Cutting Edge pp-6

by Tom Clancy

  Julia gave her another little push.

  “Let’s go, Viv,” she said in a low, insistent voice. “Now.”

  The grey offered a final bit of resistance and then complied.

  Moments later Julia was hurrying past the shop’s steel back door. Viv stopped once to look behind them, but Julia got her attention with a light tap to the head and urged her on.

  Julia had gone just beyond the door when she saw a second pair of men in power company uniforms rounding the opposite side of the building.

  They spotted her at the same time, locking their eyes on her, staring straight at her through the driving rain.

  Then they started walking rapidly toward her.

  Julia froze with alarm. She did not know who these people were, or what they wanted. Didn’t understand what was happening. But there was no longer any question that they meant trouble.

  A heartbeat later, she realized how serious it was.

  As she watched the men approach, Julia saw both of them reach into their coveralls and suddenly bring out weapons, guns of a sort she knew weren’t pistols, but thought might be Uzis or something very similar.

  She glanced over her shoulder, her heart lurching. The men she’d seen at the west window had turned the corner of the shop and were advancing on her from behind, those same compact assault rifles also having appeared in their hands.

  They were closing in.

  Four armed men.

  Closing in on her from both sides.

  Julia stood rooted in place another second, trying to think despite the terror whirling through her mind. She couldn’t go forward, couldn’t retreat, and recognized it would be hopeless to consider making a run for the woods. What, then? What was she supposed to do?

  Her eyes darted to the back door of the shop. If she could make it inside, get to a phone fast enough, she’d at least have a chance to call for help. The police, her father’s security people…

  It was her only option.

  “Viv!” she shouted. “Come on!”

  Julia hurled herself at the door, tore it open, and ran into the shop, Viv sprinting after her, following her inside a half second before she slammed and locked it behind her. She passed through the storage and orientation rooms to the rear of the counter, lunged for the phone by the cash register, snatched it up… then suddenly felt every ounce of blood in her veins drain toward the floor.

  There was no dial tone. No sound in the receiver. Nothing but the flat, crushing silence of a dead line.

  All at once Julia remembered seeing the workers, the men who’d been posing as workers, high up on the utility poles as she’d driven in from the road a little while ago.

  The telephone wires, she thought.

  Whoever they were, they had cut the wires.

  She stood for the briefest of moments, her breath coming in broken gasps, Viv pressing against her leg in the cramped area behind the storefront counter. Then she heard a loud thump outside the storage room, another, and knew her pursuers were trying to break their way in through the door. One chance left, and not much time. She tossed down the receiver and grabbed her purse off the counter, snapping open its clasp, reaching inside.

  At the rear of the shop, a crackle of automatic gunfire, then the sound of the back door bursting open. Steel or not, the bullets would have destroyed the simple cylinder lock in its knob.

  She groped in the purse for her cellular phone, pulled it out, flipped open its earpiece. There were footsteps behind her now, hurrying through the storeroom. Only seconds left. Julia’s heart racing, she fingered the cellular’s ON button, listened to the inane electronic theme that sounded when it was powering up, waited with maddening helplessness for the little smiley face welcome image to pop up on the LCD screen—

  She had enough time to see the figure of a tall, broad man appear outside the storefront entrance, just enough to note his utility worker’s uniform through its glass pane before the door exploded inward with a loud crash, the little clutch of bells above it jangling wildly, its wood frame fracturing, splintering apart as something stormed into the shop ahead of the man, an animal, a huge black-pelted dog, hurtling forward at his shouted instruction, coming straight at her, all fur and teeth.

  That was when Viv leaped out from behind the counter.

  * * *

  Kuhl had kept his stubby MP5 subsonic extended as he kicked in the rescue center’s door, ordering Lido forward with the German commands demonstrated by Anagkazo.

  The sight of a greyhound dashing out around the end of the counter caused him some small surprise and perhaps even a cold flash of appreciation for its pluck. But his cardinal rule was to be ready for the unexpected… why else had he acquired the Schutzhund dogs?

