“Yeah, I got it. It never happened. Let’s go in.”
“But it did happen.” She kept ahold of his arm, but her grip was surprisingly gentle.
He had entered the bedroom suite, not knowing she was in there. Just out of the shower, Palmer was naked. She’d been drying herself, but the towel did little to hide her body. He’d stood frozen for several long seconds, then turned away.
“Sorry, I was looking for a room to do some yoga. I didn’t know you were in here.”
“That’s okay,” she said quickly. He’d fantasized that she hadn’t wanted him to leave, so he didn’t. When he looked back at her, she had let the towel fall away. He’d closed the door and turned to face her. He didn’t intend to approach her, but the heat that flashed through his body took control. She met him halfway and they kissed feverishly. She had wrapped her arms around his neck, fingers clawing into his shoulders, and he had grabbed her butt and pressed her into him…
…for all of three seconds.
Their comm units had beeped in their ears and the spell was broken.
“Agent Palmer, I have actionable intel,” Peoples said. “Are Johnson and the others still on the channel?” They had separated, though neither wanted to, and Carl had gone into the living room.
He tried to blink away the memory. Her bare skin had been hot from the shower, soft and smooth. Her muscles were tight in his grip.
Carl said, “Yes, it did happen, but I know it shouldn’t have.”
She nodded and let go of his arm. “The men I meet don’t live in my world.”
Translation: Normal men can’t handle a badass killer like Agent Palmer. Beyond sex, she probably wouldn’t be able to find any kind of comfort or support from someone not in her line of work. Carl got the feeling the woman standing in front of him, lovely though she was, lived a very lonely existence.
“Thank you for that,” he said.
She cocked her head a bit. “For what?”
“For being…gentle…about rejecting me.” He smiled to break the tense moment.
“I haven’t rejected you yet.” She smiled in return and nodded toward the door.
Once inside the house, Carl fell in behind Palmer. She moved carefully and quickly with the stock of her PDW glued to her shoulder. Her gaze followed the front and rear aim sights on the weapon as the rifle proceeded her into each room. He waited by each doorway as she gave the rooms they passed a quick interior scan and hollered, “Clear!”
Carl basically protected her rear, staying in the hallway with his Glock pointed at the floor. The mercs still considered him a rookie, even though he’d shot the Glock the day before and now had combat experience. He hadn’t been given an automatic rifle because, as Palmer had said, a combat scenario was no time for learning how to use a new weapon.
Carl crab-walked sideways in Palmer’s wake. He tried to mimic her cat-like movements and settled quickly into a practice of rotating from side to side every few steps and scanning behind him and in front as they moved through the hallways. Like Palmer, he kept a wall at his back, but he was careful not to actually make contact with the walls. He noticed Palmer did the same thing. Neither wanted to make any scraping noise. He knew that, while the exterior of the house looked like an old remodeled adobe, the inside was all two-by-four frame construction covered by five-eights-inch drywall. Bullets would blow right through that stuff if they rubbed their gear against it or leaned against it and it creaked.
It wouldn’t be like in the movies where the heroes could duck out of the way as little neat holes in the wall chased them around corners. He’d actually tried to sell a house that had felt the touch of a drive-by shooting in Albuquerque’s Westside. Inside the house, the drywall had literally exploded from the bullet impacts, leaving dust and debris and two-by-four wood splinters everywhere. The bullets passed through the stucco and the drywall and through multiple walls of the house before blasting out the back and into the next house. There was literally no place to hide from bullets in a house, unless it had an old metal bathtub.
Whenever Palmer came to a doorway or a blind hallway, she hollered, “One!” which was her numerical designation for this op. If a friendly was nearby, he would holler back his own number designation so the two wouldn’t shoot each other. The amazingly simple method of identification made a lot of sense to Carl, as an opposing force couldn’t possibly guess at which numbers his group would be using.
