They had switched to encrypted CB radio. The power outages, and surges, and what the DARC Ops crew thought was a signal jammer, had made communications over regular phone networks tenuous at best. Jasper, distracted by the chaos unfolding on his earbud, almost wished he had no communications at all.

“Go ahead, Jackson,” he barked into his mic as his legs pumped down the steps like pistons firing away in the engine of a sports car.

“Stop what you’re doing,” said Jackson. “We need you up here in surgery.”

“What? You told me to check downstairs.”

“We need you in surgery. Some of the doctors are trying to leave. They’re trying to evacuate as many people as they can.”

When Jasper came to a dead stop at the flat portion of the stairway, and after the echo of his steps faded away, he could finally hear the faint sound of an alarm.

“I was right about the bombs?” he asked. But he didn’t have to wait for Jackson’s response to know the answer. A muffled concussive blast rippled through the building and through his body. The lights surged and then almost died away as the backup generators struggled to meet their energy demands.

And now he heard something louder: an alarm, the stairwell itself erupting in a digitized scream.

Something had gone seriously wrong.

“How far along are they?” Jasper was looking up and down the stairs, trying to decide which direction he’d take.

“Eighty percent.”

“I’m on my way.”

There was no time to debate it, or even think at all about the decision. Something catastrophic must have happened for such an alarm to be sounding, and for Jackson to need him in the operating room. Vic’s bombs must have been placed, at least a portion of them, near or right on top of the main generator.

But then a sudden calm swept over him. And a direction took hold, an idea. Something deep inside compelled him to continue down one more flight of stairs and take the door to the old morgue. He was already so close. What was another extra minute?

The old morgue floor was completely dark. Jasper quickly fished out a headlamp from his pants and then continued down the narrow corridor, holding his handgun in front of him and aiming it into every empty room as he walked by. He was heading toward the room in question, the source of the login fails, and even before he could read the placard, he knew which door it was. The door that was lying on the ground surrounded by a pile of debris. He frowned as his foot hit something tacky. And covered in half-wet paint.

He ducked his head through the doorway, aiming his gun and his light at each of the danger spots before entering. Cleared, he checked the sectors in order of their danger priority. First under the operating table, then the two corners on either side of the doorway, the back corner, the computer station . . .

He moved immediately toward the computer, staring at the keyboard. It had been recently moved, leaving tracks in a thick layer of dust. And then handprints on either side over the edge of the countertop. Smallish hands with thin, artistic fingers. Soft, delicate features for his hacker. The computer screen was asleep, and with a slight touch of the mouse and a few blind smacks of the keyboard, the screen came to life, flashing its soft bluish light into the room. Jasper dimmed his headlamp as he read the screen, a text-only interface for what looked like temperature controls. There was a login box opened, and a cursor blinking at the end of the words.

HELPME.

The cursor seemed to make a sound with each blink, matching the sudden pounding of his heart beat. Beating fast, but at regular intervals, unlike his royal patient upstairs. Jasper looked away, back through the darkened doorway. He then turned his head so that his ear facing out heard a distant knocking sound. He knew it wasn’t gunshots, or more explosives. It was closer. Softer. It reminded him of the sound his brother once made, the frantic tapping after he’d locked him inside Dad’s old empty refrigerator.

The sounds grew louder as Jasper retreated back out into the hall. His heart was pounding now, quickening and throbbing with anxiety as he neared the source of the noise.

But then there was something much louder.

A new, much stronger thud of the heart. His heart. And the frightening sensation of raw, kinetic energy blasting into it, over his chest plate and radiating out through his rib cage, the energy knocking him back on clunky, unsteady feet. His knees buckled and he collapsed against the wall, his chest on fire with pain. His ears were ringing loudly.

Everything hurt. His old war injuries. His most recent battle scars from his part in a Dumpster sandwich. And now, a new addition, the white-hot agony of his chest. His neck even hurt when he craned it up to check down the hall, looking toward the source of the loud pop and the flicker of light. His own light, his headlamp, lit up the back of a pair of running shoes as they scampered away and around a corner. He noticed, before they had disappeared, the shoe company’s logo, gleaming against the beams of his LED headlamp.

He patted his chest, expecting to feel a ripped shirt and growing pool of blood. It had to have been an armor-piercing round, his chest hurt so damn bad. But the only thing that was ripped was his pocket. He slid his finger through a small hole and felt the destroyed back panel of his phone.

