The Killing House

by Chris Mooney

  Fletcher pulled into a gas-station lot, turned and navigated his way back to the house. He handed the monocular to Karim.

  ‘When I reach the driveway, I want you to look for heat signatures in the surrounding brush before turning your attention to the house.’

  Fletcher slowed and turned left. A slight bump and then the car climbed up the steep driveway. From the corner of his eye, he could see Karim’s pulse beating in his throat. His own heart rate remained unchanged.

  Earlier, Karim had told him about the garage. With both remotes located inside the house, he had given Boyd Paulson a four-digit code to use on the keypad-entry system located on the outside of the garage. Reaching the top, Fletcher found the circular area clear and the garage-bay door hanging open, the black BMW parked inside. The door he’d entered last night – the porch door leading into the kitchen – was closed.

  Karim searched the grounds with the monocular. Fletcher’s gaze swept the dunes, on the hunt for movement in the shaking brush and sea grass, the glint of a sniper scope – an unlikely scenario, but one he had to consider.

  ‘There’s no one out here,’ Karim said, and turned his attention to the house.

  The garage, wide and windowless, was painted a dull white. The BMW was parked in the same spot it had been a few short hours ago. Fletcher’s roving gaze recorded what he saw now in the daylight, comparing these new images to the ones he had stored in his mind.

  ‘I’m not detecting any heat signatures inside the house,’ Karim said. ‘This device can see through a single wall but not multiple walls and floors, right?’

  ‘Correct.’ Fletcher pulled into the garage bay and looked at the security camera mounted in the right-hand corner, directly above the door leading to the portico that annexed the house. ‘The security camera’s light is blinking.’

  ‘Because the system’s offline,’ Karim said. ‘If they’re in there, they can’t watch us from the monitoring station.’

  ‘You mentioned earlier that it contained a hard drive.’ Fletcher had his attention on the rearview mirror, watching for movement. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Karim nod.

  ‘The drive is secured by a magnetic lock,’ Karim said. ‘If you don’t remove it with a special key, the drive is erased. I have the key with me.’

  Fletcher put the car in park. Karim removed a sidearm – an updated version of John Browning’s legendary Colt design, the powerful BUL M-5 10-mm developed in cooperation with the Israeli Special Forces.

  ‘Stay here,’ Fletcher said, and withdrew the SIG from his shoulder holster.

  He stepped out of the car. No one came running, and no shots were fired. He moved around the car and hit the garage-door button. The bay filled with the roar and clack of gears as the door lowered. He waited until it was halfway shut and then hand-signalled to Karim to kill the engine. Karim did and opened his door.

  ‘I’ll talk to you over this,’ Fletcher said, and handed over a small Bluetooth headset that clipped around an ear. ‘I’ll be wearing one as well.’

  ‘You’ve already found something, haven’t you?’

  ‘The garden hose on the side of the house, I used it last night. After I finished, I placed the spray nozzle back on top of the hanging rack. Now it’s lying against the ground.’

  ‘Maybe the wind knocked it down.’

  Fletcher shook his head. ‘Someone used it recently,’ he said. ‘There are still some damp pockets on the garage floor that haven’t evaporated, and the remaining micro-fibre towels I saw last night on the shelves in here are missing, as well as three rolls of kitchen towel.’

  Karim stared dumbfounded at the garage shelves.

  ‘I’ll contact you when I’ve secured the house,’ Fletcher said. ‘Until then, please remain here.’

  ‘Bollocks. Going in alone is –’

  ‘I need to concentrate. I can’t do that while guarding you.’

  Karim reluctantly waved his hands in surrender.

  ‘Thank you. Now put away your gun before you hurt yourself.’

  Silencer in hand, Fletcher locked it in place with a quick snap of the wrist. He approached the door, reminding himself that he couldn’t shoot to kill. He needed to keep as many men alive as possible in order to find out where Nathan Santiago had been taken.

  Fletcher grabbed the doorknob, turned and stepped back with his weapon raised.

  52

  The chilly hall of white walls and concrete flooring was empty.

