The Boy Who Walked Toward the Gun

Marcus kicked the door of Room 402 open.

Inside, a man in a doctor’s white lab coat was standing over Victor Kane’s hospital bed. The assassin had a syringe filled with clear potassium chloride poised directly over Kane's intravenous line.

Kane, hooked up to a heart monitor and breathing through an oxygen mask, was struggling weakly against his wrist restraints, his eyes wide with impending terror.

"Step away from the IV!" Marcus barked.

The fake doctor whipped around, pulling a suppressed Glock from beneath his white coat.

Marcus fired a single round through the assassin’s right wrist. The gun clattered to the floor as the man screamed, clutching his shattered hand. Marcus closed the distance in two strides, driving his elbow into the assassin’s temple, knocking him unconscious onto the tiled floor.

Marcus immediately secured the door with an emergency medical wedge.

Ethan walked into the room, standing at the foot of Victor Kane's bed.

Kane stared at Ethan through his oxygen mask, his chest heaving with rapid, shallow breaths. The monitor beside him was beeping erratically at 140 beats per minute.

Marcus pulled the oxygen mask down to Kane's chin. "You have about three minutes before Sterling’s backup arrives, Victor. You want to die as Sterling's disposable pawn, or do you want to take that bastard down with you?"

Kane coughed, blood speckling his cracked lips. He looked at Marcus, then down at Ethan. A bitter, defeated smile touched the old commander’s face.

"You... you really are his father's son... and Abigail's boy," Kane wheezed, his voice raspy and broken.

Ethan pulled the digital recorder from Diane’s bag, turned it on, and held it inches from Kane’s mouth.

"Speak, Victor," Ethan commanded softly. "Tell the world what you did."

Kane closed his eyes for a second, then looked straight at the red recording light.

"My name is Victor Kane," he rasped. "Former Commander of the Federal Special Investigations Division. Six years ago, on the direct orders of State Senator Donald Sterling, I orchestrated the assassination of federal witness Abigail Cole outside the Blackwood safe house."

Diane’s hands trembled as she watched the audio waveform dance across the screen.

"Marcus Hale had no knowledge of the operation," Kane continued, tears of physical pain and regret squeezing from his eyes. "I used Hale's stolen service weapon. I doctored the security footage from the front gate. Sterling paid me three million dollars through a shell account in Zurich called 'Aegis Holdings.'"

"Where is the master server for Chronos?" Marcus demanded.

"In Sterling's private vault... beneath his residence on Elmwood Estate," Kane gasped. "The biometric lock... requires Sterling’s retinal scan and... Abigail’s second encryption key."

Kane looked at Ethan, his breathing growing increasingly ragged. "Kid... your mother... she fought like a lion for you that night. She told me... justice would come for me wearing your face. She was right."

Suddenly, the hospital fire alarms began to shriek. The overhead sprinklers activated, drenching the room in cold water.