As he walked along the quiet streets trying to avoid the pools of light cast by the occasional overhead streetlights, he considered how he could approach FBI Special Agent Lenore Cummings. She wasn’t going to be any happier to see him again than Anita Chapman and her family were. That, Carl knew for a fact. Difference was, the FBI agent had the skills and the tools to fight while the Chapmans did not. Cummings wouldn’t be amenable to any kind of discussion. Of that, he had absolutely zero doubt. She’d kick his ass if she had the opportunity, or shoot him if she had a gun handy.
He’d strapped that woman to a table naked and humiliated her. He’d given her all kinds of visualizations of what he could do to her daughter. He’d even strapped Lisette to a table right next to her and almost cut into the girl’s chest with a scalpel to make the agent give up Director McGrath’s location.
In the end, he almost killed the girl in a blind rage. He’d wanted to very badly, just to punish the FBI agent for her role in his son’s death. He wanted to make her feel what he felt, just like he’d wanted to kill Anita Chapman to punish her father. But he hadn’t been able to do the deed. He couldn’t kill Cummings’s child or McGrath’s adult child. Fact was, he knew his mercy wouldn’t garner him any karma points with the special agent just as it had not with Anita.
No, Cummings won’t talk. She’ll take action. She’ll try to kill me first chance she gets.
His next thought was to try entering quietly and taking her daughter hostage again—hold a gun to the girl’s head. Surely, that would make a mother hesitate, make her listen to reason. But, this particular mother was highly trained. She might sense he wasn’t prepared to kill the girl any more now than he had been three days ago. Besides, he was unwilling to put that girl through that kind of hell again.
As he approached her street, he realized his decision had been made for him. He spotted a big black SUV parked on the street to his right. It had a government license plate and that stopped Carl in his tracks for a moment. He nodded to himself as he realized he’d just learned something new about his adversary. His opponent could command the use of government assets, even if the personnel, as Palmer figured, were mercenaries. The assault force wanted to remain undetected so they’d parked on the next street.
He approached the vehicle, crossing the street at an angle the way someone would if they were simply on their way home after the midnight shift. Then, he realized what a rookie he was. If they’d left someone in the truck, that guy would see him coming. He closed his eyes and cursed himself silently. Nevertheless, he was committed. He couldn’t change his path now because that too would alert any watcher left behind in the truck.
Carl sauntered past the driver’s door, then at the last second he spun back and pulled his Glock in the same motion. He aimed two-handed, but found the driver seat empty. He couldn’t see into the back because the other windows were heavily tinted. He took a deep breath to steady his nerves and reached for the door handle. It was unlocked and the door opened easily, but no explosion of gunfire greeted him. The vehicle was empty. On a hunch, Carl checked the ignition and found the key missing. He pulled down the sun visor and the key dropped onto the seat. He snatched the key, tossed it into the shrubs across the street, quietly closed the truck door, and headed back to the corner to make his way over to Cummings’s street. When the kill squad tried to escape, they’d have to walk.
The FBI agent’s house was third from the corner, on the west side of the street. He paused at the house on the corner. For a brief moment, Carl thought about avoiding the confrontation. He was a fifty-three year old rookie, not a combat veteran. He thought about removing his suppressor and firing a few shots in the air to give Cummings the warning she needed. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind, he realized all that would do was let the commandos know he was in the area. They wouldn’t abandon their mission. They’d simply accelerate. Cummings was a federal cop, so she had her firearm with her, but she was out-gunned, warning or not.
Carl took a deep breath to steel his nerves. The corner house featured a long, six-foot tall brick wall along the north side of the backyard. Carl slid into the bushes at the end of the brick wall almost at the front of the house where the yard wrapped around the side a bit. He remained still and silent for a few seconds and strained his senses for any sign of movement near him.
He heard a whining sound behind him and saw a dog lying on its side next to the chain-link fence that connected the brick wall to the house. In the moonlight, he could see its flank was covered in blood and knew at least one member of the assault team had crouched exactly where he was now.