Fucking thing saved his life.

He’d heard of soldiers getting saved by random bits of their gear. Drink flasks. Ammo clips. But never some piece of commercial crap made in China.

As he got back to his feet, he slid it out of his pocket, the half-exploded device falling and shattering to even more pieces on the ground. He was sore. His chest and ribs were likely bruised to hell and back. But he was alive.

He grabbed his gun off the ground and began to carefully follow the tracks of the gunman, creeping around a corner in the hall while calling in to Jackson. He skipped the hysterics. “Are you in front of a computer?”

“What do you think?”

“Can you tell me where the service elevator is headed?”

“Who’s on it?”

“The guy who just opened fire on me.”

“Oh,” said Jackson. “Must not be a very good shot.”

Underneath the nonchalant banter, Jasper could hear him typing, working frantically. His breathing was audible. Jasper imaged all the invisible steps that were currently being taken, all the precautions, the warnings, the plans set into motion. Everything had a contingency, including a freak occurrence of active shooters and how to track down and neutralize them.

“He’s in basement two,” said Jackson, the message coming across Jasper’s comms as he bolted up the stairwell, running, taking two steps at a time in long hard strides. “I’m waiting to see if he used his access key for any . . . Wait. Someone just entered room A12.”

“What’s A12?”

“A12 is . . .  air conditioning. It’s an air-pump room.”

What kind of trouble could someone cause in there—someone who’d been manufacturing bombs, and someone who’d just shot at him—what kind of interesting scheme they could come up with in regards to the hospital’s air system?

“Jasper?”

“Go ahead.” He climbed to the basement’s second level and then barreled out the stairwell door.

“We’re getting more reports of gunfire, in multiple sectors. I don’t think I can send anyone your way.”

“That’s fine.”

“So you need to hold off on A12. Do you read? Do not enter A12.”

“That’s a negative,” Jasper was thinking again of the ventilation system.

“Excuse me?”

“Jackson, I think this guy’s a chemist. I found bomb-making supplies all over his office. And you already know what else he’s been up to.”

Jackson was quiet for a moment, just long enough for Jasper to reach the door, when he heard over the radio, “Hold your position. I’m sending Matthias down.”

Jasper’s response was to wave his badge over the door’s reader until the door’s lock popped open with a quiet clunk. It was loud enough for whomever was inside to be ready. So he entered gun first and ready to fire. He wanted to be first this time.

The room’s setup was more elaborate than he’d hoped. Instead of a nice open space, it was filled with boxes of loud spinning fans and coils of various pipes, a whole maze of heating and cooling instruments in the way. The only good news was that the lights were still on.

He crept into the room, his head rotating around, eyes scanning all angles of the room, all possible hiding spots. The droning noise of the machinery hid his almost silent steps, but it also masked any other sound. He had nothing to go on but cold, hard instinct, and the military rudiments of entering and clearing close-quarters situations. And bravery, which was perhaps just masked stupidity.

The room was also narrower than he’d assumed. And more twisty, adding plenty of hiding spots for his cornered attacker—if he was still inside. When he passed by a row of computer interfaces, he noticed one of the screens was still on and perhaps just recently in use. The rest of the screens were dark, in power-save mode. It was the first definite clue that he was not alone. The second clue, after rounding another corner, was those black running shoes. He saw them, and a pair of black-panted legs peeking out from under an opened cabinet door. Above the door was the top of someone’s head, moving, working, then ducking down and out of view.

The easy move would be to just shoot through the thin metal cabinet door. No questions asked. No warning. Hardly an aim since it was so close.

But despite everything he’d witnessed in the last six hours, and despite what his gut said, he couldn’t make himself to take the risk. He’d rather be dead than shoot a friendly.

Certainly, there was no set protocol, no rules of engagement for attempting to stop a possible bio-weapon terrorist in the hospital’s ventilation room. It would be a no-brainer if he could identify his target with certainty. That would be the easy part: point and shoot, bag and tag.

He waited there, his weapon trained steadily on the door and the torso beyond it. He waited for a moment longer, keeping track of his breathing, his nerves, keeping an eye on the target. What were his options, any other possible action over blinding shooting and killing a possible friendly?

Should he say something? Make a cop-like command, like “Freeze!” or “Put your hands up!”?

But that might give the person behind the door time to react. He didn’t want his opponent to have any invisible reaction.

It would be best to wait.

