Breacher (Tom Keeler Book 2)

by Jack Lively

  I got out Willets’ phone and dialed Ellie. She answered on the first ring. Her voice was hot and heavy, rushed and anxious.

  “Keeler.”

  I said, “Two things. One, you need to get the Port Morris cops to the Emerald Allure cruise ship. Make sure the boat doesn’t leave the dock. Second, you need to get to the front gate of the property. I’ve got people here. I’m sending them up to the gate, they’ll need help. Copy?”

  Ellie didn’t answer immediately. I looked at the phantom faces, watching me watching them. Ellie’s voice finally crackled down the line. “Copy that. We’ll be there.”

  “Any news from Chapman?”

  “No. But Smithson got FBI cooperation, there’s a team from Fairbanks landing at the airport in half an hour.”

  The tinkle of another triple burst filtered through the trees. I hung up the phone.

  The woman in front of me looked back over her shoulder and shuddered.

  I said, “You need to get to the front gate. Think you can make it there?”

  She nodded, fatigued but resilient. “We’ll get there.”

  “How many more of you back at the property?”

  “There are five more. Too weak to get up and go when the lady came for us.”

  I said, “The lady, blonde and tall?”

  She nodded. I smiled inside. Chapman wasn’t stuck in the house anymore. She had gotten loose and was causing a ruckus. The shooting was her. Which made me feel warm and fuzzy. First, I had to get this group on their way.

  Two of them could barely stand, but they were able to count on those who could. The column trooped mournfully in a single file behind their leader, each holding on to the shoulder in front, like something out of an old Dutch painting, the blind leading the blind. Except they weren’t blind, just dying.

  When they were safely across the orchard, I turned away. It was quiet again. The shooting had stopped up at the house. The islands below were dull green spots in a black surface. I stayed there for a moment, planning the sequence. Chapman was loose. I’d give her the benefit of the doubt and stick to my plan. Outside in. Clear the external buildings, then arrive at the main house to attend my first board meeting.

  Fifty-Three

  I came through the woods, west side of the property, avoiding the driveway.

  It was dark and crisp and clear. Any residual mist had been pushed away by the wind. The back of the first building was blunt and windowless. I went to the rear exit and waited. No sound coming from inside, no light filtering out through the door cracks. Nothing moving, no more gunfire. Just calm silence. The knob turned without resistance. The door opened and I stepped inside.

  It took a moment for my eyes to adjust. Compared to the interior, the moonlit landscape had been bright. I counted off sixty seconds. By the end of that minute, my pupils had dilated sufficiently to use the light from electrical fixtures set into the walls and machinery. The place was filled with machines, none of them working. Nothing moving. Only a hum from the electricity surging through circuits, fueling the immobile hardware with potential energy. Once I could see, I started to make sense of what I was looking at. Which was a cake factory.

  The place ran like the instructions in a recipe book, multiplied by a thousand, and automated. Each machine had a little sign on it indicating the function. First came the mixing tubs where dough was put together. Next came the giant ovens. After that were stations that pumped filling into the cakes through plastic tubes. Once that was finished there was a dipping station. I plunged a finger in. The vat was filled with chocolate, still warm. The cooling machines came next. Finally there was a long zig-zagging route to the packing stations, where the product was siloed into plastic wrap and cardboard boxes. All automatic. All of it connected by wide conveyor belts. Thousands of cakes rested silently on the motionless conveyor belt, in various stages of completion. At the end, boxes of Mister Lawrence product were stacked in piles that went above my head.

  The boxes were white with a picture of a cake, a logo, and a smiling bald guy above it. Mister Lawrence.

  Someone had hit pause, then turned off the lights.

  At the far side of the packaging area was a loading dock. Two forklifts were parked side by side. Then there were the doors. One large rolling cargo door, one normal person-sized door. I pulled the handle. Unlocked. I pushed it open a couple of inches with my foot. Through the crack I could see the house, about fifty yards to the east. The connecting areas were clear of brush and trees.

