Pitt's grandfather had acquired a small fortune in developing Southern California real estate. On his death, he left his grandson a considerable inheritance. After paying the estate taxes, Pitt had chosen to invest in classic cars and aircraft rather than stocks and bonds. In twenty years, he had built up a collection that was highly unique.
Rather than bathe the hangar in a battery of floodlights, Pitt preferred that it appear desolate and empty. One small light atop an electrical pole that gave off a dim yellow glow was all that illuminated the unpaved road that ended at the hangar. He turned and stared through the car's window and studied the top of the pole. A red light that should have beamed from a concealed security camera was dark.
It was an indication as conspicuous to him as a blinking stop sign that something was drastically wrong.
Pitt's security system was designed and installed by a friend with an intelligence agency who was at the top of his trade. No one but a skilled professional could have come within a country mile of breaking the code and compromising it. He gazed around the barren landscape and detected the shadow of a van faintly visible fifty yards away under the reflected light from the city across the Potomac. Pitt didn't require the services of a psychic to know that someone or some group had gained entry into the hangar and was waiting to throw a welcome inside.
“What's your name?” Pitt asked the driver.
“Sam Greenberg.”
“Sam, do you carry a satellite phone?”
“Yes, sir, I do,” Greenberg replied.
“Contact Admiral Sandecker and tell him I have uninvited visitors and to please send a security force as quickly as possible.”
Greenberg was young, no more than twenty, a student studying oceanography at a local university while earning extra money under a marine educational program with NUMA created by Admiral Sandecker. “Shouldn't I call the police?”
The kid is sharp, Pitt thought; he'd quickly grasped the situation. “Not a matter for local law enforcement. Please make the call as soon as you're away from the hangar. The admiral will know the drill.”
“Are you going in alone?” the student asked as Pitt exited the car and retrieved his well-traveled duffel bag from the trunk.
Pitt looked at the young man and smiled. “A good host always entertains his guests.” He stood and waited until the NUMA car's taillights faded into the dust cloud trailing the rear bumper. He paused to unzip his duffel bag to retrieve his old Colt .45 before remembering that he'd failed to obtain any cartridges after Julia Lee had emptied the gun at the ultralight aircraft on the Orion River.
“Empty!” he said through his teeth. As he stood alone in the night he began to wonder if he had a permanently dislocated brain. There was nothing left but to act dumb and enter the hangar as if he suspected nothing, then attempt to reach one of his collector cars where he kept a shotgun secreted inside a walnut cabinet originally crafted to contain an umbrella.
He pulled a small remote transmitter from his pocket and whistled the first few bars of “Yankee Doodle.” The sound-recognition signal electronically shut down the security systems and unlocked a shabby side door that looked as if it was last open in 1945. A green light on the remote flashed three times in series. It should have flashed four, he observed. Someone who was very clever at neutralizing security systems had broken his code. He closed his eyes, paused for a few moments and took a deep breath. As the door cracked open, he dropped to the ground on his hands and knees and reached around the frame and flicked on the interior lights.
The inside walls, floor and curved roof were painted a glossy white that accented a spectrum of vivid colors gleaming off the thirty beautifully painted cars spaced throughout the hangar. The visual effect was dazzling, which was what Pitt counted on to blind whoever was waiting in the blackened interior to ambush him. He reminded himself that the orange-bodied and brown-fendered 1929 Duesenberg convertible sedan containing the shotgun was the third car from the door.
