The Hunters h-1

by Chris Kuzneski

  Standing in the doorway between the rooms, he grew confused. He had expected to find her crumpled in the corner of the freezer, coughing up blood from his vicious blow. But she wasn’t there, or anywhere, that he could see. He moved forward to investigate.

  Unbeknownst to him, she had scrambled across the floor and taken refuge behind the door. The instant he was fully inside the freezer, she slammed the door shut behind him. Darkness swallowed them both.

  Without light, they were forced to rely on sound, and the only thing they could hear was each other’s labored breathing. The giant pointed his gun in the direction of the door and fired. He held his breath, hoping to hear the squeal of his victim, but was greeted by silence.

  He fired again … then again … then again.

  Each time aiming in a different direction.

  Each time coming up empty.

  Her matte-black bodysuit helped her stay hidden in the maze of dangling carcasses. With every flash of the guard’s pistol, she moved closer and closer to her target. Once she had narrowed the gap to three feet, she made her move.

  She swept her foot violently behind his knee, knocking his leg from under him. As he crashed to the floor, she launched herself toward the ceiling. Clutching the hanging side of beef as if it were a rope swing, she cut the nylon line of the hoist with a cleaver. In an instant, the combined weight of herself and the steer crashed down upon the guard. His hip took the brunt of the impact, shattering like fine china.

  She stood and illuminated the scene with her flashlight. The guard’s face conveyed the intolerable pain of his broken hip. Tears streamed down his chubby cheeks.

  Thankfully, she had the perfect item to ease his pain.

  Wrapping her hands around the brass knuckles that she never left home without — she had yet to meet a man who could withstand more than one good punch — she reared back and knocked out the giant with a powerful hook to his chin.

  The big baby went right to sleep.

  It was time to see what he was protecting.

  5

  She opened the door slowly.

  In stark contrast to the dark freezer, the secret room was bathed in soft, warm light. It had the look and feel of a large, windowless office, complete with a desk, computer, and a landline phone. A Russian calendar — featuring naked women in fur hats — hung behind the door, but her attention was focused on the crates of antiquities that lined the other three walls.

  Seemingly every culture was represented. There were tribal masks, Oriental vases, and Roman weaponry. Everything from intricate baubles to uncut jewels. She even spotted a Gutenberg Bible, one of the most valuable books in the world. It was sitting inside a glass display case, which sat on top of a carton of Faberge eggs.

  Turning to her left, she spotted a crate of paintings in the far corner of the room. She hustled forward and pried open the crate.

  Inside were several paintings.

  All of which had been ‘lost’ years ago.

  Portrait of a Young Man — painted by Raphael in 1513. It was looted by the Nazis during World War II. The Battle of Anghiari — painted by Leonardo da Vinci in 1505. Often referred to as ‘the Lost Leonardo’. Portrait of Alfonso I d’Este — painted by Titian in 1523. It disappeared from the Royal Alcazar of Madrid during the eighteenth century. The Storm on the Sea of Galilee — painted by Rembrandt in 1633 — stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, the biggest art theft in US history.

  Masterpiece after masterpiece, just sitting on the floor.

  All of them there for the taking.

  And yet she was forced to ignore them.

  Rummaging through the canvases, she quickly discovered the small, framed arrangement of stained glass she had been told to locate.

  Arguably, Marc Chagall’s most notable works of stained glass are the windows at the synagogue of Hebrew University’s Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem. But long before he set about that large-scale project, he created each window in miniature. These ‘rough drafts’ and their finalized counterparts represent the twelve tribes of the Israelites — one picture for each tribe. Pulling a photo from her pack, she matched the image in the picture to the seventh piece in the series.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said aloud.

  Then she smashed the art into pieces.

  Hidden inside the frame, sandwiched between two opaque plates of glass, was a single sheet of paper. She carefully removed the dried, cracked parchment, taking every precaution to prevent further damage. Without taking the time to read it, she inserted the document into a flexible, tear-resistant membrane and secured the package in a hidden pouch inside the back of her suit.

