Gail took the prisoner’s arm and let him set the pace. She noted that he was trembling but said nothing about it. Masterson smelled like disease, a rotten, musty stench that was equal parts filth, blood, and infection. She supported his left forearm with her right and noted, again silently, that his steps were short and halting.
“It’s been a while since I’ve done this,” he said.
“Take your time,” Gail said.
It took all of two minutes to move the distance to the base of the stairs. Masterson stopped and craned his neck to look at the climb. “I don’t think I can do that,” he said.
“Then I’ll take it from here,” Boxers said. He moved to Masterson’s right side and stooped to maneuver the prisoner’s arm around his neck.
“Be gentle,” Gail said.
“At least as gentle as he was to all those dead people in the stadium,” Boxers said.
For all the bluster, he was gentle, anyway. Masterson winced in anticipation of pain, but didn’t yell as Big Guy cradled the prisoner’s knees across his forearm and lifted him as if he weighed no more than a child. Size notwithstanding, it was hard sometimes to comprehend just how enormously strong Boxers was. He led the way up the stairs, across the porch, and then back into the house. Gail brought up the rear.
“Hey, Boss!” Big Guy shouted as he stepped over one of the corpses that littered his path from the gun room to the front room.
“Holy shit,” Masterson said, taking in the carnage. “You guys had a war.”
“More like a skirmish,” Boxers said. “If you haven’t figured it out already, screwing with us is always a mistake. Boss!”
Jonathan’s voice called from outside. “Here!”
Gail and Boxers, with Masterson in his arms, crossed to the front door and on out into the yard, stepping over yet another body on the way. Jonathan stood next to the Suburban. Ray stood next to him. Both wore their rifles slung muzzles-down across their chests.
“Where are we going?” Masterson asked.
“Where we take you,” Boxers said.
“To a doctor,” Gail said.
Boxers stooped low and stepped high to fit himself and his charge through the door. He maneuvered past the captain’s chairs in the second row and back to the bench seat that ran along the back. He laid Masterson onto the black cushions with a gentleness that surprised Gail.
As Big Guy backed out of the vehicle, he hooked a thumb at Ray. “What about him?”
“He’s going with us,” Jonathan said.
Boxers stepped closer to Ray, towering over him. “Did you already get the speech about what happens if you get sideways with us? The penalty for betrayal?”
Ray took a concomitant step back and tossed a glance back to the carnage. “Got the speech and saw the demonstration,” he said. “You’ll have no issue with me.”
Chapter Nine
Fred Kellner pulled the buzzing phone from his pocket and checked his watch. 16:04 hours. He connected the line and brought the old-fashioned flip-style burner to his ear. “Yep.” Only one person knew this number, and Iceman was not one to care about pleasantries.
“We’re a go,” Iceman said. “Any questions?”
As far as Kellner knew, they’d never met, but he felt that he would recognize Iceman on the street. In his mind, he saw the ubiquitous Special Forces physique, thick battle beard, and carefully mussed hair. Perhaps he saw himself. “H-Hour sixteen forty-five.” It was a question, but he framed it as a statement.
“Affirm. Stay alive.”
“How many this time?” Kellner heard the click before he got the last word out. The question was inappropriate at its face. Kellner knew that his was only one of several targets to be hit this afternoon, and while his curiosity was real, the details were none of his business. His assigned target was all he needed to worry about.
Well, that and getting away.
He started the engine of his plain vanilla white cargo van, pulled the shift lever into gear, and eased out onto the street. A squatty little motel sign at the driveway’s apron read THANK YOU FOR STAYING WITH US!
Kellner smiled. “You’re welcome.” He made sure he had a wide clearance and took care to obey all traffic laws. He used his turn signals, and he kept his speed at twenty-seven miles per hour, two over the limit. Nothing piqued a cop’s interest quite as readily as a vehicle that nailed the speed limit straight on. That was a sure sign that the driver had something to hide.
