With Jack's keen hearing he detected the rattle of wind and whisper of voices, and in the distance the scream of sirens. He judged how far away by the wailing that rang in his sensitized ears. Seventeen minutes, two patrol cars.
The Judge's bullish scent reached Jack's nostrils strong and clear. So Warren had come and was close by. Not that it mattered. The whole situation would be over before anyone had a chance to enter the church.
Olivia's higher-pitched but soft voice tinkled through the musty air like chimes in a breeze, and it was followed quickly by the oily sound of Randolph's words. Jack moved stealthily toward the source of the sounds, his knife blade clenched between his teeth. The sweat of the hunt slicked his flesh and he flashed back to the jungles of Africa and his last mission. It might all end here, he thought.
The aroma of incense and smoking candles wafted through the building as he edged carefully through the dim room. The hollow slap of Olivia's bare footsteps and the much heavier tread of the killer's shoes resounded through the church.
Jack darted behind a sleek column and peered into the large vault of the church's interior. Randolph held Olivia's left hand. Although her eyes had a heavy look, she appeared unharmed. Her bare feet showed from beneath the hem of a brown robe that covered her body and fell to the floor. In a single moment, she looked up and then quickly away as he jerked behind the column.
Good. She'd seen him.
He removed the knife from his teeth and hefted it once, twice. Grasping the knife by the blade, he raised his hand over his head and aimed for the vulnerable eye socket where the tip would pierce the brain and bring instant death. He darted another look around the column. Olivia stood between him and the target, an inadvertent barrier protecting Randolph.
He hesitated.
In the moment that he wavered, the quiet creak of a door opening in the foyer alerted him to someone entering the church. The Judge.
Stupid move. There was a reason Warren avoided field assignments at his age.
Howard Randolph reacted to the sound immediately, pulling Olivia in front of him and using her as a human shield. He eased backward one pace at a time. Jack stepped from the shadows in full view, his back to the foyer of the church. Olivia strained against the vise of Howard's arm around her waist.
"Bitch!" Randolph snarled and cuffed her hard on the face with his free hand.
From the pocket of his robe, he pulled a.32 caliber Baretta and pressed the barrel against her temple, his left arm still secure around her waist. The weapon was so small it looked like a toy, but Jack knew its lethal capacity.
"Back up, Agent Holt," Randolph ordered.
Had the threat to Olivia been a knife to her throat, Jack would've thrown his dagger straight for Randolph's exposed eyes. And he would've enjoyed watching the life drain out of the man as the blade penetrated the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex. He was that sure of his skill.
But even as fast as his reflexes were, he couldn't outrace the speed of a bullet. Livvie would be dead while his knife still flung through the air. His heart tripled-hammered in his chest, a fearful staccato wholly unfamiliar to him. He glanced once at her as her fingers dug into the powerful arms clutching her waist while rage flooded through him like the roar of a waterfall.
The risk was too great.
Slowly, he lowered the knife, crouched down, and laid it on the marbled floor.
"That's a good boy," Randolph taunted. "Are you wondering how I know who you are, Agent Holt? Wondering how I knew where you'd hidden her." He indicated Olivia with a jerking of his chin. "While you've followed me, I've followed you." He grinned. "And her, of course."
"I suppose you must be a very smart man, Randolph." Jack bared his teeth and growled quietly. "A computer search, an informant who knew, or you followed her. What does it matter?"
"It doesn't. My, look at you, Agent Holt dressed like a cast member of… what? The Lord of the Flies?" His shrill laugh revealed his disintegrating mind.
"Which character are you, I wonder?" he continued. "Are you Jack, Jack? Or Ralph? I'd have guessed Ralph when I saw you years ago, dressed so tidily in your federal costume of suit and white shirt. So sure that the rules would save everyone."
The gun wavered in Randolph's hand while Jack considered rushing him. A mere leap and he'd be on him, ripping his throat out with gnashing teeth.
"But now," Randolph continued, "seeing you in your primordial state, I realize you're not Jack. Not even Ralph. But Roger." He nodded as if answering his own question. "Yes, Roger of the simian brow and the jutting jaw. Man at his most primitive."
Jack thought of Roger Strong, Olivia's stepfather, and tamped down the fury. "Shut the fuck up." The words came with a calm and coldness he didn't feel. As if he were the one who held all the cards, but the emotion was that of a beast in pain.
Then the reflection of red and blue lights – from a patrol car, probably – flashed through the stained glass windows.
"Cops are here, Randolph," Jack snarled. "You'll never get out alive." And if you put down that gun, you'll be dead in less than a second. I'll gut you faster than a hog for slaughtering.
At Jack's warning, Livvie's expression changed and he imagined he saw revulsion fixed there, not for her captor, but for him, her would-be rescuer. The thought jarred him deeply.
