Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Page 21

“Didn’t you hear, Chandler?” she shouts above the wind, raising the blade up. “You’re second-best. I’m number one.”

  “This…this is what you are,” Chandler says, punching Hammett’s knife hand.

  Hammett almost laughs at the attempt, and then feels the spike of pain, accompanied by a roiling nausea. She looks at her hand and sees Chandler has stabbed her with a piece of silverware.

  Chandler grins, her face manic. “You’re forked.”

  Then Hammett’s nose explodes when it meets Chandler’s fist.

  Fleming woke up to pain. Excruciating, unrelenting pain.

  It took her back years, to waking up on the operating table, her shattered bones poking through her skin in so many places her legs looked like cacti. She screamed so hard her throat bled, screamed while the nurses scrambled to put her under, screamed even as she slipped into unconsciousness.

  This pain was similar. Except she wasn’t in a hospital. She was in an elevator. And her legs weren’t the cause of her agony. It was her finger.

  Her broken finger, that the Russian was twisting back and forth, pulling it and snapping it again and again.

  Fleming tried to claw his face, his goddamn smiling eyes, but he easily slapped her hand away, twisting even harder, prompting the biggest scream of her life.

  Hammett pushed herself away from me, and I rolled to all fours, taking a quick look over my shoulder at the howling Chicago skyline, the building’s edge less than two meters away.

  My stomach twisted into a vertigo knot, and then I scrambled after Hammett. She was staring at the fork in her hand as if it had magically appeared. Her nose was a mashed tomato, leaking down her chin.

  I bent down, reaching for my VORAX blade, when my head was pierced with the most horrible sound I’d ever heard. A scream in my earpiece. So sharp and shrill that it drowned out the whooshing wind.

  Fleming.

  Victor twists the cripple’s finger once more, grinning at the screams he provokes. Then he snatches the earpiece from her and shoves it into his own ear.

  “You hear that, Chandler? That’s your sister. You couldn’t save your dear Kaufmann, but I’ll give you a chance to stop her pain.”

  He twists so hard he hears the knuckle pop out of place. The high-pitched keening is probably waking up every dog in the building.

  “I want the transceiver, Chandler.”

  For a moment, I was unsure what to do. Fleming’s cries cut me to the core, and suddenly I was back in that helpless place, watching Kaufmann break down, lose his humanity, knowing it was me who’d betrayed him. In that instant of inaction, Hammett pounced on me, throwing a reverse kick. I managed to catch it on my shoulder, bunching up my muscles. She followed with a knife thrust, and I managed to block that, too.

  Another scream threw off my concentration, and this time Hammett used a Muay Thai kick known as a Kradot thip—a jumping foot-thrust. It connected with my thigh, forcing me backward, backward toward the edge of the world.

  “Don’t give him shit!” Fleming cried out, followed by more shrieks of agony.

  I took a quick glance behind me, the night wind slapping my face, the ninety-five-story drop so steep I couldn’t see the ground.

  Hammett took two steps toward me. She’d yanked out the fork and was slashing her knife in front of her, cutting the air. Not any martial arts move I was aware of, but terrifying nonetheless.

  I dug the cell phone out of my pocket and held it up. “Come closer and I throw it off the building.”

  Hammett stopped, but her face morphed into a bloody sneer. “It will survive the fall.”

  “Maybe. But how long do you think it will take to find? If ever?”

  I was liking the idea more and more. I had never asked for this responsibility in the first place. I didn’t want to be the president’s backup plan. I didn’t want to have the fate of the world resting on me. Better to chuck the transceiver as hard as I could and hope it would be lost forever.

  The elevator chimed, first on the floor, then in my ear. Victor stepped out, dragging a still-crying Fleming across the floor by her hand.

  “Hold it,” Hammett warned. “She’s got the transceiver.”

  Victor scowled at her. “I know, you ass. And look what I’ve got.” He raised up Fleming, holding her like a prize fish.

  “Give me the phone, Chandler.”

  “Don’t do it,” Fleming gasped.