He climbed the fence as quickly and quietly as he could and knelt beside the dying animal for a moment. The old mutt gazed at him through puppy-dog eyes and whimpered again, but Carl could do nothing for the animal. Even a suppressed gunshot to end the pup’s pain would echo in the near-silent night.
He continued through the backyard and climbed over the side wall of the next house. He paused and listened, then approached the wall to Cummings’s house. He grabbed the top of the wall and slowly did a chin-up until his eyes cleared the top and he was able to look into the yard. Nothing moved.
The FBI agent had a nice Victorian house with a fairly large backyard. While most of the restored Victorians in East Downtown were red brick, or painted brick, with wrap-around porches, and were trimmed in vibrant colors of green or white or mauve or even yellow, Cummings’s house looked light blue or gray in the moonlight. Wide slats of horizontal vinyl siding covered the outside of her house.
He’d seen lots of old Victorian houses in Ohio two decades before, when he’d been stationed at Wright-Patt. In fact, he knew that in the early nineteen hundreds a lot of folks moved to Albuquerque from back east and had built their homes in the eastern Victorian style, in what was known as New Town. Back then, New Town was the eastern edge of Albuquerque, the frontier. Downtown was its neighbor to the west and a mile west of Downtown was the enclave still known as Old Town, which featured the native adobe style of home.
New Town, Downtown, Old Town—that was all there was to Albuquerque a hundred years ago. Over the decades, New Town was absorbed into Downtown, becoming known in recent years as the hip and trendy East Downtown.
While the colors of the Victorians and the front façades looked different, Carl knew the interior layouts were all fairly similar. Most had porches, front and back, some stretching the full width of the house and some not. The front entry doors of most of the homes evenly bisected the width of the houses. Most of the homes were two-story, as was Cummings’s house, and most of the front doors led not into a foyer, but directly into a wide hallway that featured a staircase up to the second floor. Typically, the bedrooms and a bathroom were upstairs and the living areas and kitchen were downstairs.
As Carl peeked over the wall, he noticed Cummings’s house lacked a back porch. Instead, it had an expansive deck on the back with a shiny steel cooking grill shining in the moonlight. There was a minimal amount of grass beyond the deck, and some shrubs and a couple of trees stood guard next to the back cinder block wall.
On the side of the house near Carl’s wall was a small sitting patio with a metal lattice table and two matching chairs. He assumed the furniture was black, though he couldn’t be sure since they were in deep shadows. The sitting patio was lined with foot-high planter boxes, though all the plants were in hibernation for the winter. The patio door was a glass French door and it was ajar, having been forced open without breaking the glass.
Carl completed his chin-up, scrabbling over the top of the wall far less gracefully than the heroes in the movies. He landed awkwardly but on his feet, then crept through the open glass door. He squatted just inside the door and his attention was drawn straight ahead toward voices coming from a room on the opposite side of the house. He heard a man’s voice and a no-nonsense woman’s voice he instantly recognized as Lenore Cummings.
He crept silently toward the voices and heard the wood floor creaking
above his head. It was a stealthy creak, slow and deliberate, like his own. Someone was searching the upstairs rooms to see which were occupied. From his previous research on the agent earlier in the week, Carl knew she lived with her mother and her daughter. There was no man in Cummings’s life, yet the creaking floor sounded to Carl like a heavy person moving about cautiously.
Carl could tell Cummings’s house had been modified from its original layout. The living room where he now crept and the dining room and kitchen had all been combined into one open living space with all the walls removed. He knew from experience that at least one of those walls would have been load-bearing back in the day, so thick laminated wood beams would have been inserted above the downstairs ceiling to support the upper floor. It hadn’t been done well enough, which was why he was hearing the flooring above his head creaking. Also, the wall between the hallway and the living room had been removed. With that wall removed, the stairs seemed to sit inside the living room. The staircase itself had been remodeled into a trendy fixture with metal steps and metal railings, with see-through lattice below the banister to make sure kids didn’t fall over the sides. It was very modern and chic. The front door on Carl’s left was almost directly in front of the staircase.
