by Brad Thor
The good thing about the door having been propped open was that the alarm, which Salomon never bothered to arm, would have already sounded its quick, three-bell chime. No one heard Ralston as he slipped inside the house.
Near the service entrance was a utility room the size of a small family apartment. Here, all of the home’s mechanics were housed, including eight panels of circuit breakers.
Ralston cut the power, plunging the house into darkness. Once his eyes adjusted, he went for a weapon.
He could have used a golf club, but he preferred something he was more proficient with. In the kitchen, he found exactly what he wanted. It was the perfect tool—not too long, not too short, and incredibly sharp. He pulled the seven-inch fillet knife from the knife block and moved on.
Coming around the corner of the large island in the kitchen, he found what he assumed to be the victim of the muted shot he had heard from outside. He was relieved to see that it wasn’t Salomon.
In his midtwenties, in jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of Chuck Taylors, he looked like a college kid. Ralston had never seen him before. Who the hell was he? he wondered. A friend? A visiting relative? An employee?
The boy had been shot through the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes. He was lying in a puddle of milk commingling with his own blood. An upturned bowl of cereal lay nearby. Ralston reached down to double-check him. He had no pulse, but was still warm.
Moving quickly, he crossed the kitchen and moved into the darkened dining room. From what he could tell, nothing was out of place. Salomon’s expensive pieces of art still hung on the walls and his box of antique silverware was still proudly displayed on the sideboard. That fact, coupled with the professionalism with which the boy in the kitchen had been dispatched, was making this look less and less like a home invasion and more and more like some sort of hit.
The thought was just solidifying in his mind, when Ralston heard someone step on the warped floorboard that Salomon had never bothered to get fixed.
CHAPTER 5
Ralston’s breathing all but stopped. Making sure he didn’t bang into any of the dining-room furniture and give himself away, he slipped across the room as fast as he could to the open double doors on the other side. Pressing himself against the wall, he gripped the knife tighter and waited.
He didn’t have to wait long. From out in the hallway, he could hear a man’s voice. He was whispering and in some sort of a foreign language. It sounded to Ralston like Eastern European, maybe Russian, but he couldn’t be sure.
When the man repeated himself, Ralston realized he was speaking over a radio. Was he trying to raise the driver outside? Or were there more men inside the house?
Either way, it wasn’t good. Ralston needed to get to Salomon. He could hear the man’s footfalls upon the wood floor of the hallway growing closer.
Ralston had two choices. He could face the man head-on, or he could wait until the man had passed and take him from behind. Shots had been fired and at least one person inside the house had already been killed. Ralston was literally bringing a knife to a gunfight, so he slipped off his shoes and settled on the latter course of action. Three seconds later, the man moved past the dining room doors.
He was huge—just as the man outside had been—six-foot-three, at least, and well over 250 pounds. He had wide shoulders, draped in what even the home’s semidarkness couldn’t hide was a very cheap suit. His feet were shod in the long, box-toed dress shoes so popular with Europeans. In one hand he carried a radio and in the other a suppressed pistol.
His hair was crew-cut short and the back of his head looked just like a Russian’s. From the base of his neck to the crown of his head, it was flat as a board. It was a cultural attribute that most Russian men, tightly swaddled and picked up seldom by their mothers, shared.
As the Russian passed, Ralston slipped into the hallway behind him. The intruder had no idea he was there until it was too late.
In one fluid motion, Ralston grabbed across the man’s forehead, yanked his head to the left, and with his right hand plunged the filleting knife into the anterior triangle between the top of the clavicle and the side of the neck. It severed the man’s internal jugular vein and carotid artery. He then swept the blade across, severing the trachea. All that could be heard was a hiss, like air being let out of a tire.
Ralston put all of his weight on the man to prevent him from using his last seconds of life to fight back and rode him down to the floor. Convinced he was no longer a threat, he dragged him off to the side, next to a cupboard, and left him there to bleed out.
It was a black art, the taking of life, and one that Luke Ralston was all too well versed in.
Dropping the knife, he picked up the intruder’s suppressed Walther P99 and did a press check. Satisfied that a round was chambered and the weapon was hot, he turned the volume down on the radio, tucked it into his back pocket, and went off in search of Salomon.
The problem, though, was twofold. Were there any more intruders in the house and where should he begin looking for Salomon? He decided to start with the producer’s office.
To get there, he had to pass through the entry hall with its wide double staircase. There was nothing for cover and Ralston used the darkness and shadows as best he could. The living room, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and ambient moonlight spilling from outside, was even worse, but he made it through both without incident.
The entrance to Larry Salomon’s office was down a short hall just past the living room. The hairs on the back of Ralston’s neck were standing on end before he even got to the door.
With the weapon up and at the ready, he button-hooked into the room and tried to take it all in.
Everything was different. The office looked as if it had been turned into some sort of war room. Whiteboards and bulletin boards were leaning against the walls and a large, rolling chalkboard was off to one side. Salomon’s imposing glass-and-steel desk now sat cheek-by-jowl with two additional, smaller desks, which were topped with high-end Apple computer systems and what Ralston recognized as editing equipment. There were stacks of cardboard filing boxes filled with reams and reams of papers and documents.
