by Dean Koontz
No one in sight.
A twenty-foot-deep overhang sprouted from the wall above the roll-up. It extended the length of the market, jutting nearly halfway across the alley, to allow additional trucks to pull under it and unload while protected from the elements. It was also protection from eyes in the sky.
The morning was surprisingly chilly. Though the market and stockroom had been cool, Spencer wasn’t prepared for the briskness of the outside air. The temperature must have been in the mid-forties. In more than two hours of breakneck travel, they had come from the edge of a desert into higher altitudes and a different climate.
He saw no point in following the service alley left or right. Both ways, they would only be going around the U-shaped structure to the parking lot out front.
On three sides of the shopping center, a nine-foot-high privacy wall separated it from its neighbors: concrete blocks, painted white, capped with bricks. If it had been six feet, they might have scaled it fast enough to escape. Nine feet, no way in hell. They could throw the canvas bag across, easy enough, but they couldn’t simply heave a seventy-pound dog to the other side and hope he landed well.
Out at the front of the supermarket, the pitch of engines from at least one of the helicopters changed. The clatter of its props grew louder. It was coming to the rear of the building.
Ellie dashed to the right, along the shaded back of the market. Spencer knew what she intended. They had one hope. He followed her.
She stopped at the limit of the overhang, which marked the end of the supermarket. Beyond was that portion of the back wall of the shopping center belonging to neighboring businesses.
Ellie glowered at Rocky. “Stay close to the building, tight against it,” she told him, as if he could understand.
Maybe he could. Ellie hurried out into the sunshine, heeding her own advice, and Rocky trotted between her and Spencer, staying close to the back wall of the shopping center.
Spencer didn’t know if satellite surveillance was acute enough to differentiate between them and the structure. He didn’t know if the two-foot overhang on the main roof, high above, provided cover. But even if Ellie’s strategy was smart, Spencer still felt watched.
The stuttering thunder of the chopper grew louder. Judging by the sound, it was up and out of the front parking lot, starting across the roof.
South of the supermarket, the first business was a dry cleaner. A small sign bearing the name of the shop was posted on the employee entrance. Locked.
The sky was full of apocalyptic sound.
Beyond the dry cleaner was a Hallmark card shop. The service door was unlocked. Ellie yanked it open.
Roy Miro leaned through the cockpit door to watch as the other chopper rose higher than the building, hovered for a moment, then angled across the roof toward the back of the supermarket.
Pointing to a clear area of blacktop just south of the market, for the benefit of his own pilot, Roy said, “There, smack in front of Hallmark, put us down right there.”
As the pilot took them down the last twenty feet and maneuvered to the desired landing point, Roy joined the four agents at the door in the passenger cabin. Breathing deeply. Peach in. Green out.
He pulled the Beretta from his shoulder holster. The silencer was still fitted to the weapon. He removed it and dropped it in an inside jacket pocket. This wasn’t a clandestine operation that required silencers, not with all the attention they were attracting. And the pistol would allow more accuracy without the trajectory distortion caused by a silencer.
They touched down.
One of the strike team agents slid the door out of the way, and they exited rapidly, one after the other, into the battering downdraft from the rotor blades.
As Spencer followed Ellie and Rocky through the door into the back room of the card shop, he glanced up into cannonades of sound. Silhouetted against the icy-blue sky, straight overhead, the outer edges of the rotors appeared first, chopping through the dry Utah air. Then the glide-slope antenna on the nose of the craft eased into view. As the leading edge of the downdraft hit him, he stepped inside and pulled the door shut, barely in time to avoid being seen.
The deadbolt had a brass thumb turn on the inside of the door. Although the hit squad would focus first on the back of the market, Spencer engaged the lock.
They were in a narrow, windowless storeroom that smelled of rose-scented air freshener. Ellie opened the next door before Spencer had closed the first. Beyond the storeroom was a small office with overhead fluorescents. Two desks. A computer. Files.
Two more doors led out of there. One stood half open to a tiny bathroom: toilet and sink. The other connected the office to the shop itself.
The long, narrow store was crowded with pyramidal island displays of cards, carousels of more cards, giftwrap, puzzles, stuffed toys, decorative candles, and novelties. The current promotion was for Valentine’s Day, and there was an abundance of overhead banners and decorative wall hangings, all hearts and flowers.
The festiveness of the place was an unsettling reminder that regardless of what happened to him and Ellie and Rocky in the next few minutes, the world would spin on, unheeding. If they were shot dead in Hallmark, their bodies would be hauled away, the blood would be expunged from the carpet, a rose-scented air freshener would be employed in generous sprays, a few more potpourri might be set out for sale, and the stream of lovers coming in to buy cards would continue all but unabated.
Two women, evidently employees, were at the glass storefront, backs turned. They stared out at the activity in the parking lot.
Ellie started toward them.
Following her, Spencer suddenly wondered if she intended to take hostages. He didn’t like that idea. Not at all. Jesus, no. These agency people, as she had described them and as he had seen them in action, wouldn’t hesitate to blow away a hostage, even a woman or a child, to get at their target—especially not early in an operation, when witnesses were the most confused and no reporters were yet on the scene with cameras.
