NOW

“So…what was the earthquake thing about? The thing under the lake started moving and there was a fault line close by or something?”

No reply.

Keel frowned, and looked up from his tablet before grimacing. Lucas was limp against the armchair opposite his, his head langing and a soft snore escaping his lips. “Agent Rouke!”

The faint sound of vacuuming in the other room stopped, and Rouke poked her head out. “Yes sir?”

“What did you give him?” He nodded at Walker.

“Eszopiclone. I put it in his tea earlier.”

“How much?”

“How…” She patted down her pockets. “Uh, I’m pretty sure the label is in here somewhere. Can’t have been more than a few tablets…”

“He’s not going to die, is he?”

“No, no! Absolutely not!” Rouke protested. “I take that two, three times that amount the day before a long op anyway! It’s really far from an overdose.”

Keel glanced at his phone. “Well I have to go for a bit. Tell Callahan I’ll be back to continue this in a couple of hours. If he wakes up, I want to be the first to know, got it?”

She saluted him.

Keel got out of his chair, groaning at how good it felt to be sitting in one place for such a long time, which was rare for him these days. He went back towards the lift, trying not to think about the very-likely-stolen painting Callahan had thought to decorate the penthouse with, and got back in the lift, which closed with the push of the lobby button. As he descended, he checked his messages again, and found Karuchek was already typing.

Of all the days… Keel hit the next button below the lobby in addition, putting his phone back in his jacket and adjusting his collar, patiently waiting for the numbers to tick down.

When it reached L, in the place of the number zero, Keel stayed in the back of the lift, smiling at the office workers waiting to go up rather than down, his eyes scanning the big wall of glass behind them. From where he was, there didn't seem to be anything obviously wrong, but then again, this was through hardened, polarised windows that stopped everyone on this side from getting a tan. He watched through the closing gap between the doors, when the lift went down one more level.

Keel emerged into the small waiting area around the lift, and pushed straight out into the parking space, moving from air conditioned cool into the sweltering, humid climate of the outside made worse by the heat from all the cars. It was nowhere near as bad as Turpentine had been, in absence of all the air pollution, but it was still one of the reasons he preferred Rutherford always parked by the curbside. Turpentine doesn't have the benefit of good public transport, he thought to remind himself.

A Pegasus Excelsior, glossy black and sleek and yet armoured in all the right places, rolled up to the door and one of the back doors popped open for him.

He ducked into the cooled interior, shutting the door. "Pass by the front, will you? I need to know what they're up to."

"Of course," Rutherford said in his exquisite, buttery accent.

"Sharp eye by the way."

"It wasn't exactly subtle. We're not expecting anything bigger than pistol calibers, are we?"

"Not if the Governor and the Marshal have been doing their thing effectively." Keel scooted into the seat on the right, behind Rutherford, and pulled down the cushion in the middle to divide the backseat into two positions. Ignoring the bottle of liquor and two glasses nestled in the divider, he reached through the back of the seat, removed the partition and retrieved a tablet. Switching it on, he navigated to the cameras it was linked to, and spun it on top of the car's roof, pointing it where he knew the other building would be.

Rutherford brought them up the ramp and out of the underground lot, making a sharp turn around their skyscraper and onto the main street out the front.

“I see them.” Keel tapped on the screen of his tablet where he had spotted shady figures leaning out of views of the windows of the third and fourth floors. “Looking right at us.”

“And we just changed plates too,” Rutherford said. “What a bother.”

“So they’re after me. We can pick the battlefield.”

“And your appointment?”

“Can wait. I’ll plot you a route out of the city in the same direction as the estate. Need to see if we own any properties on the way.”

“Might I suggest we detour onto the southern waterfront and use one of the warehouses by the old piers?”

Keel looked up from his tablet. “Empty?”

“Mostly empty sir. There are some condemned areas down there after the tsunami, but some structures were sound enough to survive. It’s isolated enough that we’ll be able to use the full arsenal.”

“So will the team, good idea. I’ll leave that to you.” Keel navigated out of the GPS system and into a different application where all the different protocol listings were, tapping once onto the button that said:

He confirmed he wanted it right on his current position, and then scanned his thumb on the corner of the tablet for good measure. The program told him his request had gone through, and he put the tablet back in its compartment, taking a handgun from the holster inside instead and looking out the back window.

