Stealth Attack

by John Gilstrap

  “Anything that looks like it might tell us where Patrick Kelly gets his income. We need to know who this guy is and whether someone might feel compelled to kidnap his daughter.”

  Gail couldn’t remember the last time she’d filed a piece of paper. When important papers came to her, she scanned them and trashed the originals. At the office, the individual investigators dealt with their own paper piles.

  Another sweet victory for the good guys: the individual file cabinets were not locked.

  The first cabinet Gail opened was packed with stuff, all crammed into hanging files, all of which looked overloaded. Lots of memos, some printed-out emails, and more than a couple of school yearbooks. She closed that one and moved to the drawer below, where she encountered more of the same.

  “You’re a hacker,” Gail said. “This kind of thing is up your alley. Any idea what the system is here?”

  “You’re right,” Venice said. “This is a lot like hacking. Social engineering. Filing is a very personal thing and often makes sense only to the filer. That’s why it’s always traumatic for a company when a senior administrative assistant quits. Not only can’t the new person find anything, she starts her own that makes sense only to her.”

  Gail hadn’t really intended for Venice to take the question that seriously.

  “You know, I think that’s what we’re working with here. I bet we’re seeing decades of many different filers. I haven’t even found a financial record yet.”

  Gail paused, her hands hovering over the files in the second drawer of the first cabinet. Maybe they were going about this the wrong way. She turned away from the cabinets along the walls and turned back toward the desk that sat in the center of the room.

  Financial files were the ones that a finance officer would reference most frequently, right? She wouldn’t put those frequent files in the cabinets that were farthest away, she’d keep them close to her chair, maybe even in her desk.

  Gail closed her current drawer and scanned her light over the other cabinets, the ones deeper in the room. She felt a smile blooming as she noted the change in the labeling of the cabinets. TAXES. FUNDRAISING. COMMUNITY. SWIMMING POOL. LANDSCAPING. Some of the labels were for individual drawers, but some were for entire cabinets.

  “I found it!” Gail announced. Except it wasn’t quite right. Them was more appropriate. Three cabinets stood side by side directly behind the desk chair. The labels across the top of each read TUITION AND APPLICATIONS. Below, the labels on the individual drawers were marked alphabetically.

  “We’re not alone anymore,” Venice said.

  Gail looked out the window in the direction Mother Hen was pointing. A set of headlights was approaching up the driveway toward the school building. “That was fast,” Gail said. “How close does our friend Desmond live?”

  “I never thought to plot that out,” Venice said.

  And it didn’t matter, did it?

  The Ks didn’t begin until the top of the second cabinet. Gail pulled the top drawer open and finger-walked across the tops of the folders as Venice added her light beam to Gail’s.

  “Kelly, Kelly, Kelly . . .” Gail spoke aloud as she searched.

  Venice reached back farther into the drawer and pinched the top of a file. “Here,” she said. She pulled it out of the drawer. “Kelly, Charles. Wrong one.”

  As Venice put the file back into the slot from which she’d drawn it, Gail looked out the window again. The headlights were no longer visible. “Our clock’s ticking.”

  Venice stayed focused. “Kelly, Madeline. Kelly, Gregory. Apparently, alphabetical order goes only so far.”

  “You keep going,” Gail said. “I want to peek out and see what our status is. When you find what you need, take a picture and get it back into the drawer.”

  Aware for the first time of how creaky the old floor was up here, Gail eased back to the office door and pulled it open a crack. The hallway was empty. That was a good start. She opened the door all the way and turned left, back toward the doorway that separated the staff wing from the central stairs.

  She stopped at that door and pressed her ear against it. She didn’t know what she was listening for, but that didn’t matter either, because all she could hear was the pounding of her own pulse.

  Right now, the only data point she had was that they were not alone in the school. Beyond that, she was situationally blind. That couldn’t stand. She held her breath as she rocked the NVGs back out the way and gently pushed the door open. Wood scraped against wood as the door cleared the jamb. She’d have sworn that there hadn’t been any noise when they’d entered.

