Page 93 of Devil's Due

“No!” Kavanaugh screamed, but it was too late. There wasn’t a buildup and there wasn’t a warning. It fired.

There was a smell of frying circuitry, cracks and pops, and every electronic circuit within a thousand feet went dead.

Including the lights.

Lucia rolled, banged into Stewart and sent him stumbling; he fired blind. By the muzzle flash, she got a snapshot of where everyone was standing, and she kicked both feet up, catching Stewart hard in the groin and lifting him literally off the ground. He hit the wall and screamed in high-pitched agony. She slithered backward in that direction and felt his gun on the floor, grabbed it in her cuffed hands and twisted on her knees.

Another muzzle flash, and something like a sledgehammer struck her in the chest. A hit, low and on the right. The afterimage showed her that the two men with Kavanaugh had their guns out. Kavanaugh, preternaturally quick, was already through the door.

She braced herself for the pain, cocked her elbows, and fired without letting herself think. The recoil slammed up through her arms, hard enough to make her cry out, but she didn’t let it stop her. Two shots, directed to the positions where she’d seen the two men. She heard one hit the floor. The other staggered, then went down.

She struggled to her feet, sweating and light-headed. It was unnaturally silent, with not even the air vents working in the room.

She hit the glass doors with her shoulder, praying that the locks hadn’t been reset, and saw Kavanaugh rounding the corner up ahead. He’d be getting help, and she was handicapped, gun held behind her back. With Jazz and Ben out of action, she didn’t have a hope in hell …

And then Kavanaugh backed up, looking as if he’d seen a ghost.

And maybe he had.

Max Simms came into view. He was armed with what looked like one of Jazz’s guns, and in that moment, Lucia wondered if they’d all been taken for a ride by the frail old-man act, because the expression in his eyes … she’d never seen anything like it. Power. Terrible power.

“Endgame,” Simms said. “Your move, Gil.”

Chapter 17

“You can’t be here,” Kavanaugh said. He backed up, collided with a padded cubicle wall decorated with crayon drawings and clipped-out Dilbert cartoons. “Youcan’tbe here. You’re dead.”

“Do I look dead?” Simms asked mildly.

“I saw you die.”

“What, the vision you saw of your man coming up behind me and putting a bullet in my brain?” Simms smiled. “In some reality that happened. Not this one. You should learn to parse time lines better, Gil.”

Kavanaugh glanced desperately around, but he was trapped. Lucia, to his right, had her gun on him; Simms had him from the front. A blank wall to his left. A cubicle wall at his back.

“An endgame,” Simms continued, “is nothing but the last moves of a foregone conclusion. You were always going to lose, Gil. It was just a matter of sacrificing enough pawns to draw you out.”

“Like her?” Kavanaugh’s eyes cut to Lucia. “Two for one, is that it?”

“Oh, they’re not my pawns,” Simms replied. “We may very well be theirs. Didn’t you understand that when you failed to keep McCarthy in prison by stealing Jazz’s files on the case? Or by trying to have him killed inside?This had to happen.Inevitability at work, and neither you nor I have anything to do with it.”

“You’re insane,” Kavanaugh said flatly.

“You’ve made a fortune out of the disasters of others,” Simms said. “So have I. Maybe that does make us insane. It definitely makes us culpable.”

“Then kill me.”

Simms smiled. “Now thatisinevitable.”

Lucia, intent on holding aim in an achingly difficult position behind her back, heard the elevator doors rumble open, and shifted her attention that direction.

Uniformed guards. “Simms!” she yelled, and darted out of the line of fire. Kavanaugh was already moving. When she looked back, Simms was gone, Kavanaugh was heading for safety, and she was on her own. Again.

She dodged through the cube farm, hoping she wouldn’t reach a dead end, and somehow found the stairs. She elbowed the handle down and tried to decide which direction would be best. Down was obvious, and that was why she hesitated.

“Lucia!” Jazz’s voice echoed in the stairwell. “Get your ass up here!”

She breathed a sigh of relief, wished she could wipe her sweaty hair out of her face, and took the stairs up at a run.

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