  Halfway to the house was a dark shadowed form, a human figure who had been stopped and put down. Didn’t look like he’d be getting up again.

  I stayed there watching. After the gunfire there was too much silence. The shadows had eyes.

  I counted five minutes. The patience paid off.

  A figure broke from the trees to my right and crossed the dirt yard. Huddled tight, gripping an assault rifle. There was a brief moment when he was exposed, but the operator knew to keep to the shadows. Below the door was a steel staircase. Five steps down to the ground. The guy crept along the edge of the building and under the staircase. I could hear his breathing and the soft padding of his boots on dirt. He tucked himself below me and to my left. I heard him speaking softly into a radio. Russian.

  Chapman was out there and the hunt was on.

  My ballpark guess was six enemy remaining. She had taken out the one that I could see, which left four plus this guy. He wasn’t going to last long. The question was how best to kill him. I figured I would be most useful to Chapman as a silent accomplice. I pulled further back into the factory and set down the weapons. First the Breachers, then the Remington. Once I had lightened the load, I crept back to the door.

  All that separated me from the guy were the twin railings of the steel staircase and a three-foot drop. I figured I’d vault the railings and come down on the guy’s back. I could grip him with my legs and my left arm and stab him a dozen times in the chest. I brought my knife out once again and locked the blade.

  The door made no noise. I eased it open slowly. My eyes didn’t leave my prey, maybe seven feet away. Once I made the move, I’d be committed. There was no going back because the guy would react to movement. His weapon was ready but pointed down across his chest. He was staring into the shadows made by the growth across the yard. I figured he was waiting for something, maybe a friend. I got the door open wide enough so that I could move out freely. I took a long breath and went for it.

  Total commitment. Like an athlete, except getting it wrong wasn’t going to be try and fail, it was going to be try and die.

  One fast stride onto the platform, one step up onto the first railing. Boot planted firmly. I pushed off hard and sprung into the air. The guy was still clueless, looking deeply into the trees. Trying to draw meaning from the wind in the branches. Or maybe he was thinking, reflecting on life. In either case he was condition white. Unaware.

  I went over the other side of the railing and up, a panther coming down from a jungle tree. The guy was slow to notice the movement above and behind him. He was still fixated on the spot across the yard. I was a quarter-second away from landing when my peripheral vision was disturbed. I whipped my head back to the staircase I had just launched from and caught a blur of black clad movement. Another guy, coming right behind me. I got eyes on him just as he was grabbing at my foot in mid-air. I tried to pull the boot back. At that point my target grunted in surprise, noticing what was happening for the first time. I felt the new guy’s hand scramble to grip my boot but I managed to twist it free of his grip. I lost balance. I wasn’t going to land as intended, that was for damn sure.

  I landed on the guy below, bringing us both to the ground. He scrambled clear of me.

  At that point I was dealing with two enemies. My only instinct was to prioritize the threat. The guy I’d landed on was recovering his wits. He’d been thinking about something, which had kept him condition white. Now he was moving out of that and transitioning to another mental state, ge
aring up for a decision. But he wasn’t there yet.

  The second guy was condition black, fully alert and combat ready. I moved the first guy to my peripheral vision and brought my full attention to the guy who had come at me from behind. One thing I registered instantly, the smoothly shaved head and pointy ears. This was our fourth encounter.

  One too many.

  He was putting up his weapon and smiling. I had landed badly, rolling my ankle and coming down hard on my ass. I saw muzzle flash as the guy fired twice, in quick succession. I was hit once on my left side. The impact came like a glancing blow from a sledge hammer.

  I’d been hit before. When it happens, it happens fast. No time to understand what’s going on, only time to react.

  My hand still gripped the knife. I had practiced throwing it so many times that doing so now was only a muscle reaction, not even a conscious thought. The pointy-eared guy was sucking in air. I figured he’d been winded by the lurching and grabbing and had forgotten to take a breath before letting off two rounds. Whatever. I guess I saw the target and just went for it. By the time my thoughts caught up, I had flicked the knife backhanded. It spun in the air a couple of times and went straight through into his open mouth.

