The Equalizer

by Michael Sloan

  He moved on to the third pipe.

  This one was even narrower than the one he’d just traveled down. It was about four feet high. A pipe from the ceiling led down into it, but part of it had been cleaved away. McCall looked at Elena’s blueprint on the LED screen, superimposed over the blueprint of pipes on this level. This was the last one highlighted. It snaked along the bottom of the blueprint and then simply disappeared.

  McCall shut off the iPhone and clipped it to his belt. He got down on his hands and knees and crawled into the pipe. The ceiling was just above his head. His shoulders scraped along the pipe on both sides. He switched on the little flashlight. All the beam showed ahead was darkness and the floor of the pipe.

  McCall took a deep breath and started to crawl.

  If the claustrophobia had got to him before, now it completely engulfed him. He felt like a rat that had been coaxed and tricked into a long dank tunnel from which there was no escape. He had no idea how long the pipe might run, as it had disappeared off the bottom of Elena’s blueprint. It could be miles. In which case McCall would be trapped. The thought of having to back out the way he’d come was terrifying. There had to be a cutoff point. If he saw no light at the end of the pipe in twenty minutes, he would have to start crawling backward.

  But he knew he couldn’t do that.

  He was sure Diablo was somewhere ahead of him. That he had taken this same elaborate route, using the same blueprint that Berezovsky had provided him with. He would not be expecting anyone to come along behind him—certainly no one crawling through this barely accessible piece of stinking, rusting pipe. But he would know how far he had to crawl to reach whatever his destination was.

  McCall had no idea.

  The minutes became meaningless in darkness only alleviated by the small white arc of the flashlight.

  Which began to flicker.

  McCall had not checked the batteries. He’d grabbed the flashlight from a drawer in the kitchen of his apartment. Stupid. He should have bought fresh batteries for the trip, but he’d had no idea if he’d even be using the flashlight.

  McCall stopped as the voices in his head began to scream at him.

  Get out of this metal coffin! Get out!

  He snapped off the flashlight to save the batteries. He closed his eyes in the utter darkness. Slowly he regulated his breathing. He opened his eyes again, switched back on the flashlight, and crawled forward. His breathing was the only sound in his world, and his hot breath came back at him, stale and rancid. There was little air in the pipe, and he was using it up fast.

  Time had stopped, the way it had stopped for Serena Johanssen in the isolation of her solitary prison cell.

  No light.

  No human contact.

  No sound.

  And McCall was buried deep in the ground.

  Then his world began to vibrate. There was a far-off rumbling sound. At first McCall couldn’t imagine what was causing it. Then he got it.

  A train.

  Thirty seconds later the train thundered very close to the buried pipe. Pieces of it collapsed and rained down onto McCall’s figure, along with rock and dirt and cement.

  He was buried in an avalanche of choking filth.

  McCall coughed and retched. The cave-in lasted only a few seconds, then the vibration ceased and the sound of the train became distant until there was utter silence again.

  The silence of a tomb.

  McCall tried inching forward. More debris rained down on him. He squirmed his body to either side, crawling out of the debris on his elbows and knees. He shook the dirt out of his eyes. It was caked through his hair. He stopped again, coughing rackingly as the dust cloud settled over him.

  He remained absolutely still and waited.

  Slowly the choking cloud dissipated.

  McCall lay in the pipe, his shoulders up against both sides of it, his heart hammering in his chest. He had to bring his heart rate down or he’d hyperventilate. It took him a full three minutes, but he calmed his screaming nerves until they were just a murmur. He breathed in and out very slowly for another full minute. He inched forward again and came out of the last of the debris.

  Which was when he realized he’d lost the Ruger .357 Magnum in the cave-in.

  He felt around for it behind him, but his fingers didn’t close over the cold metal. He started to inch back, but more debris rained down.

  Not going to happen.

  He couldn’t turn around.

  He crawled forward.

  It might have been a few minutes later—it might have been an hour—but the darkness ahead of McCall seemed lighter. Grayer. The flashlight beam was very pale now, a sliver of wan radiance.

  Then it went out.

  McCall dropped the flashlight beside him and crawled forward faster. The grayness became more apparent. Just up ahead there was a thin swathe of light. It reflected off the pipe. The air was not as close and musty. It smelled fresher.

  McCall crawled the last few feet to the pale radiance.

  The pipe ended in a chunk of rock. The jagged opening was slightly smaller than the pipe itself. McCall wedged his shoulders through it. It would have been better to put his legs out first, but that was impossible.

  He got stuck.

  He took another couple of steadying breaths and heaved. First one shoulder, then the other moved through the pipe.

  Then his shoulders jammed again.

  Wait. Breathe. Center.

  He scraped one shoulder forward.

  The other shoulder.

  Squirmed on his stomach and fell out of the pipe onto the ground.

  He rolled over, breathing in the night air, but didn’t dare just lay there. Diablo could be standing over him with a gun pointed at his head.

  McCall pushed up onto his knees. That’s as far as he could go before his head started pounding. He waited another couple of seconds for the nausea to clear, then got to his feet and looked around.