And brother, did Kellner have cargo worth hiding. His was a plan that could never work in New York City or Washington, DC, but it was perfect for the little town of Bluebird, Indiana, where the crime rate was miniscule, and if a homicide occurred, it was because somebody’s neighbor got too big a snootful of whisky and settled a bar bet with a bullet. Terror didn’t come to towns like Bluebird, so it made no sense to build bollards or security barricades at soft targets. Not even the County Office Building. Who’d want to hurt the mayor or police chief or a member of the Board of Supervisors here? If somebody had a beef with one of them, they could just as easily attack in the school parking lot on the way to a PTA meeting.
Sometimes it disturbed him how soft America’s soft targets were. Two weeks ago, when Kellner opened up on those kids and parents and coaches at the football game in East Texas, he was stunned by the level and depth of confusion that defined the emergency response plan. After thirty kills with thirty shots, Kellner had been able to disappear without even a real effort. The evasive procedures he’d planned and geared up for never came into play. No roadblocks. Not so much as an increased police presence, as far as he could tell. These burgs were ripe for whatever the Bad Man brought.
On the night of that attack—Black Friday—Iceman had coordinated identical hits on six different sites. At the time, Kellner believed he was truly a lone wolf. The only reason he knew about the others now was because of the media coverage. Wall-to-wall and nonstop, with the usual talking heads beating the same predictable themes about gun control and mental health.
It was the Russians! No, it was the Islamists! White supremacists. The NRA.
Truth be told, Kellner neither knew nor especially cared why he’d been hired to do these things. But he cared about his bank account, thank you very much, and when this was all done, it would be a long time before he ever needed to work a day again.
But it was more than money. Kellner liked the juice, the adrenaline. What did he care who he was killing for or why? He didn’t give a shit when he was in the Sandbox, and he didn’t give a shit now. This was a hell of a lot better way to use his skills than on some two-hundred-thousand-a-year security contract guarding businessmen who wanted to feel important.
Kellner had tried that bodyguard bullshit before, and it didn’t suit him at all. He was an offensive operator, addicted to bringing violence to his assigned targets and living on to fight another day. That’s why he’d joined the Navy to begin with, and that’s why he persevered all the way through BUD/S training to become a SEAL. And then the Navy lost its nerve. According to his discharge papers, he was too willing and anxious to deploy the skills they’d taught him. They stopped short of a dishonorable discharge but being removed from the teams was the same as far as he was concerned.
Politics were not his thing.
Morality was not his thing, either, but he had to confess that this job—this extended series of hits that had only just begun—had thrummed his conscience. Not much, but it was there. For the whole of his career, the deaths of innocents were a sure thing, part of the package that delivered justice to the bad guys and liberation to their victims who survived. It had always been part of the job—baked into the cake, as a former CO used to say. And that’s what this killing gig had always been to him—a job. A noble job, in fact, in which he prided himself with damn few bad hits and never a single negligent discharge. He’d never cared what his targets had done to earn his bullets, and while their transgressions were always a part of the mission briefings, he’d never embraced thei
r importance.
The one given was that a man—and it was always a man, in the Sandbox—was going to die. Kellner didn’t want to know him or anything about him. Hell, everybody’s got a mother and a father, most have siblings, and most have children and women to make them with. Everybody had someone to mourn them, and Kellner deeply didn’t give a shit about any of that. He had targets to spot, wind and weather to compensate for, and triggers to caress. If he did those things well, he’d consider it a job well done and his bosses would be happy. Truthfully, he didn’t give much of a shit about the bosses, either, but keeping them pleased made his life a hell of a lot easier than dealing with them when they were pissed.
As if there were ever a two-hour period when some boss somewhere wasn’t pissed about something.
So, at its face, the current mission shouldn’t move him too deeply, and in fact it didn’t. But it was hard to feel good about this kind of killing, to feel proud. There still was the rush of a mission accomplished and the challenge to get away unseen, but in the wake of such emotional media coverage, he found it progressively harder to stay focused and shut out the noise.