The intruders were not on a social visit. His suspicions were abruptly confirmed when he heard what sounded like a series of muted pops and sensed rather than felt a torrent of bullets spraying the doorway. The suppressors on the killers' guns changed the character of the gunfire in such a way that it was not identifiable as gunshots. They were using silencers even though there wasn't another soul within a mile. His arm whipped around the door again, and he flicked the lights. Then he slithered like a snake under the hail of fire around the doorway and then crept beneath the first two collector cars, a 1932 Stutz and a 1931 L-29 Cord, blessing the old vehicles for sitting high off the ground. Reaching the Duesenberg unscathed, he leaped over the side door onto the floor of the rear seat. In almost the same motion he turned the knob on the door of the cabinet behind the front seat and pulled it open. Then he removed an Aserma 12-gauge Bulldog self-ejecting shotgun that held eleven rounds. The deadly, compact firearm lacked a buttstock but was mounted with a flash hider/muzzle brake. It was one of four guns Pitt secreted throughout the hangar for just such an occasion.
The interior of the hangar was as dark as the deepest reaches of a cave. If these guys are pros, Pitt considered, and there was almost no uncertainty about their being highly trained, they'll be using night-vision scopes and infrared laser sights. Assessing the trajectory of the bullets as they whistled through the doorway, Pitt guessed that there were two assassins probably armed with fully automatic machine pistols. One was somewhere on the ground floor, the other on the balcony to his living quarters thirty feet above one corner of the hangar. Whoever wanted him dead made certain there was a backup in case one assassin failed.
There was no attempt to rush the door. The killers knew that Pitt had entered and was somewhere on the floor of the hangar. Realizing their intended quarry had knowingly entered the trap would make them apprehensive and wary.
With no place to go, Pitt quietly cracked both rear doors on the Duesenberg, peered into the darkness and waited for his assailants to make the next move.
He tried to slow his breathing to hear any sounds of stealth, but all his ears could detect was the beat of his own heart. There was no overpowering sense of fright, no feeling of hopelessness, only a slight mist of fear to be sure. He wouldn't be human if he didn't experience a degree of dread at being a target for two professional killers. But he was on home ground, while the assassins were in a strange environment. If they were
to fulfill their mission and kill him, they had to find their target in the dark amid thirty antique automobiles and airplanes. Whatever advantage they had before Pitt walked in the hangar was lost. And what they didn't know was that he was armed and deadly. All Pitt had to do was sit it out in the back of the Duesenberg and wait for them to make a mistake.
He began to wonder who they were and who sent them. The only enemy that came to mind whom he had antagonized in the past few weeks, and who was still among the living, had to be Qin Shang. He could think of no one else who wanted him dead. It was evident to him the Chinese billionaire nurtured a f vindictive streak.
He laid the shotgun across his chest, cupped his ears and listened. The hangar was as quiet as a crypt at midnight in the middle of a churchyard. These guys were good. There was no soft patter of stockinged or bare feet, but then stockinged or bare feet did not make noise on concrete if stepped on carefully. They were probably biding their time, also listening. He decided against the old movie trick of throwing something against a wall to draw their fire. Master assassins were too savvy to give their position away with random gunfire.
One minute dragged by, two, then three—it seemed far longer than that. Time seemed to flow like a stream of molasses. He looked up and saw the beam of a red laser sweep across the windshield of the Duesenberg and move on. He was betting his assailants were beginning to wonder if he might have slipped out of the hangar and escaped the trap. There was no way of knowing when Admiral Sandecker, backed by a team of federal marshals, would arrive on the scene. But Pitt was prepared to wait all night if need
be while he laid there waiting i for a sound or shadow that betrayed movement.
A plan began to form in his mind. He normally made a habit of removing the batteries from all his collector cars because of f the danger of creating a fire from an electrical short. But since he planned on driving the Duesenberg when he returned from Orion Lake, Pitt had arranged for the chief mechanic of NUMA's fleet of vehicles, who was entrusted to enter the hangar, to charge a battery and install it in the car. It now struck him that if the opportunity presented itself, he could use the headlights of the Duesenberg to illuminate the floor of the warehouse. Prudently keeping his eyes locked on the laser beams that swept around the hangar like tiny guard-tower lights from an old prison movie, he silently rolled over the backrest and slipped into a horizontal position on the front seat. Taking a calculated gamble, he aimed the spotlight on the outer cowling beside the steering wheel upward until the lens faced in the general direction of the balcony on the outside of his apartment. Then he raised the shotgun over the upper frame of the windshield and switched on the light.
