He kept the smile in place. “I’d like that.” The way he’d phrased it, it wasn’t even a lie.
He followed her to the station as planned. When he was satisfied she was in a safe area, he pulled out alongside her. She turned and looked at him, and he thought she was going to come to the car. So he gritted his teeth and held up a hand in goodbye, and pulled out into traffic. He checked the rearview as he drove and the sight of her standing on the sidewalk, alone and watching him leave, made him feel sadder than he’d felt in a long time.
The next morning, the four of us stood on the tarmac at sleepy Santa Monica Airport. Kanezaki had flown commercial to LAX that morning, where he was changing to a chartered jet that would pick us up here. We could have met him at LAX, but security at major airports was extreme at the moment and we didn’t want to risk it-even if we’d been willing to leave the firearms behind, which we weren’t. So I’d dropped the others off at Santa Monica Airport and then driven the truck to a nearby U-Haul place, hoping Kanezaki would only be hit with a penalty for accidentally returning the truck on the wrong side of the country, rather than the cost of replacing a truck he’d failed to return entirely.
We’d spent the night at another downmarket L.A. motel. Kei was gone, and it was a relief-even, I thought, for Larison. Larison and Dox had spoken, but they’d been out of earshot and I couldn’t hear what was said. At the end of it, though, Dox had pulled the obviously stunned Larison in for one of his big hugs. Larison seemed as surprised and discomfited as I’d been when it had first happened to me. I wanted to tell him he’d get used to-Dox would say enjoy-it after a while, but I supposed he’d work that out on his own. In the meantime, it was good he was figuring out that while there might not be a worse enemy than Dox, there was also no better friend.
I hoped I’d done the right thing in tossing Larison that Glock. When I looked back on it, I felt like I wasn’t entirely sure of my own motivations. It was either the noblest, or the stupidest thing I’d ever done. And the problem was, it was still too early to tell.
I’d checked the secure site that morning. There was a single message from Horton:
Call me. This thing has got to be stopped.
And thank you. I won’t forget it.
The last part must have been about letting Kei go, and maybe specifically for saving her from Larison. Probably, in the overwhelming relief that must have washed over him after several nights of the worst fears he’d ever grappled with, he’d meant it. But I doubted his gratitude would last. I decided not to call. Larison had been right. Horton was an inveterate manipulator, and I didn’t want to give him another chance to lay out a line of bullshit.
There wasn’t much traffic at the tiny airport, and I had no trouble recognizing the plane Kanezaki had told me to watch for: an oddly bulbous private turboprop with a set of stubby wings under its nose and the main wings set way back. A Piaggio P180 Avanti. It came in from the northwest, taxied, turned, and stopped. The door opened and Kanezaki walked out onto the tarmac. He saw us and waved.
We all climbed on. I paused to shake Kanezaki’s hand; Dox, naturally, suffocated him with a hug. Kanezaki closed the door behind us, and five minutes later, we were airborne, the pilot on course for Lincoln.
“Damn,” Dox said, reclining in one of the plush, leather-clad seats. “I might have to get me one of these.”
The strange thing was, he could. But I didn’t think he really meant it. The money still didn’t feel real. We had too much heat on us, for one thing. And we were too focused on stopping this horror we’d inadvertently helped start, for another.
“I was right about Gillmor,” Kanezaki said. “He’s in Lincoln now.”
“Your friend is tracking his cell phone?” I asked.
He nodded. “Which means we need to divide the labor. We’re expecting four shooters on-site, and a ground team-presumably one man-operating the drone from somewhere else. You guys need to decide how to take it all down.”
“Depends partly on what toys you brought us,” Dox said.
Kanezaki got up and went to the back of the plane, then came back with a couple of long canvas bags. He set one on the floor and handed the other to Dox.
Dox unzipped the bag and grinned like it was Christmas morning. “Well, goddamn,” he said, extracting and hefting a long black carbine. “Knight’s Armament SR-25, integral suppressor, twenty-round magazine, and oooh, the Leupold Mark 4 HAMR. Haven’t played with one of these before. Gonna be somewhere I can zero it?”
“We’ll find a place,” Kanezaki said. “Lots of open fields where we’re going.”
He knelt and unzipped the other bag. “Here’s your commo,” he said. “INVISIO Digital Ears X5 Headset and X50 Multi-Comm. Hands-free, in the ear, boom mic. All encrypted and we’ll all be able to talk to each other.”
“Other weapons?” Larison asked.
Kanezaki reached into the bag and took out a pistol I was quite familiar with. “HK MK23 SOCOM, Knights Armament suppressor. One each.”