  She took her time. A five-one-thousand count just to peer through the crack, then she opened it farther. Six inches. Twelve. Eighteen. She saw no shadows, sensed no movement.

  “Where is he?” she whispered to no one. Easily five minutes had passed since she’d seen the headlights, maybe even seven. Why wasn’t he inside? And if he was inside, why wasn’t he making noise?

  At times like these, whenever the dots didn’t connect logically, the danger scale shot up. No such things as coincidences.

  She dared a step out onto the balcony, where she craned her neck to peer down to the security desk. Sure enough, it sat abandoned.

  Were those sirens in the distance?

  Of course they were.

  And as soon as Gail realized what was happening, she could see blue lights through the front windows, strobing against the trees out on the main road. Whatever dim hopes she’d harbored that maybe this wasn’t about their burglary were dashed. The strobes stopped, and two police cruisers headed up the driveway, one on each leg of the circle, presumably to block egress.

  It was time to go.

  Gail spun on her own axis and scooted back into the staff wing, closing the door behind her.

  With her NVGs back in place, she hurried back into the office, where Venice had placed a file folder on the desk and was using her phone to take pictures of every page—a blast of white light in the otherwise dark space.

  “Stop!” Gail shouted at a whisper. “Police are here.”

  “Oh, God.”

  “Yeah.”

  “But I haven’t finished.”

  “Yes, you have,” Gail said. She slid the file folder over, straightened the pages, and closed it. “We’re out of here, now.”

  “But what—”

  Gail stuffed the folder into her rucksack and closed the flap. “We’ll take it with us.”

  Downstairs, the front doors opened. She could hear voices, but couldn’t make out words. A dog barked. A big bark, the kind that comes from a big dog.

  “Oh, shit, a canine unit!” Gail hissed.

  “How are we going to get out?”

  “Not the way we came in.” What came next was all raw instinct. No thought, no strategy. They needed time. Not a lot, but enough to get out of the building and back to the car. Gail scanned the desk for something heavy she could throw. The best she could find was a stapler—one of those industrial jobs that probably weighed the better part of a half-pound. She lifted it from next to the blotter-style desk pad and heaved it through the window. In the silence of the night, the noise was startling.

  “What are you doing?”

  Gail didn’t answer. Instead, she drew her Glock. Standing away from the window opening, she settled her sights on the base of a distant tree and fired four shots.

  The response was both loud and instant as the officers scrambled for cover and dragged the dog out of the building.

  “Gail, are you crazy?”

  “We bought time,” Gail said. “With shots fired, if they’re like every other police agency in the country, they’ll pull back and wait for backup. Follow me.”

  “Now they’re going to shoot us if they see us.”

  “They won’t see us if we hurry.”

  As Gail stepped back into the hallway, she looked left at the glowing exit sign on the far end, but opted against going that way. That exit was too close to the
front of the building—too close to arriving cops. She turned left, instead, and headed back out toward the main stairway balcony.

  “We’ll be out in the open,” Venice said.

  “Stay on me.”

  Gail didn’t have time to explain and wasn’t even a little bit sure that she wasn’t being stupid, but this close to the time of the gunshots, the cops would still be in disarray, hoping to find cover as they tried to figure out where the shots were coming from. Since it was nighttime, they had no way of knowing that she’d shot a tree—had no intention of endangering officers. She was rolling the dice on them not watching the interior right now. They’d have eyes on the windows.

  For the time being, the cops didn’t have enough manpower to cover the exits and watch for more shooting, but without a doubt, every cop from every conceivable jurisdiction was screaming toward them, as was every air asset.

  Back out on the formal breezeway, among the mural of Virginia’s antebellum history, Gail led the way to the double doors that opened to the second floor academic wing.

  “Are you going to tell me what we’re doing?” Venice asked.

