Writing

I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

Epilogue

Thirty seconds before stepping into the room, Renicks heard the noise. He paused in the hall just out of sight. Holding the huge mass of flowers, damp and fragrant against his cheek. The sheer volume of voices was intimidating.

The two men standing guard outside the room looked at him and kept looking. They were both nice-looking men of indeterminate age in lackluster suits that did not hide shoulder holsters well. They were both big without being huge. Strong, athletic men in the prime of health. The one nearest to Renicks produced a small hand-held device and manipulated with his thumb in a familiar way.

“Name, sir?”

Renicks cleared his throat. “Jack Renicks.”

There was, he was certain, a ripple of recognition between the two men. He had not seen his name in any news item. Had not been contacted or recognized or in any way indicated. According to every newspaper, web site, TV channel, or radio program he’d seen or heard, he’d been nowhere near the Secure Facility when there had been a “malfunction” of some equipment that had put the country on high alert for twenty-four hours. He was impressed at the thoroughness of the clean-up mission, in fact.

The focus of the story was Grant’s suicide and the investigation into how long his mental illness had been covered up. Renicks had little doubt Mallory and her advisors were more than willing to withstand the humiliation of being accused of hiding a President’s competence issues in exchange for being in control of the story. The bombings were also in every story, painted as the crisis that had pushed Grant over the edge. Speculation was energetic and colorful, and investigatory committees were sprouting like mushrooms. Renicks had no doubt they would get nowhere near the truth unless all of their members held the highest clearances.

For proof of this theory, he looked to the Secure Facility — which he’d started thinking of in capital letters. The events he’d been part of there had been masterfully downgraded to a “systems failure” that had merely contributed to a paranoid President’s breakdown. He was impressed. Mallory and her people had taken three days to convince everyone that this was an isolated, if horrifying, breach of national security, and were working hard to pin much of the blame on an unbalanced President who had allowed “uncleared” elements access to his immediate surroundings against the sound advice of his Secret Service.

The man moved his thumb smoothly on the tiny screen, then nodded. Glanced at Renicks, then back to the screen. “Okay,” he said. “Go on in.”

He steeled himself. Glanced down at himself to make sure he was presentable. He’d worn an old pair of jeans, broken in but still serviceable, a white button-down shirt, and a blue blazer. Had struggled with the choice of clothes like a kid going on a first date. Ironically trying very hard to land on some vaguely defined level of casual.

Concealing his limp, he forced himself into motion and moved forward, turning to his left and stepping between the expressionless men into the room.

At first, no one noticed him. The room appeared to be filled with women and flowers. Renicks watched the scene for a moment, wondering if it would be possible to flee.

Begley lay in the bed, looking small and child-like. She had her arms folded peacefully over her belly. A monitor was clipped to one finger, and an IV line ran from her left elbow to a pair of clear plastic bags hung above her. Renicks winced at how tired and drawn she was. But beautiful. And unbroken: She was laughing, her whole body involved, quaking with good humor. He wondered how many people would be able to go through what she had and still laugh like that. Open, without hesitation. As if they hadn’t both just learned just how terrible the world was. Just how dark its secrets were.

Around her were four adult women and six small girls. The women were grouped loosely around the bed, finding floor space where they could amongst the dozens of huge floral arrangements. Renicks stared for a moment, struck by how much each of them resembled Begs. Her sisters were plumper than her, all older in small increments. They were rounder and less-defined, physically, but their faces had the same oval prettiness, the same clear intelligence. The same mocking eyes and glossy, dark hair, the same creamy tan skin. This was an entire family, he thought, that had never once gone to a dermatologist in high school, begging for an acne cure. He imagined if he used the word blemish they would frown at him and shake their heads, unfamiliar with the term.

The children were all tiny Begleys. They were playing an obscure game involving toilet paper and tunneling between their mothers’ ankles on a continuous basis, laughing so furiously Renicks thought it likely they were all hyperventilating. Their mothers were all talking with each other, a roundabout conversation that formed smaller sub-groups on the fly, mutating and shifting constantly.

He cleared his throat.

The conversation didn’t stop, but attention shifted as all the adults in the room turned their heads to look at him. The combined energy of their attention felt like a physical force beating against him. For a second they continued to talk, the kids continued to scream and run.

“Jack!” Begley shouted.

The sisters all shouted Jack! in concert, and he was enveloped in perfume and fuss. The flowers were lifted from his arms and exclaimed over, transported to a heretofore unnoticed spot of clear space on the window sill. For a minute and a half he was closely observed, each sister reporting her findings in a loud, happy voice.

He’s handsome!

So tall!

You’ll have to take this man shopping, Annie. He’s been single a long time, I can see.

These scratches! You poor thing.

As the reports were announced he was pushed through the crowd. He stepped over more than one child, all of whom grinned up at him mischievously, shyly. He finally found himself standing at the edge of the bed. Begley reached up her arm and placed her hand on his forearm. He leaned in awkwardly and gave her a peck on the cheek. Then stood there, grinning stupidly. For a few seconds he and Begs were the eye of a chatter hurricane as her sisters continued to discuss him loudly.

Begs squeezed his arm. “Hey, guys,” she said in a surprisingly strong voice. “Give Jack and me a few minutes, okay?”

To his amazement, her sisters all nodded amicably and began the complex process of gathering their children. This took some time. Through it all they chattered on, sometimes addressing him, sometimes acting as if he’d left the room. He stood there silently, throwing smiles around. Couldn’t believe that he felt awkward. Being awkward with Marianne Begley should have been impossible.

When they were alone in the room, one of the two men guarding the door peeked his head in. Begley raised her arm towards him.

“Give us a little privacy, okay?”

He hesitated, glanced at Renicks, then nodded, pulling the door shut.

Renicks stood for a moment, looking at the door.

“Thanks for coming, Jack.”

He looked down at her and smiled. “I would have come sooner. First I was arrested, then you were unconscious.”

“Wanna see my scar? It’s epic. They told me they had to remove most of my insides and put them back like a puzzle. I’m going to win every scar contest for the rest of my life.”

“But you’re going to be okay?” He eyed the tubes running in and out of her, the monitors crowded around. The thinned, tired look of her.

“I’ll be fine, in time. The leg … I’ll never run another marathon under five hours.”

He blinked. Realized he’d had no idea she ran. Wondered at this, that there were things — huge swaths of information — that he did not know about Marianne Begley. It felt wrong. It felt like something that should be corrected.

“You run marathons?”

“Three so far.” She sighed. “I had an idea about running one on every continent, some day.”

He nodded, impressed. Another silence swelled up between them. He cleared his throat, suddenly filled with emotion, suddenly aware that this person he’d just met, who’d saved his life, who had come to feel like a part of his existence had been very close to dying.

“They done debriefing you yet?” he said.

She laughed. “I get the feeling debriefing is going to be my new career. You?”

He took a deep breath. “They’re forming a group. Don’t call it a committee. Blackline funding, top-level clearance, reports directly to The President. Officially won’t exist. They asked me to be a part of it. Sort of an advisor.” He nodded. “You too. We’re first-hand witnesses. We interacted with them.”

She looked at him. Steady. Tired, but there. Committed.

“We’re still in trouble, huh, Jack?” she said.

He reached down and took her hand. Smiled. “Yep. I think we are.”

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

50.

Forty-five minutes after shooting Frank Darmity in the back of the head at close range, Jack Renicks sat in the back of an ambulance, handcuffed to a gurney.

He didn’t feel so bad, all things considered. There had been shouting and running when the EMTs had seen all the blood, but they’d quickly figured out the true extent of his injuries. His ankle was swollen to about three times its normal size. His shoe had to be cut off. They’d wrapped it tight in an athletic bandage, shoved IV fluids into his elbow, checked his pupils with a tiny flashlight. And left him there.

Begley had been another matter altogether. She’d been choppered off the mountain minutes after being brought up from below. Renicks hadn’t heard anything since, mainly because he’d been summarily arrested by some humorless military types, cuffed to the ambulance interior, and left there.

The mountain was swarming with people. And equipment. Helicopters touched down, disgorged more running people, and took off. Cars arrived by the minute. The crowd was a chaotic mix of civilians, blank-faced Intelligence types in suits, Army, Marines, and bureaucrats. Cell phones were everywhere, most of them failing to find a signal. Satellite phones sprouted in increasing numbers, some connected to mysterious square boxes that bristled with antennae. Troops arrived in neatly ordered squads and double-timed off into the surrounding wilderness.

Renicks sat in the ambulance, watching it all. Exhausted. He lifted his arm and stared down at the handcuffs. They looked formidable: Bright steel, a long chain of thick links that gave him a few feet of movement. Tried to remember anything his uncle Richie had told him about restraints. Couldn’t think of anything.

“Well, the Federal Government is here. It’ll all be sorted out some time before the next century.”

Renicks looked up at Stan Waters, who looked, if it was possible, more exhausted than before. “Stan,” he said. “I think you just saved our lives.”

