Blood Demons. Richard Jeffries

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СКАЧАТЬ that expression winked off like a snuffed candle when the child snapped out of his grip. The naked man stumbled a few feet down the rocky path, then twisted to see Key standing placidly behind him, holding the corpse child like a crafty cornerback who had intercepted the game-winning touchdown pass. Key waited a second until Daniels and Nichols flanked him, their guns at the ready, before commenting.

      “Keep your eye on the prize, asshole,” he said.

      That was all he got to say before the temple fort grounds were invaded by a screeching assault team in military gear. “Down, down! Hands up, get down! Now, now!”

      Key did not get down. He watched the naked man scurry off toward the river even faster than he had before, then turned to pinpoint the commanding officer of this bunch of stupid interlopers. To Daniels’s surprise, Nichols’s chagrin, and Key’s presumption, it was the man they had known as Captain Patrick Logan.

      “You have got to be kidding me,” Key complained as he raised his hands, holding the child corpse to the sky like an offering.

      Chapter 3

      “Your miscalculation was you wanted to beat him, to defeat him. But we weren’t there for him. We were there for his victim.”

      Josiah Key was talking to his right-hand people in yet another interrogation room, which looked like almost every other interrogation room anywhere in the world. Four gray walls, one gray floor, one gray ceiling, one cheap table, five cheap chairs, one door, and one one-way window taking up most of one wall.

      Nichols was going to argue the miscalculation, although Daniels knew better. “But if we could have captured him,” she started, “that would have helped us figure—”

      “But we weren’t fighting him like we were trying to capture him.” Daniels sighed, already having accepted, and learned, from his mistake. “Admit it. We were fighting him like we wanted to shove his sneering teeth down his throat.”

      Key smiled at the growing maturity of his associate. He was even kind enough to say “we,” when everyone, including Nichols, knew it really meant her.

      Everyone at Cerberus had been relieved when Daniels, who was known to go after anything in skirts, pants, shorts, skorts, panties, G-strings, thongs, or anything remotely vaginal, had immediately started treating Nichols like a sister-in-arms and fellow Marine.

      “I don’t shit where I sleep,” he once told Key when explaining how he targeted his “romantic conquests.”

      Nichols exhaled strongly, laid her hands flat on the table, and slowly nodded. “Yeah, I get it. You’re right.”

      “What do I tell you?” Key grinned, pleased she had taken responsibility, but he had to make sure she wasn’t just doing it as way to forget about it. “What do I always tell you?”

      “You want to know how smart I am, not how tough I am,” she said in a mild singsong, but with an honest, comprehending smile.

      “It’s not about how bad-ass you are,” Daniels chimed in like a five-year-old reciting his alphabet. “It’s about how effective you are.”

      “It’s also not about proving how bad-ass you are,” Key stressed. “To anyone, especially yourself!”

      The door finally banged open, as Key figured it would. It was the main reason they had started the lesson in the first place. Key knew it would drive Logan crazy.

      Sure enough, in walked Patrick Logan—wearing, as was his custom, a full uniform, and carrying, as was also his custom, a thick file. He seemed to always want to have it at hand in case he needed something to hide behind.

      Daniels looked behind him in anticipation, but to his obvious disappointment, there was no beautiful blond Second Lieutenant Barbara Strenkofski, who had been Logan’s aide when last they met. He had wanted to at least attempt a reconciliation after Daniels had left her “Mickey-Finned” in an Omani medical college break-room bunk bed—where she had successfully attempted to “romantically conquest” him.

      Instead, there was a statuesque, violet-eyed brunette in a tailored uniform, sporting first lieutenant insignia. Logan looked pointedly from her to Daniels as she sat down, her notepad at the ready.

      “Ah,” Logan snapped as he slapped the file onto the table and settled in. “The men from Cerebral.”

      Key didn’t take the bait. Nor did Nichols, but she did check his chest and crotch in pointed silence. Key was certain Logan had purposely used the misogynist greeting, and fairly certain he had purposely mispronounced the organization’s name, but you never know. Somebody like Logan might actually think that was the name, but it made little difference to Key. He had heard every variation, from Cerebrum to Short Bus, in such a short time that he went back to simply saying he was from the CID—which actually wasn’t a lie. Logan had originally made both he and Daniels CID agents back in the day, and the question whether they were still CID, or even Marines, would probably have to be unraveled by the NCIS.

      Instead, Key looked placidly at the florid, ambitious officer and said, as way of greeting, “Captain.”

      Because they all knew Logan was far more thin-skinned than Key, they all expected the result. Logan stiffened, then sharply pointed at his uniform’s insignia. “Colonel,” he stiffly corrected.

      “Oh, we got you a promotion, did we?” Key said like a cat toying with a mouse who was already dead. Cerberus had allowed Logan to take the credit for destroying the Idmonarchne Brasieri, and everyone in this room, except for maybe the buxom brunette, knew it. Getting a certain one of them to admit it, however, was a different matter.

      “I got me the pro—!” Logan started before he realized he was acting the way he had wanted Key to act. “Never mind, Corporal Key. Maybe you could utilize your time to better advantage by telling me why I shouldn’t let the local Punjabi authorities do to you what they are threatening to do to you.”

      If he was expecting Key to react in agitation, he really should have known better. It wasn’t like they hadn’t faced each other across much the same table in much the same room before. Key didn’t even respond to the “corporal” crack since, although he had since been promoted to major, once he threw in with Cerberus he decided to leave rank behind.

      “Because they know as well as you that we all have a problem that won’t be solved with a hammer,” Key replied calmly, then continued by giving credit where credit was due. “No matter how strong and effective that hammer may be.”

      Logan leaned back as if he had sprung his own mousetrap. “What we have, Corporal, is a terrorist problem, and I think that hammer you so accurately referred to will do just fine.”

      Key exhaled through his nostrils and couldn’t help shaking his head in a “t’was ever thus” manner. He also leaned back and spread his hands to encompass the file on the table between them.

      “So that’s the theory you’re going with?” he sighed sadly. “Terrorists who use a child as a bomb to damage property. Terrorists who can get from the base to the top of a mountain in minutes. Terrorists who survive an explosion that kills two park rangers who were farther away from the detonation than they were. Terrorists who can disappear from a lockdown even a TSA agent couldn’t avoid. You really want to walk into the teeth of this that way?”

      Both Daniels and Nichols wondered whether Key had used the word “teeth” СКАЧАТЬ