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“Looks quiet, Bones.”
“Of course it is, Maddock, it’s three in the morning. White people don’t party this late.”
Maddock, Bones, and Angel stood in the shadows of a parking lot across the street from the gate which served as the only entrance to the office compound in Maryland which Renfield had claimed was Alex Scano’s headquarters location. Each wore an A/N-PSQ20 ENVG-III night-vision monocular covering the right eye. This new model of night vision optics, which could switch between infrared and thermal vision—or a hybrid of the two—with the flick of a switch, wasn’t available yet even to most military personnel, but Tam Broderick had the contacts to provide it to her people.
The entrance gate was twenty feet high and constructed of thick cast iron. A brick guard house about fifty meters inside the gate contained an array of external lighting with enough lumens to disorient a blind man—and certainly bright enough to render their night-vision devices useless. At least half a dozen cameras were displayed in an overt show of security.
Angel said, “Forget the cameras, we’re not getting through that gate even if we use Bones’ thick skull as a battering ram.”
“You’re right, but I have other body parts that would do the trick.”
Angel scoffed. “We’d need something much thicker to get that lock picked.”
Maddock shook his head. “The gate’s not the way to go. But I gotta say I’m surprised at the fence. That wall is over ten meters high and it goes all the way around the compound. So much for Scano lying low.”
“Remember what Jimmy said, dude. It screams government. Everyone knows something is here, but there’s no way to know what. Hey, maybe it’s aliens!”
“Um, it’s Alex Scano, remember?”
“Sure, but I just realized he could be an alien. That would explain a lot.”
Maddock ignored him. “Obviously we have to get over the wall somewhere and scope out the place. We need to try to figure out if there are any gaps in the cameras.”
“Don’t forget motion sensors. We need to get back out before daylight, too.” Angel added.
Bones removed a small tablet device from his backpack and powered it on.
He’d already set the brightness to a dull setting which was easy enough to see looking at it directly but didn’t give off enough light to be spotted by someone more than a few feet away.
“I’ve been itching to give this baby a try,” he said, as he removed a small machine from the pack and set it on the ground. About four inches tall, the mini drone—another piece of equipment supplied by Tam Broderick—contained ten rotors which allowed it tremendous maneuverability in the air. It was constructed of a material which both reduced its radar cross-section and absorbed the kind of minimal light common during the night hours. It would be as close to invisible as they could get.
Bones tapped the tablet screen and the rotors began spinning in near silence. The drone lifted off, and by the time it had risen fifteen feet in the air it had disappeared. Maddock and Angel looked at the tablet from either side of Bones. The drone contained six cameras, and the controlling app on the tablet used a complex computer algorithm to produce a detailed picture of the drone’s view.
Soon the drone crested the wall to one side of the gate. Bones slowed it down, directing it along the top of the wall with about five feet of clearance. The layout stayed consistent as it went.
Maddock said. “Okay, looks like there are only cameras about every hundred feet or so. Lights every fifty feet. So far I haven’t seen the cameras pointing up, so we can probably find a gap where we can drop quickly with minimal chance of being seen.”
“Looks like a lip on the back side of the wall,” Bones added. “The anchor should grab easily. We should do it around the side, though, in the park.”
The parking lot they were in was accessible from two different parallel streets. They exited via the street a block away from the ScanoGen gate, to minimize any chance of being picked up by a camera. Then they made their way around to a small park which abutted one of the side walls of the ScanoGen complex. Bones had continued to run the drone, and its video confirmed that the camera and light layout remained the same on this other wall.
As they stood under some thick spruce trees, Bones brought the drone to a hover. “This looks like a good spot.”
Maddock opened his pack and took out a fat coil of rope and the “gun” which would launch a collapsible grappling hook attached to the rope up and over the top of the wall. After a final check of the drone feed, he tilted the weapon up and depressed the trigger. The report of the compressed gas charge blasting the hook skyward wasn’t nearly as loud as a gunshot, but was still loud enough to make Maddock wince. He remained stock still as the hook soared up, trailing out the rope like a spider’s silk, then arced over the wall and dropped out of view. He stayed that way—completely motionless—for a full minute thereafter, eyes glue to the screen that displayed the drone feed.