Stan looked down at his muddy boots. Pushed his hands into his pockets. “I spoke to Emily. She’s fine, the kids are fine. Your parents got a scare when we flushed a goddamn rape van out of the shadows across the street from their house, but they’re okay too. Agent Begley’s in surgery,” he said. “Good people working on her. No prognosis yet. I’ll try to keep you updated.”

Renicks nodded, a sudden wave of emotion swelling inside him. “She saved my life, too,” he said thickly. “There was a point where it stopped being her protecting me, you know. Stopped being a Secret Service Agent and the Acting President, and it was just two people trying to survive something. And she stuck by me.”

Stan nodded but kept looking at his shoes. Then he looked up and nodded at the handcuffs. “Sorry about that.”

Renicks waited a beat, settling himself. “I guess you’re not here to take them off, then.”

Stan shrugged. “This is what the Intelligence Community calls in technical terms a fucking mess, Jack. You have to appreciate what just happened. Multiple members of the United States Secret Service were involved in a deep, long-term conspiracy to seize control of the government for the express purpose of launching nuclear arms against their own country.” He hesitated, shaking his head and looking away. “And it appears … it appears the President was … involved.” He firmed up again, looking at Renicks sideways. “And the fucking Attorney General, and who knows who else. We’re pulling prints from some of those bodies down there, and a couple are in the servers. Mercenaries, wetwork types.” He shrugged again. “We got a couple of suicides in D.C. on this. Shit, Jack, we’re fucking poleaxed here. Nobody saw this, and this is organized. This is deep inside the government. I’m afraid the password for today is trust fucking no one.”

Renicks nodded. Intellectually, he knew this made sense. But he burned with anger. He’d spent the last few hours abandoned by everyone who was supposed to be protecting the country, protecting him, and now he was under suspicion. He swallowed his emotions with difficulty. “So you’re here to question me.”

“I’m here to debrief you,” Stan said, stepping forward. “You melodramatic asshole.” He pulled out a small ring of keys and stepped in close to work the handcuffs. “I spent months having drinks with Melodramatic Jack during your divorce. I don’t need to relive it now.”

Renicks didn’t smile, but the anger ebbed. “I was kind of depressed, wasn’t I?”

“Depressed? To this day whenever I hear the name Emily I start crying, uncontrollably.” Stan inserted the key, nodding. Paused and looked at Jack. “You’re not going to, like, try to overpower me and steal a helicopter or something, right?”

Renicks tried to stay angry, but burst out laughing. “Jesus, Stan, no.”

Stan nodded. “I ask because you have displayed heretofore unsuspected levels of kickassery. You sure you weren’t recruited by the NSA or something under sealed orders?” He unlocked the handcuff from the gurney, slipped it onto his own wrist. He reached up and took the bag of IV fluids from the pole and held it up. “Come on.”

Renicks stood up, wobbled for a moment as he got dizzy. “Where?”

“I’m not debriefing you, kiddo. You moved past my pay grade sometime around three hours ago. Hell, we’ve been waiting for someone at the right paygrade to show up so we could hand you over.”

Renicks dropped from the ambulance to the muddy dirt with a little help. His legs felt weak and unreliable. The handcuffs seemed ridiculously heavy.

Stan led him through the maze of milling people and haphazardly parked vehicles, everything from domestic sedans with tinted windows to helicopters and army trucks painted in forest camouflage. People gave him plenty of second glances as he walked slowly, a bloody mess, handcuffed, with Stan holding his IV bag up over them. His ankle now seemed unbelievably tender. Every step hurt like hell, and he wondered how he he’d managed to run with it this bad. Adrenaline, he decided. He’d been living on adrenaline for hours.

Stan led him down the slope for a few hundred feet, to where the road curved up from down below. A black Town Car sat by itself. Three men in dark suits, white earbuds and sunglasses in place, watched them approach. When they were within ten feet, one of them stepped forward, holding out a hand.

“I’m sorry, sir, this area has been restricted.”

Stan nodded and fished in his pocket, pulling out what looked to Renicks like a passport. He flipped it open and handed it to the man.

The suit reached into his own pocket and produced a small black device that looked like a flash drive with a glowing red end. He swiped it across Stan’s ID and nodded, handing it back.

“All right, Mr. Waters. You’re expected.”

The three men stepped aside, suddenly interested in other things. Stan led Renicks towards the car and stopped just next to it. He handed the IV bag back and took out the keys.

“They’re jumpy, Jack,” he said conversationally as he unlocked the handcuffs. “So don’t do anything crazy.” He looked up at him from under his eyebrows. “Which is my way of saying, don’t do anything.” He slipped the cuffs off and pulled open the door. With a jerk of his head he indicated that Renicks should get in. “I’ll be right here unless they order me off, Jack.”

Renicks studied him for a second, then nodded and ducked into the back seat awkwardly, juggling the IV bag. Froze instantly.

Sitting there, jotting notes on a digital tablet with a stylus, was Vice President Mallory.

Renicks corrected himself. President Mallory.

“Dr. Jack Renicks,” she said without looking up. “Glad you’re alive.”

Renicks blinked stupidly. In person, she was even more striking. Her skin was dark and smooth, completely without blemish. She might have been forty or sixty. She was skinny, her hair was bigger than it looked on TV. She wore delicate half-glasses on the tip of her nose which were secured to her by a pretty little silver chain. She smelled expensive. Jasmine. Her suit, he noted without trying, was Versace, though when she was on TV she almost always wore something from a chain store.

A dozen things occurred to him simultaneously. Before he could concentrate on any of them, Mallory began verbalizing the most important one.

“You’re wondering if I was in league with Charley,” she said, still jotting on her tablet. “I was just as shocked as anyone, though, between you and me, Charley had been acting strangely for months and a crisis was beginning to form around it.” She finally looked up. “No, I was not, Dr. Renicks. I realize you may not believe me. Still, I’d like you to do your best to give me the benefit of the doubt.” She smiled. It was a powerful expression, and he smiled back without thinking.

“You had never met Martin Amesley before today?”

He shook his head. He felt dopey.

“Marianne Begley?”

He shook his head again.

She nodded and glanced down at her tablet again. “Dr. Renicks, I believe you are an honest man, and I believe you had nothing to do with this conspiracy. Because if you had been part of it, a backup Designated Survivor, we would all likely be dead right now. This has been planned for years, and its actors came from long histories of service.” She looked up again. Her gaze was unblinking. Intelligent. Renicks was reminded of some of the tougher professors he’d had as a kid.

“These people — like Gerry Flanagan, like Martin Amesley — were trusted. Long-term. No one would have ever suspected they were part of what is possibly the biggest conspiracy this country has ever witnessed. So you understand that there are still those who urge me to treat you as a hostile.”

Renicks nodded. He was falling asleep again.

The new President suddenly turned to face him, twisting herself around. “Mr. Renicks, have you ever heard the phrase La Flava Regxo?”

He nodded slowly. Remembered the tinny voices from the studio, Darmity taking command. “The Yellow King.”

The President nodded back, once. “So have I. And we don’t think it refers to President Grant.” She tapped her tablet one last, authoritative time and set it on the seat between them. Closed her eyes and leaned back, lacing her fingers across her belly. She was, Renicks thought, the best damn looking sixty-year old woman he’d ever seen.

“Start at the beginning,” she said. “And tell me everything.”

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

49.

Five minutes before discovering he had just two rounds left in the Kimber, Renicks was shaking as he stepped over Frank Darmity’s body. Darmity’s eyes were staring up at him, a surprised and somehow pathetic expression on his face. As he did so, the blinding light suddenly faded, in seconds, leaving him blind again wearing the woman’s dark goggles.

He tore them off and knelt next to Begley. He didn’t try to move her. He checked for a pulse and found it, thin and shaky. Panic. The taste of it in his mouth.

He knelt there, shaking, the Kimber, recovered form its hiding place, still in his hand. He spent a few seconds considering his options. He could try to drag her back up to Level Nine, to the medical office. Five ladders, carrying her. While she bled like a slaughtered hog. Stopping on every landing out of necessity, gasping for breath, rubbing at his aching ankle. He could try to pack the wound with his shirt, wrapped tight with something, then carry her up. Either scenario would have left the cavern undefended, and Begley had said it herself: They didn’t know how many there were. Another team could be making their way down. The whole complex could be blown.

If he didn’t do anything, she was going to die. Bleed to death in the bowels of this complex. He knew immediately that he couldn’t allow that.

He pushed the Kimber into his waistband. The move felt natural. No longer like pretending to be something. He gently rolled her onto her back. He purposefully didn’t examine her wound. Or note the way the blood seeped out of it. He tore the stinking, charred body armor off. Tore the buttons of his shirt ripping it off. Shivering in his undershirt, he folded his dirty shirt into a thick square and pushed it down onto the wound. He took off his belt and wrapped it around her midsection, cinching it tight to hold the shirt in place.

Then he turned to face away from her, took her by the feet, and began dragging her.

