13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  The old man’s reaction passed over him in a shuddering wave. He swallowed and licked his lips. Picking up the photograph as though it were a death warrant, he peered fixedly down at it. Warring expressions crossed his face, distaste struggling with a look of softness, of sadness.

  “Where…Where did you get this?” He refused to so much as glance at Remington.

  “At the house in Rosarito.”

  Victor coughed. She thought he might break down into sobs.

  “The Mexicans have a term for it,” Remington continued. “Bígamos. Men who maintain families on both sides of the border.”

  What Remington saw in front of her was an old man’s pigeons coming home to roost. She almost felt sorry for him. Almost.

  “I don’t…Brockton isn’t here. I need…” He pressed an intercom button on his desk. “Brock?”

  His voice sounded as if he were calling down a well. “So Brockton knows?” Remington asked.

  There then came an odd occurrence, a development that emphasized the out-of-time nature of the encounter. The sound of the cascade abruptly stopped. Whenever it happened—Remington had been present at Wildermanse only a couple of times before—it came as a jolt. Everyone understood that they had been hearing the steady, rolling whoosh all along, but its absence served as an eerie reminder. It was as if the faint whisper of blood in Remington’s veins had abruptly halted.

  Into the silence another sound arose, the staccato rip of gunfire, coming from somewhere in front of the house. A pair of huge booms punctuated the percussive pop-pop-popping, forming a kind of rhythmic counterpoint.

  Remington’s mind balked. What had they told George W. Bush when the Twin Towers and the Pentagon were hit? “Mr. President, we are under attack.” Or was it “America is under attack”? He had been reading a children’s book to schoolkids.

  “We’re under attack,” Remington said to Victor. She lurched out of her chair and went around to reach him behind his desk. He rose unsteadily to his feet. The old man’s face appeared stricken and confused.

  “What? What’s happening?”

  Another round of small-arms fire exploded. They had been thrust into the middle of a war zone. More gunfire, more concussive blasts. There were shouts and the sound of running footsteps inside the house.

  She took Victor by the arm, but he jerked away from her grip. He looked at her with abject terror. “You! You did this?”

  “No, no—sir, we have to move.” Remington corralled him again. “Do you have—I don’t know, what’s the protocol? Listen to me!” Trying to get him to focus. “What’s the protocol in case of attack?”

  A huge bruiser of a Graystone security guy, wearing combat boots and a cargo vest, an automatic rifle slung over his back, appeared in the doorway of the study.

  “Sir!” he managed to get out, before his head exploded in a great flower of brains and blood. He crashed forward to the floor. Behind him, through the doorway, Remington glimpsed a sight that she could scarcely understand.

  Val Duran stood in the Wildermanse living room, a pistol in his hand. With a lazy grin, he advanced toward the study. He was Tino Zaldivar now.

  “No!” shouted Remington. Some sort of crazed momentum carried her across the room. She just made the door before Tino got to it, slamming shut the heavy slab of oak. Bending down, she stripped the dead security guy of his weapon.

  Gunfire and explosions sounded from the grounds in front of the house. More blasts came from the next room. Rounds tore through the oak panels of the door.

  She didn’t have time to notice that the weapon she had taken from the dead Graystone guy was a Bushmaster assault rifle, a military version manufactured by the Remington Arms Company. She sprinted across the study, bullet fragments and splintered wood flying in the air behind her. She knew there was another exit from the room, a hidden door leading to a small hallway connected to the dining room. She grabbed a confused, panicked Victor. Remington had no idea where she was leading him, but she knew that they had to get the hell out of the study.

  It seemed that the old man could not run, only stagger. In the tiny hall, she had a choice. Left for the central hall, right for the rear of the house. Since all the gunfire was coming from the front, the back might be the safer option.

  “Safe room!” Victor jabbered.

  “Where?”

  “The—the—the offices!”

  Behind them, a crash signaled that their attacker had made it into the study. Somehow Tino Zaldivar had managed to penetrate the concentric rings of Graystone security personnel. He must have an army with him, she thought, judging from the exploding ordnance all around.

