Дэвид Балдаччи - Hell's Corner

After the shooting range was a room outfitted like the famed Hogan’s Alley at the FBI Academy. Here Stone and his teammates had practiced what they’d learned in the classroom. After that room was the lab. It was there where the psychological testing took place — really glorified torture to determine what your breaking point was. Stone had seen hard-as-steel men weep in that room, as the technicians played numbing games with their minds, which would never be as strong as their physical side, no matter how much they trained. There were proven exercises that would enlarge and strengthen muscle. The mind, on the other hand, was not so easily quantifiable. And the recruits all carried hidden mental elements with them here that would jump out at unexpected times and cause them to falter, to fail, to scream in rage. Stone had felt all those emotions. No place on earth had ever humbled him like the lab at Murder Mountain.

After the lab was a series of rooms that served as holding cells. Stone never knew what persons might have been “held” here, and he didn’t want to know. If Caleb and Annabelle were not down this way he would start through the other cylinder where there were only two sections. The first was a tank full of foul liquid. One would fall into this muck if one did not know where to step on a catwalk that constituted the top of the tank. Once inside the tank it became a fight to the death. After the tank came a maze that Stone thankfully had the answer for. Or at least he thought he did. He now wondered if Friedman had built some surprise for him.

Of course she has. She’s enjoying this. I ruined her plans. She has a half billion dollars she can’t spend. She’s going to take it all out on me. At least she’s going to try to.

But again something tugged at the back of Stone’s mind, telling him there had to be more to it than that. He listened as the flap of wings evidenced that birds had gotten into Murder Mountain. That had happened when the place was operational. Stone had even made a pet of one bird that had built a nest near where he slept. It was the only tie to the outside world he’d had.

The place had been built in the 1960s, and the design reflected the era. There were even ashtrays built into metal consoles. Everywhere he looked he saw something hopelessly out of date. But when it was new, Murder Mountain was a state-of-the-art facility. The government funds to build it, Stone had been told once, had been buried in a huge spending bill that included subsidies for hog farmers and the textile industries.

What was a little governmental assassination with your ham and polyester?

He cautiously entered the firing range. It was here that he had killed the first man he’d shot in thirty years. He had done it to save himself and Reuben Rhodes. His gaze traveled to the very spot where the man had fallen and died. The fluorescent overhead lights were too weak to allow Stone to see if the man’s blood was still there. At least his body wasn’t. The place had been cleaned up after his last visit here. He wondered why they hadn’t just imploded Murder Mountain, burying it under tons of steel and rock. Maybe they were holding on to it, in case they needed to use it again. That was a chilling thought.

The lights were on, though, however feebly. Which meant Friedman had figured out how to use the old generator system to create a bit of power. He crept forward, past the tattered targets, ducking under the sagging wires on pulleys that allowed the paper targets to be moved back and forth. He stopped thinking about anything other than what would be waiting for him.

The bare scrape of a shoe on the dusty floor caused him to drop low behind a wooden counter where he had once stood daily to fire his allotted rounds. The sound had come from his left, ten yards at most. He wondered if they were all using darts until the moment of truth came. It didn’t really matter. If he allowed himself to be knocked unconscious by a tranquilizer round he was as good as dead anyway.

Crouching down, he circled backward, his gun covering both front and rear flanks in alternating swivels. This tactic must’ve confused his opponent, who probably thought Stone was moving forward and not backward with every creak of boards. When the man emerged from his hiding place to fire at a target that wasn’t where it was supposed to be, Stone placed one round in the man’s arm, disabling him. As he clutched for his wounded limb, Stone fired the kill shot into his neck, neatly bypassing his body armor. The man dropped on the spot, his carotid severed.

Stone studied the door, did the math in his head. It was probable that the man he’d just killed was a ruse to flush him. Sacrifice one to accomplish the mission. The landing at Normandy in 1944 had followed this same strategy, only the number of lives sacrificed had been in the thousands. On the other side of that door were probably at least two shooters waiting to take him.

So he waited. He counted off the seconds in his head. Patience. He had spent years learning that trait. There were few men who could outwait him. Ten minutes passed and the only part of Stone that moved was his chest, with each shallow breath.

The only problem was that Friedman, and thus her men, knew that one could not go back in these sections. One had to go forward. How long were they willing to wait? How long was Stone willing to wait?

We’re all going to find out.

“Wait a minute, how’d you know to bring that laser thing?” Knox asked Chapman as they crouched in the darkness.

“Like your Boy Scouts, it’s the mission of MI6 to always be prepared.”

“Meaning you didn’t believe Stone?”

“The key?” Chapman scoffed. “Of course I didn’t believe him. Reading his psychological profile was fairly easy. He wasn’t going to endanger us too.”

“He let us go to New York with him,” Finn pointed out.

“I guess he believed the South Bronx was safer than this place,” pointed out Knox.

“Murder Mountain,” said Chapman. “Made for interesting reading.”

Both men looked at her.

“I researched it, of course,” she said. “Didn’t you?”

Knox cleared his throat. “How did you know what to research? Stone didn’t mention the place until we were on the way here.”

“The place where it all began? Remember, that’s what Ming said back in New York. So I did some digging, got my folks back in the UK doing the same. I knew that Stone started out his career in Triple Six. What I didn’t know was that it began with a year’s worth of training right here. Got a file emailed to me two hours before we left. Like I said, interesting reading.”

Finn looked down at the laminated plan of the place Stone had given him. “Looks like multiple spots to be ambushed.”

“That cuts both ways,” said Knox, and Chapman nodded in agreement.

She pointed at the plan and said, “We have two choices. Go through each side together or split up.”

Finn said, “I vote for getting out of the open. If we need to go through these section things, let’s split up. I’ll go to the left and you two to the right.”

Chapman shook her head. “No, you two go right, I’ll go left.”

The men looked at her again. “What?” she said. “A woman can’t go it alone? She needs a precious man to hold her poor, fragile hand?”

“It’s not that,” said Knox uncomfortably.

“Good to hear it,” she said. “I’ll take the one on the left. Now here’s some little tidbits you need to know about the section on the right to traverse it safely.” She filled them in on particulars she’d gained from her research.

“Got it?” she said, looking at them.

“You’ve given this a lot of thought,” said Knox.