Rampage

by John Sandford

  The parking lot would accommodate perhaps twenty vehicles. The concrete-block building had a single glass door on the front and two high, unfriendly-looking windows; both the windows and the door were barred.

  There were two SUVs in the parking lot.

  “If one of those belongs to Thorne…I mean, I really don’t want to take him on right now,” Harmon said.

  “It’s pretty public,” Shay said.

  Harmon grinned and shook his head. “I was thinking I might lose.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  “Don’t really believe it, do you?”

  “I’m going to live forever,” Shay said.

  Harmon sighed and put the walkie-talkie to his face and called the other car. “Let’s find somewhere we can watch that door for a while,” he said.

  “Let’s try them on one of the clean phones and see who answers,” Twist called back.

  “Go ahead and do that,” Harmon said. “Let us know what happens.”

  Twist called back a minute later. “Rang twenty times—no answering service or recorder. Just kept ringing.”

  “Call them every five minutes,” Harmon said.

  “For how long?” Twist asked.

  “Let’s give it a couple of hours, anyway. See if Cade can run the plates on the cars in the lot.”

  —

  A half hour later, Cade, who was looking at the iPad, said, “Thorne filed a flight plan for an airport near Phoenix two hours ago. Deer Valley Airport. It’s just coming up in my database.”

  Twist, sitting beside him, said, “If he’s gone, then let’s go knock on the door.”

  They called Harmon, who talked to Shay and Cruz, and they agreed.

  Shay and Harmon made the approach. Finding the door locked, they looked through the glass and saw a small lobby with a waist-high counter with a dish of jelly beans on it, two chairs, a coffee table in a corner, and a door that apparently led to the back of the building.

  No doorbell, so Harmon rapped with a key, one of the sharpest and most annoying sounds in the world, as every hotel maid knew. Nobody came to the door. Shay cupped her hands around her eyes and peered through the glass and said, “But there are two cars here….”

  “Let’s check the back.”

  There was a single door, made of steel, with a good lock, but no handle. Apparently meant to be opened only from the inside. They knocked on it for a while, with no response.

  “I’m getting worried here,” Harmon said.

  Shay nodded.

  Harmon said, “I need to get into my stuff.”

  They went back to the truck, and Cruz asked, “Nobody home?”

  “Nobody answering, anyway,” Harmon said. He pulled what little luggage they had—mostly clothes in duffel bags and backpacks—out of the back of the truck, lifted the tire cover, pulled the spare and then the floor cover out, and finally pried up a small trapdoor in the floor. Beneath it was a shallow box containing two fattish foot-long tubes wrapped in nylon cloths. He set them aside and pulled on a tab that lifted the floor of the box, revealing an odd-looking instrument with a pistol grip and a trigger and, instead of a barrel, a long loop of stiff wire.

  “What is all this stuff?” Shay asked.

  “The stuff they’d probably put us in jail for.” He touched the tubes. “These are sound suppressors for the M15s. You screw on one of these things and a shot sounds not much louder than a hand clap.”

  “What’s the gun thing?” she asked.

  He held it in his hand and said, “Called a rake. It opens locks. Battery-operated.”

  “Where do you get this stuff?” Cruz asked.

  “Actually, we’re trained in it—the guys I used to work with. All that James Bond stuff—hot-wiring cars, picking locks, building atomic bombs out of trash cans and women’s cosmetics….”

  He checked the area for watchers, then said to Cruz, “Pretend like you’re changing a tire,” he said. “I’m going to try this.”

  He went to the door, knocked a couple more times, looked around again, then pushed the wire into the lock and pulled the trigger while twisting the lock cylinder. There was a chattering sound, and in ten seconds or so, the lock suddenly rolled over, and he pulled the door out an inch.

  He walked back to the others and said, “Door’s open. Let’s put this all back together before we go inside…in case we have to leave in a hurry.”

  —

  Twist called: “What’s going on?”

  Shay answered him in a low voice, even though there didn’t appear to be a soul around to hear: “Go out to the entrance road and watch for cops. We’ve got the door open; we’re going in.”