  Which was one move in a fast-moving sequence. The guy I had landed on was backing up and raising his weapon. Maybe the knife play had caught his attention. Maybe he was a thinking person, which didn’t bode well for his chances of surviving. By the time he’d paused his philosophical reflections I had the Glock out of my waistband and had squeezed two rounds into his chest. He fell back, his breath coming out quick and hard, the way a balloon deflates. I pulled the trigger on a head shot and nothing happened. The slide was jammed. I dropped the weapon and turned back to the guy with the pointy ears and my knife in his mouth.

  He was on his knees trying to deal with a serious situation. My blade had buried itself in the back of his throat. Which caused him to clutch and gag and generally bug out. That might have been enough, after a while, if time had been allowed to play out. He might have choked on the thing or bled out. Or maybe the blade had gone into key areas in the neck, areas that are necessary for the continued viability of the human organism.

  I’ll never know.

  What I do know is that I moved at him very quickly, with neither mercy or delay. I vaulted the stairs, seized his head and ripped it the wrong way, with maximum prejudice. I felt the vertebrae pop as they separated unnaturally, tearing out and shredding vital elements of the pointy-eared guy’s nervous system. In the darkness I saw the whites of his eyes film over as he ceased to be a living being and became an inanimate object. Black magic. It was as obvious as shades being lowered on a window. I eased the body to the steel platform. He was dead weight, all slack and nothing holding it together anymore.

  His mouth closed with a sharp snap, like some kind of involuntary muscular contraction. A final, jealous reach from the nervous system. For a moment I hesitated. That knife had become an important souvenir of my time in Alaska. Now it was locked up in the guy’s head. I released the object from my mind. After all, it was just a knife.

  I stepped into the factory again. Picked up the Breachers. I knew at least two things to be true and meaningful. I had been hit, and the only thing keeping me going was the adrenaline of combat. No time to lose, no reason to stop. Two more enemy down. I stepped off the stairs and crouched against the wall. Waiting and watching.

  From across the yard came a low wolf whistle.

  The whistle came from the spot that the first guy had been staring into, which had drawn his attention. I couldn’t see anything in there. A figure emerged from the darkened brush. Slim, tall, blonde hair. Chapman moved slow and cautious to the edge of the woods and crouched low. She was wearing a blue dress beneath a black tactical jacket that she must have looted from one of the Wagner mercenaries. I loped across the dirt and pushed into the growth. Chapman had also taken one of the Tavor assault rifles and her feet were bare against the soil.

  Just like old times.

  Fifty-Four

  Chapman stepped back into the trees. I followed. Once we were away from the open yard, she stopped and examined me. The cold moonlight filtered in through leafless branches. I could see her very clearly. Her sharp profile and large, wide-set eyes, blue, and cutting.

  She said, “That was really quite something, Keeler. I knew you had game, but I never expected anything like that.”

  I said nothing.

  She said, “I was stuck here waiting for the guy to stop staring in my direction. I was hiding in the shadow and I think he couldn’t quite see me. I didn’t want to shoot him because of the other one. I knew the second one was out there, but I didn’t know he was coming through the factory. Well, first I thought you were him when you came out.”

  “But then you noticed my style.”

  “You were like a berserker, Keeler.” Chapman said this in an admiring tone, like being a controlled psychopath was the best thing you could hope for, which made her part of my world.

  I said, “What are we looking at?”

  She said, “I sent people up to the gate. I guess you met them.”

  “I did, and I called it in. There’s a welcome committee coming.”

  “There are more here. People who couldn’t walk so good.”

  I looked around. It was deadly silent. I said, “Pretty quiet here.”

