by Jon Land
She started down the corridor, one with the darkness, stopping at regular intervals to wedge packs of the plastique home. This first set was purposely misplaced. There would be lots of noise but minor structural damage on this level, the idea being to draw attention and bring the majority of the building’s inhabitants up here.
The second batch of explosives, which she now began to set, would bring the entire floor down. When this set followed the first by a generous sixty seconds, the rest of the villa’s occupants would have had ample time to charge to the source of the initial blasts and be gathered conveniently when the next series erupted. A five-minute timer for the first, a six for the second.
The blonde finished packing the fourth floor and moved to the stairway. Her plan called for the packing of the third floor with C-4 as well. When both crumbled she would have the freedom she needed to move about on the floors below. Packing the third floor with plastique took precisely three minutes, which left her comfortably ahead of schedule.
She checked her watch: under two minutes to go now before the explosions began. She had to be in position by that time to complete the second stage of her plan. The guards patrolling the walled courtyard enclosing the villa had to believe the attack was coming from outside the compound as well as inside; confusion had to be created, with illusion as the framework. Her reports indicated that the headquarters for this stronghold was in the basement. She would rely on the confusion to allow her to gain access. The woman started for the stairway, intending to descend to the second floor.
A door on the corridor opened. She pressed herself into a doorway and froze. A man was approaching, whistling to himself. An instant before he reached her she sprang out and used the butt of one of her Ingrams against his face. Dazed, he reeled back and went for his pistol as the blonde’s knife came up. Her free hand had looped around his throat before he could aim. She spun him around with a hand clamped over his mouth. In the next second her blade plunged into his back and found his heart. The man stiffened and slumped. The woman tried the door closest to her and found it open. Effortlessly, she dragged the body inside and closed it again.
Just a minute left. Damn!
“Henri, what the hell …”
Her eyes met those of the huge, bearded guard as she crossed back toward the staircase. He seemed to recognize her.
“You!”
But then he made his mistake. He lunged for her, confident he could cover the ground between them before she could steady her rifle, never expecting she would choose to encounter him hand to hand, meeting his attack with her own. The guard was huge and quick for his size, twice her weight at least, but the blonde slid by him in a blur, a hand whipping up and catching him in the throat with a whap! The man sidestepped, gagging, and felt a knee buckle as she sliced a kick into it from the side.
He tried to swing, but by then she had come up in front of him, and his groin exploded in pain. He lashed out wildly with his tree trunk of a right arm and felt the blow captured and redirected. Then a hand snaked around his chin and twisted as the one grasping his wrist pulled.
This time the snap was muted. His head flopped utterly loose. The woman let him fall and was in motion again.
Thirty seconds. No … Twenty-eight.
The plan had to be altered slightly, but with so much at stake nothing was slight. She bounded down to the second floor with no time for care and rushed to the first door on the left side of the corridor. This room would overlook the front of the compound. A clear view. A clear shot. When the explosions started, doors would open immediately, and the hall would fill almost as fast. Timing. The blonde had to use it to her advantage.
Fifteen, fourteen, thirteen …
At the count of eight, she lifted a foot to the door and put all her thrust behind it. Wood shattered at knob level, and the door flew inward. The three men inside responded instantly by grabbing for their weapons.
The blonde fired just as the first series of explosions sounded. The men danced backward with her bullets tearing into them. Her spray was too wide, too much ammo wasted, but she had to be sure. The last of the first wave of explosions rumbled as she shoved the broken door back into position. As she rushed to the window she heard the corridor behind her pulsing with screams, shouts, and the heavy pounding of feet.
Her view of the courtyard and stone fence was clear. The chaos on the outside was as widespread as inside. Men ripped rifles from their shoulders and rushed toward the house. The blonde stripped the first two square grenades from her belt and tore the pins from each.
Ten more seconds until the next wave of explosions sounded. Everything was going perfectly. She could hear dozens of footsteps pounding up and down the steps in confusion, but it was the screams of the women she had accompanied here that rose above all else.
She hurled the first of her grenades not for the center of the guards in the courtyard but well beyond them, toward the outside of the wall. This would induce them to think that the attack was two-pronged, that they were about to be penetrated from outside the wall in addition to whatever was occurring inside the house. The explosions coughed fragments of stone skyward. Inside the courtyard the guards dropped to their stomachs. A few scaled the top of the wall and began to return nonexistent fire.
The blonde hurled her second grenade and followed up quickly with two more. Her fourth lob was aimed for the inside of the courtyard now that she was confident the enemy’s forces had been splintered.
She had lost track of time when the main explosions from the floors above shook her to the bloodstained carpet. Plaster cracked, and only a nimble roll to the left saved her from being crushed under a section of the ceiling as it tumbled down. Ignoring the chaos around her, she eased back to the window and hurled another series of grenades. Then she was moving toward the door, weapons shouldered as she mentally catalogued what remained of her arsenal.
