by Dalton Fury
“You say Shiner’s a hired gun,” Slap continued. “Maybe they fired him. Hired this loser instead.”
“Maybe—”
“Hello?”
The voice was faint, barely audible over the rush of wind coming in through the broken window, but both men were instantly on alert.
“Is it safe? Are you police? Can I come out?” The voice was male with an unusual cadence, possibly a foreign accent, and seemed to be coming from the hall behind them.
Slapshot looked over at Raynor and mouthed the word “Survivor?”
Kolt shrugged. Anything was possible. He nodded in the direction of the voice and they started moving. “We’re federal agents,” Kolt shouted. “Stay where you are.”
“I hide under desk when shooting starts.”
The voice was definitely coming from the nearest side office, the one just past the woman who had been shot in the back. “Move out into the open,” Raynor called out. “Lie on the floor with your hands out in front of you.”
“Yes, I am moving now.”
Kolt pied the corner, peeked into the room, saw movement. A figure was crawling across the floor between the desk and the doorway, just a couple steps away. There was something in the man’s right hand.
“Empty your hands!” Raynor barked. “Drop it!”
The man immediately let the object fall. It didn’t appear to be a weapon, at least not a conventional one. It looked more than anything else like a folded-up collapsible nylon tent pole.
“You’re blind?” Slapshot asked from behind Kolt.
“Yes.” The man’s voice rose at the end, almost like it was a question.
“Guess we can’t ask him if he saw anything,” Slapshot muttered.
“Just stay where you are,” Kolt said. “We’ll let you know when it’s safe to move.”
“Yes,” the man said again. “Thank you.”
He raised his head, smiling, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses.
But Raynor recognized him anyway.
EIGHTEEN
Raynor brought his pistol around, aiming it at the unarmed man.
Unarmed. The realization gave him pause.
It was Shiner. The man who had killed countless American soldiers, assassinated the Greek prime minister, attempted to kill POTUS, and possibly just murdered the first lady. But he wasn’t armed, wasn’t threatening anyone, and Raynor had absolutely no legal standing to take his life on American soil.
That moment of hesitation was all Shiner needed. Like some kind of spring-loaded toy, he launched off the floor and hurled himself straight at Raynor, slipping inside Kolt’s guard, and slammed a shoulder into Raynor’s chest. Miric wasn’t a big man and the blow wasn’t hard enough to hurt or even stun Raynor, but it did cause him to take a reflexive step back, right into Slapshot. In that instant, Shiner scrambled around the two men like a monkey scurrying up a tree, and leapt into the hallway beyond.
“Shit!” Raynor swore as he struggled to disentangle himself from Slapshot. Bunching up in the doorway had been an absolute rookie mistake on both their parts, as was letting a potential hostile get close enough to make a move like that.
They had both been snookered by a pair of dark glasses and a white cane.
Raynor twisted around, half crawling over Slapshot, and threw himself out into the hallway, aiming the pistol at the retreating form, but before he could pull the trigger, Shiner ducked around the corner and vanished.
Still half crawling, half flailing, Raynor got his feet under him and took off in pursuit, reaching the reception area just as Miric disappeared down the outside hallway. Kolt sprinted after him, feeling the crunch of broken glass underfoot. He could hear Slapshot shouting something, probably telling him to wait.
There wasn’t time to wait. Shiner would never be more vulnerable.
It wasn’t hard to piece together Miric’s escape plan: kill his accomplice and stage the scene to make it look like a one-man suicide mission, then pretend to be a survivor of a shooting rampage that conveniently killed every other witness to the crime, and because he appeared to be blind, the police probably wouldn’t even question his story. If anyone else but Raynor had been the first on the scene, it might even have worked. Now he was alone, unarmed, and effectively trapped in the high-rise. The only chance he had to escape was to outrun Raynor, which meant Kolt could not afford to wait for backup. Slapshot would just have to get the lead out and run faster.
