McCall’s left ankle gave way suddenly and he had to grab the catwalk railing for support.
Dr. Cross turned to look at him.
McCall took another step in the shadows.
“What is in the vials?”
Cross’s voice was barely above a whisper. “Taï Forest ebolavirus.”
“But Ebola can only be contracted by close encounters with other Ebola victims.”
“I changed the bacterial make-up so it can be transmitted through water. It is a virulent strain of the disease. It would be lethal in the city’s water supply,” Cross said, his voice softly hoarse.
McCall took another step forward.
“You’ll infect millions of people with a deadly plague. Don’t do this, Doctor.”
McCall looked at the man’s eyes.
They were totally dead.
8:02:42 P.M. EDT
Kostmayer took his S&W 9mm pistol from his belt and stepped out of the shadow of the parking pillar.
Tom Coleman turned at that moment and looked right at him. He opened his Windbreaker more fully, revealing more of the suicide vest.
Kostmayer froze again where he stood.
Tom’s eyes were wild. “Those who reject our Signs, We shall soon cast out into the Fire!” Tom’s voice was ranting, echoing through the parking spaces. “Those with diseased hearts are to be seized and slain with a fierce slaughter.”
Tom’s right hand was pressed against the trigger mechanism. If he let go, it would detonate.
Kostmayer saw a shadowy figure move behind Tom Coleman.
7:03:15 P.M. CDT
In the Riverwalk Hotel lobby, Bo Ellsworth ran through the smoke from the shattered offices. One of the staff grabbed the pretty blond girl who had talked to Hayden Vallance when he’d first registered. The Muslim man was using the girl as a human shield. He was the enemy here, Bo thought, not his Texas Minutemen Militia.
They were the good guys.
“Let her go!” Bo shouted.
The Muslim whirled and the blonde wrenched out of his grasp.
Bo fired a burst from his M4 rifle. The bullets exploded through the man. The girl stumbled to her knees, looking up at Bo with a mixture of gratitude and terror in her eyes.
Bo held out his hand, as if to help her up.
A bullet exploded into the side of Bo Ellsworth’s head. He collapsed, dead before he even hit the tiles. Hayden Vallance turned and saw Control leaning against the railing on the stairs, the Glock 17 in his hand. Vallance was impressed. A pretty good shot for a civilian.
Gabriel Paul Dubois came down the rest of the sweeping stairs. Willis Deevers Sutherland came out from where he’d been kneeling beside one of the couches. Vallance holstered his Heckler & Koch pistol. The smoke from the smashed offices and decimated reception desk still hazed through the lobby. Cries and screams were coming from all sides. The survivors were picking themselves up from the carnage. The Riverwalk Hotel staff moved among the victims. Vallance found the body of Clive Ashley-Talbot near the reception desk, riddled with bullets.
Control walked into the shattered lobby. Bo’s militiaman were scattered across the floor where they’d been unexpectedly struck down. Teddy Danfield, Randy Wyatt, Jeremiah Buchanan, Kyle Savage, and the rest of them were all dead. Control looked for more opposition, but there was none.
7:03:32 P.M. CDT
On the catwalk, Dr. Patrick Cross reached into his coat and brought out the .25 Colt semiautomatic pistol his brother Bo had given him. McCall shot him with Renquist’s Glock 26. Cross collapsed beside the vials, his hand nudging them right to the edge of the Clear Well. McCall leapt past him, diving down onto the catwalk, grabbing the vials before they could smash their deadly plague into the city’s water supply.
The last vial teetered on the brink.
McCall grabbed it. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, he slid the vials back onto the catwalk.
With trembling fingers he put the four vials filled with the altered Ebola virus into Cross’s blue vial cooler and protection case.
8:03:51 P.M. EDT
Gunner reached Tom Coleman and grabbed his Windbreaker, yanking it down across his forearms, curtailing his ability to fully reach into his jacket. At the same time, Gunner clamped his right hand tightly around Tom’s right hand, immobilizing it. Kostmayer slammed the butt of his S&W pistol against Tom’s head. He slumped down, unconscious.
“He’s got his finger pressed on the detonator of the device,” Gunner said tersely. “If his finger moves from the button, it will detonate. Bring him gently down to the ground with me.”