  Moving as quickly as they could, Remington and Victor passed through the small hallway into the larger central one. The “I love me” wall was to their right, an empty hole in it where Remington had ripped down the Loushane family portrait. To their left was the dark gulf of the corridor that led to the offices of the east wing. It represented a gigantic tactical mistake, a gauntlet in which they would both die.

  “Safe room,” Victor said again.

  Some sort of firefight was happening outside the front entrance of the house. They plunged down the central hall anyway, moving directly past it. Remington had a quick awareness that the Graystone security corps had set up a position there, banging off rounds into the night. Far off, the sound of a lonely police siren rose from the flats below. You are going to need more than one car, Remington thought grimly.

  At the entrance to the east wing lay a dead body. George Sarin stared blankly at them with an expression of permanent surprise. The man’s shirtfront was well bloodied, but he seemed otherwise intact. Remington had to guide Victor past his fallen aide. The old man stumbled forward, aghast, eyes wide with panic.

  They made it into the offices, entering the big main room just in time to see Brock, his arms loaded with account books and papers, step toward the open door of a steel vault that was set into the center of the space.

  “Brock!” Victor called out. His shout was obliterated by the chatter of gunfire.

  Brockton Loushane saw the two of them, Remington felt sure of that afterward. The light in the offices was dim, a single desk lamp illuminating the large, forty-by-fifty room. The scene was confused, with the distracting crash of weaponry outside. But he had to have seen them.

  Brock stepped into the vault and swung the door shut.

  Victor lunged forward, his body caroming off desks and chairs as he reeled across the room. “Brock! Brockton!” Screeching, he slammed his fist on the door of the vault again and again.

  Behind Remington, the figure of Tino Zaldivar loomed in the doorway. He banged off a succession of shots in her direction. She ducked behind a desk still clutching the Bushmaster. Laying down fire—he had pistols in both hands now—Tino dashed across the offices to tackle Victor.

  “Tino, no!” Remington’s words were instantly swallowed in the fury of the moment.

  Dragging Victor by the neck, putting one of his pistols to the man’s temple, Tino stiff-legged it in a backward walk. From behind the desk, Remington had a clear bead on him. She told herself not to pull the trigger for fear of hitting Victor. But she wondered if she really had it in her to kill Tino Zaldivar.

  “Tino!” she called out. “He’s your father!”

  The two men disappeared together in the darkness of the hall.

  “He’s your father.” Remington repeated the words in a despairing whisper.

  Part of her wanted to hunker down in her hidey-hole behind the desk and wait there until rescue arrived. But she had an idea what Val had in mind for Victor, and she needed to try to stop it.

  She crawled over the door of the vault. “Brock! Just stay there! Police on the way! Brock!”

  She got no answer.

  Chapter 21

  Fausto was a great fan of Iraq war tactics, reading up on the conflict there as well as the one in Afghanistan. He had charted out every move of the Battle of Tora Bora, where bin Laden had hol
ed up in a series of interlocking caves and U.S. forces, in an operation code-named Jawbreaker, failed to root him out.

  One thing Fausto learned from Al Qaeda was the beauty of simultaneous attacks. He had placed Chupé in front of the Loushane estate, three hundred yards down the long driveway from the house. They had set up a couple of radio-controlled rifle emplacements in the scrubland along Sesnon Boulevard, thinking the neighbors wouldn’t mind being part of the fireworks.

  The vehicle Chupé had used to do all this was stolen from a landscaping service, so he looked like a simple Mexican groundskeeper. In Los Angeles, that made him pretty much invisible to white people’s eyes.

  Fausto and he had synched watches, the way they did in the movies. Chupé let loose as directed, at full dark, an hour after sundown. Just a single guy, parked in a van, operating a transmitter. The radio-controlled assault rifles he had set up exploded, sounding like an attack by a whole platoon.