There were more pillars of books, some stacked three feet high and surrounded by yellow Post-it notes on a pair of matching drafting tables. And then there was another body.
The man appeared to be in his midforties, doughy, with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching beard. He wore jeans, loafers, and an Oxford cloth shirt. He had been shot in the back of the head execution-style. Ralston rolled him over to see who he was. As with the body in the kitchen, he didn’t recognize the man.
Exiting the office, he went down the hall to the back stairs. If Salomon had retained any of the emergency response advice he had dispensed to him dozens of times, perhaps he would have headed straight upstairs. If so, maybe it had bought him some time, especially if he’d heard the shots and had been able to figure out what was going on.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Ralston crouched down and stole a quick peek around the doorframe. The hallway was empty.
Stepping into the hall, he moved as quickly as he could toward Salomon’s bedroom. He stopped only for open doors, and even then, it was for just long enough to make sure there were no threats on the other side.
He was fifteen feet away from the master bedroom, when a figure stepped into the hall and fired.
The bullet came so close to the side of Ralston’s head that it actually set his right ear ringing. On instinct, having fired hundreds of thousands of rounds during his Spec Ops career, he depressed the trigger of his own weapon twice in quick succession and dropped the shooter onto the carpeted floor of the hallway.
Ralston advanced on the man and kicked the suppressed pistol away before checking to see if he was still alive. One round had entered just below his nose; the other had entered through his throat. He was big and dressed in a cheap suit just like his partner downstairs. The back of his head was flat as well. What the
hell was going on? Who were these people? Why were there Russians in the house?
Ralston’s questions were interrupted by the sound of a sharp crack from inside Salomon’s bedroom. It wasn’t the crack of a pistol. It was the crack of molding as drywall was being ripped away.
It told him two things. Salomon was still alive, but he had only seconds left to live.
CHAPTER 6
Larry Salomon had expected that a savvy intruder would probably cut his telephone hard line. That was why he always kept a charged cell phone in his panic room. A fixed external antenna had been installed to guarantee reception, but suddenly it wasn’t working either. He was panicked. No matter how many times he dialed 911, he couldn’t get through.
He’d been around enough weapons, even if only on movie sets where blanks were being fired, to know what real gunshots sounded like. Suppressed gunshots, contrary to what many people thought, were still audible. There was no such thing as completely silenced gunfire.
Having changed out of his evening attire, Salomon had been on his way out of his bedroom and back downstairs for one final drink, when he’d heard the first shot. He’d stood paralyzed, wondering what he’d actually heard. Then the second shot came. That’s when he knew.
He had turned and fled back to the master bedroom. He didn’t dare waste even a fraction of a second looking over his shoulder to see if he was being followed. He didn’t need to. His animal instinct for survival told him that he most definitely had someone pursuing him. He also knew that the two gunshots meant his houseguests were dead.
Charging into his walk-in closet cum panic room, he slammed the heavy metal door shut, threw the bolts home, and hit the panic button for the alarm system. He expected the high-pitched piercing shriek of the alarm to kick in instantly. It didn’t, and his fear mounted.
On a small monitor mounted inside the closet, he watched via the hidden bedroom camera as a large man with a gun rushed into the room just behind him. He pressed the panic button again and when the alarm failed to engage, he attempted to call the police, only to discover that neither his landline nor his cell phone were working.
He then watched as the intruder attempted to kick in the closet door. Again and again he kicked, but the steel-reinforced door held. Finally, the man turned and walked out of view. Had he given up?
Salomon’s question was answered when the man passed back under the camera a moment later with a fireplace tool and disappeared from view once again.
The producer strained to see what the man was up to, but the monitor provided only a very limited field of view. The security system, like the panic room, had come with the house and had been installed by the previous owner. Salomon had never really thought about it much. It was only now that he realized that a pan-and-tilt camera would have been infinitely more useful than a static, fixed lens.
It was at that moment that all the power went out. With the phone line cut and his cell phone signal having somehow been jammed, Salomon wasn’t surprised when the emergency generator failed to kick in. Whoever had cut the power knew what he was doing. He was now effectively blind.
He wasn’t, however, deaf, and his heart soon choked his throat when he figured out where the intruder was and what he was doing with the fireplace poker.
The first thud had been somewhat displaced, but Salomon locked on to the second swing of the poker like a sonar operator.
The sounds had come from the far end of the closet. On the other side was the master bath. Using the poker, the intruder was clawing his way through the drywall and into what really wasn’t a true panic room, but rather just a closet with a very heavy door.
It was a poorly thought out feature that provided a false sense of security and would only slow, but not stop, a determined attacker. It dawned on Salomon how much trouble he was in. He was trapped.
