He was trying to be honorable.
She understood.
She just didn’t like it.
Chapter 39
Alan crouched in the lot next door, concealed by the dense vegetation, the lights in the house all off, everyone down for the night. He watched the guards in the dim illumination of the few lamps on the front of Arthur’s property, and checked his watch. If they stuck to their pattern, the two men at the front would meet with the two from the rear, hang out for a few minutes, and then return on their rounds. Each patrol took ten minutes, nobody in any hurry. Four more guards lounged up by the gate, there to stop anyone foolish enough to try to crash through the iron barrier.
The guards carried shotguns, which they did after dark, preferring to keep them out of sight during the day and not alarm the neighbors, even though they were all licensed to carry them as part of their job. Twelve-gauge scatterguns, loaded with double-ought buckshot, he knew from Jet’s research.
The faint sound of cars three quarters of a mile away on the freeway, an almost inaudible but constant whirring, became louder when an occasional big rig went by. The surrounding trees masked the sound, as they did virtually every noise – something they were all depending on once the fur began flying.
The rear patrol began making its way back to the front gate, as usual, and he waited until they cleared the corner before he sprinted straight for the rear wall and vaulted it effortlessly, his move executed with the grace of a gymnast. He landed squarely on the grass and rolled, then paused on one knee to verify his position. He would need to move ten yards straight ahead, then five to his right near the cottage, and then another twenty straight towards the house, then seven to the left, before completing his final approach. While he would have much rather run flat out, his mind urged caution, and he carefully trotted forward, stopping at the first estimated sensor gap, then turning and taking five more large steps before moving towards the house again.
To anyone watching, he would have looked like he was out of his mind – dressed in all black, his M4 strapped over one shoulder, his backpack cinched tight, moving in an elaborate sequence of steps of no discernible pattern. But he was completely concealed by the bulk of the stately home, so his performance was wasted, no spectators around to view it.
He reached the house without any spotlights going off. He hadn’t triggered the motion detectors, which were positioned to allow the patrols to move along the perimeter of the grounds without setting them off, with the focus being the front and back home entrances and the side service entry for the kitchen.
Alan could easily make out the door to the root cellar with the night vision goggles, and he edged along the hedges that ringed the base of the house before arriving at the rectangular form.
And got his first nasty surprise.
A stainless steel padlock was clasped through the eyelets. A big one. Industrial, by the looks of it. He had a pair of bolt cutters in case he ran across a lock, but they wouldn’t work on this type – the hasp was protected by its own steel case.
He weighed his options and briefly considered trying to scale the side of the house, but discarded the idea. The wooden siding wouldn’t support his weight, and wouldn’t have adequate holds for him to make it. The windows on both floors were all wired, he knew from his study of the diagram, so that wasn’t a way in, either, if he wanted to avoid detection.
Alan glanced around and mentally calculated how long he had before the guards returned. Three minutes, at most. The choices weren’t good. He would have to abort.
And then he saw it: a drainpipe running up the corner to the rain gutter rimming the roof. Maybe he could use it to reach the eaves, and then somehow climb over and in from above. As far as he could remember there were no sensors on the high roof – there was no way to access it, so the designers of the system had felt it was safe.
He glanced at his watch and then steeled himself for the climb. It would be difficult, but he’d done worse. He inched along until he was directly beneath it, and then grabbed the pipe and pulled, trying to gauge its strength. It didn’t budge. A good sign.
Alan took a deep breath, and clutching the metal edges with both hands, pulled himself off the ground and clamped onto it with his feet. He willed himself higher, using his legs to keep himself from sliding back down, and was quickly past the first story and moving up to the second. Once he was at the top floor he looked up, and could see the roof edge only four or five feet above. It would be close, but he would be able to make it over the side before the guards returned. From there, it wasn’t all downhill, but if there was an attic or ventilation duct and he could gain entry to the house, he might be able to execute Arthur before anyone knew what had happened. Getting out would be harder, but he would cross that bridge…
The pipe creaked and shifted, and Alan froze, suspended two stories above the hard-packed ground, his sole means of support protesting his weight. A rusted bolt that held the top of the pipe in place groaned, but then the movement stopped.
Perhaps it would be all right. He reached up and continued to pull himself up, now being even more tentative so as to avoid vibrating the pipe any more than he had to, and his fingers had nearly reached the gutter when the top shifted again – and the bolt snapped.
The pipe, with Alan, swung away from the house as if in slow motion before it broke halfway along its length, and Alan was falling backwards, trying desperately to spin so he could land facing forward and cushion his impact with his hands and feet. Luck wasn’t with him, though, and the last thing he registered after slamming into the ground was four guards running at him, shotguns at the ready, their boots pounding against the dirt as the world spun and he blacked out.
Chapter 40
“He’s coming to.” The first guard’s voice sounded distant, as if he was speaking in a tunnel. Alan’s eyes flitted open and then closed again, a bright light blinding him.
He tried to move his arms, but his wrists were cuffed behind him, the steel of the restraints cutting into his skin as he strained against them.
