One for One (John Flynn Thrillers Book 3)

by A. J. Stewart

  He and Gorski swept the grounds. There were no more men with guns. They collected the bodies and put them on the platform trailer behind the old cherry-red tractor, and Flynn drove them down to a back pasture by a copse of trees and left them in the tall grass. Gorski collected the Suburban that the men had parked down the road, and he drove it into the shed, and then closed and locked the door.

  Monsieur Pepard left on his bicycle and returned thirty minutes later with a small backhoe, which he drove down to the rear pasture and dug a hole. Flynn and Gorski collected all the men’s radios and phones and turned them off. As Flynn was switching the last phone off, it rang.

  The screen said Thierry. The ringing ended, and then immediately began again. Thierry, whoever he was, was getting impatient. Flynn switched the phone off. Then he and Gorski dragged the bodies over and dumped them into the hole. Monsieur Pepard poured a bucket of lye into the hole, and then filled the hole and drove over it a few times to smooth it out.

  “The grass will cover it by spring,” he said as if he had seen it all before, and then he drove the backhoe away, to wherever it was that it had come from.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Flynn lay in the underbrush and watched the rear of the estate house. He had tried to get Elyse to leave the Pepard farm and go and join the refugees where they had moved them the previous day. Flynn didn’t know where that was, and he figured it was better that way. But Elyse refused to leave, instead staying with Monsieur Pepard. At least she moved into the farmhouse. Monsieur Betesh wanted to come with him, but Flynn assured him that he was not going to attempt to get the man’s family without him, and that this was, essentially, just groundwork.

  It was more than that. It was a chess move. Designed to manipulate his opponent’s next move while simultaneously taking out more of his pawns. Flynn had spent the day trying to rest, but constantly thinking one step, two steps ahead, and then coming back as he second guessed his moves. He pushed the thoughts away. He couldn’t waste the energy of second guessing that which hadn’t happened.

  He lay in place watching the evening rituals. There were no riders on the arena. Jean Loup and his daughter were in Paris. Elyse had found a social pages article that told them that Loup and his wife would be attending a gala at the Opéra national de Paris that Saturday evening. That told Flynn two things. The obvious: that Loup would not be down at his estate for the weekend; and the not so obvious: when Loup wasn’t around, the airfield got busy.

  Flynn hoped that losing some men would put Loup on edge. Men getting killed was one thing. Men completely disappearing from the face of the earth was another. But he still needed to make this next move count. With it, he would be one step closer to victory or one step closer to defeat. There was no halfway, no tie, no stalemate to be had.

  There were two stablehands. One was junior and one was senior. Flynn deduced this from their duties. The junior was tasked with mucking out the stables, the senior walked the horses along the track that ran around the arena. He noted one security guy on the patio and one by the tree on the lawn. There was no one walking the perimeter—Flynn spent the first hour near the river watching for his friend with the night vision goggles, but saw no one. There was no one by stables. The skeleton security crew that covered things when Loup wasn’t in town had six guys who were AWOL.

  He didn’t assume that they wouldn’t be replaced. He kept an ear out for the helicopter but there was no sign of it. Perhaps Loup’s non-presence that weekend had made then relaxed. Perhaps they were still scrambling to figure out where the six missing men had gone.

  The horses weren’t hosed down. The stablehands groomed them with curry combs and put powder on their backs, and then as the light was fading from the day, they returned the horses to the stables. The senior stablehand entered the code into the keypad to lock everything up once the horses were down for the night. Flynn wondered for a moment whether the horses preferred to be outside in a paddock, free to run or jump or even just lie down sleep, or whether they were so bred and conditioned to living in stalls they had become like people who lived in New York City and could no longer tolerate the tedium of country living.

  As dusk fell, soft lights came on around the barn and the path leading to the house. Flynn was in no hurry. Patience was the key, more often than not. He watched the bird settle in the trees and the guy on the lawn wander up and join his buddy on the patio. Before long they both went inside.

