Free Son of Cerberus (The Unusual Operations Division Book 2) by Jacob Hammes Page B

not up.”
    Something inside Stephen felt suddenly strange.
    The man behind the counter rifled through a few pages of legal documentation and punched some keys on his keyboard before eying their badges again. He obviously felt uncomfortable with their arrival. To Stephen, it was just another annoyance.
    “You guys sure want to figure this case out, huh?” he said, trying his hardest to stack some stapled papers nervously. It didn’t seem as if he was satisfied, yet he looked up with a smile. “You’re not on the list, but your badges look real enough to me. Let’s head down the hall and I’ll show you where Amy is.”
    “Amy is it?” one of the detectives asked. “I wasn’t aware that she had a name yet.”
    “That’s what the doctors have taken to calling her,” Ashley responded. “No, she hasn’t been formally identified yet, but it’s better than calling her girl.”
    The newly formed group of five people walked down the hallway toward a man at another desk. He handed them all breathing masks in order to keep them ‘safe’. By now, many tests had been performed on Amy and all of them had come up clear. Still, the precaution was a necessary one, seeing as how this unidentified woman showed up without any memory at all of where she had been or what she had gone through.
    The man behind the second desk let the visitors sign in before they headed down the last bit of hallway in order to see Amy. It was much brighter here, with white walls and white floors. The place seemed much more like a hospital than the entryway.
    “Oops,” the male detective said. “Forgot something in the car. We’ll catch up with you in a minute.”
    The man who had been escorting the group looked annoyed, but he told them to hurry up and kept walking. They disappeared around the corner, but something made Cynthia jumpy. They had shown up unannounced and now they were disappearing without ever seeing the patient in the first place.
    As the group walked on, the uncontrollable urge to look back took over Cynthia. She couldn’t place the feeling, but suspicion was driving into the back of her neck like a steel spike.
    Her suspicion proved correct. The woman who had been playing at being detective had a garrote tight around the guard’s neck. It wasn’t until the woman put her weight into the thing that it cut through his neck like a cheese slicer through warm butter. She yanked on it with as much effort as possible, feeling muscle and veins, arteries and cartilage part around the filament.
    There would be no hope for that man. Even in this hospital, they would not be able to save him.
    The male faux detective had a silenced pistol out before the job with the garrote had been finished. He gave Cynthia a wicked smile and pointed his pistol down the hallway before she could react. Something inside her gave out and she knew they had been duped. She could feel a tingling in her wounded arm as something more important came over her.
    “Hey.” A man in a doctor’s outfit had come around the corner behind them. Everyone stopped to turn around as he sounded distressed, to say the least. “Police! Someone call the police! Get help up here immediately!”
    It was just the distraction Cynthia needed. As Stephen was still processing what was happening, Cynthia used the tingling sensation in her wounded arm to guide her toward a nearby wheelchair. In one great heave, she threw the thing like a ragdoll down the narrow corridor at the distracted gunman. If she could have been faster, it would have saved the doctor’s life. Instead, the wheelchair slammed into the back of the shooter at the exact same time he pulled the trigger.
    A silenced clack echoed through the hall followed by the clattering of an empty shell and the banging of the wheelchair as it came down. The man the chair struck fell forward in a heap, covering his head as he did. Meanwhile, the bullet he had unleashed flew over the head of his accomplice and met with the head of the