  She said, “The opposition has gone to ground. When I got out of the house, they were in the middle of an operation. Moving those people out on the bus. I took down two of them over there. Then another guy coming out of the house. Now there are at least a couple more inside the house protecting the VIPs.”

  “I figure they’re cutting losses. You get that impression?”

  “Big time. The clown was nervous. He said that the bosses had flown in and were cleaning up. Seemed to me that he was getting ready for the chop.”

  “Like they’d kill him?”

  Chapman was nodding. “The guy was a creep, but an intelligent one. Like he knew the score but didn’t know how to face it. He was going hard tonight, like it was the last night.”

  I said, “How did you get out?”

  Chapman was crouched close to me. The blue dress was thin for the temperature, but her metabolism was going hard. I could feel her warmth.

  She said, “Second floor, back side of the house. I was in there with another girl and the bald clown guy. Some kind of bachelor pad fantasy room. Guard outside the door. The clown spiked our drinks with Rohypnol. She was drinking, I was faking it, pouring it into a potted plant."

  “And?”

  She shrugged. “The clown tried to do his thing and I did mine.”

  I looked at Chapman. She didn’t look away. Her bright eyes were clear and uncomplicated by doubt.

  I said, “Where did that happen?”

  “What?”

  “You, doing your thing.”

  “The bathroom. You want the full picture. Marble tiled floor. Right next to the shower. Guy was wearing a kimono, like he was a samurai or something.”

  “And?”

  She said, “And I broke his neck.”

  “In that dress.”

  Chapman looked down. There was a tear in the dress. She looked up at me and shrugged. “Yes.”

  I pictured the scene. The Mister Lawrence guy on the floor by a shower in a very uncomfortable-looking position. Dead and half naked in a silk kimono that had come undone. I pictured his neck, black and blue and misshapen. An image populated my mind of Chapman’s powerful swimmer’s thighs wrapped around the guy’s neck, squeezing patiently, pulsing with muscle. I could see the guy trapped, red-faced and flailing. He would have been in a state of disbelief, wondering how this could have happened to him? Like an over-confident rat who find himself in the embrace of a constricting snake. No need to wait, Chapman would have gone in for the kill, a quick shake of the hips and a twist of the knees.

  I said, “Good work. Let’s go.”

  She lo
oked at me, and her eyes travelled to my torso. “You got hit.”

  I lifted up my jacket and shirt. Nothing but blood and shredded flesh. Chapman bit her lip and moved closer. She felt around with her fingers, probing. It hurt. But I knew that the loss of blood was minimal.

  I said, “Flesh wound. I got lucky. Let’s get this over with so I can put a Band-Aid on it.”

  Chapman was now very close. Her hair brushing my neck as she moved. She explored my wound with expert fingers. It was painful and pleasant, stimulating. Until she pressed hard into my side and made me pull away involuntarily.

  She made a shushing sound. “Keeler, you are a lucky man. A graze. One centimeter closer and I would be so sad.”

  “Yeah, just don’t make me laugh okay?” I pulled down my shirt and the jacket. Felt better that I was wrapped in clothing. The pain made me impatient.

  “Let’s do it.”

  She shook her head. “There’s something you have to see first.”

  Chapman didn’t wait for me to agree. She took off through the woods. Barefoot and silent. Assault rifle up and ready. I followed. We arrived around the back of the second production facility building. Identical to the first. Another back door. Chapman paused at the side of the door. She removed a chrome cylinder from her pocket and held it up for me to see.

  I said, “Hagen told me about your hidden Geiger counter.”

  “Good. But it isn’t a Geiger counter.” Chapman flipped the top off on hinges and twisted the cylinder once. It popped up from the middle to reveal a digital readout. She waved it around me and then moved to the building. She lowered the device and scanned the closed doorway. She turned and showed me the reading. There were numbers, they didn’t mean anything to me.

  I said, “So what?”

  “Normal reading. Baseline gamma radiation, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Chapman twisted the lipstick case one more turn and it clicked. She showed me the readout. The numbers had gone way higher.