He also wondered if Hollingsworth was going to show his face, or if he’d have his henchmen do the dirty work. And how in hell did they know he would be on that particular road at that specific time anyway? Someone tip him off when I was leaving the base? He remembered Tom had seen a car parked at the rear of Hollingsworth’s mansion with a Pacific Missile Range Facility security decal on the windshield.
As they walked toward the far wall, Kale removed his hand from Marchetti’s collar to grab a fistfull of nylon rope on the bench to his right. Marchetti assumed Kale was planning to use it to tie him up somewhere in the house.
Marchetti glanced around the room again to see if there was anything he might use to cut the rope if it came to that, but nothing seemed obvious. The padded weightlifting bench had no sharp edges, he saw no sharp tools left out in the open, and breaking one of the room’s exterior windows would attract attention. A closed cabinet on the far side of the room might contain something useful, he guessed, but he doubted he’d be able to get to it.
The muscles in his arms and back grew more flushed with increased blood flow. Desperation mounted every minute. The situation seemed hopeless, until he spotted a crowbar lying on the laminated workbench.
As Kale reached for the rope on the bench, Marchetti grabbed the forged steel tool and swung it hard to his left. He smashed the crowbar across Kale’s wrists with a loud cracking noise. Kale let out a scream, and the pistol flew out of his grasp, hitting the workbench with a metal-on-wood thud.
Marchetti paused only a moment, then swung backhanded across Kale’s shoulder, sending him sprawling to the floor. Marchetti dropped to his knees and pressed the metal bar hard against Kale’s neck. Pressure turned the guard’s head a puffy red. His eyeballs started to bulge, as he gasped for breath.
“That’s just for starters, shithead,” he said.
Kale tried to shake his head but couldn’t move.
Marchetti stood and grabbed Kale’s weapon off the bench and a screwdriver from the pegboard. He knelt back down and stowed the pistol in his belt at the small of his back.
Then he touched the screwdriver to his throat. “I’m tempted to poke this through your carotid, understand?” Kale barely nodded. “If you tell me what I need to know, you’ll live. If you don’t, you die.” The tattooed man blinked, sweat pouring down his cheeks and forehead.
“Where’s Hollingsworth?”
When he didn’t respond. Marchetti pressed the screwdriver harder against his jugular, enough to make him wince.” Something having to do with the president’s visit?”
When he still didn’t answer, Marchetti yanked his head forward by the stringy hair he wore down to his shoulders. “I asked you a question.”
“Yes,” he answered, finally.
“Here on the island?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll ask again, where’s Hollingsworth?”
“At the Harborview Hotel.”
Marchetti moved the screwdriver up close to Kale’s eye. “What’s your part in all this?”
“I’m just one of his guards, I swear. That’s all.”
“But you must have heard something, Kale. Don’t bullshit me.”
He gave a slight nod. “Hollingsworth and the others planned to blame the smallpox outbreak on Iran to justify destroying a couple of their power plants.”
“Destroying them when?”
Kale coughed repeatedly. “Don’t know–soon, I think.”
Marchetti paused to think for a few moments, then asked, “Who else is here at the residence?”
“Viktor is upstairs; he’s the only one. Akamu and Pika are headed to Port Andrews Airport. Louis, the house manager, has gone to Oahu.”
“Do Akamu and Pika have any other weapons besides what they were carrying?”
He nodded. “A few at the hangar–handguns mostly.”
Not a lot of firepower considering what Hollingsworth had to hide. But more than I can handle alone.
Marchetti pulled the pistol from the small of his back and listened for sounds in other parts of the house.
“Where’s the smallpox?” he asked.
When Kale didn’t answer, Marchetti pushed the point of the screwdriver harder against his neck. Kale let out a moan and strained to get the words out. “I don’t know, I swear! Probably at the lab.”
“Where’s my cell phone?”
