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  “Six hours is too long,” Rick said, leaning forward in his chair. He watched the struggle in Heath. Rick knew the man well. He was regimented, polished. Heath wouldn’t try to disrespect Rick if he cursed out his own mother.

  “I will have it done, sir, but for the sake of time, the communications quality will be poor.”

  “Fine, just make sure it’s there.” Rick turned back to some of the papers on his desk, having some of the focus returned to his mind, knowing that his problem would be taken care of soon. It was a physical cue that Heath normally picked up on but deliberately ignored this time. “Is there something else?”

  “Yes, sir. I would like possession of Agent Hill’s brother.”

  “What? Wh... Oh, it doesn’t matter. Fine. We’ve gotten all the use out of him that we can.” Rick returned to his work. When Heath turned to leave, a smile crept across Rick’s face. He had outsmarted some of the brightest minds in the world, and now, with the blunt instruments at his disposal, he was about to deliver the final blow to an agency that had operated at such a high level of espionage that it was beyond governments, beyond control. This was to be a battle of titans. There wasn’t a square piece of dirt on this earth that he wasn’t capable of possessing, there wasn’t a mind he couldn’t outmaneuver, and Rick was truly beginning to believe that there was nothing beyond his reach. He was limitless.

  “Heath,” Rick said, calling out to him just before his shoulder was out the door. Heath stopped and turned around. “If it’s possible, bring me Agent Hill alive. I’d like to have a word with her before she dies.”

  The mattress was flipped from the frame onto the floor, and sheets were torn from the bed. Anything that could have been broken and torn was done so and spread sporadically through the room, and with the lights turned off, it looked like nothing more than piles of trash.

  Ben positioned himself right behind the wall from the hallway entrance of his room’s door. He’d covered himself in a clump of sheets next to the shattered television. He lay there, in the dark, breathing softly, hiding, and clutching the piece of jagged television screen glass.

  This was all he could think of. He’d done the work in the dark, and he hoped that someone would come and check on him soon. He couldn’t be sure how long he’d been lying there in the darkness. He could feel the stiffness in his muscles and the fog in his mind. But when he heard the door handle turn, he could feel his heart beating through his shirt, and he prayed that whoever entered wouldn’t be able to hear the beat in his chest or see the pulsating thump through the layers of sheets he was covered in.

  Ben heard the door open, and the lights flicked on. The dull darkness that had shrouded him for the past few hours suddenly burst into light. Even through the filtering layers of sheets, the light still managed to cause his eyes to squint, but he had little time to adjust as the voices of the men entering grew louder.

  “Holy shit!”

  The vibrations from the men’s footsteps rippled through the floor and into Ben’s back. He could only see the odd-shaped clumps of their bodies, distorted through the pieces of cloth, and from what he could see and hear, there were only two.

  The two men started flipping over the mattress and sheets. “Where the hell did he go?” Ben felt his pulse quicken. He gripped the shard in his hand harder, letting the jagged edged cut into his palm. He could see one of the body clumps hovering over him. He wouldn’t get much time. He had to do it quickly. Aim for the neck.

  The sheet was ripped off, and as Ben watched, the guard’s realization spread across his face, and with all the speed he could muster, Ben jumped from the floor and jammed the tip of the shard into the side of the guard’s neck.

  Ben felt the warm splash of blood explode over his hand and arm, and a few specks flew onto his face. The air around him burst with a metallic scent and the stench of the man’s last dying breath on Ben’s cheek. The man gurgled then collapsed on top of him.

  The second guard immediately rushed over, even firing a few rounds that missed Ben and entered his dead comrade. Ben reached for the sidearm at the lifeless guard’s hip and tugged, but the hammer snagged on the man’s belt loop. The second guard peeled the dead man’s carcass off Ben in one quick pull, and before Ben could jam the piece of glass into his neck, the man countered with a punch to Ben’s face.

