I was completely awake, totally alert… and couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary. I listened. Birds, very distant traffic noises from the road beside the river… the droning of an airliner. The buzzing of a small plane, fading… and…
And…
I began moving my head to the right. Glacially, as slowly as I could make my muscles move. Of course, that would be the direction the threat would come from since I had thought it the least likely and the bush obscured my vision — and hid me — and I would have the devil of a time getting the MP-5 turned that way. I already had my eyes two-blocked that way, so as I moved my head I could see…
Limbs, leaves… more leaves… and a man.
No ghillie suit this time, just a head-to-toe camouflage outfit. He even wore a camo hat and had grease on his face. I spotted him initially only because he was moving. He hadn’t yet seen me because I wasn’t, and because I was embedded in vegetation.
I lay there motionless as a week-old corpse.
He had appeared from behind the house and was moving to my right, toward my rear. Every step he took put me at a larger disadvantage.
He was carrying some kind of assault rifle.
Oh, Jesus, I was up against the first team! This guy knew what he was doing and he was hard at it, sneaking along with every sense alert, looking for something to kill.
The stupidity of my choice of an ambush position became brutally obvious. I was hidden, all right, but I had no ability to change positions or engage the man. If I twitched a muscle, I was dead. I knew it and lay frozen with sweat popping from every pore. A few minutes of this and he would smell me.
He was sneaking out of my range of vision to my right. Since I couldn’t move, I looked around in the other direction.
If there were two of these camo guys out here I might as well shoot myself now and be done with it.
I didn’t see anyone else. That didn’t fill me with confidence — this guy was so good he didn’t need any help. I had a nearly overpowering urge to pee and restrained it with difficulty.
I was going to have to do something soon. He was moving behind me, and when he saw me he would finish me instantly, without remorse. Exactly the same way I’d shoot him.
My mind was going a hundred miles an hour and I couldn’t think of a goddamn thing!
He was going to finish me in just a few seconds. My whole life… and it was ending. Here! Now!
Whump. I heard the noise and for a second it didn’t register. Then I heard it again. Shots! Two of them. From inside the house.
I took a chance, turned my head another inch to my right.
He had turned and was surveying the windows of the house. Now he looked around, scanned everything quickly, then advanced toward the back of the house, back along the direction he had come. One of his buddies must have gone in the back door.
I lay there frozen until he passed behind the house, out of view. Then I came out of that bush, as quickly and silently as I could, and got pointed in the right direction, the MP-5 in my hands.
I ran for the corner of the house, came up short, and eased an eye around.
He was standing outside the basement door, looking in the other direction, about to enter.
I snicked the safety off, shouldered the weapon as I rounded the corner and gave him a hell of a burst, at least half a clip. The bullets spun him, knocked him off his feet, hammered at him until I released the trigger. I ran toward him while looking around to see if there was anyone else.
Didn’t see another soul. The camo man lay sprawled out like he’d been hit by a Freightliner. I don’t think one of those 9 mm bullets missed. There wasn’t much blood. He looked unnaturally plump. I bent down, tugged at his shirt. He was wearing a bulletproof vest, which hadn’t saved him from the slugs that hit him in the head and neck, at least three of them.
I eased the door open with my left hand — the glass had been cut out and the lock opened from the inside — and passed through, the submachine gun at the ready.
Taking my time, I slipped through the basement, a room I had never been in, until I found the stairs up. I could hear a woman sobbing.
I climbed as silently as possible, then pushed the door at the head of the stairs open inch by inch and looked out. I was in the passageway just off the kitchen. The sobbing was louder now.
I moved toward it, the submachine gun at the ready.
Dorsey was sitting on the bottom stair, her face in her hands. She was sobbing. Kelly Erlanger was sitting beside her, her arms around Dorsey’s shoulders.
In front of them lay a man. He wasn’t moving. Blood was everywhere, a widening lake.
Keeping the gun on him, I walked over, stood in the blood, and turned him onto his back with one foot.
It was Baldy from this morning, Johnson Dunlap. He looked at me, tried to focus his eyes, and went limp, staring at nothing at all.
She had fired twice. The first bullet hit him in the body apparently — I could see the bullet hole in his shirt — doubling him up but not injuring him; he, too, was wearing a bulletproof vest. The second slug, however, whacked him on the inside of his right thigh. Severed the femoral artery. Johnson Dunlap had bled to death in Dorsey O’Shea’s hallway while she sat sobbing on the stairs.
I wouldn’t have tried to save the bastard either.
After running my fingers through Dorsey’s hair, I unlocked the front door and went out that way. I thought maybe I ought to make a circuit of the house, just to make sure there were only two men sneaking about. Undoubtedly there was a getaway car somewhere, but I had zero chance of tracking these guys back through the forest to find it.
On the bright side, maybe now Michelle would get herself a better fella.
Basil Jarrett and Linda Fiocchi stood on the porch of their vacation cabin on the bank of the Greenbrier River staring at the sleeping form of Mikhail Goncharov, stretched out in the sun by the woodpile. They knew nothing about him, not his name, nationality, age, or condition… nor, of course, were they aware of the previous day’s events at the CIA’s Greenbrier facility six miles from their cabin. Not only had the CIA not informed the press or local law enforcement agencies of the murders at the facility, the fact that the spy agency owned anything at all in this state was classified. Jarrett and Fiocchi had never even heard a CIA rumor.
Basil Jarrett owned two sawmills that manufactured decorator fencing. His fences lined suburban lawns in thirty-seven states. Fiocchi, his cabin co-owner and live-in girlfriend of ten years, was an accountant. “He’s not a drunk or doper,” Jarrett said.
“How can you tell?”
“Look at him! He’s a healthy man in his mid-sixties, I’d say, properly nourished yet not fat, reasonably fit, seems to have most of his teeth, bathes regularly…”
Fiocchi didn’t argue. She, too, had seen her share of derelicts, and obviously the sleeping man wasn’t one of them. “So who is he?”
“I haven’t the foggiest.” Jarrett held up the clothes Goncharov had come in, which were now dry. The new trousers and shirt were brands that were sold in many large clothing chains nationwide.
Fiocchi shrugged. “He knows we are here and went to sleep anyway. On the other hand, he did break into the cabin. Should we wake him and demand an explanation, or should we go to Durbin to call the law?” There was no telephone in the cabin — no electricity at all — and no cellular service this close to the Radio Astronomy Observatory.
“Take hours for a deputy or trooper to get here,” Jarrett replied gloomily. “They have to come all the way from Marlinton. Maybe we should find out who he is before we toss him overboard. Maybe he’s sick or crazy and wandered away from a cabin or farm around here.”
Linda Fiocchi didn’t think much of the police option either. “He’s probably sick. He looks harmless enough.” She went into the cabin for a blanket, which she arranged over the sleeping man.