Cut and Run 4 - Divide and Conquer
hyperventilating, “and he‟s coming with a
bomb.”
Zane stared at him hard for a few heartbeats, then turned to see if
Ty had heard. Ty met his eyes, hand dropping as if in slow motion,
body already tensing and gears already turning—he was trying to
decide the best way to sound the alarm without causing a mass panic,
and Zane wasn‟t sure it would be possible.
“Do you know where he is?” Zane asked the boy. If this kid knew
Zane and had a connection to Pierce, the chance of this being legit was
way too high.
“No, I got out just before him. I couldn‟t let him do it.” The kid
looked about to break into tears. “But I couldn‟t stop him. I was
afraid.” Zane grasped his shoulder for a moment before turning to Ty.
“The families?” Zane bit off, noting that the agents gathered
around them had focused on the disturbance.
Ty turned and whispered to the man beside him, then moved to
speak to another, trying to get word around quickly. Then a commotion
broke out on the other side of the crowd.
“It‟s him,” the kid said, pointing, voice high with terror.
With his height, Zane saw over crowds better than most, and he
zeroed in on a person pushing through the civilians gathered by the
family under the awning. Zane didn‟t wait.
“Bomb! Down!” he yelled harshly, trying to shove through the
crowd while pulling his Glock and focusing on the young man he
recognized as Pierce Sutton.
His words were met with complete stasis. For crucial seconds, no
one moved. No one seemed to comprehend. Then time kicked into fast
forward, and the panic and comprehension crashed through the crowd
on a wave as agents pulled their weapons and people hit the ground.
Zane stopped and raised his gun. Pierce bulled his way toward the
casket, clambered up on the side rail to snatch the tightly folded
Divide & Conquer | 271
American flag in one hand, and he waved it around, his face twisted
into a snarl, before throwing it to the ground and jumping off the casket
to land on it with two booted feet.
“Son of a bitch!” Ty growled from beside Zane.
Zane saw his chance as Pierce deliberately reached into his
trenchcoat: the civilians had cleared out, the minister ducked behind a
nearby oak tree, and he had a few seconds for a clear shot.
He wasn‟t the only one who took it.
A volley of bullets tore into Pierce Sutton before he could utter a
word, sending his body jerking like a puppet on slashed strings to the
ground.
Time slowed. Silence reigned again. Several heartbeats, and then
the frozen tableau broke. Civilians milled about in confusion, and
Bureau agents fanned out and around the gravesite, checking for further
threats as the family gathered together, most of them sobbing angrily.
As another agent needlessly checked for a pulse, Zane stopped to
stand next to the body of the young man who had masterminded bank
robberies amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars in losses,
deliberately promoted ill will and hatred in the city, and caused tens of
millions of dollars in damages and destroyed property in four separate
bombings that had also resulted in scores of injuries and three deaths.
When Lydia Reeves had died, Pierce Sutton had become a dead
man walking.
Zane holstered his gun as people started drifting closer. The
cacophony that utterly destroyed the quiet peace of the cemetery was
giving him a headache. He‟d noticed that being blind had by necessity
sharpened his hearing, and now he was paying for it. Children sobbing,
raised and nervous voices chattering, law enforcement vehicles arriving
with sirens on, Bureau agents yelling out perimeter checks, and to top it
off, an unexpected boom of thunder echoing from the roiling clouds
overhead.
Ty stopped beside him, then bent down to pluck the flag from
under the dead kid‟s foot.
“Crime scene, Grady,” someone reminded breathlessly.
272 | Madeleine Urban & Abigail Roux
“Don‟t care,” Ty shot back as he saved the flag.
Zane was pinching the bridge of his nose, trying to ward off the
pain, when he heard a nagging sound that didn‟t fit. Frowning, he
looked around for a cart or machine nearby. He wasn‟t wearing a
watch. But he could just barely hear a measured clicking.
Zane‟s chest seized, and he looked down at the body as Ty
rescued the flag. A flash of metal mostly covered by the trenchcoat
caught his eye, and a streak of pure fear burned through him as he saw
a wireless timing
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