Carl approached a set of solid wood double doors to the left of the front door, as one would perceive it upon entering the house. He approached out of view of the occupants because the left door of the set was closed and the right half was open just wide enough for a person—maybe a mercenary—to slide through sideways.
Pulling his silenced Glock from his shoulder holster, Carl eased into the doorway and saw the doors led into Cummings’s bedroom, likely a former reading or family room now remodeled into the master bedroom suite. She sat upright in her king-size bed located under a large window. With her table lamp on, he could see that her blanket covered her lower body and she was wearing a high-necked, white cotton nightgown.
“You!” she said as she saw Carl in the doorway.
The commando, who stood in front of the left half of the double door set, had his back almost completely toward Carl. The man chuckled.
“Like I’m going to fall for that trick.”
Carl said, “You should have.”
Just as the commando started to turn toward his voice, he shot him in the side of his neck, just below the edge of his combat helmet. The bullet tore out through the other side of his neck accompanied by a minimal squirt of blood and the man collapsed where he stood.
There was a sudden movement from upstairs, like maybe someone twisting in surprise at the sound from below, so Carl knew the other commandos knew that something had gone wrong with their plan. After all, a suppressed gunshot was only silent compared to an unsuppressed shot, but it was still quite loud in a quiet house, in the dead of night.
Carl ran up the metal stairs three steps at a time. A girl’s squeal of fright reached his ears and he grabbed the metal banister at the top to fling his momentum back in the opposite direction, toward where he now knew the girl’s bedroom was—right over her mother’s.
He burst through her closed door with a kick that shattered the wood jamb and ripped the top hinge right out of the wall. The commando had a hand over Lisette’s mouth and was trying to manhandle the kicking girl into a firmer grasp, so he was totally unprepared for Carl’s violent entrance. Carl shot him right through the left lens of his acrylic combat goggles. He fell back and released the girl, and Carl simply grabbed her hand and literally dragged her into the hallway.
“Let’s go! Your mom is waiting downstairs.”
To his surprise, she didn’t argue or scream or resist. They had just gotten to the back of the hall at the top of the stairs when Carl realized he’d made a critical error. The creeping sound he’d heard when he first entered through the patio door had come from the room above the living room—not from Lisette’s room.
Even as he realized his mistake, four things happened at almost the exact same instant. First, Carl got to the top of the stairs with the girl at his side at the same time that Agent Cummings arrived at the bottom of the stairs. She lined up the sights of her MP5 right between Carl’s eyes.
Then, the second thing happened.
The door opened across the hall from Lisette’s room and a commando took aim. Without thinking, Carl spun in front of the child as flame erupted from the man’s weapon.
For the second time in a week, Carl took bullets in the back of his combat vest. The multiple impacts pushed him and the girl against the wall. She squealed as they bounced off hard. He fell flat on his back with the girl still in his grasp.
Then, the third thing happened.
Chapter 37
0106 hours MST Saturday
Albuquerque, NM
Carl’s momentum rolled him over on top of the girl and almost down the first step of the stairs. When Carl looked up, he saw the commando looking right at him. His weapon was aimed at Carl’s head as he pulled the trigger again at point-blank range.
But he missed.
Cummings had fired a brief salvo that peppered the steel railing in front of the killer a millisecond before he’d fired. She’d missed since she didn’t have a clear shot, but sparks had flashed in every direction and the commando flinched as he fired.
Carl felt the heat as the man’s bullets zipped by his left shoulder. He shot the man five times—twice in the neck and three times in the face.
Then, the fourth thing happened.
Right after Cummings fired at the commando, she took two steps back to get a better angle on the guy. She raised her MP5 to fire, even as Carl shot the man dead, and the front door exploded inward. Carl saw the FBI agent knocked off her feet by the blast, and her weapon slid across the highly polished wood floor.