  Victor kicked her, then dropped her to the floor and stepped on her neck. He unslung the AR15 around his chest and pointed it at Fleming’s head. “The phone! Or she dies.”

  Fleming’s eyes found mine. I saw fear there. But also resolve. She was willing to die so the transceiver was safe.

  I should be the same way.

  I need to think of the greater good.

  These maniacs can’t have access to nuclear weapons.

  I have to throw the phone away.

  I have no other choice.

  They’re going to kill Fleming anyway. Fleming, and me.

  The world is more important than we are.

  But I couldn’t drop the phone.

  I’d only known Fleming as Fleming for a short time, but I’d known her as Jacob for years.

  I couldn’t watch her die. I couldn’t watch anyone else I cared about die. Never, ever again.

  “Let her go,” I said, with more bravery than I felt. “Or I’ll drop it.”

  Hammett began to creep closer to me. I took a step back, my heels on the windowpane. For a millisecond I wondered if I should just keep going, plummet to my death with the phone. Then I wouldn’t have to watch Fleming die, and this worst day of my life would be over.

  But my tank still had a bit of hope in it. And where there’s hope, there’s always a way.

  “Here’s how it will work,” I said, staring at Hammett. “You let Fleming go and throw me your gun, and I’ll throw you the phone. Or I chuck it out the window. Am I bluffing, Hammett? Do you see anything on my face that indicates I’m lying?”

  Hammett narrowed her eyes. “She’s telling the truth.”

  “I will drop it, Victor. And you can spend a few months combing the entire block looking for it. That is, if someone doesn’t pick it up and take it home.”

  “Do it,” Hammett said.

  Scowling, Victor released Fleming, then tossed his gun my way. It didn’t reach me, coming to rest on the carpet two meters from my feet.

  True to my word, I tossed him the phone.

  Hard.

  Real fucking hard.

  Victor did what anyone would have done. He ducked.

  Hammett and I both went for the gun at the same time. She reached it first, but I was ready with a punt to the head. She bunched up, and I connected with her shoulder, then drove an elbow down on the back of her neck.

  “Broken!” Victor yelled. “The phone is broken!”

  It was broken because that was the trac phone Fleming had given me. The transceiver was still in my backpack. As Hammett ate the ground, I got a hand around the sling of the MP9, tugging as hard as I could even as she grasped the butt of the weapon. I saw Fleming crawling toward us on her elbows, her face a stone mask of determination, and then Victor was on me, hands around my throat, his eyes bulging with rage.

  He tugged me off of Hammett and pushed me back, back, toward the broken window.

  Gunfire, behind Victor. Five or six shots.

  Oh…no…

  Although I was getting strangled and about to be thrown off the building, I strained to see what happened, blinking away the encroaching darkness.

  No…no…

  Hammett was standing over Fleming, the barrel of the MP9 smoking, Fleming still trying to slink away, leaving a thick streak of blood across the floor.

  “Don’t drop her, you idiot!” Hammett called. “The transceiver is in her backpack!”

  Victor reached one hand down for the bag, and I raked my fingernails across his eyes, then tried to kick him in the crotch. He pushed me back farther. My feet wer
e hanging in open air. I was going over the side of the building.

  He released my throat and I fell off the ninety-fifth floor and into open space.

  I had a moment of pure, animal terror, rivaling drowning, then I jerked to a stop and slammed into the side of the building. Pain yanked through my bad shoulder. My elbow was hooked around one of my rucksack’s straps, and Victor held the other.

  Legs kicking, feet scrambling to find purchase, I reached for Victor with my free hand, stretching to grab his arm or shirt. He swatted my attempt away and tugged down the zipper.

  The stun gun began to slip out of the opening, then tumbled toward me.

  I reached for it…

  …missed.

  Victor dug around. He pulled his hand out, the transceiver clutched in his fist. He gazed down at me, his eyes glinting.

  “See you at the bottom.”

  Then he let go of the strap.

  It was over.

