Parallelogram : Day Two : Chapter 26
Five Days, Seventeen Hours, Thirty-Two Minutes
BLAM!
Michelson swore under his breath, fumbling to yank his Walther from under his jacket in time to parry DeMarco's whirl. The terrorist – when he faced him – had already pulled his gun, and the chrononaut immediately felt his heart sink as he had lost the advantage of surprise. Time slowed down as he watched the gun spark brilliantly from its black muzzle, propelling the lead bullet into the open space that separated them down the long hospital corridor. DeMarco fired at him, and, instinctively, Michelson released all weight from his left side, falling in that direction, as he finally cleared his jacket and raised his pistol into the air.
"Get down!" he cried. "Get down!"
BLAM! BLAM!
He fired his retort, but DeMarco's companion now had his pistol out, aiming in his direction. It would only be a matter of milliseconds before another barrage of fiery lead tore through the air, a second volley much better targeted than the first, and Michelson knew that – unless circumstances changed dramatically in that infinitesimally small amount of time – Olga and Bradley would be victims.
Hitting the floor, he reached forward, his hand landing on the rung beneath a hospital gurney. Quickly, he grasped the bed's manual brake lever, jerked it upward, and shoved. The wheels squealed as the mobile cot went sailing down the hallway, and the distraction gave Olga the time to fully realize what was happening – that they were under lethal attack – and she, too, dropped to the floor behind Michelson.
BLAM! BLAM!
As luck would have it, DeMarco's companion was unable to draw as clean a bead on his targets as Michelson expected. Instead, the enemy's bullets tore into the wheeling hospital bed, ripping into the slim mattress with a force that lifted the bed off its wheels and sent it teetering into the wall. It clanked loudly into the corridor's handrail, and it smashed noisily to the grey marble floor.
To his delight, Michelson glanced up and found that his boss – the ever unpredictable Bradley Talmadge – had pulled his silver Sig Sauer P228 from his coat and had taken aim at their opponents.
"Richard DeMarco!" the director cried. "By order of the NSA, I order you to stop right where you are!"
His head jerking upright in suit with his taut body, a startled Craig Donovan recognized the crack of gunfire when he heard it. His reflexes twitched, and he opened his eyes wide to take in his surroundings. The nurse standing at his bedside, checking his vitals, glared with an open, wordless mouth at him.
"Get down!" he told her, quickly throwing off the covers ... and quietly thanking whatever higher power there was in this crazy universe that the hospital staff had dressed him in pajama bottoms and not one of those dimensionless, unflattering gowns.
He leapt out of the bed, ready for anything. Dashing to the room's only closet, he threw open the door, found his property, brushed the short stack of clothing aside, and grabbed his nine millimeter Beretta. Stopping only to check that the clip was full, he broke for the hallway outside.
BLAM!
Ignoring the shot fired at him, Talmadge did the unthinkable ... he took a step forward, releasing the safety on his pistol, and returned the favor.
Immediately, the two men separated – DeMarco dropping to one side of the hallway and his partner to the other – as the bullet tore harmlessly through the open space, piercing the Emergency Room's single sliding glass door, and shattered the tempered glass. The shards erupted outward, pouring to the concrete in a downfall of violent, sparkling rain. An alarm sounded – a high-pitched whine – and the director knew that, within a minute, hospital security guards would be rushing into a firefight the likes of which they couldn't contain ... unless he stopped it before it grew further out of control.
Talmadge wasn't finished.
To Michelson's surprise, the director brazenly took another two steps forward, crossing the width of the corridor to take up a defensive position in front of Olga and him. Then, he fired two more shots at DeMarco, but both men ducked closer to the wall, concealed barely out of his sight behind the frame of an open doorway that, under dire circumstances like fire or natural catastrophe, separated the Emergency Room from the remainder of the hospital.
"That's enough!"
Confused, the chrononaut rolled over – carefully lifting his weight so as not to injure his unarmed lover, Olga, lying on the floor beside him – and glanced in the direction of the voice. Reacting, he brought his Walther up in front of him. There, emerging from the waiting area, he found two police officers, and he stared into their fixed expressions. Undoubtedly, these were the two men that the duty nurse had explained were here questioning a woman about a drive-by shooting – with the regulation pistols drawn. One of them aimed at him, and the other pointed his loaded weapon at Talmadge.
"Drop those guns!" the officer ordered.
Michelson knew the time of the lives had been reduced to fractions of fractions of a millisecond, and he had to act now.
"Don't shoot!" he exclaimed, taking one hand of his Walther and holding it up in the universal sign of surrender. "We're with the NSA! We're after those two men!"
Who he was and the agency he served didn't matter. It never did in a firefight. That was just the nature of police training.