Miric disappeared around another corner. The tower was a damned maze and Raynor knew he wasn’t going to get a clear shot, so he holstered his pistol on the run, and then poured on a burst of speed to close the gap. The effort was already taking a toll. He had not earned his Unit code name because of his prowess as a runner. Still, there was only one place Shiner could go: the stairs.
Raynor almost caught him there. The heavy door slowed Miric down just enough that Raynor was able to reach the door before it closed. He blasted through it like a linebacker hitting the scrimmage line. Shiner hadn’t yet rounded the landing at the midway point. For a split second, Kolt contemplated leaping off the top step, diving out into empty space in order to tackle the other from above, but his instinct for self-preservation was stronger than his urge to sacrifice everything to take the killer down. He wasn’t that desperate. Not yet.
But Shiner evidently was. He was bounding down the steps four at a time with the surefootedness of a mountain goat, and leaving Raynor in the dust.
Screw this, Raynor thought. At the next landing, he skidded to a stop and hauled out the suppressed Glock that was tucked into his appendix area, then leaned over the railing and aimed down at the fleeing figure. Shiner was a moving target, but only about twenty feet away. Kolt led him for a second, but just as he was about to pull the trigger, a second form came into view right beside Miric—a security guard on his way up the stairs.
Raynor lifted the weapon, finger coming off the trigger automatically. “Stop him!”
Miric was already several steps past, and the guard was staring stupidly up at Racer.
“Shoot him!”
That seemed to get the guard’s attention. He turned and drew something from his belt holster, aiming it down the steps. A stream of partially aerosolized liquid shot through the air, forming a hazy fog in the air above the steps. Raynor didn’t dare slow down, but charged past the guard and headlong into the vapor cloud.
“Fucking pepper spray?” Kolt rasped as his eyes began to sting. “Shit!” He didn’t know if he was angrier about missing his best opportunity to put Shiner down, or about very nearly shooting down a stairwell with no idea who else might be on it. Now he had to factor in other civilians on the stairs who might be hit by a stray shot or a ricochet. At least he wouldn’t have to worry about the guard shooting him.
But Shiner’s lead was growing by the second.
Kolt blinked away the pepper spray and drove on, taking the stairs one at a time in short quick steps to reduce the chances of stumbling. Maybe he would get lucky and Shiner would take a spill.
The nightmare spiral seemed to go on forever. He kept his left hand on the inside rail, letting it slide on the flights and gripping it on the landings in order to pivot around the turns. It wasn’t long before he encountered more civilians. Some of them were hugging the outside wall, others were picking themselves up after being shoved out of the way by Miric. Raynor almost tripped over one of the latter, avoiding that fate only by vaulting the rail and launching himself over the stunned victim. His momentum carried him all the way to the landing, and as soon as his feet touched down, he slammed face-first into the wall.
The impact left him seeing stars and tasting blood, but he stayed on his feet. As he pushed away from the wall, he tapped the bottom of the mag, and brass-checked his Glock to ensure it was still hot. There were large painted numbers beside the door—“12”—the twelfth floor. Kolt turned, almost lost his balance, and resumed the pursuit; only now he had no idea how far ahead Shiner was.
There were e
ven more civilians below, a veritable migrating herd. Racer surmised the order had been given to evacuate the entire building, or maybe just the lower floors. He wasn’t sure if that would complicate things on the ground floor or not. If the police were locking the place down, they would hold everyone in the lobby until they had the situation under control.
They might not even notice a blind man slipping through their cordon, but they would definitely notice a guy running with a suppressed pistol. Kolt slipped the Glock back into his appendix and tugged his shirt down over the grip.
“Coming through!” he shouted, and when that garnered only dumbfounded stares and grudging compliance, he tried again. “Out of the way. Federal agents!”
The numbers on the wall ticked down and the gaggle on the stairs got thicker, slowing him almost to a walking pace.