  The grey leaped at his alpha in a blur of speed and collided with it midair, knocking it down onto the floor with its own momentum, snapping at it with a kind of rumbling growl. Its teeth sank into the alpha’s shaggy black hide and slicked its breast and neck with blood.

  Kuhl swung his carbine at the greyhound from where he stood in the door, squeezed off a rapid three-round burst. Crimson spurting from its flank, the grey emitted a shrill yelping scream that sounded almost human, rolled from his alpha in a flail of limbs, and then lay heaped on the floor.

  The situation remedied, Kuhl shifted his attention to his target. She stood behind the counter, staring at the greyhound’s still, blood-splashed form with mute horror. There was a cell phone gripped in her right hand.

  Kuhl did not pause. He held his MP5 straight out and crossed the room toward her, simultaneously calling Sorge and Arek from the parking area. Back on all fours near the sprawled grey, his lead dog seemed essentially unharmed despite the deep bites it had sustained.

  Kuhl ordered the alpha forward again.

  “Voran, hopp!”

  Go on, over.

  Lido reared toward the four-foot counter, bounded over it, and fell upon the Gordian daughter — a leaping drive that knocked her back against the wall and then down onto the floor under his mammoth weight. Fixing its eyes on her right hand, interpreting the phone it gripped as a possible weapon, the alpha took quick action to disarm her and buried its fangs in her wrist.

  She produced a sharp cry of pain, her blood mixing with the alpha’s saliva, smearing its teeth and gums with red-laced foam.

  Kuhl saw the open cell phone drop from her hand and go clattering to the floor as the great canine held her arm in its bite. He came around the counter, slid the phone out of her reach with his booted toe, and reached down for it.

  It was an UpLink, he noted aridly.

  Kuhl examined its backlit main display screen and determined there was no active connection. Then he pressed the mouse key and went through its menu selections until he found the call history feature. The Gordian daughter’s recently dialed phone numbers appeared in the order the calls had been placed. Satisfied that the last she had made was not a 911, he highlighted the number and pressed SEND to determine who the recipient might have been.

  An answering machine picked up after two rings, its greeting in the Gordian child’s voice — her home phone. Kuhl disconnected. Most likely the purpose of her call had been to remotely check incoming messages, but he wanted to assure himself she had not left a message intended to alert anyone who might discover it as to precisely what had occurred here.

  When they learned, it would be at his will.

  Poised over his captive behind the shop counter, Kuhl turned his MP5 down at her, peripherally aware his men had gathered in the small back room to his right. Sorge and Arek sat at wait behind him.

  “Give me your remote play-back code,” he told her.

  Silent in her pain, her eyes bright with defiance, she glared at him over the barrel of the submachine gun. Blood dripped from her arm over the alpha’s clamped, bristling jaws.

  There was, Kuhl realized, much of the father in her.

  He pushed his weapon closer to her face, decided to make a threat of what already had been done
.

  “The code,” he said. “Give it to me, or I will order the woman and infant in the house downhill killed.”

  She kept looking up at Kuhl, her eyes boring into his own.

  “I do not bluff,” he said.

  A flicker of hesitation on her features. A blink. Then her silence broke.

  “Six-four-eight-two,” she said.

  Kuhl recalled the home phone number, interrupted her recorded greeting with the code. There were no incoming messages stored in the machine.

  Good, he thought. His assumption had been correct. She hadn’t had time for hasty warnings.

  Kuhl hit the END button again, moved the scroll bar down to the next listed number, and then dialed it as an added precaution. He listened to a prerecorded announcement for the business hours of a sporting goods shop. Yet another prosaic call.

  Good and better.

  “The people down at the house,” the Gordian daughter said in a croaking voice. Her arm still locked in the alpha’s mouth. “I don’t know what you want from me… but promise you won’t hurt them.”

