Gregory Haltman's mind was like a pinball machine on steroids.
He watched the monitors. Intermittent fog drifted over the grounds, sometimes blurring the view from the cameras, sometimes clearing.
One of the guards walked across the front of the house, accompanied by a dog. Haltman didn't trust the high strung dogs. They were never allowed inside his home. They were there to serve a purpose, nothing more.
The men who had killed his brother were coming, he was certain of it. Perhaps not all of them, but that was of little importance. If there were others, they would die in the nuclear holocaust he still hoped to unleash. Perhaps they would come tonight. Perhaps it would be tomorrow or the next day. It didn't matter. He was waiting for them. His security was on high alert.
They couldn't get to the house from the back unless they were human flies, able to climb the cliff. But the cliff was protected, as much by nature as by the hidden booby-traps strung below the patio edge. No, they had to come through the grounds.
He'd given orders to take at least one of them alive. He wanted to confront them, to make sure they knew they were responsible for the destruction that was about to happen. Things could still go wrong. It was still possible that war might not start. But at least he would have the satisfaction of knowing his brother's murderers had paid.
In the unlikely event his enemies somehow got past all the security, they would find him in this room. They'd be confident, seeing just an old, dying man, sitting in a chair. But he had a surprise in store for them, if it came to that.
Haltman's mind was a jumble of thoughts and images. He stood and winced with pain, then walked over to a desk and picked up a picture of Carissa.
Things could have been different, he thought. If you'd lived. If that animal hadn't taken you.
He held the picture up to his forehead for a moment, remembering, then set it back on the desk. The window coverings used to block the daytime sun were open. Outside, the wet stones of the patio glistened under the landscaping lights.
He decided he needed a drink. The doctors had warned him about mixing alcohol with the powerful cocktail of drugs he consumed every day. Well, the doctors had said a lot of things. Everything except what he wanted to hear, that a cure had been discovered or a new drug that would delay the inevitable.
Haltman went to a tall liquor cabinet in the corner of the room. He took out a bottle of cognac distilled from grapes grown on a sunlit hillside in France during the nineteenth century. It was the only bottle left in existence of that particular year and lineage. There didn't seem to be much point in letting it get any older. He broke open the wax seal and extracted the cork. He took a large, crystal snifter from the cabinet, filled it half full with the liquor, and returned to his chair.
He reached for another pill and swallowed it with some of the cognac. Somewhere at the edge of his jangled awareness, he heard the sound of a plane passing in the night.
CHAPTER 49
Nick, Lamont and Ronnie waited in the back of the plane. It had plenty of room. The Cessna was big enough to carry eight or nine passengers in addition to the pilot. This one had been modified for skydiving with the rollup door.
Nick activated his microphone.
"Selena, you copy?"
"You're five by five, Nick."
"Where are you?"
"I just passed Haltman's place. I'm about to turn around and head back."
"We're coming up on the drop zone any moment now."
"The fog is getting thicker," Selena said. "Be careful."
The voice of the pilot came over the comm link. "Two minutes."
"See you soon," Nick said. "Out."
Lamont pulled open the rollup door. Nick and Ronnie lined up behind him. The cabin filled with the noise of the engine and the air rushing by.
"Go in five," the pilot said over the comm link. "Four. Three. Two. One."
Lamont dove out of the open door, followed by Nick and Ronnie. The slipstream buffeted them, then was gone as the Cessna disappeared into the night.
They popped chutes and steered for the target.
Below, the white froth of the ocean broke in a ragged line against the rocky coast. The pilot had done a good job. Haltman's house was below them in the mists, outlined by landscaping lights. The patio where they would land was visible through the shifting fog.
A gust of wind tried to send Nick into the swimming pool. He steered clear and came down hard near the diving board. His ankle twisted under him as he struck the stones. Pain shot up his leg and into his lower back. He rolled, released the chute and stood, testing the ankle. It hurt, but he could walk on it. As long as he kept moving, it would be okay. He could feel the muscles in his back trying to lock up. It had given him trouble since a bad landing in Tibet.
They'd landed at one end of the house. They ran to a set of glass doors opening onto the patio. A single light shone inside the room. Nick guessed it was a guest bedroom. He slid the door open on quiet rollers and they stepped inside. No one was inside the room.
Lamont spoke in a quiet voice. "That was easy."
"Yeah," Nick said. "Maybe too easy. Remember what Freddie said."
In the room at the other end of the house, where Haltman was sipping from his crystal snifter, a red light began blinking on the wall over the monitors.
Haltman picked up a handheld radio and spoke into it. "They're here. The blue bedroom."
Two clicks sounded an acknowledgment.
Ronnie waited by the door of the bedroom, his hand on the knob. Nick nodded and Ronnie pulled the door open.
The bedroom was at the end of a hall leading away to the right, toward the rest of the house. Across the hall another door opened to a second bedroom. Lamont crouched down and covered the hall. Nick and Ronnie slipped across and into the bedroom.
"Clear," Nick said.
He came out of the room. The hall was spacious, with a high ceiling. It was ten feet wide, carpeted from wall-to-wall with thick pile and lined with expensive paintings in carved, gold frames. The only light came from lamps hung over the art.
Nick looked down the hall.
It's a shooting gallery. If I remember the plans right, this opens out into the main living area.
He signaled with his hand. They moved toward the living room. Ronnie heard a sound and glanced back, his MP-7 up at his shoulder. One of Haltman's guards stepped out of the bedroom they'd used to enter the house. Ronnie opened fire, a three round burst that caught the careless guard full in the chest. He fell back into the room.
Two men appeared at the other end of the hall. Nick and Lamont dropped down and opened up as the men fired.
The noise from the guards' guns drowned out the coughing stutter of the MP-7s. Two of the paintings blew from the wall. The frames shattered, sending a cloud of splinters through the air. Bullets gouged into the walls on either side. The two guards went down under the hail of bullets Nick and Lamont sent toward them.
"That's torn it," Nick said. "Move. Haltman's in here somewhere."
Selena heard everything over the comm link as she waited in the Suburban.
They ran into the main living area. Couches, chairs and end tables were scattered about the room. A light shone on a large oil painting hung over a mission style sideboard. A wall of windows twelve feet high faced out toward the back and the patio.
"Outside," Ronnie yelled.
Four more men were sprinting across the flagstones. Nick, Ronnie and Lamont turned as one toward the patio and fired. The windows exploded in a cascade of falling glass. The noise was intense, a strange symphony of breaking glass, the chatter of the guns, and shots and cries coming from the men outside. The couch next to Nick exploded in a cloud of stuffing as bullets ripped into it.