with nine subsonic rounds each, then a full ten rounds into magazines they loaded into their guns. Chambering a round left nine in those magazines. That would give them ten rounds in the gun the first time around, but nine thereafter.
She even had a couple of holsters Jack could use. The bottoms were cut out so the suppressor would fit through. She set out a couple of extra boxes of ammo to take along.
He had trouble imagining why she had all these things, but then again, she could recognize killers, and some of those killers would be able to recognize her.
When you hunted killers, killers hunted back.
He was beginning to see how she had survived. He wished more of the people he found had Angela’s sense of self-preservation.
Besides the holster at the small of her back, she clipped another just behind her hip to give her two guns, the same as he was carrying. She pulled her top over the one on her hip to conceal it. With her shape and size, it didn’t conceal very well.
After the magazines were all loaded, she picked up the bowl with the brain, then went to the far end of the basement and opened a hatch. Without ceremony, she tossed Cassiel’s brain, plastic bowl and all, down into the black opening.
Jack came up behind her and looked down. “What is this?”
“It’s where bad people go,” she said in a quiet voice. “It’s called the hell hole.”
He stared down into the darkness for a moment, his head spinning with everything he was learning. He usually had to work hard and long to try to convince people with the ability to recognize killers that they needed to take it seriously and learn to protect themselves.
Angela was in a different league. She was from a different planet.
“Most of the time I feel like life has no meaning,” she said as she gazed down into the darkness. “Sometimes this place feels like it’s drawing me. Ya know? I think that one day I may end up down there.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Just … everything,” she said in a faraway voice, still staring down into the darkness.
The pain and emptiness in her voice was heartbreaking.
“Angela,” he said, gently taking her arm and pulling her back from the abyss, “a person who is determined to go off to stop terrorists from detonating an atomic bomb, and may very well end up getting herself killed in the process, certainly has meaning in her life and does not belong in a hole that leads down to hell. Only killers—predators who prey on innocent people—belong in a place like that. People like Cassiel, not you, belong in such a place.”
She turned back to look at him with a sudden, wicked grin. “Good, because he’s already down there.”
Once they were back upstairs, Angela locked the basement door and replaced the key. He could see, now, why she didn’t want anyone wandering down there.
Ready to leave, he took a critical look at her. “Are you going to change? You aren’t really going to wear those same cutoff shorts to a gunfight that you wear to tend bar, are you?”
“Yes.”
Jack was at a loss. “Why?”
“Because none of the terrorists we’re going to kill are women.”
“So?”
“Women wouldn’t be distracted by my legs.”
It suddenly made sense. Crazy Angela sense. She was on her way to kill terrorists. Those terrorists were men.
In a fight to the death, any distraction, even if it was only for a fraction of a second, was a precious advantage.
Four of these terrorists had interrupted their mission to rape her. Clearly they were vulnerable to leggy female distraction.
And if anyone’s legs were distracting, it was Angela’s.
In that light, Angela wasn’t crazy at all.
She was deadly.
SIXTY-FOUR
Angela slitted her eyes. The light was too bright for her to open them all the way. She had to squint to see. She yawned and stretched in the backseat as she sat up a little to take in the view out the windows.
She peered all around at the sights going by just off the interstate. They drove past a sign on the right saying they were on Interstate 270. In a moment more, she hunched down to be able to look out the windshield as they drove under an overhead sign for the Interstate 495 East exit in two miles.
She thrust her arm forward, pointing over Jack’s shoulder. “There. You need to take that exit.”
“I know, I know. You already told me that you knew this much about the roads we needed to take.”
Most of the visions from Cassiel were of places where he looked—memories of what he saw. He had looked at that interstate exit because it was so prominent. It was frustrating not to know most of the other roads they needed to take.