Skystorm (Ryan Decker)

by Steven Konkoly

  Now he truly wondered what had transpired last night. What would give Steele the confidence to brazenly reemerge like this? The coolers looked large enough to carry drinks for a dozen or more people. Just like that, she was taking friends out for a sunset sail on the Chesapeake Bay? Mind blowing. He sat in the plush leather couch facing Steele’s house, the midday sun dancing on the water below. A thick suppressor floated in his peripheral vision.

  “How far to the boathouse?” he asked.

  “Five hundred feet,” said one of the men behind him.

  He glanced over his shoulder at the sniper team, who sat side by side at a desk they had moved from one of the bedrooms. The desk lined up with the top of the couch, providing a stable platform for the rifle and a fairly concealed location if Steele’s security team took a hard look at possible threat locations within line of sight of her estate.

  “How about the house?”

  “Six hundred and fifty to the deck,” said the sniper. “Easy shot.”

  Guthrie nodded. He had no doubt in their ability to reach out and touch the senator. They were one of APEX’s best sniper teams.

  “And you think it’s okay to keep the sliding door open? Doesn’t look suspicious?” asked Guthrie.

  “There’s a nice breeze. This is the day to have your screen door open,” he said.

  “Sounds good,” said Guthrie, getting up. “Same ROE. If you get a solid opportunity—take it. You don’t need my clearance. Don’t even waste the time reporting it. Shoot and let me know on the way out.”

  “Easy enough,” said the sniper.

  “Any bonus for her security detachment?” asked the spotter.

  “Actually, no,” said Guthrie.

  “Seriously?” said the spotter.

  “Yes. But they’ve increased the overall bonus for the primary target,” said Guthrie. “Trust me when I say you’ll be very pleased with the amount.”

  “Right on.”

  “The target is special,” said Guthrie. “Very important.”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” said the sniper.

  “Looks like the two of you have this well under control,” said Guthrie, handing him the binoculars. “I’m heading back to the staging area. I’ll let you know when the senator is inbound.”

  “We’ll be here,” said the sniper, setting the binoculars on the table next to the sniper rifle and spare ammunition magazines.

  The spotter looked up from his tripod-mounted range-finding scope and gave him a mock salute.

  “Lunch is in the kitchen. Crab cake sandwiches and fries,” said Guthrie. “Still warm.”

  The sniper gave him a thumbs-up without looking back. Guthrie locked the door behind him on the way out and got back in the vehicle. Part of him really didn’t want to leave these two alone to decide his fate, or more importantly, APEX’s. But picking competent operatives and delegating responsibility was exactly what set apart a leadership position in the security force from one as an operations project head. As a security team leader, he rode in the first car of the convoy or kicked in the first door. In operations, he was expected to plan the mission, then step back and let the pieces he’d assembled do the work.

  He supposed it didn’t matter. He couldn’t be in two places at once. If he was forced to raid Steele’s house and root her out, his tactical expertise and leadership experience would be far more useful during a direct attack. The sniper would succeed or fail regardless of his presence. The assault team was a different story.

  Guthrie started the SUV and backed out of the driveway, dialing Dalton on his satellite phone.

  “If you’re calling to tell me she’s dead, there’s a one hundred-thousand-dollar bonus with your name on it,” said Dalton.

  “No. But she should be dead within a few hours,” said Guthrie. “I just confirmed, with my own eyes, that her sailboat has been prepped for immediate use. I watched a boat service crew carry two oversized coolers down to the boat. It looks like she’s throwing a party.”

  “I bet she is,” said Dalton. “The nerve of that woman.”

  “That’s what I was thinking,” he said.

  “I’m tempted to drive out and watch,” said Dalton.

  Whatever Steele had pulled last night must have been bigger than he thought. Dalton made it sound almost personal.

  “The sniper team is set up with a clear shot to the pier and the house. If she steps outside, they’ll take the shot,” said Guthrie. “If a shot isn’t practical, I have a full urban assault team staged seven minutes away. We’ll kill her inside her own house.”

  “Can you hit her before she gets to the house? A preemptive strike?” asked Dalton. “I don’t like the thought of Steele getting into her safe room. I want her dead. Today. If she gets in that room, we’re back to square one. And the hundred-thousand-dollar bonus I got approved for you this morning is off the table.”

  “There’s no way for us to prestage a hit-and-run team in her neighborhood without drawing immediate police attention. It’s a very exclusive, well-patrolled area. I’d have to position multiple vehicles along three different approaches just to detect her arrival, significantly diluting the assault team.”

  “I’ll send you more people,” said Dalton. “It’s that important.”

  “It won’t be necessary. I have the code to open the safe room door,” said Guthrie.

  “What?”

  “The company that designed and built the senator’s safe room programmed the keypad system with a unique reset code she can access by contacting the company’s chief security officer directly in the event that she forgets the original,” said Guthrie. “I spent most of the operation’s remaining discretionary budget to acquire those sixteen digits. That code opens the door so she can reset it from the inside control panel.”

  “Are you serious?” said Dalton.