Emerging into the corridor she caught the hot smell of fire and smoke, intermixed with the scents of exposed wood and the musty innards of the ruined walls. The stairway leading up was jammed with debris. She could hear the screams of those who’d survived the blast only to be buried by the rubble.
Debris also covered the flight down to the ground floor, and the blonde had to choose her footing carefully. Reaching the first level, she turned her attention to the basement entrance, but just then the double doors in the foyer rocked inward. The blonde brought both her machine pistols from shoulders to hands and was firing almost instantly. She wheeled to bring herself closer to the basement door and dropped more of the figures pouring through the entrance. She remained exposed, oblivious to the bullets ricocheting wildly around her. One dug a chunk from the wall just over her shoulder, and she twisted in time to find a pair of gunmen racing down the stairs from the second floor, firing as they came. She felled them both with a burst from one pistol while the other she continued to blast blindly toward the door.
Click.
One clip had exhausted itself, and the second quickly followed. The blonde abandoned one of the Ingrams and used her free hand to snap a fresh magazine into the one she still held. She pulled a grenade pin with her teeth and laid down suppressing fire long enough to allow her to hurl it at the heavy cellar door. The explosion rocked her, and the door shattered at the frame. The blonde yanked both of the gas canisters from her belt and tossed them down the now exposed stairs. As the noxious smoke began to spread, she wedged her last two packs of C-4 against the nearest wall and activated the ten-second detonators. That done, she lunged through the remains of the shattered door.
Thick gray gas filled the entire stairwell leading down into the basement. The blonde stuck a small portable breathing apparatus not much larger than the mouthpiece of a scuba tank into her mouth and disappeared into the smoke. She fired her rifle wherever motion or coughing alerted her to the possibility of a weapon. She reached the bottom of the stairs and followed her instincts toward a door behind which she could hear desperate screams and people moving abo
ut.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Upstairs the plastique charges she had set on the first floor had just brought much of the ceiling down, entombing the entrance to the basement. The blonde tossed a final grenade against the door where she heard the sounds and pinned herself against the wall to shield her from the blast. She lunged back into motion before the echo had fully subsided, charging through the splintered door with rifle ready.
A few of those inside tried to fire at her, but her eyes had already locked onto them. Four were felled before she switched to the Beretta, using her shots more sparingly but with deadly effectiveness. Even as she was firing, her mind registered the smoky fire at the back of the room. She shot a man hurling himself at what she realized was a flaming barrel. Though dying, he still managed to drop a sheath of white paper into the fire.
Pistol clutched tight before her, the blonde whirled across the room. Without hesitating, she dropped her free arm deep into the fiery barrel. The flames tore at her flesh and had her nearly gagging on the pain when her fingers closed on the last pages dropped in, which had not yet burned totally. Lifting them out, she fought to ignore the burns that ran from her elbow down. She forced herself not to feel the pain.
She could hear activity above her now, the remnants of the courtyard guards regrouping, probably realizing they had been played for fools. She had time only to rush to a closet that, as expected, opened onto a secret escape tunnel that would take her safely from the fortress she had destroyed.
The man in monk’s robes moved closer to the fire in a futile effort to ward off the room’s damp chill. The crackling flames provided the only light as they played against his cheeks.
“We could make nothing of the documents, Danielle,” he said to the blond-haired woman who had just taken a seat in the dimness behind him. “They were too badly scorched for our equipment to yield anything more than a single raised seal.” He hesitated, the gesture dramatic without trying to be. “The seal of the United States government.”
“America,” Danielle muttered. Her left forearm was wrapped in gauze, and the pain of healing had begun to set in. She swallowed it down like a bitter pill.
The man in monk’s robes spun slowly around, still rubbing his hands together to force warmth into them. “The lead must be followed up,” he told her. “We know their base in Nice was a key stronghold, and its destruction may have yielded even more than we had a right to expect.”
“The men in the basement could have defended themselves, but they didn’t,” Danielle said. “Defending the pages, then destroying them, was more important to them.”
“They had their priorities, as we have ours. You will go to America immediately. Bring all our resources there to bear. At last we may be able to stop one of their vicious actions instead of following in its wake.”
Danielle was already rising.
“I can’t tell you why,” the man in monk’s robes continued, “but I have the feeling we’re facing something more here, as if, as if …”
“Don’t bother,” she said. “I have the same feeling.”
Chapter 5
“YOU GOT BUSINESS in that nuthouse, mister?” The driver of the launch asked Kimberlain.
“Just visiting a friend.”
“Ain’t been safe in these parts since they built it. People try to sell their houses and nobody wants ’em, not with that view from their backyard.”
The launch driver pointed disgustedly at the island’s rocky shoreline and the parapets rising there like the horns of some ancient beast with daggers for teeth.
Watertown was closer to Montreal than New York City, and Kimberlain had spent the drive steeped in apprehension. To meet Winston Peet again after three years … He had to admit he was looking forward to it, as if something remained unfinished in what had passed between them.