  Flynn waited.

  At 12:33 a.m. he moved. He had found, by study and accident, that the attention of people on any kind of sentry duty tended to waver. It ebbed and flowed like a tide with a predictable rhythm. Found that sentries were most alert on the hour and half hour, and less alert at a quarter past and a quarter to, as if they brains were driving by the hands on a clock. Their attention was generally at its lowest during those in-between times, the times that never meant anything to anyone.

  Like 12:33 a.m.

  Flynn kept to the trees and moved around the woods to the rear of the stables. Here he broke from the tree line and crept across to the back of the building housing the horses. It was now 12:45. He waited three more minutes in the shadows and then moved again.

  Flynn had seen all the video camera positions, and he expected more inside the barn. He figured they would be infrared, able to produce a high quality picture in low-to-no light. In his Legion days he had options. One of his team, Thorn, had been an electronics whiz. He would have found some way to hack into the security system at the estate and blind the cameras. But Flynn didn’t have Thorn anymore. So he went with an old fashioned method. It might work, or it might not. But it wasn’t a fifty-fifty proposition. See him or don’t see him. Because of human nature, and attention and alertness and odd times past the hour, it was closer to seventy-thirty, or even eighty-twenty.

  At 1:06 a.m. he stepped out of the shadows near the wash station and moved around the front of the stables. He crept along the wall until he reached the keypad, and then he heard a boom, and a flash of light exploded into the sky from the front of the manor house. Flynn punched in the number, heard a heavy thunk and then pulled the door open and slipped inside.

  Gorski hated the psychological mumbo-jumbo. Back in the day, Flynn had always been reading about psychology, and teams, and stories about people achieving success under stress or danger. It was as if those were the only kinds of books the French ever wrote. The problem was, his unit commander—his adjudant—was right more often than he was wrong. Much more often. It made debating the issue utterly pointless. So when Flynn said to move at 1:04 a.m. precisely, Gorski did just that.

  He had poured a line of gasoline along the base of the hedgerow at the front of the estate. He started at the gate and ran back to the north about three hundred meters. As he ran he dropped a flash-bang every fifty meters or so. Then he waited. For 1:04. At which point he lit the gasoline and ran.

  There was no point man on the roof of the house. He was missing. One of the upstairs guys was also missing so the remaining man was rotating between front and rear views. And their team leader was also missing. But Delacourt had it under control. He kept his eyes on the screens in the security room in the basement of the house. Everything was in greyscale because it was dark. He saw nothing on any of the eighteen external or twelve internal cameras.

  And then he did.

  The point man on the roof would have seen it earlier, but the trees around the house prevented the upstair guy seeing as far as the front hedgerow, the bottom of which was glowing on the gray screen.

  “Does anyone have eyes on the front gate?”

  “You do, moron,” came the reply.

  Delacourt let it go. “There’s a bright light coming from the hedges. Can someone investigate?”

  The upstairs guy volunteered to take a look from the roof. When he looked through the binoculars he nearly dropped them.

  “We have a fire. I repeat, a fire. The front of the property is burning.”

  “Call the sa
peurs-pompiers, now!”

  Delacourt fumbled for the phone to call the fire service. He tried dialing and watching the screen at the same time without success at either task. Then he dropped the phone.

  “Was there a lightening strike?” he asked as he tried reaching down to pick up the phone.

  “It’s a clear night out.”

  “What about the back? Anything happening? Patio?”

  “Negative, all quiet.”

  Then the vision of the front hedge exploded into bright light, rendering the camera blind. Delacourt heard the explosion from the basement.

  “What the hell was that?”

  “There may be a car accident down there. That was an explosion,” said the upstairs guy, now on the roof.

  “Are we under attack?” asked Delacourt.

  “No,” said the guy. “The front gate is a thousand meters from the house. There’s nothing near us. Did you call the pompiers?”