Nothing. No alarms had been triggered. Nobody was coming to investigate the odd noise.
He turned to the others. As if by some mutual unspoken agreement, no one said a word. Bones flashed a thumb’s up. Angel just nodded. Maddock returned the nod, and then clipped the gun to a carabiner attached to his heavy-duty rigger’s belt. He depressed a switch on the gun’s exterior, and activated its built-in motorized ascender. The device wasn’t powerful enough to pull him straight up the rope, but it gave enough of an assist to make the job of “walking” up the wall like Batman and Robin in the old TV show, a little easier.
When he reached the top, he hooked one leg over before deactivating the ascender and letting it slide back down to Angel and Bones. Five minutes later, they were all perched atop the wall, and after repositioning the grappling hook, were ready to descend into the compound.
So far, so good, Maddock mused, but the thought brought more dread than comfort. When things went smoothly, it usually meant that bad luck was just around the corner.
With their ENVG’s set to thermal—which would pick up on the body heat of roving guards and hopefully give them a few seconds of advanced warning—they made their way through the compound, following Jimmy’s map. They didn’t have an exact location for Scano. The man was a fugitive from justice after all, and unlikely to list his name or the address of his office within the complex. It was possible that he had staked a claim to one of the generic offices in the administration building, but Maddock’s gut told him that, if Scano was on the premises, they would find him in the main research laboratory. Even if they didn’t, the lab still would have topped his list for places to visit. He wasn’t going to leave until he made sure Brainwash wouldn’t ever be used against anyone, ever again.
They moved to a fire exit on the south side of the research building, the largest structure in the compound, and with the help of some remote digital wizardry courtesy of Jimmy Letson, succeeded in opening the door without triggering an alarm. They stole inside, and after another brief pause to ensure that they had not been detected, began moving down the corridors toward a cluster of rooms marked on the floor plan as laboratories #1, #2, and #3.
Maddock expected that they would have to proceed by trial and error, but they got lucky on their first try. The door to lab number three was locked, but a low hum of activity vibrated from it, and there was light streaming out through the crack above the threshold. Maddock used a digital “skeleton key” to override the card reader that controlled the lock, and when he heard the mechanism click, he and Bones swept inside, pistols leading. Angel, likewise armed with a Glock, would bring up the rear.
He cut right, knowing that Bones would go left, and began sweeping the room for targets. Anyone with a weapon would take first priority—he would shoot first and hold the questions for later. Everyone else would be dealt with on a case-by-case basis, but as far as he was concerned, anyone they might encounter was potentially hostile.
He saw no weapons... No security guards. There were only three people in the vast, mostly empty space of the lab, all of them clustered together around a lab table on the far side of the room with their backs to the door. Two of the figures were attired in white lab coats. The third wore a high-collared turtle-neck shirt. Even though Maddock couldn’t see the man’s face, he instantly knew that they had found their target.
“Scano!”
The three figures whirled around—the two men in lab coats immediately raising their hands in the air when they spied the guns aimed at them. Alex Scano looked like he might spontaneously combust from rage, but then his expression quickly transformed into a look of sardonic amusement.
“Well, well. Dane Maddock and the Bonehead twins. What a surprise.” His voice was raspy, like someone with a two-pack a day cigarette habit.
“Sorry about the way things ended in Guatemala,” Bones growled. “If we’d known you were still alive, we would’ve stuck around and put you out of our misery.”
Scano uttered a terse laugh. “Maybe you should let Tiger Lily do the talking, Boner-brakes. She’s actually kind of scary, unlike you two.”
“You want to see scary little man?” Angel said, her voice as cold as steel.
Scano gave a mock shiver. “Ooh. See what I mean? You and Maddock are all bark, no bite. I saw the video from the Brainwash test. You two couldn’t kill each other to save your own lives. No way are you going to kill me in cold blood.”