  “Very serious,” said Guthrie. “I still intend to keep her from reaching the safe room, but even if she somehow gets inside, it’ll be her last resting place. The woman I paid for the reset code deleted it from their system. I’ll punch in my own code after we kill her and shut the door. They’ll have to cut the room open with a thermite torch to get her body out. That’s assuming they somehow figure out she’s inside. It could be weeks before they decide to open it up to check.”

  “Couldn’t you make that happen anyway?” asked Dalton.

  “I suppose I could,” said Guthrie. “If that’s what you want.”

  “I most definitely want the senator’s next public appearance to be in the form of a rotting corpse,” said Dalton.

  “Consider it done,” said Guthrie, making a mental note to stay on Dalton’s good side.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Senator Steele fidgeted in the seat, her mind racing with fear, as Klink, one of the last operatives to arrive, turned the SUV onto Claude Street. They were less than a minute from her house.

  “I really don’t think this is a good idea,” said Steele. “It feels like they could hit us at any time.”

  Rich spoke from the front passenger seat without turning his head away from the street in front of them.

  “The roads are clear. One of our teams drove through a minute ago, and our eye in the sky is keeping a close watch over us. You’ll be safe inside the house before you know it.”

  She understood this to be true on nearly every level. A team she had never met had installed an array of concealed sensors on her property and inside her house, then monitored them for months, looking for evidence of intrusion or irregularities. Steele just couldn’t stop focusing on the one remaining irrational level, where APEX was all-powerful and all-knowing—capable of anything.

  “I know. It’s just nerve-racking,” said Steele. “I keep thinking they could have drilled a hole underneath my house, from one of the neighbors’ homes, and planted a bomb. Or they could drop some kind of massive homemade bomb on the house from a helicopter the minute we stepped in the door. They have the resources and the kind of sick imagi
nation to pull something like that off. The scenarios are endless.”

  “They are, and there’s always the very outside possibility that APEX has taken an entirely extreme and unexpected course of action. But there’s nothing we can do about that.”

  “Except stay away from the house,” said Steele.

  “We can take a right instead of a left up ahead and get out of here,” said Rich. “It’s entirely up to you.”

  The plan to take down APEX required the kind of momentum they might not be able to build again if she turned them around. Depriving them of SKYSTORM, less than a year after literally burning down their two-billion-dollar cannabis operation, put APEX in a uniquely vulnerable and desperate position—the kind of position where people tended to make bad decisions under pressure. Steele knew it was either now or possibly never. She couldn’t realistically expect Rich’s team to keep her alive long enough to reach this point again.

  “No. Stick with the plan. This ends today,” said Steele. “I hope.”

  “I have a good feeling about it,” said Rich.

  “He’s never said that in the ten-plus years I’ve worked with him,” said Jared, who lay across the third row, out of sight. “Never even hinted at it.”

  “Is that good or bad?” asked Steele. “I really have a hard time reading any of you, except for Anish and Caz.”

  “Caz is still a work in progress,” said Rich. “Anish is Anish. There’s no hope for him.”

  The entrance to her estate came into view as the SUV pulled up to the stop sign at the end of Claude Street. Two thick redbrick pillars flanked a black dual-swing gate.

  Rich turned in his seat to face her. “Last chance to turn back.”

  “This isn’t just about me,” said Steele, thinking about Decker, Pierce, and everyone else she’d inadvertently dragged into APEX’s crosshairs. “Let’s get this over with.”

  The SUV turned left onto Simms Drive, Rich pointing a paperback book–shaped device at the gate about halfway down the street. The gates swung inward and had cleared the brick driveway by the time they pulled up, allowing them to continue to the house without stopping. Steele squeezed the door rest handle the entire ride, only easing up when the SUV pulled directly into the garage bay farthest from the house. Caz was out of the vehicle before the garage door started on its way back down, presumably making sure nobody slipped inside. She knocked on the window when the door stopped.

  “That’s our cue,” said Rich, the locks clicking open.

  Caz opened Steele’s door and helped her down from the oversize vehicle.

  “Stay close behind me,” Caz said, drawing her pistol. “We’ll get you inside the safe room and do our thing.”

  She followed Caz through the garage to the door leading into the house while Rich and the others gathered near the back of the SUV. Caz punched in the code to open the door, turned the dead bolt when the keypad flashed green, and slipped inside the house. She ushered Steele into a small walk-in closet on the right and examined the home security system touch screen.

  “Everything looks good,” said Caz, before disabling the system.

  It was almost like they knew the house better than she did. That alarm had given her enough trouble over the past few years that she often didn’t set it when leaving the house. She didn’t like the time pressure of having to enter the code within a minute after gaining entry.

  “We’re going to keep you clear of any windows facing the water until we’re set up and ready,” said Caz. “So we’ll take a right at the end of the hallway and make our way through the guest area to reach the safe room. Sound good?”

  “Lead the way,” she said.

  Steele paused when they reached the end of the hallway and looked over her shoulder. Rich and Jared slid a long, jam-packed green duffel bag inside the house.

  “Let’s go. We may not have a lot of time,” said Rich, before the two of them headed back into the garage.

  “Let’s keep moving, Senator,” said Caz.

