BALTIMORE, MARYLAND
Kealey glanced at his chronograph wristwatch. It was nearly time. The five minutes were up. Hopefully, Colin had done as his aunt had instructed. Kealey had built in a minute after that to execute his own section of the plan.
Down in the exhibition hall, guns had sporadically resumed their raging outbursts amid the cries of the wounded and panic-stricken.
He turned to Allison, who was still crouched with him in the walkway. Her eyes looked glazed.
“You with me?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Okay. Once we’re out of here, run straight across the mezzanine to those conference rooms. It shouldn’t take us more than fifteen seconds-half a minute, tops.”
Allison looked at him. “That’s going to leave me a moving target, Ryan.”
Kealey regarded her steadfastly. “No, it isn’t.” He shrugged a shoulder, slipped off one of the MP5Ks he’d taken from a fallen gunman. He tugged open its folding stock. “You see how I’m holding this?”
She nodded slowly.
“Once the stock’s extended, it locks into place. If you have to fire, brace it against yourself, like so.” He demonstrated, pushing the stock against his upper arm. ”Keep one hand around the grip, the other around the foregrip. Your fingers should be rigid, but don’t squeeze. It’ll help prevent the gun from jerking.”
She nodded slowly as he gave the weapon to her. She held it as he’d shown. “Is this right?”
“Yeah,” Kealey said, his eyes intent.
He was thinking that Allison appeared to be in good shape, certainly strong enough to handle the weapon. Other than with the M60 machine gun, he’d never found kickback to be a major consideration, and even that hadn’t been too bad. She would have no chance to get used to the weapon’s feel and was apt to miss a lot. The advantage of an assault weapon was that it would give her more opportunities of not missing than a pistol.
“You’ve got a full magazine,” he went on. “That’s thirty rounds. The selector’s set for three-round bursts. If you have to fire, pull the trigger with your fingertip. Don’t wrap your finger around it like you’re scratching. You want to maintain a light touch, and you want to keep the weapon as steady as possible.”
Allison nodded again. She had already slipped the MP5K’s strap over her shoulder, in a practiced motion that made it seem like a handbag. Now she was looking over the gun with what appeared to be rapt revulsion. It was a strange expression.
“Guess I should have taken some firearms training,” she said.
“You can start tomorrow,” Kealey said. He was checking the dial of his watch again. The second hand had just crossed the one-minute mark. “Last thing, Allison. When we move, bend as low as you can. In any case, keep your head down. That’s coming out of the walkway and on the mezzanine. Got it?”
Allison nodded. She looked down at the phone, which she held in her left hand. Even knowing that both the cell and his watch were set by radio transmitter, Kealey had made sure they were in time-standard sync. Every moment would be crucial.
He started counting down at a whisper. “Five, four, three, two
…”
At the zero mark Allison touched her finger to Colin’s one-touch call listing, raised the phone to her ear, and listened for the first ring. Then she dropped the phone into her purse, the connection with her nephew left open.
They sprang to their feet, Kealey sidling his MP5K with his right hand and gripping Allison’s forearm with the other as they launched themselves onto the mezzanine and went racing over the wide-open hell of the exhibition hall.
Colin Dearborn had scuttled to his right, still crouching, and thrust his phone deep in the pot of an artificial silk Ruscus tree. It was the nearest of the four trees that lined the wall. Then he scuttled back, putting as much distance between himself and the ceramic container as possible. He froze as soon as the guard at the door turned back to look across the room. It was a routine pass, nothing suspicious in the set of the man’s head, shoulders, or weapon.
No one had moved for as long as they had been here, not even when Colin made his little crab move. Most of the people were either sobbing or praying, aware of nothing but their own immediate space and the disposition of the guards at the door.
The first power chords of “London Calling” by the Clash chopped rhythmically from his cell phone, the bass line sliding into them as their volume swelled and the vocals broke through on a heavy, crashing downbeat:
London calling to the faraway towns,
Now that war is declared-and battle come down…
His assault weapon snapping upward in his hands, the guard inside the room vaulted from the door toward the mass of prisoners huddled toward the back of the room. There was a surprised, befuddled expression on his face. His gaze darted across the sea of mostly bowed heads, swept over them, settled on the tree even as the door flew wide open and a second masked killer came charging in from the hallway.