Kale touched his jacket pocket. Marchetti removed the Colt revolver and his nearly discharged iPhone from Kale’s pocket and patted him down for anything else he could use. He knew he wouldn’t find his car keys, since he’d seen Akamu drive away in his Charger.
Marchetti rolled Kale over, pulled his left arm behind his back, and placed his left wrist over his right. He wrapped the nylon cord Kale planned to use on him to fasten his hands at the small of his back. When Kale groaned as the ropes cut into his wrists, Marchetti cut off the sleeve of Kale’s shirt to use as a gag.
“That ought to hold you for a while,” he said. He got to his feet and walked to a door on the other side of the room. Inside was a bathroom and closet. As good a place as any to stash one of Hollingsworth’s goons, he figured.
Marchetti walked back into the exercise room and knelt down beside him.
“Get to your feet,” he said and helped him struggle to get upright. He ushered him into the bathroom. “Over there,” he said and pointed to a corner of the closet underneath a rack of hanging clothes.
Once he had Kale sitting halfway upright in a corner of the closet, Marchetti used two shirts hanging above him to tie his ankles together. Closing the closet door behind him, he paused for a moment to examine the handgun he’d confiscated from Kale: Ruger American nine millimeter with a full magazine. Wish it had more firepower, but it’ll do.
He listened for sounds outside the door. Hearing nothing, he left the bathroom and peered out the door to the rest of the home’s interior.
He decided to go through the house room-by-room, starting with the ground floor, until he heard the muffled voice above him of someone on the phone.
He clutched the nine millimeter tightly in his hand and quietly moved to a set of polished oak stairs leading to the second floor. Reaching the top of the opulent, massive stairway, he listened carefully for sounds of movement or conversation. Nothing now.
Glancing down the carpeted hallway, he saw what appeared to be three rooms on either side; a total of six. For a few moments, he thought he heard the tap-tap of a computer keyboard coming from the second room on the left. Satisfied the first rooms on either side were empty, he continued down the hallway. The antique-looking, multi-colored runner spanning its entire fifty-foot length muted occasional squeaks of walnut-stained boards, likely in place for decades.
Marchetti stifled his heavy breathing and concentrated on steadying his thought processes, recognizing the classic symptoms of fight-or-flight response. His heart felt like it would beat out of his chest. His vision had become tunnelized and focused on the hallway ahead.
The door to the middle room on the left had been partially propped open by a cardboard box. He quickly moved up against the wall, out of sight from anyone in the room or doorway. He continued inching along the wall until he’d reached the doorframe. He paused a few moments to slow his breathing. It wasn’t long before he heard the sounds of someone rapidly dropping items into boxes and taping them closed with a hand-held tape machine.
He listened a while longer to get some sense of whether the occupant was moving around the room or remaining in one particular location. He concluded whoever was working was alone, busily removing files or papers from a steel cabinet and stashing them in cardboard boxes. One of Hollingsworth’s employees most likely, packing up, getting ready to move out.
Marchetti raised the pistol and inched to the doorway. He figured whoever was inside wouldn’t be holding a weapon while packing boxes. Firing his weapon was the last thing he wanted to do anyway. A nine millimeter going off inside a residential structure would awaken the dead.
>
He heard the person slide a box across a carpeted floor. A few seconds later, the tape machine used again to seal the box. This may be my best chance.
He took two long steps. Then, with his right foot, he kicked the door open, smashing it against a doorstop.
“On the floor,” he ordered. The man turned to face him: mid-fifties, close-cropped, salt-and-pepper hair with taut muscles and lean body. Viktor Brusilev.
Marchetti wasn’t expecting what came next. Viktor lashed out with a karate-type kick aimed at Marchetti’s handgun. He parried the kick and slammed him on the left temple with the butt of the pistol. “On the floor. I said! Face down… your hands where I can see them.”
“Where’s Hollingsworth?” When he didn’t answer immediately, Marchetti jammed the pistol barrel hard against the back of his neck. “One more time, Viktor, where’s Hollingsworth?”