  Steele nodded and started to move but stopped again, convinced her eyes had been playing tricks on her. She could have sworn she’d just seen Klink carrying some kind of fully dressed mannequin or life-size doll.

  “Sorry,” she said, following Caz toward the safe room.

  When they reached the safe room door at the end of the hallway in the bedroom wing of the house, Steele couldn’t resist asking about what she’d seen.

  “Caz? Did I see Klink carrying a mannequin?”

  The operative smiled. “Something like that.”

  “You’re really not going to tell me any more, are you?”

  “Trust me, Senator. You really don’t want to know what they have planned. Just stick to me like glue and you’ll be fine,” said Caz, punching in the safe room code.

  “What about them?” asked Steele.

  “Don’t worry about those three,” said Caz.

  All she’d really been told about the plan was that she’d never be directly exposed to any danger and that she had to do exactly what she was told at all times—without hesitation. Unsatisfied by the lack of details, she’d pushed Rich until he’d casually stated that “the house would require extensive repair work when it was all said and done.”

  After hearing that, Steele quit asking questions. She stepped into the safe room, convinced she was better off not knowing any details of their plan.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  Ezra Dalton needed to be in this meeting right now like she needed a ruptured appendix. Steele had returned to her house in Annapolis nearly an hour ago with three mercenaries, two of whom had been directly linked to the early days of retired General Terrence Sanderson’s Black Flag program—Richard Farrington and Robert Klinkman. The third, a still-unidentified woman, appeared to be the senator’s primary personal protective agent. The few glimpses the sniper team had so far managed to catch of Steele indicated the woman never left her side.

  The SKYSTORM fallout was Quinn’s job to clean up. Senator Steele was hers. But instead of sitting in the hub’s war room, directly monitoring Guthrie’s communication and video feeds during a moment pivotal to the Institute’s survival, she was stuck listening to little more than feeble rants about past mistakes and generic prattle about the path forward.

  “Sorry if this bores you, Ezra,” said Kline, clearly sensing her detachment from the proceedings. “But we wouldn’t be sitting here if you hadn’t insisted you could control Senator Steele.”

  “Finger-pointing tends to get boring,” said Dalton. “Particularly from someone who hasn’t initiated or run a single significant project for close to a decade. When this setback is behind us, maybe it’ll be time for you to consider a more risk-averse retirement than your current one.”

  “Setback? You call this a setback?” said Kline. “We should have booted your ass out of here years ago, before you could do too much damage. I predicted all of this.”

  “Poor Allan. I hate to think you might have to sell one of your dozen mansions to stay afloat,” said Dalton. “Mansions you bought with the money the rest of us fought tooth and nail to bring in while you jetted around the world with wife number four, five, six . . . Who can keep track?”

  “This isn’t about me or money,” said Kline.

  “Really? Because you get like this when the big payouts don’t pan out,” said Dalton. “I remember your epic meltdown after EMERALD CITY.”

  “For shit’s sake, Ezra, we’re looking at real exposure with this SKYSTORM mess. The feds have the terminal locked down and are going container by container with explosive ordnance disposal teams, thanks to some strategically placed anonymous tips. I wonder how they’ll react when they start opening our containers. And then there’s the airfield mess. The Texas Rangers have our entire SKYSTORM production facility locked down—soon to be put under the microscope.”

  “The program can’t be linked back to us. Samuel has been careful—like always,” said Dalton. “Something you wouldn’t know anything about at this point
in your semiretirement.”

  “It doesn’t matter how careful we’ve been!” said Kline, standing up. “With Senator Steele connecting the dots—”

  “Senator Steele will be out of the picture very shortly,” said Dalton.

  “Why very shortly? Why not right now?” said Kline.

  Dalton considered reexplaining the reasons for giving the sniper option some time to develop, which all boiled down to minimizing APEX’s potential exposure during the inevitably thorough investigation of the senator’s assassination, but decided to skip it. If Kline wasn’t convinced that a single suppressed gunshot from an untraceable house was worth waiting a few hours for—to avoid turning one of the most exclusive waterfront neighborhoods in Annapolis into a war zone—maybe he wasn’t the only one. Perhaps everyone’s patience had worn thin.

  “Is anyone here opposed to me giving the order to hit the senator’s house right now?” said Dalton.

  Nobody actively indicated any opposition. Samuel Quinn, who arguably had the most experience running this kind of sensitive operation, didn’t look enthusiastic about the idea but remained silent. He had very smartly recused himself from sticking his neck out any further than necessary given his precarious situation.

  “Then it’s settled,” said Dalton, picking up her phone to dial Guthrie. “In less than thirty minutes, Senator Steele will no longer represent a threat to APEX.”

  “Don’t count your chickens, Ezra,” said Kline, before sitting back down. “General Sanderson’s protégé burned you pretty badly before.”

  When the dust settled from all this, she would look into getting rid of Allan Kline, through a directors’ vote or an assisted fall down the winding marble stairs in his favorite Tuscany villa.

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Guthrie tucked the satellite phone into a side pouch on his plate carrier vest and triggered his radio.

  “All assault teams. This is ZULU. We’ve been ordered to breach the estate,” he said. “Stagger departure by twenty seconds. Form up at the rally point for the final approach.”