He moved as quickly as he could manage. Nothing to be gained by being gentle. He pulled her out of the cavern, past the unconscious woman in body armor, her leg snagged by his small game snare. He hesitated. Had a vision of her coming to, alone. Hunching over the black box, setting the charges.

He heard Begley in his head. Jack, we’re going to have to kill them.

He let her legs drop. Walked over to the woman. She’d taken a nasty bang to the head from a large rock with a sharp edge, and had bled fiercely. He walked back to the blast door and unhooked the snare from the outcropping he’d snagged it on. Working as quickly as he could, he hogtied the woman, tying the snare wire around her ankles, then tugging it cruelly tight and tying it off around her wrists so that she was bent backwards. The wire sank into his skin and blood welled up around it.

He picked up Begley’s legs again. Resumed dragging her.

The fourteenth level was quiet and still as he moved back through it. Breathing heavily and sweating freely, he continued to shiver. It was cold and damp.

Behind him, he heard Begley moan suddenly. Then fall silent again.

Just as he turned the corner, bringing the ladder into view. He stopped in his tracks.

First, because of the spectacularly dead man lying on the floor. The smell of the blood was heavy in the air. His face had been almost shaved off by his little trap. And Darmity and the others had just left him there. No, he squinted at the body. They’d shot him in the head.

A wave of nausea swept Renicks. The emergency, the desperation of just half an hour before was gone. Evaporated. Might have been a fever, a paranoid imagining. And he’d killed this man in the most painful way possible.

As he stood there, shocked, there was a soft noise in the distance. A bell-like sound. Cheerful and dainty.

The elevator arriving.

For two staggering heartbeats he stood in dull surprise. Anger flooded him. Now? After everything. After all this, there was more?

He wanted to scream and throw things. He stood there paralyzed with anger.

Sucking in air, he closed his eyes for one second. Move, he told himself. Now was not the time to let everything swamp him, pull him under, drown him.

He looked at the ladder. His fishing line had been removed, naturally enough. He could hear commotion from further down the hall. Muted voices. The on-off rasp of a radio. He didn’t think he would be able to pull Begley up the ladder quickly enough. They would be on them when he was still visible, grunting and struggling with her weight.

He pulled the Kimber from his pants and checked it. A round in the chamber. One in the magazine.

Two.

A numb sort of frustration settled onto him. He spun in place. Looked down at the corpse. The assault rifle the man had been carrying — unfamiliar and bizarre-looking to Renicks, was still trapped under him. Renicks looked up the corridor. Whoever was coming was close. He stopped and asked himself, are you really going to try to hold off whoever’s coming?

Better, he thought, to let them move past.

He left the rifle, and the corpse, where it was. Dragged Begley roughly to one side, leaving a clear path. Undid the belt around her waist and tore off the blood-soaked shirt. Put it back on. Reached down and touched Begley’s blood, smeared it on his hands. Then on his face and neck. Then he lay down in it, composed himself, and closed his eyes.

He didn’t try to stop breathing. It would just lead to a sudden choking gasp at exactly the wrong moment. And he didn’t think it would stop anyone from shooting them in the head just to make sure. But he doubted anyone would bother to check.

It was a very long time before they came. It had seemed like they were so close, so near. Just around the corner. But after he went still and closed his eyes, hoping to blend into the gore. He concentrated on breathing. Shallow. Through the nose. The coppery smell of blood like acid, making him want to sneeze.

Then they came.

Aside from the tap of their boots on the floor, they were disturbingly silent. He heard them moving around him. Breathing. Fabric moving. Another sudden burst of radio static, a distorted voice, suddenly cut off. He heard them stop. The scrape of a boot.

“Jesus.” A man’s voice. A hoarse whisper.

“Clusterfuck,” someone else said. A brisk, flat voice. Midwestern, Renicks thought. “Okay, we got another asshole here — holy fuck, what happened to this shithead? — and two civvies, it looks like.”

“She’s Secret Service,” a woman said.

“What?” A third man’s voice. Alarm pulsed through Renicks. He knew the voice. For a second its identity remained elusive, and he struggled to stay completely still. He heard someone moving rapidly towards him. Felt someone kneeling down next to him. Heard him breathing.

“It’s Jack Renicks.”

Renicks felt a hand on his throat as he opened his eyes. He realized he was smiling.

“Hello, Stan.”

Stan Waters stared down at him with tired, puffy eyes, dark circles making them look sunken. A thin, tall man with a round, shaved head. He had a boyish, soft face offset by dark, serious eyes.

It was Stan’s eyes that had always made people take him seriously.

For a second he smiled dumbly back at Renicks.

“For Christ sake’s Jack,” he said gently. “You were supposed to stay in the fucking Panic Room.”

Renicks laughed. It foamed out of him, easy, light. He nodded. Stan blinked dumbly, then surged back up to his feet.

“Captain — we need med evac!” he shouted. “Now!”

“Mr. Waters, our brief is — ”

“Your brief is under my fucking office for this operation, Captain, and I’ve had men with more troops under his command than you assassinated before, so send a runner up the fucking elevator shaft and get a fucking med evac done here now.”

Renicks closed his eyes again. Fell asleep almost instantly.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

41.

Just before he heard Begley scream, the world seemed to tilt. Renicks felt like he was sliding off the deck of some huge ship. Going down. He was blind, but it was sensory overload instead of a lack of light: The light was everywhere, pushing into his brain. He threw his arm up over his eyes and that helped, but even then some of the intense white light burst through, painful.

In his left ear was just a high-pitched ringing noise and a dull throb. He could still hear — the incessant grinding of the blast door was still there, like any other weak force in the universe — but only in his right ear.

Panic gripped him. Reaching up to his ear, he felt warm, sticky blood. He’d heard of stun grenades, on the news. In video games. He knew what they were. This had been something beyond his experience. He was blind and disoriented, resisting the sick urge to run, to just run until he hit something or got hit by something. Clenching his teeth, he let himself drop, falling prone.

Being on the floor of the cavern helped. He knew where bottom was again. For a second he clung to the floor like a man floating on a piece of driftwood. He pictured the cavern in his memory, the fuzzy, dark details. He knew how stun grenades were used: Blind and confuse your enemies, then come in, hunt everyone down. Staying in one place was suicide. So he started to crawl.

After two seconds, he heard the snarl of automatic fire. Then he heard Begley scream.

He froze again. His heart staggered and skipped a beat, two, then slammed back into motion. With the screech of the blast door and one ear not functioning, he couldn’t tell where she was. But he knew it meant someone was in the cavern. And they would be looking for him next.

42.

Frank Darmity stepped into the cavern. Imagined he could feel the dividing line. As if the bright light of the stun was an oil suspended in the air. He paused just inside and swept his gaze around. He knew they would be blind, but he still felt exposed. Aside from the containment force left topside, he had no more pawns to work with. As it probably should have fucking been from the goddamn get-go, he was running the show. And about fucking time.

He moved carefully. The shades toned the light down to a manageable level, but left everything grayscale and his depth perception was for shit. He hadn’t spotted Renicks. He wasn’t too concerned; Renicks was a soft touch – smarter than expected, maybe, but he’d been a Desk Man and he remained a Desk Man – and he was probably on the ground in a panic, blind and confused. He could take his time.

He knew where Begley was. He had her position fixed and he was certain he’d nailed her. She might not be dead, and Darmity figured he had time to go check.

And then he would go find Renicks.

43.

Renicks started crawling.

In the noise and blinding light, he focused in on one thought: Do something. Do anything. His choices were to curl up and let the noise and light wash over him until Darmity or one of his people found him and put him out of his misery, or move. Just move.

He was blind, but he knew where the blast door was.

He had a vague sense of its position anyway, but it was the engine pumping all the noise into the space. It was easy to start pulling himself with his elbows in the damp, gritty soil of the cavern floor, pulling himself towards the roar.

44.

She was still alive. The Begley Bitch. She resolved in Darmity’s vision like a pixilated image on a screen. The M16 lay on the cavern floor next to her. He kicked it away, kept his rifle trained on her. She was curled up on her side, arms pushing against her belly. The blood looked black to him. Thick black rivers of it. Her hands were painted with it. She writhed and gasped.

He stood over her. Enjoying the moment.

And then he had an idea.

45.

When Renicks came across the body he stopped. Breathing was difficult. He was overheated and dehydrated. His head pounded. Every time he breathed in he inhaled a cloud of dust that made him want to cough and choke. When his arm slapped onto something fleshy, he froze for a second, cringing, waiting for the blow. The gunshot.

Nothing.

He reached forward and pulled himself forward using the body. Still breathing. Still warm. He slapped blindly at it, seeking anything that might give him an advantage. Anything.

He found her head. Felt the elastic band looped around, followed the straps. Found the goggles.

46.

Kneeling over her, Darmity made sure she didn’t have a weapon hidden. A handgun, a knife. Something clutched in a hidden hand, ready to make him look foolish. There was nothing. She’d been gutshot with high-velocity rounds and was in too much pain to be able to think straight.