The music went on for thirty seconds before it cut off and his aunt’s incoming call was transferred to voice mail. By then the masked guards had pushed through the group and were pulling up the fake Spanish moss in the pots, flinging it madly across the room. It took them just seconds to find the phone-not long, but long enough he hoped. Kealey certainly couldn’t have expected more. He had to know Colin’s options were limited.
Now that he thought of it, though, Colin realized it was more than just the few seconds he’d bought. It was the time it took for the guards to come through the crowd, find the phone, look at it, and start to try and figure out who it belonged to. During that entire time, he, Colin, had taken four eyeballs off the corridor to help enable whatever Kealey was planning.
His heart was pounding hard. Sweat rolled down his pants legs. Each instant seemed stretched-not taut but loose, drooping, like Silly Putty-as he wondered if this… no, this… no this was going to be the last second of his life.
The first guard whipped around and held the cell phone aloft to show it to the gathered hostages.
“To who this belong?” he shouted in broken English. “Who?”
His stomach a band of tension, Colin remained squatting in fearful silence. His brain ticked off the added seconds he was buying Kealey.
“ Who? ” repeated the masked man. Gripping the phone hard, waving it in the air, shaking it furiously in the air. “ Tell me! ”
If anyone had a suspicion, they were too afraid to voice it. Or maybe it was courage, a last act of defiance. Colin didn’t know.
Jesus, he thought. You’re writing tweets in your head.
With a gruff oath, the other guard said something to the man with the phone. It was in a language Colin did not understand. He didn’t have to. He knew what they were doing. The men were to his right. Colin rolled his head slowly in that direction.
They were pressing buttons on the phone. The men might not be able to read the tweets or figure out real names from Twitter accounts, but there was one language he knew they would understand.
They were going through his photos. Colin estimated there were two dozen pictures of him stored in the album, shots in which he was posing with a smile, which might as well be a giant bull’s-eye.
More seconds were passing. Each one was a small triumph for Colin, but he knew they were running out. He pulled in a breath, hoping it would settle him, but he was beyond any semblance of calm. His legs were shaking, barely able to support him. He shifted to his knees. The men were so intent on the phone, they didn’t notice. He looked at the door, wondered what his chances were of getting there, over and around his fellow hostages, before the guards could fire. The likelihood was probably real small, but he knew he did not want to die here, doing nothing except perspiring into his Nikes.
He was wondering how much longer he could hold himself together when he heard the commotion, a sudden uproar in the corridor. The noise was like fresh air blowing into the room. He heard a radio crackle on one of the men, heard the masked men move, saw them step on hands and bags on their way to the door, bringing their guns around with them.
It was only as the shooting started that he realized he still hadn’t exhaled.
Kealey saw the stairs leading to the third floor as they emerged from the walkway. They were straight ahead. He ran with his shoulders rolled forward, his chin tucked into his chest, and his legs working like pistons, the way he’d once run through simulated cross fire on the training courses at Fort Bragg; the way he’d run through the war-blasted streets of Kosovo, loaded down with weapons and 150 pounds of combat gear, dodging sniper rounds from windows, rooftops, and doorways as he moved from one position to another; the way he’d run to avoid getting cut to ribbons or blown out of existence in burning deserts, steamy jungles, and urban hellholes around the bloody, violent world.
His hand still clutching Allison’s forearm, she kept her head low alongside him, a quick study, and it was a good thing, too. This was a natural kill zone, open, without concealment, but he’d had no time to spell out the risks, nor seen any upside to it. It was in or out, and she would not want to leave without trying to help her nephew.
Anyway, what would he have told her? Just keep moving so you weren’t a large, exposed target-survival could be that basic in a fight no matter how alert you were, how effective your weapons, how thorough your training.
