by Tom Grace
The trooper placed two 9-mm rounds from his suppressed Glock into the skinny man’s forehead; the back of the man’s skull exploded onto the metal wall of the trailer in a Rorschach of blood, bone, and gray matter. He then adjusted his aim to the right, sweeping to his next target, and fired another double tap between the driver’s eyebrows. The younger trooper shot the third mover with equal efficiency.
Both men closed the distance between themselves and the movers. The three young men lay absolutely still as the last seconds of their lives ticked away.
‘Clear,’ Dmitri Leskov announced. ‘Pavel, go get the others.’
‘Da,’ Pavel acknowledged as he jumped down from the trailer.
Pavel was halfway to the unmarked Blazer – blue strobes still flashing – when three men, all dressed in the same tan uniforms that the movers wore, emerged from the rear of the vehicle. The men quickly moved to the back of the Blazer and unloaded a nested set of three orange plastic barrels, three battery-operated caution flashers, a bundle of large gray mats, and a ten-foot-long sausage shaped object emblazoned with the PLG corporate logo at regular intervals along its gray fabric exterior. Pavel grabbed the sausage, retrieved a large canvas gym bag from the Blazer, and then followed the others back to the trailer.
‘Hand me the bag,’ Dmitri called out from the open door. ‘Then feed the Pig to Vanya.’
Pavel tossed the gym bag up to his older brother, then lifted up the end of the sausage. The coarse fabric of the Pig chaffed against his neck and shoulders as Vanya pulled it into the trailer.
‘Quickly, Yuri,’ Vanya said as he pulled the full length of the Pig into the trailer, ‘contain the blood before it covers the whole floor.’
Yuri nodded and laid the Pig on the floor to act as a dam around the perimeter of the slowly expanding pool of blood. Vanya then ripped open the package of mats and spread a blanket of thin gray quilted rectangles atop the red-black liquid. Like the Pig, the mats immediately began absorbing the blood.
The fifth man, Josef, had the three orange barrels set with their open bottoms facing up.
‘Keys?’ Dmitri asked.
‘I have them,’ Josef replied, patting the key ring in his pocket.
Dmitri and Pavel picked up the skinny mover’s body by the arms and legs and carried it over to the first container.
‘Steady the barrel, Josef,’ Dmitri barked as he and Pavel lifted the body over the open end.
Carefully, they lifted the mover’s arms and legs, folding his body at the waist as they lowered it into the barrel. When the body reached the bottom, they folded his arms and legs until the man disappeared into the drum.
They repeated this maneuver twice more as Yuri and Vanya wiped down the trailer walls and floor with the absorbent mats. Drawn by the blood, flies began to swarm annoyingly around them.
Dmitri checked his watch. ‘Let’s wrap this up,’ he announced.
The other men nodded and went about finishing their assigned tasks. Dmitri and Pavel stripped off the police uniforms and stuffed them into one of the barrels.
‘Here,’ Dmitri said as he tossed his brother new clothes from the gym bag.
Pavel pulled the snug-fitting work shirt over his broad shoulders and looked down at the embroidered company logo over the left breast.
‘I feel like I’ve been demoted,’ Pavel said with a laugh.
Once the trailer was wiped clean of blood and gore, the soiled mats and the sausage were stuffed into the barrels, and Josef snapped the thick plastic lids closed. The men then carefully turned the barrels right side up. The movers’ bodies slumped to the bottom, but the lids easily held the weight.
Yuri and Vanya jumped down from the trailer and took the barrels, one by one, from Pavel and Josef.
After Pavel and Josef exited the trailer, Dmitri handed them the three flashing caution lights and the gym bag that contained the two suppressed Glocks. He then leapt down and closed the trailer’s side door.
Between the trailer and the Blazer, Dmitri’s men arranged the barrels around a wide, deep pothole near the pavement’s edge. Snapped in place, the orange caution lights began blinking.
‘Let’s go,’ Dmitri announced, smiling to himself that the barrels might actually do some good.