Kimberlain had been on the road at seven A.M. sharp Wednesday to make his drive north through New York State. Just outside Syracuse, the slight morning mist over Route 81 changed to a wet sticking snow which made the remainder of the drive unnerving and uncomfortable. Three inches had piled up by the time he passed through Watertown en route to the small town of Cape Stone, which overlooked Lake Ontario near the U.S.-Canadian border. Bowman Island was visible from anywhere you stood, and from the water so was Graylock’s Sanitarium for the Criminally Insane. No one called it that, though. To those who knew of its existence, it was simply “The Locks.”
The launch driver slowed his boat as the dock came clearly into view. A single attendant stood on it. The accumulated snow was virtually untouched in the shadow of the huge gray-stone structure of The Locks. Few of the occupants within would ever see the world beyond Bowman Island again; in point of fact only a small number would even see Bowman Island. The Locks had been constructed for survival but not for what could be construed as life. In seven years of operation, though, there had never been an escape.
“Excuse me for not waiting,” the boatman apologized, not bothering to tie down before Kimberlain climbed off.
“You Kimberlain?” the attendant asked, helping him steady himself on the snow-crusted dock.
“That’s right.”
“Got a car right over here for you. Dr. Vogelhut’s expecting you.”
“Hope I won’t be disturbing him.”
“Tell you, friend, the one thing the docs up at The Locks got is plenty of time to talk to normal folks.”
Three minutes into the drive down the single two-lane road, the towers of The Locks rose on all sides, seeming to grow out of the island itself. The United States judicial system stored its worst criminally insane here, those given virtually no chance at all for recovery. The capacity for violence lurking within those walls was something Kimberlain could feel even from this distance as clearly as the cold and the snow.
The car’s worn wipers fought a losing battle with the accumulation on the windshield. The driver spoke again without taking his eyes from the slick road as the front gate appeared. “I understand you’re here to see Peet.”
“Know him?”
“Not when I can help it. Got a wing all to himself, that guy. His guards don’t even eat with the rest of the personnel.” A pause. “Dr. Vogelhut asked me to brief you on the security.”
“Go ahead.”
“Two twenty-four-hour armed guards outside the cell. His cell’s been reinforced, the bars double thick. No window. Video surveillance, too. And on the chance that Peet manages to escape, there’s a foot-thick door at the head of the corridor for him to contend with, manned by another pair of guards, and none of the guards in the wing with him have keys.”
“You mean you lock them up in there?”
“Essentially, yes. We know what Peet’s capable of. The men have been specially trained and are specially paid.”
“Salaries sent on to their survivors in the event something goes wrong?”
“It’s doubtful that it could.” They were waved immediately through the front gate. “None of the guards ever get within reach of Peet. Don’t even have to open the cell door to give the animal his food. Got ourselves a whole different system for him.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“Please, Mr. Kimberlain, sit down.”
Dr. Alan Vogelhut was an old-looking forty-five with a paunch. Nervous sweat coated his palm as he shook hands. Vogelhut reseated himself at his desk as Kimberlain settled into a leather Queen Anne chair angled in front of him.
“You understand that technically Winston Peet is permitted no visitors. I agreed to make an exception in your case in view of Mr. Kamanski’s phone call and because of your rather unique interest in this patient and his history.”
“I wouldn’t call him a patient.”
“Be glad that I do, Mr. Kimberlain, for there is no power on earth that could have induced me to permit this visit unless I felt it would have some bearing on Peet’s therapy.”
“Therapy? Don’t tell me you’re trying to help him?”
“I do have an
obligation.”
“Do you have an obligation to the seventeen people he killed?”
“Mr. Kimberlain, it was precisely because of his capacity for violent behavior that I chose Peet for experimentation with a new behavior-modification drug.”
“For a minute there I thought you were going to tell me he found God.”
“You didn’t let me finish. Maybe it was the drugs and maybe it wasn’t, but Peet’s changed. I won’t say reformed or cured, just changed—and for the better.”
Kimberlain shook his head in dismay. “You tell him I was coming?”
Vogelhut nodded. “He believes it to be a reward in the positive-reinforcement end of his therapy, an extension of the letters I have permitted him to write you.” A pause. “Are they what brought you here?”
“Have you read them?”
“I respect my patients’ privacy.”
“Then I suppose I should, too.”
Vogelhut leaned forward, slightly agitated. “It is my feeling that your visit here today will help me evaluate his progress. I’m the only one he converses with, and under the circumstances that doesn’t tell me much. I’m using you as a barometer and thought it best to prepare you for what you’ll be facing.”
“Don’t bother. I know Peet.”
“Not this Peet.”
“Seven feet tall, bald, wide as a house, and just as solid?”
“A quirk of evolution is the way he describes himself. Does a minimum of a thousand push-ups and two hours of isometrics a day.”
“And the rest of the time?”
“He reads.”
“Reads?”
“Philosophy. Nietzsche mostly, everything he ever wrote. Peet has taken to quoting him extensively. I’ve obtained dozens of books for him.”
“Not in hardcover, I hope. A man like Peet could turn those edges into weapons like you wouldn’t believe.”