  It worked. All the security personnel headed to the front side of the Wildermanse grounds like a herd of sheep, or maybe more like marbles rolling around in a tin pan. The Graystone stooges fired back, too, blasting away at nothing. The return fire grew especially intense when the timed charges Chupé had salted along the perimeter of the property started going off.

  Fausto and his sicarios swooped down on Wildermanse from the rear. They were all angel-dusted within an inch of their useless lives, the horse tranquilizer rendering them immune to petty considerations of mortality. PCP was the perfect sicario drug, because it convinced them that they were already dead.

  As the seven of them crept up on the estate through the empty concrete channel of the irrigation cascade, Fausto had to marvel at his own ingenuity. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and therefore Fausto was the Lord, because he was sure enough raining his vengeance down upon the Loushane family. In a few hours they would all be dead. Tino kept railing about the meddling girl cop. They’d take her out, too.

  “Por aquí,” he directed his troops when they reached the property line of the Wildermanse estate. The lumbering monsters tore apart a section of fence that skirted the cascade, ripping it down as if the chain-links were made of paper instead of steel. Together they climbed up out of the channel and disappeared into the gloom of the woods behind the house. Fausto felt glorious, as though he were in the middle of a Lord of the Rings fantasy. He and his pet Uruk-hai, warrior hitmen created by his own hand.

  They emerged from the trees. There it was in front of him, just as Tino had said it would be, the big mansion, unprotected in the rear because all the fool security personnel had been drawn to the front by Chupé’s diversion.

  “Let’s go,” Fausto said, forgetting for the moment that his soldiers didn’t understand English. It didn’t matter. They followed his lead anyway. They infiltrated the landscaped gardens, neglecting to use the pretty lanes and tidy walkways, plowing straight over and through the elaborate plantings to reach their goal.

  —

  Remington had no idea what she was doing. In fact, that specific question kept up a constant thrum in her brain. “What am I doing? What am I doing?” More sirens sounded from the Valley side of the house. Relief was coming. By all measure of logic and reason, she should just sit tight. But she left the offices in the east wing and trailed Tino and his hostage out into the rest of the house.

  Cradling her Bushmaster, Remington walked warily through the living room and then into the dining room of the big house. To her left, the shattered oak door to the study hung off its hinges. She heard muffled dragging sounds and knew that she was paralleling Tino’s progress as he hauled Victor down the central hallway.

  Through the expanse of French doors that lined the whole of the house on her right, she saw them advance—shadowy figures, a small child and a half-dozen huge, plodding men. They climbed from the gardens onto the stone terrace. She stared and realized that the child was actually a dwarf.

  They came armed. Remington doubted her own mind. Was this a rogue security contingent? That unlikely thought evaporated as four of the big hulks walked directly through the glass-fronted doors of the living room, not bothering to open them but smashing the frames to bits as they stepped into the interior of the house. The world had gone crazy.

  A security cop came around the eastern end of the house and started firing on the intruders. Two of the big men who were still outside pivoted and returned fire. The sizzle of the rounds went back and forth across the stone terrace, hitting the clapboard siding with a slapping sound.

  That decided Remington. She pulled up her rifle and blasted the lead pair who had crashed into the living room, squeezing off a half-dozen shots before retreating back into the shadows.

  The targets didn’t fall. She couldn’t understand it. The figures were at most thirty feet away, and she had sprayed them with lethal 5.56-mm rounds. The Bushmaster was a veritable howitzer of a rifle. Remington couldn’t believe her marksmanship had deteriorated to that degree. But she didn’t have time to consider, or think, or decide anything. The intruders turned their fire on her.

  The dwarf led the charge. As she dodged for the door out of the dining room, Remington somehow grasped that he was the commanding officer of the bizarre invasion force. She couldn’t gauge how many rounds were left in her magazine and cursed herself for not looting additional ammunition. Unsure whether a cartridge remained in the chamber of her weapon, she leveled it at the little person and pulled the trigger.