  Then she checked her watch.

  A minute or two more was worth the risk.

  She darted over to the small desk and studied the system. Tapping on the mouse, the monitor flickered to life. She plugged a portable drive into the port on the side and copied the entire hard drive. Kozlov had art around the world, and she wanted to know who supplied it. Maybe she would come back for these treasures another time.

  Satisfied with her haul, she made her way back into the freezer. Her contented smile quickly vanished when she realized that the wounded guard was no longer on the floor. Scanning the room, she saw that the other door was open. Bracing herself, she stepped out of the freezer and into the basement.

  The moment she cleared the steel walls of the walk-in, the connection to her earpiece was restored. The voice on the other end of the mic was freaking out.

  ‘Sarah, can you hear me!’ the voice shouted. ‘If you can hear this, you need to evac immediately. I repeat, get the hell out of there!’

  ‘Calm down, Hector. What’s going on?’

  ‘I’m not sure, but it’s major. Everyone mobilized about a minute ago. The guards are pouring out of the neighboring houses, and they’re coming your way!’

  Hector Garcia studied the array of computer screens that he had assembled for this particular job. Although he was two thousand miles from the action, he had been feeding Sarah information from the moment she had landed in Brooklyn.

  His guidance had been invaluable.

  In addition to the data from the FBI surveillance van — which he had hacked with relative ease — Garcia had been monitoring the transmissions from the sticky blobs. His software processed the collective data stream in ways that would stagger the imagination. By differentiating and triangulating sounds, Garcia could not only determine how many people were inside the mansion, he could also tell which floors they were on and whether or not they were moving.

  Sarah followed a trail of blood and boot prints to the stairs that led to the kitchen door. There was no mistaking the giant’s size-twenty shoes.

  ‘Shit,’ she mumbled under her breath. She sprinted up the steps and jammed the lock from the inside. It wouldn’t hold long, but it would buy her some time. ‘I think I know why the natives are restless. I should’ve killed Shrek when I had the chance.’

  ‘Shrek?’ Garcia said, confused. ‘Are you feeling alright?’

  ‘I’m feeling fine. I’ll feel a lot better if you can get me out of this basement.’

  ‘Do you have the package?’

  ‘Of course I have the package! I wouldn’t be looking for a ticket home without the goddamn package. What do I look like? An amateur?’

  ‘How should I know? We’ve never met!’

  ‘And we never will unless you find me a route out of here.’

  ‘I’m trying. Trust me, I’m trying!’

  Sarah could hear shouting in the kitchen. She tried to decipher what they were saying, but the walls were too thick. ‘Can you make any of that out?’

  ‘I can make all of it out,’ Garcia said. ‘Unfortunately, I can’t speak Russian so I don’t know what they’re saying.’

  ‘Don’t you have software for that?’

  ‘I can only do so much at once!’

  ‘Fine,’ she said stubbornly. ‘Then I’ll find a way out myself.’

 
‘The kitchen is not an option,’ he assured her. ‘There’s so much activity up there, I can’t even get an accurate count. You’ll have to find another way.’

  ‘What about back through the vault? Maybe a ventilation shaft?’

  ‘You know the schematics as well as I do,’ Garcia said. ‘It’s an old house, but they refitted the basement with modern ventilation a few years back. There’s no way you’re fitting through a three-inch exhaust.’

  ‘Maybe I won’t have to,’ she said as her mind whirred through a list of possibilities. She had studied enough floor plans and security systems in her life to recognize the details that most people would miss. ‘I think I found another way.’

  Sarah studied the column in the center of the room and slid open a wooden panel in the front. She had glanced at it earlier and had quickly dismissed it as part of the cooling system, but then she remembered that this house had been built decades earlier. In order to feed the occupants and their staff, several pounds of meat and vegetables were cooked daily. The intense, continuous heat of the cooking fires would have made the kitchen unbearable, so the ovens had been relegated to the basement. Rather than make the staff carry the food up several flights of stairs, the architect came up with an alternative.

