Still behind the door for protection, Reiff rotated his carbine and blindly fired around the outside edge. Merely guessing at where the man was lying. He then paused, trying to listen through the deafening echoes reverberating in his ears.
When no shots came, he examined his own rifle and regripped it with his left hand. Mentally calculating how many bullets he had left. Standard M4 magazines held thirty rounds. With two releases of perhaps ten to twelve rounds total, he was at least half empty.
The last of the echoes faded within the walls, leaving behind an eerie silence beyond Reiff’s ringing ears. But nothing that sounded like breathing or scraping over tiled flooring.
Slowly he pushed the door farther out, until he saw the third man’s boot. He watched it, looking for any movement. Even a twitch. But there was nothing.
He pushed until the door revealed the man’s lower body. Legs, waist, stomach, and, finally, a pool of blood. Then the man’s rifle. On top of him and pointed down at the floor.
He was motionless. Like the others, but with eyes staring up at the ceiling. One of Reiff’s shots had struck him under the left armpit.
Reiff let himself collapse, exhausted and in pain, from somewhere around his left foot. But he was alive.
He rolled and looked back down to the end of the hall, where Robert Masten was slouched and leaning forward. A streak of smeared blood on the wall behind him, following him down to the floor in an arc.
He was still breathing when Reiff managed to stand and stumble to the end of the hall, where he found a gun next to Masten’s open hand. Not a single shot had been fired.
He managed to look up at Reiff with difficulty, sputtering and coughing blood as he spoke. “I … was coming to get you out.”
The elevator dinged, and its doors opened on the ground floor to reveal a wobbling John Reiff supporting Masten beneath the man’s outstretched arm. Masten’s eyes were half closed and his body was covered in blood from the chest down.
Two people were waiting for them in the lobby.
With his right hand around Masten’s waist, Reiff raised the handgun with his left and pointed. Blinking through bright sunlight filtering down through a row of overhead exterior windows, he squinted at the two figures before him. One was standing to the right, in what appeared to be a small booth, attending to something on the floor. The other was taller, facing Reiff and Masten from perhaps thirty feet away. With a gun aimed in their direction.
It took a few moments for Reiff to recognize Dr. Souza. The other person was an older man, tall, with a trimmed beard and mustache beneath a boonie hat—and something about him looked very familiar.
Features within the man’s face finally crystallized, and Reiff recognized his old friend, now a much older Devin Waterman. Who was staring grimly at him and Masten.
Slowly, Waterman lowered his weapon and began walking forward. With every step closer, his eyes remained locked on Reiff’s face until he came to a stop several feet away and studied Reiff from head to toe.
“I thought you would look better.”