  The shard fell from Ben’s hand as the hammering of his head continued. The fourth or fifth crack knocked Ben to his side and slammed his forehead into the wall next to him. His eyelids opened and managed to see the pistol from the dead man’s holster wedged between the body and the wall. He reached for the pistol again, and when the second guard pulled Ben’s shoulder back, he shoved the barrel into the guard’s stomach and squeezed the trigger three times.

  Ben dropped the pistol in his hands and pushed the dead men off him, wiggling out from under their heavy bodies. When he stood, he found that his legs shook. He took a few wobbly steps forward, looking at the devastation around him.

  Some of the blood from the guards had seeped from their bodies and collected around the pistol. Ben reached out his hand and picked it up from the pooling liquid. Blood dripped from the side of the barrel, and he wiped off as much of it against the sheets as he could. Even after he was done, the grip around the handle felt sticky, which wasn’t a bad thing, considering how sweaty and shaky his palms were.

  Ben stopped at the entrance to the hallway. He looked to his left—empty. To his right—nothing. He hesitated, waiting at the starting line like a track athlete in preparation to the gun firing into the air and starting the race. A pent-up energy rustled within him, waiting to be set free, and he struggled with the comprehension of what he’d done.

  The torture, food and water deprivation, the constant stress of worry about his wife and children, all of it had piled into a mountain that he carried on his back, and he wasn’t sure if he’d make it more than a few steps down the hallway. He looked back at the bodies in his room then down to the gun in his palm. He closed his eyes, focusing his thoughts, his energies, his will. He slowly wrapped his fingers tighter around the pistol’s handle and stepped out into the hallway. He closed the door behind him and ran.

  Before Ben made it past the fifth door on his right, the lights shut off. He immediately stopped, his eyes completely blind in the darkness, with no artificial or natural light to guide him. He stepped to his right, reaching his hand out for the wall to offer any guidance. His fingers scraped the concrete, and a darker, reddish tone replaced the white lights from before, casting the hallway in a filter that looked like the same shade of red as the spots of blood on the pistol in his hand.

  The wailing din of the alarm screeched in Ben’s ears, jolting him in fear and panic. He looked back at his room and took one step backward before stopping himself. No. His family was still somewhere in the building. He had to get to them. Before it was too late.

  Ben kept low, navigating the hallways as best he could, always on the lookout for anyone with a gun meant to kill him. He tried retracing his steps from the times he had been escorted from his cell and room, but the memories were fuzzy. He twisted and turned, looking for anything that was familiar, but it all looked the same.

  This couldn’t be how it ended, not for him, not for his family. He picked up his pace, his feet pattering against the floor in hurried succession. His body and joints twisted along the path he set himself on, turning corners, keeping his pistol up. It’d been years since he’d held a weapon, but the motions of his youth slowly came back to him.

  After the next corner Ben turned, he froze. He kept the barrel of the pistol aimed at the cluster of guards and the tall man that had tortured him and threatened to hurt his family. The man’s eyes widened, and just before Ben watched the man’s lips move, barking some command, he squeezed the trigger, missing the tall man but taking out the guard just to the left of him.

  Once the first shot had been fired, Ben backtracked, his right arm firing the pistol into the cluster of Kevlar and flesh wh
ile his left hand checked the door handles he passed. After he’d tried a half dozen, one finally opened.

  The thump of bullets hit the metal door as Ben locked it. He retreated to the rear of the room, glancing around for any other door, any other way out, but there was nothing. He’d trapped himself in a steel box. The red light in the room blinked on and off in time with the alarm, casting the room in darkness then flashing the bloodstained red.

  Bullets and fists beat on the door as Ben kept the pistol aimed. He slid down the wall until he hit the floor. This was it. He closed his eyes and tried to remember the faces of his children, the smile of Matt and the mischievous giggle of Ella. Tears flowed down his face as the moment of his wedding day flashed in his mind. His wife walking down the aisle and the smile he couldn’t wipe away from his mouth no matter how hard he tried. And he remembered when he was a boy, he and his sister teasing each other in the backseat on family vacations, both his parents telling them to stop, but in the laughing manner that egged both of them into continuing their torture of one another.