Still on his belly with the girl protected beneath him, Carl aimed at the three black-clad commandos who stormed through the blown-out doorway. They all held some kind of futuristic-looking, short-barreled weapon with smooth rounded features that was barely longer than the width of a man’s shoulders. There was no magazine extending downward beneath the weapon.
The first man in aimed at Cummings, so Carl shot that man first. His shot bounced off the top of the man’s Kevlar helmet and the man screamed in pain and fell back. Carl rose up on one knee, firing in a two-handed position until his gun was empty. Shaking and breathing deeply, he picked himself and Lisette up and led her by the hand cautiously down the stairs.
He saw Cummings get to her feet and he said, “There could be as many as two more unaccounted for if their SUV had been crammed to the gills with shooters. Or, maybe they had another team in a different SUV parked somewhere else.”
Cummings grabbed her MP5 and hugged her daughter. “Reload, Johnson!” she said.
Carl looked around, suddenly not able to breathe. He felt dizzy and disoriented. He looked down at his Glock as if the weapon was responsible for the victory and not him. Everyone was dead. He did it. He survived his first gunfight against six professional soldiers.
I won! Six!
“Reload!” the agent repeated. “You’re empty. Like you said, there may be more.”
Absently, he thumbed the release and let the expended magazine drop out. He felt for another from his vest and palmed it into place. Then, he scanned the three dead men. Their Kevlar helmets were pickled with multiple bullet impact dimples. Two of the troops had acrylic face shields instead of goggles and those shields were now totally destroyed.
“Christ, Johnson! You killed them all with head shots!”
“Fuck me!” he whispered.
“Swear jar,” Lisette said quietly.
Carl tried to lean against the railing of the stairs, but he grimaced at the movement. His back erupted in pain.
“We were very lucky,” Cummings said. “These three had P90s.” He looked at her, tented his eyebrows and shook his head, unsure what she meant. “They use 5.7x28mm cartridges. Armor-piercing. The bullets would have punched right through that vest you’re wearin
g. They’re designed to tumble around inside a target to make a bigger internal wound. You get shot by one of those, you’ll go into shock immediately. You’re going down and you’re not getting back up. If the guy upstairs had a P90 instead of an MP5, we’d all be dead right now.”
Carl took a deep breath and tried to will the grogginess away. “So why do these guys have them and the guys upstairs didn’t?”
“Because you don’t need armor-piercing rounds to shoot women in their beds. The P90s were for the mop-up crew, so they could deal with any bodyguards or law enforcement wearing body armor.” She glared at him and he could see competing emotions shifting across her countenance. She said, “Why are you here?”
He looked at her, then at her girl. Under his gaze, Lisette shrank back behind her mother. The lanky girl wore pink cotton pajamas with a cartoon character he didn’t recognize on the front. He looked at the agent again, aware of the weapon in her grasp. He had to give her an answer that she found acceptable or she was going to use that weapon. He could see that in her eyes. So he settled on the truth.
“You’re on a kill list, Agent Cummings. Your daughter, too. And your mom and Anita Chapman and her family.”
“But why are you here? Why do you even care?”
He started to confess that he felt deeply ashamed at what he’d put her and her daughter through three days ago, but he sensed she wouldn’t be able to match that bit of humanity with the terrorist she knew him to be.
“Someone—my adversary—wants you dead, so I want you alive. They’re going to blame your murder on me. I don’t know why yet, and we don’t have time to discuss it now. So get your coats and let’s move.”
As he looked again at the dead bodies, he found it amazing that he had not missed a single shot. With the exception of Alfonso Reyes a couple days ago, and Mrs. Orizaga and her mother today, he hadn’t fired a handgun in almost thirty years since Air Force Officer Training School. And yet, he’d scored all seventeen shots in the head or face or neck.
American Terrorist Trilogy Page 51