Carl was designated as Zero. He wanted to think it was because he was the leader of the band, but he knew it was more likely because he had limited combat experience. He’d been lucky in his free-for-all engagements where everyone was his enemy. Now, though, the home invasion required true combat experience, quick thinking, and restraint, and he understood his limitation.
There was a lot of screaming and harsh language inside while the commandos forced everyone out into the front yard, but there was no violence. There were perhaps a dozen children on the property and the adults weren’t willing to risk their safety.
The mercs know their crowd-control business, Carl thought as he moved through the house to the front foyer. He saw out through the wide-open, double front door that the mercs had rounded up everyone a dozen paces away. Everyone was grouped together and all had been made to deposit their cell phones in a pile in front of the group. One merc stood guard over the collection of occupants, while the other two prowled inside and outside looking for stragglers.
Those three mercs were designated as Three—because that was Trent Englebaum’s previous designation—and Nine and Twelve. Numbers were staggered, Palmer had said, just to mix things up. An opposing force might just assume there were at least twelve in their force and might hesitate to engage them. Or, they might call out the wrong number and get shot for their troubles. If they didn’t call out a number, they’d still get shot.
The team cleared the house quickly and found Orizaga’s office on the second floor of the northwest wing, near the front of the estate. The room was probably close to eight hundred square feet. It was richly appointed in dark red hardwoods, and an exotic black wood trim wrapped around the room at the three-foot level. Below the wood, the wall was dressed in rich cloth wallpaper with thick stripes in red and brown and green. Above the wainscot, the wall looked like finely brushed plaster painted beige.
The wall to the right of the door held a huge floor-to-ceiling window covered partly by sheer drapes. The wall opposite the door held a six-section sliding glass door that led to an expansive balcony, complete with a bamboo cocktail table and two matching, cushioned recliners. The wall to the left of the entry door held a massive built-in bookshelf constructed of the same fine black wood as the wainscot. The shelves were filled with books. The only anomaly in the wall of shelves was a huge black safe mounted midway along the wall with the top of the safe about shoulder height. The access panel held a digital keypad instead of the typical round combination knob.
A massive desk occupied the center of the room equidistant from the entry door and the balcony. Carl knew next to nothing about exotic woods, but the reddish-black desk looked extremely expensive. Its surfaces held a brilliant sheen that highlighted its subdued wood grain. The top of the desk was immaculately empty of everything except three large flat-screen monitors.
Carl could tell a laptop was missing because the charger cable snaked around the front where a person would sit. Carl followed the cable and discovered the cord was still plugged into a floor receptacle in the honey oak floor. Orizaga also had a tower computer beside the desk. Carl circled the desk, finally standing behind the very comfortable looking, black leather chair. The computer equipment sat on the floor on the left side of the desk. He pulled out a tray on well-oiled rollers from under the desk and found a wireless keyboard and mouse. He hit a key and the displays lit up two seconds later. The center screen held a login password box. He grunted his disappointment.
Over his shoulder, Palmer said, “We don’t have time to try to guess what his password is.” She m
ade her way directly to the safe.
“I’ll find someone who knows the password.” He pivoted and headed toward the door. “Zero!” he hollered.
There was no response, so he raised his Glock and moved quickly into the hallway prepared to shoot anyone he saw. He knew no one was going to voluntarily give up the password, so he tried to psyche himself into getting ready for the task of convincing someone to cooperate. Tried to convince himself that it was nothing he hadn’t already done in the previous weeks. Told himself it wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do again in the near future. He had to release his monster from its designated compartment. He felt a sense of excitement along with the dread. Carl hated his monster, but also loved it, for it gave him confidence and strength. His monster made him feel alive.
He walked quickly out the front door, toward the gaggle of family members and groundskeepers huddled together under the watchful eye of Merc Three. Carl approached the group, holding his Glock at his side, and stood by Three’s side.
“Which one of these people is Mrs. Orizaga?”
“No clue, Boss. I don’t speak the language.”
“Let’s see if they speak my language, then.”