The men in lab coats recoiled visibly at this overt mention of murder. Maddock didn’t think either one of them would pose much of a threat. He kept his pistol trained on Scano. “That’s called being in control. Which is where we are right now. As for killing you... Well, we both know that you’re about to do something stupid which will give us the excuse we need, so why don’t you just get on with it. Make your move.”
The mocking smile sharpened. “Let’s talk about why you’re really here. You want my little Golden Apple of Discord, don’t you?”
“Cut the crap,” Bones snarled. “There is no Golden Apple. Never was.”
“God, you really are thick. It’s called a metaphor.” He threw his head back in a dramatic sigh, giving Maddock a glimpse of the angry scar tissue at his throat. “A rather clever one if I may say it. It’s true, that story I told you about Franklin and King Louis was a contrivance. Our research suggested that the drug would work better if we provided a plausible rationale for the hallucinations. A Golden Apple full of chaos energy seemed like something the two of you would accept at face value.”
“Guess again, pharmabozo,” Bones countered. “We didn’t buy it for a second.”
Scano rolled his eyes and then waved his hand dismissively. “It doesn’t matter. The point is, Brainwash is my Golden Apple. A little whiff of it, and you two were ready to kill each other. Now that’s what I call chaos magic. It actually comes from Africa—a little place called the Kundelungu Plateau. I suppose Renfield told you all about it. I really should have terminated his employment a lot sooner. If there’s one thing I can’t abide, it’s incompetence.”
He sighed again. “But I digress. The natives there burn wood infiltrated with the fungus in fires to create a mildly hallucinogenic smoke which they use in their primitive rituals. We figured out a way to go 21st Century with it, and made it into vape juice, which is, let me just say, a helluva a lot more potent.”
Maddock risked a quick glance over at Bones, and saw his own wariness reflected in his friend’s expression. Scano was being unusually forthcoming with information.
He’s stalling.
“We’re still trying to isolate the exact chemical structure of the fungus so we can synthesize it, but for the time being, it’s still cheaper to go to the source. And I’m sure that’s what you’re really here for, isn’t it?”
“We’re here for you,” Maddock said, taking a step forward. “I promised a mutual friend that we’d try to bring you in alive. Whether you walk out or we carry you is another matter.”
“See what I mean?” Scano made a barking sound, then half turned away, lowering one hand to gesture at the table behind him. “But seriously, Brainwash is right here.”
Maddock reflexively followed Scano’s pointing figure to a small rack filled with stoppered test tubes resting on the table. In the instant that he looked, Scano made his move, slashing out with the extended arm to sweep the rack off the table, flinging it across the room toward Maddock and the others.
Even though he had been expecting Scano to make some kind of move, the suddenness of his action, coupled with the fact that Scano was still technically unarmed, caused Maddock to hesitate a fraction of a second too long. He shook it off and shifted his aim to track Scano, who was now darting toward a back exit, but before he could pull the trigger, the rack of test tubes crashed against the wall behind them, and suddenly they were engulfed in a pungent white cloud.
“Don’t breathe it,” Bones shouted, but Maddock knew it was already too late.
The mist dissipated but not quickly enough for Maddock to stop Scano from reaching the door. Cursing, he started forward, sprinting across the lab, intent on giving chase. He skidded to a stop in front of the door and yanked it open, but as he was about to step through, he saw that a sheet of solid steel now blocked his route.
He whirled around to face the door they had come in through, and saw Bones and Angel contemplating a similar barrier there.
Scano had triggered some kind of security or safety isolation protocol. They were locked in.
“Damn it,” he rasped, mentally chiding himself for not having anticipated something like this.
Angel uttered a low wail that was completely out of character for her. She had turned and was backing away from the door as if it had suddenly become red hot.
“Oh, my God. It’s closing in... The walls.” She spun in place, looking at the far wall behind them, and then turned to Maddock. “They’re closing in. We’ll be crushed.”
