Chapter 3: Assault
Logan stopped in his tracks two feet from the entrance to his Penthouse the sound of the splintering door still fading in his stunned ears. With quick reactions he backed the way he had come, returning to his study. There he grabbed his pistol, taking only enough time to ensure it was loaded, then pushing hard on the wheels, feeling as if they were going too slow from reverse to forward he headed for the bedroom. He chanced a glance over his shoulder as he reached the bedroom door. He did not see his assailants yet, there was still a cloud of smoke obscuring the front of his apartment. He rolled through the door and deftly switched direction pulling on the door as he did. Gritting his teeth he quietly shut the door behind watching down the hall until it latched. He backed his chair along the wall until he was against the adjacent one, facing the side that the intruder would have to enter the bedroom through. There he waited, half hidden in the shadows waiting. That was a hard thing to do, knowing that no help was on the way. He couldn't even phone for help, it was in the other room. The only thing that he could hope for was someone to have heard the explosion and made the call for him.
His heart was racing as he thought about the implications of this intrusion. There were those out there who had been looking for Eyes Only for years. It was not hard to make enemies when you did what Logan did. This world was ruled by too many underhanded men for the truth to be a comfortable thing. Those same people would do extreme things to stop the truth from coming out.
What if this was one such party…looking to shut him down for good? There was a huge file of contacts within his computer that some crook would be all too happy to get a hold of. He closed his eyes and grit his teeth realizing that he had no time to dump his files. His informant net was going to be compromised, and that could mean the death of many of the people who had trusted him to keep their secrets and their identities safe. Logan knew this day would come sooner or later, Eyes Only couldn't remain anonymous forever. That didn't leave him prepared for the reality of it now that it was happening.
Logan took a deep breath trying to calm his heart. A part of him hoped that was all that they had come here for. Reminding him that there were other precautions in place to keep unwanted eyes out of his computer. Firewalls and passwords with encrypting in them to keep anyone but him out. It would take a hacker with better ability than his own to decrypt the information. But if they had come here to shut Eye's Only himself down…That was another matter.
He had been the driving force behind a lot of change, convincing some of even the most reluctant people to testify, or to give over damaging information to help bring a crook in. If he went down, the network would be crippled, there were few others with the nerve for what he did on a day to day basis, fewer still of those who had the contacts to make the operation come off. Or perhaps he was giving himself too much credit. He shook his head negatively in the dark, no, no he wasn't. The informant net would die without him to support it.
Logan took another breath, he wasn't going down without a fight, that was for sure. Then he looked down at his white knuckled hands wrapped tightly around the grip of his nine-millimeter. It was the same one he had tried to give Max some time back, one that she had refused to take. He still didn't understand her aversion to guns, she was as soldier after all, and guns pretty much came with the job. Something had happened when she was in Manticore and he hoped that one day she would explain it to him.
He closed his eyes silently wishing that Max were here right now to help repel this invasion, with or without guns.
Logan's eyes returned to the door as the footsteps neared it, steeling himself he raised his gun aiming at a spot that should be level with the chest of whoever came through the door. He held his breath as the doorknob turned in slow motion and the door opened inward. Logan reacted with the reflexes of someone who had been on the run too long. The figure in the door lurched sideways as two bullets hit home in his chest and abdomen. Logan's eyes widened when the man did not go down. The man slowly straightened and turned to face Logan still half-hidden by the shadows closing on his position.
Logan got a good look at the man as he walked through a pale beam of moonlight from outside. He recognized the soldier even as he was firing. Max had been on the run from something that she had not encountered before, when Logan had first gotten a good look at him. In his research to find out who her newest foes were Logan was able to get video from the hotel where Max had been hiding Bruno. The man who was now before him had punched through a solid steel elevator door without a thought. This man was one of the Disposable Soldiers from the South African Army.
Terror and relief ran a parallel course through his brain at that realization. The informant net was safe…that would not be what he was here for. Yet somehow they had linked him with Max and were probably here to find her. It begged the question…how they had tracked Max to him? The answer loomed in his mind even as the Red towered over him... Max's lost pager. Somehow they must have recovered it at the hotel and extracted his number from the memory. This was not good!