With his left hand he peeled open the Velcro tape holding the combat goggles firmly to his face. The lenses were practically clear, but he wanted the adults to clearly see the conviction in his eyes. He stuffed the goggles in the left thigh cargo pocket of his black fatigues and slowly walked around the group of about twenty people. Their eyes followed him as he moved.
Four of the people were workers, dressed in cheap gray work pants and shirts. Those men all wore gray caps, maybe to shade their eyes from the sun while they worked or maybe as a sort of informal work uniform. Two of the women were similarly dressed in maid’s uniforms of gray and white striped skirts and blouses.
There was an elderly woman and an elderly man, three women maybe in mid-thirties to mid-forties, and the rest were children ranging in age from maybe five to fifteen. Everyone looked scared except for one of the women. She was Mrs. Orizaga, Carl knew instantly. She was the kind of trophy wife a middle-age accountant with mega-millions in the bank would keep.
She was a light-skinned, lovely woman with curvy hips, narrow waist, and large breasts. He face was extraordinarily fine. She wore expensive clothing. While the rest of the group followed him with their eyes until they could no longer see him without turning their heads, this woman twisted to watch him as he moved around the side of the group. She knew she was his target and she wasn’t about to let him step up behind her and intimidate her. By her defiant attitude, Carl could tell she was accustomed to dealing with, or at least seeing, dangerous men.
Several of the younger children whimpered and huddled closer to the older children and adults as Carl stepped into their midst. Mrs. Orizaga had turned completely around to face him. She gazed at Carl through hazel eyes. She was as tall as he was, and they faced each other from a closeness of only twelve inches. Without breaking eye contact, he placed the business end of his Glock against the head of the elderly woman who stood directly to her right.
The beautiful woman gasped, but the older woman did not. The elder woman rested a bony hand on the handle of a pull-along cart holding her oxygen bottle. Plastic tubing turned into a small cannula beneath the old woman’s nose. She was leaning heavily on the handle of the cart for balance. Carl could tell the old woman was expending a lot of energy simply standing up.
To the defiant woman Carl said, “You are Mrs. Orizaga, are you not?”
“I am.” She seemed to square her shoulders a bit with the statement. She did not scare easily, he had to give her that. “You’re an American. You cannot do this.”
“I am Carl Johnson, also known as the American Terrorist,” Carl replied. He saw her flinch. “You know I will do this.” He paused while she considered his revelation. “My president and her sixteen-year-old daughter are in the hospital because of men your husband works for. I will kill everyone here if you don’t tell me what I want to know.”
Carl paused for a moment, then said, “I want the password for his computer system.”
“Please, I don’t know—”
Carl pulled the trigger and the explosion of sound set off shrieks and screams of terror. The elder woman folded to the grass. Mrs. Orizaga screamed too, and turned to kneel at the dead woman’s side, but Carl grabbed her by the hair and yanked her sideways. Carl shifted his aim and together he and Mrs. Orizaga faced one of the younger children. He aimed at the child’s face. Mrs. Orizaga shouted something in Spanish and Carl whispered in her ear.
“I can do this all day, lady.” He tensed his arm. “What is the password?”
“I just told you!”
“In English, please.”
“I can’t. You have to enter it in Spanish.”
“Then say it again.” She muttered a word or phrase that sounded like it took twenty letters to spell. “Come with me,” Carl said. He released her hair, took a firm grasp on her upper arm, and led her back toward the front entrance of the house. As he scanned the property, he saw Agent Palmer watching him from the window of the office.
Carl led Mrs. Orizaga up the stairs and toward the corner entry to the hallway leading to the office. Almost as an afterthought, he hollered out as he stepped around the corner.
“Zero!”
“One!”
But it was a man’s voice.
Chapter 23
1629 hours MST Friday
Northern Mexico
Mrs. Orizaga had actually crossed the threshold of the corner and became partly visible to the man around the corner, so when Carl yanked her back toward him, her left arm and leg remained in sight of the gunman for a moment before following the rest of her body to safety. She looked like a cartoon caricature, arms and legs and hair flailing.
