“Some of them may have been destroyed,” said Priest.
“I don’t want to hear that. Maybe there are copies. Find out.”
“This is getting expensive, Mr. Bell.”
Bell gulped some scotch. “No kidding.”
“I have to ask… but is it worth it?”
“Christ,” said Bell, “I hope so.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
The force of the blast plucked Harry Bolt off the carpet and slammed him into the wall. He rebounded and fell hard, his head ringing with the blast, eyes stinging with smoke, and flesh screaming from where a dozen splinters had stabbed him. Violin was on her knees, face twisted in pain, one hand clamped around a splinter as thick as a pencil that was buried in her chest above her left breast. Red blood boiled out around the wound and ran over her fingers.
Harry looked up to see glowing red lines bobbing through the pall as dark figures clogged the shattered doorway.
“Move!” he bellowed as he launched himself from the floor and tackled Violin as the first barrage of bullets ripped through the smoky air. They fell together, but she pushed herself away and with her free hand swept her pistol from its holster. As the first of the men entered the room, she shot him in the face.
Harry clawed his own gun free and rose to a kneeling position, bringing the gun up in both hands, and fired. The doorway was packed with men. Missing was impossible, even for Harry. He aimed for center mass on the next man in line, missed but hit him in the shoulder. The impact spun the man, jerking him backward toward the shooter behind him. It caused a chain-reaction collision as the men behind bumped into the man he’d shot.
The smoke eddied as the men pushed through, and Harry saw that these were not the Brotherhood. They were dressed differently, in dark suits with white shirts and sunglasses. They looked like Secret Service men, though that was impossible. Some kind of government goon squad. If that was the case, then they might be official agents and not actual murderous bad guys. That thought stalled him because he did not want to murder Hungarian cops.
Violin had no such qualms.
Even with a chunk of wood buried in her chest, she rose and fired, attacking them as they tried to untangle themselves. She went for headshots only, and pressed her attack because Harry’s poor aim had created a momentary advantage.
There were five men in the entrance.
She killed them all.
Ten shots, two into each man.
They died.
All of them died.
Harry knelt there, horrified and dumbfounded, his gun nearly forgotten in his hands. Violin ran outside and then came hurrying back.
“The street is clear but there may be more,” she barked. “Be ready to move.”
Without waiting for him to reply she ran upstairs and returned seconds later with an oversized suitcase. Harry knew what had to be inside it. He could almost feel the cold power of that damn book.
She also had a medical kit tucked under her arm and let it fall in front of Harry. “Grab that,” she said, pain flickering across her face. “We’ll need it. Come on.”
She paused long enough to scoop up her small laptop and tuck it into an oversized pocket on her left pants leg. Then she ran from the house.
Harry Bolt stood up slowly, blinking from the smoke, his ears still ringing.
“What…?” he asked the room. But there were only dead men to answer.
Then he heard a thump from the rear of the house. The crack of wood, the crash of breaking glass. There were more of them.
He turned and ran.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
How do you know if you’re asleep and dreaming that you’re awake or if you’re actually awake? After all the things I’d seen and felt, all the places I’d been, I did not know.
Maybe it was the pain that woke me. I became gradually aware of a leaden heaviness in my limbs and a pervasive ache that went all the way to the bone. In dreams I’d felt pain, but it was always big pain. The sear of flames, the white-hot burn of a knife across flesh, or the volcano heat of a bullet buried deep in my skin. Those were phantom pains or distortions of remembered pain.
This felt real.
It was not as intense, but it did not flash on and off like dream pain.
I hurt. My body was wrong and the pain owned me. It weighed me down like chains even as my senses came awake.
I opened my eyes, surprised that I had been asleep and not dead. Really surprised, actually. I was surprised I still had eyes to open.
The room was different.
It wasn’t the little biohazard cubicle. It wasn’t an intensive care unit, either. This was bigger. Less threatening, less dire. More normal.
If “normal” was a word I could ever apply with any accuracy to my life anymore.
It was a hospital room. A real hospital, too. It had the look, the smell.
I lay there and tried to understand what was going on.
Where was I?
What was left of me?
And… what were those things I saw? Was I able to go somewhere else, or were they simply bad dreams?
How does one tell?
Well… you ask.
I turned my head and saw that I was not alone.
A woman was curled into a leather chair positioned beside my bed. She had a blanket pulled around her, covering her to the nose. Her eyes were closed and for a long time I lay there and watched her breathe, watched her sleep. Saw the spill of curly blond hair rise with her chest, saw the down-sweep of lashes against the sun-freckled cheeks. Saw the woman I loved more than any person on this planet.
Junie.
I didn’t want to wake her. She looked so peaceful and if she woke, would it be to the news that I was, in fact, dying?
Or would waking release her from the dread of believing I was already gone?
Such questions to fill the mind of a man who thought he was dead and in hell. Actual filled-with-monsters hell.
I rolled onto my side as far as tubes and wires would allow. There was no muscle tone left as far as I could tell and even that simple action was like bench-pressing a Volvo. But it brought me marginally closer to her. I reached over to her, lightly — so, so lightly — touched her hair. Whispered her name.
“Junie…”
Her eyelids fluttered.
And opened.
Junie looked at me with fear, with wonder.
With joy. She flung off the blanket and surged up from the chair, bending over me with equal parts passion and need and care. Being gentle with me, as if I was a fragile and easily breakable thing. Which I was.
I was almost nothing.
But I was alive.
We were alive.
And this was definitely not hell.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
I kept falling asleep and waking up. Kept dreaming wild dreams in between. Sometimes it seemed to me that I was dreaming even though I was awake. Or thought I was. The room stayed the same, though. There were flowers on the table and half a dozen get-well cards taped to the walls.