A blow landed on his face, a slap, and he opened his eyes again to find himself looking at two bodyguards, and the man he recognized as Standish.
Standish nodded at the guards, and they departed wordlessly, leaving Alan alone with Arthur’s assistant. Standish slowly paced around Alan before returning to a position facing him.
“Who are you? Who sent you?” Standish’s voice was quiet, but the menace was clear.
Alan didn’t respond.
“I asked you a question. It’s very rude to ignore a direct question, did you know that?”
Alan closed his eyes again, a wave of dizziness and nausea washing over him.
Another slap.
“Answer my question. Who are you?”
Alan raised his head and opened his eyes. “You asked two questions,” he croaked, his voice seeming to be somehow broken. His neck hurt like he’d been slammed in the side of the head with a brick. Something, perhaps more than one thing, was badly damaged.
“Ah, so it speaks. Very good. Now answer both questions, then. Who are you, and who sent you?”
“I’m with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Have you heard the good news of Je–”
Another blow knocked his head sideways, this one harder than a slap.
“Answer me.”
Alan grinned, blood covering his teeth from a cut inside his mouth, and spat red saliva at Standish. He needed to stall for time. Give Jet and Matt a chance to get to him.
“That’s the best you can do? A little girl punch? Please,” Alan taunted.
“Oh, I think you’ll find I can do much worse.”
“But you won’t. Because it’s the United States, and it’s illegal to torture people here, isn’t it? So you’ll call the police, they’ll arrest me, and that will be that. Now go make the call, pussy boy.”
Standish chuckled. Alan didn’t like the sound.
“Is that how you think this is going to work? Ah. I see wh
y you’re so confident. But I think you have something a little wrong. These men are not ordinary security guards. They’re mercenaries. They’ve all killed many, many times. And they’re paid an extraordinarily large amount of money to guard this place. So nobody is going to say a word about your capture. You don’t exist. I can do whatever I want to you, and believe me, what I have planned…well, it won’t be pleasant.”
“You’re lying.”
“No, I’m not. If you’ve done any research at all on this house, you know that the owner is ex-CIA. An extremely powerful ex-CIA at that, I might add. Since you’re equipped to kill a platoon, I’m going to guess that you’re here to assassinate him. So spare me the theatrics and let’s get down to business. Who are you, and who sent you?”
“Your mother.”
Standish sighed. “How did you get to the house? The entire grounds are wired.”
“Not very well.”
Standish shook his head. “I don’t have a background in interrogation, but I know the head of the security team does. I’d hoped to keep this entre nous, but if I’m forced to, I’ll bring him into it. And the result is sure to be extremely painful and messy.”
“Sounds terrifying.”
The two men exchanged hateful glares, and then Standish spun and moved to the door.
“You were warned.”
~ ~ ~
Jet watched the commotion through her scope, and then gasped when she saw one of the spotlights go on and four men carry Alan’s inert form into the house, the security men at the front keeping an eye out, confirming that the altercation had gone unnoticed.
Matt reappeared at the bottom of the tree a few minutes later. “Did you see?” he whispered to her.
“I’m coming down.” She lowered herself next to Matt, the M4 strapped over her shoulder. “They’ve got him.”
“I know. I was watching,” Matt said. “Something went wrong. He tried to climb up the side of the house, but then the pipe he was using let go. He fell at least twenty feet. It didn’t look good when he hit. Landed on his back.”
“We have to get him out of there.”
“Impossible. The guards are on alert now. Even a frontal assault with a full squad wouldn’t be enough to make it in,” Matt said.
“Shit. This is all my fault. I should have been the one to go.”
“And do what? Whatever happened, he couldn’t get to the com lines, obviously. So he improvised on the spot. And he got it wrong. How is that your fault?”
She brooded for a few seconds. “It should have been me.”
“All right. It’s all your fault. Happy? But how does that change the situation?”
She didn’t say anything. “It doesn’t,” she finally conceded. “We need to go in for him. He wouldn’t leave me in there. I’m sure of that.”
“So he’d make the same kind of stupid decision he made trying to scale the pipe. Fine. But you’re not him, and you shouldn’t be driven by what he would do. What would you do?”
Jet took her time, thinking, and then turned to Matt, gesturing for him to return the MP7 to her.
“I’d do this the right way.”
~ ~ ~
Jet was just preparing to work her way to the rear of the lot from the park when an engine revved at the house. Matt and Jet exchanged glances and watched as a black Ford Expedition rolled to a stop by the front door and Arthur emerged from the entry, supported by a man at each elbow. He struggled to get into the rear seat before one of the men lifted him and then slid in beside him. She debated trying to get back to the high point in the tree where she would have a shot at him, but it was too late. A second SUV pulled around the Expedition to the front guardhouse, and then both vehicles waited for the gates to open.
“Damn. He’s making a run for it. How far is your car?” Jet seethed.
“It’ll take me about two minutes to get to it.”
“Run. There’s only one road out of here. You can pick them up where it lets out. Hurry.”