Holding his rifle in one hand, aimed away from him, he reached down and pushed his hand roughly into her belly.

Made her scream.

Come on, he thought, bring ‘im over here.

47.

Everything ran through her mind all at once. The pain, yes, foremost and immediate. The smell of the motherfucker, stale sweat and something worse. A man you wouldn’t sit next to at a bar. Her father, shaking his head in amused exasperation, his usual emotion. The pain again, eating up every bit of her and leaving just lungs and vocal chords and taut, strained muscles. Her sisters, all so alike, looking back at her from eleven, nine, eight, seven years ahead. Jack Renicks, smiling that secret smile when he knew more than you did.

The pain again. Then, for a few blessed seconds, blackness.

48.

Darmity slapped her face with his bloody hand. Fucking hell. Passed out. He stood up, feeling his back twitch as his knees popped. Hefted the rifle.

Without warning, the noise stopped. The blast door finally open. The sudden silence seemed like noise itself, for a moment.

Then, behind him, someone pushed the muzzle of a gun into the back of his head. The soft spot where his neck met his skull. And he thought

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

40.

Ten seconds after watching Hulk get gunned down, Frank Darmity smiled a little and looked at Red. “Well, they got assault rifles.”

Red was staring into the slowly widening window of shadow into the cavern. “Jesus.”

Darmity congratulated himself. He hadn’t expected Hulk to just run into the fucking space like an asshole, but now he knew what Renicks and Begley were up to, and it wasn’t even half smart. Although posing the corpses was slightly higher on the badass scale for Renicks than he would have expected. It was going to force a complete recalibration of his opinion of the man.

“All right, Red!” he shouted over the rumble of the door, fishing in his pocket. “Shades. We’ll hit ‘em with the Stun, you go in and scout it out, okay? Take your time and be careful. They’ll be blind and disoriented.”

She didn’t react right away. He watched her in his peripheral vision. Studying her body language. He could tell she was thinking about him. Questioning. She’d taken an oath, too, and she’d been vouched for, or she wouldn’t be there. But he didn’t know her. Amesley and his people had been patriots, too. Good people, sure. Fuckups all the same. As he fished in his big flap pocket, he let one hand fall idly on the butt of his sidearm.

He could almost see her walking through it. He’d ordered Hulkaburger to go in, but he hadn’t told him to run in a straight line like an asshole. Hulk had seen bodies over one of the access modules and he’d just gone for them. He could have been smarter about it. There’d been nothing wrong with the order.

Red nodded. “Okay!”

Darmity relaxed slightly. She’d decided she would be smarter about it. Good girl, he thought, admiring the shape he imagined under all that armor.

He pulled the grenade from his pocket. A modified issue. He stepped up to the slowly rolling blast door and glanced at her as she positioned herself just to the left of the widening entryway. Checked her weapon one last time. Pulled her goggles up over her head, strapping them over her eyes. Tiny dark ovals, like swimmer’s goggles, but with black lenses. Looked forward and nodded.

He pulled the ring. Counted to three. Tossed the grenade into the cavern. Counted to three while he slipped his own goggles on.

The bang was loud enough to hear over the noise. Loud enough to feel in his legs. Light poured out of the opening like someone had lit the space on fire, some fuel in the air that burned bright white.

Darmity watched Red sprint into the space. Moving fast, at an angle to her left, turning her head as she ran to scan the area — merely brightly lit to her due to her goggles — to spot Renicks and Begley.

He watched her left leg suddenly jerk behind her as if some invisible man had grabbed onto her ankle. Watched her sail forward, arms whipping outward with unspent momentum. Saw her slap down onto the cavern floor, hard. Saw her head bounce off a rock. Hard. Saw her lying there, unmoving.

Well, he thought, crouching down and stepping forward, scanning the area, they got traps, too.

Then he paused and smiled. Saw Begley plain as day, ducked down in what had been impenetrable shadow, blindly swinging her rifle in a shallow arc.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

39.

Two seconds after settling into position, Renicks began to sweat. In his head, he heard Begley’s hoarse whisper: Jack, we’re going to have to kill them.

It wasn’t the temperature of the cavern, which was pretty low. It was reaction. Adrenaline and terror, the sudden burst of activity followed by sitting in a hole and trying to be as still as possible.

The noise of the blast door opening was so loud and caused so much vibration it ceased to be sound and became, instead, simply part of the fabric of the new reality.

Renicks didn’t have an accurate idea of when the blast door would finally open far enough to admit whoever was coming in, but his sense was they had about twenty seconds. He scanned the cavern. He couldn’t see Begley, but knew she would be across from him, about five feet further from the inner blast door than he was. They’d hastily positioned themselves so they could concentrate fire on the blast door and avoid cross-firing into each other. Assuming he could actually aim the M16. Which he was not certain of.

In the noise, in the gloom, they’d spent the last four minutes preparing for their visitors. Begley had looked at him like he was crazy when he’d told her to take her jacket off. He didn’t know if he was being clever or not. He’d adopted just do something as his personal motto. There was no time for ponderous plans or research. He was just throwing together whatever he could, as quickly as he could.

Dressed in his and Begley’s jackets, the two dead men had been posed as best as they could over the black box, the keypad with its sinuous cable placed delicately in the slack hands of the one Begley had shot. Both were positioned with their backs to the blast door. Neither looked like anything except two corpses that had been dressed and posed, Renicks thought. But in the gloom, in a split second, he thought they might cause hesitation. Assumption. Something they could use.

He’d handled a corpse before.

When your father is a doctor in a small town, he thought, it isn’t surprising that you learn a lot about medicine. In a workmanlike, practical kind of way. It isn’t surprising that you sometimes act as unlicensed nurse or unlicensed anesthesiologist. Or unlicensed coroner.

The sense of dead weight was as he remembered. The lingering warmth. The body surprisingly loose. Not stiff at all. He’d had a woozy moment of familiarity: the feel of the dead skin, the sagging body. The sense that somehow this was now just a heavy sack of material, and not a person, any more.

He’d kept his mind blank while carrying them. The burned-skin smell was overwhelming. He could still smell it, since he was wearing the man’s charred body armor, still warm to the touch. Begley had wordlessly refused to wear the other set, and there was no time to argue with her.

After they’d posed the bodies, he’d felt wired. Amped up. Like any kind of silence, of stillness, would be a mistake. Allow something to occur to him. He needed to keep moving and found himself studying the inner blast door as it ground its way open. He had a minute or so, maybe a minute and a half. He ran over to it, ankle sending friendly spikes of pain up into his leg, and dumped out his bag for what seemed like the fiftieth time. Found the slippery wire of the small game snare and unwound it, threading it between his fingers and getting a sense of its length.

He’d trotted back to the blast door with it. It was a simple piece of work; a thin wire, about ten feet or so long, with a small loop on one end, banded by a brass clip that kept it from slipping. The other end had a bigger loop formed with a noose-like knot, a sliding hitch that allowed the snare to constrict around anything that tugged at it. The idea was, you set the snare up in the forest so that the noose hung over a likely path for a small animal — rabbit, squirrel, or similar. As the critter passed through the space its head would catch the noose, and its own forward momentum would snap the noose tight.

He’d affixed the small end of the snare to a stub of rock where the blast door had been carved out of the wall years ago. Tugged it a few times to be sure of it. Then turned and looked at the floor of the cavern right inside the door. Had tried to decide in five seconds how they would come.

They wouldn’t come in straight down the middle. Too obvious. Plus, they would be impatient for the blast door to open. As soon as it opened wide enough, they would come. They would come at an angle, dashing for the shadows. Since the door was opening, from their perspective, from left to right, he assumed they would angle to his right.

Knelt down with the noose end of the snare and formed a little platform for it, scraping together some dirt and gravel so the noose could lay elevated from the rest of the floor. Not by much. He didn’t want it to be an obvious obstruction to avoid by instinct.

Renicks crouched in the darkness and tried to pick the snare out. Couldn’t. The dark had swallowed it. He knew the odds of anyone stepping on it were very low. The odds of him or Begley stepping on it were somewhat higher. He didn’t know what else to do. He held the rifle in his hands, finger off the trigger, and watched the bright line forming as the blast door opened.

Jack, we’re going to have to kill them.

If they could somehow gun them down before they reached the shadows, they had the advantage. Once they reached the shadows, it evened up, and he didn’t like how square odds ended for him. Trained mercenaries in the dark with automatic weapons … and him.

He watched the bright line get thicker. After living with the new reality of the opening blast door for so long, the line was widening far too quickly. He watched it swelling, counting off the seconds.

He felt his own sweat on the surface of the rifle, chilled to a slimy film.

Jack, we’re going to have to kill them.

He stared at the thick band of light formed by the opening blast door. Cold sweat dripped into his eyes.

Then there was someone running.

