by Diane Capri
Outside the fence, though, was a different story entirely. The land immediately behind the property was heavily populated with decades-old, maybe centuries-old, fir trees. They were big and ancient and provided excellent cover for anyone interested in observing the facility while keeping his presence a secret.
Sitting quietly in this thickly forested area were Tony, Brian, and Jackie. It was Sunday, just shy of 2:00 a.m., and United States President Robert Cartwright was scheduled to fly into Logan Airport on Air Force One in approximately three hours. Tony’s goal was to ensure that it was the last time the president ever flew anywhere, except straight to hell where he belonged.
Clouds gathered overhead, thickening rapidly, effectively obscuring the quarter-full moon. Ambient light would not be a problem. The weather forecasters were calling for ceilings to continue to lower and eventually for a light but steady rain to begin falling across the region. If the conditions deteriorated too quickly, it would spell problems for the remaining two members of the team, who were hunkered down in a remote location outside Logan Airport with the stolen Stingers, but Tony wasn’t worried. He had studied several different forecasts, and they were unanimous in their estimates that the worst of the conditions around Logan would not occur until much later in the day—long after their mission had been completed.
All his men needed in order to fire upon Air Force One as it hung in the sky over the airport—exposed like a fish in a barrel, just waiting to be blown to bits—were cloud bases of as low as a few hundred feet. Assuming the current forecast was accurate, in a few hours the president would be killed in a fiery plane crash. Once the job was done, the clouds could extend all the way down to the ground; it wouldn’t matter to Tony in the least.
The faint sound of rubber-soled shoes scuffling on pavement floated through the heavy air. Tony glanced at his watch. Two o’clock. Right on time. He and his men had staked out the BCT for several days now, and each morning at exactly the same time, one of the two security guards on duty clomped past on the paved walking path encircling the facility just inside the perimeter of the security fence.
Protocol, not to mention common sense, should have dictated that the guards vary the timing of the nightly sweeps, but it had become quite clear to Tony that security at this facility—located far off the beaten path in New Hampshire—was inexcusably lax; the guards had not varied their routine in the slightest from one evening to the next.
A damp breeze rustled the massive evergreens all around them, and the group held their positions, standing perfectly still in the shadows as the patrolling security guard materialized out of the darkness. He yawned, practically sleepwalking as he strolled the path, paying little attention to his surroundings and moving with the gait of someone who couldn’t wait to get back to his favorite chair and take a load off.
#
Jackie lay prone on the cold carpet of moss and reddish brown fallen pine needles and watched the man pass. He was stationed just far enough into the pitch-black area behind the trees that he remained invisible to the security guard as he made his rounds.
He sighted down the barrel of a TCI M89SR sniper rifle, patiently tracking his prey. The compact semiautomatic weapon, originally manufactured for the Israeli Defense Forces and now in common use by the Special Forces units of numerous countries, was fitted with a sound suppressor and rested comfortably in a portable bipod, barrel angled upward. Jackie followed the ambling gait of the unwitting guard, making minute adjustments, keeping the man’s body centered in the crosshairs.
Minutes earlier, Jackie had taken out the lone security camera monitoring the grounds behind the BCT building. The camera, mounted high on the back wall of the building, had been programmed for constant motion, continually scanning for anything out of the ordinary. Now, however, this area remained free of electronic surveillance, the camera currently resting in a thousand useless pieces scattered across the rear parking lot.
#
The possibility that the guard manning the security station might be alarmed by the lack of video surveillance in this area didn’t concern Tony. There were so many cameras on this federal government property that it was unlikely the guard would even notice the blank screen for some time, and that was assuming he was even paying close attention to all the monitors in the guard shack rather than sleeping—an unlikely scenario given the late hour and general security laxness Tony had observed.
The patrolling guard wandered sleepily in front of Tony and his unmoving men, three pairs of eyes quietly marking his progress. When he reached a point almost directly in front of them, passing less than forty feet away on the other side of the chain-link fence, Jackie squeezed the trigger of the M89, and a soft phht sound was accompanied a second later by the sight of the guard tumbling to the ground. He executed a slow, almost balletic, pirouette before dropping gracefully to the pavement. He kicked his legs once and lay still.
Under the over of the trees, no one moved for nearly a full minute. When Jackie was finally satisfied the man was either dead or fully incapacitated, he took his finger off the trigger and began dismantling his equipment and repacking it into his bag.
#
Brian approached the fence carrying a small but powerful set of bolt cutters. He was covered by Tony, but the team anticipated no interruption from the other guard, who was undoubtedly still huddled in the security building and out of sight around a corner, unaware of what had befallen his partner. The two men never patrolled together.
When Brian reached the fence, he began snipping the tempered steel with the powerful jaws of the bolt cutter, steadily moving from the ground up in more or less a straight line, until he had created a jagged opening in the fence roughly six feet high and three feet wide that the group could squeeze through. For sixty seconds, the only sound was a muffled ting-ting-ting as he worked his way through the reinforced steel.
