Thriller 2

by Clive Cussler

  The main character in “Killing Time,” Fallon, is a sociopath. He’s a professional killer who—after a kill goes horribly wrong—hides out by murdering and impersonating an English teacher at Hampton Lake Middle School. Jon got the idea for this story after the tragic events that happened in Chechnya when terrorists seized a school—killing and wounding hundreds of students. It fascinated him to think about what would have happened if the terrorists had come across someone as demented and violent as they were. “Killing Time” is the answer to that question. And it’s not pretty.

  KILLING TIME

  “We’re glad to have you aboard, Mr. Beechum,” said Roger Meeks, principal of Hampton Lake Middle School, rising from behind his desk. “I think you’re going to be most happy here.”

  Fallon thought about how he’d killed the last man he shook hands with and released the principal’s flaccid grip quickly. That man’s name was Beechum and he’d had the misfortune to pick up a sodden, weary Fallon hitchhiking on the side of a lonely interstate. Poor Beechum also had the misfortune of being in the process of relocating to a new state to take a new job and for having a passing resemblance to Fallon. Passing in that they both had dark hair and features, close enough to allow Fallon to effortlessly fool principal Meeks with only minor modifications to his own appearance.

  “Your résumé is quite impressive,” Meeks continued, retaking his seat and looking up from the pages before him. Their eyes met and for just a moment Fallon thought the principal was studying him, perhaps noticing the anomalies with the face of the now-dead teacher clipped to the top sheet. But then he smiled. “I think you’re going to be very happy at Hampton Lake Middle School. Let’s show you the building.”

  The “tour,” as Meeks called it, was important to Fallon. Though he smiled through its course, careful to ask all the right questions, he was actually cataloguing various routes of escape and hiding. That his former employers were after him was not in doubt at all, any more than the fact they would eventually be successful. Because Fallon had failed them. Worse, Fallon had misbehaved by executing those sent to make him pay for his failure.

  His former employers would have been wise to let him go and be done with it. But they couldn’t take the chance Fallon would come after them. Here he became a victim of his own well-deserved reputation. His background in Special Forces had taught him to not just accept killing, but embrace it as a skill to be mastered like any other: with practice. The means—knife, gun, bare hand, explosives—mattered not at all, only the result. And with Fallon the result was always the same.

  Except once. And now because of that he was on the run. Killing time in the guise of a middle-school English teacher. Or Language Arts, as they called it these days.

  Meeks continued the tour of Hampton Lake Middle School in perfunctory fashion, Fallon nodding and smiling at all the appropriate times. The building was T-shaped with two long hallways separated by an enclosed courtyard adjoining a perpendicular two-story wing at the building’s front end located farthest from the road. A gym and presentation room were located in the back end, the cafeteria in the front. Fallon noted a drop ceiling heavy enough to support a man’s weight, accessing a crawl space that ran the length of the building on both sides. The location of the subbasement, containing the electrical and heating elements, was more difficult to pin down at this point.

  Normally, Fallon would look for places to stash weapons, as well. Here he didn’t consider that to be a factor. If he was found, escape would be the thing, not confrontation.

  “Now,” Meeks said, the cursory tour over, “let’s show you your classroom.”

  Eighth-grade honors English, Language Arts, was just finishing an abridged, heavily censored version of a book called Catch-22. Fallon rented the movie that night and didn’t really get most of it, except the title concept of a wartime pilot in search of a loophole to be deemed too crazy to fly. Fallon thought parts were supposed to be funny, but didn’t laugh and was glad when it was time for the class to move on to Frankenstein. Fallon hadn’t read the book, either, but he’d seen the movie, the old one with Boris Karloff, and figured that was close enough.

  His classroom overlooked the front of the building, including an oval-shaped drive that enclosed a parking lot used by teachers, as well as visitors. Fallon couldn’t see the main entrance but had a clear view of any vehicle approaching it, which was the next best thing.

  “So who do we think is the villain in the story?” Fallon asked his class.

  His remark was greeted by shrugs and quick glances cast amidst his young charges. Having no real concept of how to teach exactly, he’d constructed his classes around discussion. Fortunately, he’d come at a time of the semester devoted to literature and didn’t expect to still be around for the next unit. More than a month in any one setting would be tempting fate indeed.

  “The villain?” Fallon prompted, leaning back so he was halfway sitting on the lip of his desk.

  “Frankenstein,” a boy named Trent said from the rear. Trent had floppy hair and the first signs of acne.

  Fallon liked him because he recognized a worn patch in the rear pocket of his jeans as the outline of a switchblade. Fallon looked into Trent’s eyes and saw emotionless, stone-cold resignation. A boy after his own heart.

  “Not the monster,” Trent continued, without further prompt. “The doctor.”

  “Why?” Fallon asked him.

  “’Cause he fucked with nature.”

  The moment froze, everyone staring at Fallon in shock. Trent resumed again, saving him the bother of coming up with an appropriate response.

  “So the monster kills all these people, terrorizes the village, scares the crap out of people. But it’s not his fault, not really.”

  “So he’s not responsible for his own actions?” Fallon challenged.