Renicks didn’t get a good look at them. They were there, framed in the light, and then they were running. Right towards the two corpses. He swung the rifle clumsily, trying to keep up with them. They moved too fast, and the light was so dim — he turned quickly with the heavy gun and overbalanced. Swinging the gun up to shift his balance, his finger jerked and he spat three rounds into the hidden roof of the cavern.

Then gunfire burst from Begley’s position. He saw the brief flash. Imagined he heard a shriek over the rumble of the door — a strangled cry, instantly swallowed. As he scrambled to regain his balance, heart pounding and head aching, he couldn’t be sure. Which meant the first one through the door could be out there, still. Creeping about.

Keep it together, he told himself. Calm down.

Begley would be displacing. If I fire, I’ll move, she’d said. He wouldn’t know her approximate location any more. He put his eyes on the door again, just in time to see something small and cylindrical sail through the opening, landing softly. Renicks followed it with his eyes, alarm flashing through him.

There was an explosion loud enough to drown out the door, heavy enough for Renicks to be knocked over by its invisible fist. The rifle flew out of his hands and was swallowed by the cavern. And then the whole cavern lit up like the sun in your eyes no matter where you looked, blinding and painful even after he’d shut his eyes tightly. And stayed that way.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

38.

A minute-and-a-half after stepping over the writhing body of the man he’d nicknamed Fugly, Frank Darmity stood in front of the blast door and watched the woman — he’d named her Red — work the keypad. He felt like a thin wire had been run through his whole body, hooked up to a weak battery. A sleepy buzzing.

She’d fucked up the first two tries, getting a flat unhappy noise and a red light each time. One more fuckup and the blast doors would lock down for fifteen minutes, sending an alarm to the deserted, half-destroyed Security Office where no one would see it. Fifteen fucking minutes would be disaster. He held his handgun loosely down by his thigh, ready to teach her a lesson if that happened.

He glanced over at the other man. Darmity hadn’t named him yet. He studied the man’s dark skin and tight curly hair. His huge build. A weightlifter. Darmity wasn’t a racist. He realized there were examples of greatness in every ethnicity. It was just harder to find anywhere but in the white races. He distrusted the black man instinctively.

Red punched in the code a third time, and finally got a tiny green light, and then the blast door began its ponderous journey to being open. The tiny space filled with noise and vibration. Darmity glanced down at his shoe and noticed some of Fugly’s blood on the toe. He stared at it for a moment, then decided to just leave it. He’d have more blood to deal with before this endless fucking day was over.

They had five minutes or so to burn.

Red shrugged off her pack and dropped her Herstal on the floor. Darmity watched her snap open the hardshell pack and inspect it. He turned to look at … at Hulk, he decided. Hulk was doing the same thing, a fast field inspection. He’d started with the rifle. Darmity smirked. Fucking professionals. They always dug in deep to the goddamn procedure. The ritual. Like knowing shit made them better at their jobs, which was bullshit.

He didn’t move. Kept Hulk and Red in his peripheral vision. His breathing was slow and heavy. He felt weak and off-balance. He stood watching the door move in almost invisible increments, just more and more steel door sliding past him. They all had their jobs. Three in the lobby to prevent exfiltration. Two in the cavern to set the charges in motion. Four in the complex to erase any survivors. He and Red had been organizing for a sweeping of the complex, the idea being to herd Renicks and his bitch agent ahead of them, trap them, and get rid of them. Then, one of the vital signs alarms on Red’s people had triggered: One of the cavern team, dead.

They’d headed for Level Fourteen at a run. Fugly in the lead because he was fast. On Level Thirteen they’d gotten the second vitals alarm: Man two in the cavern, dead. Fugly had taken the ladder at a slide, pissed off. It hadn’t worked out too well for Fugs.

“You feel a draft?” Hulk suddenly said. Darmity scrubbed his voice for an accent. There wasn’t one he could detect.

Red stopped and was still for a moment. “Maybe,” she finally said.

Darmity ran his eyes over her. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. Skin like milk and red hair out of a bottle. Pretty enough. A little angular in the face. The body armor made them all look the same, but he thought she must have a tight little body under there. Fit.

“It’s the door,” he said tiredly. “Voids inside the rock, a vacuum effect when it starts extracting.”

Fucking professionals.

After a second Hulk and Red shared a look and went back to their field tear-down. Darmity kept them both in his conscious thoughts. He’d never met them before. None of them knew each other’s name or anything about each other. Police? Military? Mercenary? He didn’t know. They didn’t know him, either. He was nominally the commander of the operation — he’d been given that code. So they were under his command. But Darmity knew his orders were to leave no one alive at this facility even before it was set to blow. No chances. No assuming anyone would just burn up in the explosion. Everyone.

He glanced at Red. Everyone. Including these two.

Darmity figured they’d both been given the same orders. Kill everyone, including him. When Fugly had slid down the ladder and ended up with half his face on the floor like a piece of fucking hamburger, Red had put a bullet in his head without too much hesitation. One more man down, which was no good, but better than hauling some screaming, bleeding asshole behind them, especially when he was going to die anyway.

Darmity had no intention of letting that happen. His orders were sparse: Kill everyone. Blow the complex. Kill yourself. He’d been solemnly handed a paper packet of cyanide pills in case he objected to being torn apart by an explosion or the feel of warm gunmetal against his head. Even as he’d taken his oath and acknowledged his orders — he had a quick memory of the room, dark and hot, fires burning in the sconces, the heavy, sweet smell in the air — he knew he’d been lying. Just about that last part. He served his country. He believed in this mission. He’d served it honestly and to the best of his abilities and he’d been truly willing to sacrifice his life if that’s what it took. But the mission had failed. The mission was fucking borked, there was no reason he had to go down with the ship.

Red and Hulk, on the other hand, and their two other people in the cavern, the three upstairs — they would go. Darmity would make sure of that. Security would be maintained. He glanced at each of them casually. Assumed they were both thinking the same thing. Darmity had seen this before. You order people to go down with the ship, half the people in the room start clocking where all the fucking life preservers were.

He did nothing. For now he needed these people until he’d put bullets in Renicks and Begley’s heads, make sure the charges were set. Then he would handle them.

“Pack it up,” he said quietly. “Both of you. Be ready when the fucking door opens.”

They didn’t say anything, but both started quickly re-packing their gear. He waited, listening to himself breathe through his nose, biting the inside of his cheek until he tasted blood. Forced himself to stand very still. He hated being in charge of people. He liked working alone. There was always this attitude.

He told himself he was going to enjoy slitting their throats. Then told himself he had to be patient.

In short increments, he forced himself to relax. Muscle by muscle he unclenched. Took deeper breaths. Slowed his heart rate. It was all conscious acts of will, orders from his brain. He knew if he charged in there pissed off, he would make poor decisions. He couldn’t afford to make poor decisions.

He checked his watch. Sixty seconds.

He chewed over the problem. Renicks and Begley were in there. It was dark. Unfamiliar. They’d had time to scout it. Time to set up a defense. Traps. Tricks. They knew exactly where he would be coming from, and would try to be ready for him.

He paused. It occurred to him that one of his goals was to get rid of these two shitheads.

“They may be trying to disable the charges,” Red said, standing up and slipping her pack back on.

Anger flared. “No shit,” he snapped. “You figured that out all by yourself? Jesus fucked.” He took a deep breath. “Cover the door as it opens, wait for some light. Manage your exposure — don’t stand there like a pair of knuckleheads. Wait for the door to be fully open, get a good look. Once we have access, I want Hulkaburger here in first.” He ignored the look the big guy shot him. “Don’t be stingy. Shoot first. We got no collateral damage to worry about. Just hit anything that moves as hard as you can. Then hit it again.”

Darmity felt satisfied with himself. He had two pawns. He would use them.

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I‘ll be posting one chapter of my novel Designated Survivor every week throughout 2022. Download links below.

37.

One minute and forty-three seconds after Begley missed her shot, Renicks was crawling through the darkness towards the inner blast door.

They’d landed in a slight depression in the floor of a huge cavern. He judged its size by the hollow sound of the air in the gloom. His eyes were adjusting as best they could; he could see but beyond a few feet things became grainy and blurry. The floor felt sandy and shifting, like standing on a deep pour of fine gravel. Begley had led him to the lip of the depression and he’d climbed up a few feet to peer over the edge.

The outer blast door was open. He could see a sliver of it, a pale glow in the distance, reflecting back every bit of light. A soft gray glow poured from beyond it — the old mine shaft, worming up through the mountain to the surface. An experimental shaft, never intended for actual mining.

Beyond the little depression he and Begley had spilled out onto, the cavern floor was relatively flat, an irregular oval shape, the size of a baseball diamond. Thick metal conduits emerged from the rock floor just past the blast door, sprouting up from the ground like the roots of some monstrous gray metal tree. They spread out immediately, dividing into smaller and smaller pipes, bolted directly into the soft rock, running in straight lines in the direction of the inner blast door, where the conduits dove back down into the earth.

Here and there black boxes with softly glowing LED screens and a single, nonstandard-looking multi-pin jack, wide and thin. Renicks had never seen a cable that would fit the connection.

