Jeff Abbott - Fear

He saw Nathan Ruiz with one arm handcuffed to a bed, trying to move out of the aim of the wavering gun. Miles fought street-dirty: he drove a knee into Sorenson’s groin, leaned down, and bit hard on the bridge of Sorenson’s nose. Sorenson screamed again and clubbed Miles with the gun.

They toppled onto the bed. Nathan pounded Sorenson’s head with his unbound fist; Miles wrenched the gun free from Sorenson’s grip.

‘Kill him!’ Nathan yelled.

Miles put the gun on Sorenson’s forehead. ‘Who are you?’

Sorenson didn’t speak.

‘Who. Are. You.’

‘I’ve read all about you, Miles,’ Sorenson said. ‘And I don’t think you can shoot in cold blood. Not again.’

He knew his real name. Miles dragged Sorenson off the mattress and cracked Sorenson’s head once against the tile floor. ‘How do you know my name? Who the hell are you?’

‘Your only hope of staying alive,’ Sorenson said.

‘Bullshit. You killed Allison. You put the bomb in her office. I saw you.’

‘I didn’t kill her. I can explain. But not here. This is Quantrill’s turf.’

‘I know what I saw.’

‘You see a lot of things, Miles. You see Andy.’ Sorenson grinned past the blood in his teeth. ‘You don’t need to fight this war, not alone. Let me help you.’

Andy. He knew about Andy. ‘Who the hell are you?’ he screamed.

Sorenson jerked a thumb at Nathan. ‘Ask Mr. Explosives about who really planted the bomb.’

Nathan shook his head in horror. ‘No… he’s lying. I never hurt her…’ He fell to the floor, still handcuffed by one arm, and closed his free hand around Sorenson’s throat, tightened the grip. ‘You’re lying!’

Miles heard running in the hallway. He ran to the door, saw two guards approaching. He fired, high, and the bullet creased the ceiling, shattered a light, and the guards fell back to the elevator.

He heard the gasps of strangulation behind him; Nathan and Sorenson gripped each other’s throat, Sorenson gaining leverage and Nathan’s face purpling. Miles yanked Sorenson free from Nathan but kept his throat in a grip.

‘Move and I’ll shoot you.’ Sorenson went still.

‘Pull the cuff tight,’ Miles ordered Nathan.

Nathan obeyed and Miles aimed the gun on the narrow length of chain, fired. The link shattered and Nathan ran for the door. He started kicking the unconscious Groote.

Miles hauled Sorenson to his feet, pushed him against the wall. ‘Last chance,’ Miles said. ‘Who do you work for?’

‘I can give you everything you want, Miles, everything you need. I’m not your enemy. Come with me and I can prove it.’

‘Kill him,’ Andy purred in his ear.

‘I don’t believe you.’ Miles smashed the gun across Sorenson’s face, threw him into the wall. The man collapsed, eyes rolling into whites.

Miles grabbed Nathan. ‘Did you hurt Allison?’

Nathan shook his head. ‘I didn’t. I swear, I didn’t. If I had I would have killed you when you stepped into her house. Who you gonna believe?’

Miles chose. ‘I believe you.’

He heard the sliding hiss of the elevator doors. The guards. Trying again. The adrenaline surge was still high, warring with the pain the guard and the tech had dealt him, with the sedative Hurley had dumped into him. He fought down panic. ‘How many guards?’

‘Two or three. Most of the staff isn’t allowed on this floor.’

Of course; the fewer eyes to see, the easier to illegally test drugs. And if there were only three, he’d already downed one. But two were still too many.

He risked a glance down the hall, barely putting his head into a possible line of fire, easing the gun out with him. A guard stood, five feet away, pistol out, leveled at Miles’s head.

Miles ducked back as the bullet hammered into the door frame.

‘Throw your guns down!’ Miles yelled. ‘Or I kill Groote and Sorenson!’

Silence for a moment.

‘Slide the guns down the hall! Now! They got ten seconds… Ten. Nine. Eight.’ He wondered what the hell he would do if they called his bluff.

A gun slid along the tile, stopped in front of him.

‘Both of them!’

Another gun joined the first.

Hope they only had the two, Miles thought. He stuck his head out again; two guards stood in the dimmed hallway, murder in their eyes. Miles stepped out, collected the guns, flicked on the safeties, crowded them into the back of his pants.

‘Come on, Nathan,’ he said quietly. He kept his gun leveled at the guards. Nathan stepped out into the hallway. In his hands he held the police baton Miles had stolen.

‘You’re not going to get out, dumb-shit,’ one guard said. ‘We’re in lockdown.’

‘Then you’re going to come with me and unlockdown it,’ Miles said.

‘I can’t.’

‘You’ll damn well figure it out.’ Miles grabbed the guard’s arm, pushed him along.

‘Mister, please, I got kids,’ the guard said.

‘Shut up.’

Nathan stepped past them and cracked the baton into the second guard’s stomach. He bent double, vomited, moaned.

‘They hurt me,’ Nathan said in a distant whisper. ‘Hurt me, hurt me…’

‘We didn’t,’ the first guard said. ‘Groote did. Not us. Okay? Not us.’

Miles could hear patients yelling and hitting fists against their doors, roused by the ruckus, screaming questions. Miles handed Nathan the passkey and Nathan bolted ahead, opening the stairwell door.

Miles hurried the guard past the doors and down the stairs at a run. ‘Are the other patients in immediate danger?’

‘I don’t think so.’ Nathan dashed ahead of him, leaping five stairs at a time.

‘Get behind me,’ Miles yelled, but the younger man paid him no heed, recklessly barreling down the four flights of stairs, Miles half sliding down the metal railings to keep up. The haze from Hurley’s dope burned away; his fear fueled him but he didn’t know how long the energy would last.

They hit the parking-lot exit door at the bottom of the stairwell. The passkey no longer worked. Locked. Trapped. Miles thought his heart would burst through his skin.

Sorenson shook off the pain and the dizziness and stepped out in the hallway. He saw the guard, still retching from the blow to his stomach.

He tightened his grip on his gun. He could kill the guard, kill Groote, but he didn’t want to waste a moment or a bullet.

‘Which way?’ he asked the guard.

The hurt guard stopped heaving his guts long enough to point at the stairwell. Then he handed Sorenson an electronic key. ‘It’ll… override… locks.’

Sorenson grabbed the passkey and ran.

‘How do we open the doors?’ Miles yelled into the guard’s face.

‘Control panel – lobby.’

Miles shoved the guard through the hallway exit from the stairwell, all of them running, and as they rounded a corner into another hallway leading to the lobby, he glanced back and saw the stairwell door opening, then Sorenson in the dim light. Miles shoved Nathan and the guard forward and a bullet screamed from the doorway, hot as a devil’s finger as it rocketed past the nape of his neck. He dived for the cover of the corner as a second bullet pocked the wall an inch above where his head had been.

The guard broke into a run for the lobby door. Nathan launched himself into the guard with all the grace of a zombie, a screaming, raving fury. They fell to the ground and Miles pulled Nathan off the man, shoved them both toward the door, keeping the gun trained on the corner.

‘You unlock the doors!’ Nathan screeched at the man, waggled his tongue and his fingers as though all sanity had abandoned him. ‘Or I will kill kill kill you!’

The guard’s face paled.

They ran into the lobby; Nathan shoved the guard to the computer. He, with trembling hands, entered in a key.