Veil of Civility: A Black Shuck Thriller (Declan McIver Series)

by Graham, Ian

  Another distant gunshot echoed from the tin-roofed building in the distance and Declan rushed forward, suddenly remembering why he was there. His steps were unsteady and his vision blurred as he made his way forward. Stopping at the base of a tree, he leaned against it for support, realizing the seriousness of the injury to his head. Doing his best to shake it off, he continued forward towards the building fifty yards ahead of him.

  Unlike the house and the garage, the building was made of wood that had been blackened by age. Several sets of barn doors lined the outside of it and steel icebreakers jutted out of the tin roof to break up any falling snow as it descended during the winter months. Declan ducked back behind the tree trunk and lowered himself to the ground in a prone position as two black clad men carrying submachine guns appeared around the side of the building and ran up the driveway towards the garage. He watched from the wet ground as the men passed within twenty yards of him. When they arrived at the garage, they slowed to a stop, speaking to each other in a foreign language.

  Staying low to the ground and keeping an eye on the two men at his six o'clock, Declan continued forward. Arriving at the building he rested against the aged wood before continuing around the perimeter in search of an open entrance. How many men were there? The vehicle they had arrived in could easily seat six, but could hold as many as eight or nine if they'd used the rear cargo area in addition to the regular seating. Slowly rounding the northwest corner of the building and being sure to stay out of the line of sight of the two men near the garage, he saw another dark red SUV parked next to the building, its passenger doors open. On discovery of the second vehicle he knew he was facing impossible odds. In his injured condition and having expended nine of the sixteen bullets in his magazine, there was no way he could hope to take on what could be as many as twenty men.

  The sound of a vehicle starting up and a pair of headlights illuminating the driveway next to the building preceded the appearance of the SUV that had been parked in front of the garage. Arriving around the opposite corner of the building from where Declan was standing, the vehicle came to a stop in front of its twin. The passenger door opened and one of the men who'd run up the driveway got out and entered an open door across from the parked SUV.

  "Someone's here," he said in accented English to whoever was inside. "Tariq and Nadir are dead!"

  "Get out there and keep a lookout!" a harsh voice bellowed. This time Declan was sure the accent was Slavic and belonged to someone from the old Soviet bloc of countries. "It looks like our fun here has come to an end, little brother, but before you die, I want you to know that I'm going to cut off your head and mail it to your family!" the voice continued. Declan was sure he heard the voice of Abaddon Kafni next, but couldn't make out what was being said. He closed his eyes as two gunshots rang out from within the building. Moments later, as the ringing of the gunshots faded, several celebratory whoops filled the air.

  "Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!" several men repeated over and over again.

  Declan moved away from the building towards a clump of trees twenty yards away. He watched from cover as ten heavily armed men exited, aiming their submachine guns and pistols in all directions as an eleventh man moved abruptly out of the building and straight to the parked SUV. In his left hand, Declan could see a white sack with a dark red stain forming at its base. He felt the breath leave his body as a surge of anger erupted within him. Falling back against the trunk of a tree, he slid to a sitting position as the scarlet glare of the SUV's brake lights sliced the darkness. Doors slammed as the men entered the vehicles and a cloud of dust was pushed into the air as they moved out in succession, the tires sliding on the loose gravel as they accelerated around the side of the building and up the driveway towards the house. As the SUVs rounded the knoll next to the teardrop shaped yard and disappeared over the hill, Declan closed his eyes, breathing heavily as darkness took him.

  Chapter Ten

  7:38 p.m. Eastern Time – Friday

  Graemont Lane

  Charlottesville, Virginia

  Senator David Kemiss swallowed the last few sips of the cocktail he'd been drinking and looked at the LED on his cell phone as he pulled it out of his pocket, vibrating. His eyes moved from the LED to the disapproving glare of his wife. Mary Ellen Kemiss was seated on the opposite end of their sofa, the one cushion between them like a thousand snow-covered miles. Bitch, he thought as he stood.

  "I'll just be a moment," he said.

  She rolled her eyes in disgust. Their two children, sitting on the floor of the darkened den, stared on at the glowing television screen and didn't look up or even acknowledge that a real person had spoken. Their faces stayed blank, emotionlessly enthralled in the latest adventure film to grace the store shelves and vending devices.

  Tonight was supposed to be their family time, an event the Kemiss family carved out of the busy week to spend together and keep up appearances to their children and any other interested parties. For the last few years family night had meant movie night. If there wasn't a fundraiser, parade or dinner they needed to be seen at, a movie was the only activity where the kids wouldn't notice that mom and dad didn't speak to each other. Two biological children were the only things they had in common and each of them had been seeing other people romantically for years, their marriage a theater production for the eyes of the electorate and the upper crust community they socialized with.

  Having exited the dim living room, David Kemiss climbed the open central staircase of the Georgian mansion. When he arrived at his third floor study, he closed the door behind him and flipped open the phone.

  "What is it?" he asked, as he sat back in the dark red chair behind his walnut desk. The aged leather protested loudly as he settled his tall frame and made himself comfortable.