He didn’t want innocent blood on his hands.
Of course, they couldn’t merely wait in Hallmark until the agency went away. When they weren’t found in the supermarket, the search would surely spread to adjacent stores.
Their best chance to escape was to slip out the front door of the card shop while the hit team’s attention remained focused on the supermarket, try to get to a parked car, and hotwire it. Not much of a chance. As thin as paper, as thin as hope itself. But it was all they had, better than hostages, so he clung to it.
With the chopper landing virtually at the back door, the card shop was so hammered by the screaming of engines and the pounding of rotor blades that it couldn’t have been noisier if it had been under an amusement-park roller coaster. The Valentine banners trembled overhead. Hundreds of novelty key rings jangled from the hooks of a display stand. A collection of small ornate picture frames rattled against the glass shelf on which they stood. Even the walls of the store seemed to thrum like drumheads.
The racket was so ungodly that he wondered about the shopping center. It must be cheapjack construction, the worst crap, if one chopper could set up such reverberations in its walls.
They were almost to the front of the store, fifteen feet from the women at the window, when the reason for the fearful tumult became obvious: The second helicopter settled down in front of the shop, beyond the covered promenade, in the parking lot. The store was bracketed by the machines, shaken by cross-vibrations.
Ellie halted at the sight of the chopper.
Rocky seemed less worried by the cacophony than by an unfurled poster of Beethoven—the movie-star Saint Bernard, not the composer of symphonies—and he shied from it, taking refuge behind Ellie’s legs.
The two women at the window were still unaware that they had company. They were side by side, chattering excitedly, and though their voices were raised above the clamor of the machines, their words were unintelligible to Spencer.
As he stepped t
o Ellie’s side, gazing at the chopper with dread, he saw a door slide open on the fuselage. Armed men jumped to the blacktop, one after the other. The first was carrying a submachine gun larger than Spencer’s Micro Uzi. The second had an automatic rifle. The third toted a pair of grenade-launching rifles, no doubt equipped with stun, sting, or gas payloads. The fourth man was armed with a submachine gun, and the fifth had only a pistol.
The fifth man was the last, and he was different from the four hulks who preceded him. Shorter, somewhat pudgy. He held his pistol to one side, aimed at the ground, and ran with less athletic grace than his companions.
None of the five approached the card shop. They raced toward the front of the supermarket, moving quickly out of view.
The chopper’s engine was idling. The blades were still turning, though at a slower speed. The hit team hoped to be in and out fast.
“Ladies,” Ellie said.
The women didn’t hear her over the still considerable noise of the helicopters and of their own excited conversation.
Ellie raised her voice: “Ladies, damn it!”
Startled, exclaiming, wide-eyed, they turned.
Ellie didn’t point the SIG 9mm at them, but she made sure they got a good look at it. “Get away from those windows, come here.”
They hesitated, glanced at each other, at the pistol.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” Ellie was unmistakably sincere. “But I’ll do what I have to do if you don’t come here right now!”
The women stepped away from the storefront windows, one of them moving slower than the other. The slowpoke cast a furtive glance at the nearby entrance door.
“Don’t even think about it,” Ellie told her. “I’ll shoot you in the back, so help me God, and if you aren’t killed, you’ll be in a wheelchair forever. Okay, yeah, that’s better, come here.”
Spencer stepped aside—and Rocky hid behind him—as Ellie guided the frightened women along the aisle. Halfway through the store, she made them lie facedown, one behind the other, with their heads toward the back wall.
“If either of you looks up anytime in the next fifteen minutes, I’ll kill you both,” Ellie told them.
Spencer didn’t know if she was as sincere this time as when she had told them that she didn’t want to hurt them, but she sounded as though she were. If he had been one of the women, he wouldn’t have raised his head to look around until at least Easter.
Returning to him, Ellie said, “Pilot’s still in the chopper.”
He moved a few steps closer to the front of the store. Through the side window of the cockpit, one of the crew was visible, probably the copilot. “Two of them, I’m sure.”
“They don’t take part in the assault?” Ellie asked.
“No, of course not, they’re flyers, not gunmen.”
She went to the door and looked north toward the front of the supermarket. “Have to do it. No time to think about it. We just have to do it.”
Spencer didn’t even need to ask her what she was talking about. She was an instinctive survivor with fourteen hard months of combat experience under her belt, and he remembered most of what the United States Army Rangers had taught him about strategy and about thinking on his feet. They couldn’t go back the way they’d come. Couldn’t stay in the card shop, either. Eventually it would be searched. They could no longer hope to reach a car in the parking lot and hot-wire it, behind the backs of the gunmen, because all the cars were parked to the front of the chopper, requiring them to pass in full view of its crew. They were left with one option. One terrible, desperate option. It required boldness, courage—and either a dash of fatalism or an enormous measure of brainless self-confidence. They were both ready to do it.
“Take this,” he said, handing her the canvas bag, “this too,” and then gave her the Uzi.
As he took the SIG from her and tucked it under the waistband of his jeans, against his belly, she said, “I guess you have to.”