  Trees marched right up to the rocky shelf of rock. Moonlight flared through them. There were moving shapes and lights far below him.

  McCall knew exactly where he was.

  CHAPTER 42

  The grounds of the chateau covered twenty acres. From where McCall stood he could see the imposing mansion far below, probably over a mile away and down in the valley, emblazoned with spotlights. There were people on the front lawns, vehicles moving up a long driveway, security everywhere. To the east and north of the chateau were heavily wooded areas. A hill rose up on the east. Here, on the west side of the estate, the hill was almost a mountain, climbing up through more thick woods, winding gravel and dirt paths laced through them. There would be no way to get onto the chateau grounds from either mountainside—theoretically. McCall was sure that Control had done a sweep on the east and west grounds anyway. They would have been pronounced clear on both sides.

  The Company might even have had intel about an abandoned oil pumping station a few miles from the chateau. There were probably other landmarks in the area, either operating or abandoned, none of which would have been of any interest to Control. He could not have known that a series of fractured and empty oil pipes led from that disused pumping station, burrowed in the ground, toward the chateau—and that one of them came out on the property’s west side, providing a potential assassin access to a fortified area without tripping any alarms or having to move past any security. But Alexei Berezovsky had known. No wonder he’d had Elena killed to get back that flash drive with the pumping station pipes highlighted on it—although without the map on the pumping station wall, the intel on that flash drive was virtually useless to Control.

  Far below, McCall could see limos heading up to the magnificent old chateau. Troops and Policie České Republiky lined the entire driveway route. He looked up onto the roofs of the mansion. He couldn’t see them, but he knew Company snipers were on those roofs with high-powered rifles with nightscopes on them. Constantly surveying the scene around the arriving dignitaries.

 
But not looking west up to the side of a mountain.

  McCall looked above him. He could not see Diablo in the trees, but he didn’t expect to. He only could calculate what sniper position he would use if he was going to assassinate a target at the front of the chateau. He found one—a copse of thick trees where a stone wall meandered in and out. The angle would be right.

  McCall started to climb up the hill directly above him, through the trees, his breathing labored from the journey through the pipes. He had started out the night with two guns, a Beretta 9 mm and a Ruger .357 Magnum. Now he had no guns.

  Shit happens.

  So he had to get right behind the assassin, very close.

  * * *

  Control watched the arrivals from a small parlor off the main hallway of the chateau, on six different monitors from cameras set up around the mansion. The Secret Service were in charge of the security for the Summit Conference; Control and his Company agents were there for added manpower, experience, and to appease Congress in the wake of recent terrorist attacks. Control had already sent ten agents out on four sweeps of the extensive grounds. The east and west sides of the chateau grounds were impassable, but he’d sent agents up those hills anyway. All clear. The north side of the chateau was very heavily wooded with no way in from behind a ten-foot stone fence that had more surveillance cameras on it than the Pentagon. The only egress into the chateau was from the south, where the big iron gates stood announcing Letenské Chateau. The driveway wound through the extensive grounds from a narrow country road. There were video cameras on the ornate gates and Control had fitted six more of them along the driveway up to the chateau. He’d scanned tapes on the traffic in and out of the chateau for the last sixteen hours. Sixty percent of it had been the press and media. All of their IDs had been run and verified. No unauthorized personnel had been allowed onto the grounds. His men were patrolling behind the perimeter set up by the Secret Service. There were practically more Czech troops and Policie České Republiky here than press and dignitaries.

  There had been no intel about any terrorist attack on the Summit Conference. The usual chatter and saber rattling, but nothing that had sent up any red flags at The Company. But because of the eleventh-hour amendment to the guest list, security had been ratcheted up even higher. The vice president had come down with a tummy bug. He’d been throwing up for twelve hours and did not make the trip to Prague, with regrets.

  So the President of the United States had changed his schedule and decided to attend the summit.

  It had been a very last minute decision, the president barely expected to arrive in time for the start of the conference. Intel that he was coming had been restricted to very few people. It had not been reported on any of the major worldwide news outlets or local news broadcasts. He could not be a target of any assassination attempt that had been months in the planning. But Control could feel his stomach muscles tied in knots. His instinct told him something was wrong. It was based on no intel whatsoever. It was just a vague feeling of apprehension.

  But staring at the various monitor screens, there was nothing at all to warrant the foreboding. Everything was going like clockwork. The secretary of state was about to arrive. Five minutes after him the President of the United States would be stepping out of a limo in front of the chateau and Control would be in the background, watching as he shook hands with their chateau hosts and was escorted inside, with a phalanx of Secret Service agents around him. No one in the crowd outside the chateau could get to the president or any of the other world leaders. Control’s gut feeling was a sniper’s shot. But from where? The grounds of the chateau were protected and had been searched four times. This was the safest place in the Czech Republic.

  Control wondered if the ulcer in his stomach had started to bleed again.