  Fleeting memories of his past, his present, and all the things he would miss in the future. Ella and Matt’s graduation from high school, their proms, sports, and dances. Their weddings and their children and all the moments he would miss with his wife.

  The shouting outside the door grew louder, and the banging stopped. Despite the finality, his heart was full, brimming over with the mixed feelings of joy and sadness. He kept those precious moments close to his heart, even as the explosion rocked the door, and he watched the tall man enter through the smoke and wreckage.

  The rally point where Sarah met the rest of the field agents was two miles from the base’s perimeter. Fifteen agents managed to show up—well, fifteen and a half if you included the dilapidated state Vince was in, which Sarah didn’t.

  “Everyone have their entrance points?” Sarah asked, securing another magazine around her belt. She was greeted with a series of curt nods. “I know everyone received the mission docs from HQ, but I wanted to make sure you know that my family is in there.”

  For the first time since the group arrived, they all looked at her, breaking whatever premission rituals they normally walked through. It was common knowledge that her family had been taken, but she wasn’t sure if everyone knew that they were here. Technically, she didn’t either, but she was going to find out what happened to them.

  “You want the kill shot?” Jared asked.

  “I want my family, and whether that involves keeping Rick Demps alive or killing him, I’m all for it,” Sarah answered. “But I will bring them home with me. Today. In whatever forms they’ve been left in.”

  Nobody argued. Being the top field agent carried with it a certain weight that no one ignored. Sarah hadn’t always been top dog. She remembered her first year when that title had belonged to someone else, but after his retirement, she gladly took over.

  “We’re with you,” Jared replied.

  “Thanks.” Sarah gave her belt one last check, threw on her holster, loaded her pistols, donned her black jacket, and picked up the AR-15 with its mounted scope. “Let’s kick some ass.” The group scattered, spreading out from their current location like the spokes from a wheel.

  “You ready for this?” Bryce asked.

  “Just try not to cry this time,” Sarah answered.

  “I get emotional one time, three years ago, and you never let me live it down.”

  Sarah cracked a smile. “You got so bad that Johnny had to finish the mission with me.”

  “I didn’t realize it was a crime to care too much.”

  “Just don’t get too squeamish on me,” Sarah said, breaking into a sprint, feeling the fueled mixture of adrenaline, rage, and hate course through her like a high-octane cocktail. “You might see some things you haven’t laid eyes on yet.” The compound came into view with still half a mile left on her run. It nestled in the middle of three hills, with nothing but grass and brush sprawling across the surrounding fields.

  Enough clusters of cover allowed her to make it all the way to the compound’s wall, where she’d have to climb to get in. She peered through the scope, the crosshairs meticulously scanning the sprawling green around her. She checked to the left and right of her, seeing that everyone was moving into place. She swung the scope over to the wall, where a cluster of guards patrolled the top, walking back and forth at a leisurely pace. She lowered the scope and bit her lower lip. “Bryce, did you run a thermal scan prior to our mission rendezvous?”

  “Yeah, I included it in your docs.”

  Sarah lifted the rifle again, using the scope to home in on the guards as closely as she could. She scanned every inch of the wall that her position allowed her to. “Run a polar imaging on the base and the surrounding area up to one hundred yards out.”

  “Okay.”

  She knew Bryce didn’t know what for, seeing as the satellite feed Bryce and the rest of the support agents were using kept a constant thermal of the compound, but he did it anyway. Something wasn’t sitting right with her. No patrols outside the walls, no security sensors were being picked up—it didn’t fit the profile of her previous encounters. Something was off.

  “Sarah, you’ve got movement on your six! Get out of there now!”

  But the unnatural rustle of grass behind her gave the hostiles away before Bryce finished the radio transmission. She rolled into the bushes to her right, evading the bullets from the unit of men behind her. From the sound of the shots, they weren’t farther than twenty yards back, well within her grenade range. She plucked one of the plump explosives from her belt, pulled the pin, released the lever, and arched her arm in a hook as she chucked it in the direction of the bad guys.

