Miguel ducked from the knees as a burst of gunfire suddenly tore through the wooden slats of the wall just ahead of him, allowing more light to spill through.
His legs quivering from the adrenaline rush, he cautiously edged up to the hole and took a peek. He seemed to be looking into what must have been the main bar area. It was chaos in there, with a small fire burning out of control in one corner where an oil lamp had been smashed or shot to pieces and had spilled its fuel onto the wooden floor, where spilled liquor and bedclothes had quickly caught alight. Bodies lay everywhere, some still, some twitching or trying to drag themselves away from the carnage, But he also counted at least five road agents still standing and able to give a good accounting for themselves. They were all hunkered down at the front of the building, firing out into the street. The shots that punched through the wall in front of him must have come from Aronson's men out there.
Miguel furrowed his brow as he took in the scene.
There was no sign of any woman who might be Sally Gray. Jenny had said she was in a storeroom, but there was no such area off this corridor. He could see three camp whores from his vantage point, easily discerned by their sluttish mode of dress. Two were dead, and one was firing a carbine out into the street. Indeed, the agents were putting out such a volume of fire that he had to worry about Aronson and the others. Had they found cover before coming under fire?
How many were alive?
Was it even worth continuing the search for Miss Gray? Papa should be out of there by now, Sofia thought. She had given up any pretense of hiding at the edge of the battle, crossing the street a block up from the Hy Top. Rifle fire popped around her, but she did not pay it any mind. The adrenaline was flowing through her, giving her a rush that was far more intense than the flush of deer hunting. She worked around to the back of the Hy Top.
"Don't shoot me, please!"
The Mormon girl, about the same age as Sofia, fell down in front of her. She ran up to the young woman and knelt down. Adam caught up with them seconds later, his weapon leveled on Sofia until realization took hold.
"Holy hell, Sofia! Your father is going to be furious with you," he said.
"Where is he?" she asked. "He should be out by now."
"Still in the Hy Top," Adam said, bringing her up to speed.
"Anything left in that rifle?" she asked, pointing at the M16 Adam carried.
"Sure," he said. "I've not even fired it yet."
"Give it to me," she said.
"I think not," he said, trying to summon up all the dignity his few months of added maturity might lend him-without any luck. "Your father-"
Adam didn't complete the sentence. She butt swiped him across the face with the flat of her rifle stock. It made a pretty good club.
"Here." Sofia handed her Remington to the crying woman. "What's your name?"
"Jenny," she said.
"I'm not going to kill you. Do you know how to use this?"
Jenny nodded.
"Fine," Sofia said, collecting Adam's M16. "Stay here. I'm going after my father." Miguel dismissed the unworthy option of cutting and running without a second thought. He had promised Adam that he would do his best to rescue the girl, and even if he hadn't, that did not change the fact that she was a good woman-he assumed-being held captive by the worst sort of men. Were it his daughter and another man had turned away from a chance to save her, what would he think of such a worthless cur?
Not much, after killing him.
Miguel settled on what he had to do and determined to see it through, no matter what. He took a moment to examine the room again, taking care this time to commit to memory as much detail as he could: the positions of the agents firing into the street and those of the dead and the wounded, the cover he might use, the paths he might take through the chaos. He did not have perfect vision of the room, far from it. But life was not perfect, and God expected his children to be about his business anyway.
He checked the Winchester one last time as he walked on a few paces to a door that would surely have to give on to the barroom.
Seven rounds of 30.30 smokeless in the tube.
He made the sign of the cross.
Kissed the small locket hanging around his neck.
Jacked a round into the chamber and stepped into the room.
Working from left to right, Miguel punched 170 grains of 30.30 deer killer through the back of the first man's neck at 2,227 feet per second. The agent crouched next to him lost the top of his head as he turned slightly to see what had happened to his comrade. Miguel worked the lever action and put his third round into the back of the next man in line, who was taking cover behind a structural beam as he fired out into the street. The woman, the camp whore, who had been firing her carbine blindly over the window ledge reacted with catlike speed and managed to turn toward him, cry out a warning over the clamor and tumult, and even squeeze off a couple of rounds. But they hit the ceiling, bringing down a shower of dust and particleboard before her face exploded when hit by his fourth shot. Blood and gray matter spattered the face of the man next to her.
"Dixie!" he cried out, turning on Miguel. "Fucker, you ki-"
Dixie's boyfriend died of a bullet through the heart, and before Miguel could finish the last of them, the final agent, an older man, threw his weapon down and put his hands up.
"Whoa, pardner, don't shoot me! I fucking surrender!" the graybeard said.
Miguel covered him with the rifle, advancing cautiously through the room, still hunched over slightly and flinching as fire from the Mormons outside continued to smash into the building. All of his senses were singing; light and sound and the reek of gunpowder and death flooded in as time seemed to stretch out forever-as though he might walk across this room, surrounded by the dead and dying, from this moment until the ending of the world.
Something was behind him. He whipped out his Lupara.
A burst of rifle fire cut the shape down before Miguel could pull the trigger. He caught the briefest hint of the agent's head disintegrating in a shower of blood and bone before blessed silence fell and all that remained was the ringing in his ears and the wailing of a woman somewhere in the dark. The man who had been coming at him from a doorway to his left fell facedown onto the floor.
Sofia stood behind the man, an M16 in her hands.
"Papa," she said sheepishly.
31
Berlin As she'd expected, the BMW was an older model, an X5 from 2002. The Bayerische Motoren Werke hadn't gone under like so many other automakers, but it had shrunk enormously and had not released a new line beyond the 2003 models. Still, this X5 from Berlin Control was a pretty good SUV crossover. A little stiff in the handling for her taste, but powerful and kitted out with the balance of her equipment in a sealed diplomatic box in the back. No Landespolizei patrols would be pulling her over and poking around in her unmentionables.
Caitlin blinked away the fatigue of a long day's travel. She had risen before dawn in London, and it was coming up on midnight. Six lanes of the A100 ribboned away in front of her, sweeping past the radio tower on her left, lit from below by golden lights. It would have been an almost cheery sight after the drab gray Orwellian tones of London, but she was too tired to care. She was also lonely, an unusual, almost unknown state for her. She'd tried to phone Bret before flying out, but the guard at the safe house had told her that both he and Monique were asleep, and she hadn't wanted to wake either of them. Her breasts felt heavy and ached from not having fed her baby in so many hours, but there was nothing to be done about it. It wasn't like she could express milk in the field, after all. Soon enough her milk would dry up, anyway. She felt an irrational flicker of resentment at that, as if it was the worst thing Baumer had done. Caitlin flicked the air vents to keep the uncomfortably cold AC blowing into her face, warding off drowsiness.