4
JUNE 23
South Bend, Indiana
Nolan Kilkenny and Ted Sandstrom stood leaning against the wall beside a large window as the movers wheeled another cart of boxes from the nearly empty lab. They heard Kelsey and Paramo engaging in a rapid exchange of words out in the corridor, their voices growing louder as the pair neared the lab’s door.
‘Problem, Kelsey?’ Nolan asked.
‘Just a friendly debate,’ she replied.
Paramo smiled. ‘Kelsey and I were mulling over some of Guth’s work on false vacuum theory.’
‘False vacuum theory?’ Nolan repeated. ‘I’m almost afraid to ask.’
‘It’s one of the more recent theories kicking around about how a universe forms,’ Kelsey offered.
Nolan held his hands up as if to push any further explanation away before it could reach him. ‘Stop right there! My head still hurts from last night’s little after-dinner discussion about M-branes and eleven-dimensional multiverses.’
‘Wimp,’ Sandstrom said with a laugh. ‘Hey, Raphaele, did the movers get those boxes out of our office?’
‘Everything went down with the last load,’ Paramo replied.
Kelsey eyed the blue plastic cooler near Nolan’s feet. ‘Anything left to drink?’
‘There’s one can of Diet Coke with your name on it.’
Kelsey fished the last can from the slush of melted ice and sat down on a lab bench. ‘How long before we’re done here?’
‘Not long. All that’s left are those two boxes. It’s a short drive to the research park,’ Nolan said, running through a mental checklist. ‘I figure a couple of hours to unload at the new lab.’ Nolan picked up the cooler and dumped the icy dregs into the lab sink, shaking the last few drops out before closing the lid. ‘I’m going to take this down to my truck so we can reload it at the gas station. I’ll be back in a minute.’
The hallway echoed with his footsteps, the building nearly empty on this early-summer Friday afternoon. Kilkenny took the stairs and exited Nieuwland Science Hall around the corner from the loading dock. A semi filled the single bay, its trailer flush with the elevated concrete dock. The four-wheeled carts were nearly empty; the five-man crew had made quick work of this job.
Kilkenny’s truck was parked at the far end of the loading area facing the dock. He fished the key fob out of his khaki shorts and pressed the button that unlocked the lift gate.
As he placed the empty cooler into the back of the SUV, he observed one of the movers pull two canvas bags from the white Blazer parked near the semi. The man then carried the bags back to where the rest of the moving crew waited. Another of the movers crouched down, unzipped one of the bags, and extracted a pistol holster.
‘What the hell?’ Kilkenny cursed quietly as he watched the distribution of weapons and other equipment among the men.
Using hand signals, the leader of the crew ordered the others into position. One remained on the loading dock while the others went back into Nieuwland Hall.
With his SUV screening him from view, Kilkenny searched the cargo area for a weapon. In the row of bins where he kept his tools, he found a combat knife – a memento from his navy days. He strapped the sheathed blade to his right thigh and carefully closed the lift gate.
As the mover paced along the elevated platform, Kilkenny surveyed the area between the loading dock and the rear of the semi trailer, timing the man’s movements. The short span of the platform meant that the trailer blocked the man’s view of the parking area for only a few seconds in each circuit.
Realizing that he would have to move quickly, Kilkenny crouched behind his truck, tensed and ready. When the man turned at the far end of the platform and began walking back toward the semi, Kilkenny sprinted acr
oss the entire lot using the trailer as a shield. His heart pounded as he slipped under the truck, adrenaline coursing through his body and his senses charged. Loose gravel and chips of broken glass dug at his forearms and shins as he stealthily snaked his way beneath the trailer to the platform.
When Kilkenny reached the space between the double axle at the rear of the trailer, he pulled himself back on his feet and again began timing the man’s movements. As the man turned away, Kilkenny shifted closer to the platform, hiding in the space between the right-side tires and the steel-frame bumper.
Soon the man turned facing the driver’s side of the semi, walking back toward the open trailer doors.
Kilkenny slipped out from beneath the vehicle and stood next to the rear tires. Carefully, he unfastened the door catch. As the sound of the man’s footsteps grew closer, Kilkenny timed it perfectly and thrust the heavy metal door forward. The sudden rush of the door caught the man broadside, striking hard against his shoulder.
‘Blat!’ Vanya cursed as he rolled from the force of the blow.