  “No,” Gail said. It was the real answer, and she didn’t have the time to explain that, either. If Venice kept up, she’d know exactly what the plan was. If they executed it with speed, they might actually succeed. If they paused to discuss it, they’d have plenty of time to fill in the details in the paddy wagon.

  Beyond the closed doors now, they could run. No lights were on, save for the red exit sign on the far end of the hallway. Gail hadn’t seen any diagrams of the building’s interior, but she’d committed the exterior footprint to memory. There were no annexes to the building, so that far door should lead straight to the outside.

  Besides, they needed a break.

  Gail didn’t slow as she approached the door, turning sideways at the last stride to throw her hip into the crash bar and launching the door into the fire escape railing with a bang that sounded nearly as loud as the gunshots.

  She threw a glance back over her shoulder and was pleased to see that Venice was still with her, keeping up step-for-step.

  The fire escape stairway was more a cage than a stairway, screened by expanded metal vertical mesh screening, presumably there to keep children from jumping to their deaths while escaping the flames. Two long flights took them down to the parking lot at the rear of the building, where suddenly it felt as if they were onstage. The lot was illuminated by twice as many streetlights as the front driveway.

  “We can’t get back to the car in this light,” Venice said.

  She was right.

  And Gail had a solution. It was a massive overkill—on the scale of the proverbial shotgun to kill the proverbial fly—but Gail had no intention of going to jail tonight. She had no doubt that in the future, she’d look back on this entire op as a colossal mistake, but that didn’t change the here and now.

  “Stay put and lift your NVGs. This will only take a minute.”

  “Do we have a minute?”

  “Ask me in two minutes.”

  The main electrical feed for the campus fed into a transformer that sat atop a pole on the edge of the parking lot, about ten yards away. From there, the main traveled down the length of the pole to a massive locked breaker cabinet that sat at about chest level.

  As Gail moved toward the box, she unslung her rucksack. If there was one thing she’d learned during her time with Jonathan and Boxers, it was that you never knew when explosives might come in handy. While Big Guy was routinely burdened with pounds of the stuff, Gail allowed herself a single GPC—general-purpose charge. Consisting of a small block of Compound C4 with a tail of detonating cord, GPCs offered a lot of flexibility, but in very unsubtle ways.

  Gail’s hands trembled a little as she let the paper wrapper from the C4 drop to the ground and she slapped the malleable block into the base of the rat’s nest of electrical inputs at the top of the breaker box. Next, she pulled an assortment of detonators from a different pocket in her ruck and fingered through them until she found the one she wanted—OFF, old-fashioned fuse, the kind you light with a match.

  She jammed the detonator into the block of explosive, then cut the fuse to what she eyeballed to be fifteen seconds. She stuffed the excess back into her ruck, then produced a Zippo lighter. It took three cranks of the wheel to produce a flame, but the dangling fuse jumped to life the instant the fire kissed it.

  Keeping low, she turned to rush back to Venice.

  “Freeze! Don’t move!” A cop had rounded the corner from the building’s green side and had lit her up with the muzzle light from his pistol.

  “Get down!” Gail yelled to both Venice and the cop as she closed the distance to the school building.

  “I want to see your hands!” the cop yelled. “Don’t make me shoot you!”

  As Gail dropped to her belly, she pointed to the plume of smoke rising toward the breaker box. “Explosives! Get down!”

  The cop’s face showed nothing but confusion.

  “I’m not kidding—”

  The rest of her words were lost in the sound of the blast.

  The world went dark.

  Chapter Ten

  Gail grabbed a fistful of Venice’s coveralls and pulled her up. “We need to go. Now.”

  The pressure wave of the explosion was big enough to knock the cop on his ass, but not big enough to do any harm. Gail couldn’t completely dismiss the possibility of fragmentation injury, but she hoped that he was smart enough to be wearing body armor. He was still struggling to find his feet when Gail dashed over to him and pushed him over onto his side. She ripped the pistol out of his hand and tossed it into the parking lot.

