“Motherfucker!” bellowed the young giant. “Top? Top — are you alive, you old bastard?”
“Kiss…,” gasped Top, “my black… ass.”
Bunny grabbed him with his free hand and pulled Top up. The door to San Pedro’s office stood open, the wood nicked and charred. Both men raised their weapons.
“That was a fucking microwave pulse pistol,” growled Bunny.
“I know.”
“That fucking guy was a—”
“I know.”
“—fucking Closer.”
“I know.”
The fear was there for Top to hear in his own voice.
A Closer.
One of the elite group of trained killers who worked for the warped scientist who had developed the MPP handguns as well as a long list of other even more deadly weapons.
But Howard Shelton was dead.
His organization, Majestic Three, was gone. Torn down by the DMS. Top and Bunny had both been there when that group was ripped apart.
The Closers had been killed or arrested. Employment records from M3 had helped the DMS and the FBI track them all down. There were no Closers anymore. There was no M3 anymore. And no one had MPP pistols.
No one.
Except…
“Fuck me,” said Bunny as he began inching toward the open door.
“No,” said Top, “fuck them.”
His fear was still there, but now anger was burning hotter than the flames that were eating the wall behind them.
“What’s the play?” asked Bunny.
“Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke,” said Top. He reached into his jacket, produced a micro-FB, flipped the arming switch with his thumb, and hurled it side-arm through the doorway.
The new generation of flash-bangs were tiny, less than a fifth the size of the M84 stun grenades used by the military. But the flash and the bang were 30 percent larger.
The explosion rocked the room and made the dividing wall shudder as if it had been rammed by a truck. The sprinklers overhead kicked on and the whole hallway was caught in a rainstorm.
“Go, go, GO!” yelled Top and they were up and running, moving around the edge of the doorway, pointing their guns, following their barrels into the room, cutting left and right, seeking targets.
The Closer who had shot at them was on the floor, his face scrunched up with pain, eyes blinking as he tried to see, his MPP held up in a two-hand grip as he fired blindly.
TOK!
TOK!
TOK!
The superheated microwave blasts tore the room apart.
Literally tore it apart. Desks and filing cabinets exploded into burning clouds of metal splinters and blazing paper. The whole doorway disintegrated into a cloud of superheated gas. Top once more felt himself lifted and thrown like a doll. He crashed into an oak desk, rebounded, and fell hard onto the floor. The world swirled around him like toilet water after a hard flush, and he fought to hang on to his gun and to his consciousness.
Bunny was somewhere on the other side of a cloud of burning dust, cursing and grunting. Top could hear the sound of a vicious fight as vague shapes moved in an awkward ballet.
The Closer got to his feet and swung the MPP toward him. His face was lined with pain from the flash-bang, and blood ran from both ears, but his eyes had cleared and there was a cruel smile on his hard mouth.
He said a single word as he raised his gun to fire.
“Sims.”
Top shot him six times. Three to the chest, but that only staggered the man, and Top remembered that the Closers wore a micro-mesh undergarment that was harder to penetrate than Kevlar and whose structure nullified most of the foot-pounds of impact. The 9mm rounds drove him backward but didn’t put him down.
The next three shots went into his face.
The cruel grin disintegrated into red nothingness and the rounds punched through the back of his skull, pulling streams of blood and brain matter behind them. The Closer went down and Top rolled onto his knees, sweeping around to find Bunny. Immediately he had to throw himself to one side as a figure came hurtling through the smoke toward him.
A big figure with blond hair, and for a terrible moment Top thought that it was Bunny.
But it was not.
This man was a stranger and unless Top read his autopsy report he would remain one. His head was twisted more than halfway around, and his eyes bulged with shocked awareness at how this day had ended so much differently than he expected. The big body landed hard and lay immobile.
By then Top was up and moving, running into the smoke.
He saw the third Closer and he saw Bunny.
The man saw him, too, and Top could see his eyes, could see the quick calculation of his eyes. The man knew he could not win this fight. Or maybe he did not want to roll those dice.
So he did something that Top would have thought impossible.
The man ducked under a looping right from Bunny that would have dropped a bull, grabbed the big young man by the arm and belt, picked him up, and hurled him at Top as easily as Top might have tossed a small suitcase. The man did not even grunt with the effort of lifting 240 pounds of solid muscle.
Top tried to get out of the way.
Tried.
Failed.
And went down.
By the time he and Bunny managed to untangle themselves, the Closer was gone. The office was filling with dense smoke and everything seemed to be on fire. They paused, looking around, trying to decide how to save the moment. The Closer was nowhere to be seen, and the other two were dead.
Top dragged Bunny to his feet and they ran for the elevator, but when the doors were halfway open they suddenly stopped. The lights went out, inside the car and in the hall. In fact the whole building seemed to go strangely still despite the water pulsing from the sprinklers. Then they died, too.
“Stairs,” yelled Top and they blundered through the smoke to a crash-door and into a stairwell.
It was utterly black. Even the battery-operated emergency lights were dark. Far below they could hear the clatter of footsteps.
“Give a light,” growled Top, but Bunny already had his powerful little penlight out. He slapped it into the clip on the underside of his gun. But the light did not flash on. There was nothing, not even the faintest glow. They stood for a moment, confused and disturbed, lit only by the trembling firelight behind them. The stairwell was like the mouth of a dragon, black and deep and treacherous.
Bunny leaned one hand on the rail. “We go down there and he’s waiting…”
No need to finish it.
“How’d he kill all the damn lights?” asked Top. “Don’t make no sense.”
They saw a brief flash of daylight at the very bottom as the killer broke from the fire tower.
“Call it, Top,” said Bunny.
If they had been dressed for combat they would have both been carrying nonelectric chemical flares. Below them the door swung shut and the stairwell was immediately plunged into total darkness.
“Call it in,” said Top. “Let’s get a BOLO out on this son of a bitch. And we need the fire department.”
But, of course, their cell phones and earbuds were as dead as the lights. The fire behind them began to roar.
INTERLUDE TWENTY-ONE
Oscar Bell dreamed of her.
Or, maybe it was that she dreamed of him.
He was in his bedroom, alone in a midnight house, all the doors locked, all the alarms set. Dogs on the prowl, guards with guns. The way it always was.