Ben rubbed his hands together. “I’ll send one of my techs to pick up the blood specimen from the state lab. When he gives it to you, label it using an alias. I don’t want anyone to know what we’re doing.” He glanced back at the closed door. “And Elmer, tell no one — and I mean no one—about this discussion.”
A lab technician suddenly threw open the door. The sound of a TV carried from the next room.
“Dr. McKenna, you better come in here,” the tech said. “It’s — it’s…there’s something on TV that you need to see.”
“What about the bodies?” the client asked.
“There weren’t that many,” Calderon replied. “A few got washed downstream by the flood, but my men cleaned the area. Like I said, that village is now buried under forty feet of mud.”
The background hum in Calderon’s earpiece stretched for several seconds before his client’s sterilized voice said, “What about the woman and that priest?”
“They’re tucked away.”
“Make sure your men understand. We need her alive, to take care of Petri.” A heavy breath, then, “How’s he doing?”
“Not good. Maybe my men should get him to a hospital.”
“No. We’ve got a doctor there now — that woman. Put her to work.”
“Okay.” Calderon looked out his hotel room window at the helicopters over Griffith Park. “I assume you’ve seen the news reports about McKenna.”
“Yes,” his client said. “Amazing how the cops managed to botch a simple arrest. But his escape plays into our hand, makes him look guilty.”
“I still think we should’ve gotten rid of him, and that pathologist.”
“Forget the pathologist. He has nothing left to work with. It’s over,” his client said. “As for McKenna, give the police another hour or two. They may find him. But if they don’t—”
“My men have the script.” Calderon checked his watch. “They’ll call it into one of the local TV stations at noon.”
“You think McKenna will take the bait?”
“I hope so.” In fact, Calderon was certain that McKenna would take the bait. He just wasn’t going to tell his client that.
“Good. If he does, then you can deal with him.”
Luke was packed into the corrugated drainage pipe like an oversized bundle of cannon fodder. It was going on two hours and the muscles under each of a dozen welts and bruises were steadily hardening into rigid knots.
But he was still outside the police dragnet.
He had glanced back when he leapt over The Observatory’s retaining wall, catching a glimpse of helmeted cops with assault rifles fanning out along the eastern side of the grassy promenade. Apparently, they hadn’t considered the possibility that he had already come that far west.
He had made his way to Ferndale, an eclectic little area on the southwestern edge of Griffith Park. Each day, Ferndale played host to youthful birthday revelers, hikers, philosopher-chess players, indigents, and amateur botanists. This early in the morning, it was usually deserted except for the occasional runaway teenager sleeping off a drug stupor.
A flotsam of decaying leaves and muck drifted under him in a stream of rust-colored water. He watched as it made its way out the end of the drainage duct.
He lay on his stomach, arms stretched out in front of him, breathing through his mouth to lessen the stench. In a prior life, the stink would have barely registered. Proteus warriors suppressed everything but mission.
The military apparatus had used Luke and his fellow Proteus members, collecting them like lab rats for some sort of perverse Darwinian experiment. It was elegantly simple. Bring together the fifty most capable special ops commandos in the U.S. military — each man selected for his primal alpha traits, physical prowess, and killing skills — then submit them to a training program that stretched the known limits of human performance to the breaking point. The warriors had fed on one another like a fusion reaction, the training itself costing two men their lives.
When it was done, Luke was among the final twenty-four selected for Proteus.
In his lifetime, only one goal had consumed him more fully — undoing what Proteus had done to his psyche. He had worked for years to dismantle the unflinching ferocity and lethal instincts that for a time had been his defining identity.
He shook himself free of the unwanted memories and aimed his gaze at a public restroom nestled in a copse of trees.
Where is Sammy?
When the grim reality of his situation had taken hold, Sammy’s smirking face surfaced in his mind, as if to say, I knew you’d be calling. Sooner or later, everybody needs Sammy’s help. Exactly how Sammy Wilkes helped people, and the types of problems he helped them with, had never been entirely clear to Luke. When asked, Sammy would throw out the term “corporate security,” but when pushed to describe what that meant — exactly — the man had always displayed an astonishing talent for vagueness.
Ex-Proteus member or not, there was something conniving about him, and Luke had always stood clear of him. That is, until today, when there seemed no viable option but to dive headlong into the dark crevasse of Sammy’s world.
The sun was out, which strengthened Luke’s concealment. Set back six feet from the mouth of the pipe, he was invisible to eyes constricted by the sun.
Five more minutes passed before a tall, lanky black man dressed in gray coveralls walked into the restroom carrying a red metal toolbox. When he came out, he wasn’t carrying anything.
The man dusted his sleeves — no threats in sight — then disappeared from view.
A minute later Luke was in the restroom donning coveralls and ill-fitting shoes left for him in the toolbox. A minute after that, he climbed into the front passenger seat of the white van in which Sammy was waiting.
“Let’s get out of here,” Luke said.
He was studying the sleepy tree-lined road when the hard, blunt end of a rounded cylinder brushed against his ear.
“Don’t make me splatter your brains.” Sammy threw a pair of handcuffs onto Luke’s lap. “Put ’em on. I figure the po-lice will want you cuffed when I hand you over.”
34
“The hell you thinking?” Wilkes said. “That Sammy’s gonna risk everything, help you escape after popping that football player? Now put the cuffs on.”
Luke could feel a thick sighting blade at the top of the rounded barrel. A revolver.
“Slo-ow and easy, Flash.”
Luke leaned forward slightly when he reached for the handcuffs.
Sammy flexed his wrist, following the forward motion of Luke’s head, and shoved the muzzle deeper into his captive’s ear.
It was exactly what Luke had expected. Both movements loosened Sammy’s trigger finger for just that instant. An immutable reflex. When combined with the slower double-action trigger of a revolver that had to rotate the cylinder while cocking and releasing the hammer, it was long enough.
Luke grabbed the pistol before Sammy took up the trigger’s slack, thrusting the barrel upward and out of Wilkes’s hand in a lightning-fast motion.
He pointed the gun at Sammy’s chest. “You were never very good at the close-in stuff.”
“Eew-weee.” Sammy’s luminescent white teeth blossomed into a smile. “Flash still got the touch.”
“Did you have something you wanted to ask me?”