Kilkenny followed the rotation of the door forward and leapt up on the platform behind it, releasing his grip on the handle and unsheathing his knife to press on with the attack.
Despite the burning pain, Vanya reached for the Glock 9-mm pistol strapped to the left side of his chest. He snapped a glance over his battered shoulder in time to see Kilkenny emerge from behind the steel door.
‘Krasny adín!’ Vanya shouted as he twisted the holstered weapon up and fired from beneath his armpit.
The first round drilled through the muscle of Kilkenny’s left thigh, a point-blank shot that struck at almost the same instant it left the Glock. After boring a bloody tunnel, the bullet erupted from Kilkenny’s leg and ricocheted off the concrete dock. A second shot flew just inches wide because of the recoil of the first.
Momentum still carrying him forward, Kilkenny grabbed the holster strap and held tight as he drove his combat knife into the man’s back. The knife shuddered as its serrated back edge sawed through the cartilage that connected a rib and vertebrae.
Vanya’s grasp on his pistol weakened as his heart spasmed, the blade puncturing the muscular walls of the organ. Kilkenny pushed the knife sideways as he extracted it, widening the gash in the man’s blood-soaked back. Vanya’s legs gave out, and Kilkenny let him fall to the dock.
Kilkenny then rolled the body over onto its back; a blank, open-mouthed stare gaped back at him. Using his knife, he cut two strips of cloth from the man’s shirt and hastily wrapped a pressure bandage around his thigh.
Kilkenny found a German-made military-grade radio transmitter clipped to the man’s hip, the kind of communications equipment favored by special forces. He flipped the SEND switch into the off position, then removed the earpiece/lip mike component from the man’s ear and slipped the gear on himself. His right ear filled with a faint hiss of static, then two sharp clicks crackled harshly in the ear-piece. The clicks repeated a few seconds later.
These guys are operators, Kilkenny thought as he ignored the clicks – a request for the dead man to report in to his commanding officer.
A quick pat search of the man revealed little. The mover carried a silenced 9-mm Glock and two spare clips of ammunition. Kilkenny found no identification of any kind. He pocketed the two ammo clips, chambered a round in the Glock, and carefully moved back into Nieuwland Hall.
One shitbag down, he thought, four more to go.
5
JUNE 23
South Bend, Indiana
Krasny adín? Dmitri puzzled over Vanya’s urgent warning in his mind.
Yuri, the radioman, sent two more rapid clicks and waited.
No reply.
Yuri looked over at Dmitri, the team leader, and shook his head.
Dmitri knew that things went wrong on missions – it was a fact of life. The Americans had a name for this phenomenon: Murphy’s Law. He’d lost radio contact with men before; nine times out of ten it was an equipment failure. But Vanya had broken radio silence and called out Krasny adín – Red One – alerting them that his position was under attack. Now Vanya was off the air, and his brief warning had stopped Dmitri and the rest of the team just as they got off the freight elevator.
Dmitri carefully moved to a window that overlooked the rear of Nieuwland Hall. Below, he saw the trailer extending from the loading dock and, in the far corner of the paved lot, a black Mercedes truck. The scene appeared just as they had left it moments ago. Other than a few people walking on the campus pathways, he saw nothing to indicate that their mission had been discovered, nothing that would cause Vanya to report that he was under attack.
‘I don’t see anything,’ Dmitri said quietly, wishing he could, ‘but Vanya’s position is almost beneath us.’
His men were all professionals; each had served under him in the Spetsnaz, the Red Army’s elite special warfare unit. He’d handpicked them for this private operations force when paychecks in the Russian military became scarce. Today, they were well-paid and well-equipped mercenaries in the employ of Victor Orlov.
Dmitri scratched at the stubble on his chin. A gritty film of dried sweat covered his muscled frame, the result of moving dozens of heavy boxes containing the equipment, books, and experimental documentation that he had been sent to retrieve.
‘You want me to go check on Vanya?’ Josef asked.
Dmitri pondered the question, then shook his head at the swarthy, black-haired Georgian. ‘Nyet. We proceed as planned, but stay alert. It may be nothing more than garbled communications and equipment failure.’