#
The sound of the links snapping was surprisingly clear, enough so that Tony wondered whether it would carry through the moist, still air all the way to the guard shack. He then decided it didn’t really matter.
Even assuming the lone remaining guard was awake and heard the noise, he would take some time to try to figure out what the hell it was. By the time he decided to get off his ass and investigate, the sound would have long since stopped, and he would likely just shrug and forget about it. It was clear to Tony that these rent-a-cops didn’t exactly represent the top of the law enforcement food chain.
#
When Brian finished creating an opening in the security fence big enough for the team to squeeze through, he pulled the chain links apart, and Jackie slipped through and entered the property. The fence creaked quietly and then fell silent as Brian maintained a steady tension on the links.
Jackie approached the fallen security guard cautiously, his Glock 9mm semiautomatic pistol with sound suppressor trained on the unmoving man. He reached the guard in a few steps and knelt beside him, running his fingers lightly along the side of the man’s neck, feeling for a pulse. He shook his head in disbelief, then placed the gun at the guard’s temple, turned his body, and squeezed off a single shot. He felt for a pulse again.
Now satisfied that the man was dead, Jackie jammed the gun into the waistband of his jeans and grabbed the prostrate guard’s ankles, dragging him back through the fence and into the relative darkness and safety of the thick stand of trees just outside the BCT property line. Brian eased the makeshift gate closed behind him and then retreated into the trees, too.
Shivering from the cool and damp air, Jackie began to undress.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Jim Shay was bone tired. Working two jobs—one of which required him to be alert between 12:00 and 8:00 a.m. while the rest of the world slumbered snugly in their beds—was a major pain in the ass. But with five kids and a wife who spent money like they had a printing press in their basement, he had no choice but to do what he was doing. “Keep on keepin’ on,” as the song lyrics went.
On the bright side, this BCT security gig was a piece of cake once you got past the shitty hours. He worked days as a Merrimack town cop, slept in the afternoon and early evening, then put on his generic security guard’s uniform and drove to this out-of-the-way government facility to work the graveyard shift five nights a week. As the sun peeked over the evergreen trees in the morning, he would leave the BCT and drive straight to the Merrimack Police Department to begin the whole exhausting cycle all over again.
It was a tiring life, boring too, but the way Jim saw it, he had no real reason to bitch. The United States government paid damned good money to maintain a minimum staffing level of two armed guards at the BCT 24/7, and Jim was thankful he had been selected to fill one of the slots when the air traffic control facility opened five years ago. In this economy, when a lot of people were scrambling to keep one job, Jim wasn’t going to complain about having two.
He leaned back in his rolling office chair and yawned. As tempting as it was to close his eyes and take a quick power nap, Jim was too conscientious to ever sleep on duty. It wouldn’t be right. More to the point, if he got caught, he would definitely get fired, and what would he do then? Lucy was sure as hell not going to stop spending money, and there was no way he’d ever find another second job that paid the kind of scratch this one did.
At least he had someone to talk to; that little bonus helped pass the time. And although his night shift partner, Morris Stapleton, wasn’t going to make anyone forget Albert Einstein and didn’t exactly set the world on fire with his initiative, he had a pretty good sense of humor and loved to talk sports, so for the most part, the nights went by as quickly as Jim had any right to expect.
Thinking of Morris made Jim wonder what was taking him so long to return from his perimeter patrol. There were only three duties mandated by the government on the overnight shift: maintain a constant presence in the guard shack in order to screen traffic at the front gate; scan the bank of monitors showing the real-time video feed from the dozens of CCTV security cameras positioned inside and outside the BCT building; and patrol the perimeter of the property and the inside of the building several times a night.
In other words, do a little bit of law enforcement.
Over the course of their partnership, Jim and Morris had worked out an agreement whereby they would trade off perimeter patrol duties on alternating nights. Walking perimeter patrol was by far the most distasteful of the job’s few requirements, since it involved exercise often conducted in weather conditions that were less than desirable.
Tonight was Morris’s turn to “Walk the Line,” as they called it, and he was pretty fortunate; the conditions weren’t too bad. It was cool, and it was going to rain later. But for now the air was still, and although the atmosphere was saturated with moisture, the rain had thus far held off.
As Jim considered whether he should go look for Morris—maybe the fat slob had suffered a heart attack and was even now lying face down and motionless behind the building—he noticed the vague shape of his partner coming into focus in the dim, hazy glow of the sodium vapor arc lights spaced at regular intervals around the property. Morris was still far off across the open empty expanse of field bordering the access road, ambling along like he always did. Jim often wondered if Morris even knew how to run. If he did, Jim had never seen any evidence of it.
Jim turned his attention toward a large imitation maple console that ran alongside the front interior wall of the guard shack. The console contained a series of small closed-circuit television monitors, each one countersunk into the surface so that only its viewing screen protruded. The guards had had a few close calls with spilling coffee onto the damned things, but so far, thank God, none of the accidents had fried any of the monitors.
