Page 97 of Lone Wolf

“I got you Nathan Friedhoff,” Devine said.

Evan’s hands whirred in a tactical reload: touch-verify and extract full mag from concealed pocket behind right hip, up beside partial mag loaded in pistol, eject partial, catch in same palm, rotate palm to shove full mag in, partial load stored in right front pants pocket.

“Okay.”

“It was easier than I anticipated. He sounds like a mess. I’m not even sure he knew what he was agreeing to but he said he’d see you tomorrow at five o’clock.”

Evan checked the action. “Okay.”

“I’ll text you time and address.”

“Okay.”

“That’s all you have to say?”

“Yes.” Evan disconnected the call, opened his door quietly, and slid out into the night.

He eased the driver’s door back into the frame and leaned against it gently until it clicked closed.

A vent over his head blew out wet-smelling air tinged with mold. The windows of the first floor were boarded up with plywood. There was no sound save the whisper of a weak wind and the white-noise susurration of traffic from Route 95 two blocks to the east. Pressing his ear to the rough stucco, he made out the thrum of an HVAC unit inside and the faint high notes of feminine weeping.

How much disregard and corruption and apathy paved the road to a building like this—smack in the heart of an American state in the twenty-first century—stocked with slaves and walled off from civilization? He thought about Allman streaming digital manipulation into the minds of users, driving them farther and farther from reality. And this place rising before Evan now, erected to feed flesh to real-world desires that had moved farther and farther from any moral bearing.

He wondered how the world could find its center again, let alone hold it.

His jaw had tightened, and he forced it to relax. A few rounds of four-square breathing brought him fully into himself and this moment.

He was here to get information on Karissa Lopatina. To liberate the human chattel inside. And to kill those responsible for their suffering.

Circling the building, he kept tight enough that his shoulder scraped along the wall. Surveillance cameras passed overhead one after another, tilted on metal necks, gazing at the empty space beyond his silent approach.

Setting down his boots with care, he reached the brink of the entrance and peered around the corner. The front door bore two dead bolts that looked freshly installed and a trio of cameras covering the porch. From what he’d pieced together from the prior location’s surveillance footage, the building’s nerve center was in the first room past the entrance to the right, a shotgun-armed guard overseeing monitors and hardware.

Drawing back to the side of the building, Evan reversed to a high window he’d passed beneath. Sliding window, privacy glass, high-set and narrow—likely a bathroom. Though the pane was opaque, enough interior light streamed through to make clear there was no plywood beyond.

He had to hop up to reach the sill. It gave his fingers a two-inch perch, cramping his hands and forearms as he dragged himself off the ground chin-up style.

His face level, he noted the rusty frame and frayed screen. To free a hand, he jammed his right forearm across the narrow ledge and dug his chin into place beside it. He poked a finger through the screen, jostled the window open a few inches, and then fell back to earth before he made too much noise. The landing jolted his legs. He shook out his hands, then set them on his knees and regrouped.

Another hop, another jostle to the pane, and his hand shot through and caught the inside of the frame. A graceless thirty seconds of squirming and scraping got him over the hump, and then he found himself in a modified handstand on the back of a toilet tank. He eased himself down, retrieved the ARES from his appendix carry, screwed in the suppressor, and exited the stall.

Chipped tile, water stains, four toilet stalls and a urinal. The mirror had been removed, no doubt to prevent any of the captors from getting their hands on shards. The scent of mold and bleach overlaid the low reek of human waste.

Evan moved swiftly to the swinging door, pushed out into the hall, and literally bumped into the guard on his patrol.

The man drew back, gave a little yelp, the baton dancing on its leather strap around his wrist. Evan shot him in the chest—pfft—the suppressed round like a fist punching a pillow. The guard fell stiffly, the back of his skull cracking the floor.

Evan swung to face in the other direction just as the front guard stepped out from the nerve center at the end of the corridor, shotgun rising. Evan dropped to a knee and grouped three shots at his upper torso, the first knocking the shotgun from his hands and ricocheting up into his left ribs, the other catching him in the exposed sternum, the third opening up a red spot beneath his clavicle. When he crumpled to the floor, it sounded like a dropped sack of laundry.

Two dead, three to go—one guard apiece for the upper floors and the hoofer on the roof.

Evan rose.

Prison bars split the black doorways on both sides. The doors weren’t pinned open; they’d been removed entirely. It was eerie knowing he was being watched, unable to see what lay out of reach in the shadows.

First he heard breathing.

Then figures melted from the blackness, visible only in pieces. Stooped forms. Milk-white hands gripping bars. Tangled hair across floating faces.