He passed the landing on the second floor, wondering if Shiner was already outside the building, and if so, which direction he would go to make his escape. Then the steps ended and the only way forward was through the doorway beneath the exit sign. The door was open, with each person passing through holding it for the next in line.
“Out of the way,” he shouted again, shouldering through the crowd until he was past the doorway and once more in the open lobby at the base of the tower. He scanned the crowd, looking for Shiner. There was no sign of the sniper, but he did see about two dozen men and women in identical blue uniforms with badges and peaked caps trying to corral the herd of evacuees.
Thank God, Kolt thought. He sprinted toward the nearest officer. “Did you see a blind guy come through here?”
Even before he got the question out, he heard screams of panic. All around him, people were hitting the ground. The officer he had been approaching was shouting, “Gun! Gun!” even as he dragged his service weapon from his holster.
“No!” Raynor shouted. He immediately realized that with all the jostling with the crowd his weapon either printed under his shirt, or his shirt had pulled up, exposing the pistol grip. Kolt looked down at the Glock while trying to raise his hands above his head but the officer already had his own pistol out, pointed right at him. Then something slammed into him and everything went black.
* * *
Thirty feet above the lobby, Rasim Miric was making his way through the deserted halls of the third floor at a dead run.
Although his original plan had been to remain in hiding, pretending to be a survivor of the shooting massacre awaiting rescue, he had anticipated the possibility that things might not go according to plan. He had known that the police would respond to reports of shooting by locking down the building and systematically evacuating everyone, checking IDs as they went. He wasn’t certain that his cover story would pass muster, and so he had developed a contingency. The one thing he had not anticipated, that he never could have anticipated, was that the first responder on the scene would be the same man that he had encountered on the slopes of Mount Lycabettus, but then that was the very reason for a contingency—a plan anticipating the unanticipated.
He knew that man, recognized the face, and not only as the man who had almost caught him in Athens.
It was Racer, the American who had taken his eye all those years ago.
He didn’t know Racer’s real name. The American commandos had not ever used names or ranks or any other identifiers. Over the years, as he had watched American soldiers through the scope of his rifle and taken their eyes, he had often fantasized that one of them might be Racer. A foolish delusion, but one that had brought him a measure of satisfaction.
Racer looked different, older, without the beard he had once worn to blend in or disguise his identity. But the eyes, his voice … those had not changed.
Miric had not dared to hope that he would get a chance to look into Racer’s eyes again.
He came to a halt before a set of Herculite doors, locked, of course. A glance back revealed no sign of his pursuer. He drew the revolver from his pocket, aiming it down the corridor behind him, just in case, but no one else appeared. The ruse had worked. Racer had continued down to the ground floor.
Miric turned back to the glass doors and fired a single shot from the pistol into them. The glass frosted over, and then fell in a shower of glittering fragments. He started forward, running again. The layout was different, with a larger open area partitioned by low walls to form dozens of cubicle workstations, but he could see over them to the large framed windows, all that stood between him and escape.
When he got within twenty feet of the windows, he aimed the pistol straight ahead and started firing.
The window glass was thicker than the glass used for the doors, coated with a thin laminate layer to make it nearly unbreakable. The .38-caliber rounds had considerably less effect than the close-range blasts from the shotgun he had employed to smash a hole in the thirty-ninth-floor window. Spider web patterns appeared in the glass, radiating from small pock marks, but the window did not shatter.
Miric never slowed. An instant before contact, he turned his face away, taking the blow on his left side. The glass gave way, crumpling around him like a heavy blanket, and then he was falling.
The drop was short, only about twenty feet, but the impact at the end was softer even than the collision with the window. He did not hit the ground, but instead landed on his side on the heavy-duty mesh screen that topped the protective scaffolding ringing the building above the sidewalk. The canopy, he had learned while scouting the building with Dooley, had been erected prior to a safety inspection several years earlier and never removed. Its function was to shield pedestrians from falling construction debris, but it worked equally well as a safety net.