  As the cop reached for the radio mic clipped to his epaulette, she ripped it away, epaulette and all. Acting purely on instinct and fear, she drew the pepper spray canister from its holster on his belt, stepped back, and let him have four or five seconds’ worth.

  That would hold him.

  “Goggles down,” Gail said, and she pushed Venice forward, toward the edge of the parking lot that would lead to more woods but would keep them away from the front part of the athletic fields.

  “You hurt that officer,” Venice said as they ran.

  “Shh. We can talk later.”

  Gail had done more than just hurt the cop. She’d committed a felony, and by taking a weapon away from the officer—two, actually—she had justified the use of deadly force against them. The sky would soon be filled with helicopters, the woods with dogs, and the airwaves with breathless reports of the burglars’ assault on a police officer.

  They needed to be somewhere else. Anywhere else. And quickly. Like, now.

  The darkness of the night was blessedly black, and she told herself that they alone were equipped with night vision, but she had no idea whether or not that was true. All she knew was that the window of opportunity to get away whole was closing with blistering speed.

  The slice of field they decided to cross on the way out took them straight to the horse corral and the stables beyond.

  At the fence, Gail said, “Squeeze through, don’t try to climb,” and Venice complied. To climb presented a risk for a fall that might injure, but more importantly, climbing over the top would change the silhouette of the structure of the corral, if only slightly. At this point, there was no such thing as a superfluous detail.

  Gail was right behind Mother Hen as they ran at a low crouch through the churned grass and horse shit past the open doors of the stables. A few horses acknowledged their presence with whatever you call the equine equivalent of a growl, but for the most part the occupants of the stable remained silent.

  On the far side of the corral, they squeezed again through the fence rails, and Gail had the sense that maybe, just maybe, they’d made it.

  They made no effort to avoid the creek this time, splashing through the knee-deep water as quickly as they could without falling. Venice almost went down once—she’d later blame it on a submerged
rock—but she got her hand out in time to grab Gail’s shoulder for support.

  “You okay?” Gail asked.

  No answer. No need for one, really.

  On the opposite bank now, they scrambled up a much steeper slope, and the woods went on for longer than Gail thought they should.

  “Stop for a second,” she commanded.

  “Where’s the car?”

  “Right where we left it,” Gail said. “But we’re not where we’re supposed to be.” The new path they’d taken to return had caused them to overshoot the cul-de-sac. If Gail’s sense of direction wasn’t totally wrecked, they needed to pivot to the left and feel their way through this patch of woods. In the best case, they’d emerge directly in front of their vehicle.

  In the worst case, they’d emerge in someone’s backyard.

  What was it about worst cases that there always turns out to the even more terrible outcome that you never thought of?

  They emerged in the backyard of a house with a big noisy dog that took its guard responsibility very seriously. The beast came at them at a dead run, making homicidal noises at 100 decibels. Cujo meets the Hound of the Baskervilles.

  “Oh, God. Ohgodohgodohgod . . .” Venice stood frozen in place.

  Gail shoved her. “Get going. That way.” She pointed.

  “You’re not supposed to run from—”

  “Go!”

  The dog’s yard was surrounded by a fence, but under the circumstances, it seemed far too low and far too fragile. Running was still the best option as far as Gail was concerned.

  The fence held, but that seemed to piss Cujo off even more.

  After a dozen strides or so, Gail finally saw the Nissan in the distance. They’d overshot it by way more than she’d expected.

  “There it is,” Venice said, pointing.

  “Got it.”

  Thirty seconds later, they were almost home.

  “Take off the NVGs,” Gail said as they closed the distance. She thumbed the button on her key fob and heard the locks click. “Balaclava, too.” She tore the door open.

  Gail moved quickly, sloppily, as she stuffed the gear into the bag and zipped it closed.