  Fletcher stepped inside, closing the door softly behind him. Another door was less than twenty feet ahead; mounted in the corner and watching, a security camera, its single green light blinking.

  He raised the SIG as he threw open the door.

  The morning’s dull light filtered through the gaps between the wooden blinds drawn around all the kitchen and living-room windows. The ceiling fans mounted in the rafters hadn’t been shut off. The spinning blades pushed the warm air down him, with its lingering smell of an extinguished fire.

  No one came running. Watching and listening for movement, Fletcher crept towards the archway leading into the living room. Then he swung around the corner. The entire living room was empty.

  Now he checked the security room. It was empty, the monitoring screen dark. The electrical cord for the security station had been unplugged. He checked the bedroom across the hall, found it empty. Same with the bathroom. The ground floors were empty.

  The wind died down and the warm air inside the living room seemed to throb with silence.

  Were they waiting upstairs?

  Fletcher moved up the carpeted steps, mindful of his shadow dancing across the wall, announcing him.

  The first-floor hallway was empty, the air significantly cooler and the three bedroom doors were hanging open. The first bedroom, the one on his left, was empty. The second one was empty. The last one was empty. Everything was in order. Slowly he moved down the hall and when it curved left he walked across the last part and entered the large room where Dr Sin had treated Nathan Santiago.

  The hospital bed was still in the centre of the room, the plastic liner covering the pillow and mattress smeared with dried blood. Drops were on the floor, and the rubbish bin was full of bloody gauze.

  Fletcher wondered if Karim’s surveillance cameras had captured anything useful.

  Returning to the security room, Fletcher slid the plug for the console into the wall outlet. As the system turned on, he opened the unit’s metal cabinet. The Ethernet cable had been torn from the router, and the system’s hard drive was missing, prised from its metal clasps. The person who had performed the work had known exactly where to look. Only someone well acquainted with the design mechanics of security-system stations would be able to locate where the hard drive was housed, as the area was concealed and couldn’t be accessed easily. Someone had taken every available action to remove recorded evidence of what had happened inside the house.

  The security cameras were back online but not recording. Fletcher spoke into his headset: ‘There’s no one here.’

  ‘What did you find?’

  ‘The hard drive is gone.’ Fletcher moved back to the foot of the stairs. ‘Dial Boyd’s number.’

  No ringing, just the sound of the wind shrieking.

  Karim’s voice came over his earpiece: ‘It’s coming from the BMW – the trunk, I think.’

  ‘I’ll be right there.’ Fletcher did not want the man to pop the trunk and witness Boyd Paulson’s manner of execution.

  Opening the door for the garage, he found the BMW’s trunk already popped open, the small halogen light shining down on Boyd Paulson. A gunshot entry wound the size of a half-dollar had replaced Paulson’s left eye.

  Dr Sin was not in the trunk. Had she been taken with Santiago?

  Karim had a phone mashed up against his ear. Fletcher was moving towards him when Karim yanked the phone away and said, ‘FBI and New Jersey SWAT are on their way.’

  53

  Fletcher looked at the Range Rover. />
  ‘Forget that,’ Karim said. ‘They’ll be here any moment. I’ve got to hide you.’

  Karim whisked past him and darted into the hall. Fletcher followed.

  ‘My New Jersey people were monitoring police frequencies,’ Karim said over his shoulder. ‘They intercepted communications between the Feds and the Jersey cops and state police. They know you’re here, Malcolm. I don’t know how, but they know.’

  Racing quickly up the stairs, Fletcher heard the rotor thump of an approaching helicopter over the wind roaring past the house. The sound grew louder when he followed Karim into the treatment room. Fletcher moved to the windows overlooking the back of the house and peered through the blinds.

  A half-dozen or so SWAT officers dressed in black tactical gear, faces hidden by helmets and black balaclavas, were crouched in the brush and tall sea grass on the dunes overlooking the water, wind blowing sand and grit across their visors.

  Karim had opened the bi-fold doors of a closet. ‘You’ll be safe in here,’ he said, pushing aside the hanging white lab coats. Then he turned to an alarm keypad unit with glowing numbers mounted on the wall.