Together they brought Tom’s inert body down to the concrete. Kostmayer turned him on his side with the suicide vest hugging his chest.
“I can’t move my hand from this grip,” Gunner said. “I want you to trace the wires from the detonator up the vest.”
Kostmayer was sweating. He traced the wires up the vest to the place where they came together. “Right here?”
“Yes. Reach into my right jacket pocket. You’ll find a small Leatherman. There’s a penknife on it.”
Kostmayer fished out the multitool from Gunner’s pocket and flipped up the penknife blade.
“Now cut the wires.” Gunner told him which of the wires to cut.
Kostmayer’s hand was shaking. “In the movies it’s always the red wire or the blue wire that gets cut.”
“Just do it. Gently.”
Kostmayer nodded.
He cut the wires.
Gunner released Tom’s hand, which he had been holding in a death grip.
Nothing happened.
Gunner said, “It’s been deactivated.”
Kostmayer sat down beside Tom’s body.
“There may be a second mechanism as a backup,” Gunner said. “There’s a mercury switch on the vest. I am going to initiate the evacuation of the UN facility. You’re going to have to stay here with Tom until the bomb squad arrives. If Tom wakes up, put a bullet into his brain, but don’t move him or the vest.”
Kostmayer nodded, his face awash with perspiration.
Gunner got to his feet and ran toward the banks of elevators.
Kostmayer settled himself, not moving, and tried to breathe.
* * *
McCall snapped shut Dr. Patrick Cross’s vial cooler and protective case with the vials in their slots and put the cooler in the Greenbriar Mall shopping bag. He walked down the catwalk stairs to the ground level and through the shadows back to the first building. He located a workroom filled with tools, where he found a drawer with half a dozen open padlocks. There were no keys. He entered a deserted greenroom with a large refrigerator and placed the shopping bag with the cooler on a bottom shelf. He closed the refrigerator door and snapped the padlock over it. The authorities would have to use bolt cutters to open it.
McCall ran out of the building into the drenching rainstorm to the fence. He climbed it and jumped down into the churning mud. He ran to the Buick LaCrosse and slid into it. He turned the vehicle around, drove a quarter of a mile down the road, and pulled up under some Texas shade trees. He could see the facility through the curtain of rain. He dialed the cell number Control had given him for Todd Blakemore. The FBI agent answered. McCall asked him if he was still in Boerne. Blakemore said he was, and who was this? McCall ignored that and told Blakemore to get to the West Texas Regional Water Treatment Plant just out of town. McCall told him to bring a hazmat team to deal with a cooler with four vials of a contagious Ebola virus in a refrigerator in the first building. McCall advised him to alert the CDC in Atlanta. He told Blakemore he would find Dr. Patrick Cross, a physician with Doctors Without Borders, lying on a catwalk in the third building. Dr. Cross had attempted to poison the water supply. He was dead. McCall said they would also find an assassin who was part of a conspiracy plot. He was lying dead on the catwalk in the first facility building. McCall suggested Blakemore might consider bringing Homeland Security into this. Blakemore told him that Homeland Security agents were already with his t
ask force and demanded to know if McCall was working with James Cameron. McCall said he’d never heard of him and disconnected. He smashed the chip, rendering the burner phone useless.
Then he waited.
Twenty minutes later four FBI cars and the SWAT truck converged on the West Texas Water Treatment Plant, along with half a dozen Boerne police cruisers and a couple of Homeland Security cars.
McCall nosed out of the trees and drove back into Boerne. He stopped at a McDonald’s and tossed the useless phone burner into the trash. Then he cut across Highway 87 and picked up the I-10 going to San Antonio. He tried the first radio station he came to, which had breaking news that the UN buildings in New York City had been evacuated in response to a terror attack. A massive police presence was there with hundreds of NYPD officers. The evacuation of the UN workforce and visiting diplomats was ongoing. There were no reports of casualties, but details on the terror attack were sketchy. There was no word on the identity of the suicide bomber, except that he was thought to be an American living in Manhattan.
McCall thought about Mickey Kostmayer and wondered if he was still alive.