“Crap,” Bones muttered. “She’s right.”
Maddock saw it, too. The walls were sliding toward them, encroaching inch by relentless inch, forcing them back....
He bumped into something... Turned and saw a lab table piled with scientific apparatus. It hadn’t been there a moment before, but in the instant it had taken him to confirm that the walls were indeed moving inward, the lab tables had slid away from the walls, clustering in the center of the room to form a devilish maze.
He dropped to his hands and knees, intent on scuttling underneath them, but as he started forward into the forest of table legs, he saw writhing shapes hanging down from the underside of the tables like the tentacles of a Portuguese Man o’war.
“What the...” He recoiled, scrambling back until he bumped into the moving wall.
This couldn’t be happening. Isolation doors were one thing, but the rest of it? It was like something from a nightmare....
Realization broke through the Brainwash-induced fugue like sunlight slicing through the fog. “It’s not real,” he muttered. “Not real.”
He wanted to believe it, but the tables and the wriggling tentacles told him otherwise.
If you can’t trust your eyes...
But his eyes were deceiving him. There were no tentacles. The walls weren’t moving to crush them. It was all a hallucination. Angel had unwittingly planted the suggestion in his head, and the drug had done the rest.
“It’s not real,” he shouted, rising once more to his feet.
As if the words had magic power, the maze of tables shimmered and vanished, clearing his path to Bones and Angel. Bones was staring back at him with a glimmer of understanding, but Angel looked positively freaked out. She was backing away from the wall, her head bobbing left and right as if surrounded by snakes.
For a moment, Maddock thought he could actually see a nest of vipers all around her, but he knew that they existed only in his head.
“Angel! It’s not real. It’s Brainwash.”
She swung her gaze around to meet his, but unlike Bones, there was no gleam of comprehension in her eyes. “Who are you?” she snarled, and brought her Glock up, aiming at him. “What have you done with Dane?”
“Angel, it’s me.”
He could see her finger tightening on the trigger. She was going to shoot him.
That’s not Angel.
The idea bubbled up like swamp gas in his brain.
It’s not her. Scano replaced her with a look-a-like. It’s a clone... No, a shapeshifter. It killed Angel, and it’s going to kill me if I don’t....
His gun was up and trained on her before he knew what he was doing.
“Maddock,” Bones shouted. “Angel. Put your guns down. This isn’t real.”
The words broke the spell for Maddock, but Angel was beyond their reach. She swiveled the gun toward her brother, the fear in her eyes doubling. Bones let his own pistol fall, raising his hands in a show of surrender. “Sis, it’s me,” he pleaded, and then, perhaps sensing that a different tack was called for, sharpened his tone. “Don’t be an assclown. Put the damn gun down.”
There wasn’t even a flicker of recognition. She was going to pull the trigger. She was going to shoot her brother, and then she was going to shoot Maddock.
Unless I shoot her first.
No! It’s Angel!
It’s not Angel.
But it was, and she was in the grip of a hallucination that would kill them all if he didn’t somehow find a way to wake her up.
Hallucination.
An idea struck him. Angel’s claustrophobic hallucination had been contagious because Brainwash made them all susceptible to the power of suggestion. What if he could use that to distract her, get her to point the gun somewhere else.
“Angel!” He barked. “It’s me. Dane. Look at me.”
She turned both her eyes and her gun to him.
Slowly, so as not to spook her, he pivoted, aiming the gun at the wall to her right, and said, “Shoot them.”
Angel’s head snapped around, her eyes going wide as her drug-addled imagination filled in the blanks, and then the business end of the Glock followed. The pistol thundered, then thundered again and again, shifting a few degrees with each discharge. Maddock had no idea what she was shooting at—the bullets were simply gouging holes in the very-much motionless walls—but he knew he had bought only a brief reprieve at best. He had to get the gun away from her somehow, wake her up....