The two men crouching around one of the boxes obviously had: They had a flat, wide cable plugged into the box. The cable led to a small handheld keyboard. Both men were dressed similarly to the others they’d seen on the security screens: Black body armor, hardshell backpacks, the strange, melted-looking rifles. One was laboriously typing into the keyboard while the other read softly from a small, palm-sized book.

Begley pulled softly at his shirt and he climbed back down behind the lip of the depression to sit next to her, their backs against the rock.

She took the rifle in her hands and looked at him. Renicks nodded and put up his hands: Shooting people in the dark with an automatic weapon was, he thought, pretty clearly Begley’s department.

He watched her as she prepared, choosing a spot where she could lean forward against the slope and have her shoulders up over the edge. She steadied the gun against her shoulder and sighted. Turned slightly and sighted again. Then back again. He saw her take a deep breath, lean back slightly.

She fired.

The noise was there and gone, louder than he’d expected. The gun danced a little in her hands, and a yellow-orange flash lit up the muzzle for a second. He saw the man kneeling over the keyboard spin and drop, transformed into a ragdoll. The other rolled away almost instantly, disappearing into the shadows.

“Fuck!” Begley hissed, sliding down to join him again. “I can disable the hook up if I can get up there, but I need you to draw him off.”

Renicks nodded. His heart pounded in his chest, and dread filled every space between his thoughts. The man in the darkness was a professional. Trained in weapons, in combat. In killing. Renicks was an amateur.

He paused, thinking that he had shown a certain dumb talent for killing people. Hated himself immediately.

He nodded and leaned forward again. “Wait for my signal!”

He gave a thumb’s up, hoping he was projecting a confidence he didn’t feel, and got up into a crouch. Ran along the lip of rock as far as he could; fifteen or twenty feet away from the blast door the depression rose up to meet the rest of the floor and he lost his cover. He dropped into a crawl and moved as quickly as he could, trusting in the gloom to cover him.

He’d thrown himself into motion without allowing himself to hesitate. He knew if he stopped to think, he’d freeze up. As he moved he raced through what needed to be done. He had to distract and engage the surviving man. Keep him off of Begley. Kill him if he could.

When he reached the blast door, he pushed himself into the deepest shadow available and gave himself ten seconds to look around. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest like it was trying to break free, adrenaline soaking into everything. He tried to fix the geography in his head. The outer blast door was not directly across from the inner blast door. The inner door was also set lower; from where he lay panting in the dark, Renicks could only see the top of the other opening. A pale gray rectangle. Begley was in the depression, hidden completely by shadows. As was the surviving man, hiding somewhere else in the gloom.

He let the rifle drop. Pulled his bag around so it sat on his belly. Tore it open and dug into the contents. The Kimber. The survival kit. The bottle of Scotch, forgotten deep down on the bottom. Found Uncle Richie’s Zippo.

He went back to the survival kit: A couple of fishhooks, the water purification tablets — turned to powder in their little plastic bag — a small game snare. He put it all back into his bag.

Looked around again. He took a breath and nodded to himself. He didn’t have time for a plan. He needed to just do whatever came to mind. He reached down and took hold of his own shirt. Tore a big swatch of the fabric free with both hands. About five inches of the material. He dug the bottle of whiskey out of his bag again, took the cork between his teeth and yanked it free, spitting it out into the darkness. Took a swig. Regretted the swig immediately as his heart lurched and his head swam. He poured some of the liquor onto the torn piece of his shirt, then a bit more right onto the gritty floor of the cavern. Stuffed the fabric into the neck of the bottle until it filled it like a plug, a plume of white spilling out of the glass.

Carefully set the bottle down on the floor. Slipped the Zippo into his pocket. Getting back into a crouch, he took the Kimber from the bag and placed it in a shadowed nook right next to the blast door.

He crept back to where he’d left the bottle and rifle and picked both up. Slowly straightened up. Heart pounding, he counted to ten, wondering, far too late, if Darmity’s people had brought night vision with them.

Then he figured if they had, he would have been shot two minutes ago.

He held the rifle exactly the way you weren’t supposed to: One handed, arm outstretched. He pointed it off to the side. Tried to brace himself.

Well, so much for my marksmanship merit badge, he thought.

Squeezed the trigger.

The rifle roared for a split second, the muzzle flashing in the gloom. The rifle bucked and jumped out of his hand, straining his wrist. Biting back a cry, he stumbled a little but forced himself to watch the darkness. Just as he steadied himself, he saw it: A similar flash, then the noise of return rifle fire, aimed a few feet to his right.

He started running.

Fixing the location of the flash in his mind, he ran as fast as he could push himself, holding the improvised bomb in one hand while he dug the Zippo out of his pocket with the other. He approached at an angle, coming around in a loop so he would pass in front of the spot from the left side, from the shadows across from the open blast door.

Lungs burning, he forced himself to wait until he started the approach, looping inwards. Then he snapped the lighter open and flicked it into life, the tiny yellow flame dancing immediately. He touched it to the piece of white cloth and it flared into bright life. Without pausing to think, he threw it as he ran.

The tiny flame traced an arc across the distant, black ceiling of the cavern and smashed into dancing flames. For a moment they swirled on the floor, liquid, rising up in tongues. A second later they seemed to reach out like an arm reaching into the darkness and grabbing onto a man’s form, revealed next to the pyre as if he’d formed out of the new light itself. Then there was a man outlined in flames, running. Running. Falling to his knees. A burst of gunfire from the darkness of the downslope, and he fell backwards as if kicked.

Triumph surged through Renicks. He resisted the urge to throw his arms up in the air as he made out the dim form of Begley scrambling onto the maze of conduits. Continued to run out of sheer exhilaration. As the triumph faded into a vague, rotten horror, he passed close to where the first man had fallen, shot by Begley. He slowed to a walk, all the energy draining from him. He’d killed two people directly. Murdered them. Self-defense, maybe, but they were still dead. He’d aided in other deaths, too.

He stopped and stood for a moment. Pictured the woman up in the TV studio again. His kids were going to ask him to tell them how this all happened. He was going to have to tell them the story.

“Jack!”

He blinked in the darkness and snapped his head up. Pray for forgiveness on your own time, Jack, he told himself, and pushed himself back into motion, back towards Begley. She was crouched over the tiny handheld LED screen and keyboard, attached via the thin, broad cable to the black box on the cavern floor.

“This will take me about ten minutes,” she said without looking up.

Renicks shook off the last clinging horror and self-disgust, clearing his head. “Maybe we should go find an ax. Just cut the lines.”

She shook her head without pausing or looking up. “Can’t. Interrupt the signal improperly, the charges blow. It’s designed to prevent people from taking possession of this facility when it’s online as the new Commander-in-Chief’s headquarters.” She tapped something into the keyboard and studied the stream of data that spilled out after it. Shook her head. Finally looked up at him.

She was exhausted, and Renicks felt immediately guilty. She was in worse shape than he was. She was still focused and working to save lives — to save their lives. “I need ten minutes.”

He nodded. “What about the mine shaft?” he said. “Just making a run for it?”

She looked back down at the screen. “Aside from the potential deaths of civilians? We’re not alone in this facility yet, Jack. We walk away, Darmity gets in here five minutes later and sets the charges, we’re half a mile up that shaft when a fireball comes through, burning us alive, and then the whole damn thing just collapses. We don’t even know how many people they’ve sent. We’ve seen nine, including our friend Mr. Darmity. There could be dozens more we just haven’t seen.”

Renicks nodded. “I’m sorry. I’m not thinking. I’m — ”

Somewhere behind them, a red flashing light sparked into life. A klaxon split the silence. And a deep rumbling noise he could feel in the stone under him lurched into life. The Blast door, being opened.

In his head, Renicks heard Begley again. We’re not alone in this facility yet.

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36.

One minute after their decision, Renicks trotted unsteadily behind Begley, wondering how in the world she managed to almost run with a broken leg while carrying a heavy automatic rifle. He wanted to draw some blood when they were finally done with this and win a Nobel Prize analyzing her genetic code. They were retracing their steps back to the service tunnel. They passed a series of unmarked doors along the damp, finished hallway that Renicks remembered. He knew the door that led to the tunnels was rusted. There was water flowing nearby, deep underground. He could smell damp in the air and wondered how often they had to tear out the carpet and moldy drywall, replace everything dry. Every few years, he thought.

When the rusted door came into view, Begley attacked it. Tore it open with a grunt. Her own momentum carried her back into Renicks. He steadied her and pushed her gently back into forward motion.

He felt the energy. The necessity. They had, for the first time, an advantage. They were some minutes ahead of Darmity, and for the first time knew exactly where all the other players were: Above them. Everyone was above them, heading down. Heading down fast, and coming armed. But simply knowing something concrete was energizing. He hadn’t realized how long they’d been running blind, scampering from one faulty hiding place to the next, always worried about turning a corner and finding an enemy.

Running felt perfectly natural.