  A few seconds later, screams briefly floated into the air before the explosion silenced them. Sarah rolled back out of the brush, keeping the scope glued to her right eye, and the crosshairs fell onto the column of smoke from the blast. Three bodies lay lifeless, but Sarah put a bullet in each, just for good measure.

  “On your left!” Bryce said.

  Sarah rolled from her stomach to her side, swinging the rifle in the same motion to bring the barrel face to face with two more hostiles bursting through the brush. The rifle’s muzzle flashed four blasts of white light, and the bodies dropped to the floor.

  The fields around her erupted into similar gunfire. The blasts echoed off the hills, bouncing the sound around in a twisting, tornado-like fashion. “What’s the count?” Sarah asked, making her run to the entrance point.

  “Sarah, you don’t have to do this no—”

  “What’s the count, Bryce?” Her words were louder, harsher as she kept one eye in the scope, pivoting to her left and right, ears open, listening for anyone or anything close enough among the echoes of gunfire.

  “Two agents killed. Three wounded. The rest are still on their routes.”

  “You tell everyone to make their adjustments now, and radio them over our frequencies, making sure it’s clear.” Sarah’s words came out in the same sprinting fashion as her run. “These bastards knew we were coming. They wanted us to come. Get the rest of the support agents to gather everything else we missed, run scans, whatever you have to do. I want to know what they know, now.”

  “On it.”

  The compound’s wall was less than one hundred yards away, and the trees and brush cleared out for that last hundred yards into an open field, leaving no cover. But a moving target was harder to hit than a still one. Sarah broke through the tree line, knocking down both guards on the tower before she was ten yards into the field. She swung her rifle over her shoulder and squeezed her gloves, activating the adhesive, and used the momentum of her speed to get a running start up the wall until her momentum stopped, and she slammed her palms into the wall, pulling herself upward.

  Bullets pierced the concrete next to her right arm as she neared the crest of the wall. The cluster of guards heading toward her out of her peripheral vision were getting closer. With her left hand
on the edge of the wall, she deactivated the adhesive on her right glove, drew her pistol, lifted herself onto the ledge, and knocked the guards off the wall like milk cans at a carnival shooting gallery.

  Keeping her right pistol drawn, she lowered the adhesive levels on her left glove and placed her palm on the inside portion of the wall, where she slid down until her feet touched the ground. “I’m in.”

  “All agents in position,” Bryce said. “There are three different levels in the compound. From what I’ve been able to see, it looks like your family would most likely be on level one. It’s below ground, with plenty of different rooms to be locked up in.”

  “Who doesn’t love a good game of hide and seek?” Sarah asked, checking the entrance door for any traps. “Can I get a scan on my entrance?”

  “You’re clean.”

  Three .45 bullets later, Sarah was on the inside, the base’s alarm blaring in time with the red flashing lights signaling her breach into its lair. The hallway blinked black, then red, then black, then red in a continuous pattern. Both pistols were drawn, and every other second, her eyes were cast into darkness. She kept the mental outline of her surroundings in check.

  “Stairs to your left,” Bryce said. “And you better hurry. You’ve got a lot of hurt heading your way.”

  The stairwell was just as noisy and just as dark as she descended the steps, keeping one pistol aimed below her and one aimed above. Everything felt fluid to her in that moment. Her body did exactly what it needed to without her having to offer any direction.

  “Stop!”

  Sarah froze at the door, her hand gripped around the handle, her shoulder lightly brushed up against it.

  “Six guards, down the hall on your left when you come out the door. They just showed up, and they’ve got backup heading in that direction as well.”

  “Then that’s where my family is.” Sarah pushed the door open, and the flashes of red immediately revealed the six guards, all armed with fully automatic rifles, covered from head to toe in riot gear and Kevlar and waiting for her. “They came prepared.”