As if in answer to his unspoken prayer, Bones closed with Angel, wrapping his arms around hers, sweeping down to brace her forearms against her hips to prevent her from aiming the pistol at either of them. A swat of his powerful right hand knocked the pistol from her grasp.
Against anyone else, that might have been the end of the fight, but Angel wasn’t anyone else. Faster than Maddock’s eyes could follow, Angel twisted in her brother’s embrace, lashing her fists up into his unprotected face. The fury of the attack forced Bones to let go, and as he staggered back, she pounced.
Bones was quick for his size, but Angel was lightning-fast. She snapped a sharp jab that caught Bones on the bridge of the nose, followed with a kick to the knee that nearly toppled him, and then danced out of his reach. Bones shook his head and moved forward.
“Angel, calm down,” Maddock urged, moving closer. “Both of you. It’s the drug. The Brainwash. You have to fight it, not each other.”
Bones made a quick move, grabbing for Angel’s wrist, but once again she was too fast. She sprang to the side and punched him in the elbow.
“Are you freaking kidding?” Bones snarled.
Angel feinted a right cross, but Bones wasn’t biting. He saw the next punch coming, a left to the ribs, let it land with a dull thud, and quickly trapped her arm against his side.
Now drawn in close, Angel lashed out with an elbow strike that Bones took on the side of his head. It was a vicious blow, but the man had a thick skull. Angel tried to break loose, and almost succeeded, but Bones grabbed her wrist with both hands.
Angel leapt into the air and attempted a roundhouse kick to the head. It was a measure of her mental state that she tried such a crazy attack.
It didn’t work.
Bones turned and ducked. Simultaneously he pulled Angel off-balance. Having left her feet, it was easy for the big man to take her down. She landed hard on her back, but immediately kicked out, with both feet, catching her brother on the shin.
He cursed and grabbed her by the ankle, and she made him pay by driving her heel into his chin. Momentarily stunned, Bones lost his grip, allowing Angel to roll away and regain her feet.
“You’re fighting out of your weight class,” Bones said, stalking her.
Maddock wracked his brain, trying to think of a way he could bring this to an end. At the start, Bones had been merely trying to subdue Angel, but with the Brainwash still in his system, there was no telling how far this would go. He had to stop them before they killed each other, but putting himself in between a pair of angry Bonebrakes wasn’t the answer.
“Angel, you’ve got to listen to me,” he said. “You’re not yourself.”
But Angel didn’t hear. Bones had her cornered, and she lashed out with a fury. Her punches came lightning-fast, but Bones managed to dodge or block most of them.
“Don’t make me knock your ass out.”
Maddock could tell that, sister or not, his friend was on the verge of doing something drastic. He was going to have to intervene, but on who’s side?
Frantic, he looked around for something he could use to distract them, and then his roaming eyes noticed something, not on the tables or on the floor, but on the ceiling, directly above them.
Will that do the trick? He wondered, and then decided that he had to take the chance.
In one smooth motion, he snapped his pistol up and fired once.
The bullet blew apart the glass bulb of an overhead fire-suppression sprinkler, instantly releasing a torrent of murky water that rained down like the Flood.
The water splashed down on Bones and Angel. For a few seconds, neither of the combatants seemed to take note, but as the chilly water finally soaked them through and sluiced away the last few grains of Brainwash that were still in their nostrils, the figurative fire of their mutual rage guttered and died. They both retreated a few steps, away from the incessant artificial downpour, and regarded each other with more confusion than animosity.
Maddock ventured closer. “Guys, are you with me again?”
Bones nodded. Angel just looked at him, bewildered. “What the hell just happened?”
“Scano happened,” Maddock replied. “And he’s getting away.”
He glanced back at the door through which their foe had fled, and wasn’t at all surprised to see that it stood wide open. The steel barrier had been just one more illusion conjured up by Brainwash.
Bones blinked as if trying to clear his head, then said, “If he’s outside, I might be able to pick him up on the drone.”
“Try it,” Maddock said, “But do it on the move if you can.”
