Warren Murphy: Blood Ties

Tringle pushed away from the wall where he was leaning when he heard a sound from down the corridor that sounded like the burp of automatic-weapon fire.

The sound died almost as soon as it started, which was strange, for even the shortest pull on the trigger of one of these machine pistols meant a full-second burst of about fifteen rounds.

"Hey, Sam," Tringle called out. "What's going on?" There was no sound from the East Wing hall. There were no elevators at that end of the building and Agent Sam Bindlestein was guarding a stairway exit. But now he wasn't answering.

Tringle pulled his walkie-talkie from under his armored vest.

"Harper, do you copy?"

"What is it?" Agent Kelly Harper's voice crackled back.

"Something's up, I think. I don't want to leave here. Everything quiet at your end?"

"That's a roger."

"Then come running and watch your back."

Three heavily armed agents were all the local FBI office had thought were needed for the job. But now, with one agent unresponsive and a second leaving his post, Agent Lester Tringle wondered if that might not have been a serious miscalculation.

He called Bindlestein's name into his walkie-talkie a half-dozen times but got no response, then saw a patient, a thin man with high cheekbones, walking toward him wearing a ragged-looking hospital robe.

"You there," Tringle called, turning toward the man and bringing his weapon almost up to chest height. "You don't belong here."

"I'm lost," Remo said. "I can't find my room. Can you help me out?"

"You're on the wrong floor. This is a restricted floor. There are no other patients here."

"I'm a patient and I'm here," the patient said reasonably.

"Well, you don't belong here. There's an elevator down the hall. Take it to the lobby and someone down there will help you."

But the patient kept coming. Then Tringle noticed that although the man's arms were bare, his legs, under the robe, were not. He was wearing black pants, and hospital patients never wore anything under their robes.

Tringle brought his machine pistol perfectly level with the man's stomach and touched the trigger lightly. A red dot appeared over the man's navel.

"I am ordering you to halt," Tringle shouted.

"I stopped taking orders when I left the Marines," Remo said.

"I'm asking you to halt then. Don't make me shoot." The red dot wavered as the patient kept coming. There was no weapon in his hands, Tringle saw, but there was a confident expression in his dark eyes.

"One last time. Stop where you are."

"I told you, I don't know where I am. How can I stop where I am if I don't even know where that is?"

Tringle let the intruder get to within ten yards, then tapped the trigger.

The burst was short, only a dozen rounds or so, and a wall behind the patient erupted into a cloud of plaster and paint chips.

The man kept coming. The red laser dot still floated over his navel. Tringle blinked furiously. Was this a ghost? Had the bullets gone right through him?

He fired again, a longer burst this time.

And this time, Tringle saw the blurry motion of the patient as he slid away from the bullet track. Tringle corrected right. The red dot found the patient's chest and he aimed again.

The patient floated left. The sound of the weapon, in this narrow hallway, was not loud, since the weapons had been silenced.

Tringle swore to himself. The silencer must be throwing off his aim. But almost as soon as that thought flashed through his mind, he rejected it. The laser was supposed to make up for the silencer's bias.

Tringle clamped down on the trigger and a long volley of bullets spewed forth. The man in the hospital robe seemed to ignore them and just kept coming.

"Why are you shooting at that patient?" Agent Kelly Harper asked, as he trotted up, holding his gun at his side. "Because he's unauthorized," Tringle said hotly.

"He's also unhurt. Are you firing blanks?"

"Look at the walls behind him and see if you believe that," Tringle said hotly. The walls behind and on either side of the patient in the ragged robe were riddled and in places hunks of plaster hung loose like peeling skin.

"Isn't your laser working?" Harper asked.

"You try yours," Tringle said.

"This is the FBI. I'm asking you to stop where you are," Harper called out.

"Make me," Remo called back.

"Okay. That's excuse enough," said Harper as he lined up on the approaching figure's unprotected chest. By that time, Remo was almost on top of the pair. Harper pulled the trigger, intending to fire a brief burst, but for some reason, his machine-gun muzzle pointed at the ceiling all by itself. He tried to take his finger off the trigger but it seemed to be attached and would not move.

Then Harper noticed that the patient was standing next to him, a finger massaging Harper's elbow lightly, a cruel smile on his lips, and somehow he knew that the touch of the man's hand on his elbow was responsible for his arm pointing upward, trigger finger frozen.

Remo lowered the agent to the floor while Tringle backed up to get into better firing range.

"You just killed an FBI agent," Tringle said coldly.

"He's not dead. He's just out of it. Like you will be in a second."

"Like hell," Tringle snapped, and fired. He didn't bother to check where the laser dot was pointed. At this range it would not matter.

But it did matter. Bullet holes peppered the walls, but the patient was not even touched. He was laughing aloud.

"You can't laugh at the FBI that way," Tringle cried, tears of frustration welling in his eyes.

"No? What way can I laugh at the FBI?"

Tringle did not answer. He was busy trying to yank the empty clip from his gun so he could ram home a fresh one. In training, he had consistently performed that operation in less than 2.5 seconds and had received a commendation for that speed.

He found, though, that it meant very little in actual practice because before he got the old clip out, the gun began falling apart and he was left holding a finely machined piece of junk. The laser targeting system still worked however. Tringle knew this because he could see the red dot dancing on the unconcerned face of the patient, who was holding portions of Tringle's gun in his right hand and who was raising his left hand slowly to the FBI agent's weeping face.

Then there was nothing more to see because Tringle was on the floor, unconscious.

Remo put the two agents in a closet and covered them with blankets because it was cold in the closet. In a few hours, they would be clear-headed enough to receive official reprimands for dereliction of duty and only Remo would know that they were not at fault. There had been only three of them and three was not enough.

Remo entered the unlocked door of Room 12-D. Hubert Millis lay wide-eyed on the bed, tubes plugged into his mouth, his nose, and his arms. His breathing was barely noticeable amid the beeping and blipping of electronic monitoring devices.

Remo passed a hand over the man's eyes. There was no reaction, not even a dilation of the pupils to interception of the light. Remo could sense that the man was very close to death. A quick thrust to the temple might be more mercy than murder.

He reached his right hand toward the man's head, then withdrew it. He had killed many times but this was different. This man was not a criminal, not someone who deserved death, but just a businessman who happened to wind up on somebody's hit list.

But Remo's own father had asked him to kill the man. His own father.

Slowly he raised his right hand again.

The EKG machine suddenly stopped beeping. Another machine kicked into life; the sound it made was a long, drawn-out, tinny "screeeeee."

Alarm horns rang out in the corridor. Somewhere, someone was yelling. "Code blue. Room 12-D.