Before Logan could get out of the Soldiers way he clapped one hand against Logan's wrist and the other halfway up his forearm, knocking the gun away from him. Logan cried out as something in his arm snapped. Rising, the soldier backhanded Logan so hard that it toppled his chair and sent him sprawling across the floor. His legs were tangled up behind him putting his entire upper body weight on his injured arm. He grit his teeth in pain, unable to breathe much less get off of his arm. His cheek stung terribly where the fist had contacted his face and he felt a warm trickle of blood running down the left side of his nose. The soldiers hit had shattered his glasses and they had cut him before flying across the room.
He felt a rough hand lift him completely off the floor by the collar. Once in the air the grim figure turned Logan to face him, wrapping a viselike hand around his throat. The pressure of his grip steadily increased until Logan could not breathe and novas were exploding in his vision. He futilely grabbed the soldier's wrist with his left hand trying to break the grip before he lost consciousness. His right arm dangled uselessly at his side, pounding with jolting pain. Just as he was about to pass out, someone he couldn't see said, "Stop!"
The gargantuan holding Logan turned slightly, affording him a blurry look at the other intruder. He was a shorter man of medium build with red hair and a neatly trimmed beard.
"We need him alive," The man said coldly. That told Logan that it was only conditional on them getting what they wanted. After that his life was expendable. The man's grip eased on Logan's throat and he gasped drawing ragged breaths down his bruised throat. The man carried Logan by the lapel to the living room and tossed him casually onto his sofa like so much garbage. The force of it nearly toppled the couch onto its back. Logan glared at the two of them as he awkwardly straightened into a sitting position. He cradled his surely broken arm as a new round of pain shot up through his shoulder locking the muscles in his neck.
"What do you want?" Logan ground out when the pain had ebbed enough to allow him to breathe.
"Shut up," The bigger man said glaring at Logan.
Logan looked at the shorter one, mad and just a bit embarrassed by the circumstance, "You break into my home, assault me... the least you can do is tell me why?" Logan retorted. He already knew that answer, they wanted Max, but he wanted to get these guys talking.
The shorter man leaned into Logan's bruised face, and Logan flinched despite his want to do otherwise, "You either shut up or I will kill you myself."
Logan bit back the list of retorts that ran through his mind at that moment. This man meant business and he knew it. His normal acid sense of humor would only serve to get him killed if he did not watch his step. He turned his attention out the window trying not to think about what they had in store for him.
Logan raised his left-hand, palm up to look again at his watch, noting that an hour had already passed since the Red soldier had turned his Penthouse upside down and captured him. He had been forced to remove the watch from where it usually resided on his right wrist. His right arm had been steadily swelling since they had put him here, and it was now about two and a half times its normal size. Any movement of that limb brought about a round of excruciating pain. His head was swimming in pain, and his back was hurting from his position on the couch, which was pretty much the same as when he was thrown down here. He badly wanted to rearrange his legs to make at least his back more comfortable. There were two things stopping him from doing that however. The combination of his head and his arm had forced him to be still and had also forced him to draw as little attention to himself as possible. The soldiers tended to shove or hit him when he did, sending shock waves up his already pain-shredded nerves. The other was the thought that these two might misinterpret the move and end up shooting him without another thought. Logan certainly wanted to see the end of this ordeal.
They had not done much of anything short of hover over his battered form, expecting him to somehow miraculously walk and create some sort of problem. Occasionally they would converse with each other in another language, sometimes heatedly, pointing and gesticulating his direction. It was something that did not make him comfortable.
He had tried many times to get the soldiers to talk to him, to give him some sort of idea what they had in store for him, or why they wanted Max so badly. He knew better than to ask about Max directly. He was still trying to claim ignorance about why they were here, and letting that out of the bag would surely sink them both.
What he hoped beyond anything else right now, almost as much as he had wished her to come to his rescue earlier…he hoped that she would stay away. He cringed every time he heard the elevator move outside his shattered door, praying that it did not stop at his floor. The last thing he wanted was Max to walk unknowing into a trap these two had set for her.
"God Max, whatever you do don't show up now," He thought staring at the back of the larger soldiers head, and wishing there was something that he could do to fight back. Just then the phone rang and his heart sank.