  “Poor bastard doesn’t even know what he’s doing. Blame Frankenstein for bringing him to life.”

  “Like parents,” a frizzy-haired girl named Chelsea chimed in between crackling chomps on a wad of gum, sending a brief laugh rippling through the classroom.

  “Maybe that’s Shelley’s point,” someone else said.

  “So the monster’s not evil,” Fallon raised.

  “No,” came the multiple response.

  “But he’s not good, either.”

  “No.”

  “So what is he?”

  “The same as everybody else,” Trent said, booted feet propped up on the desk before him.

  Five weeks earlier Fallon had received his next job through the usual means. A text message sent to his cell phone dispatched him to a public e-mail Web site. He logged in at the nearest FedEx-Kinkos and entered the coded details into his PDA. Fallon never knew the reason for his targets’ selection. He only needed to know who and where; sometimes how and when. His logon automatically triggered the deposit of half his fee into a previously designated offshore bank account.

  Setting up a kill could take considerable time, up to several weeks, a period during which Fallon became intimately acquainted with the habits of his targets without immersing himself into the minutia of their lives. The last job was different because it specified the target’s entire family be included. Someone out to set an example, obviously, make a point.

  Discussion here was not an option. Even if Fallon had wanted, he couldn’t have asked for confirmation and clarification. And if the fact that the target’s family consisted of a wife and three young children bothered Fallon, there was no way to contact his employer to change his mind. The URL from which his assignment had been sent was a dummy site automatically deactivated as soon as Fallon logged off. Declining a job was never an option, once the mechanical triggering apparatus made Fallon an even richer man. Catch-23.

  Wiring the target’s house with explosives was easy enough, doing it in a way that would make it look like a tragic accident only slightly harder. The only drawback: he’d have to trigger the blast manually himself. Not an attractive prospect, considering
he much preferred being somewhere else far away when the explosion ripped lumber and concrete, flesh and blood, apart.

  Fallon was not a man prone to question or marred by pangs of conscience. And the early stages of the job progressed without being terribly struck by either. A man like Fallon could not view human beings with any higher regard than, say, crash-test dummies or department-store mannequins. They were his means to an end, though with ample funds for a secure retirement in place he was hard-pressed to say exactly what those ends were. Except he couldn’t retire; he enjoyed his work too much. Catch-24.

  And his latest assignment should’ve have gone down like all the others, all in place and on schedule. Fallon following his instructions to the letter to make sure all family members were inside before triggering the blast.

  Detonators were a thing of the past mostly, cell phones the thing these days. Simple matter of wiring the trigger chip with a number and then dialing it at the appropriate time. There’d be a brief delay, several seconds or more, but that wasn’t a problem in this case.

  Fallon took his throwaway cell phone from his pocket and dialed. Let it ring once and then settled back to wait from his car parked safely down the street, counting the seconds out in his head.

  One…two…three…

  By five, Fallon began to feel edgy, and at ten he redialed, let it ring twice this time. Counted the seconds again.

  Same result. Nothing.

  Setbacks were nothing new to Fallon; failure something else again. There was no time to consider what had gone wrong. Better to focus on damage control, what to do from here. Fallon had weapons, a bounty of them. But murdering an entire family in the suburbs with guns and knives without a clear plan of access and approach would be a desperate move not befitting a professional of his level. Worse, he’d be acting rashly with the eventual outcome dictated by fortune instead of forethought. Better to come back, rethink the next step tomorrow.

  Except tomorrow turned out worse.

  The next book on the honors English list was called Johnny Got His Gun. Fallon couldn’t find a movie version, but the book was short and supposedly about war, so he decided to read it.

  The book was short. And Fallon understood nary a word, much less what the book was supposed to be about. Antiwar, that much was clear, if nothing else. So he decided to focus the class’s discussion on war itself, something he knew plenty about.

  But Mr. Beechum, of course, didn’t, which meant Fallon couldn’t appear to, either. He listened to the surprisingly intelligent, unsettling comments made by his students. Unsettling because it made him realize how much he missed that part of his life for its simplicity and clarity. The ability to kill for a cause with impunity. Of course, the cause meant little to Fallon; it was the impunity he embraced with a fervor and passion unknown in any previous segment of his life.

  An unpleasant end to his military career was as expected as it was inevitable. Fortunately, there were plenty of private firms willing to pay far more while letting him practice his same skills. That, too, ended badly, in an embarrassing scandal for the company and yet another inglorious dismissal for Fallon. But there was no shortage of work for a man with Fallon’s skills, and he’d been stateside barely a week when a similarly ex-member of the same private firm came calling with an offer to join a network of professionals whose work was appreciated instead of vilified. Fallon didn’t bother himself with delusions of morality, of right and wrong. He did what he did, and he liked it. Simple as that.

  The class agreed with the book’s antiwar stance. Fallon wished he’d been able to tell them the true side of things. About the various pleasures a man could derive from watching a face explode to a bullet or the guttural gasps a victim makes when a knife digs deep and tears. He wished he could explain that violence was something to neither be shunned nor embraced. It simply was.

  Just like him.