He stepped closer to Angel and reached out with a tentative hand to touch her shoulder. She still looked a little rattled from the fight with Bones—the reasons for it had probably already slipped from her mind—but she placed her hand atop his and gave it a squeeze. “I’m good. Let’s move.”
They headed through the back exit and were on their way to another fire door when a blaring siren assaulted their eardrums.
Angel yelled to be heard above the noise. “Is that because you shot the sprinkler?”
Maddock could only shrug. “Must be on a delay,” he shouted back. “Let’s get outside.”
But leaving the building brought only a measure of relief. The sirens were blaring all over the compound, lights flashing every couple of seconds, alternating red, orange and white light. Even stranger, there were people streaming from the buildings—researchers in lab coats, security guards in uniforms, workmen and janitors. Many appeared to be on the verge of panic. None of them paid any attention to the bedraggled looking trio standing in the shadows of the research building.
Maddock began to get a tingle in the back of his neck, something which occasionally happened when he started to sense an unexpected complication. He had a feeling that they weren’t going to like whatever was behind this development.
“Anyone have a clue what’s going on?” Angel asked.
Bones said, “If I had any less of a clue I’d be a politician.”
“I think we need to get out of here,” Maddock said. “We’ll try to pick up Scano’s trail once we’re back over the wall.”
The alarms and flashing lights continued unabated, but as the evacuation dwindled, they made a run for the back of the compound, where they used the grappling gun to scale the wall again. Once on the other side and secreted in the trees of the park, Bones flew the drone to the front gate to observe the gathering crowd.
“Hey, check that out.” Maddock pointed to the tablet. Three maintenance vans had just arrived near the gate, each with a Spark Energy logo and a natural gas symbol on its side.
“A gas leak? Come on, does anyone actually fall for that?” Bones muttered.
“Gas leaks do happen,” Angel said, “But this is a hell of a coincidence.”
Maddock still felt the tingle in his neck and was trying to hear what his subconscious was telling him. “Maybe Scano cooked this up to distract everyone while he slipped out.”
“I—” Bones stopped as a tremendous boom sounded and then rumbling shook the ground beneath them. Maddock’s right foot slipped on some leaves and he fell to the ground. Bones clicked his tongue.
“Not very smooth, Maddock.”
Maddock bit back a response then stood up and looked over at the tablet screen. The feed from the drone now showed only static. Bones started swiping a finger back and forth across it.
“The drone is spinning. I can’t get it back under control.”
Angel and Maddock watched as Bones continued to work the tablet. After a minute, he let out a breath. “Okay, I think I have it back. We’re still near the gate, about fifty feet off the ground.”
The feed was beginning to clear, and it became apparent that what they had assumed was static was in fact smoke. Maddock gasped as the pictures became distinct enough to make out the scene on the ground, a scene which had him blinking to make sure his eyes weren’t deceiving him.
The building which had formerly constituted the ScanoGen research lab was nothing but a smoldering pile of rubble.
––––––––
“Tying up loose ends.” Maddock muttered under his breath.
“What?”
Maddock looked at Bones. “Scano is tying up loose ends. First the car bomb that killed Danzig and Renfield. Now his headquarters is gone.”
Bones raised his eyebrows. “I guess the guy’s got a thing for blowing stuff up. If you’re right, he’ll probably disappear again.”
Angel said, “That, plus he must already have backup plans for Brainwash. This sucks on multiple levels.”
Bones gritted his teeth. “All I know is that it sounds like I don’t get to pound on him.”
Over an hour had passed since the explosion, and the first glimmers of dawn were spreading across the sky. The three of them had retreated a couple of blocks away to avoid getting caught in the law enforcement activity which had begun shortly after the blast. Sitting in the rental car with the ENVGs wasn’t completely secure, but Maddock wasn’t about to walk away yet.
He flipped the goggles back over his eyes. At this point only the bomb squad truck and fire vehicles had been allowed beyond the gate, and a perimeter of police tape separated a bunch of other official vehicles and personnel from a small but growing crowd of onlookers.