  Karim punched in a four-digit code. Fletcher committed the numeric sequence to memory as he heard a faint click of locks springing free, the sound followed by a soft hiss of escaping air pressure. The closet’s left-corner wall opened to a narrow room of dim and flickering light. Fletcher had to duck to enter, and immediately found the light source: a laptop computer on a small table, its fifteen-inch screen holding six camera views of different areas inside and outside the house. No sound, just images.

  ‘The same code opens the door,’ Karim said. He handed over his phone, caught Fletcher’s puzzled expression. ‘Your phone number’s listed on it,’ he said, speaking rapidly. ‘Remove the battery so it can’t be traced. Shut off any devices you have that make noise and –’

  A booming sound erupted from somewhere downstairs. Fletcher glanced at the computer screen and saw that the front door had been blown open – an explosive had been used on the locks. The order had been given to breach the house.

  ‘Hold the door and it will automatically seal and lock,’ Karim said. ‘Keep your ass parked in here until I come for you.’

  Fletcher pushed the false door shut. The suck of a vacuum seal, and a moment later the locks bolted home. He heard Karim rearrange the clothing and then the closet’s bi-fold doors slammed shut.

  Quickly he removed the batteries from his phone. Quickly he removed the batteries from Karim’s phone, tucking everything inside his trouser pockets. He was standing inside a makeshift panic room. The area, with its three-foot-wide floor, could accommodate several people, if needed. Karim, always the meticulous organizer, had stocked it with every conceivable provision – cases of bottled water and meal-replacement bars; plastic urinals and neatly stacked portable cardboard toilets, the kind used by outdoorsmen. Fletcher found a defibrillator, an emergency first-aid kit and a ‘blow-out’ kit. Small and portable so that it could easily be stored inside a cargo-pants pocket, backpack or glove box, the blow-out kit contained a number of life-saving emergency items: QuikClot Combat Gauze, a decompression needle, Israeli Bandages and a pair of HALO chest seals.

  Karim had installed lead shielding over the walls – a clever touch. Used mostly as a radiation shield, the lead would prevent the government’s new thermal-imaging devices from picking up a heat signature. An additional keypad had been installed on the wall near the false door, its numeric keypad glowing.

  Muffled shouting on the other side of the wall: ‘Stand down! I repeat, stand down! ’

  On a top-right-hand corner of the computer screen Fletcher saw a view of the treatment room. The hidden camera had been installed somewhere along the ceiling so its parabolic lens could capture the bedroom’s entirety – in a fire alarm, he suspected, given the high angle.

  Karim had dropped to his knees, his fingers laced together and resting on the back of his head as a pair of SWAT officers looked down the target sights of their weapons – HK MP7 submachine guns with extended 40-round magazines, shoulder stocks and collimating sights installed on the top rails. Fletcher knew of only one tactical unit that supplied its men with this new breed of Personal Defence Weapon.

  He dropped to one knee in front of the computer. He recognized the brand of surveillance software installed on the system. A quick glance at the screen revealed that recording option for each camera had been turned off.

  A tap of a key and the camera view for the bedroom enlarged and filled the entire screen.

  Karim was no longer wearing his earpiece; he had tucked it inside the breast pocket of his coat, the tiny microphone end sticking out so it could listen in on the room. Fletcher could hear, over his own earpiece, Karim’s erratic breathing.

  Now Karim’s voice: ‘I’m armed. Left shoulder holster.’

  One officer stood guard while the other pushed Karim to the floor. Both men wore balaclavas; only their eyes were visible. Fletcher saw a patch on the right-shoulder sleeve of one of the men and zoomed in on it. An eagle patch. Not local or federal SWAT but operators from the FBI’s Delta Force-inspired Hostage Rescue Team. To categorize these men as a bunch of steroid-laced elite alpha males itching with buck fever would be both unfair and unwise, as HRT recruited only the brightest tactical minds.

  HRT’s presence here meant several snipers were now watching the house.