Clouds of drywall dust and two-by-four studs exploded in front of them as the gunman’s bullets chewed into the wall inches from their bodies. Carl pulled the woman down to the floor and fired five shots through the wall to where he knew the gunman had to be standing. Then, he reached around the corner and emptied his Glock into the space, pulling the trigger as fast as he could. When there was no return fire, he peeked into the hallway. The man was down. He let go of Mrs. Orizaga just long enough to eject his spent magazine and replace it with a fresh one from his vest. He dragged Mrs. Orizaga along with him and approached the gunman. From far ahead he heard another yell.
“One!” It was Palmer’s voice this time.
“Zero!”
She came into the hallway with her weapon at the ready while Carl examined the dead man. Of the seventeen-round clip he had fired off, only one bullet had hit home. He’d scored in the center of the man’s forehead.
Carl rough-handled Mrs. Orizaga toward her husband’s office at the end of the hall. He walked right past Palmer without looking at her and shoved Mrs. Orizaga into the office. He could feel Agent Palmer’s eyes on him as he moved past her. He and the woman stopped behind the desk and Carl pointed at the keyboard. She entered the password and the screen unlocked.
Palmer said, “Write it down so I can verify it.”
The woman wrote it down and Carl locked the screen and unlocked it. He put his gun on the desk and told Mrs. Orizaga to sit on the floor beside the desk. She didn’t move, so he shoved her back into the corner where the bookshelf wall met the French door wall. The woman trembled, but it was with anger, Carl saw, not fear. He set about his task of scanning the hard drive of the computer.
Mrs. Orizaga glared at Carl and said, “If it’s the last thing I ever do, I will hunt you down and kill every last member of your family.”
Carl, hunched over the keyboard, looked sideways at her.
“You know what?” he said. He picked up his Glock, stepped over to her, and placed the barrel against her belly. “Your husband and his people already did that.”
He pulled the trigger and the sound of the shot echoed in the big room. She flopped back aga
inst the wall as if punched, then slid slowly down the wall of shelves until she fell into a sitting position and over sideways. Her mouth held the shape of an O as if expressing surprise. Carl glared down at the woman for a moment more.
“Fucker,” he said. As he uttered the word, he felt a chill of exhilaration spread through his body. He recognized it as the same feeling he experienced while he was hack-sawing Agent Klipser’s head from his body a week ago. That feeling had been a combination of vindication and hatred. And thrill.
Carl shoved his gun back into its holster on his thigh. He went back to the desk and resumed his scan of the computer’s file directory. He glanced behind him when he heard a click at the wall where Palmer was working and saw her pull open the wall safe. She pocketed an electronic device she had been using, reached into the small box, and pulled out a folder.
She thumbed through the stack and said, “I’ve got something here called Operation Trojan Horse.”
“Not a very original name,” Carl said.
“Yes, but it’s an ominous name for an operation involving the president’s daughter.”
Carl scrolled through Orizaga’s computer files. “I see about eighty gigs of movies here and a bunch of PDF files. It’s all in a folder called Operation Unity. It’s all in English, too.” He looked over at Agent Palmer. “Like it was intended for English-speaking clients, not Spanish-speakers. And here’s a subfolder also called Operation Trojan Horse.”
“The plan to kidnap and infect Melissa Mallory?”
“It fits.” Carl nodded. “Damn, Nancy.” He continued to scroll. “This looks big. Real big. There are spreadsheets, presentation files, and PDFs here. And there are videos with gigabyte file sizes.” He looked up. “This isn’t the kind of material you prep for an audience of one, or even for a small group.” He scanned some more. “These presentations and reports include tables of contents and executive summaries.” Finally, he stood. “This material is intended for a substantial group, maybe a dozen or two participants. This is a massive program plan, and they’ve been at this for a long time.”
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 45