Incredibly, most of the interior systems seemed to be on in this section of the building, the air-conditioning cycling to make it breathable in here, the large metal halides overhead merging with the brightness from whatever late-day sunlight was still pouring through the glass walls and ceiling. That made sense: whatever backup electrical system the facility had, this would be an area from whence the most people were leaving or, in an emergency, where the most would naturally congregate.
Glancing neither left nor right, his eyes on the stairway a few yards in front of him, Kealey still managed to scan both sides of the mezzanine with his peripheral vision and caught glimpses of the horrible scene down in the exhibition hall: fallen debris, blasted plywood booths, toppled signs, broken glass, bodies everywhere. Those still alive and able to move appeared to have been herded toward separate ends of the hall; Kealey supposed their captors’ next step would be to gather them into conference rooms with the other hostages or massacre them right there on the spot, an undeniable possibility.
It won’t come to that, Kealey thought. He wouldn’t let it.
They dashed across the last few feet to the stairs. Kealey figured they would need less than thirty seconds to make their way through the open mezzanine, and hoped the gunmen downstairs would be too preoccupied with the prisoner roundup and Colin’s cell phone to spot them immediately.
Reaching the stairs, they bounded up them, taking them as quickly as possible. They had gotten to within four steps of the mid-floor landing when Allison produced a kind of clipped, horrified gasp. They both snatched hold of the handrail as their feet nearly slipped on the blood. Slick and dark, it was everywhere, reflecting the overhead lights and streaming down the risers to puddle on the flat marble treads.
She could not help but stare up at the body, even as Kealey pulled her around it. Riddled with bullets, one leg dangling loosely over the edge of the landing, it belonged to a young man about Colin’s age. Kealey had noticed the momentary dread that passed over Allison’s face before she focused on the bloodied clothes plastering him. They weren’t Colin’s. There would have been no way to tell his identity from his features; the shots that had torn into his skull had left the victim badly disfigured.
Kealey squeezed her hand as they hurried up the remaining stairs to the third-floor hallway.
On the wall to Kealey’s right were signs for the conference rooms, and past them the large glass door to the corridor. He raised his weapon slightly as they drew closer, and that was when he saw the masked man in the slight recess leading toward the door, guarding it there on the mezzanine. The man saw them, too, and his submachine gun came up quickly.
Kealey caught him with a 3-round burst at close to point-blank range, then instantly triggered a second burst. The man dropped without firing a single round, blood erupting from his chest, hitting the floor with a soft smack as his weapon went twirling from his grasp like a flung baton.
“Come on,” Kealey grunted, leaping over the man’s body and pushing through the door into the corridor. He immediately saw four black-clad men outside a room up ahead to the left, maybe 20 feet up the corridor. They had started turning toward him, toward the sound of the gunfire. Kealey cut them down as he simultaneously pulled Allison directly behind him. It was an easy strike; the masked men were all in a row, one behind the other, all but the first man blocked from firing at him by the man in front of him. And that first man never got a chance to do anything but die.
The fact that the men were clustered around the door, not fully turned toward the corridor, showed that his plan had worked. They had been facing the room, waiting to see who had managed to get a cell phone inside. That had bought him the seconds he needed to cross the walkway after shooting the guard.
As soon as the four men went down, Kealey stiff-armed Allison across the chest, pushing her back toward the wall and following her up against it. He waited. He did not think that whoever was inside the room would strafe the corridor without first making sure the four guards were down.
A masked forehead poked out, one eye looking down the corridor. The side of the man’s face evaporated in blood. The head dropped.
“ Down! ” Kealey hissed to Allison, simultaneously pulling her and dropping. He held his firearm in front of him, arms extended, hands cradling the weapon. He might have only a second to fire.
Someone else inside stuck his automatic out and fired chest high down the corridor-just as Kealey had expected. He saw the black glove and ignored the flashing gunfire, which chewed ceramic projectiles from the wall and painfully peppered his head and cheek. He found the hand with the nub on the barrel and destroyed it with a three-shot burst. The man yelped, dropped the gun, and withdrew his hand.