The bright beam shot aloft and pinpointed a figure in a black ninja suit with a hood covering the head and face crouched at the balcony railing and clutching a tactical machine pistol. The assassin's hand instinctively flew up to shield his eyes from the unexpected blinding glare. Pitt barely had time to adjust his aim before firing off two shots and blinking out the light, throwing the hangar into darkness again. The twin blast from the shotgun sounded like the firing of a cannon inside the metal-walled hangar. A surge of satisfaction swept through him as he heard the thud of a body against the concrete floor. Reckoning the second assassin would be expecting him to hide by throwing himself under the car, he stretched out horizontal on the wide running board and waited for a hail of gunfire. It never came.
The second killer failed to react because he was searching for Pitt inside an antique Putfman coach parked at one side of the hangar on a pair of rails. The car had once been part of the crack express train called the Manhattan Limited that ran between New York and Quebec, Canada, between 1912 and 1914. Pitt had acquired the old coach after finding it in a cave. The killer barely perceived the brief flash of light through a glass window of the Pullman before hearing the explosive roar of the shotgun. By the time he rushed to the rear platform, the hangar had been plunged back into blackness. He was too late to hear the impact on the floor of his accomplice's body or know what target to fire at. He crouched behind a massive Daimler convertible and panned his night-vision goggles around and beneath the maze of parked cars. As he peered through the binocular eyepiece connected to a single objective lens that was attached to his head with straps, giving him the look of a robotic Cyclops, the pitch-black interior of the hangar appeared bathed in a green light that distinguished surrounding objects. Twenty feet ahead of him he spotted the body of his accomplice crumpled on the cold, hard floor, a pool of blood spreading around the head. Any confusion as to why their prey had willingly and knowingly walked into the trap evaporated. He now realized Pitt had somehow armed himself with a weapon. They were warned that their target was a dangerous man, and yet they had still badly underestimated him.
It was essential for Pitt to make a move while he had an advantage, and move as quickly as possible before the remaining killer pinpointed his location. Pitt made no attempt at stealth. Speed was what counted. He scrambled around the front end of the cars toward the entrance door, keeping low and using the wheels and tires to shield his movement from the view of a night scope probing the floor beneath. He reached the door, threw it open and fell back behind a car as bullets sped through the opening into the night outside. Then Pitt crawled along the wall of the hangar until he could huddle against the wheel of a 1939 540-K Mercedes-Benz sedan.
The move was foolhardy and reckless, but he only paid a small price. Pitt could feel blood streaming from his left forearm where the flesh had been nicked by a bullet. Had the remaining assassin been given five long seconds to divine Pitt's intention, he would have never rushed headlong toward the door in the certain belief that his quarry had tried to escape from the hangar.
Pitt heard the soft drumming of supple rubber soles against concrete. Then a figure dressed from the top of the head to his feet in black became outlined in the doorway by the dim light outside on the electrical pole. All's fair in love and war, Pitt thought, as he pulled the trigger and cut down the killer with a shotgun blast through the back below the right shoulder.
The arms flew upward and outward, his tactical machine pistol clattering to the walkway in front of the hangar. The killer stood there a moment, tore off his night-vision goggles and slowly turned. He stared disbelievingly into Pitt's face as the hunted approached the hunter and saw the muzzle of vicious-looking shotgun aimed at his chest. The shocked realization of his deadly blunder, the awareness that his death was only seconds away, seemed more to anger than frighten him. The bitter, stunned expression in his now visible eyes gave Pitt a chill. It was not the look of a man afraid to die, it was the desperate look of a man who had failed his mission. He staggered toward Pitt in a hopeless gesture of tenacity, the lips that were faintly visible through the open slit in his black hood hideous in a blood-flecked snarl.