  To make his point, Fallon decided to stray from the lesson plan and introduce the only story he actually remembered reading as a boy. Read so much the pages actually disintegrated, the words disappearing until there were no sentences left and Fallon reluctantly discarded the handout. He hadn’t thought of that story in a very long time until now, glad to find a copy ripe for photocopying in the school library.

  “‘The Most Dangerous Game,’” the librarian said, reading over Fallon’s shoulder as collated copies spit out from the machine’s feeder. “A true classic. But a bit violent, don’t you think?”

  When Fallon returned the following morning, the target family was gone, whisked away in the dawn hours by shadowy men in black SUVs, if the neighbors were to be believed. FBI or federal marshals, no doubt, extricating Fallon’s targets into witness protection Fallon had never failed before, but there were percentages involved in everything and here the odds had finally caught up with him. He found himself obsessing over every move he had made to retrace where he’d gone wrong. The wiring, perhaps. Maybe a bad chip. A reception or transmission problem, even.

  That was why Fallon was awake in his motel room when they came. Four of them, all well-armed and well-skilled enough to know not to drive their car too close to his room in the motor court. But they’d left their headlights on a second too long, enough to alert Fallon that someone was coming.

  He gauged the distance suggested by the strength of the headlights and counted the seconds again.

  One…two…three…

  The door blew inward at six, Fallon unleashing a fusillade that was every bit the equal of his four would-be killers. So much passed through his mind as the bullets chewed up the walls around him and the smell of blood mixed with sulfur and cordite. The roar from the three guns he managed to reach drowned out the screams mostly, and Fallon was screeching away from the scene before another light snapped on in any of the nearby rooms.

  The reality of the moment struck him, and fast. The fact that his employers wouldn’t stop with these four men, especially since Fallon had so effortlessly executed them, was no less a reality than the fact that his time as a contractor was effectively over. There was no redemption or second chances. He had gone from the very best at what he did to irrelevant in the seconds it had taken him to gun down four men.

  Catch-25.

  Fallon had effectively prepared for this moment, while never really considering it a possibility. Money would not be a problem; he had plenty of it stashed away. The issue was getting to it safely, making the necessary arrangements with according precautions, and such things took time. That meant disappearing without the use of any of his various identifies, all of which could be compromised now. His employers and conduits knew too much about him, his habits and patterns. Disappearing meant relying on none of them, becoming someone else entirely while laying the groundwork for his permanent departure from parts known.

  There were plenty of Third World countries into which he could vanish, only to resurface as a man with a different identity boasting the kind of skills that were always in need. Fallon couldn’t imagine himself wallowing away the time on a beach, no matter how beautiful or plentiful the women. His life had been defined by killing for too long to either risk or want change.

  For now going off the grid meant avoiding all forms of security cameras and public transportation, including buses, trains and airplanes. Rental cars were out, as well, and stealing too many cars could leave the kind of pattern he needed to avoid.

  That left hitchhiking. Mr. Beechum’s was the fifth car in a week to chance picking him up. Fallon didn’t kill the others and hadn’t expected to kill Beechum until the ditzy man kept speaking enthusiastically of the new job he was headed for. That’s when the plan unfolded for Fallon, and the best he was able to do for Beechum in return was kill him in quick, painless fashion.

  “I love kids” was the last thing the teacher said. “Making a difference in their lives and all.”

  In that moment Fallon couldn’t have known the kind of difference he’d end up making.

  Fallon saw the two vans creep tow
ard the school’s entrance when he was in the third day of discussing “The Most Dangerous Game.” They were noteworthy first for the fact they drove onto the grounds down the wrong side of the U-shaped drive fronting the building and second because the vans wore the markings of a professional cleaning service. Such markings always allowed for unquestioned access to buildings, public and otherwise, but why would a middle school with a full janitorial staff need a professional cleaning service?

  Fallon’s heart began to beat faster as the vans drifted out of his line of sight. Two vans meant a dozen men or more, certainly overkill on the part of his former employers. And if they had ascertained his presence here at Hampton Lake, they’d be much better off laying an ambush instead of storming the building in full awareness of his conceivable escape.

  That reality should have made him feel better.

  But it didn’t.

  Instincts had saved his life often enough for Fallon to learn to trust them, and right now they were scratching at his spine like scalpels peeling back the flesh.

  “Rainsford’s my kind of guy,” Trent was saying from his customary perch in the back of the room.

  “Why?” Fallon managed to ask, not really paying attention. His eyes strayed out the window again, but the vans did not reappear. He moved closer to the glass, hoping to better his angle.

  “Because he kicks General Zaroff’s ass. And it was Zaroff’s own fucking fault.”

  “Why?” Fallon asked, intrigued in spite of the nagging feeling that wouldn’t go away.

  “Because he’d been playing the game too long. Hunting men, who knows how many of them.”

  “So why stop?”

  “Because he should’ve known he’d meet his match. Sooner or later. It’s like, you know, inevitable.”

  Fallon moved away from the window, suddenly intrigued. “So why’d he keep doing it? Come on, people, put yourself in Zaroff’s shoes.”