All those times over the last few years, those bewildering incidents when Decker had sort of blacked out, fallen into a fugue state, only to wake hours later unsure of his whereabouts and uncertain of what he had done.
Who was he? What was he becoming? Who had he already become?
The rope suddenly loosened. Decker swung out through the night, started falling, only to come to a sudden sharp stop. The harness dug into his shoulders and crotch. He’d dropped nearly ten feet. Then Decker saw him, a soldier, staring down over the lip of the building.
He was untying the line!
The second soldier, thought Decker, as his hand reached for his gun. Where the hell had he come from?
But before Decker could pull out his weapon, the soldier seemed to rise up on the tips of his toes. He shivered and shook, then tumbled to the roof out of sight.
Seiden was standing behind him, a knife in his hand. He waved crisply at Decker, stepped back, and was gone.
You’re on your own, Decker thought with a smile. He looked up at the cables. The transponder was still fixed to the black plastic mass. It was still safely transmitting. Time to go.
He reached for the ascender and began to haul himself back up the rope. His whole lower body was illuminated now, exposed to the window. Frantically, inch by inch, he climbed up the line. He had almost vanished back into the darkness when a shadow slipped past the glass.
Decker froze. Another soldier. And he was standing right there in the window.
For a moment the soldier seemed to hesitate, unsure, perhaps, of what to make of the oddly shaped object dangling down from the heavens, when his brain finally made sense of the image. He unslung his QBZ-95. And then, as if in slow motion, Decker saw the progression.
Legs. And a pair of black boots. What the…
The gun barrel rose painfully slowly. Decker reached for the Glock 19C on his hip, pulled it out. The soldier took a step backward. He swung the assault rifle round, when he suddenly stopped.
Decker leveled his weapon, he aimed, but the soldier simply stood there, unmoving. Then, like a puppet whose strings have been severed, he simply dropped to the floor.
Decker continued to look down his gun sight. The soldier didn’t move. He lay motionless in a heap.
After a moment, Decker holstered his Glock. He started to pendulum his body back toward the window, trying to get a better view of the room. With an effort, he managed to latch onto the cables again. He pulled himself closer.
The soldier wasn’t moving for a very good reason. He was dead. Decker could see that now. There was a hole in the side of his head. Beside him, Decker could also see the hand of another man. Another soldier. He was lying there motionless too.
Ten minutes. That’s what Seiden had said. He should just climb up that line and cross back to the Hualian Department Store roof. That’s what he should do. But Decker couldn’t seem to tear himself away from the window.
Seiden hadn’t shot those two soldiers. Not through the roof. Then who had?
Decker lowered himself carefully to the window. He could see the two soldiers clearly now. The second one was shot in the neck. The window was an old-fashioned affair, with a wooden frame, and it took Decker no time at all to jimmy it open. He sat on the windowsill and swung his legs through the opening, down into the room. There was no one about, except for the two men on the floor. The room was packed full of routers and servers, linked together by cobwebs of colorful cables. Decker unclipped his harness and pulled out his gun. He made his way toward the door. The corridor was eerily empty. He took a couple of deep breaths to settle his heart and started to move down the hallway.
It was the same everywhere. Each room he passed was littered with corpses. Most of the dead soldiers were curled up on their cots. Others were slumped over rows of PCs. A few simply lay on the floor. They’d all been shot at close range.
Decker passed by another doorway when he glimpsed something move at the rear of the room. He dropped to his knee, lifted his weapon… when he saw who it was.
Emily!
Decker lowered his gun. He entered the room. His dead wife was sitting at the end of a table, a hole in her forehead, her hair matted with blood. She was wearing a Chinese military uniform, Decker noticed, khaki green with those crimson diamond-shaped swatches on each collar. She stared at him with a pained look in her eyes, raised a hand and pointed behind him. “Get out,” she said voicelessly, mouthing the words, until blood bubbled up over her lips.
Decker turned toward the door. Someone was moving outside in the corridor. Someone was running nearby; he could hear him. Whoever it was, he was right there, only a few yards away. Decker glanced back at Emily but his dead wife was gone, replaced at the end of the table by a young Chinese man with the same neat little hole in his forehead.
Decker lifted the Glock 19C to his face and took another deep breath. Get a hold of yourself. He peeked round the corner, then ducked back.
A man. Dressed in black. A white man with blond hair. He was fiddling with some sort of panel. No. Not a panel. Decker replayed the image again in his mind. Some kind of device affixed to the wall of the corridor. His back was to Decker.
Decker lifted his gun, aimed and stepped through the doorway.
The man was staring right at him. He’d already turned, and their eyes locked for an instant — long enough for Decker to take in the bright sky-blue eyes, the blond hair, more white than pure blond, plus that scar on his cheek. Decker almost fired when his attention was distracted by a blinking light on the wall.
On that panel. A timer. Pressed to a wad of C4.
A bomb!
The man smiled, raised his gun, but before he could fire, the wall by his head came apart like a seam in a shower of gunfire.
A Chinese soldier appeared down the hallway, his assault rifle stuttering.
The blond man leapt through a doorway. Then he popped out again, aimed and fired.
Decker glanced at the panel, at the red LED counting off, and without waiting to see the result of the firefight, took off down the corridor. Within seconds, he’d passed by the rooms full of corpses and was poised by the open window again.
The gunfire had stopped now, replaced by a shrieking alarm. Decker didn’t even bother to clip on his harness. He threw himself onto the line and began shimmying down as fast as he could — when the first of the charges went off.
Decker was blown through the air on the edge of the blast. Fire poured from the window. He swung out through the night, barely holding on to the line, and then back again as a second explosion ripped through the building.
The top of the Shanghai Hotel seemed to lift itself off the foundation as all the windows on the top floors shattered in a great ball of fire. Decker sailed down the line, hands burning, in a shower of glistening glass.
He hit the ground hard, with a terrible thud. For a moment, he couldn’t move. The wind had been knocked from his chest. Above him, he could see the bright ring of fire rolling back on itself, followed by a luminous cloud of gray smoke, and then pieces of burning debris began to rain down from the heavens.
He rolled out of the way just in time as a chunk of smoking black masonry crushed the earth by his head.
Car alarms wailed. People screamed.
Decker leapt to his feet. He looked down the tracks and took off at a run, disappearing into the heart of the night.
CHAPTER 19
“What the hell were you thinking?” said Associate Director Ed Hellard as he paced back and forth in his office. He glared down at Decker, started to say something, and then squeezed in behind his desk once again. With a sigh, he settled into his chair, leaned forward and dropped his head in his hands.