Matt nodded and then tore off, moving flat out down the trail towards the far side of the park. The gates finally stopped moving, and the lead SUV rolled out onto the lane, followed by the Expedition with Arthur in it, moving slowly, no doubt to limit his discomfort.
Arthur had probably panicked when he’d been told that an assassin had been captured, and ordered the men to get him out of there. Wherever they were taking him at this hour would pose its own problems, but they could deal with that after she got Alan out of the house. Now that half the security detail was gone with Arthur, there wasn’t anything left to guard, so it would be easier to get in. She hoped so.
Jet slipped across the street a hundred yards down the road, around a bend where the guards at the gate wouldn’t spot her, and navigated through the neighbor’s park-like estate to the rear of Arthur’s lot. The patrols had stopped once Arthur left, which was both good and bad. It meant that their movements were unpredictable, but also could mean that they had let down their guard.
She took a run at the wall and threw herself over, somersaulting as she cleared the iron fencing before landing on catlike feet, then moved swiftly in the same pattern Alan had, but at twice the speed. She was at the house in twenty seconds, and quickly spotted the problem with the lock. Glancing up, she saw a light in what she knew from studying the plans was the main bedroom upstairs, and then another in a room at the far end of the house on the same floor. That would probably be where they were keeping Alan. Had to be. The light had only gone on recently.
Discarding all pretence of a stealthy entry, she felt for a grenade in her backpack and retrieved it, then pulled the pin and tossed it at the back door. It rolled to a stop near the base, and she fished out her other one and hurled it through a window, the glass shattering as it clunked against the living room floor.
The explosion at the back door shattered the night, followed by the living room grenade tearing the downstairs apart. She gave it a few seconds to clear of dust, then dashed to the ruined rear door and ducked inside, the MP7 leading the way.
Two guards were down by the foyer, the blast having knocked them off their feet. She fired two silenced three-round bursts into their bodies as the nearest one tried for his shoulder-holstered weapon. She mentally ticked off the number of men still there. Eight total, if four had gone with Arthur. Four outside at the gate, two dead in the foyer, leaving two more inside. Probably upstairs.
She’d have to make it fast. The police would be on their way after the explosions, and at best she might have five minutes, tops. Then again, the local cops weren’t equipped for a military raid, so while they worried her, the guards worried her more. Each was a trained mercenary, and they wouldn’t go easy.
A floorboard creaked above her, and she fired up through the ceiling, her silenced rounds tearing through the wood and plaster. She heard a thump from a falling body, and then a thin stream of fresh blood dripped through the bullet holes onto the floor next to her feet.
A round whistled by her ear as she spun to face the stairway and she dropped instantly, firing as she turned, and was rewarded by a man falling backwards onto the stairs, his pistol clattering on the floor at the base.
She waited, listening, her ears ringing from the grenade blasts in spite of having plugged them when the detonations went off, then she moved to the front of the house, her night vision goggles illuminating her way in the dark. She’d need to deal with the exterior guards, by now running down the drive towards her, or risk being overwhelmed by their sheer number. The last thing they would be expecting would be fire from the house. At least, that was her hope.
Jet peered through one of the windows, the glass blown out from the concussion, and spotted two men creeping towards her position along the periphery, by the wall. Her weapon barked twice, and the lead man was knocked off his feet, his shotgun discharging with a boom as his finger reflexively jerked the trigger. The second man was bringing his weapon to bear on her when another burst of death shredded into his torso and he c
ollapsed.
The question was now whether the two at the gate would also try to be heroes, or simply wait for the police to arrive. She could see them ducking down in the guardhouse, and she fired off four bursts to dissuade them from any impulsive acts of pointless bravery.
She didn’t pause to see what their decision was, and instead took the stairs two at a time while ejecting the MP7’s magazine and slapping another home. At the top of the stairs she got her bearings, the house now dark, the electricity knocked out by damage from the grenades. That was another advantage she could leverage – she had night vision equipment, and the guards didn’t, relying upon the motion detectors to turn on the spotlights. Likely a critical distinction she could use in her favor.
Jet stepped over a piece of debris, toed a pistol away from the inert form of the guard she’d shot through the floorboards, and then inched around the corpse before tiptoeing to the doorway at the end of the hall. She stopped outside and listened intently, but didn’t hear anything. Gripping the weapon with her right hand, she twisted the knob and pushed the door ajar, then scanned the room with the gun barrel before stopping when she came to Alan, slumped over in a chair, his hands cuffed behind him, his shirt torn open and his feet in a bowl of water with a wire lying next to it, the other end leading to the wall.
“Alan. It’s me. Can you hear me?” she whispered, but there was no answer. She tried again. “Alan. Wake up. We need to get out of here.”
His chin lifted off his chest, and he struggled to form a word as he came to. She edged nearer.
“What? What is it, Alan?”
His left eye was swollen shut, but his right met hers as he tried again.
“Beee…beh…hin… you…”
She twisted to get her gun pointed at the doorway, but wasn’t fast enough.
Jet 04: Reckoning Page 26
