He managed one last look at the window beyond the desk as he grabbed the little mirror with Kirby’s hologram and dropped to the floor. As he landed on his back he focused on the image of the window. He saw what looked like a toothpick-sized chip—a toothpick-sized chip with a pinprick-sized hole in the middle of it.
Before he could process that, he heard another tiny hair-snapping sound to his left. His eyes snapped in that direction to see another window in the kitchen that was placed high on the wall, seemingly designed to look down on whoever might be lying on the floor. As he looked, another toothpick-sized crack appeared in that glass pane.
Morgan rolled faster than even he thought he could, hearing a small snap of the glass being breached, but this time he also heard a soft sound behind him. It was like an inhalation.
Morgan came up onto his knees to stare down at the expensive carpet where he had just been lying, but only saw the slightest ripple of something deep in the tight, padded nap there. He instinctively reached out with his free hand to see if he could feel the invader, but then another distant hair-snapping sound came to his right ear.
He spun his head in that direction to see another rectangular, bulletproof, glass eye—with a splintering mote in the middle of it—staring at him from the front hallway. Morgan launched himself backwards just in time to avoid another thin, shining thing disappearing into the back of the luxurious sofa where he had just been. But, unlike twenty-two, thirty-two, thirty-eight, three-eighty, three-fifty-seven, forty-four, forty-five, or even fifty-caliber rounds from standard guns, which left noticeable, if not gaping, holes in whatever they hit, these things hardly left a mark.
Dan didn’t have time to dwell on it since his eyes were all but cork-screwing around their sockets trying to spot every possible window in the place. Not only was he apparently surrounded with assassins sporting cutting-edge silenced sniper rifles, but they were seemingly positioned on every level as well—up, down, and in the middle. All the better to puncture him with.
There was only one saving grace. If these had been normal windows he probably would have already been dead, with some sort of acupuncture-thin, scalpel-sharp shard in his head or heart. But these were not normal windows. Morgan was fairly certain these were top-of-the-line aluminum oxynitride, level ten, bullet-resistant panes, because that’s the kind of security a tight-ass like Kirby would insist upon. But, as Morgan snaked to the bottom of the kitchen counter, he wished he could kiss Kirby’s tight ass for giving him a split second to avoid the killer projectiles.
The expensive apartment had become a maze of subtle destruction, but instead of having to avoid laser security beams, Morgan had to duck, dodge, twist, turn, slide, and somersault to avoid getting perforated, with only his eyes and ears as warnings. Not only were they coming at him from all sides and all angles, they were coming at him from deep in the night, giving him no targets for return fire.
They were also trapping him in a cone of silence. If they had been using standard weapons, even silenced ones, they’d be making enough of a ruckus to raise an alarm—especially in such a high-security, ritzy, neighborhood. Instead, it was as if he was in the middle of a test lab, with various minor home accessories—a vase here, a clock there, a TV screen over the mantle—cracking or breaking or shattering seemingly of their own accord.
The planning for this ambush had to have been extraordinary—finding multiple vantage points without coming to the attention of private or public surveillance cameras. But even that didn’t demoralize Morgan. It only made him madder. He was sorely tempted to call their bluff and raise an alarm himself. If he filled his hands with his PPK and Ruger, then opened up, the cops and private security would descend like locusts.
But as he dove from the base of the kitchen counter to the side of the refrigerator, he decided he didn’t want to raise an alarm. The authorities might save him from whoever was attacking him, but they also would keep him from tracking those responsible for destroying his home, and happiness. No, he would much rather tear the heads off of “them” personally. But he would have to get to them first.
Dan took one last look at the apartment, which looked like it had been attacked by the most subtle, polite vandal ever, then all but vaulted through the cellar door. He leaped over all the stairs, to land with a satisfying thump on the basement floor. He had hardly settled before he was barreling back to the mistress partition entrance, his silenced PPK in one hand and the hologram mirror in the other.
He gave the latter a cursory glance, feeling only a slight twinge of regret, as he decided the laser projector that was creating the hologram was inside the frame, behind the reflective glass. Any other mysteries it might have solved upon further examination would have to be sacrificed for the greater good.
The greater good and regret became clear as he pressed the pop-open panel. Paul Kirby’s silently mouthing, multi-colored form seemed to waver in the air of the darkened tunnel for one split second before it became a splintering, shattering pin-cushion, accompanied by what sounded like a half-dozen hydraulic pistons. The mirror danced in mid-air before bursting, spreading, and raining down in tinkling, clattering pieces.
Then there was silence, as dust clouds dissipated and the two assassins stationed there stepped forward to examine the damage.
“Seven years bad luck,” Morgan murmured as he shot both shadowy figures from where he had crab-walked in the pitch blackness to the middle of the left wall.
The fact that he stayed crouched saved his life as the two attackers responded to what should have been killing shots by whirling around and opening fire again. From his vantage point below them, Dan could better examine the attackers and their weapons as he silently swore his head off. Night vision goggles they apparently didn’t have, since they were peppering the wall above him with what looked like streamlined harpoon guns that had been modified for, apparently, rocket-powered needles. Whatever they were had almost no muzzle flash and a sizzling, thudding sound he’d never heard any other gun make.
Morgan could see they were wearing the same sort of dark, apparently bulletproof, outfits and visored helmets as the stranger outside his home’s explosion. That all but galvanized him, Morgan moved between the two men, bringing his boot heel down on the top of the right man’s foot while jamming the barrel of the Walther’s silencer under the rim of the left one’s helmet’s visor.
With a twitch of his trigger finger he splattered the left one’s skull and brains inside the helmet while using his knee as a battering ram between the other one’s legs. That way he knew it didn’t matter whether the bastard’s jockey shorts were bulletproof or not.