They had barely turned two streets and a pair of lumbering SUVs with tinted windows were already on their tail, each painted pitch black and the driver’s intentions impossible to read at this distance. “It’s not going to be hard to split them up and take them out one at a ti-”

A third SUV, then a truck painted the same way, turned onto the same road behind them and joined the convoy.

“Who the fuck are these guys?”

“There’s a highway. Should I take it?” Rutherford asked.

“If it’s faster, yeah.” Keel checked the magazine of the pistol, and the little battery at the back of the slide. “Reckon their windshields are reinforced?”

Rutherford’s eyes flickered to the rearviewmirror, and then back on the road as he turned onto the highway ramp. “They seem like commercial vehicles to me. An accelerated shot should be sufficient.”

“Best news I’ve heard all day.”

Once on the highway, they went much faster, sticking to the rightmost lane and speeding quickly out of the city centre and past the fringes. It didn’t take long for all the skyscrapers to fall away and be replaced by lower residential areas, then the beginnings of a jungle that surrounded this part of the peninsula. On his left he could see the ocean and the long strip of sunken land parallel to it, with the remains of the old pier still jutting out into the blue. The parts closer to the city seemed to be absolutely devastated, the surviving parts reminiscent of a skeleton from which flesh had been stripped away, but as they continued south and Rutherford took them down a spiraling left turn down to meet with a road below, the warehouses and concrete piers seemed a lot more intact, just…abandoned.

“Everyone’s moved up north,” Rutherford said, seeing the pondering in Keel’s eyes via the rearview mirror. “Apparently it’s safer there, and the Governor’s been subsidising the move. Life goes on.”

“And you’re sure it’s not occupied?”

“Positively. They didn’t want anybody living down here anymore, so there was this big campaign.” They turned back onto the large, sparse road that ran along the shape of the coast, past the ruins of old apartment blocks and smaller houses the families of the workers once lived in.

No sooner had they done that did the screeching of tires draw Keel’s gaze back behind them, where the little convoy following them had also made it off the highway. Someone in a balaclava was climbing out of the passenger side window, the compact shape of a submachine gun in their hands.

“Can you slide into the pier connection?” Keel asked, pushing forwards the frontal part of the slide of his pistol. In the space that was left, small lights flashed as the coils charged up. “Make it so they have to come on foot.”

“Certainly. Smoke?”

“And the left side window.”

Rutherford’s hand hovered over some switches on the underside of the dashboard, and once they were in range flicked one, waited for pure white smoke to billow out of the back of their vehicle before turning the wheel sharply, putting them in a slide. They stopped right at the start of the ramp that went over as a bridge onto the small concrete island their target warehouse was built on, facing it straight ahead, and Keel angled himself against his seat, the door and the divider, taking aim with both hands at the smoke though the open left side window.

As soon as the first SUV came out of it, Keel pulled the trigger, the accelerator coils within the slide of his handgun pushing the combustion round out of the chamber faster than normal, clean through the SUV’s windshield and directly into where the driver would be.

Rutherford gunned their engine a little, making their car lurch forwards and avoiding the swerving SUV, which overshot their position, hit the concrete barrier on the side of the road and thanks to its own weight, went through, flipping down towards the rocky shore below. He only stopped when they were at the end of the bridge, where he turned the car, wedging it as much as he could, between the railings, and flipped another button to shift their weight downwards.

Keel kicked the door open and climbed out, using the bridge railing for support. He glanced down at the wrecked SUV on the rocks below, and saw no movement. “How many more?”

“Hard to tell with all the smoke.” Rutherford pulled himself out of the driver’s seat, before reaching in and locking their wheels. Then he reached under the passenger side seat and removed a pristine Marksson lever-action rifle, which he cocked with one hand in a fluid motion. “We need to get inside.”

They both made a run for the side of the warehouse, as gunfire from the other side of the bridge flew by them. At this distance, with SMGs, they would be safe. At least until the mercenaries found a way up from the beach.