But focus he would. Whining and mourning were counterproductive, even when done silently. Emotions made no difference because Kellner had already seen his payment money tucked away in its offshore account. Once paid, a professional always did his best, always kept his promises—a commitment that also allowed him to stay alive.
He’d been driving only ten minutes when he saw Memorial Circle looming ahead. A miniature version of the massive obelisk that marked the center of Indianapolis, Memorial Circle celebrated the Union victory in America’s Civil War. Here, the circle marked the leading edge of the business district. Kellner had been here in town for six days, letting his truck be seen parked along Main Street. Everybody noticed strangers in a small town, until the stranger said hi, and maybe bought a cup of coffee and some breakfast in the Drip ’N’ Donut Diner.
The locals knew him as Bain—short for Bainbridge, originally from Cincinnati—who’d just opened a franchise delivery service in town. He was staying at the Bluebird Manor Motel until he could settle down and find a place to live. When he did that, he’d bring his wife and two kids out to join him. These rubes loved family. The more you talked about them, the more the locals warmed up. Didn’t matter that they’d never met the family—or, let’s be honest, that the family didn’t really exist. They saw a clean-cut white guy who wanted to move in and they were all over it.
All of that—his bullshit and his smiles—were a kind of social artillery, the sole purpose of which was to prepare for the moment when he could park his delivery truck in front of the County Office Building and run inside for a few minutes, no doubt on a delivery. If someone peeked inside the van—and no one would do such a thing in Bluebird, where everyone had manners—they would see stacks of cardboard boxes, each one addressed to a business in town. The real shock would come if one of the boxes was opened. That’s when they’d find blocks of C4 and Semtex. Four thousand pounds, in all. When this baby went off, it wasn’t just going to level the building.
It was going to leave a crater that was deeper than the three-story building was tall.
H-hour at 4:45 guaranteed that the sidewalks would be full and that offices inside the building would be closing down. The police, who also resided in the County Office Building, would be in the midst of shift change, at the moment of maximum confusion and carnage and minimum involvement in their surroundings.
Achieving maximum casualties wasn’t difficult if you took the time to study your opponent.
Kellner took the second turn off the circle. The clock on the dash read 4:17. Right on time. Locals referred to morning and evening traffic as “rush hour,” but clearly they’d never seen the real thing. Or, perhaps they were being ironic and Kellner missed it. The final half mile of the approach to the “Commercial District” was lined with one- and two-story homes, all about two-thousand square feet, and all with huge yards. More brick than siding. Autumn was fairly advanced here, with the leaves bright and brilliant. With the sun hanging low, it occurred to Kellner that this place looked like a postcard—no, a love letter—from Norman Rockwell’s Middle America.
The County Office Building had been built in 1858, according to the numbers engraved in the worn white cornerstone. The redbrick edifice appeared to Kellner to be original construction. A part of him marveled at the history the building had witnessed. It was from here that the boys of Bluebird would have formed up by company to march off to the trains that would take them to the fighting of the Civil War. It was from here that soldiers returning from two World Wars would have been cheered as heroes after setting the world free.
In twenty-eight minutes—no, make that twenty-seven now—it would all be gone, and this spot would forever be known as the place where everything changed forever. They would know the futility of trying to hide from violence.
The closest spot to the building’s front doors was arranged for parallel parking and the pavement was stenciled DELIVERIES ONLY. 30-MINUTE MAXIMUM. Kellner smiled at the irony that at least he would not commit a parking violation.
He pulled into the spot, threw the shift lever out of gear, killed the engine, and set the parking brake. He lifted the lid of the center console, and without looking, he flipped a toggle switch that activated the countdown timer. Actually, he supposed it was a count-up timer—a digital alarm clock, essentially, because the timing of the detonation was as important to Iceman as the devastation it wrought. The alarm clock had no hands or digital numbers. If a Bruce Willis wannabe stumbled upon his creation, there’d be no clue that a timer existed or what the intended time of detonation was. And just to frustrate the television tropes even more, all of his wires were black. Never made any sense to him why a bomber would use red and blue, other than to provide that moment of tension when the movie hero was trying to decide which to cut.