After another long pause, he said in an eastern-European accent, “He left Kauai.”
“I don’t believe you,” Marchetti said and pulled the screwdriver from his back pocket. “And if your memory doesn’t improve quickly, this goes through your neck.”
Viktor paused again, then admitted Hollingsworth was at Port Andrews Airport.
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know.”
“How deeply are you involved in this smallpox business, Viktor?” He sat up and jammed the barrel against the back of his head. “What’s your part in all this?”
“I just worked with the virus. That’s all, I swear. I do as I’m told,” he snapped.
Marchetti felt only contempt for the man. “You’re his microbiologist, and you’re trying to play stupid with me? I should shoot you right now, you scum.”
Viktor uttered something in Russian and turned his head away from Marchetti, toward the wall.
“No one can help you now, Viktor. They’re tied up. Who else besides Hollingsworth is involved in this plot?”
He paused for a few moments, then gave a sigh and look of resignation. “Haven’t met them. One’s an aerospace executive, another runs a banking company. That’s all I know.”
“Turn over,” he ordered. Viktor rolled on his side until he was face up. “They’re all from off the island?”
He nodded, sweating profusely, the whites of his eyes starting to turn a light pink.
“Where’d the smallpox come from?”
He paused, as if trying to decide how best to respond. Finally, in his broken English, he said, “Microbiologist who work here before give him original virus… from former Soviet Union. After he had hiking accident, Hollingsworth hired me to synthesize virus.”
“Where are you from?”
“Ukraine.”
“And before that?”
“Many years in Russia, with KGB.”
“Is any of the smallpox left around here–either original or synthesized?”
“Some at lab before it burn down. Don’t know what happened to rest.”
“Would it have been destroyed by the fire?”
“Maybe, but Hollingsworth keep two vials in office.”
Marchetti slumped over at the thought of Hollingsworth running loose with a glass tube of smallpox.
“How long will this stuff remain deadly?”
“Lifetime, if kept properly frozen.”
“Hollingsworth have anything else planned while the president is here?”
Viktor hesitated for a minute, then his resistance melted away. “A second attack.”
“When and where?”
“Tonight–at Harborview Hotel.”
“And do what?”
“Shoot him.”
“Who’s going to do it?”
“Don’t know.”
Marchetti felt like pistol-whipping Viktor on the spot for his callousness in participating in Hollingsworth’s scheme. But he wanted everyone alive, including him, to eventually testify against his boss.
“Okay, stand up,” Marchetti said. He marched him over to the far wall and tore the nylon cord from the window shade.
Marchetti wrapped the cord around Viktor’s hands at the small of his back and and led him into the bathroom.
“Get into the tub and on your knees,” Marchetti ordered. He grabbed a face towel from beside the sink and used it to gag him.
Marchetti looked over the makeshift restraints and felt sure Viktor wasn’t going anywhere. He closed the door behind him and checked the remaining rooms on the second floor. Satisfied they were empty, he took the back stairway down to the first floor and emerged at the original hallway.
A few feet farther, the hallway opened up into a large room to his right–a “great room” with giant cedar beams spanning its width. An antler-accented chandelier hung down from the cathedral ceiling over a massive, mahogany dining table; American Indian artifacts and exotic game heads hung on the walls.
Marchetti visualized Hollingsworth and his accomplices sitting in the great room, dining on fine cognac and fancy game dishes, while they planned plausible cover stories for their imminent coup.
He was alive and in one piece, for which he was grateful, and two of Hollingsworth’s men were tied up and out of the way. Now somehow he had to warn the Secret Service detail the president’s life again was in imminent danger.
43
When he reached the kitchen, Marchetti quickly scrolled through the contacts list on his cell phone. Since the phone had a half-hour’s worth of charge remaining at best, he grabbed the landline handset off the wall to dial 911.