A figure caught his attention and he increased the magnification to take a closer look.
“That’s him.”
Scano appeared to be having a discussion with one of the uniformed officers manning the perimeter. Maddock studied the man’s features with whitening knuckles.
“No way, dude. Is he really that stupid?” Bones flipped down his goggles. “I guess he is.”
“What the hell’s he still doing here?”
Angel looked as well. “I assume we’re not going to march over there and say hello. Should we call Tam?”
Maddock and Bones exchanged a look before Maddock allowed a wry smile. “Who says we can’t march over there and say hello?”
“But...” She met Maddock’s eyes. “You guys are not completely sane, you realize that?”
Bones chuckled and opened the car door. “Sanity is overrated. But in this case we’re just curious members of the public. Everyone loves an accident.”
When they reached the scene a minute later, Scano’s argument with the officer had escalated into a shouting match, accompanied by numerous expressive gestures from the ScanoGen leader. Maddock could see a couple of other officers starting to shift in the direction of the confrontation, hands sliding down toward their holsters.
“I’m the owner of this complex and I demand to know what’s going on.”
“Sir, I’m not going to tell you this again. Not only is this an active crime scene, we also haven’t confirmed that it is free of additional threats. No one is going in there except emergency personnel.”
“Take me to your supervisor. I’ll deal with someone who can make decisions.”
“Sir, I’d be happy to give you my supervisor’s phone number. But I warn you that she has even less tolerance for self-important blowhards than I do.”
Scano’s face reddened. “I’ll have your badge, officer.”
The police officer sighed. “This is D.C. If I had a dime for every time someone’s said that to me, I’d be on my private jet right now. Do you want her phone number or not?”
Bones and Maddock picked that moment to approach from either side of Scano. Angel hung back a few feet. Bones put an arm around Scano’s shoulder.
“Alex, buddy! Are you making things difficult for the cops again? You know better than that. Shame about what happened to your building.”
Scano’s eyes showed a second of calculation, then he pointed at Maddock. “Officer, these men had something to do with the explosion. You need to arrest them!”
The police officer rolled his eyes. “First you tell me you’ll have my badge, now you want me to arrest your friends. If we weren’t so busy here, you’d be the one getting arrested.”
“But—”
Bones smiled at the policeman. “I’m sorry about Alex, officer. He’s a good guy, but when he heard about the explosion he rushed out here without taking his meds. He’ll feel bad later about treating you this way.”
Before the police officer could answer, Bones exerted enough pressure on Scano to turn him around. Scano bent his knees and dug in his heels, but Bones hissed in his ear.
“After the performance you just gave, I could drag you by your eyeballs and the cop would just shrug and be glad you were gone. So the amount of pain I cause is up to you.”
Scano closed his eyes and relaxed his body. After they had moved ten feet away, Bones squeezed the bones of his arm hard enough for ligaments to start separating. Scano yelped, and Bones grinned. “Okay, maybe not totally up to you.”
As soon as they reached the sidewalk, Maddock stepped in front of Scano. “Okay. Tell us everything about Brainwash, including any place where it is stored.”
Scano scoffed. “Or what? You’ll let me go? Even if you torture me, you’ll never know if I told you everything. I survived a plague that wiped out an entire civilization, I think I can take whatever Chief Bonehead here can dish out.”
Bones’ features darkened. “Soft guy like you, I won’t even have to break a sweat.”
“So do it. You already blew up my facility, see if you can beat me.”
Maddock tried not to show his surprise at learning that Scano wasn’t the one behind the explosion. “Hate to break it to you, but that wasn’t us.”
“Wasn’t you? Come on, I...” Scano clearly read something in Maddock’s eyes that indicated the he wasn’t lying. “If it wasn’t you, who was it?”
A voice from behind Maddock surprised everyone.
“It was me.”
Suddenly it all made sense. Maddock turned to face the newcomer, who was accompanied by half a dozen members of her team.