  * * *

  The stone wall was four feet high. Jovan Durković knelt at it, trees crowding in on both sides. Below the wall was a precipitous drop twenty feet down the steep slope to a flat plateau in the trees. There were landscaped gardens there around a white gazebo, but the gazebo was falling into disrepair. Many of the slats were missing and a section of the gazebo itself had fallen in at the back. There was a rusting black wrought-iron table in the wooden shell and four wrought-iron chairs. The gardens around it were choked with weeds. No one had lounged here for a pleasant afternoon of tea or lemonade in a long time. There was a much gentler incline two hundred yards to Durković’s left, even a path, although that was also overgrown with weeds. He figured you would need an army of gardeners to keep the grounds of this chateau flowering and blooming. Obviously the owners were only interested in what was a few hundred yards around their magnificent house. Which suited Durković just fine. They would not be sending Secret Service agents up here to look for potential assassins. Perhaps there had been a sweep of the entire grounds, but that would have been hours ago, as soon as the Secret Service and the Policie České Republiky had arrived.

  Durković had put together the AWC M91 breakdown rifle. It was a new one he had bought in Berlin, having had to leave his prior weapon in the back of the Volga at the Disaster Park outside Moscow. It was the same model and year. He liked the feel of it. It was like an old friend in his hands. He knelt at the stone wall, noting that it was crumbling in places. No maintenance was being carried out on this mountainside. Whatever was there was being left to rust and rot. He’d been careful to find a position on top of the wall that was solid. His right leg was folded beneath him. His left foot was flat on the hard ground. His left elbow was propped on his left knee. He made a minor adjustment to the MARS6-WPT night-vision scope and looked through it.

  He had it sighted on the top of the chateau. There were three roofs, the main one and the two roofs over the east and west wings. He saw black-suited snipers on all three of the roofs. There were six men to a roof, two of them facing north, south, east, and west. Durković knew the ones on the east and west sides would be the least diligent. The likelihood of a threat coming from either side was minimal. The Secret Service snipers, or Special Forces soldiers, or whoever were on those roofs, would be concentrating their attention on the approaches from the north and south. But even through the nightscopes of the snipers looking west, there was no way Durković could be seen in his position in the dense copse of trees shrouding the crumbling stone wall.

  He was invisible.

  They would not know where the shot had come from. And by the time they figured it out, impossibly on the west slope of the grounds, he’d be inside the pipe and headed back to the oil pumping station.

  He moved the scope down to the front of the chateau. There must have been a hundred people along the driveway and on the immaculate front lawns, most of them media and press, lots of Secret Service and some other personnel he didn’t recognize. They were searching the crowd for potential threats. He had nothing to worry about from them.

  Limos were pulling in. The President of China, Xi Jinping, had just disembarked from the back of his limo. Some delegate from the White House was greeting him. Durković loved the leader’s titles. Xi Jinping was the general secretary of the Communist Party of China and president of the People’s Republic of China. A dictator and a president—also head of the military, Durković was certain.

  Behind the Chinese leader’s limo another one was pulling up. A Secret Service agent opened the back door.

  The United States Secretary of State climbed out.

  He was a little stooped over and stiff from riding in the car. He’d probably just got off a plane from Washington, D.C., several hours in the air. He stretched and shook hands with a young man in a dark suit waiting by the side of the driveway. Durković knew it would be there, but he rode the scope up the young man’s face to his left ear to a close-up of the listening aid, just for the hell of it.

  Durković could afford to take his time. He would kill the secretary of state just before he walked through the main doors of the chateau. If it looked as if people were going to be in his line of fire,
he would shoot him down earlier. But he liked to savor the knowledge of the kill until the last possible moment. The sniper’s true omnipotence. He was above the crowd, above the importance of individual lives. He was over a mile away, and yet, through the scope, as close and personal as a man could get. The targets never saw it coming. Never had a split second of realization their meaningless lives were about to end.

  But when he wounded them first, then they knew. Then the awful truth clawed at their throats and churned in their stomachs. Then they screamed in their heads for mercy, for more life, so many things they still had to accomplish, so many loved ones they wanted to see again, even if it was only for a few seconds.

  Too late.

  Durković noticed there was some excitement in the crowd.

  It would not be over the American secretary of state. Yes, an important world figure, vital to American relationships abroad, but hardly a man to rouse the press out of their ennui. Although he was very important to Durković, as he represented a twenty-million-dollar payday.

  A limo was pulling up behind the one that had just disgorged the secretary of state. Secret Service men, and one woman, Durković noted with interest, were trotting along with the limo on both sides. The vehicle came to a halt. The back door was opened. The crowd of media reporters surged forward, held back by the Policie České Republiky and a perimeter line of more Secret Service agents along both sides.

  The unmistakable figure of the President of the United States stepped out of the back of the limo.

  Durković was astounded. His intel from Berezovsky had not included the most powerful human being in the free world. Yet there he was, larger than life in the nightscope of his MARS sight. Durković would carry out his assignment. He would kill the United States Secretary of State.

  But right in front of him was a fifty-million-dollar bonus.

  That was the price some terrorists had put on the world leader’s head.

  Durković kept his scope on the President of the United States.