  —

  When they had the car back to normal, they walked up to the front door, X on a leash. As soon as Harmon pulled the door open, X snarled, showing his teeth, and took an odd stance, his back legs cocked for attack but his front legs and head pulled back, as though he were frightened.

  “That’s not good,” Harmon said.

  He took his handgun out of the lower pocket on his cargo pants and edged inside.

  There was nothing to be seen in the lobby, but Harmon said, “Blood.”

  “Where?” Shay asked.

  “I don’t know, but I can smell it,” he said. “X can, too.”

  Shay sniffed and picked up the odor. She slipped the compact 9 mm pistol out of the concealed-carry holster on her hip. Harmon said, “Cruz, don’t touch anything—cover your hand with your sleeve and pull the door shut.”

  Cruz did that, and Harmon said, “Shay, we need to go through that door to the back, but we don’t want to touch it. Get one of those brochures on the counter, and use it to cover your hand when you turn the doorknob. Stand off to the far side of the door and push it open with your foot. And be sure to put the brochure in your pocket when you’ve done that. We can’t leave it behind.”

  Shay did as he said and kicked the door open. Harmon went through, his gun up in a two-handed shooting position. He said, “Oh boy.”

  Shay stepped in behind him. Two bodies were sprawled on the floor, both burly males with short hair, sharing a puddle of almost black blood; they both had holstered guns on their hips. They’d been shot in the head.

  “Do not touch anything with your skin,” Harmon said. “Don’t spit or vomit. That DNA shit’s gotten really good.”

  “Let’s just get out of here,” Cruz said from the doorway.

  “I need to look around for a sec,” Harmon said. “Cruz, you go back to the car and drive it out of here. Take X with you. Do not touch anything as you’re doing it. Call Twist and Cade, tell them about this, tell them again about calling us if they see cops. Oh, pull the front door shut behind you. It’ll lock automatically.”

  “If you’re staying, I’d rather stay….”

  Harmon said, “I need you to get our car out of here. Look for cops and warn us. If we get caught here, we’re going to jail for a while.”

  Cruz looked at Shay, who nodded and said, “Go.”

  When he was gone, Harmon said, “Don’t step in the blood.”

  They were in a small room with a heavy wooden bench that was chest-high to Shay and had a scarred top and four high stools around it. On one wall was a pegboard with a lot of screwdrivers and screwdriver-like tools and a few expensive-looking wooden-handled wrenches and pliers. An alarm panel hung on another wall: Harmon looked at it and said, “The alarm’s off.”

  Shay said, “Why would…,” thought about it, then said, “Of course. They turned it off when Thorne showed up, Thorne shot them, but he wouldn’t know the code to turn the alarm back on, even if he wanted to.”

  Harmon nodded and edged toward another partly open door. He nudged it all the way open with an elbow, and they stepped into a much larger room with metalworking equipment that Shay didn’t recognize and several more of the heavy benches with a variety of vises. Long, scary-looking rifles stood on special racks on two of the benches, both rifles on barrel-mounted tripods wired into Apple laptops. O
ne wall had a barred storage area with racks that contained various gun components and parts, along with a stack of unopened laptop boxes.

  At the far end of the room was a glass wall, behind which were three desks, each with a desktop computer, and some filing cabinets. Harmon went that way, and Shay followed. He found a server whose connection had been pulled out of the wall.

  Harmon pointed at it. “Probably had a video capability that might have been running out to the Net….” He scanned the ceiling and then said, “There.”

  Shay looked and saw a small, dark hole just where one wall joined the ceiling. The camera behind it would have been pointed at the door and would have covered most of the room. Harmon knelt in a corner beneath the camera and found a cable and said, “It was hard-wired, not wireless…and it ran into…”

  He found a fist-sized box that in turn was connected to the now disconnected server. Another wire ran into the box, and he traced it to a ceiling-mounted camera in the large workroom.