Randolph's eyes darted to the vestibule. "She dies first," he threatened, digging the pistol harder into Olivia's temple. "Kick the knife this way," he ordered.
Jack heard the footsteps that crept through the vestibule into the church interior. Two men. He inhaled deeply and caught the familiar scent of his mentor and the steady odor of his old friend. The Judge and Slater.
Suddenly a white, hot pain jabbed his right eye and he felt the burning sensation in his kidney. He nearly gasped aloud. Oh shit! Now he knew why Warren had showed up. The overdose of lysergic was shutting down Jack's systems.
Not yet, he begged silently.
He shook his head and forced himself to focus. He needed a single swipe to topple his enemy, but he couldn't risk that Randolph's involuntary jerking would release the hair trigger of the gun and discharge the weapon. He nudged the knife closer to where the man stood, still shielding himself with Livvie's body.
Randolph crouched, dragging his captive down with him until they both squatted on the floor. "Get it," he ordered, shoving Olivia forward so that she could grasp the knife where it had landed mere inches from her feet.
Instinct shouted that this was the moment. Would Olivia know what to do? Jack caught her eye, gave her a silent message. Without considering the consequences, he leapt forward and caught Randolph under the chin. A sharp blow to the throat with an elbow toppled him.
Olivia flung herself flat on the floor while the gun discharged, loud as a cannon shot in the vast, vaulted room. The robe slid off her shoulders and fell to the ground. She lay on her stomach, knees curled up beneath her, arms straight out for balance. She stared at Jack over her arm, her face reflecting horror and shock.
That she witnessed him like this – carnal and primed for the kill – wounded him.
Jack's forearm pressed against Randolph's throat and he waited to hear the distinct crunch that signaled the crushing of the small bones of the neck. Her eyes wide with shock, Livvie stared as he tightened his strangle-hold on Howard Randolph.
Easing back, gazing into Olivia's stunned face, Jack wormed his way into her mind, and saw himself through her eyes. A wild brute, fierce, lustful, without reason or rationale. A creature driven by instincts and the basest desires. One which could kill without conscience or qualm.
The latest model of the Invictus soldier.
Jack remembered when Olivia had promised to love him no matter what. But how could she love a man like that? His heart thundered, the blood burned in his veins, and his muscles collapsed with fatigue. Loosening his grip on Howard Randolph, Jack rolled over onto his back.
The last thing he saw before his eyesight narrowed to a small, dark tunnel was the Judge's florid face hovering over him.
Slater slammed the suspect to the floor and jerked his hands behind him, kneeling hard with his right knee in the center of the man's back. He then tightened the cuffs in a vicious twist. The DLK suspect coughed and sputtered, his throat an angry red blotch.
Warren knelt over Jack, whose face and arms were clammy to the touch. His eyes rolled back in his head, and his body temperature had plummeted. Warren placed two fingers on the carotid artery and felt the pulse, erratic and faint.
From the corner of his eye, he assessed the situation inside the church. The Gant woman sprawled naked on the floor. The Sheriff grabbed the fallen robe, covered her, and gently led her to the row of hard wooden benches. Held her in his arms like she was crystal.
Warren checked Jack's eyes for mydriasis. His pupils were blown, a clear symptom of the overdose. He wasn't a doctor, but he'd seen enough men die that he knew Jack was in trouble. Any moment his internal organs would shut down one by one. The kidneys first, then the circulatory system, and finally cardiac arrest. The distant whine of the ambulance siren reached his ears and he estimated their ETA about five or six minutes.
Not soon enough.
"Bring the damn medeport," he yelled to Myron Higgins.
Higgins, who had hovered in the foyer, scurried over, opened the medical portage unit, and reached for the syringe and the first bottle of serum.
"Straight into the veins," the Judge instructed while Higgins filled the syringe and tapped the raised needle. "Use the neck."
Higgins injected the first vial into the vein at Jack's throat as the Judge prepared the second one. "We'll use the femoral artery for this one."
His assistant looked up in surprise. "Sir, that's a dangerous spot for the injection site."
"Hell, take a good look at him. He's no good to me if I can't bring him completely back. We don't want a goddamn vegetable. We don't have any choice."
Reaching into the medeport box, Higgins pulled out a length of rubber tubing which he wrapped around Jack's thigh, and quickly injected the second antidote. Temporary measure, Warren knew. If Jack didn't get a steady dose of specific drugs in a regimented order, he'd slip into a coma and no amount of miracle workers could bring him back. The third and final injection of this first series was administered into the vein of Jack's right arm.
Warren removed his jacket and tucked it under the unconscious man's head, sat back on his heels and waited. If the Judge was a praying man, he'd likely think of all sorts of fancy bargains to make with God. But sometimes life was a shitty little affair, so he reached for Jack's hand and clasped it firmly in his own.