  Kuhl said nothing. He motioned to his men.

  They closed in around her, rifles leveled.

  “Wait, please.” A single tear spilled from the corner of her eye and tracked down her cheek. “My dog… at least let me take a look at the dog… I can’t just leave her—”

  Kuhl interrupted her with a shake of his head.

  “No, my caged robin,” he said. His face set. “No promises, no negotiation.”

  TEN

  VARIOUS LOCALES

  It was nine o’clock when Rob Howell finally saw the wood-burned sign marking his hidden drive in front of him. As he sloshed his Camaro toward the foot of the drive, Rob glanced up at the utility pole near the PG&E routing station across the road and didn’t see any downed or sagging phone wires, but knew he couldn’t draw any conclusions from that alone. A service outage could have occurred elsewhere in the grid, or resulted from a loose contact that would be discernible only on close inspection.

  What couldn’t have been more evident was that the area had been under heavy showers for a while. The concrete circle around the station where utility workers would sometimes park had been set off the road at a slight incline, and Rob didn’t remember ever noticing a significant rain buildup on its surface. But a deep sheet of water had covered and overflowed the empty apron, gurgling down its lip to swell the drainage culvert at the margin of the blacktop.

  Rob’s quick glance at the station evoked a twinge of residual annoyance at the two power-company vehicles that had sped past him in the opposite direction about five miles back, soon after he’d turned onto Pescadero Creek road at the Highway 84 junction. A van and a wagon, he recalled that he’d seen them hurrying toward him on the deluged road, slowed his car, and expected their drivers to do the same out of common sense — if not simple courtesy. Instead they’d continued along at a full tear and splashed his windshield with a blinding curtain of water that threw him into a brief swerve. Rob had been astounded by their recklessness, and was certain he’d have landed in a ditch if his experienced driver’s reflexes had been a whit slower.

  But there were other things to occupy his mind right now. Pulling into the driveway, Rob glimpsed Julia’s Honda Passport straight ahead outside the rescue center, then saw his doddering old Ford pickup over to the left next to his house. These seemed sure signs that both Julia and his wife were around. The big question, then, was where?

  Rob drove the thirty feet or so toward the house, coasted left onto the dirt-and-gravel track branching toward it, and suddenly heard the dogs barking like crazy out back in their pen.

  A sense of foreboding crept over him. There was no way Cynth would leave them in the pen under any circumstance, not in this torrent. What they were doing outside? And what in the world could possibly be causing them to make so much noise?

  As he ducked out of the Camaro to the front door, keys in hand, Rob had time to note almost unconsciously that nobody had come to the window upon hearing him pull up.

  Oblivious to the accordion folder on its stand beside him, Rob paused in the doorway to wipe the soles of his shoes on the entry mat, an act of habitual normalcy in a life from which every trace of the normal was about to depart. He would never recall anything else from the time he swung off the road until after the police arrived. He would not even remember mustering the presence of mind to call them on his cell phone… this hole punched in his memory by shock and horror the only mercy availed him that day, and perhaps all that kept him sane in the countless tormented days and nights to come.

  For Rob Howell, the chasm between before and after would open with that automatic, momentary pause.

  So absurd and yet so natural.

  Wiping his shoe bottoms on the mat.

  “Cynth?” he called from inside the door.

  No answer.

  “Cynth? You home?”

  Still no answer.

  Rob moved farther through the house, saw the kitchen light was on, and found his gaze suddenly drawn to a puddle of wetness on the small section of floor visible through its entry from his angle in the middle of the hallway. Something was spilled there on the floor. Something red. Splashed across the floor tiles, tendriled out into the thin puttied spaces between them. A gleaming puddle of red on Cynth’s precious new kitchen tiles, which Rob had painstakingly laid himself not three months earlier as a fifth anniversary present to her.

  His heart thumped.

  “Cynth?”

  Not a sound except for the greys barking outside.