Three steps into the service tunnel. There was the butt end of the ladder leading up to the thirteenth level; Renicks stared at it and skidded to a halt. Stood for a second, an image of Begley sliding down the last few feet of a ladder flashing through his thoughts.

Begley skidded to a halt on the gritty, irregular floor and twisted around. “Jack!”

“Go!” he shouted back. “I’ll catch up in a second!”

She hesitated, then spun and hobbled off. He watched her for a second, knowing how much pain she had to be in. Then he tore open his bag and started riffling through its contents. Pulled the little mini-survival kit out and dug into it, extracting the fishing line. Dropping the rest of the kit back into the bag, he freed the fishing line from the plastic clip that kept it looped up and let it dangle free: About four feet of thin, shining wire.

He looked back at the ladder. Saw Begley sliding down. Wondered, for just a second, if that was a common trick. Decided it probably was.

When the ladder emerged from the channel a few feet above him, metal pieces had been welded into place, jutting back to the walls where they were attached with big, rusted bolts. To stabilize the last section of ladder. He stepped up close to the ladder. Put his face where it would be if he was sliding down, terminal velocity from above. Lined up the bolts on the sides above him. Concluded that any wire strung between those bolts would slice up through the chin.

Thought about that for a second.

Thought about Frank Darmity. Saw his flat, squinty stare. Remembered his voice on the PA, making Begley scream. Thought about the guns. These people, he reminded himself, had tried to murder millions, and had come to make sure he and Begley were dead. Would kill thousands as collateral damage if the complex was destroyed before a complete evacuation had been effected.

Keeping his weight on his good ankle, he climbed up a few feet. The silence was almost perfect again, and for a second he imagined he could feel the ladder vibrating under his hands. Someone up above in the darkness, riding down. Then he hooked one arm through the rungs and hung on, looping the fishing line around the bolt on the left. Three, four times, twisted. Looped it again. Twisted. Made a knot. Pulled it over to the other side and looped it around the other bolt. Pulled it taut, as tight as he could manage. Looped and twisted until it was secure. He plucked it with one finger and climbed down to the floor.

It was invisible. Anyone sliding down the ladder would have no warning. He thought it would probably clear their body and catch the face.

Hesitated for one more second. Then turned and moved as quickly as he could after Begley.

He pushed all thoughts out of his head. Blocked out any chance of imagining someone slicing through that wire. Told himself this was war. Told himself that anyone coming down that ladder was coming to set off the charges and kill Begley and himself. Told himself a lot of things, quickly and loudly, shouting to distract himself.

He caught up with Begley quickly. The hallway seemed to be devolving. The floor had become uneven and the walls were rougher. The regular hanging lights had given way to bare bulbs sprouting from a single electrical conduit. He had the impression of coming to the edges of the complex. Everything blurry. Unfinished. It was palpably colder and damper.

Begley turned her head as he fell into step behind her.

“The charges are throughout the complex,” she said breathlessly, turning back. “Every level. Deep inside the concrete. Designed to pancake the whole goddamn place. Which will destabilize the whole mountain. Rockslides, mudslides in addition to the fireball and gas venting. You can’t get to the charges. You’d have to drill into the pour on every level, each one would take a fucking hour to get to, and they’re pressure-locked, so the minute the air hit them from a bore-hole they’d trip individually. They’re linked to the outside via dedicated satellite hookup. Designed to be separate from the Security Office, because the whole idea is to blow it out from under someone seizing the complex illegally.”

She took a few steps in silence, catching her breath.

“They ran the satellite hookup through the old mine shafts. If you want to disarm the system, you have to disconnect the hookup from the complex. If you want to set the charges off manually, you have to simulate a signal from the hookup!”

They came to a right-angle in the corridor. Renicks watched Begley limp around the corner. Lungs burning, he raced after her. His ankle shooting shards of glass up into his calf with every step.

He turned the corner and slowed just a fraction of a step. The corridor widened out into a small room. On his right was a huge steel blast door. A single sheet of steel set into the rock. A small keypad — for a moment Renicks was stupidly amused at the tiny scale of the keypad compared to the door itself, which was about ten feet high and twelve or fifteen feet wide. It was unmarked. The metal reflected the weak light back and appeared to glow a soft orange-yellow.

He turned and saw Begley continuing down the corridor, which narrowed down again, disappearing into near blackness. The electrical conduit on the ceiling ended at a junction box a few feet past the corner.

“Isn’t that the access door?” he shouted, lumbering after her.

The blue light of her tiny flashlight sprang into being ahead of him. “Yes — two sets of blast doors, one leading to the old mine shaft itself and one into here. They take time to open. Five minutes or so before a single person can squeeze through, ten minutes to full aperture. It’s a production.”

He could barely make out her outline as he closed in again. He could feel the walls narrowing down. Reached up and found he could touch the ceiling. Their sounds were muffled back at them. The corridor was shrinking.

“This,” Begley said, breathing hard as she came to a stop, “is the shortcut.”

Renicks squeezed in next to her. With his shoulder jammed into what felt like rough, raw rock, he was pressed against her tightly. He could feel her struggling for breath. Could feel her body heat. She was exhausted. He was exhausted, he realized. Heart pounding, head pounding, legs shaking. They were both close to their physical limits.

He squinted, following the weak pale light of her flashlight. The space tapered off sharply from where they were — the ceiling crashing down, the walls sucking in, until there was just a black shadow, perhaps two feet high, a foot and a half wide. If that.

“What is it?”

Begley turned to face him, giving him a sudden sense of release as he was no longer being pressed into the wall. “Just a void. I had hours to myself in this goddamn tomb, so I wandered. I read specs and old manuals. I explored. I don’t think this was here when they built the place. I think something gave way and this opened up. No one ever noticed. It’s a hole, basically. It’s wet. Water erosion, I guess, caused it.”

Renicks strained his eyes at it. It was just darkness. Shadow. “A hole.”

“It’s tight. For me. For you, it’ll be really tight. It drops you into the cavern beyond, what the old mineshaft opens into. Where the hookup is.”

“You climbed into that,” he said. He tried to imagine the frame of mind that would lead Begley to shrug and climb into it. The level of boredom required. He didn’t think he had a suitable experience with which to compare it. The idea of pushing himself into that hole, with the weight of rock around him was horrifying. He knew immediately that the only thing that would ever convince him to do so was something like Frank Darmity with an automatic weapon creeping up behind him.

He felt rather than saw her preparing. Pulling off her jacket. Leaning the rifle against the wall.

“No way to carry the guns in. But we can use the straps to pull them in after us,” she said. “Give me yours.”

He slung it off his shoulder and held it out blindly until he felt her grab it. “How come you didn’t report this? It’s a pretty major breach of security.”

She removed the strap from his rifle and hers. “I don’t know. You can’t get into the cavern from the outside except through another blast door, and getting up into the void from in there is not nearly as easy as dropping down into the cavern from here.” She tied the straps together into one, then set the safeties and looped it around the rear sights, binding them together. “It was a serious breach of protocol, I admit it, Jack. When we’re topside you can file a complaint.”

He managed a ghost of a smile. “I will. I already have to file one against Darmity, so it will be no trouble.”

“I go first. When the rifles drop in, come in after me. I’ll talk you through if you get disoriented.”

Renicks swallowed. “Jesus,” he said.

Begley paused. After a second he felt her hand on his. “You gonna be able to do this, Jack?”

He swallowed again. Felt his heart lurching in his chest, a crazy non-rhythm. He thought if his heart were doing that under any other circumstances he’d be in the car already, headed for the Emergency Room. He nodded. “I’ll be okay.”

She squeezed his hand. Then let go. Went back to work.

“We’ll be inside in thirty seconds,” she said. “It’ll take them, minimum, five minutes once they get here. That’s our window. If we can trash the hookup in five minutes, they can’t blow the place.”

He shook himself. “But can still shoot us.”

He heard her small, cute laugh. “Well, sure.” She paused. “Here, take the light. I know what I’m doing here. You’ll need it more.”

He took the flashlight from her. Watched her sit on the floor, push her legs into the shadow. He wondered if her splint was going to cause her trouble, but she made smooth progress, and he figured it was a sloping fall, a straight shot. She pushed herself forward with her hands, the straps of the guns looped around one fist, dragging them behind her. Her feet disappeared, then her legs, then her midsection, and finally her head. The rifles rattled on the stone right behind her, then were sucked into the darkness behind her. It was as if the darkness was eating her.

He waited. Realized he was waiting to hear her say she was okay, or that he should come through now. Felt stupid.

Far off, he heard a sudden shriek. There and gone.

He dropped onto the floor and pushed his feet forward until they were swallowed by the darkness. Felt no resistance. Took two quick, deep breaths. Began pushing himself into the void. He watched his legs disappear, eaten by darkness. Felt a change in temperature; it was colder once you crossed the threshold. He felt the top of the void and leaned back, getting onto his elbows. When his shoulders were slipping under, he could just see the rough line of the top of the hole. Just enough room for him to slide into. His feet were suddenly dangling over an edge, and he could see that he’d be able to just barely push himself along until gravity took over and sucked him down.

