Wolfe backpedaled quickly, keeping to the wall to the side of the door. “Stay back, Graywater!”
Bullets sprayed through the open door, more or less at random. None of them hit Wolfe.
“Get out there and kill him!” came Verrick’s command from inside.
The merc was sure to rush out at any moment. Wolfe could waylay him and shoot him down—but why not kill two birds with one stone? If he did this right he could block the door?
His fingers flicked over the phone. He sent the drone down fast and hard, screaming with speed into the front door, the last of its bullets firing as it dived down.
Wolfe ducked back around the corner—there was a yelp of fear from the front door—then the drone crashed.
The house shook. Smoke billowed up at its front.
Suddenly the steel shutters over the windows flickered up. Starling may have gotten control back.
Wolfe turned—and found himself looking straight at Verrick.
And Verrick was aiming an assault rifle at Wolfe.
Wolfe threw himself aside, a moment before Verrick fired. Shattered glass flew, bullets hissed, and then Wolfe was up, running around the corner of the house. He sprinted past the front door—another burst of bullets rattled after him, cutting through the flames and smoke.
Then Wolfe angled out, dodged behind the Chevy Silverado, and used his phone to unlock its doors. This was a late model, luxurious, plenty of electronics to hack into—he started the engine remotely, then ran to the driver’s side, opened it.
Bullets strafed up the driveway and clanged off the door. But he was already in the truck, putting it in reverse, stamping the accelerator. The truck roared backwards, and Wolfe spun it around. The back window exploded from gunfire.
Would be nice to go back and shoot it out with Verrick…
But he had information to get to Aiden Pearce. Vital information.
He drove the Silverado to the highway, got on the freeway fast as he could, and headed for Chicago.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Quinn!” Pearce exclaimed, when Wolfe told him what he’d heard over the smart house’s speech recognition system. “But I killed Quinn…”
“Is there only one Quinn? Not likely…”
Wolfe was back in the safehouse, sipping Scotch at the desk. Pearce’s face was gigantic on the monitor—Wolfe clicked the mouse to put his face in a smaller window. Pearce was intimidating enough as it was.
“There’s a Niall Quinn,” Pearce said. “One of the old mob boss’s sons. I did hear a rumor he was taking over the Club. But doing it quietly. Trying to keep his name out of it as long as possible. I couldn’t find any confirmation and I discounted it…”
“Could be you shouldn’t have discounted it. Son probably wanted to get revenge for his old man.”
“Yeah—but why didn’t he just send a Club hitman out?”
“Don’t know unless it’s in case the guy screwed up. Which he did. Quinn didn’t want the thing to lead back to him.”
Pearce grunted. “Could be. So Niall Quinn reached out to Verrick. Who got Tranter to set it up. And Tranter sent Grampus. Be my guess, anyway.”
“So this Quinn’s got close connections with Verrick—and Purity? Might be they’re doing something for Purity without knowing what it’s all about… some kind of dirty work…”
“Sounds about right to me…”
“And you heard something about a guy named Starling?”
“He was there. Thinking about it, I realized I’d heard of him. Might’ve even met him—back in North Africa. He was with Air Force special technical division, a drone specialist… There was a guy notorious for verbal OCD behavior… Yeah, that’d be him. Starling.”
“Where’d you dump that Silverado?”
“I know, I should’ve kept Verrick’s truck for, maybe, planting a tracer in it or something but… it was Verrick’s. I scuttled it. Ran it down a boat ramp into Lake Michigan.”
Pearce laughed. “Don’t blame you! You search the truck before you scuttled it?”
“Yeah, he didn’t leave any laptops in it or anything. So—what about that SystemsLeak file supposed to go up?”
“They’re reshuffling their people. But let me check on that…”
And suddenly Pearce vanished from the screen.
Wolfe lifted his glass to toast the screen. “Here’s to you, Pearce.”
He sipped his whiskey, thinking, The more I hang out around Pearce, in any sense, the better my chances are of getting killed…
Wolfe turned that thought over in his mind, and then realized he didn’t really mind, that much.
Did he, Mick Wolfe… have a deathwish?
He had a revenge wish. But under that, maybe…
He’d been Delta Force; he’d risked his life for his country many times. And when they’d kicked him out with a dishonorable discharge, he’d put on a stone face about it. He hadn’t shed one tear. But inside he’d been deeply wounded, and it was a wound that might never heal. You don’t get through training for special forces, and combat with Delta Force, without having a deep sense of commitment and belonging. And then suddenly, the belonging had been taken away from him.
They’d taken it all away from him. They’d smeared him. They’d shamed him.
And he’d been so willing to die for Delta Force, so identified with it, somehow he didn’t feel like living, now, with his identity shattered…
“Fuck ’em,” he said, to the empty glass.
And he poured himself another.
GlowWorm seemed quietly scared; his gaze kept darting around the park. “I shouldn’t be here in person…”
“You told me to get rid of my phone. You didn’t seem to want to talk via Instant Message through internet cafe so…”
“I just felt like it was too insecure. This park doesn’t have any working ctOS cameras. We should be okay here…”
They were standing together on a small footbridge over a branch of a park lake on the southeast side of Chicago. It was a cold but windless midmorning, with broken clouds letting intermittent shafts of winter sunlight through.
To the north was more tree lined park, and then the great expanse of Washington Park’s many youth baseball fields. There were maples, elms and other trees Seline couldn’t identify lining the small, curved lake. “Looks peaceful here,” she said. “Not the way people think of this part of Chicago.”
“Can be,” GlowWorm said. “There are all kinds of people in the Chicago ‘hoods. There are strong families, and neighborhoods where people take care of one another; where they tell the parents if they see a child snuck out late in bad company. There are street parties with great music and food, and everyone getting along. There are a lot of good people. But there are gangs, too. And they’re some of the toughest and best-armed in the USA. This bridge looks peaceful—but I know for a fact two Black Viceroys were killed here, a couple months ago, thugs hired by The Club. Turf fight.”
“On this bridge?”
“Yeah.”
“You know how to make a girl feel safe.”
“You don’t come across like a woman that scares easily.”
“I’m not,” Seline said. “But I’m worried about being tracked by ctOS—if it’s true that the company maintaining it’s got some bad guys mixed in…”
“Blume’s a mixed bag. Most of them are okay for a corporation. But lately…” He looked her over, shook his head. “I don’t know about that disguise…”
She had on a big blowsy blond wig and enormous rhinestone sunglasses, and she’d exaggerated her makeup. She now wore a cheap, heavy bright-green overcoat with really large buttons on it.
Seline shrugged. “I’m just trying to confuse whoever’s using their cameras.”