"I said drop those guns ... now!" the officer insisted.
"I said we're with the NSA!"
"I don't care if you're with Moses ..."
Suddenly, an unshirted blur of a man rammed into the police officers, and the two men hit the wall hard, their guns jarred loose. Michelson recognized Craig Donovan knocking the two civil servants down to the ground hard with a single wisp of a perfectly executed leg sweep.
Glancing up, Olga cried out, "Craig!"
"Stay down!" he ordered, brandishing his own weapon. "Everyone just stay down!"
Donovan glanced up the hallway, and he saw the unthinkable, the unimaginable: he found the face of the mystery man from the video footage of the storage facility security camera. He saw those eyes – those dark eyes saturated with pure, unadulterated hatred – and he raised his Beretta as he charged down the hallway.
"DeMarco!" he screamed, leaping over the poised Michelson. "You're mine! You're mine!"
Once he landed on the ground, he ran, his legs pumping, his finger pulling methodically at the trigger on his Beretta, firing decisively in the direction of the terrorist and his partner. His shots echoed in an odd cacophony throughout the narrow corridor.
When he reached Talmadge, the two of them joined forces, running in tandem toward DeMarco and his companion, their guns barking together in the once silent building.
Quickly, DeMarco glanced across at Matthew.
To the young man's right, he saw the 'close' button for the doors ahead of them. He nodded at it, and Matthew followed.
Reaching out, Matthew slapped the button hard, and the doors – now activated – started to swing shut.
"No!" Donovan swore, stopping in his tracks and aiming at the terrorist. "No!"
He fired.
BLAM!
The bullet grazed the solid metal of the mechanized door, sparking as it viciously ricocheted into the unblemished white wall.
"Dammit!" he shouted.
Through the glass port in the doors, he watched as the two men made their escape through the Emergency Room arch.
Quickly, he rushed the doors, banging on them, but they wouldn't budge. They were security doors, designed for the very purpose of protecting those inside the hospital, and they could only be opened from the nurses' station.
"Open these doors!" he shouted, hoping the woman on duty could hear him. "Open these damn doors!"
He heard the hydraulic kiss of the doors activated, and, leaning with all his weight, he threw the doors wide, tearing past the barrier and rushing toward the hospital's exit. Talmadge stayed at his heels, and, together, they broke out of the building into the night ... only to see the taillights of a black sedan as the car pulled quickly under the cover of night.
"The license plate?" the director asked. "Did you make out the license plate?"
Suddenly, Donovan found his head spinning. His surroundings started to tip and twirl as the sudden exertion of energy caught up with him. The doctors – his doctor – had told him that he needed his rest as a result of the injuries suffered from the explosion that had almost taken his life and had killed his dear friend. He teetered a bit, his vision darkening, threatening to slip into the netherland of unconsciousness. He dropped his gun and started to fall ... when he felt the welcome cradle of hands underneath his shoulders.
"Sonuvabitch," he swore.
"It's all right," Talmadge said. "It's all right, Craig. I've got you."
Fighting back the temptation to slip into an altered state of consciousness, Donovan glanced up into the smiling eyes of his former boss.
"It's good ..." he tried, his voice trailing off.
"What's good, Craig?"
"It's good ... to see a friendly face," he said, and then he fell into a deep sleep.
"Are you all right?" Michelson asked, holstering his Walther and climbing to his feet. He went to Olga's side and reached down for her, gently taking her arm and helping her to her feet.
"I'm fine," she said. "It's just ... well, it's been a very long time since I've been in the middle of a World War ... and I'd forgotten what it's like."
Cautiously, he smiled at her. "You shouldn't concern yourself with those things."
She glanced up at him. "It's our job."
"No," he told her, easily straightening her coat as it had slouched off of her shoulders in the fracas. "Your job is saving lives. Mine? Well ... sometimes I'm not so lucky."
They stared into one another's eyes, experiencing a moment of attraction – a spark of intimacy in a quickly crowding corridor. The police climbed to their feet, and they collected their fallen firearms. Three hospital security guards suddenly marched down the corridor, hurrying past the police officers and heading for the Emergency Room archway. Several nurses stepped out of their respective rooms, and even a patient or two wandered near the edge of their open doorways, studying the hallway, curious as to what could possibly have gone so horribly wrong in a hospital, of all places?
"Hello," a woman's voice said.
Brought back into the here and now, Olga shook her head and turned. A woman with long beautiful hair stepped out of the waiting room, past the police officers, and stood alongside the couple.
"Everything's all right," Michelson assured the woman. "There's no need for panic."
"No," Indiri Farris replied. "I'm not ... I'm not panicking ... I was just curious ... did I hear you right? Were you just firing at ... were you just firing at Richard DeMarco?"
END of Chapter 26