Pieces of broken glass shifted beneath him, digging into him like coarse gravel, but he ignored the discomfort and crawled to the edge of the canopy, then rolled over the side, dropping down to land on his feet on the sidewalk below.
While the thick glass had somewhat muffled the sound of his shots, his exit did not go completely unnoticed by scattered onlookers loitering outside the building. Before any of them could react, or identify him as a possible perpetrator, he shouted, “They have guns!” and then took off running again.
He slowed to a determined walk as he rounded the corner. He realized that he had lost his sunglasses, probably in the fall from the third story, so he kept his head down and his hands in his pockets as he folded himself into the crowd of pedestrians making their way up the river walk from the ferry terminal. Evidently, word of the shooting incident had not reached these commuters, but they would soon learn what had happened, and they would remember him.
* * *
He took the next left onto Sussex Street, then a right onto Hudson Street, and another right a block later onto York Street, heading back toward the waterfront. Once there, he joined the flow of foot traffic heading back in the direction of the tower. As he moved, he risked a quick check for pursuit. There was none. He doubled back to his rental car, which was parked in a garage across the street from the tower, but he did not leave.
Not right away.
NINETEEN
The bruises to Raynor’s ego hurt a lot more than the actual ones on his body, though the latter could have been a lot worse. He had literally dodged a bullet, with an assist from Slapshot, who had tackled him from behind an instant before the twitchy Jersey City cop could get a shot off.
Not dying had turned out to be the high point of his day.
In the hours that followed, Raynor was able to piece together a blurry image of the big picture.
From Digger, he learned that a bullet had struck the first lady in the right thigh. She was alive and in an undisclosed area hospital, but that was all Digger had been able to determine. Special Agent Kearney wasn’t talking to him anymore.
The news channels were all reporting the identity of the would-be assassin, twenty-year-old Lyle Dooley, a resident of Pontiac, Michigan, who, according to his Facebook page, was a member of an organization called the New American Revolution Lightfoot Milit
ia. The pundits were running with that ball, spinning a narrative of domestic terrorism spawned by anger over the outcome of the election. They were also reporting that Dooley had taken his own life to avoid capture. There was no mention in the media of Miric, or of any ongoing manhunt to find him.
Raynor hoped that the search was continuing in secret, but when he called Webber, hoping to get official or even tacit permission for Delta to join the hunt, he received a very different answer. “Get back here now. Do not talk to anyone.”
The Delta commander had hung up without waiting for a response. Webber rarely wasted words when communicating with his subordinates, but the brevity of the message and the extreme degree of dispassion in the colonel’s tone told him that things were a lot worse than he suspected.
He passed the message on to Slapshot. “Get everyone back to the compound, ASAP.”
“Where are you going?”
“Probably to fall on my sword,” he replied, hoping that the quip would not prove to be prophetic.
“For what? You were right.”
“Everyone has a perspective. We’ll see what Colonel Webber’s is.”
He caught a flight from Newark to Raleigh, and rented a car to drive the rest of the way. Three and a half hours after almost getting shot in the lobby of a Jersey City high-rise, he arrived back at the Delta compound and headed straight for Webber’s office. This time, he didn’t stop to change.
Webber was on the phone when Raynor went in. He had expected the Delta commander to be irate, but Webber did not look angry. He looked beaten.
The telephone conversation was mostly one-sided, with Webber listening and only occasionally replying with “Yes, sir” every thirty seconds or so. He met Raynor’s gaze but offered no other acknowledgment until the call ended with one final “Yes, sir. Understood.”
As he settled the phone back into its cradle, he let out a sigh, and after a long pause, said simply, “You’re relieved.”
The words hit like a gut punch. Before Raynor could say a word in his own defense, Webber went on. “Save it. This wasn’t my call. I warned you what would happen.”