  “Oui,” spat Delacourt, although he hadn’t. He bent down and picked up the phone and then called it in. The fire service was a predominantly volunteer service in rural France. The dispatcher told Delacourt the fire engine from Ambérieu would be ten minutes. Delacourt figured twelve, given the roads.

  Then there was a second explosion. Just as loud and even brighter. The hedgerow continued to burn. Delacourt heard the footsteps of the patio sentry running across the ancient floorboards toward the front of the house.

  “Patio, hold your position.”

  “There’s nothing happening in the back. The front is on fire. Do you want to tell Loup we sat here and watched his centuries old hedgerow burn while the pompiers were on their way?”

  Delacourt did not. Thierry usually took the brunt of Loup’s wrath, and then passed on the displeasure to them himself. Delacourt knew which he preferred.

  “Get out there,” he said. “Find a hose, find a bucket.”

  “Turn on the damned water system,” said the roof guy.

  “I’ve got it,” said Delacourt. He ran to another part of the basement, an unfinished section that abutted the patio above. The watering system controls were there. They got plenty of rain. They really didn’t need a watering system. But the riding tracks got dry and dusty in the summer, and Monsieur Loup wanted the area watered down, and the lawn green not yellow, and the hedgerow thick and as solid as a stone wall, so he had spent hundreds of thousand of euros on installing the system.

  Delacourt found the control panel and the section marked hedgerow. He turned the lever and felt the initial rush as the flow regulated and pushed water out to the hedge. The he ran up stairs. He was puffing hard when he got to the roof.

  “Is it working?”

  The other guy shook his head. “It’s a drip system, not a sprinkler.” As they watched the fire continue but not spread, a third explosion lit up the front lawn.

  “That’s not an explosion,” said Delacourt. “That looks like a flash-bang.”

  Delacourt turned and ran. Back down the stairs all the way to the basement. He stood before the screens and as he fought to get his breath back, he checked each camera’s view, one at a time. Then he did it again. And again. The rooms were still. The patio empty. A handful of deer congregated on the lawn. He saw no movement.

  Nothing was out of place.

  Flynn heard the first bang and slipped inside the stable and leaped over the gate into the first stall. The horse reared up at him. He was a feisty beast, highly strung. The horse Flynn had seen prancing around under its master on the arena track. He figured this guy thought of himself as the alpha. And the alpha was too noisy. He had to go down.

  Flynn took care of the feisty stallion quickly. Then he jumped over the barrier between stalls and took out a syringe and stuck it in the horse’s mouth and squeezed down on the plunger, just a little, not too much. Then he repeated the process on the next horse, and the next.

  Then Flynn looped a rope around the last horse’s head and opened the stall and led it out. The horse was compliant and docile. He had squirted some Dormosedan gel under each horse’s tongue. It was a sedative used by equine veterinarians. Flynn had gone easy on the dose. He wanted compliance and quiet, not coma.

  He tied each horse’s rope to the next and then stepped to the door and as the second flash-bang exploded he pulled the door open and led the horses out. He left the door open. At this point if they saw it, they saw it. He led the horse quickly to the back of the stables and into the trees.

  The first horse wasn’t keen to wander into the dark unknown, and Flynn couldn’t blame him. But Flynn pulled and the sleepy animal dropped his head and strode forward into the forest.

  Flynn led the horses along the tree line at pace. He startled a herd of deer who took off out toward the back lawn of the estate, but he kept moving north. Until he hit the tight road that ran down the north side of the property.

  Gorski stood in grass under the trees. He had the Chevrolet Suburban hooked up to Monsieur Pepard’s cattle trailer. It wasn’t really designed for horses but it would do in a pinch. Flynn led the animals straight up into the trailer and then Gorski lifted the ramp and Flynn climbed out the side.

  Each man nodded at the other as they passed each other. Gorski into the cab of the big truck and Flynn back into the forest.