But what if the attacker was just about to launch his chemical assault on the hospital? What if he were only a few button presses away from releasing some poisonous gas?

Before Jasper could decide, the door swung shut.

And there, staring back at him, was the frozen face of Vic Demidov. Eyes squinting. Mouth curling up into a grimace.

Jasper didn’t know how or why, but out of his mouth came the word, “Freeze!”

“What?” said Vic, his eyes widening as they fixed on the barrel of the gun. “What!” he cried, a wavering of fear rippling through his voice.

“Don’t move,” said Jasper. “Just relax.”

Vic stumbled back, his shoulder bumping into the closed door. “What? Relax?”

“What are you doing?”

“How the fuck can I relax?” he started muttering something in Russian. Jasper knew a few languages, but Russian wasn’t one of them.

“What are you doing here?” Jasper asked again.

“Testing.”

“Testing what?”

“The air,” he said, swallowing as he talked, so that it came out in a pitiful little choking sound. “The air quality.”

“We’re evacuating this whole place,” said Jasper, taking a quick glance around him, behind him. “There’s no need for any tests.” He focused back at his target—who was most certainly not a friendly. Something about the way his face moved, the way he tried to feign normalcy, or fear. There was some deep-seated turmoil inside his eyes. More than just simple confusion at being surprised in the ventilation room and having a gun pointed at him while he performed some routine air-quality test.

“Well,” said Vic, “I was just . . .”

Jasper started backing up, making room. “Can you come with me?”

Vic remained in his little corner, looking down at his feet, muttering something else in Russian.

“Come on, let’s go.”

Vic looked up at Jasper, and then past him, over his shoulders, his lips still quietly muttering in his native language.

The idea occurred to Jasper to turn around.

But it came too late.

Some kind of cold leather strap roped over his head and pulled up hard against Jasper’s throat, knocking him off balance while Vic rushed in to wrestle for his gun. In the back of Jasper’s mind, the jingling metal sound of a belt buckle registered. He was being strangled with someone’s belt. In the back of his mind, also, was the idea that he would very soon—especially now that the gun had been stripped from his hand—be returning to a morgue. And this time staying there a little longer than his last visit.

Whoever held the belt was now dragging Jasper backward, his back scraping against the tiled floor as he moved deeper into the fan-and-pipe maze of the ventilation room. Vic occasionally popped into view, following behind, holding and pointing Jasper’s gun at its original owner. He was eventually dragged over and slumped headfirst into a set of metal pipes, where Vic helped string a rope around him and the pipes, locking his arms together at the wrists and then tying that in place around the metal. The other man finally tightened the belt, so that his neck was tied up to the pipe, the metal of the buckle clinking against it.

His earbud had been knocked out and it was lying next to him but just out of reach. His gun was gone. And his last contact with the outside world, his phone, was lying somewhere in the morgue with a bullet hole through it.

But even if he could talk to someone, it would come out muffled and garbled through a strip of duct tape placed over his mouth. He tried anyway, cursing loudly through the tape. He kept yelling until Vic bent over and slapped him hard on the side of his face.

“You make noise, you get slapped.”

“Fuck you,” Jasper said, the words muffling back into his mouth and making him feel dizzy, like holding in a sneeze.

“We don’t want to hurt you,” said Vic. “You’re too important to us.”

Another futile fuck you. It went unheard, but Jasper was sure they knew what he’d meant, the sentiment conveyed through a growl. And through his eyes.

“You’ll stop screaming if we take off the tape?” asked Vic.

Jasper nodded until Vic reached over and ripped off, the pain of it making him fight the urge to yell again.

One of the men had carried over a large plastic jug, a bleach container, and parked it next to one of the open flaps in one of the pipes. He reached into the pipe and pulled out a dust-covered filter. But then Vic started barking something at him. He suddenly stopped what he was doing looked at Jasper once, and then ran out of the room.

“Talk to me, Vic,” Jasper said. “What’s going on?”

He laughed. “What’s going on?”

“Yeah,” said Jasper, flexing his arms apart, twisting his wrists, doing everything he could to test the knot. But it was tight. Well constructed.

“I think you know what’s going on,” said Vic. “That’s the problem.”

“Right. You’re doing air-quality tests. Why don’t you tell me about your findings?”

Vic laughed.

“I’m a man of science, too, you know.”

“You want to hear my findings?” Vic asked, walking away to an opened laptop.

