Jake looked at the shelves beside him. They were ten feet tall, so that a member of the library staff had to bring one of the rolling ladders and climb on it to retrieve volumes on the top shelves. The ceiling was twenty feet tall, though, so there was a ten-foot gap between it and the top of the shelves.

Jake tucked the pistol into the waistband of his jeans at the small of his back and pushed in some books in several places. That didn’t make any noise, and neither did he as he used the handholds and footholds he had created and started to climb.

“Well, all that’s going to change,” Foster went on. “It won’t be long now before the big body count will belong to me. I can’t blow up the whole campus, I might as well admit that now, but you know what, Jake? I can call you Jake, can’t I, since we’re about to be blown to atoms together? I can blow this library sky-high. The detonator is right here in my hand, Jake. All I have to do is push it.”
Jake froze where he was. He didn’t want to give away what he was trying to do, so he dropped back to the floor, landing lightly, and called, “Don’t do it, Foster.”

That brought another laugh from the terrorist. Or madman. Pretty much the same thing.

“Now you talk to me! You don’t want to be blown up, do you?”

“I don’t really give a damn about that,” Jake said. “I just don’t want you to die thinking that you’re some sort of infamous mass murderer. You and me are the only ones left in this building. You blow it up, and we’re the only ones you’ll kill.”

That was a bluff, at least as far as he knew. Pierce and Montambault were still upstairs with the other hostages he had freed earlier. He supposed it was possible someone had been watching from a window and had seen the others fleeing, leading them to come downstairs and get out, too, but Jake had no way of knowing that. He’d had his own hands too full to keep up with anything else.

“What?” Foster snapped. “You’re lying!”

“No, I’m not. I don’t know who else you might’ve killed earlier, but blowing up this library won’t get any more victims except a couple of nobodies . . . you and me, pal.”

As he said that, Jake wondered about Natalie. Was she still alive, or had she succumbed to her wound? Was she upstairs, or already in custody? Jake hoped she survived. Not so much for her sake, although he had a hunch he’d always have a soft spot for her, but because she might be the only one left who could tell the authorities any details about Matthias Foster and his crazy, evil plan. That might help keep someone else from doing something similar in the future.

Foster was muttering something. Jake could make out a few vile obscenities, but the rest was an incoherent jumble.

Finally, Foster called, “Don’t try to talk me into surrendering. I’ll never be taken alive. Victory or death!”

“Colonel Travis at the Alamo,” Jake said. “Don’t dirty up the words of a noble man, Foster.” He paused. “If you don’t want to be taken alive, forget about blowing anything up. Put that detonator aside, step out, and face me. Just the two of us.”

Foster laughed.

“Head to head? Mano a mano? Just like the showdown in every bad book ever written and every bad movie ever made? So that you’ll have the chance to deliver some classic badass line like Yippee-ki-yay—”

“Screw it,” Jake muttered. He swarmed back up the shelves, flung a leg on the top, powered up, leaped to the next one, sure now from the conversation where Foster was, and dropped on top of the nutjob while Foster was trying to dig that detonator out of his pocket.
He hoped the jolt wouldn’t make it go off.

Foster screeched curses, hammered fists at Jake’s head, and tried to ram a knee into his groin. Jake was taller and heavier, but Foster battled with the strength of a madman and the cramped quarters didn’t help, either. Foster chopped a glancing sidehand blow across Jake’s throat, and while it wasn’t powerful enough to crush his windpipe, for a couple of seconds Jake couldn’t breathe. Foster pulled back and managed to jerk something from his pocket.

Jake tackled him, and as they both crashed to the floor, the little box slipped from Foster’s fingers and bounced and slid away. He tried to scramble after it, but Jake grabbed him and swung him to the side, crashing him into the shelves. Foster kicked at him, caught him under the chin. That rocked Jake’s head back and made the world go black for an instant.

Foster got loose, went after the detonator. Jake snagged an ankle and upended him again. Foster’s hand hit the detonator and sent it skidding underneath one of the heavy shelving units. Foster screamed in frustration.

Since he couldn’t get the detonator, he scrambled to his feet and ran.

Jake caught up with him in the study area with its comfortable furniture, where he and Natalie had met earlier that day, even though it seemed like days had passed since then. A diving tackle brought both of them crashing down on the carpet.

Foster fought like a wildcat. He was strong, wiry, and had blinding speed. Jake was extremely fast, especially for such a big man, but Foster was even quicker. He got a hand on Jake’s face and gouged at his eyes enough that Jake was blinded momentarily. He came up on his knees, pawing at his eyes with the back of his left hand.

Foster leaped to his feet and clawed at the pistol he had stuck behind his belt earlier. Jake’s vision cleared enough for him to see that. He reached for the gun at the small of his back, drawing faster than he ever had. Sometimes real life just played out like a book or movie.

Final shoot-out.

The shots crashed together. Jake felt the impact against his chest and went over backward. As he fell, he watched through eyes gone hazy again as Foster stumbled back and forth, trying to stop the blood that fountained from his bullet-torn throat. He couldn’t do it, of course, and after a second the gory stream slowed as his heart began slowing to its inevitable stop. He fell forward, and the blood began to form a slowly spreading pool under him.

Jake lay there, mostly numb. He was only vaguely aware of the tactically armored, heavily armed figures that began to swarm around him a few moments later. He heard some sort of erratic thumping, like the sound of distant drums, and wondered if that was his heartbeat.
Then that went away, and so did he.

- Chapter 43