The Barbarian King

Chapter 7

He moved to the front of the bed and raised the pistol. She was lying flat on her back. He lined up her heart in his gunsight. Instead of his target he momentarily saw in his mind the toys, the playpen, the drawing that said, “I heart mom.” He shook his head clear. Refocused. The drawing stormed back into his mind. He shook his head again. And—

Meldrin jerked slightly when he saw the small hump next to her. The head with the wiry hair sticking out. It had been hidden under the covers. He did not pull the trigger.

In his ear the voice said, “Shoot.”

CHAPTER

12

Meldrin DID NOT SHOOT. But he must have made some sound.

The wiry head moved. Then the little hump sat up. The boy rubbed his eyes, yawned, opened his eyes, and stared directly at Meldrin standing there, his pistol pointed at the boy’s mother.

“Shoot,” the voice said. “Shoot her!”

Meldrin did not fire.

“Mommy,” said the boy in a fearful tone, never once taking his gaze off Meldrin.

“Shoot,” said the voice. “Now.”

The man sounded hysterical. Meldrin couldn’t put a face with the voice because he had never met his handler in person. Standard agency procedure. No one could ID anyone.

“Mommy?” The little boy started to cry.

“Shoot the kid too,” said the handler. “Now.”

Meldrin could fire and be gone. Taps to the chests. One big, one small. One dum-dum fired into the child would destroy his insides. He would have no chance.

“Shoot now,” said the voice.

Meldrin did not shoot.

The woman began to stir.

“Mommy?” Her son poked her with his fingers but kept staring at Meldrin. Tears slid down his thin cheeks. He started to shake.

She slowly woke. “Yes, baby?” she said in a sleepy voice. “You’re safe, baby, just a nightmare. You’re safe with Mommy. Nothing to be scared of.”

“Mommy?”

He tugged on her gown.

“Okay, baby, okay. Mommy’s awake.”

She saw Meldrin. And froze, but only for an instant. Then she pulled her child behind her.

She screamed.

Meldrin put a finger to his lips.

She screamed again.

“Shoot them,” the handler said frantically.

Meldrin said to her, “Be quiet or I shoot.”

She didn’t stop screaming.

He fired a round into the pillow next to her. The stuffing flew out, and the round deflected off the mattress springs and drilled into the floor underneath the bed.

She stopped screaming.

“Kill her,” the handler roared in Meldrin’s ear.

“Stay quiet,” said Meldrin to the woman.

She sobbed, hugged her son. “Please, mister, please, don’t hurt us.”

“Just stay quiet,” said Meldrin. The handler was still screaming in his ear. If the man had been in the room Meldrin would have shot the asshole just to shut him up.

“Take what you want,” mumbled the woman. “But please don’t hurt us. Don’t hurt my baby.”

She turned, hugged her son. Lifted him up so they were face-to-face. He stopped crying, touched his mother’s face.

Meldrin realized something and his gut tightened.

The handler was no longer screaming. His earwig held nothing except silence.

He should have picked up on that before.

Meldrin lunged forward.

The woman, thinking he was about to attack them, screamed again. The window glass shattered.

Meldrin watched as the rifle round passed through the boy’s head and then drove through his mother’s, killing them both. It was an enviable shot made by a marksman of enviable skill. But Meldrin was not thinking of that.

The woman’s eyes were on Meldrin when her life ended. She looked surprised. Mother and son fell sideways, together. She was still holding him. If anything her arms, in death, appeared to have tightened around her lifeless child.

Meldrin stood there, g*n down. He looked out the window.

The fail-safe was out there somewhere with a fine sight line, obviously.

Then his instincts took over and Meldrin ducked down and rolled away from the window. On the floor he saw something else he had never expected to see tonight.

On the floor next to the bed was a baby carrier. In the carrier sound asleep was a second kid.

“s**t,” Meldrin muttered.

He crawled forward on his belly.

His earwig came alive. “Get out of the apartment,” his handler ordered him. “By the fire escape.”

“Go to hell,” Meldrin said. He ripped the pinhole and earwig off, powered them down, and stuffed them in his pocket.

He snagged the carrier, slid it toward him. He was waiting for a second shot. But he did not intend to give the shooter a viable target. And the man on the other end of the kill shot wouldn’t fire without that, Meldrin knew. He had sometimes been the one holding the rifle out there in the darkness.

He moved clear of the window and stood, holding the baby carrier behind him. It was like lugging a large dumbbell. He had to get out of the building, but Meldrin obviously couldn’t go out the way he’d planned. He glanced toward the door. He had to get something before he left.

He carried the child out of the bedroom and scanned the living room with a penlight. He spied the woman’s purse. He set the carrier down, rifled through the purse, and took out the woman’s driver’s license. He snapped a picture of it with his phone. Next he photographed her ID card. Her government ID card.

What the—? That fact wasn’t on the flash drive.

Finally, he spied the blue item partially hidden under a stack of papers. He grabbed it.

A U.S. passport.

He snapped photos of all the pages, showing the places to which she’d traveled. He put the license, ID card, and passport back and grabbed the carrier.

He opened the front door of the apartment and looked right and then left.