Though his ears were singing from the gunfire, Kealey had long ago trained himself to filter sounds through the hum. It was like listening underwater: the activity was there, but at a different pitch and volume. Fortunately, the enemy usually suffered from the same disability without Kealey’s training.
There were no sounds from inside the room. The hostages hadn’t been emboldened to take him out, which meant he had another weapon or there were still other gunmen inside. The fact that killers had not emerged from any other locations suggested they assumed this was just another mass murder of hostages. Still, it wouldn’t be long before some centralized control checked in. There had to be a unit leader. The room had to be taken before then.
He turned to Allison. She was breathing like a rabbit.
“As soon as I take off, I want you to count to thirty Mississippi,” Kealey said. “When you’re done, call Colin’s number.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t seen his cell phone anywhere,” Kealey told her. “One or two thugs may still be among the hostages. I’ll try and use my target as a shield, tag whoever’s left. But if more of these guys come down the hall from ahead, get out the way we came. Fast.”
She was processing the information, nodding numbly.
“Stay strong,” he said. “I think reinforcements are on the way.”
She shot him a questioning look, but he did not elaborate.
Kealey let his weapon hang from its strap. He got his feet under him, reached into his jacket, and withdrew his balisong. A flick of his wrist and the double-handled knife snapped open, its six-inch stainless-steel blade locking with a soft click, coldly mirroring Kealey’s eyes as they stared ahead.
Taking a breath and exhaling, he took three charging steps forward. Kealey swung into the open door like a bull, low with his hands in front like horns. He saw the man with the wounded hand kneeling. He was snarling in the ear of a blond woman, his gun at her head. Her hands were raised, and she was sobbing, shaking her head, but she was rising just the same. The gunman was getting up with her. He obviously intended to use her as a human shield. The wounded man turned just in time to be hit, full on, by Kealey.
The American locked his left hand around the wrist with the gun, pointing the weapon up. With his right hand he sank the blade into the hollow of the man’s throat, a quarter inch above the collarbone. The blonde shrieked and dropped and covered her head with her fingers, still screaming. The man gurgled and thrashed, hot blood brewing from the wound, his hands clutching at Kealey’s, trying to pull it away from him, pull the knife from his throat. But Kealey thrust it in deeper, angling the blade up toward the subclavian and giving it a hard, sharp twist to completely sever the artery and finish him.
All the while Kealey held the man up by his forearm and the blade, keeping him between himself and the hostages-and any potential attacker.
His knuckles wet and slick around the knife, he felt the man go limp. Kealey was carrying his deadweight now and went to his knees. It was quiet enough for Kealey to hear the splash of the man’s blood as it hit the floor around him.
No one fired at him, but that didn’t mean anything. Kealey had a dead man for protection and an assault rifle on his shoulder. He was still a formidable enemy.
The phone sounded. Someone barked with surprise, threw it with a grunt. The phone cracked on the floor.
The voice had come from the corner ahead and to Kealey’s left. Kealey glanced under the dead man’s armpit. He saw a gunman rise from the back of the crowd, pulling Colin Dearborn with him. He had the young man by the collar, the bore of his assault rifle pushing into the soft flesh under his chin. Kealey guessed the man had heard him talking to Allison or had simply assumed there were others out there, possibly an entire unit. He couldn’t know for sure, and there had been enough shooting to create that impression.
Which is probably the reason no one from the other rooms has attacked, Kealey thought. He had a good idea the bad guys hadn’t been able to confirm anything with video surveillance. Someone on the outside had seen Allison’s tweet. Somewhere, someone had either cut the trunk line that ran the system or had gotten into the security center. That could also have fueled the idea that they were under siege.
This ape was supposed to find that out. He had a Bluetooth in his ear, like the others. He was going to try to hostage his way into the corridor, see what was up, let the others know. Kealey hadn’t slipped on one of the headsets he’d confiscated, because he hadn’t wanted to be distracted.