  The child-size intruder apparently did not possess the same unstoppable mojo as his larger brethren. He collapsed instantly to his knees, and then toppled forward, facedown. Remington wanted to shoot him again for good measure, but when she pulled the trigger her rifle proved empty.

  An odd effect: all the aggression seemed to drain from the room. It was like a balloon deflating. The half-dozen soldiers immediately stopped firing. They froze in place for a moment and then milled around the living room as if they had lost their compass. From the terrace, the Graystone cop still blazed away at whatever targets he could see. No one paid any attention to the felled dwarf, bleeding out onto the living room’s antique carpet.

  The firing started up again. With the distinctive hiss of rounds tearing the air apart like giant zippers, gunshots appeared to be coming from all directions. Remington wasn’t going to stick around to be collateral damage. She withdrew from the field of battle. Heading back toward the central hallway, she encountered a half-open door.

  The cellar, the family always called it, quaintly enough. As teenagers, Ellis had led her astray many times into Wildermanse’s cavernous lower level, a haunted basement story that seemed to go on forever.

  The lower level could be where Val had taken Victor. Or it could turn out not to be. At any rate, the solid walls of the basement foundation made it a good refuge to wait out the siege. She held an assault rifle that was empty of rounds. While Remington didn’t feel like going around defenseless, she also didn’t want to head back into the study to retrieve a full cartridge magazine off the dead Graystone operative.

  She slipped through the door and down the stairs into the basement.

  —

  “What other kind of freaking fuckery can possibly happen to this fucking family?” Sergeant Chuck Tester asked the question of no one in particular. He stood among the assembled platoons of law-enforcement officers along Sesnon Boulevard, at the foot of the endless Wildermanse front drive. The LAPD was there in force. SWAT was there. More uniforms were arriving by the minute. It was overkill chaos.

  Tester and other late-arriving officers who had answered the all-available call were tasked with evacuating the neighborhood. They hustled residents, many of them elderly and clearly terrified, out of their homes. Tester himself chased off a Mexican laborer who had been fast asleep, parked in his landscaping service van. Like the dude could snooze through a war. The brass had ordained a half-mile perimeter around the estate. With the crackle of small-arms fire still coming from the grounds, Tester doubted that a h
alf mile would be enough.

  He had another, nagging worry. Layla Remington had been staying at the Loushane place. He had already fielded a call from Gene, her father. They both hoped she had gotten the hell out before this nasty firefight went down. No one had heard word one from the girl. Calls to her phone went straight to voicemail. Gene was frantic. Even though he knew what kind of pandemonium it would be, Tester had volunteered to check out the scene. Upon arrival, he had immediately been ordered into service.

  Command had set up a blocking position at the entrance of the mansion’s drive. The Graystone folks had originally established the post when the family brought them in for security. Now the LAPD took over the roadblock. Tester didn’t think the location was exactly optimal. No one had eyes on the house itself, for one thing, since it was tucked out of sight in the foothills up the driveway.

  Farther down on Sesnon Boulevard, you could get a view of the place, all dark now except for the occasional flare of small-arms muzzle flashes. Beirut-in-the-Valley. A squad was just now employing Ghost Hunter nightscopes, trying to surveil the house and the immediate area, but no one knew what was really going on inside.

  “I hope to God you’re not up there, Layla,” Tester muttered to himself.

  A hostage situation, came the word. One of the Loushane sons was holed up in a safe room on the premises. He was in communication with central dispatch, but the cell signal kept cutting out. The guy was said to be off his nut and babbling, terrified that the wood-framed mansion would be set on fire, cooking him inside.

  With a throb of rotors, an LAPD helicopter finally showed. Much of the fleet had been grounded by poor visibility at Hooper Heliport, marooned twenty-two nautical miles away. In response to the present emergency, the Air Support Division was forced to bring one of its birds all the way from a hangar in Orange County.

  The crowd of police officers on the ground gawked as the powerful Bell JetRanger chopped its way across the Valley to the scene. The twin Nightsun spotlights were already switched on. The machine swept low over the command post and continued on to hover above the house.