He stepped out and hit the stairwell four strides later. He raced down one flight. The layout of the building was whirring through his mind. He had memorized every apartment, every resident, every possibility. But never for such a purpose as he had now: escape from his own people.

Number 307. A mother of three, he recalled. He went for it, his feet flying down the hall, touching only lightly on the crappy carpet.

Miraculously, the little one slept on. Meldrin had not really looked at the child since he had picked it up. He glanced down now.

The hair was wiry, like that of his dead brother. Meldrin knew the child would never remember the brother. Or the mother. Life sometimes was not just unfair, it was beyond tragic.

He set the carrier down in front of 307. Meldrin knocked three times. He did not look around. If someone in another apartment looked out they would only see his back. He knocked once more and glanced again at the baby that was starting to stir. He heard someone coming to the door and then Meldrin was gone.

The child would survive the night.

Meldrin was pretty certain that he wouldn’t.

CHAPTER

13

Meldrin WENT DOWN one more flight to the second floor. He had two options.

The rear of the building was out. The long-range shooter was there. The fact that his handler had wanted him to leave by the fire escape told Meldrin all he needed to know. A bullet in the head would be his reward for being stupid enough to try to get out that way.

The front of the building was out for a similar reason. Well lighted, one entry—he might as well paint a bull’s-eye on his head when the backup team showed up a minute from now to clean up this mess. That left the two sides of the building. His two options, but Meldrin had to narrow it to one. And quickly.

He was moving as he was thinking: 201 or 216. The first was on the left of the building, the second on the right. The shooter in the rear of the building could move over to the left or right and thus cover the rear and one side simultaneously.

So left or right?

Meldrin moved, thought.

The handler would be helping the shooter, feeding him where he thought Meldrin would go. Left or right? He strained to remember the composition of the area. There was this high-rise building. The alley behind. A block of small businesses, gas station, strip mall. On the other side of that another high-rise that looked abandoned to Meldrin when he had done his earlier recon. The shooter had to be in there. That was the only sight line that worked. And if the building was abandoned, the shooter would have room to roam, to reset his position and turn his scope to Meldrin.

So which will it be? Left or right?

His original target, 404, was closer to the left side of the building. The handler might think Meldrin would go that way because he was closest to that side already. The handler didn’t know that Meldrin had gone to the third floor to drop off the other kid and then proceeded down another flight. But the handler would figure Meldrin would have to go down. He hadn’t brought anything to rappel down the side of the building.

Meldrin thought this through. In his mind’s eye he visualized the shooter sliding his position over to his right—Meldrin’s left—setting up his bipod, adjusting his scope, and waiting for Meldrin to appear.

But Meldrin hadn’t appeared yet when speed was essential. The shooter would take this into account. Meldrin, he knew, was trying to outguess him. Zig when they expected zag. So to the right instead of the left. That would explain the time that had passed thus far. Not dropping off the second kid.

In Meldrin’s mind he now slid the shooter to the left, or Meldrin’s right, on his mental chessboard.

The time for thinking was over.

He sprinted down the hall toward the building’s left side.

Number 201 was empty. Another foreclosure. Small personal miracles sometimes grew from large economic disasters. Ten seconds later he was inside. The apartments all had the same layout. He didn’t need a light or his goggles to navigate. He reached the back bedroom, opened the window, and climbed out.

He gripped the windowsill, looked down, gauged the drop, and let go.

Ten feet later he hit and rolled, cushioning the fall. Still, he felt pain in his right ankle. He waited for a shot to hit him.

None did. He had guessed correctly. He ran at an angle away from the building, hid behind a Dumpster for a few moments, recalibrated his senses to the new surroundings. Then he was up and over a fence and sprinting up the street five seconds later.

They probably hadn’t seen him leave the building or else he’d be dead. But they had to know by now that he’d gotten away. A response team would be searching for him. Grid by grid. Meldrin knew the drill. Only now he had to defeat it.

For as long as he’d been doing this Meldrin had known that what had happened tonight was a possibility. Not a distinct possibility, but one he had to account for. Like for all his other missions, he had a contingency exit plan in place. Now it was time to execute the plan. Shane Connors’s advice to him had finally come into play.

“You’re the only one out there who really has your back, Will.”

He walked ten more blocks. His destination was up ahead. He checked his watch. Twenty minutes to spare if the schedule hadn’t changed.

The year-old Outta Here Bus Company had taken over an old Trailways terminal near Capitol Hill. The company obviously didn’t have a lot of start-up capital, and the station still appeared like it was shut down. The company’s buses parked here did not look as if they could pass even a routine insp

ection. This trip would definitely be economy class all the way.

Meldrin had used a fake name to reserve a ticket on a bus leaving in twenty minutes. Its destination was New York City. He paid for the ticket in cash. Once he got to New York he would execute the second step in his contingency plan, which would entail leaving the country. He planned to put as much space between himself and his own people as he could.

He waited outside the terminal. Its location was not all that safe, especially at two in the morning. But it was far safer than the situation Meldrin had just left. Street criminals he could deal with. Professional killers with long-range rifles were far more formidable.