  ‘You aren’t going to believe this,’ she said as she shined her flashlight up the elevator shaft. ‘This house has a dumb waiter.’

  ‘To where?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said as she climbed inside the shaft and closed the door behind her. ‘I’ll let you know when I get there.’

  6

  Agent Callahan was a block away from the surveillance van when he used his cell phone to call his partner. ‘Are you seeing this?’

  Koontz stayed focused on the monitor in front of him. ‘Of course I’m seeing this. The Angels have the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth. One hit and the Yankees can suck it!’

  ‘You’re watching the Yankees?’

  ‘Of course I’m watching the Yankees. We get great reception with our satellite. Why do you think I wanted you out of the van?’

  Callahan fumed. ‘You’re such an idiot! We finally see some action, and you’re jerking off instead of taking pictures?’

  ‘Action? What action?’

  ‘Look out the damn window!’

  Koontz did as he was told and was stunned by the sight. Guards poured from the surrounding homes like a flood, filling the streets with crew cuts and guns. ‘Holy shit! What the hell happened? Did someone find the Red October?’

  ‘I don’t know what happened. I was hoping you could tell me!’

  ‘Heck if I know,’ Koontz admitted. Instead of monitoring local chatter, he had been listening to the audio feed of the baseball game. ‘Give me a minute, and I’ll check the tape.’

  ‘Screw the tape! Check the live feed from the house.’

  Despite his lackadaisical demeanor, Koontz was actually a talented field agent, one who knew Russian, Ukrainian, and several other languages. It was that skill more than any other that had led to this particular assignment. He could eavesdrop on any conversation in Brighton Beach and figure out what was being said.

  Koontz listened and translated for his partner. ‘They found a body in the kitchen. A big fucker named Boris. He was just lying in the middle of the floor.’

  ‘A body? As in, someone died?’

  The news excited Callahan. A dead body, no matter who it was, would give them cause to knock down the door. Not only that, it would tie Kozlov to a murder.

  His mind raced at the possibilities.

  ‘No, not dead,’ Koontz informed him. ‘Just really messed up. There’s a lot of commotion, but I think someone said he broke his hip.’

  ‘Shit!’ Callahan blurted. His vision of storming the mansion was replaced by thoughts of an old man slipping on an ice cube.

  Koontz continued to listen. ‘Now they’re talking about killing someone.’

  ‘Killing who?’ Callahan demanded.

  He paused for a moment. ‘You.’

  ‘Me? They’re talking about killing me?’

  Koontz laughed. ‘Nah, I’m just messing with you. They’re looking for some intruder. They think he’s in the vault, and they’re gathering the troops to find him.’

  ‘What intruder? What vault?’

  ‘How the hell should I know? I can only translate so many things at once — especially since I’m flying solo. It might be nice if I had some help.’

  Compared to traditional elevators, the dumb waiter shaft was dark and cramped, but it felt downright spacious compared to the chimneys, crawlspaces, and ventilation ducts Sarah had shimmied through over the years. And since the dumb waiter car had been removed long ago, she had plenty of room to maneuver.

  Splaying her legs to the sides, she climbed the chute with relative ease. All she had to do was maintain enough side-to-side pressure with her arms and legs to support her bodyweight while she crawled vertically toward the roof. She wasn’t sure if the top of the shaft would offer an exit or if she would have to create one herself. For the time being, her only goal was to avoid a messy confrontation in the basement.

  When she reached the pulleys that had once held the support ropes in place, Sarah realized she had come to the end of the line. The exit door to the third floor had long since been covered by plasterboard, but it wasn’t all bad news in her mind since they hadn’t reset the studs in the wall. She knew she could punch through drywall, but two-inch-thick boards would have been a different matter.

  Before she did anything drastic, Sarah pressed her ear against the shaft and listened for any signs of life on the other side of the wall. Guards scurried on the floors below, desperately searching for the evil ninja who had defeated the giant ogre they kept locked in the basement, but she heard nothing but silence outside the chute.