  Flynn ran. Hard. He counted as best he could and when he hit a thousand he cut right. Within a couple of meters of the tree line he cut to the back of the stables and then around to the front.

  He stepped inside the stables and pulled the door closed.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  They did the sweep room by room. They had nothing better to do and lots to lose if they were wrong. The fire service had arrived and put the fire out in around thirty seconds. They declared it the work of children, vandals. A terror to such a stately home. The hedge was burned underneath but the flames had not been sufficient to take the tangle of trees down.

  The security guys found the unexploded flash-bangs. Those were not the work of kids. They immediately got in line and walked from the hedgerow to the house, and then swept from the roof to the basement, every room, every cupboard, under every table and chair and desk. Then they moved out the back. From the patio to the forest, around the stables and the arena. They turned on every light and walked the back lawn and scared away the deer. They called and woke the stablehand. Then one of them took the new night vision headgear and walked through the trees on all sides of the property. They found nothing.

  Then the stablehand arrived. He was an older man, and had worked with horses since he was a boy. He preferred the company of the horses to the company of most people. It was the only thing he had in common with his master, Monsieur Loup. But it was a strong bond.

  He knew the moment he pulled the door open. Everything was wrong. The stall gates were closed but hung loose. The medication cupboard at the end of the building was ajar. All the horses were missing.

  And there was a pool of blood by the first stall.

  The horse’s name was Golden Empire. Loup called him El Jefe—in Spanish, the boss. Blood dripped from the gate to his stall and pooled on the cobblestones, running in a rivulet toward the drain.

  The stablehand stumbled in disbelief. All the horses gone. His companions. Monsieur Loup’s prize possessions. Tens of millions of euros in horseflesh, tens of millions more in future stud fees. He turned and stepped out of the stable like a zombie. The security detail stood outside, mouths agape.

  “Call Monsieur Loup,” he said.

  None of them wanted to do it. They feared he would kill the messenger. They feared it quite literally. So Delacourt called and woke Thierry.

  Thierry didn’t wake Loup.

  There were some things one didn’t do. Short of a nuclear blast, it could wait. Except perhaps if the blast occurred in one of Loup’s reactors. Besides, he had a meeting later that morning with the Japanese Deputy Prime Minister, who had spent the evening having his unique physical appetites cater to. It was a project worth twelve
billion dollars. That would replace a lot of horses.

  Loup was sitting up in his bed watching news on the Asian markets when Thierry walked in. The ensuite shower was running.

  “Mrs. Loup . . .” said Thierry.

  “Is in Provence. Back tonight. What do you want?”

  “There’s been an issue at the estate.”

  Loup let out a groan. “What now.”

  “There’s been a break in.”

  “At the house?”

  “At the stables.”

  Loup sat up further. “The horses?”

  “Are missing.”

  “El Jefe?”

  “All of them.”

  For a moment Thierry thought that his boss might cry. He knew that Loup loved his horses almost as much as he loved money. Loup slipped out of bed, padded across the plush carpet to the the chest of drawers opposite, put his hands around the widescreen television on his wall, and ripped it from it’s anchor. He spun and threw the television past Thierry—who leaned back to watch it fly by—and into another wall and an antique dressing table. The television exploded in a million pieces of plastic and glass and precious metals.

  Then Loup turned to Thierry. He looked calm.

  “If you don’t find my horses, I will fucking kill you.”

  “Oui.”

  A half-naked woman stepped from the ensuite bathroom.

  “What happened?

  “Finish your shower,” said Loup.

  “What happened to the television?”

  “Finish your shower!”

  Loup took a breath. He hadn’t taken his eyes from Thierry.

  “How does this happen?”

  “The staff is smaller when you are not there.” Thierry resisted the urge to roll his eyes. He had warned Loup a thousand times about security numbers.

  “I would think just one person with a brain and two functional eye could handle watching . . . how many cameras?”