* * *
Kostmayer sat beside Tom Coleman’s inert body for twenty minutes until the first bomb squad officers entered the UN level D parking facility. They moved with caution until six officers surrounded Kostmayer. They wore explosive-ordnance disposal protective suits. A senior NYPD Bomb Squad man was in charge, along with a sergeant. Kostmayer thought the bomb technicians were part of the NYPD Detective Bureau’s Forensic Investigations Division.
The senior man knelt down beside Kostmayer and Tom Coleman. He noted the battery and the mercury switch on the vest, which hadn’t been touched. The four rectangles of C-4 explosives were two inches by one and a half inches by eleven inches long, wrapped in olive Mylar-film containers with the detonator beside Tom’s right index finger.
The bomb squad put sandbags around Tom’s body.
“You can get up now,” the senior man told Kostmayer.
He got up shakily.
It took the senior bomb squad officer twelve minutes to remove the mercury switch from the vest. He stood up. “The US Army colonel who was with you knew what he was doing. There was a second detonator rigged up, but the wiring was faulty and it didn’t function.”
The bomb squad sergeant pulled the vest off Tom Coleman’s body. Two other officers took charge of him. He was still out cold.
Kostmayer was still shaking.
He rode up the elevator in police protective custody to the ground level. He emerged out into the bright lights, yellow police tape cordoning off the UN buildings. Word had already reached up top that the situation had been defused. Tom Coleman was taken to Bellevue Hospital Center on First Avenue. It took half an hour for Kostmayer to persuade the NYPD that he had not been a coconspirator with Tom Coleman. Kostmayer found Helen Coleman and Colonel Michael Ralston among the crowd surging around the UN facility.
Helen took Kostmayer’s hands. “You could have killed him,” she whispered.
“That wasn’t what McCall would have done,” Kostmayer said simply.
* * *
McCall walked into the chaos in the Riverwalk Hotel lobby. He’d been escorted inside by one of the San Antonio police officers. McCall saw Control talking to a senior FBI agent, who towered over him at six feet, four inches. He wore a dark suit and sported a well-groomed gray mustache. He carried a Glock 23 handgun in a holster on his hip.
Control spotted McCall and said, “He’s with me.”
The senior FBI agent, Calvin Locke, motioned to the San Antonio police officer that it was all right. Locke moved over to where Deaf was sitting talking quietly to a couple who were completely traumatized. Control moved over to McCall.
McCall spotted Hayden Vallance standing beside the body of Clive Ashley-Talbot. Gabriel Paul Dubois stood beside him. Vallance made eye contact with McCall, but that was all.
“Hayden Vallance brought two mercenaries with him,” Control said. “One of them didn’t make it.” He noted McCall’s left arm. “You’re hurt.”
“Bullet grazed it. What happened here?”
“Bo Ellsworth and his militia didn’t realize they were walking into an ambush. It was all over in seconds.”
“How many hostiles were killed?”
“All of them, including Bo. There was one man who was parking cars and would have joined his comrades, but when he saw the slaughter he took off. The senior FBI agent here in San Antonio, Calvin Locke, has a warrant out for his arrest. The Feds will be rounding up the rest of Bo’s Texas Minutemen Militia, scattered around Texas. Without their leader, it won’t take much disbanding. There’s no evidence that any of them were directly involved with this bloodbath.”
“What are the casualties?”
“Eight killed, twenty-two wounded, three of them critically. They’ve been taken to the San Antonio Metropolitan Methodist Hospital. Hayden Vallance did a hell of a job. That FBI agent talking to that couple on the couch? They call him Deaf. He saved my life.”
“Todd Blakemore and his task force are out at the West Texas Regional Water Treatment Plant,” McCall said. “They should have recovered four vials from a refrigerator that Dr. Patrick Cross was going to empty into a Clear Well at the facility. He’s dead.”
“What was in the vials?”
“A virus, Taï Forest ebolavirus. Modified to be contracted in water.”
“My God. He was going to infect people’s drinking water with a plague?”
“That was his intention.”
“Any more than four vials?”
“Only the four.”
“FBI agent Locke said there was a second man his agents found at the water plant facility.”
“He tried to kill me. I had to deal with him.”