The man stood behind Colin, his back to the floor-to-ceiling window, one arm locked around Colin’s throat. The rest of the frightened, wide-eyed hostages had begun sliding to the other side of the room, creating a clear path between the man and Kealey.
“ Jebem ti mater! ” the gunman husked through his mask. “ Vi ete ga gledati umreti.”
Kealey regarded him without expression. Still on his knees, he simultaneously hefted the dead man to his right and swung his own firearm around. He felt as if he’d been kicked through a dark, spiraling time warp. His lack of visible emotion gave no hint of his surprise and puzzlement. It had been over a decade since he’d heard Serbian spoken by a native, but he’d recognized it now, remembered the dialect from down in southern Kosovo, and understood the coarse profanity followed by an invitation to watch Colin die. No doubt the man hadn’t expected Kealey to understand. It was just one of those spit-in-your-eye gestures so common to Eastern European insurgents. What was stranger, though, was that in the corridor minutes ago, when the other hostage takers had been shouting excitedly to one another, they had been speaking some other language entirely.
A moment passed. Another. Kealey stood there, pulling the long-unused vocabulary from his memory, giving its particular syntax a moment to click into place.
“Steta ga i… da e… biti ubi Jeni,” he said at last. He was warning the man that he would also wind up dead if he tried anything. “Ja u te ubiti… sebe.” Kealey was promising that he would make sure of it, would kill the man himself.
The man snorted. “Yawa zhaba heskla bus nada!”
Kealey didn’t respond. That had not been Serbian. It was the same language he’d heard from the others out in the corridor. Pashto, he thought.
What the hell is this? A convention of anti-American terrorists? Someone at Immigration and Naturalization was going to have a lot of explaining to do when, dead or alive, the gunmen were all ID’d.
Kealey kept staring into the room. Behind the gunman, the window shimmered a little as the lights of a hovering helicopter bounced off its tinted laminated glass, coming in almost horizontally over the church across the street. For a moment, the hostage taker and Colin were in stark silhouette. The helicopter was far enough away, at least a half mile, so that the sound did not intrude. Their gun-muffled hearing also worked to conceal its presence.
Shifting his gaze to Colin, Kealey was able to hear his rasping intakes of air. He looked at the weapon under Colin’s chin, at the hand in the fingerless shooter’s glove clenched around its stippled grip.
“I didn’t come to play games,” Kealey said at last. “What do you want with these people?”
The gunman laughed, shifting to English. “They say the more languages one speaks, the better one can know other men.”
Kealey looked at him. “That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Who are you?” the man asked. “You do not seem FBI.”
“I’m the janitor,” Kealey said flatly.
“That doesn’t answer my question,” the man snapped. Without warning, he tightened his choke hold around Colin’s neck, pushing his head up higher with the assault rifle. Colin gagged audibly, a sound like water draining through a clogged pipe.
“Who is out there? How many of you?” the man demanded.
“What’s it matter?” Kealey asked. “You’ve lost.”
“I have won!” he roared. “I enter your house to kill as many as I can, to send your people to the grave one after another.”
There were muffled sobs from different places around the room.
“Even if it means joining them?” Kealey asked.
“If I accomplish my goal, yes.”
Kealey felt his stomach wring tight with anger, but he just kept staring at him, his face a shield of calm. He needed to stall. Help was coming, but he had to make sure it came soon enough to save Colin.
“I remember Cuska after the massacre,” Kealey said. “I saw what the Sakali did to the villagers. Do you know what I said to one of the killers?”
The man did not respond. Obviously, Kealey was not FBI. The references had caught him off guard.
“I told him that he would die in torment if he harmed anyone else.” Kealey’s voice dropped as he said, “I told him, ‘ Al sizvul.’ ” He had chosen his words carefully, using the idiomatic Serbian phrase for “blood oath.” “I say that now to you,” Kealey went on, “and to whoever is working with you, and to whoever you leave behind. I will find them and make it my business to kill them. Or we can stop this now.”
“You think I fear you?” the gunman yelled.
“It doesn’t matter,” Kealey said. “It’s over.”