Then he hunkered down and prayed a little anyway, though he'd given up the notion of God years ago. Couldn't hurt, he told himself, and if it helped… well, it was a small inconvenience. He waited for Jack to snap out of the systemic shutdown of his internal organs.
Warren was peripherally aware of the bustle around him. Two patrol cars arrived a few minutes later with several deputies and federal agents who raced around securing the scene and suspect. Slater took the Gant woman to a patrol car. Howard Randolph was shackled and locked in the back of another car.
The ambulance finally arrived and carted the patient off. By the time they reached the hospital, Jack had begun to recover his color, his breathing stabilized, and his blood pressure normalized. The Judge could tell, however, that the agent was still in a lot of pain, and he knew Jack would need continued medication for at least a week before the recovery journey would begin in earnest.
"Damn, Jack, I'm too old for a rescue mission," he grumbled, standing beside the bed where the agent lay in the emergency room.
Warren understood Jack's refusal to let the ER doctor do more than take blood pressure and pulse. When the doctor left to examine Olivia Gant, Warren administered an injection of fentanyl intravenously. He saw the curtain of pain begin to lift from Jack's eyes.
His agent was returning from the dead.
Olivia couldn't bear to look at him. Through the police custody of Randolph, finishing up at the abandoned church, and the emergency medical attention, she had studiously avoided Jack's eyes. He didn't blame her.
He'd lived with what he'd become – what he was further capable of becoming – for a lifetime. Even though he'd felt the gentle tug of what he'd once been pulling at him again, even though he knew she loved him, he couldn't expect her to accept the kind of life he lived.
The hospital released him quicker than they approved of, but Jack's own body would heal faster than anything civilian doctors could do.
"Are you heading back to Baltimore?" Jack asked the Judge.
"We both need to wrap it up as soon as we can." The Judge eyed him speculatively as if he expected an argument. "I'll be in on the interview with Howard Randolph."
Jack kept the surprise from registering. Warren had never been in on an UNSUB's arrest, never participated in an interrogation. Hell, there'd hardly ever been an interrogation anyway what with the suspects dead for the most part.
"You okay with that?" Warren asked.
Jack twitched a shoulder and immediately regretted it when a pain shot through his ribs. "Why not?"
"I'll meet you there," the Judge said and turned to go.
"One last question," Jack said. He met Warren's faded blue eyes with a steady gaze. "Have you always known about Olivia?"
The Judge hesitated, indecision flitting across his face. "You were always different, Jack. I suspected it was because of her, but I underestimated the, ah,… connection."
With that he and Higgins hustled out of the hospital.
Hadn't they all, Jack thought.
Considering what he'd been through, he didn't feel too bad. The drugs and his body's own healing powers, weak as they'd been recently, were now working their recuperative magic.
He overheard the emergency room physician suggest Olivia stay overnight for observation, but stubborn even in crisis, she squelched the idea quickly. "No, I'm leaving now, no overnight stay."
Jack heard her bewilderment and scented the underlying pain as he watched from the sidelines while the nurse cleaned cuts and scrapes and applied bandages to Olivia's slender body. Someone – probably the ever-vigilant Higgins – had provided clothing, which hung baggy on her small frame. Finally Slater led her down the hospital corridor and pulled a patrol car around to the emergency room pickup circle.
She hadn't once looked Jack's way. Sitting outside on a cement bench, she stared straight ahead, refusing to acknowledge him as he sat down beside her.
"Are you okay?" he asked.
After a long moment she lifted her shoulders in answer.
"Olivia," he began, "I'm sorry. Sorry you had to… to see that."
"No," she said, her voice eerily calm, "it's better that I know the truth. See it for myself." She looked down at her hands folded tightly in her lap. "I know you told me about the Change, but it's not the same. Not the same as seeing it firsthand."
"I'm sorry," he said again. "I'd undo it all if I could." He scooted closer and put his arm around her, ignoring the slice to his heart when she jerked involuntarily.
"We've got to find a way to get past this, Livvie." He turned her face gently toward him. He dipped his head to touch her forehead softly with his lips. "I love you."
Her eyes shimmered with emotion, but she didn't cry. "I don't know how I feel, Jack. I need some space… and time. I need to figure things out."
He told himself she was still in shock, that later she'd acknowledge her feelings for him. She loved him, of that he was certain. But he didn't know if that was enough for her.
He nodded and minutes later watched the taillights of the patrol car until their red glow dwindled to the same size of the nothingness in his own dark heart. Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he hunched his shoulders and crossed the parking lot to the Blazer a deputy had retrieved for him.
Inside, he folded his arms over the steering wheel and rested his head on them. Jack was terrified that nothing – even time – could undo what Olivia had witnessed in the abandoned church. He started the patrol car and accelerated onto the freeway, exorcising his frustration through reckless driving as he sped toward Bigler County.