He handed it to Larison, who reflexively checked the load. Treven said, “Great gun, but with the suppressor it’s the size of a rifle. What do we carry it in?”
Kanezaki went to the back again and came back with a large black attache case. He opened it. An HK with attached suppressor was held in place with foam inside. “I know there’s no good way to conceal one of these on your body in an urban environment,” he said. “But you can access it inside the bag in less than a second. By the time it’s out, it won’t matter who sees it. And if the attaches aren’t the right cover, I have gym bags, too.”
Treven nodded, satisfied.
I said, “Body armor, I hope? You know, just in case.”
“Dragon Skin vests,” Kanezaki said. “Capable of stopping multiple 7.62 rounds.”
He pulled out a folder and opened it. “This is a satellite and street view of the school and environs,” he said. “Some of it is Google; some is military. It should at least give you some ideas. I have a van waiting on the other end. After we land, we’ll do a drive-by.”
We looked at the maps. The school was a square brick building outside the downtown, two stories, surrounded mostly by dirt and grass fields. It had one main entrance, but secondary points of ingress and egress on the other three sides.
“If all four shooters plan on using the front entrance,” I said, “then we’re good to go. But if they split up, we’ll need a man on each side of the building. Which leaves us one short to engage the drone operator.”
Kanezaki looked up. “You’re not counting me.”
“That’s right,” I said, “I’m not. Tom, we’ve been through this before. You’re a great intel guy but you’re not a door-kicker. Pick the wrong entrance to cover, and you might wind up in a one-on-four. It doesn’t make sense.”
Dox said, “I think there’s a better way.”
We all looked at him. He said, “Look at these buildings around the school. What do we have here…a church, a video store, car dealer, and a Holiday Inn, it looks like. Nothing but flat fields in between, and from any one of those vantage points, I have full coverage of two sides of the school. With a spotter on the ground for target confirmation, and my new friend the SR-25 here, and with the distances being so short, I could drop four targets in four seconds. If Tom here does the spotting for me, I say that would free up Treven and Larison to cover the other two sides of the building. And free up Rain to engage the drone operator, wherever he’s set up shop.”
I didn’t know whether he really needed Kanezaki to do the spotting, or if he was just giving him something to do to placate him. I said, “Either the spotting for you, or the driving for me. Depends on where and when we locate Gillmor, and what the terrain is like.”
No one objected. I thought it was a sensible approach. Treven and Dox were the two best combat shooters, Dox was the only sniper, and that left me for the guy operating the drone, who would likely be alone and, even if armed, distracted by the task at hand.
“What’s security like at this school?” Treven asked.
“In ordinary times,” Kanezaki said, “nonexistent. But with all the speculation about attacks on schools, a lot of towns are putting police in place at the entrances. I think we’ll see some of that.”
Treven nodded. “Security theater.”
“Exactly,” Larison said. “One or at most two bored cops at the entrance with their .38s holstered? Speed, surprise, and violence of action, and they’ll be dead before they even realize there’s a problem.”
“The area looks like eighty percent farmland and fields,” I said. “Lots of room for privacy. If your friend can’t give us a fix on Gillmor’s cell phone, we’re going to have a hell of a time finding him.”
“I’m working on it,” Kanezaki said grimly. “In the meantime, let’s see if can figure out from these maps where we would set up if we were Gillmor.”
We spent the rest of the flight refining our plan and getting some much needed sleep. When we landed, it was evening, and though residual heat still radiated from the tarmac as we got off the plane, the day was getting cooler. We pulled on baseball caps and sunglasses just in case anyone was looking for us all the way out in Lincoln. “Only way to travel,” Dox said, the SR-25 bag slung over his shoulder as we headed to the car rental to get Kanezaki’s promised van.
We picked up food, then drove out to the school. The sun was getting low in a blue, cloudless sky that went on forever, and even in the van, the air smelled of cut grass.
The school was on the edge of town, an area that was mostly single family houses, with a few farms and a single mixed office and retail center. I thought the plotters might have chosen the school for its relative remoteness: fewer potential witnesses to describe aspects of the carnage the plotters didn’t want seen.
A little farther out, we passed a construction site. Dox said, “Hang on, I like the look of this.”
We circled around and drove back through the plume of dust we’d kicked up on the road behind us. “Doesn’t look like much is happening here,” Dox said.
He was right. There was no equipment and no material, just a four-story I-beam and cinderblock skeleton without even a chain-link fence around it. No windows in place, no roof, no doors.