They looked at each other, Colin between them. Kealey kept his eyes steady, appearing to stare at the man while again letting his gaze travel past him to the window. Outside, the spotlight from the helicopter seemed to coat the church towers with molten gold as it washed over their high, curved roofs before splashing brightly up against the smooth glass wall of the convention center. But it was no longer shining on the window behind the gunman. And there was a good reason for that.
Recon was over.
Suddenly, the gunman’s patience appeared to run out. The man jerked the arm he’d clamped around Colin’s neck up with a sudden violent motion that audibly stopped his breath. The hostage taker began moving forward with the young man, who was gagging as he tried to walk on his toes.
Kealey felt his stomach constrict. He wished to hell he knew what was going on outside this room. Because the only option he seemed to have left was to take a shot at the man, drawing his fire and hoping he could kill the son of a bitch before he himself went down.
Chandra knelt on the wooden boards of the bell platform, the barrel of a Heckler amp; Koch PSG-1 sniper rifle cradled in his left hand, his right wrapped lightly around its grip, his elbows carefully balanced on the sill beneath the tower’s window arch. Inhaling, exhaling, getting into the right breathing tempo, he peered through the weapon’s powerful 6x42 telescopic sight, studying his target through the third-floor window of the convention center across the street.
There were good shooters, and there were snipers. There were methods and formations that could make ordinary shooters better-by making a “figure eight” rotation with the barrel and firing at the peak of the second circle, or by firing in between breaths, but not actually holding your breath-but just how fast and how accurate a shooter was at making the calls and the shots, estimating a long-range target’s distance, adjusting for conditions, stalking the prey to the point of invisibility, learning to live with discomfort in even the most serene terrains, and disguising himself to adapt to the most hell-sucking surroundings, anywhere and nowhere, and all while never existing in the enemy’s eye, that was what demarcated a sniper. A sniper was as stealthy as his rifle was deadly.
Chandra was a city boy, recognized by his comrades more for his precision than his trail-hunting abilities; country boys were better known for tracking. But in either battlefield setting, it was imperative that scopes and muzzles remained invisible. If they couldn’t see you, they couldn’t hit you. Luckily for Chandra, urban environments were filled with glinting metal structures and flickering lights and windows. Perfect cover for a sniper rifle.
Beside him, in a nearly identical firing position, Alterman held a rifle of the same make and model, which gave them almost thirty thousand dollars’ worth of precision ordnance to match the twenty years of training and experience between them here in the church tower. Both agents, in addition, wore tactical vests and black unis with the circular black and silver patch of the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team sewn onto their shoulders, though only Alterman, the pair’s senior member, had on amber shooter’s glasses.
In his flippant moments-and this was anything but one-the Indonesian-born Darma Chandra joked that the glasses were a sign of the other man’s advancing decrepitude, Alterman being forty-three years old in comparison to his thirty. But Chandra knew his partner was the most capable and seasoned marksman in the unit, having been certified at the U.S. Marines Corps’ 4th MEB antiterrorism school at Camp Lejeune, having done advanced recon in northern Afghanistan, then having been selected for diplomatic and embassy security in Kabul back in the days when Taliban assassins were a common roadside presence in and around the city.
Chandra didn’t have quite as colorful a background, having spent his entire career stateside since joining the FBI fresh out of college-and with new citizenship. And while his top gun rating in the SWAT and sniper courses gave him cred among his peers, he willingly bowed to Alterman’s expertise. After the president’s executive ARI order had been received-All Resources In, overriding the allocation of sectors and jurisdictional red tape, and triggering the FBI-led assault-there had been not a word of discussion about who would execute the takeout. Alterman was boss all the way.
The BPD chopper had lighted the target before withdrawing, allowing their helmet cameras to grab an image for reference. The radio-linked gun laser locked on the target selected by the heads-up displays in the sharpshooters’ glasses. The laser did not determine the actual trajectory; that was in the hands of the marksman. It simply created a circle, about the size of a wedding band, for aiming. The target discs were far more diffuse than the old single-point laser beams. It was unlikely that anyone inside the kill zone would see the circle unless they were looking.