  "It's me. I'm afraid there's some bad news."

  Kemiss took a deep breath. The voice belonged to a longtime friend, Seth Castellano, the man he'd been seeing romantically for nearly five years. They'd been working together for nearly a decade, beginning with Castellano's stint in the Russell Senate Office Building as an intern just out of college, and now Castellano was the ambitious Assistant Special Agent in Charge of the Richmond Virginia Field Office's Counterterrorism Division of the FBI.

  "Go on," Kemiss said, feeling the muscles in his face tense.

  "Well, as you're probably beginning to see on television if you're watching, everything went off as planned, but we didn't make the goal."

  Kemiss closed his eyes and exhaled a long breath. He knew that Castellano was being intentionally vague and careful to avoid using any words that might trigger the vast security measures in place to monitor phone conversations by potential terrorists. On the prepaid wireless devices they were using, words like bomb; target or operation could trigger an electronic monitoring system and create a file that could eventually be traced. Even though the phones were paid for in cash and the farthest any trace could go was the cell tower the call had originated from, it was still closer than he wanted anyone to get. The everything Castellano was referring to was the car bomb that had gone off an hour earlier outside of a building at Liberty University, an hour south of Kemiss' residence. The goal had been to kill Dr. Abaddon Kafni. Apparently it had failed.

  "And what about our friend," Kemiss asked. "What's the status of his plan?"

  "Done," Castellano said. "Two are gone, including the goal but—"

  "You've got the scene closed down? No one's getting in and out of there, right?"

  "Relax, David. Both scenes are closed up tight. My department is in complete control of the scene and they report only to me. The investigation is in the right hands."

  "So what's the but about then?"

  "There was an emergency call to the residence and someone has been rushed to the hospital with serious injuries."

  Kemiss clenched his teeth. "Someone saw it?" he asked as he exhaled, his lungs tightening along with his grip on the cell phone.

  "We don't know that yet," C
astellano cautioned. "Whoever he is, he's been rushed to the hospital unconscious. We don't know if he's seen anything or not."

  "We can't afford to wait and find out."

  "I know. I'll handle it. I'll call you back in a while."

  Kemiss closed the cell phone and tossed it across the desk, knocking over a pencil jar. Leaning back in the chair again he wiped the sweat from his face with the back of his sleeve. Guilt settled in the pit of his stomach and acid leapt at the back of his tongue as he sat there thinking. He knew that the people he should be thinking about were the victims who had most likely lost their lives at Liberty University. How many would there be, a dozen, several dozen? He didn't care. He didn't want to think about them. It was all the means to an end. The people he was thinking about were himself and Seth Castellano. The lives they had each built were in jeopardy. If things went wrong, they were both finished.

  Standing, he walked over to the long table in front of the bay window that looked out over the Blue Ridge Mountains west of his home. The table was made of the same walnut as the desk. The same walnut as the end tables that sat on either side of the dark red leather sofa, against the wall opposite his desk, and the same walnut as the two floor to ceiling bookshelves that held dozens of thick law books; state, federal and international. They all matched, meticulously handcrafted by American carpenters from North Carolina and, like most of the items in his home, expensive.

  On the table was a crystalline tray holding several glass bottles. He opened one with a clink and poured a double shot of bourbon. How had his life and career come to this? David Kemiss, graduate of Harvard, renowned international attorney and the thrice re-elected senior Senator of Virginia was hanging on to the life he'd built by a thread; by something thinner than a thread, by a hair.

  He knew how he'd arrived at this dismal place, he wasn't oblivious. The questions in his head were rhetorical. His political career had been in a tailspin since his party had lost the presidential election in 2004, with his name on the bottom of the ticket. Although his party had made a comeback in 2006 and had taken a majority in both the House and the Senate, and had taken the Presidency in 2008, he hadn't been up for re-election until 2010, by which time the so-called Tea Party had risen and the policies he and his colleagues had helped to enact had become extremely toxic.

  In the 2010 mid-term election he had narrowly held onto his seat only because of the sharp divide on the conservative side of the ticket which had seen two candidates, one an establishment-backed Republican whose lack of conservative credentials had been sharply criticized and had led to a Tea Party backed candidate who had served to split the Republican vote and hand the election to the Democrats, to him. The circumstances by which he had won had signaled to the national leadership of his party that he was becoming a liability instead of an asset and in Washington D.C. liabilities didn't last very long.

  He looked out of the bay window, his eyes stopping on his reflection in the tempered glass. His hair was as gray as his soul felt and his morals had receded along with his hairline: politics was a rough business. He adjusted the wire-rimmed glasses on his nose and looked away towards the skylight in the den below. He couldn't see his children through the frosted glass, but the flicker of the television told him they were still there and likely unaware that he'd even left. He thought briefly about the other families that had been affected by the actions he'd helped set in motion. He didn't know Abaddon Kafni very well, but he was sure the fifty-something Jew had children and that they'd be finding out soon, if they hadn't already, that their father wouldn't be coming home. His thoughts turned to the families that were yet to be affected, but surely would be by the time this was over. There was a term for them: collateral damage. He raised the glass to his lips and drank down the bourbon, willing the sordid thoughts away as the drink burned all the way down into his stomach.