He wondered how much money would be withheld from his paycheck to replace a monitor if he destroyed one and shuddered. They were just basic black-and-white CCTV monitors, five inches high by seven inches wide, but with the United States government doing the purchasing, undoubtedly the sky was the limit on the cost of the goddamned things. Each one probably priced out at upwards of a thousand bucks or something.
He glanced at the three rows of monitors, looking away and then doing a double take. Something was wrong with camera seventeen, the one mounted on a swivel high on the southeast corner of the BCT building. It provided the only video coverage of the grounds directly behind that portion of the building, and either the camera had just shit the bed, or else the monitor itself was on the fritz. All that was being displayed was interference, like the snow you used to get on the broadcast TV channels—in the Dark Ages before cable—in the middle of the night when the station was off the air.
Jim tried to remember whether that particular monitor had been working the last time he checked and was pretty sure it had been; he would have noticed if the screen had been grey and fuzzy like it was now. It wasn’t all that unusual for the cameras to suffer glitches, though. He would have to ask Morris if he had noticed anything unusual in that area when he made it back to the shack. He had passed by there just a couple of minutes ago. Where was he? Christ, that guy was slow.
Finally the man’s bulk filled the open doorway. Jim registered him entering in his peripheral vision but continued watching camera seventeen’s monitor as if he could somehow will the piece of crap to begin operating normally again. It would certainly make life easier if he could.
“Check out this piece of shit,” Jim said, glancing up at the man and immediately freezing in place, his blood running cold. He had no fucking idea who was standing inside the guard shack’s bulletproof door dressed in Morris’s ill-fitting uniform, but it certainly wasn’t Morris. This guy was shorter than Morris, squat and powerfully built, with curly jet-black hair sticking out of his blue ball cap at odd angles, making it look as though he had a bunch of antennae coming out of his head. Kind of like Uncle Martin on My Favorite Martian, the old TV comedy he had loved when he was a kid.
But there was nothing funny about the gun the guy was pointing at Jim’s chest. He held the weapon securely in a two-handed shooter’s grip like he knew exactly what he was doing, and he appeared completely at ease. “Check out what piece of shit, my friend?” he said pleasantly in a high-pitched nasally voice tinged with traces of a Brooklyn accent.
“Who the fuck are you?”
“I would think you might try to take a more civil tone, considering I have absolute control over whether you live or die in the next few seconds.”
Jim tried to get his breathing under control as he considered his options. There weren’t many. He could try to draw his weapon on the man, but it was holstered at his hip, held in place by a thick leather strap. He would have to unsnap the strap, lift the gun, and shoot in one smooth motion before the guy squeezed the trigger on his own weapon, which he now recognized as a Glock very similar to his own. Odds of success: pretty fucking slim.
Other options? He couldn’t think of any, except maybe to keep the guy talking. Slow things down a little. Maybe he would have the opportunity to get a jump on this character if he could draw things out and establish some control over the situation. Easier said than done, though, especially since this guy looked like a pro.
“Yeah, you’re right. Sorry about that, dude. Let me try a different question: Where’s my partner?”
“Partner? What partner? You had a partner?” The guy had a wiseass smirk on his face, and Jim realized he was playing with him. He also realized the guy said “had a partner,” not “have a partner.” He didn’t like the choice of wording and didn’t think it was accidental.
He pushed on. Keep the guy talking. Wait for an opportunity. What choice did he have? “Yeah, my partner, the man whose uniform you’re now wearing. I gotta tell ya—he fills it out a lot better than you do.”
“Not anymore he don’t.” The man’s dark eyes had gone cold, and they glittered dangerously. He held the gun perfectly centered on Jim’s chest. His hands looked relaxed and steady. This guy knew what he was do
ing. “He won’t be filling any uniforms out anymore, good or bad.”
Jim’s heart sank. Unless the guy was playing with him again, and that seemed unlikely, he was making clear that Morris was dead. Matters suddenly became much more dire, if that was possible. Question: What could be worse than a man pointing a loaded gun at you from no more than seven feet away? Answer: A man who had just killed another human being in cold blood pointing a gun at you from no more than seven feet away.
If this crazy bastard really had murdered Morris, then clearly he had nothing to lose. He was already facing a lethal injection and would have zero reason to allow Jim to live and every reason in the world not to. Jim knew he should be shaking, should be shitting his pants actually, but he felt a strange sort of Zen calm envelope him. He had been in bad situations before, serving two tours with the Marine Corps in the Middle East, where there was virtually no respect for human life among many of the people; they just didn’t place the same value on it that Westerners did.
He had survived confrontations with men who were twice as savage and cunning as this young man, and Jim was sure if he kept his wits about him that he could survive this, too. He just had to figure out how.
“So Morris is out of the picture. That’s too bad, man, but we can still resolve things without anyone else dying. Especially me. That sound reasonable to you? What’s your name?”
The guy coughed out a harsh laugh like the question was the funniest thing he had heard all night. His dead shark eyes narrowed. He probably knew exactly what Jim was trying to do. “Okay, I’ll play along, seeing how we’re becoming so close and all. My name’s Jackie. Jackie Corrigan. It make you feel better knowing my name?”