  “Thorne was cleaning up,” Harmon said. He waved a hand at the filing cabinets: they were all open, and several of the drawers were empty. All the computers had been taken apart, and when they looked inside, Shay said, “No hard drives.”

  “He erased himself from their records,” Harmon said, “and, by killing them, all their memories of him. Okay, there’s nothing here. Let’s get out. Don’t touch—”

  “Anything.”

  Going out, Harmon paused both in the smaller back room and in the lobby. “No cameras. The first time Thorne was here, he wouldn’t have missed the cameras in the back, so this time he probably came in, walked into the second room with them, and killed them right there. Then he’d have put on a mask, gone into the back, and ripped out the server. So the cameras went out to a spooling memory bank on the Net, but all they’d have seen for a couple seconds was a guy in a mask.”

  “What about the first time he came here? There’d be a record of that.”

  “Maybe, but probably not,” Harmon said. “These things usually spool a month, then start over. They don’t just spool endlessly. If he got the gun two months ago, or three or four, that memory has probably been written over.”

  “Wonder if there was another gun? You know, a super-super-gun,” Shay asked.

  “No way to know for sure, but I don’t think so,” Harmon said. “If he’s planning to do something like what we’re thinking about, he’d want a gun he’d shot a lot. Not something new. With a shot like what we’re talking about, even the slightest unfamiliarity could screw things up.”

  “We’ve been here too long,” Shay said. “Gotta go.”

  “You’re right.”

  —

  Because Harmon wanted to get as far away from Waxahachie as they could, as fast as they could, they wound up going all the way back through Dallas on I-35 East until they saw signs for the University of North Texas. They got tacos from a food truck and sat on benches under some trees in front of a red-brick-and-stone building.

  “Why do you want to go back to Oklahoma City?” Twist asked.

  “Because we can get there in a hurry, like we’ve never left,” Harmon said. “We’ll talk to Armie again, if we can. He’ll have seen us last night and then again today in midafternoon. We can’t let ourselves be hooked into these murders. And if Armie was serious about a plane…we might need one. Depending on what Thorne does.”

  Shay said to Cade, “You gotta keep tracking him. Anything new?”

  “Not yet,” Cade said.

  Twist asked Harmon, “On a scale of one to ten…”

  “Eleven,” Harmon said.

  Thorne rode in a deep sleep and near silence from Scottsdale to Washington, D.C., in one of Varek Royce’s jets. The rifle and its sound suppressor were contained in an aging Fender guitar case, covered with a variety of stickers from EarthQuaker Devices, MESA/Boogie, and other music equipment manufacturers, in case somebody didn’t get the point.

  He’d flown from Waxahachie to the Deer Valley Airport, then had ridden with his bags and the rifle in a limousine from Deer Valley to Scottsdale. The whole idea had been to break up his trail, in case it was ever investigated. The Gulfstream G280 jet had been waiting for him, and they took off just minutes after his arrival. The pilot and copilot had asked no questions but told him that a cold box lunch was available in a bin just behind the cockpit. Thorne hadn’t bothered with it but asked if he could pull out a couple of blankets and sleep in the aisle.

  Not necessary, he was told: the two seats closest to the forward bulkhead would fold flat, into reasonably comfortable beds. He had them set that up, and a minute after the plane’s wheels left the ground, he was asleep.

  He was very nearly exhausted. The past few days had been loaded with stress, and he’d had very little sleep; the anxiety of his new assignment had worn on him. He thought he had maybe an eighty to ninety percent chance of pulling it off. That was worth doing, but the call was a close one. At this point, he could still run. Plenty of jobs in Africa and the Middle East for “security consultants” who weren’t too fussy about who got hurt, or why.

  On the other hand, if he pulled off this mission, he could have almost anything he wanted. Almost anything—and right here in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Varek had promised a major payday, he’d get a shot at some kind of high-level White House or CIA security role, if he wanted one, and he might even live forever….