  Fleming was unarmed and outnumbered, and even if she’d had healthy legs before, they certainly weren’t healthy now. She hadn’t smeared liquid body armor on the backs of her legs, since they were already protected by her chair, and Hammett had shot them full of holes. Then Fleming had watched Chandler—poor, dear, heroic Chandler—fall out the window and felt something inside of her die.

  “Hello, Fleming,” Hammett said, gazing down at her. “Apparently you survived that fall in Milan. My my my, how pathetic your life must be.”

  Hammett nudged Fleming’s legs, and she set her jaw to avoid crying out.

  “Don’t worry,” Hammett said. “We’re not going to kill you yet. We have one more use for you first.” She turned to look at Victor, who had walked over.

  “It wasn’t working out between me and Chandler,” he said. “So I had to drop her.”

  Victor eyed the MP9 dubiously, but Hammett was wiping it down with her shirttails, then she tossed it off to the side. “We carry her down in the elevator. If the police stop us, we’re taking a wounded woman to an ambulance.”

  “What if she talks?” Victor asked.

  “She won’t talk,” Hammett said.

  Fleming saw Hammett’s boot come down, and then everything went blessedly black.

  “You shouldn’t fear the inevitable,” The Instructor said. “And it is inevitable that one day you’ll die.”

  For the second time that day, I was falling off a building into open air. But the Hancock Center was a lot taller than my apartment, and I had been in much better shape earlier.

  Panic making it impossible to breathe, I hugged the rucksack to my chest like a teddy bear. Cold wind beat my face, my body. My fall felt slow, painfully slow, each fraction of a second stretching out into hellish, terrifying infinity. Tears streamed from my eyes and I saw nothing but a swirling mosaic of darkness and light.

  Then something skimmed past my leg.

  I didn’t think, just grabbed it.

  Fire seared my palm.

  A cable! A goddamn lifeline!

  The window washers.

  An image flashed through my mind, earlier in the day, searching for a place to hide the phone, noticing the cables outside the restaurant windows, the ones that lowered the window washers’ suspended scaffold.

  I couldn’t hold on—I was falling too fast—but I felt the cable or rope or whatever it was still whizzing by, still near. Thoughts blasted through my brain like machine-gun fire:

  Can’t grab the scaffold—can’t hold on—hit it square and I’m dead—thrust an arm through the rucksack strap—push it tight over my shoulder—one shot, just one shot at this—might rip my arm out of the socket—gotta try—scaffold rushing up at me—the whole city beneath my feet—dizzying height—stretching—reaching out with the other strap—timing it just right—even with the scaffold—streaking past—looping the strap around the corner winch bracket—

  A force ripped through my arm, my shoulder, my back, my neck. For a moment, all I felt was excruciating pain.

  When my brain kicked back in, I realized I had stopped. Motes swam in front of me in the darkness, and I struggled to assess what had happened.

  I hung on the side, one handle of the rucksack caught on a bracket at the base of the platform. The force of my fall had unseated the scaffold, and it listed sharply to one side, hanging from the safety cable. The wind and reverberation thrashed it against the side of the building.

  I gripped the rucksack strap with every bit of strength I had left. It took a few seconds for my heart to catch up and feel as if it was part of my body again. It took longer for the scaffold’s bucking motion to slow to a dangerous sway.

  Then the rest caught up to me as well.

  Disbelief. Amazement. Exhilaration.

  Terror. Panic.

  Anger.

  Loss. Sadness.

  Pain.

  Too many kinds of pain.

  Wind whipped around me, over me, through me, twisting me left and right. The backs of my eyes hurt like they’d been wrung out, and tears froze to ice on my cheeks. I no longer had the strength to sob, but my breath hitched painfully anyway, in my throat, in my chest, in my gut, as if it would never stop.

  Fleming was gone, almost as soon as I’d found her. I could picture her body, crumpled on the floor of the restaurant, life draining from the holes Hammett had punched into her. She’d be dead soon, if she wasn’t already. Just an anguished, lifeless face, staring into nothingness.

  Like Kaufmann.

  Kaufmann…Fleming…

  Oh, God.

  Maybe it didn’t matter. Hammett had the phone. It was only a matter of time before she used it.

