Untouched The Girl in the Box - By Robert J. Crane Page 0,72
his hand clutching the back of his head, stumbling over to me. “You okay?” He asked the question while I still stood transfixed, staring at the remains of the small town where I had been only minutes before—and which was now wreathed in flame and smoke, the last resting place of its occupants. “Are you all right?”
His glove brushed my cheek, stirring me back to reality. The explosion had died down, but the light of the fires still burning in Glencoe reflected off the clouds, casting the night in the most surreal light. “I’m fine,” I said, barely managing to get the words out. “How many people lived in that town?”
Zack’s hand was still on the back of his head, but his gaze fell. “I don’t know. Several thousand.”
I spoke in a voice of awe. “He killed them all. He’ll do it again, Zack, he’s going to do it again in less than twelve hours if he doesn’t get what he wants. He said this was his warning—his only warning.”
“Even Gavrikov wouldn’t be so insane as to...” He didn’t finish his sentence. His eyes stared back into the distance, to the fires that still burned. “He wouldn’t. He just wouldn’t.”
“He would,” I whispered. “He will,” I said, this time with firmness. “Unless we bring Kat to the tower tomorrow morning, he absolutely will.
“And you can kiss the city of Minneapolis goodbye.”
Chapter 24
We stood arrayed around Old Man Winter’s office, Zack glaring at Kurt, Ariadne leaning against the wall looking faint, the four members of M-Squad situated behind me and Kappler. Ostensibly because we were women, we were the ones that got the chairs. I didn’t care; I was tired. Old Man Winter sat behind the desk, his usual inscrutable self.
“Why’s the girl in here for this?” Clary’s words came out in a kind of low whine. “She ain’t an agent or one of us.”
“She’s here because she’s got more experience dealing with the hostile than any one of us,” Bastian said in a clipped tone. “He spared her life from the explosion, after all.”
“He did more than that,” Kappler said in a heavy, Germanic accent. “He picked her up and carried her clear.” Her eyes were narrow by nature, now they were slitted, her thin face looking like nothing so much as a snake. “I think a good question would be ‘Why’?”
“He perceives me as the only one who will reliably deliver his message.” I was so tired, I didn’t care if they thought I was in league with Gavrikov. I guess technically I had let him loose.
“I figured it was because he was sweet on you.” Clary said it with a suggestiveness that made me assign him once more to the category of “idiot” in my head. Thank God Wolfe was quiet.
“He’s gonna do it,” I said. “You don’t get Kat to the top of the IDS Center, he’s going to send you another message and this one will be a hundred square blocks of flattened buildings and an inferno at the middle of it.”
“He won’t do it,” Ariadne said, quiet.
An uneasy silence settled over the room, broken by me. “Um, yes he will. He’s already done it once tonight just to prove his point. If you’ve already killed several thousand to make a point, why not a few hundred thousand to actually get what you want? Just because you hope he doesn’t, don’t think that bears any resemblance to what will actually happen.”
“He will do it,” Old Man Winter said, quieting the whispers I heard from M-Squad. “Let there be no doubt. But equally certain is the fact that we cannot turn Kat over to him. She is an innocent and he is...unstable to say the least.”
“Sir, we’ll do as you order,” Bastian said, “but the girl compared to a several hundred thousand lives...”
“You will eliminate him,” Winter said.
“I’m sorry,” I interrupted again. “But you guys had a chance to go a few rounds with him down in South America, as I recall, and it’s all well and good that you captured him, but it seems like the nuclear option wasn’t on the table for him back then, for whatever reason. Now it is.” I turned around to find Bastian staring at me, along with Parks, while Kappler glared and Clary looked on with a kind of cluelessness. “If you couldn’t take him down then, when he wasn’t up to using his full power, how are you going to do it now?”