  They flew into Manassas Regional Airport, a half hour or forty-five minutes south of Washington, in the early afternoon. Thorne carried his guitar case and gear bags to a waiting black limo with tinted windows and sat in the back without talking to the driver, who asked no questions but took him north. They never got to the capital, but pulled into an underground parking lot at an expensive-looking red-brick apartment building. There were a dozen other cars—Mercedes-Benzes, Jaguars, Porsches, one fiery red Ferrari—and three more black limousines. The driver stopped next to a bank of elevators. Thorne called the left-hand elevator and, once inside, took a key out of his pocket, stuck it in a lock below the floor buttons, turned it once to the left, and punched the 9 button.

  The procedure locked out all other floors and prevented the elevator from stopping for any other calls.

  At the ninth floor, he got out, looked both ways down an empty hallway, turned right, walked to a door marked 920, and went inside.

  The room had been designed for confidential conferences, with a dozen chairs, a couple couches, a bar. Three people were waiting next to a wall of tinted windows: Royce, Earl Denyers from the CIA, and Lawton Jeffers, the vice president of the United States. Denyers had his anti-bugging machine sitting on a coffee table.

  They all looked at him as he came in, and the vice president finally said, “So you’re the guy.”

  “So far,” Thorne said. He put the guitar case on the bar. “We’ve still got time to back out.”

  “The FBI was at the ranch yesterday with that Odin Remby kid,” Denyers said. “They had a forensic team in there, and word is, they’ve identified parts of at least four bodies so far.”

  “And we can’t stop the trouble with Dash? Make her the top dog at Singular?” Thorne asked.

  Denyers shook his head. “See, there’s the problem—how did the kid know exactly where the burn pit was? How did they manage to remove the experimental subjects? They must’ve had the place under surveillance, but for how long? You and I flew out of there, Royce was there, Dash was there, Ian Wyeth was there. If they have any brains at all, they’ll have taken pictures. They’ll have tail numbers of the planes. We have to stop the investigation right where it is or we’re all finished.”

  “But the vice president wasn’t there?” Thorne said, a question in his voice.

  Royce smiled and said, “No, but the vice president probably figures if it comes right down to it, either me or Earl will roll over on him in exchange for immunity.”

  “That’s what I figure,” Jeffers said with dry humor. He rattled the ice cubes in the glass he was h
olding. “We got another shot of that Johnnie Walker?”

  —

  When it came to talking about what they were actually going to do, the vice president shied away until Denyers said, “Goddammit, Law, we’re going to kill the president. You can’t keep trying to sneak that off your plate. We’re gonna kill him and you’re in on it. We’ve got a plan that can pull it off, but if we don’t, there’s a good chance we’ll all go to prison. So let’s get that out there and figure out the last moves.”

  “Just have a hard time saying it,” Jeffers said.

  “You gotta say it, and you gotta think it. Now, have you scheduled a place you can be that’s pretty far out? Not San Francisco or anywhere near New Mexico…”

  “Yeah, there’s a private fund-raiser down in Florida for the senior senator. He’ll be delighted that I’m droping in—he’s been begging me to, and I’ve told him I’ll try. So I’ll be in Palm Beach.”

  Denyers turned to Royce. “How about you?”

  “I’ll be in San Antonio, on business.”

  Denyers nodded. “And Thorne and I’ll be on-site.”

  They talked about tactical details for a while, and Thorne gave them rehearsal notes—he’d been on the shooting platform twice, had timed his exit from the building.

  “Nobody’ll hear the shot,” he said. “They may never find the shooting platform. If they do find it, I estimate best time possible to pinpointing the platform at two hours. By that time, I’ll be eighty or ninety miles away. It should be a very clean op.”

  And then there was a long, long gap of silence.

  —

  Jeffers stood up and walked over to the Fender case. “A talented man—with everything else, you play the guitar. You mind if I look?”

  “I don’t mind you looking, but don’t touch the weapon, and especially not the scope,” Thorne said. Almost as an afterthought, he added, “Sir.”

  Jeffers threw the latches on the case and lifted the lid. He took in the rifle and said, “Looks like a regular old elk gun.”

  “If you look closely at the base of the scope, you’ll see there’s a USB 3.0 port,” Thorne said.