No Immunity

tanned brow, and Kiernan could almost read his thoughts as he realized the impossibility of controlling all the buildings at once. Above him the sky was rumbling. It wasn’t thunder.
    Kiernan whispered, “As soon as he goes inside—”
    “Get those kids out here! I’m giving you five seconds! I’ve got torches here. Five seconds! Then I start torching the place. You can all fry.”
    “He’s not going to—”
    In a burst Louisa was out the door. “No you won’t, you bastard!” She aimed her gun and fired.
    Adcock screamed, spun toward her, and shot.
    She fired again and he slumped slowly to the ground, clutching his pistol as if it could heal him. He shot at her one more time as he fell.
    Louisa grabbed her chest and sank. A gust fingered her blond hair, and Kiernan couldn’t tell whether the weak cry was from her or the wind. Her gun had fallen inches away; she reached for it but her arm was rubbery and her hand fell ineffectually to the ground. “Help me! Help!”
    Adcock didn’t move.
    “Help!”
    Kiernan started toward her, then stopped. The porch door of the house creaked. Connie raced out. Get back! But it was too late for Kiernan to warn her. Running, Connie circled left, making a wide U on her way to Louisa. She almost reached the moaning woman when the shot struck her.
    Kiernan looked to her right. Adcock was still lying on the ground. Standing over him. gun in hand, was the Weasel.
    Above them was a helicopter.

CHAPTER 52

    As the helicopter blades drummed above, Louisa lay on the ground, moaning ever more softly. A few feet away Connie neither moved nor made a sound. She had just been trying to do the decent thing. Near the truck, Adcock, too, had crumbled to the ground. There was no way of telling whether they were alive. Snow was beginning to collect in the creases of their clothes. Kiernan had to keep herself from running to them. But there was no help she could give them, not now. She peered out through the car barn cracks.
    McGuire was still out there, armed with his weapon and Adcock’s. The wind whipped his thin brown hair, snapped his flimsy jacket against his ribs. His eyes were wild.
    “Hey, O’Shaughnessy, it’s the boys I need. Gimme them and I’m gone.” He hadn’t even looked up at the helicopter a hundred yards overhead. “Hey, I got no beef with you. This is a money deal. Gimme the kids. I sell ‘em to Nihonco, I take my millions, and I’m gone. Gimme the kids and you got nothing to fear.” He was shouting, but she could barely hear him over the beat of the blades.
    Grady, Louisa, Adcock, and Connie, dead or dying, all for the knowledge of the oil deposit the boys had no way of transmitting. McGuire didn’t know the boys had no language. By the time they could learn to communicate—if they could do so at all—Grady Hummacher’s oil would be in gas tanks nationwide, via some other lucky geologist. But the Weasel didn’t know that. If he had, he wouldn’t have taken the chance of bursting through the chain on the motel door and shooting Grady Hummacher.
    “Hey, I don’t have forever. This is my one big chance, nothing’s going to keep me from it. You got no choice, O’Shaughnessy.” For the first time, he looked up. The helicopter was moving closer, shifting side to side. “Don’t think they’re going to save you. Adcock was going to burn you out. The torch is still here. The wind from that copter will turn this place into an inferno. You’ll be embers by the time that thing lands. You and those kids if you don’t get ‘em to me. Now!”
    Where were the boys? Had Connie hidden them so well they would die before anyone else could find them?
    “Hey, don’t worry. Those kids are valuable property. They’ll get the best. Hey, I’ll cut you in.”
    The helicopter was fifty feet up. She expected to hear Fox’s voice blaring from the sky, but he wasted no time on words. The navy copter kept moving down, the vibration from the blades growing progressively stronger. If Fox took the boys to B-CADS, they’d be studied to death; if the Weasel got them, they’d just end up dead.
    The Weasel was eyeing the aluminum shed directly across the courtyard from him. It was the one sturdy building in the complex, the logically safe place. To his right was the house, to his left the car barn from which Kiernan watched him. “The boys, O’Shaughnessy! Get me those kids.”
    The copter was moving down fast. Fox was halfway out the door.
    The helicopter was twenty