Chandra’s job would be to fire a heartbeat before Alterman, aiming slightly away from the target, breaking the window to leave a clear path for Alterman’s bullet. Although with Chandra shooting through glass-the convention center architects had used a fairly standard glazed laminate for their floor-to-ceiling windows-it was always possible that his round would be sufficiently deflected to hit the mark.
But that wasn’t something they expected. Made for precision shooting, their NATO Ball Special 7.62mm loads weren’t especially frangible. They would not break up or lose their shape on impact with the layered glass. The church steeple itself was a good hide, offering them shade and concealment, and the torpid weather conditions eliminated wind as a variable in the bullets’ trajectories. All factors considered, both snipers wouldn’t need spotters. Second shots here were not an option. And both men knew it.
His cheek against the HK’s black synthetic stock, Chandra saw the gunman continue to press his weapon into the hostage’s throat while facing the Company guy, or whatever he was, who had come running into the conference room and had taken down one of the hostage takers in a slick, nasty bit of business. It did not look to Chandra like he was making any progress in getting the mark to surrender. Just moments before the Company guy had raised his assault rifle. Classic standoff. But with a weapon to the throat of a hostage and the SWAT teams already closing in, time was not on the snipers’ side.
“Ready to do this?” Alterman said, as if reading his thoughts. They had been given full discretion on proceeding with the drop, and the senior agent was clearly in sync with him on the pointlessness of waiting.
“Yeah.”
“On my count,” Alterman said.
Chandra resumed his rhythmic breathing, centering the target in his crosshairs and then tilting the gun up by a tiny degree.
“Standby,” Alterman said. “Four, three, two, one…”
Chandra exhaled on the one, aimed in the center of his own faint red circle and, at Alterman’s fire command, gave the trigger of his rifle a smooth pull.
His full metal jacket NATO slug broke the conference room’s sheet-glass window with a crack and drilled harmlessly into the wall above their mark’s head. An imperceptible moment later, Alterman’s full metal jacket round entered the room, twinkling as it passed through the down-turned chopper beacon.
Out in the corridor, Allison heard what sounded like the sharp tak of a stone bouncing off the windshield of a car, a high-pitched whine, and then the screams. The first cry came from Colin. She had heard that whoop at enough U of V Cavaliers basketball games to be sure of it. The rest of the yells came from many different people, men and women. But there were no sounds of gunfire, not from within the room.
She went rushing into the conference room. As Allison moved clumsily on cramped legs, she became aware of the rumbling of automatic weapons fire in the distance. It sounded different than what she and Kealey had heard before. This was rhythmic, deeper, somehow coordinated.
It was instantly forgotten as she swung into the room. She nearly tripped over the throat-cut guard at the door, splatting through the pool of his blood as she swerved around him, her eyes seeking Colin. She saw the people who’d been crowded together at one end of the room rising slowly, like time-lapse plants, looking as stunned and overwhelmed as she was. Then she saw Kealey crouched beside her nephew, comforting him. Colin was squatting and was covered with blood. It looked like he had been the loser in a paintball competition, and her first thought was that they had failed Colin, failed him totally and horribly. He was covered with such a massive quantity of blood that her mind initially refused to accept what she was seeing. She was a doctor; she’d seen people bleed. She was very aware that the five and a half quarts in a human body Colin’s size was a lot of blood when you saw it draining out. But this much… How was he even awake? As she scurried forward, dropping the gun, her eyes scanned for a wound. Perhaps in his back, his shoulder…
“Colin!”
His eyes snapped toward her. He was sobbing openly, but not from pain. Something resembling a smile pulled at his mouth.
“He’s okay,” Kealey told her. His voice seemed far away, hollow, like he was in the bottom of a trash can.
Kealey helped Colin up by the arm.
And then, behind Colin, she saw the fallen gunman. He was lying facedown, splayed like a crime-scene chalk outline. The back of his head was gone, disintegrated, tiny bits of white showing around its gaping remnants like the pieces of a broken eggshell. There was the source of all the blood.