  It was now or never.

  She walked her feet around the perimeter of the shaft and planted her shoes firmly against the frame of the opening. Holding onto the pulley above, she curled her legs against her chest and swung out from the wall with all her might. As gravity reversed her course, she combined her momentum with a violent thrust of her legs.

  The wall splintered on contact as she drove her feet through the drywall. Chunks of plaster flew into the hallway and clanked down the shaft to the basement below, but she knew the noise was worth the risk. She repeated the process again and again, widening the hole until she could slip through the narrow gap.

  She looked like a gopher searching for hawks when she peeked her head through the hole. She turned left, then right, then left again, making sure the coast was clear before she fully emerged from the wall. Satisfied with her surroundings, she dove through the small fissure, launching all but her lower legs into the hallway beyond. She quickly pulled her calves, ankles, and feet through the wall and rose to one knee.

  She listened, wondering if her breach had been detected.

  ‘You’re good,’ Garcia said in her ear. ‘The mass of guards hasn’t moved from the lower floors. I think you’re clear unless …’

  ‘Unless what?’ she whispered.

  ‘Hold on! We have movement. One person, heading your-’

  ‘Shit,’ she blurted.

  Not thirty feet in front of her, Kozlov himself emerged from a room at the end of the hallway. He stared at her, consumed with rage. Although he was unarmed, she half expected fireballs to burst forth from his eyes — that’s how angry he was.

  ‘Here!’ he screamed in Russian. ‘The intruder is standing right in front of me! Someone, grab him!’

  Even with the language barrier, Sarah understood that she wouldn’t be getting a holiday card from Kozlov anytime soon. Preparing for the worst, she slipped her brass knuckles on and took a step toward the crime boss.

  ‘Shit!’ Garcia yelled in her ear. ‘Here comes another!’

  Almost instantly, a single figure appeared on the stairwell nearest Kozlov’s room. Dressed in a dark suit, he dashed up the steps two at a time while
pulling a pistol from the holster inside his coat. His eyes locked on Sarah as he charged at her with his gun raised. Kozlov sneered and pointed at Sarah as she turned and sprinted down a hallway toward the back half of the house.

  Thinking quickly, the gunman leaped over a railing in the open mezzanine and tried to catch her before she reached the back deck. He fired once, barely missing her right shoulder but hitting the French doors in front of her. The glass shattered on contact, which surprised everyone in the hallway because it was supposed to be bulletproof.

  Despite the chaos, Kozlov made a mental note to kill the contractor who had installed the window. Then he returned his focus to the gunman.

  He fired again. And again. And again.

  Every time his bullet just missed.

  Kozlov watched in amazement as the intruder reached the end of the hallway but didn’t stop running until ‘he’ leaped off the third-story patio with reckless abandon. His national pride soared when he watched the gunman do the same. Kozlov thought it was suicide to go after the thief in that way, but he appreciated the dedication. As soon as he learned the new guard’s name, he would reward him for his bravery.

  Just to be safe, Kozlov waited for several guards to join him before he led them down the hallway to where the intruder had made ‘his’ escape. In Kozlov’s mind, the intruder had to be a man because women were incapable of such feats of strength. Of course, it was assumptions like that that helped her get away.

  Hoping to find the intruder’s blood on his carpet, Kozlov saw nothing but broken glass. Disappointed, he raced to the balcony where he expected to see two crumpled bodies on the pool deck below. Instead, he saw something that sickened him to his very core: the gunman was helping the intruder out of the pool.

  It took a moment for it to all sink in.

  The two of them were working together.

  Kozlov’s face turned red as he roared, ‘Kill them both!’

  7

  It took Callahan nearly ten minutes to reach the surveillance van through the mob of gunmen that filled the street outside of Kozlov’s house. Not because the guards were hassling him — just about everyone in the neighborhood knew what the Feds looked like — but because Callahan was hassling them.