Jasper kept working the rope, stretching it against the metal. “Yes. Of course.” He felt the knot loosen slightly. “I’d love to hear your findings.”

“Well, the air, right now . . .” He was typing something. “Is good. Is safe.”

More pulling on the rope. He tried not to make so much noise, the belt buckle clanking against the pipe as he worked.

“But,” said Vic, “pretty soon it will be different. Not so safe for the prince.”

“Won’t that affect everyone? Not just the prince? Won’t you be harming thousands of innocent people?”

“Collateral damage,” he said with a shrug. “But most of them left already, so it won’t be so bad. You should have left, too.”

“I tried,” said Jasper.

“No, you were nosy.”

“Listen, uh, Vic . . .” More pulling, more loosening. “Was that you downstairs?”

Vic laughed as Jasper finally made enough room to slip a single hand out of the knot.

“Was that you, shooting at me like that?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“It was a good shot. And I knew you thought so, too.” Jasper very slowly and silently slipped his hand free. But he was still careful to keep it by the other hand, as if it were still tied. “You were so surprised to see me alive, weren’t you?”

Vic shrugged while he walked over to Jasper.

“Why didn’t you finish the job up here?”

“Too many pipes,” said Vic as he reached for Jasper’s earbud and put it in his own ear. He listened for a moment, and then said, “They’re trying to refire the main generator.” Vic laughed uncontrollably before putting a hand to his mouth, blocking the sound.

“What’s so funny about that?”

“Your little nurse friend.”

“What about her?” Jasper’s mind began to panic. She’d left right, gone home? The last time he’d seen her she was safely—

“She might be a little uncomfortable, if your men turn the power back on.” Vic took out the earbud and threw it at him, the small device pinging off the floor. “Why don’t you do her a favor and tell them to stop?”

The prince, in surgery, needed the power for his life support while he was under. And so did any other patient who was still in the hospital and depended on electronic devices to survive. The generators couldn’t last forever. “Why would I tell them to stop?”

“You don’t have to,” said Vic, returning to his computer. “You’ll have to make a choice.”

Jasper felt nauseous even considering it.

“So what’s in it for you?” asked Vic, still typing away. “Money? Are you getting paid for this?”

Jasper quickly brought his hand out from behind and reached it into his pocket. “I’m just doing my duty.”

“For Saudi Arabia.”

Jasper pulled out the syringe from the lab, still capped in his back pocket, and hid it behind his back.

“Why your two countries are so in love, I’ll never understand. Especially with how they fund terrorists and play your enemies against you. Let alone all the human-rights atrocities. If your country was smart, the people, they would ditch your globalist puppet leaders and finally join up with Russia. Defeat the real terrorism.”

“I think I’m looking at some real terrorism right now.”

“You think this is terrorism?” said Vic. “It’s just an assassination. Just business. The simple effect of the Oil War. It’s nothing personal.”

“Tell that to the innocent bystanders you’re about to kill off.” Jasper brought out the syringe and jammed it into the plastic bleach bottle. Using the fingers on his free hand, he pulled up on the plunger and extracted its brown contents. “What are you using, by the way? Is it chemical or biological?” With the syringe fully loaded, he aimed at the back of Vic’s leg.

“What do you care?”

“Because I want to know how fast you’ll die.”

The needle plunged deep into Vic’s calf muscle at the same time as Jasper’s thumb depressed the deadly contents into his body. It had an immediate effect, the puncture wound itself, the metal forcing Vic to yelp like a dog, jumping away from the needle and away from Jasper, falling to the ground with his hand clutching the back of his leg. He swore madly, kicking and screaming, his voice growing impossibly higher in pitch and intensity.

Jasper wasted no time, tugging and pulling at the rope still wrapped around his other wrist. Vic, meanwhile, had quieted down considerably. A look of deep sadness washed over his face, plus a green pallor—either from the substance, or from the shock of it all, the knowledge that something especially unpleasant was lying in store for him.

The rope began to loosen and then gave way with a satisfying sound as it rasped over the fabric of his shirt and fell to the floor. But the sounds that were now coming from Vic were anything but satisfying. Jasper had wanted to incapacitate him, to knock away his smugness. But what he was forced to listen to now was worse than what he’d expected. A grown man crying. And then hyperventilating, with bubbles and yellowish foam appearing from his mouth, his eyes opened impossibly wide. And then the shaking began, his body convulsing hard and slapping against the ground as Jasper freed his other hand from the rope.