‘If not?’
‘If not, Josef, then I want you here with the rest of the unit.’ Leskov turned toward the two movers watching the hallway. ‘How’s it look, Pavel?’
‘Clear,’ Pavel replied confidently. Not so much as a shadow had moved in the empty hallway.
Dmitri smiled, proud of the professionalism his younger brother displayed. Pavel was on point, checking the path ahead as the unit moved forward.
‘Move out,’ Dmitri ordered.
Pavel strode into the hallway, followed by Yuri and Dmitri, who guided a flat four-wheeled cart. Josef took up position a few steps behind the others, covering the unit’s rear. Sandstrom’s lab was down at the far end of the corridor.
‘This looks like the last of it,’ Dmitri announced as they entered the lab, his English flawlessly Middle American.
Dmitri’s men spread out, moving toward the last remaining boxes. Paramo was seated in a chair near where Kelsey stood by the windows; Sandstrom sat up on a lab bench, reclining back on his elbows.
As he closed within ten feet of Sandstrom, Dmitri’s right hand deftly slipped to the holster nestled in the small of his back and drew his weapon. The muscles in his body coiled tightly as he gripped the Air Taser with both hands and fired.
Propelled by a charge of compressed nitrogen, two needlelike metal probes silently flew toward Sandstrom. In less than a tenth of a second, the twin probes tore through the physicist’s cotton shirt and struck his chest. A pulsating electrical current raced from Dmitri’s weapon, through the probes, into Sandstrom’s body.
Sandstrom shuddered involuntarily and fell back onto the lab bench. His head struck the thick black countertop with a muffled thud.
Across the room Yuri and Pavel’s attack mirrored that of their leader. Only the briefest change in expression on the faces of Kelsey and Paramo preceded their sudden incapacitation.
‘Josef,’ Dmitri called out.
‘Corridor is clear,’ the Georgian replied.
‘The man with the red hair, Kilkenny, he is missing. His truck is still parked by the loading dock. He must be somewhere in the building. Keep an eye out for him.’
As the Taser’s pulsating charge attacked Paramo’s nervous system, the aging physicist’s heartbeat became erratic. The muscle fluttered, struggling to find a steady rhythm until the already weakened organ stopped beating altogether.
‘I think I killed
the old one,’ Pavel announced unemotionally. ‘He’s not shaking like the others.’
‘So much the better for him,’ Yuri replied. ‘Put those boxes on the cart while I set the explosives.’
Yuri pulled the quilted blanket off the cart, uncovering four pistols in shoulder holsters and a pair of sealed translucent bags, each containing about a quart of fluid. As Pavel loaded the last two boxes, Yuri picked up the two plastic bags and carefully placed them on the lab bench near the sink. He then closed the drain and turned on the water until the sink was about a third full.
‘Ready,’ Yuri announced.
Dmitri looked at his watch. ‘On my mark.’ The second hand swept closer to twelve. ‘Now.’
Yuri placed the light-colored bag into the water first, followed by the darker bag. Tiny bubbles immediately began to form on the surface of the bags.
‘We have five minutes,’ Yuri announced as he hastily strapped on his shoulder holster and checked the Glock.
Dmitri nodded. ‘Pavel,’ he said, handing his brother one of the silenced pistols, ‘take the point.’
6
JUNE 23
South Bend, Indiana
Kilkenny carefully worked his way back into Nieuwland Hall and up the building’s center staircase. He encountered no one during his ascent to the second floor. On the landing, he cautiously peered through the slit window of wiremesh glass in the fire door. The hallway on the other side was empty, but the window was too narrow to provide a view of Sandstrom’s lab farther down the hall.
Slowly Kilkenny pulled open the fire door until a quarter-inch gap appeared. Sandstrom’s lab was on the same side of the corridor as the stairwell, so he studied the reflection in the glass doors of a display case on the opposite wall. There he saw one of the movers standing watch beside the lab door.
He had to assume that Kelsey, Sandstrom, and Paramo were in the lab with four armed men. For the sake of the two physicists and the woman he loved, Kilkenny focused on the situation at hand rather than trying to fathom the motive behind it.