Pitt did not send another burst from the shotgun into the assassin's body. Nor did he use his gun as a club. He stepped forward and lashed out with one foot, kicking the man's legs out from under him and sending him crashing heavily to the ground.
Picking up the killer's weapon, Pitt did not immediately recognize it as Chinese-manufactured, but he was impressed with its advanced innovations: a plastic frame with integral electro-optics, a fifty-round magazine in line with the bore, and cased, telescoped cartridges with the ballistics of a rifle shell. It was a handgun for the twenty-first century.
He stepped back inside the hangar and switched on the lights again. Despite the harrowing ordeal, Pitt felt strangely unaffected. He walked the aisle separating the cars until he stood below the balcony of his apartment. Then he stared down at the second killer's body. The partner of the man he dropped in the doorway was as dead as a rat in a sprung trap. One of Pitt's shots had missed, but the other had taken off the top of the killer's head. Not a sight to remember at the dinner table.
Wearily, Pitt climbed a circular metal staircase and entered his apartment. There was no sense in calling 911. He expected federal marshals to come bounding up the road any minute. Methodically, he rinsed a glass with water, shook it partially dry and inverted it in a bowl of salt. Then he added crushed ice, a sliced lime, and two shots from a bottle of Don Julio silver tequila. Relaxing in a leather sofa, he savored the drink like a thirst-stricken bedouin who staggered onto an oasis.
Five minutes and a second tequila later, Admiral Sandecker arrived with a team of marshals. Pitt came down to the hangar floor and met them, drink in hand. “Good evening, Admiral, always good to see you.”
Sandecker grunted something appropriate and then nodded at the body beneath the apartment. “You really must leam to pick up after yourself.” The voice was caustic, but there was no mistaking the concern in his eyes.
Pitt smiled and shrugged. “The world needs murderers like it needs cancer.”
Sandecker noticed the streak of blood on Pitt's arm. “You took a hit.” “Nothing a Band-Aid won't fix.”
“Let's have the story,” demanded Sandecker, all preliminaries over. “Where did they come from?”
“I haven't a clue. They were waiting for me.”
“A miracle they didn't kill you.”
“They didn't plan on me coming to the party prepared after I saw that my security system had been tampered with.”
Sandecker looked at Pitt cautiously. “You might have waited until I arrived with the marshals.”
Pitt motioned through the door toward the road and barren land outside the hangar. “If I made a run for it, they'd have cut me down before I got fifty yards. Better to go on the offensive. I felt my only chance was to do something quickly and
catch them off balance.”
Sandecker stared at Pitt shrewdly. He knew his special projects director would never attempt anything without a solid reason. His eyes took in the bullet-riddled doorway. “I hope you know a good handyman.”
At that moment a man wearing casual clothes and a wind-breaker over a ballistic armor vest with a Smith & Wesson model 442 .38 revolver in a shoulder holster approached. In one hand he held a hooded mask worn by the killer whom Pitt had dropped in the doorway. “Won't be easy to ID them. They were probably imported for the hit.”
Sandecker made the introduction. “Dirk, this is Mr. Peter Harper, executive associate commissioner of field operations for the Immigration and Naturalization Service.”
Harper shook Pitt's hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mr. Pitt. It seems you had an unexpected homecoming.”
“A dubious surprise I wasn't counting on.” Pitt was not at all sure he could warm to Harper. The associate commissioner of the INS struck him as a man who spent his spare time working algebra problems. Despite the fact he carried a weapon, Harper looked benign and scholastic. “There is a van parked a short distance from the hangar.”
“We already checked it out,” said Harper. “It belongs to a rental-car agency. The name on the agreement is fictitious.” “Who do you suspect was behind this?” Sandecker asked. “The name Qin Shang comes to mind,” said Pitt. “I'm told he has a retaliatory nature.”
“The obvious choice,” Sandecker agreed. “He won't be happy when he finds out his assassins failed,” added Harper.
Sandecker's expression turned foxlike. “I think it only appropriate that Dirk tell him in person.”
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