  The study door opening gently behind him caused him to stiffen and look suddenly to the room's entrance. A tiny voice surprised him.

  "Daddy, why did you leave?" It was his six-year-old son, the youngest of the two.

  Luke Kemiss stood in the doorway, his fragile figure illuminated by the dim light in the hallway. The senator turned with a warm smile and sank to one knee, holding his arms open towards his son. The boy accepted the invitation and the two embraced.

  "Daddy had to take an important phone call, but it's done now." He brushed the boy's dark hair back off his forehead and marveled for a moment. It was as though he was looking at a photograph of himself, forty years in the past. He smiled again and stood. "Go on back downstairs, you're gonna miss the end. I'll be right behind you."

  The boy turned and walked out of the study looking over his shoulder as he neared the door.

  "I'll be right there," Kemiss mouthed silently, waving him out. He listened as the boy's bare feet thumped down the stairs before he turned back to the window. The light from the hallway had caused his reflection to disappear, but it didn't matter. These days he barely recognized himself anyway. He poured more bourbon and drank it down, returned the glass to the tray and walked out of the room.

  Chapter Eleven

  8:06p.m. Eastern Time – Friday

  Virginia Baptist Hospital

  Lynchburg, Virginia

  Seth Castellano pulled his dark blue Crown Vic under the covered entrance of the smaller of the Lynchburg area's two major medical facilities. Stepping out of the vehicle onto the concrete walkway that led to the main entrance of the multi-storied brick facility, he flashed his badge to the valet who was about to tell him not to park there. The man backed off and Castellano continued walking without a word, shrugging his tan trench coat higher on his shoulders and adjusting the collar as he walked towards a grouping of ambulances closer to the windowed entrance.

  "Any of you boys bring in a man from the Cottonwood Road area about twenty minutes ago?" he asked a group of EMTs standing near their buses. His voice rang with a southern tenor and carried briefly on the mist that hung in the humid air, his accent a mixture of Louisiana creole, where he was born, and metro Washingtonian, where he'd lived and worked for over a decade.

  The group of EMTs stopped talking amongst each other and regarded him for a moment, looking over his slicked brown hair and slightly rounded features before answering. "We did," a blue uniformed man with blonde hair said, motioning with his cigarette towards another uniformed man next to him.

  "And what were his injuries exactly?" Castellano asked.

  The EMT started to speak but thought better of it, looking at Castellano instead with a question on his face as if he wanted to say what's it to you?

  Castellano withdrew the black badge wallet from inside his coat again and flipped it open. "FBI," he said. "What exactly were his injuries?"

  "Lacerations to the back of the left hand and to his head above the right eye, he wasn't conscious until about the last two minutes of the ride and then he said something about his wife. We wheeled him to the Outpatient Center. They've turned it into an emergency room to handle the overflow from general."

  "And what did he look like?"

  "Blondish hair, a beard, kind of slim, he was wearing a blue-button down shirt and tan Dockers. He only spoke briefly but he had some kind of an accent, English maybe."

  Castellano closed his badge and returned it to the inner breast pocket of his coat as he walked through the automated glass doors into the spacious, gray carpeted lobby.

  "Can I help you find something?" asked a lady behind a courtesy desk just inside the door.

  "Outpatient center," Castellano answered.

  "Down this hallway to your left and then take a right. Go all the way to the end."

  Castellano was on the move before she finished talking. As he made his way down the light blue painted hallway he considered his options. In a modern hospital where patient and medical provider privacy were as critical as the care being given, he knew there would be video cameras and other security measures. While he intended to make sure the
man who had apparently been present at the scene of Abaddon Kafni's death never left the hospital alive, this wasn't a movie. He couldn't just walk into a darkened room and snuff the guy with a silenced pistol; he would have to be far more careful.

  As he arrived at another automatic door with white vinyl letters identifying the ward beyond as the outpatient center, his thoughts of a stealthy entrance and exit faded. The door hissed open and he was greeted by the sight of a long white hallway filled with ambulance gurneys. Doctors and nurses rushed about wearing uneasy expressions, and patients writhed painfully in their beds, some comforted by family members and others alone, their faces terrified. He'd known the small facility had been turned into a makeshift emergency room to handle the overflow from the larger and more prepared Lynchburg General Hospital, but he hadn't expected to see so closely the destruction caused by the bomb he'd known was going to go off.

  He swallowed hard and entered the ward. To his right and left lay people dressed in suits and ties, looking up and down the hallway for the people who were responsible for treating them. "Doctor, doctor!" a man called, reaching out and grabbing the edge of Castellano's coat as he walked by. "I'm in pain. You gotta give me something for this pain!"

  Castellano looked the man quickly up and down. From the hastily applied bandages it was obvious that his leg had been injured, and his clothes were covered in dust and ashes, a clear sign that he had been inside the building when the blast had occurred. "I'm sorry," Castellano said, jerking his coat away from the man. "I'm not a doctor."