She was crying by the time she reached Colin. She threw her arms around him, felt his weight fall into them-but only for a moment, as he sought to stand on his own.
“I’m okay, Aunt Allison,” he said, sounding like the little boy she used to hug, when he let her, on birthdays and holidays.
“I love you,” she said. “I was so worried.”
“Me too,” he replied, weeping.
Her fingers feeling Colin’s scalp just to be sure, she turned to Kealey while she held him. “Thank you,” she sputtered.
“Wasn’t all me,” he said. Facing the exterior wall, he made a show of unshouldering his weapon and placing it on the floor before walking toward the shattered window. “We got some help. And I’m guessing there’s more on the way.”
“Those shots…?” Alison asked.
“From the church,” Kealey said as he reached the empty window frame and flashed a thumbs-up at the steeple. “It’s the only place that has a direct line of sight.”
Allison sought out the church, could barely see it in the dark. Then a helicopter moved in, throwing a bright white light across the steeple as it rotated toward the broken window. She looked away.
Kealey returned to her side a moment later. “I have to go,” he said.
“Why?” she asked.
“I have to get upstairs to the ballroom. The one where Julie was supposed to give her speech.”
Allison released her nephew. “Dear God, forgive me!” she said. ”I forgot.”
“No need to apologize,” he said. He bent to retrieve the gun. “We’ve been thinking in little, bite-size pieces.”
“But we don’t even know if she’s-”
“There’s a lot we don’t know,” Kealey interrupted. “So let’s take things one at a time. How are you?”
“Don’t worry about me, Ryan.”
He regarded her closely. “You sure?”
She nodded.
He looked at her nephew. “Colin?”
“Same here,” Colin said, although his voice was tremulous. “Man, you did so good,” he said. “You saved me.”
“You got us here, and you stayed cool,” Kealey said. “It was a team effort. You saved all these people, too,” he added with a sweep of his arm behind him. “Your tweet said the hostages were in two groups. Where are the others?”
“They’re in a room across the hall.”
“How many altogether?”
“Fifteen, maybe twenty people. They separated us down the middle.”
“The number of guards with them?”
“I don’t know exactly.”
“Your best guess,” Kealey said. ”It’s important.”
Colin looked thoughtful. “I think they split in half,” he said. “There was him, you know”-he glanced back at the dead gunman’s body-“and a second guy, who left the room when he heard the noise out there. The one you got with the knife. Then there was a third guy, who I’m guessing you shot at the door.”
“So you’re saying there were only a few in each room. That’s it?”
“I think so, yeah.”
“Ryan, I heard gunfire downstairs,” Allison said.
“Those were point men for the hostage takers being picked off by SWAT personnel,” Kealey said. “I heard it, too. The enemy was patrolling in twos, and there were a dozen bursts from FBI Glock twenty-twos. Nothing since. Our boys are working their way up here methodically, standard operating procedure, and they may not be in time. Not if the guys in the other room figure out they’re licked.”
He didn’t have to finish the thought. Allison knew what he meant.
Kealey retrieved his weapon and slid his arm through the leather strap. He pulled in a breath, blew air out his cheeks, and turned toward the door. Everyone else in the room was standing there, looking at him, awaiting instructions.
“You’re all going to stay put,” he said. “Help is on the way. I’m-”
He stopped.
“What is it?” Allison asked.
Kealey held up a hand to silence her. He tilted his head toward the window, listening. Allison saw his expression go from thoughtful to sharply attentive.
“Ryan?”
“Hush!” he snapped.
She and Colin were silent.
Kealey listened some more, wanting to confirm what he’d heard. The sounds were rapidly getting louder. They were overlapping in multiples, the telltale whoop of rotors accompanied by the whine of turbocharged engines.
He turned back to Allison, saw the question on her face as she also picked up on the growing sound. Within seconds it had swelled to fill their ears.
“Ryan…?”
Kealey looked at her. “Choppers,” he said, throwing down his assault rifle an instant before the room was awash in white light. “Lose your weapon-fast.”