“It’s a three-second dash, at most, even less for him, but we can’t risk him freezing up.”
Spencer squatted, scooped up Rocky, and stood with the dog cradled like a child in his arms.
Rocky didn’t know whether to wag his tail or be afraid, whether they were having fun or were in big trouble. He was clearly on the brink of sensory overload. In that condition he customarily either went all limp and quivery—or flew into a frenzy of terror.
Ellie eased open the door to check the front of the supermarket.
Glancing at the two women on the floor, Spencer saw that they were obeying the instructions they’d been given.
“Now,” Ellie said, stepping outside, holding the door for him.
He went through sideways, so as not to bash Rocky’s head into the door frame. Stepping onto the covered shopping promenade, he glanced toward the market. All but one of the gunmen had gone inside. A thug with submachine guns remained outside, facing away from them.
In the chopper, the copilot was looking down at something on his lap, not out the side window of the cockpit.
Half convinced that Rocky weighed seven hundred rather than seventy pounds, Spencer sprinted to the open door in the helicopter fuselage. It was only a thirty-foot dash, even counting the ten-foot width of the promenade, but those were the longest thirty feet in the universe, a quirk of physics, an eerie scientific anomaly, a bizarre distortion in the fabric of creation, stretching ever longer in front of him as he ran—and then he was there, pushing the dog inside, scrambling up and into the craft himself.
Ellie was so close behind him that she might as well have been his backpack. She dropped the canvas bag the moment she was up and across the threshold, but she held on to the Uzi.
Unless someone was crouched behind one of the ten seats, the passenger compartment was deserted. Just to be safe, Ellie moved back down the aisle, checking left and right.
Spencer stepped to the nearby cockpit door, opened it. He was just in time to jam the muzzle of the pistol in the face of the copilot, who was starting to get up from his seat.
“Take us up,” Spencer told the pilot.
The two men appeared even more surprised than the women in the card shop.
“Take us up now—now!—or I’ll blow this asshole’s brains out through that window, then yours!” Spencer shouted so forcefully that he sprayed the crewmen with spittle and felt the veins in his temples popping up like those in a weight lifter’s biceps.
He thought he sounded every bit as frightening as Ellie.
Just inside the shattered glass wall of the supermarket, beside the wrecked Range Rover, in a drift of dog food, Roy and three agents stood with their weapons aimed at a tall man with a flat face, yellow teeth, and coal-black eyes as cold as a viper’s. The guy clutched a semiautomatic rifle in both hands, and although he wasn’t aiming it at anyone, he looked mean enough and angry enough to use it on the baby Jesus Himself.
He was the driver of the pickup. His Dodge stood abandoned in the parking lot, one door hanging wide open. He had come inside either to seek vengeance for whatever had happened on the highway or to play the hero.
“Drop the gun!” Roy repeated for the third time.
“Says who?”
“Says who?”
“That’s right.”
“Are you a moron? Am I talking to a blithering idiot here? You see four guys holding heavy weapons on you, and you don’t understand the logic of dropping that rifle?”
“You cops or what?” asked the viper-eyed man.
Roy wanted to kill him. No more formalities. The guy was too damn stupid to live. He’d be better off dead. A sad case. Society would be better off without him too. Cut him down, right there, right now, and then find the woman and Grant.
The only problem was that Roy’s dream of a three-minute mission, in and out and away before the nosy locals showed up, was no longer achievable. The operation had gone sour when the hateful woman had driven into the market, and it was getting more sour by the moment. Hell, it was past sour
into bitter. They were going to have to deal with Cedar City cops, and that was going to be more difficult if one of the residents they were sworn to protect was lying dead on a mound of Purina Dog Chow.
If they were going to have to work with locals, he might as well show a badge to this fool. From an inner jacket pocket, he withdrew an ID wallet, flipped it open, and flashed his phony credentials. “Drug Enforcement Administration.”
“Well, sure,” the man said. “Now, that’s all right.”
He lowered the gun to the floor, let go of it. Then he actually put one hand to the bill of his baseball cap and tipped it at Roy with what seemed to be sincere respect.
Roy said, “You go sit in the back of your truck. Not inside. In the open, behind the cab. You wait there. You try to leave, that guy outside with a machine gun will cut your legs off at the knees.”
“Yes, sir.” With convincing solemnity, he tipped his cap again, and then he walked out through the damaged front wall of the store.
Roy almost turned and shot him in the back.
Peach in. Green out.
“Spread out across the front of the store,” he told his men, “and wait, keep alert.”
The team coming in from the back would search the supermarket exhaustively, flushing out Grant and the woman if they tried to hide anywhere inside. The fugitives would be driven forward and forced either to surrender or to die in a barrage of gunfire.
The woman, of course, would be shot to death whether she tried to surrender or not. They were taking no more chances with her.
“There’ll be employees and customers coming through,” he called out to his three men as they deployed across the store to both sides of him. “Don’t let anybody leave. Herd them over near the manager’s office. Even if you think they have no resemblance to the pair we’re looking for, hold them. Even if it’s the Pope, you hold him.”