He pushed with his arms until he couldn’t go any further that way, then used his legs. His calves were bent over the unseen edge; he pulled with his hamstrings, letting his head and shoulders lie on the floor as he pulled himself further in. The dim glow of the flashlight showed him rough gray stone, droplets of milky water hanging half an inch from his eyes.

Then he stopped.

He kicked his legs but was unable to get any more purchase; they were extended out too far. He stopped breathing. He could twist his arms but they were wedged between his body and the rock and for a moment he couldn’t get them free. A black, swallowing terror welled up inside him. He thrashed for a second, kicking his legs uselessly and twisting his torso violently. One arm squeezed free, and he quickly found the inner edge of the slot with his free hand. With just his fingers he managed to slide himself another inch or so, and that was enough. His other arm squeezed free and then he was able to pull himself the rest of the way through. Just before his head cleared, gravity finally noticed him and yanked him down. He scraped his forehead on the rough stone and tumbled a few feet down a sharp, rocky incline, biting his tongue and knocking his head a few times.

He lay for a moment on a wet, sharp surface. It was painful, but he didn’t want to move again. Perhaps ever.

“Jack,” Begley whispered, almost in his ear. “You okay?”

He nodded. Felt foolish. “I’ll live,” he whispered back. He wondered why they were whispering. He didn’t see the flashlight; there was a thin film of weak, gray light that nudged the edges of things and left them indistinct. He could barely see Begley, a foot away. She looked spectral and immaterial, like a ghost come to haunt him. She held out one of the M16s.

“Good,” she said. “Because we’re not alone in here. Someone beat us to it.”

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35.

Thirty seconds after watching the woman salute Frank Darmity, Begley turned to Renicks and said “What the hell was that?”

Renicks finished his third water bottle in the last few minutes. He was feeling almost okay, though every muscle and ligament still ached. There was a thick core of exhaustion deep inside him, spreading outward, but he didn’t feel like he was going to fall over any more. “La flava regxo,” he said, hearing the tinny voices patched in from the studio. “A pass phrase. Esperanto. It means The Yellow King.”

Begley pursed her lips. “Looks like our Mr. Darmity is more highly placed in this than we thought.”

“Looks like our Mr. Darmity might be running this.”

There was a moment of silence. Renicks thought its flavor would accurately be described as horrified.

Their odds, he thought, had actually just gotten worse. The plan had been simple. Neither of them were in any shape to take on a fresh group of heavily armed, trained people. If they were here to “clean up”, lure them to a room with Mr. Darmity and let them sort each other out—he’d thought their worst-case scenario was just one of them dead. Instead of weakening or eliminating one of their enemies, they’d combined them into one more effective unit. And they still had to make it out of the complex alive.

“There were six of them when I saw the first poor bastard get gunned down,” Begley said. “Where are the other three?”

Begley leaned forward and pointed at one of the screens. “Lobby.”

Renicks followed her pointing finger and studied the screen. In the large, useless lobby, grainy and grayscaled, three men in similar body-armor were visible. One appeared to be walking the perimeter, his futuristic-looking rifle aimed down at the floor in casual competence. The other two were working together on the floor, back towards the unused desk. A large black bag lay next to them.

“Bolting down tripods for heavier guns. They’re planning to defend against an assault.”

Renicks frowned. Watched the screen intently. His head throbbed like his brain was trying to squeeze out through his eyes and ears. “They’re going to try and hold the complex? Jesus.”

Begley leaned back, letting out an explosive sigh. Renicks looked at her. She was dirty. Bloodied. Her crisp, tailored suit had been torn and sagged off of her in unfortunate ways. She stood there with her arms crossed under her breasts fiercely, chewing her lip. Her posture, he noticed, was still perfect. For a moment, he wanted to reach out and touch her. Just her shoulder, or upper arm. Just friendly contact.

He didn’t move. Looked back at the security screens.

He watched the tiny figures in the lobby for a moment. Conscious of the silence. He glanced back at the TV studio. Darmity and the other three were gone.

Suddenly it felt like they could be right outside the door. This huge underground space, he thought. Everywhere they went there could be someone with an automatic weapon waiting to kill them.

He leaned forward. “Wait. Look.”

Begley leaned in next to him. Their shoulders touched. He was aware of her physical presence suddenly. Warm. Solid. Comforting.

“What?”

He hesitated, trying to make the grainy security signal clearer. Trying to will it into better resolution. At the pace this complex was updated, he figured the Federal Government would get around to installing high-definition video feeds by the next century.

Then one of the three figures moved, and he had a clear view of what they were doing again. He nodded. “The tripods. Look at them.”

Begley sucked in breath. “What the hell.” She turned to look at him. “They’re oriented inward.”

Renicks nodded, leaning back. “They’re not holding the complex against an assault. They’re just making sure we don’t get out.”

Begley stepped back, turned, and began the ridiculous process of pacing in the tiny office. Three steps up, three steps back. Three steps, three steps. Then she stopped and grabbed his arm.

“Jesus, Jack, it’s the same playbook. The charges. Underneath the facility.”

Renicks blinked. Head pounding. “What?”

“They planned to blow the place. I think if they failed to pull this off, the President was supposed to blow the place and erase all evidence. But he didn’t — he killed himself. That wasn’t part of the plan. I think the idea was that Grant would be able to walk away untouched, maybe even a hero, the strong leader who guided us through a crisis. Win-win — either they launch their attack and manage their Soft Coup or whatever, or they get out of it with his image burnished and no one any wiser about whoever these crazy bastards are.”

“But then Grant goes loses his nerve. He takes the easy way out.”

“So, the backup plan. Blow this place. Destroy every single scrap of evidence.”

Renicks nodded. “There’s a lot, right? A lot of fingerprints. They re-wired the place. There’s surveillance video, access logs. The cut magnetic locks on the suite. The Brick, too.”

“Us.”

“Fucking hell.”

“This was the plan from the beginning. If they fail, blow the whole complex, make sure no one knows what’s happened here.”

Renicks nodded. “That animal wasn’t killing the other agents to keep them silent. He was killing them so they wouldn’t get in the way.”

He turned and stared at the screens again, searching for movement. The tiny office suddenly felt small. Hot.

“So what do we do?”

“We can’t go up,” Begley said immediately. “Even assuming we can slip past Darmity and his three little helpers, we hit the lobby and there’s a choke point. No other way out except the elevators. We’d be cut to ribbons. I’m willing to bet those three are ordered to fire at anything that comes up. Even their own people. No one is supposed to come out of this alive.”

“And those three? In the lobby?”

She shrugged. “Suicide. Or suicide by cop, if need be. Won’t be hard to get themselves shot once the FBI and the Marines arrive.”

Renicks suddenly shook his head. Remember, suddenly, the news feed they’d seen earlier: Bluemont being evacuated. “Doesn’t matter. Think about it. This place is rigged to be destroyed. That’s a lot of force. Even if we could teleport to the surface right now and start running — ”

Begley finished the sentence. “We’d never get clear of the blast radius.”

They stood for another few seconds in silence. Renicks swallowed, something hard and choking. All this, he thought. And then he’d thought maybe they were going to get out alive. He thought of Stan. At least someone had some idea of what had really happened. He knew Stan well enough; he would investigate. Was probably already getting into trouble over it.

He looked back at Begley. She was staring at the monitors without focus, just staring. Lost in her thoughts too.

“The charges,” he said suddenly. “They’re not designed to be set off locally, right?”

She turned to him and blinked. once. Twice. Clearing her head. “Right. They’re in place for remote detonation by order of the President.”

“So there’s no button or anything in place here, right? They can’t have a box or something, a remote detonator?”

Begley nodded slowly. “Sure, Jack, they have to … holy shit, Renicks.” She looked back at him with sudden energy. “They have to get down there. They have to set the charges manually.” She paused. “Jesus. That’s a hard suicide mission.”

It took Renicks a second or two to realize she was talking about themselves. When he looked up, she was looking right at him. He held her gaze for a moment and nodded.

“I already died once,” he said, forcing a grin he didn’t feel. His heart thudded erratically in his chest. He felt like puking. But he smiled at Begley. “What do we do?”

She smiled back. He had the impression they were both programming expressions on their faces like feeding a program into a computer: Just mechanical reactions to conscious commands. Both of them acting for the other’s benefit. He wondered if this was how his father’s patients had acted: Forced cheer, everyone in on it. Everyone smiling and saying the right things, everyone terrified and cringing underneath.

“We go down,” she said. Then her smile changed. Became more natural. He blinked and found himself smiling back, mysteriously excited.

“They’re on seven,” he said. They were buried, fourteen levels down, deep inside the mountain. “We’re ahead of them.”

She winked. Renicks thought that wink was the most remarkable thing he’d ever seen anyone do under any circumstances. “I know a shortcut,” she said.

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