Deadlock Read Online Free Page A

His phone? He looked at it, as if some evidence of it would show. The screen told him the call had been lost. He slapped it shut and dropped it into his pocket. He turned to the table, picked up his sunglasses.
    â€œWe have to go,” he told Laura.
    â€œWhat is it? Is everything all right?”
    Hutch flagged down their server and handed her a credit card. He turned back to Laura. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . . Everything’s okay. That was a guy I’d been trying to reach. He’d always avoided me, like everyone else. Now he’s in trouble and wants to talk. I think he knows something, what I’ve been looking for.”
    â€œAbout Declan’s father?” she asked.
    Hutch had always believed the billionaire military industrialist had something to do with the atrocities his son had committed in Canada. The Canadian and U.S. justice departments had ultimately disagreed. Hutch had been digging for dirt—futilely—since returning to Denver a year ago.
    He said, “I think so, yeah.” He waved at Dillon, still watching the show from the far side of the lagoon. “Dillon!”
    Black Bart pushed the sheriff off the stage. The lawman plunged twenty feet into the water. Everyone booed. Black Bart laughed maniacally.
    â€œDillon!”
    The boy glanced over. He grinned and waved.
    Hutch beckoned him. The server returned with his card and the bill to sign. Hutch scrawled the odd words Nichols had told him on a napkin and shoved it into his pocket. He said, “He wants me to research something. Said he’d get back to me.”
    Laura said, “Hey, at least he had the courtesy to call after we ate, huh?”
    Dillon ran over. “Can we get more of those roll things?”
    â€œNot this time, honey.” Laura pulled his coat off the back of a chair.
    â€œWe’re leaving ?”
    â€œI’m sorry, Dillon,” Hutch said. He tried to corral his stampeding thoughts. “We’ll come back, I promise.”
    The boy slipped into his coat. He looked around, frowning at all the places he didn’t get to explore.
    Hutch patted him on the back. “I promise.” He slipped around him and headed for the exit. He’d already started the list of things he had to do when he got home, the computer searches, the phone calls.

FOUR
    Brendan Page moved through the building like a big cat through a jungle. At fifty-eight he was as fit and agile as most of the twenty­somethings his company sent into the world’s hottest war zones.
    Staying that way wasn’t easy. He worked with a nutritionist to calibrate his diet, a physical trainer to mastermind the perfect combination of aerobic and strength exercises, a dancer to help him stay in tune with his body and movements, and experts in the fields of intelligence and memory, because what good was a powerful body without the mind to guide it? To Page, by the time that good night came, it was too late. Dylan Thomas had it right: it was not death but old age at which you should “burn and rave.”
    Now, maneuvering through the corridors, he felt everything, sensed everything: the rubber soles pressing lightly on linoleum before receiving his entire weight; the way the lights cast his shadow behind him . . . under him . . . ahead of him as he passed them; the hint of aftershave lingering from his prey’s having been there. A few minutes ago, at most. Without looking, he gently, almost absently, tried each door handle he passed: always locked. He checked his Steyr Tactical Machine Pistol—or TMP—an Outis favorite for its firepower, dependability, and compact size. It was chambered and ready, set to full auto.
    He detected a high-pitched whine coming through his headphones, so quiet he could have imagined it. He raised his weapon and tapped it against the helmet. The noise stopped. Remembering the flickering image one of his soldiers had recently experienced, he gave his faceplate a