  Dread perched on his shoulders like some cruel taloned bird, Rob rushed into the kitchen, looked down near the feet of the table, and began screaming wildly into the silence of the house, his legs melting away underneath him, the world blurring out in a gush of tears, screaming, screaming, his wails of horror and grief rising from the bottom of his lungs until they shredded off into hoarse, hysterical sobs.

  What he had seen was an abomination.

  “Hey, Roger, you made it!” Hugh Bennett said in a bassoon voice, coming over from the parlor entry. “Been looking forward to this a while… heard you were finally on the way from the airport! Guess it’s been quite a haul for all of us staying here — except Tom o’ course!”

  In Gabon only a few hours, Roger Gordian was not too surprised to find King Hughie waiting for him at the large colonial home of Thomas Sheffield, an expat Sedco official whose guest he would be for the next couple of days.

  What did catch him unprepared was the retinue of perhaps eight or ten suited, seated Sedco executives in the parlor behind Hughie.

  “Good to see you.” Gordian looked into his large, broad-cheeked face. Bushy white eyebrows ran together under the forehead like a solid raft of clouds. “Everyone’s here for dinner?”

  Bennett slapped him on the back as they shook hands.

  “And an informal meeting, Gabon-style!” King Hughie said. “They say people like doing business at night in these parts! And I say, great! No time beats the present for ironing out the details of tomorrow’s ceremonious occasion!”

  Gordian looked at him. Did he really believe everything that left his mouth had exclamatory value?

  “I hope you’ll understand that I need time to freshen up,” he said. “It has been a long trip.”

  Hughie looked over at Sheffield, who had been standing beside Gordian in apparent mortification.

  “Not a problem!” he said. “Tom’s got himself a damn well-stocked wine cellar… and his cook went and prepared some beee-eau-ti-ful hors d’oeuvres to tide me over while I do my sampling!”

  The two police detectives arrived first thing the next morning with an attitude of impatient irresistibility.

  Megan’s response was to be patiently immovable.

  She had sized them up the moment they entered her office and known they were poised to intimidate. Perhaps because they were men addressing a woman, or law officers accustomed to throwing around the weigh
t of their authority, or for some combination of those or other reasons. She didn’t really care. They had stated what they wanted. She was determined to learn more about why they had come before offering her compliance. But although they wore their game faces as well as she did, and a sense of pressing urgency could be felt on both sides of her desk, Megan thought her clearer view of their relative positions might give her a bargaining edge.

  The leveler was how much their presence worried her. She couldn’t afford to let them see it.

  “Ms. Breen, we need to speak to Roger Gordian about his daughter,” said the senior investigator for the third time. His name was Erickson. Probably in his late forties. Big squarish face, cornflower blue eyes, a crop of wavy, canary blond hair wet from the rain outside. He sat with his right leg across his opposite knee, wearing brown off-the-rack mufti under his open raincoat. “You say he’s traveling someplace?”

  “He’s abroad on business,” she said. “In Africa. It’s no secret.”

  Erickson studied Megan across her desk. “Even so, you must be able to reach him. Or his spouse.” He paused, added, “We’ve tried their residence but no one seems to be present.”

  Megan converted the tension in her facial muscles to an expression of firm resolve. Erickson seemed dogged but not confrontational. He might be the one to deal with.

  “I believe Mrs. Gordian is visiting with relatives,” she said. “But you have my full attention. As the senior executive at UpLink in his absence, I’m responsible for managing its affairs. They include observing Mr. Gordian’s privacy and keeping him from being unnecessarily distracted. If you’ll tell me—”

  “How about you make those job responsibilities include giving us some cooperation?” interrupted the other man.

  He’d introduced himself as Detective Brewer, strong emphasis on the job title. Thin, narrow-eyed, and about ten years younger than his partner. A small-town cop from Sonora who was suffering from an overkill of TV crime dramas and thought tactless and pushy equaled urban tough. He wore no topcoat over his navy suit and had left his umbrella in the stand out in her reception room.