He tried to explain to a confused emergency operator what he’d learned from Viktor Brusilov about President McHugh still being in danger. But he wasn’t convinced she understood and would notify the appropriate agencies. Time was running out before the president’s scheduled arrival at the Harborview Resort and Hotel at seven thirty.
He called Janine’s cell number, and she picked up immediately.
“Are you okay?” she asked, frantically. “I’ve been dying here, wondering what in hell was going on.”
“A whole lot of shit, that’s what. Hollingsworth and his buddies are trying to kill the president.”
“What?”
“They tried to infect McHugh with smallpox at the missile base, and now they want to assassinate him at the Harborview Hotel this evening.”
“That’s insane!”
“That’s what we thought, too, but Hollingsworth’s put together a powerful group of business and former government leaders to pull off a coup and install their own people in the White House.”
“Are you and Tom okay?”
“Yeah, we’re fine now. Tom’s in Lihue with the Secret Service being debriefed. I’m waiting to hear back from him.”
“Does the president’s detail know what Hollingsworth is up to?”
“Don’t know yet. I’ve called to let them know and asked Tom to notify everyone involved, but I can’t be certain they got the word. Lihue police are so busy with security for the president’s visit, they may be ignoring the most obvious threat of all.”
“What can I do?”
“I need to get out of here as soon as possible,” he said. “I’m at the Plantation House and believe Hollingsworth is headed for the Port Andrews Airport.”
“I know where it is, near Hanapepe.”
“His goons have taken my car, and I can’t count on Kauai Police to get there in time.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Could be a disaster. We need to stop this guy before he leaves the island. He’s got a couple of vials of smallpox with him and accomplices helping him out.”
“I can pick you up, but it’ll take a while to get there.”
He thought for a few moments and said, “I’ll just have to wait. Don’t know as I have much choice.”
“Hold on. I’ve got a better idea.” A few minutes later, she came back on. “A friend will pick you up.”
He thought for a moment. “What?”
“Keith is finished with his last tour group for t
he day. Says it’ll take him five minutes to finish refueling and another ten to get to where you are… so twenty minutes tops.”
Marcheti couldn’t believe it. “There’s a grass field a few hundred yards to the north. I’ll meet him there.”
A half minute later she came back on the line. “He’s on his way.”
44
Carl Khadem knelt down on the packed dirt and removed the carbine from his guitar case. He unwrapped the beach towel used to protect the rifle and scope and tossed it back in the case. He’d chosen this spot in particular, two hundred yards from the entrance to the Harborview Resort and Hotel, largely because of its unobstructed view of the entryway. The large shrubs lining the long drive up to the resort also provided a perfect spot for concealment and firing. He could get to the stashed car without being seen by those standing near the hotel entrance.
He didn’t see many other options anyway, unless the president planned to enter the hotel through the delivery door to the kitchen or some other entrance out of sight of the public. That could have been the presidential detail’s preference, but it wasn’t McHugh’s style. He’d shake a hundred hands or more if he could, but today’s circumstances dictated he move inside quickly.
Khadem never allowed himself to get anxious–even if the mission was as important and difficult as assassinating a president. He’d always been a good shot too, even as a kid plinking cans off a fencepost. As a professional, he was expert enough to get the operations done, silently and efficiently, without much stress. Though he still had those individuals he measured himself against: A British sniper in Afghanistan, for example, who reportedly killed two Taliban at 2,700 yards. The best he’d done was blow a guy’s head off from five hundred yards, so this one tonight should be relatively easy.
Nor was he ever racked by guilt afterward. If his chosen line of work came back to haunt him years from now, he’d take it up with his father confessor or shrink later on. Right now it was strictly business.
Khadem carefully attached the scope to the carbine and screwed the flash supressor onto the twenty-inch barrel. He looked over the assembled “sniper system,” as the manufacturer so artfully crafted it. Satisfied he was ready, he peeked through the shrubs and surveyed the surrounding area one last time.
The Omega Covenant Page 25