Though he couldn’t see the intruder, he could hear huge pieces of drywall being ripped away on the bathroom side of the wall. Any moment now, he feared, the attacker was going to burst through into the closet. Salomon had one ace up his sleeve and he reached for it.
The Mossberg tactical shotgun had been a gift. A friend, moving to New York City, had been afraid to take it with him for fear of running afoul of antigun laws. With its pistol grip, short barrel, and crenelated muzzlebrake Salomon could understand why. He’d kept the weapon around “just in case,” figuring if he ever got in trouble for owning it, he could let his lawyers straighten it out. They could simply claim that it had been taken from one of his film sets as a souvenir and that he had no idea it was actually real.
Of course he’d also have to claim that he didn’t know it was loaded, but a courtroom appearance was the furthest thing from his mind at this point. All he cared about was staying alive.
Racking the slide, he made ready.
As Ralston charged into the bedroom, he heard the blast of a shotgun, and his heart stopped.
Rushing to the door of the master bath, he saw blood and bits of flesh everywhere. Risking a closer look, he stepped into the bathroom and saw a body on the floor and the distinctive door-breacher muzzlebrake of Salomon’s shotgun protruding from the far wall. He leaped out of the bathroom just as the weapon erupted with another roar. Twelve-gauge shot shattered the marble tiles right where he had been standing.
“Damn it, Larry!” Ralston yelled. “Cease fire! It’s me! Luke!”
His ears were ringing even harder now, and he wondered if his hearing would ever fully return. “I need to get into the bathroom and see if he’s dead. Don’t you fucking shoot me,” he ordered. “Okay?”
There was a muffled assent from Salomon. Whether it was muffled because his hearing was shot or because it was coming from behind a wall, Ralston couldn’t be sure. He peeked back into the bathroom and watched as the shotgun was retracted through the blown-out drywall.
Ralston grabbed two towels and threw them down so he didn’t have to walk across the bloody floor in his stocking feet.
The intruder must have been very close when the shotgun went off, as it had blown a huge hole in his chest. Ralston looked for any weapon he might have been carrying and saw another silenced pistol sitting on the edge of the vanity near where the man had been tearing through the wall to get at Salomon.
A good portion of the man’s suit coat and the shirt beneath were shredded. Once Ralston had ascertained that he had no pulse, he began peeling the strips of cloth away around his right armpit. He heard the closet door unlock, and seconds later Salomon was behind him.
“Who the hell are they?” he asked.
“Spetsnaz,” replied Ralston. “Russian Special Forces, I think.”
“How can you tell?”
Ralston lifted the dead man’s arm and pointed to the blue-black Cyrillic tattoo. “That’s how they mark their blood type.”
“What the hell are they doing here? Why would Russian Special Forces soldiers want to kill me?”
“You’re not the only one they came for.”
“Oh, my God,” said Salomon. “Chip and Jeremy. They were downstairs. I heard two shots.” His voice trailed off.
“They’re both dead. What were they doing here? And what the hell happened to your office?”
“We were working on a film; a documentary,” Salomon said, and then changed the subject. “We need to call the police.”
“No. We need to get someplace safe,” said Ralston. “We’ve got to think.”
“Think?” replied Salomon. “This guy killed Chip and Jeremy and was trying to make me the third. He could be some homicidal maniac, for all we know. We need to call the cops.”
Ralston stood up. “This is a professional wet work team. A Russian wet work team.”
“Team?”
“There was a driver outside and at least two others inside the house.”
Salomon was trying to piece it all together. “And you killed three of them?”
Ralston nodded.
“How did you know?”
“I saw tire tracks
leading up the service road. I tried to call you, but I couldn’t get a signal.”
“My cell was down, too,” said Salomon.
“They must have some sort of jammer. Like I said, these guys were professional.” Ralston stepped off the towels and out of the bathroom. Reaching for the shotgun, he repeated, “There may be more of them. We need to get going.”
The producer shook his head. “I know how this plays out. If we don’t stay here and wait for the cops, we’ll look guilty.”
“And if we do stay and wait for the cops, we’ll both be dead. I’m not going to let that happen. The Russians have infiltrated a lot of police departments across the country.”
“Are you serious?”
“Dead serious,” said Ralston. “We’re not trusting anyone else at this point. When these guys fail to report back in, whoever sent them might send more. They’re going to use every contact, every means they have at their disposal. We need to disappear.”
Salomon began to object, but Ralston was already making his way across the bedroom. “Are you comfortable using this?” Ralston asked as he handed his friend the suppressed pistol.
“I’d rather have the shotgun.”
Ralston nodded and handed it over. Raising the pistol, he prepared to enter the hallway and said, “Stay close. And if you see anything move at all, you pull that trigger. Got it? Don’t even worry about aiming.”
Salomon nodded and the pair slipped into the hallway and down the back stairs. They stopped at the dining room long enough for Ralston to grab his shoes. He thought about wiping his fingerprints off the handle of the knife that lay only feet away, but decided it wasn’t worth the time. They needed to get out of there as quickly as possible. His damaged Porsche was already going to tell the world that he had been there.