Anyone in Kellner’s line of work understood that life was, in fact, driven by Murphy’s Law. Anything that could go wrong would go wrong and at the worst possible time. Thus, if 16:45:00 passed without incident, he needed only to make a phone call to detonate secondary or tertiary double-redundant initiators.
Kellner lifted a heavy envelope that would give him probable deniability off the passenger seat, opened his door, and slid to the ground. He closed the door, locked it, and headed for the front doors of the County Office Building.
As many times as he’d done this over the years—no matter how convinced he was in his own competency—it was difficult not to hurry as he crossed the lobby to the security desk. He scrawled an illegible signature and listed “PD” as his destination in the logbook. The uniformed guard checked his watch as he waved Kellner past, clearly marking time till the end of his shift.
Kellner passed the elevators and instead headed down the adjacent corridor toward the restrooms and the emergency exit. The sign on the exit door announced that an alarm would sound if it were opened, but employees had disabled it. From the look of the cuts in the wires, it was done quite a while ago, probably about the time when smoking was banned in the workplace.
Three twenty-somethings were out there on the little porch, pulling on their last cigarettes of the day, and they smiled at him when he passed. If they wondered why a deliveryman would continue down the short stairway toward the Dumpsters, none of them said anything. Beyond the trash collection area lay a parking lot that was largely occupied by private vehicles, but this also was clearly where the cops and building inspectors left their vehicles while they were in the office.
Entrance to the parking lot was controlled by a guy at a guard gate on the far side of the lot, one hundred yards from the building. He checked passes and identification, but he paid no mind to Kellner as he left the lot.
“Have a good night,” Kellner said as he sidestepped the wooden lift gate.
“You, too,” the guard said with a smile and half-assed salute. “See you tomorrow.”
&nb
sp; Kellner took a couple of steps, then paused and turned. “Excuse me,” he said. “What’s your name?”
The attendant looked puzzled, but he answered, “Grant Duncan.” The What’s it to you? was silent.
“You need to leave this place.”
Duncan smiled. “Love to. But my shift don’t end till six, and bills got to be paid.”
“You’re not hearing me,” Kellner pressed. “You need to leave this place. Be somewhere else. Anywhere else. Because in a few minutes . . . Look I’m trying to save your life here.”
Duncan’s smile turned to a laugh, but then the sound froze in his throat. Something he saw in Kellner’s eyes, perhaps. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”
Kellner held the man’s gaze for another couple of seconds, then started walking again.
“Where am I supposed to go?”
Kellner turned and kept walking backward. “Literally anywhere but where you are. But not that way.” He pointed toward the County Office Building. “And don’t follow me.”
Kellner turned around again and continued walking, picking up his pace to make up for the time lost to conversation. Grant Duncan was a nobody, Kellner told himself. Why should he die for a minimum wage job? He’d either take the advice and save his life or he wouldn’t. Kellner had done his good deed.
At 16:26, after a walk of two blocks, Kellner unlocked the door of the quaint little 1950s bungalow for which he’d paid six months’ rent up-front in cash. He’d never slept there, he’d never used the restroom, and he’d never so much as washed his hands in the sink. The house existed as a place to hang one shirt, which dangled in the hall closet, still freshly wrapped in its plastic dry cleaning bag.
Moving quickly now, as time was short, he stripped off his deliveryman’s shirt and pulled the powder blue oxford cloth shirt off its hanger. He was still shrugging into it when he took the other shirt to the fireplace at the far wall of the living room. A red plastic five-gallon gas can sat on the hearth. Kellner pushed the deliveryman’s shirt into the firebox, placed the gas can on top of it, and then used his pocket knife to cut a slit along the bottom.
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