“Tam.”
Tam Broderick acknowledged him with a brief tilt of the head. “Maddock, Bones, thanks for getting Scano. Saves us having to extract him from the cops.”
Maddock noted that Tam and her crew wore FBI hats despite the fact that they had nothing to do with the Bureau. “I see you came prepared for that. But why the charade? Why tell us we could go after him just for you to pre-empt us?”
Tam held up her hands. “It’s complicated. Let’s just say additional information came to our attention shortly after we spoke.
Bones said, “So you decided to blow up the complex? I can’t believe you get all the fun.”
“Believe it, big man. We can take it from here. Boys?”
Several of her team took Scano from Bones, with another one fixing handcuffs behind his back. Maddock grabbed Tam’s shoulder before she walked away.
“You’ve pretty much always been straight with us. I don’t know what’s so important that you’re willing to throw that away now. But whatever we owed you for getting us the info on Scano is gone. I can’t imagine we’d trust you again. So I hope it was worth it.”
Tam turned back to him with a look in her brown eyes approaching pity. “Maddock, there are things going on that are way above your pay grade.”
Bones chuckled. “Spare me. We’ve found Atlantis, Noah’s Ark, and aliens who gave technology to ancient man. No way pharma bro here is all that.”
Tam glared at him. “Nevertheless, I am taking Scano. Now.”
She turned and left with her crew, who had stopped and watched the interchange with obvious curiosity. Maddock wanted to do something to stop her, but he couldn’t think of a single thing. At least not anything productive. He felt a soft hand on his shoulder.
“Dane. It’s okay. Tam will make him pay.”
Maddock closed his eyes and allowed a slow exhale. “Something’s off. She didn’t even say a word about the VR technology. Blowing up the building doesn’t eliminate that threat.”
Bones grunted. “Whatever’s going on has her spooked. I’ve never seen that look of fear in her eyes other than a couple times when we were under attack.”
“So what do we do now, Bones? Just let it go?”
Bones spread his palms. “I wanted to hammer him as much as anyone, but unless we want to take on Tam and the CIA then yeah. We let it go.”
Maddock turned to Angel, who smiled and nodded. He rubbed his eyes with his hands. “I can’t believe Bones was the voice of reason.”
“Hey, it happened a couple other times recently. Angel must be a bad influence on you.”
Angel punched him in the shoulder. “Asshat.”
Bones rubbed the spot where she had struck. “That smarted.”
“Don’t be a baby. I was using my left.”
Maddock’s burner phone rang and he answered it.
“Maddock.”
“Maddock, it’s Corey.”
Corey Dean was the only member of Maddock’s crew with no military experience, and he served as the expert in all things technical. “Hey buddy, how’s the R&R going?”
“Relaxing. You still coming back in two days?”
Maddock had forgotten that the original week of vacation was almost over. Time flies when you’re trapped in a cave with VR in your head. “Probably. It’s been ... interesting. Why, what’s up?”
“If you’re saying it’s been interesting, my guess it’ll be at least a three beer story.”
“Maybe six.”
“Cool. Well I’m just calling because we got a message from a potential client. Salvage of a wreck from the early twentieth century, one supposedly with a lot of gold bars. They want an answer by tomorrow.”
“I don’t know, Corey. After the last few years, it’s hard to get excited about a ship full of gold.”
“Did I mention that the wreck is haunted? The last three companies to dive on it have disappeared without a trace.”
Maddock’s eyebrows went up. “That sounds more like it. Give me the guy’s number and I’ll work something out.”
After hanging up, he gave the news to Bones and Angel. Bones said, “Works for me. Unlike you, I’m fine with the gold too.”
“Guess we better see about a flight home. It still burns me to let this thing with Scano go.”
Bones put an arm around his shoulder.
“Don’t worry, Maddock. One of these days, Tam will need us again. And when she does, we’ll have just what every former SEAL turned hunter of lost treasures wants.”
“What’s that?”
Bones showed all his teeth. “Leverage.”