  Maybe soon the world would cease to exist.

  Maybe Kaufmann and Fleming had just escaped first.

  Maybe I should let go of the strap and let everything fall away. Simple. Final.

  Against all common sense, I chanced a look down.

  Tiny pinpricks of light unfolded below me, as cold and far away as the stars. I should have felt panic, dizziness, the moment of weightlessness before the roller coaster plunges.

  Instead, I felt nothing. I felt dead.

  Over the wind’s shriek, I heard the sound of canvas tearing, and I dropped several inches lower.

  The rucksack.

  I craned my neck, aching from the abrupt stop. My backpack had a tear in it. As I watched, the rip extended, making my heart leap up out of my throat. I thought I’d run out of adrenaline hours ago, but fear grabbed me, full body, and shook the living hell out of me.

  If I feared death that much, I obviously wasn’t ready to call it quits. At least not yet.

  Keeping perfectly still, not moving my neck, I peered over at the building, hoping to see a window with a bunch of people staring and pointing.

  Instead, the window was black, reflecting a mirror image of a terrified woman whose life was hanging by a thread.

  Far away, I heard a car honk. I glanced down again, seeing the traffic beneath my feet. Too small to even look like toys. The wind kicked up, making me sway.

  Another tearing sound.

  Another small drop.

  Another notch of sheer fucking terror.

  Moving slowly, deliberately, I eased my free arm up over my head. I could barely touch the platform, but not enough to get a grip on it.

  Instead, I cinched my fingers around the strap, and carefully removed it from around my armpit.

  Which was when the tablet PC fell out of the tear in the bag.

  Not stopping to think, my other hand lashed out, pinching the corner of the PC before it dropped out of range. If I were to live through this, I needed the tablet to find Hammett.

  I took a deep, cold breath, let it out slowly, then did a one-armed pull-up on the strap, grateful I could rely on my good arm. Slipping the tablet PC snugly into the back waistband of my pants, I grabbed the bracket the strap was hooked over. It was freezing metal with a sharp edge, but it would hold me. I released the strap with my other hand, gripped the platform, and did a slow, pain
ful chin-up.

  On the platform was a locked metal box for cleaning supplies, an automatic winch system, and a dual rope, which I guessed was for the Bosun’s chair—a pulley system that carried workers to and from the platform.

  I let my body down again, moving carefully, and lifted my right leg up to get a heel onto the platform.

  Then the wind hit.

  A freezing updraft, actually lifting me away from the platform. I lost my right-hand grip and clung to the bracket with four fingers of my left hand.

  Three fingers…

  The wind wouldn’t let up.

  Oh, sweet Jesus…

  Two fingers…

  Then, finally, when I couldn’t hold on any longer, the wind died down—

  —causing me to swing toward the building—

  —pulling my fingers off the platform.

  For a crazy millisecond, I hung in the air like a trapeze artist between partners.

  A whimper escaped my mouth, and I frantically scrambled for a handhold on something, anything, catching the torn hole in the rucksack.

  My fist closed around the canvas, increasing the rip, making the hole larger, the rucksack tearing down the middle. I was sure it would pull right in half, but at a double-sewn seam, the tearing stopped.

  I dangled, one-handed, above ninety-four floors of open space, unable to catch my breath. Then I clasped my other hand around the rucksack and waited for another fierce wind to assault me.

  The wind didn’t come. But something dark and heavy slipped out of the hole—oh hell no, the smoke grenade—and smacked me right between the eyes.

  It hit hard enough to bring out more stars than there already were. My grip slipped, my hands burning down a length of strap to the very end. For a long moment, I twisted in one direction, and my dizzy head spun in the other. My fingers cramped, begging for relief, and it almost seemed like a good idea just to let go and be done with it.

  Then the impact confusion passed, chased away by a jolt of adrenaline, a lot like waking up suddenly when you realized you were late and had overslept.

  Hand over hand, I inched my way up the backpack, eyeing the hole, anticipating the moment the rucksack would totally give out and send me sailing down to the pavement.