“He’s shaking like a leaf. It’s the serum.”
“Fuck! We’re so damn close, we can’t lose the key now! What do we do?”
“Another shot will kill him. Agent 51, listen to my voice. Focus on my voice. Focus. Change channel. Change channel and come back. Do you hear me?”
He heard the guiding voice in the chaotic darkness and focused on it like a man drowning. “Yes,” he said obediently.
“Go to the closest exit and tell me where you are then come back.”
He let his senses reach out to see which direction to go. Down. The vice around his head tightened and he screamed. He had to go down! But that thing was down there, too.
Change channel. Change…He screamed again at the pain in his head and he felt himself tumbling like a drunk acrobat. Down, down, down, somersaulting through the ether.
There was a glimpse…he could see something.
“What do you see, Agent 51?”
“The sign…says…” He tried to pronounce the German, panting the words out.“Westlicher Ausgang.”
“Good. Now come back.”
He gratefully did so, opening his eyes, and looking around at the interior of the van. His monitors weren’t paying attention to him anymore as one shouted to the driver. The pain was receding, but he was still shaking from whatever it was that had attacked him. He looked down. He’d wet his pants. For the first time ever, he was afraid.
Helen forced herself to go even faster. She could do this. She had trained for this for two years and her body could take the punishment. All the while, her whole insides felt like a giant fist clenching tighter and tighter. It wasn’t painful—just tremendously uncomfortable—and it played havoc with her ability to think at all.
She had no idea what was happening, just that something was crying out to her to move quickly, that something was wrong. Instinct, latent sixth sense, whatever.Get out! Get out!
She saw the exit and breathed a sigh of relief. Her eye had stopped doing that weird fluttering, thank goodness. For a moment there, she’d thought she was having a seizure of some kind.
She opened the door. At the same time, the awful squeezing sensation inside her stopped suddenly. She saw the CCC disguised vehicle she had arrived in heading down the alley toward her. The side doors opened and one of the operatives she had seen on the plane appeared.
The squeal of tires to the right. She turned. A dark brown truck, looking like it was a UPS truck or something, had just turned the corner. It could be making a delivery, except that it was speeding straight at her.
Everything went slow-motion in her head. She leapt into action, heading toward her agency’s vehicle, which was slowing down.
A man from the speeding truck hung out of the passenger window. She gasped as she felt the shot hit her side. She fell on her knees and did a body roll, then got up immediately. The operative from her agency had jumped out and was running in her direction, shooting at the van behind her.
“Hurry!” he yelled, his hand reaching out.
Helen’s legs felt like lead and she couldn’t seem to move any faster. The slow motion was real, she realized suddenly. Her movements were slowing down, as if…she had been drugged.
With the last of her energy, she flung herself toward her rescuer.
“Can’t…move…fast,” she gasped out as she grabbed him.
She wasn’t sure he heard her as he turned and calmly fired his weapon at the oncoming van, causing it to swerve, before turning to her. Then he half-dragged, half-carried her toward their waiting vehicle.
They launched themselves through the open doorway, hitting the floor, and Helen’s partner immediately climbed on top of her.
“Hey!” But her protest was muffled by the carpeting.
Helen heard the squeal of wheels as their van gathered speed. More shots, some of which hit the side of the vehicle with metallic thuds. She realized that the man on her was protecting her. There was the slam of doors and her body was no longer trapped. She lifted her head.
“Status, status, dammit!” De Clerq’s urgent voice piped up.
Helen frowned. That didn’t come from the earpiece. She then realized that it must be coming from the van radio.
“We’ve got her with us. A truck is right behind our vehicle. Better alert Number One and Number Nine at ground zero. I shot a GPS tag at it, so let’s hope it’s attached. The shots we exchanged are going to get Deutsche’s security operatives swarming around the scene,” the man beside her reported. He belly-crawled to the back of the van and peeked out of the back window. “Tell Number Nine I’m not in the building to help with retrieval. Question—shall we let that van follow us all the way or do we find a way to retrieve them for questioning, too? Over.”
