Jeff Abbott - Trust Me

The floor groaned, sagged, and he nearly fell. Below him he heard a rumble, walls tumbling away. The floor canted hard; he could not see past the swirling dust. He heard the shrill cry of a police siren. Help was coming.

He tried to remember the layout of the building. Stairs. Reception. Hallway. Offices on both sides.

He realized he was crawling the wrong way through the gritty fog. He turned and hoped he didn’t crawl off the edge. He splayed fingers in front of him, feeling, reaching. He found wall. A door. Blown inward by the blast, at a broken angle, wrenched clean off the hinges. He fumbled forward. Nothing but wall, more wall. A dead end. No back stairs. He crawled back out into the shattered hallway.

The building moaned. He thought it might well have been built before the days of steel beams and might be straining to stay erect, held together only by chance.

He found another door, also caved in by the force. He crawled under its twisted wreckage and the floor ended. He reached a few inches below and found only space. Stuck out a leg and his toes found the rest of the shattered stairway. He put his weight on a step and it held. Then both feet, and he lowered himself down. He sat down on his butt, shivering. Then he eased down on his belly, snaking along the stairs.

He slid down the top three stories. At the next one the walls didn’t look so cracked from the force of the roof’s collapse and he got to his feet. He tested the stairs with his feet. Behind him the stairway stood in a crazy, dust-choked warp.

When he reached the bottom, the stairway was slashed apart at the bottom floor. What looked like large chunks of a smoldering car were wedged where the steps would have once been.

He jumped down from the stairs into broken glass, burning rubber, twisted hot metal. Rubble made a moonscape of the street. The buildings on both sides were damaged as well, their facades ripped away, but their frames holding. Fire surged out the top of one of the buildings.

He stumbled through broken brick and scorched stone. Wreckage choked the street.

No sign of Jane. She’d been vaporized in the blast. But what the hell had happened?

Bomb.

The Night Road was attacking Quicksilver. They’d found his father’s people, maybe his father had talked. Or Aubrey. And they’d gone after Quicksilver with a murderous rage. They’d used bombs in the attacks at the high school and the chlorine train. And now here.

He coughed and spat blood. Hands touched him. He looked up. A young woman spoke French to him in soothing tones. He could start to hear her words over the hum in his ears. She tried to help him walk. He saw walking wounded, stunned, a woman clutching her broken arm, an old man with a brutal gash across his bald pate. Luke touched his own face and probed a wet mask of blood. The pain in his body turned savage, like a beast awakening inside his bones.

The young woman kept talking, soothingly in the lovely French, supporting him, and through the dust he saw the cream-colored sky.

He pulled away from her. She wouldn’t let him go and at the end of the road, he could see police arriving, ambulances with lights, fire trucks.

‘ Non,’ he said.

She spoke French he didn’t understand and pulled at him. No doubt she thought he was in shock. No doubt she was right. But the police, no. They would want to know who he was. Why he was there. And they would find out he was wanted in the United States. No.

He abandoned his kind savior with a thank-you, shrugged free of her grasp. He stumbled past the crowds that were gathering at one end of the street and people stopped him, trying to help him, sure that he was shaken. He pulled away. He staggered past a crowd that had spilled out of a restaurant. He went inside, to the bathroom, and was sick. He stood and studied himself in the mirror. Both his eyes were swollen, blackening with bruising. A tooth on the left side of his mouth was gone. His lips were heavy, like he’d taken a punch. A score of cuts along his forehead, up into the hairline, a bad one across his nose. Another one on his chin. His whole body throbbed like a bruise. His hair stood in spikes, dusty. His shirt was in shreds and he could see the red, scraped skin underneath. He felt the silver medal of Saint Michael, covered in grit.

He washed the blood and gunk from his face. He realized he’d lost his gun. In the dining area he saw an array of cutlery at a service station, and selected a sharp knife. He didn’t want to be unarmed. He put the knife in his waistband.

He went back out into the street and a man wearing an apron stopped him and in French said, ‘You should go to hospital, sir, do you need help?’

The man’s face was full of kindness. Of course it was, Luke thought. Most people in this world were decent. Good. They did not turn a blind eye to the suffering they saw. There is good in the world, Luke thought, and the Night Road wants to stamp it out. Destroy it.

‘I am okay,’ Luke said. ‘Thank you.’

He headed down the crowded street. The police cordoned off the avenues. How many innocent people, he thought. How many buried in the rubble, or killed outright. Nausea and anger shook him, vied for control. The ambulances were pulling away now, loading the first evacuees to the hospital. Surrounded by the onlookers, he felt marked, alone, as though he wandered among them like a ghost.

And then, a block away in the milling crowd, he saw him. Henry Shawcross. Standing close to the cordon, looking down rue de l’Abbe-Gregoire at the devastation. His face might have been carved from stone. He stood on tiptoes, peering down the street, first-hand witness to the carnage he’d helped create.

Henry turned away from the crowd, started to walk toward the ambulances that remained, where the injured were being loaded in.

He’s looking for me. To see if I survived, Luke thought. He walked up to Henry, grabbed his shoulder, and said, ‘Are you here to leave flowers on my grave?’

Henry didn’t move; he just sucked in a breath of surprise.

‘I’m armed. Are you here alone?’

Henry nodded.

‘If you lie to me, you’ll die. I’ll kill you and I won’t even blink. Start walking toward your car.’

‘Luke.’

‘Tables are turned, asshole. This is me kidnapping you.’

Henry obeyed. Luke kept a grip on his arm and under his hand Henry’s flesh trembled.

‘Thank God you’re alive-’ Henry started.

‘Don’t give me your crappy lies. You sold me out. You left me to die.’

‘I did no such thing. Everything I’ve tried to do-’

Luke’s hand slid down to Henry’s and gave the little finger a savage twist. Henry gasped and nearly stopped. ‘I am, oddly enough, not in the mood for one of your lectures about me or my life. Heard that, done that.’ They walked in the middle of the closed street, away from the other pedestrians who might overhear Luke’s harsh whispers.

‘The Night Road did this. Yes or no?’ Luke said.

Henry nodded. Misery on his face. ‘Mouser ordered this done. He’s no longer following my orders. I tried to stop him.’

‘Yeah, I can really see you called the police.’

‘Luke, please. I was going to walk up and shoot the bomber before he could detonate. I didn’t get here in time. I took an enormous risk in coming here-’

‘Spare me the heroic self-portrait. They have Aubrey and my father?’

Henry nodded again.

‘Alive?’

‘Yes.’

‘So. All this to kill me?’

‘And to wipe out Quicksilver.’

‘You’ve killed innocent people.’

‘This is a war.’

‘You’re playing at war, but this isn’t a war.’

‘Look around you. Look at what you’ve been through, Luke. War. War of a different sort. Fought in secret. But still a war.’