“There were two of the Company rogue assassins here at the hotel, the ones who kept me prisoner in the house in Virginia. Both dead. There was a third one that Gabriel Dubois shot down on one of the terraces.” Control looked over to where FBI agent Calvin Locke was talking to Deaf. “The FBI are going to want to talk to you.”
“Does Calvin Locke know I have any involvement with these attacks?”
“Not yet.”
“Then he doesn’t need to talk to me. I heard the news reports on the radio about the UN being evacuated in New York.”
“A lone suicide bomber. There were no casualties and Tom Coleman was taken into custody.”
“How did Kostmayer disarm him?”
“It was a two-man effort. Colonel Michael Ralston brought him down, and Kostmayer knocked him out. Gunner has had some Army training with explosives. He knew what to do to disarm the bomb.”
“So Helen Coleman didn’t lose another son,” McCall said quietly. He looked at Control. “What will you do now?”
“I don’t know how many more of these memento mori conspirators are left at the Company. But I’m going to find out.”
“So you’re going home?”
Control smiled ruefully. “Let’s see what kind of a reception I get when I walk into the building. If I can you get out of San Antonio before the Feds arrest you…”
“I have some unfinished business to take care of in New York City.”
McCall squeezed his one-time boss’s shoulder in a rare sign of affection and walked out of the decimated hotel.
CHAPTER 49
He’d been following two lowlifes, Delroy and Travis, for four days. Delroy was carrying an S&W .40 pistol, and his buddy was packing an S&W M&P 9mm. Neither of them had used them yet, but it was only a matter of time. The Equalizer knew they’d pulled off a series of convenience-store robberies in the neighborhood.
Tonight the pair were particularly agitated. They needed money. They had cased the twenty-four-hour Manhattan Deli on Allen Street near East Houston. They’d gone past it three times, so the Equalizer felt it was safe to stroll inside. He took a seat halfway along the counter, keeping his hoodie tight around him. He was wearing a backpac
k. He turned around on his barstool, facing out into the deli. In front of him were booths. A cash register was at the glass-fronted counter beside the front entrance, with more booths in the back.
An older Jewish woman in a booth was eating a three-decker pastrami on rye. She was chatting to a young man who might’ve been her son. He was well dressed and looked bored. The Equalizer sighed. Sons should respect their mothers. Although, to be fair, her voice jarred the fillings right out of the Equalizer’s teeth.
Delroy and Travis finally entered the deli. They sauntered past the brunette at the cash register. Travis made his way toward the back. Delroy sat down on one of the empty stools at the counter. He turned to the Jewish mama, who was regaling her son with some story about the scandalous people in her building.
“Put your wallets and jewelery on the table!” Delroy shouted.
The old Jewish woman looked askance that she had been interrupted. Delroy took out the S&W pistol from his overcoat pocket and got up. Now she shrank back. Her son looked over at Delroy in astonishment.
“Your wallets! Out on the table!” Delroy shouted again. “All of you! And the jewelery! Come on, let’s go!”
From the other deli room Travis took out his 9mm pistol and fired a shot in the air. That got everyone’s attention. Travis motioned to the booths directly in front of him. “Wallets and jewelery out on the booths! And the cash from the register!”
The diners were slow to respond, so Travis fired another round into the ceiling. Now they started to comply. The Jewish woman took her wallet out of her bag. But she balked at taking off any of her jewelery.
Delroy waved his gun in her face. “Get those rings off, bitch!”
“Please,” the old woman pleaded. “The wedding ring I’ve worn for fifty years. The signet ring belonged to my late husband. You can take my engagement ring and the others. But leave me my wedding ring.”
“It’s of great sentimental value to my mother,” her son said, and Delroy pistol-whipped him in the face. He slumped in the booth.
The Jewish mama started to slide the rings off her fingers, but they were tight and she was having trouble. She started weeping. The Equalizer drew the Glock 34 that he had lifted from the thug in the grocery-store robbery and calmly shot Delroy. The lowlife collapsed on the floor, his gun falling from his hand. The Equalizer had shot him in the shoulder, but a wound like that could be more serious than it looked, so the Equalizer had to hurry this along. He knew the guys behind the deli counter were staring at him with admiration.
Killed in Action Page 38