  One of the HRT operators had removed Karim’s weapon. The other yanked Karim’s hands behind his back and bound his wrists together with a FlexiCuff. Now the pair turned their attention to the closet. A slam and rattle as the bi-fold doors swung open, and then Fletcher heard a man’s voice just inches from where he stood: ‘Clear.’

  The two operators moved to the bedroom’s far wall so they could divide their attention between Karim and the door leading into the carpeted hall. Fletcher pressed another key and all six hidden cameras came back on the screen. On each one he saw both HRT operators and New Jersey SWAT officers swarming through the house. They threw open closet doors and overturned mattresses. They crawled through the basement with their tactical lights shining in hidden corners, behind objects and furniture, the video cameras mounted on their weapons capturing everything and sending it to their command post, which had no doubt been set up somewhere close to the house.

  The top-left-hand corner of the screen contained a camera view of the driveway. An unmarked Ford Interceptor with flashing grille lights was parked at the top of the driveway, along with a SWAT van and two other unmarked vehicles. Plainclothes officers and SWAT stood armed and ready in a wash of light from blue-and-whites.

  The driver’s side door for the Interceptor swung open. Fletcher tapped a key. The computer window enlarged and he saw a tall, burly man who hadn’t bothered to have his navy-blue suit properly tailored; the jacket had a tent-like effect on his stature. One look at his face and Fletcher knew this man was too young to be the one in charge.

  But the gentleman unbuttoning his dark grey overcoat could very well be.

  Diminutive in both size and shape, this man had his back turned to the driveway’s security camera. He had a folder tucked under his arm and stood a few feet away from the car, speaking to a cluster of law-enforcement officers. Fletcher couldn’t hear what was being said, but he had a clear view of the faces staring down at the Napoleonic man, and they all seemed displeased at having him in their presence; a federal agent, perhaps. That would explain the wide berth they had given him. A federal presence in a local investigation was treated with the same distant contempt as a leper at a skincare clinic.

  The man brushed past the group and disappeared from the computer screen.

  Fletcher found him a moment later, standing inside the living room and slicking back his grizzled, windblown hair with his long and delicate fingers. He wore a pair of aviator-style sunglasses. Fletcher was about to zoom in on the face when the man darted up the stairs.

  Fletcher switched to the camera showing a view of t
he upstairs hall. The small man had taken off his sunglasses. The folder that had been tucked under his arm was now gripped in a gloved hand. Fletcher saw the federal badge hanging on the man’s belt, stared at it as he walked across the hall, on his way to speak to Ali Karim.

  54

  Fletcher felt as though he were an invisible spectator standing in the back of the treatment room. On the computer screen he watched as the federal agent stepped inside with a companion he’d picked up along the way – another Hostage Rescue operator, this one tall and burly, his face and head covered with a balaclava and a tactical helmet. Unlike the other operators, he wore a tactical backpack. Clipped to its side was a military-grade gas mask, one equipped with the new voice-amplification system. Fletcher, his senses vibrating like a tuning fork, was set to register any anomaly.

  The two operators guarding Karim left the room. The new operator had his HK aimed at Karim, who was still lying face down on the floor. The federal agent conducted a leisurely examination of the room’s bloodstained items. When he turned to the bed where Nathan Santiago had been treated, Fletcher got his first solid, clear view of the man’s features – the razor-thin lips, weak jawline and pronounced forehead. The man appeared to be somewhere in his late forties to early fifties.

  Fletcher had turned up the volume on his earpiece. Still, he had to strain to hear the agent’s calm and cultured voice: ‘Get Mr Karim a chair.’

  The operator rolled a desk chair over and helped Karim into it. Fletcher couldn’t see Karim’s face, just the back of his head.

  The agent said, ‘You know why I’m here, Mr Karim.’

  ‘To assist me in finding out what happened to Boyd, I hope.’

  ‘Boyd?’

  ‘One of my employees. Boyd Paulson.’ Karim had shelved his grief for the moment; he spoke clearly, and well. ‘His car is here – that’s his BMW parked in the garage.’