Morgan didn’t pause to savor the sliver of revenge he had accomplished. From the attack on Kirby’s townhouse, he knew there were a lot more where they came from. He wrenched off the helmet of the one writhing at his feet before planting another PPK round between the man’s pain-wracked eyes. Then he yanked off the guy’s jacket before marching toward the mistress tunnel’s entrance.
By the time he got there, both the jacket and helmet were on him—which was pretty much the only thing that saved him as he dove out into the alley. There was a man stationed at either end of his car, and they opened fire as soon as he appeared. Thankfully for him, they were well-trained, so they went for his head and chest. Thankfully their assault gear was powerful enough to protect him from their own hi-tech weapons.
Still, that only gave Morgan a second, but that was less than what he was planning to use. He threw his blackjack at the one furthest from him, on the left, and brought the bottom of his boot, full force, on the left knee of the one nearest him. He heard the satisfying thunk of leather-enclosed lead hitting the left one’s helmet while feeling the even more satisfying crack of the right one’s knee and leg bones under the full power of his kicking stomp.
Again, he took no pause for celebration. Morgan grabbed the club-length needle gun from the hands of the nearest one
as he started to topple, and swung it like David “Big Papi” Ortiz’s Boston Red Sox home-run baseball bat. When it connected with the falling man’s helmeted head, it again didn’t matter if the outfit was bulletproof or not.
With both assassins down, Morgan dove toward the car. No way anyone who was left would let him get to his shotgun, but if he could just carve out a few seconds of safe time he could get the car started. As if by magic, the keys were in his hand. As if guided by his wife’s angelic hands, the engine roared to life. Accompanied by the heavenly sounds of the attacker’s pained screeches, he prepared to peel out of the alley faster than the GT had ever gone.
But his moment of saving grace was over. To his utter astonishment, the car seemed to pump downward as if a giant monster’s hand had slammed atop it. It bounced up once like a cockroach—as if the giant had misjudged the strength needed to crush it—then shook as if gripped by a seizure.
Morgan was sure he was about to be engulfed in a ball of flame, then ripped apart by a car bomb explosion, but that didn’t happen either. He almost wished it had as he stared at how his beautiful car was being punctured and torn by what now seemed like both of an invisible giant monster’s hands.
His windshield wasn’t shattered; it was punched open by invisible fists. Morgan saw, as if in slow motion, one round piece of windshield glass shoot by his head, and then felt something resembling a concentrated tube of wind—like a savage punch that had just missed. Then, blinking, he watched as the hood of his car shredded like a piece of paper being ripped apart.
Morgan tried to get out, but the car was shaking so badly that the bouncing prevented him during his first few attempts. All the while, ragged holes were being stamped and gaping tears were being ripped in the Mustang’s rapidly disintegrating body.
Morgan was astonished, not by what he was experiencing, but by how he didn’t care, choosing instead to whirl around. Seeing his shotgun leaping up and down on the back seat told him all he needed to know about his attackers’ arrogance.
They weren’t trying to kill him. Not really, not yet. They were playing with him, like a sadistic cat with a lowly mouse. It was no coincidence, or accident, that they had kept four car lengths ahead of him during their first chase no matter what he did.
As he grabbed the shotgun out of mid-air, he saw that a small team of helmeted, assault-uniformed attackers were all around, moving slowly toward him. Each was carrying a weapon in both their hands. Some carried the needle guns. Others had what looked like a long, streamlined combination of a sniper’s rifle and an anteater-snouted Taser. And then there were a few with what looked like a bazooka crossed with a t-shirt cannon. They all looked like escapees from the futuristic videogames his daughter used to play.
The attackers kept coming in a smaller and smaller semi-circle, and kept pulling their weapons’ triggers, leaving more tears and holes in his once beautiful muscle car. But Morgan realized he could only hear the sound of the destruction. He couldn’t even hear the weapons, other than a strange, unsettling sensation of pressure on his eardrums.
“Screw this,” Morgan seethed, all but hurling himself at the driver’s door. It cracked open in mid-jump, and he stumbled out into the alley like a newborn pterodactyl. Morgan slammed against the alley wall, barely keeping his balance, while the smallest of the helmeted, visored, uniformed attackers held up a fist.
The encroaching semi-circle stopped moving and firing, but Morgan didn’t. He brought the shotgun around to spray them all at close range, but just before he could center his aim, the one who had raised a fist seemed to leap and spin in midair like some sort of demonic whirling dervish…a whirling dervish who seemed strangely, even sickeningly, familiar.
Much to Morgan’s rage, the dervish kicked the shotgun out of his hands like an expert punter scoring the winning field goal. But it didn’t stop there. The spinning kick continued as if the dervish were a prima ballerina, smashing into Morgan’s head next, sending the helmet he had stolen flying at the same time the kick hurled him, whirling, into the alley dirt.
Morgan was amazed he wasn’t unconscious. He lay there, head reeling, the top of his skull facing his devastated car, which was blocking entry to Mount Vernon Street. By this time, the other four attackers had semi-circled him in a curved line between him and his Mustang.
Meanwhile, coming toward his twitching feet was the kicker, who, by the way the others deferred to him, was clearly the leader of the pack. Except it wasn’t a him. That much was made perfectly clear when she spoke.
“Well, well,” he heard a female, accented voice from behind the helmeted visor say. “Where are my manners? You have lost your helmet, so the least I can do…”
Dan Morgan watched, still stunned, as she reached up and lifted off her own helmet. It was what he had been dreading ever since he had gone to “rescue” his daughter Alex from a Trans-Siberian Express train in the “dark territory” of Russia some time before.
The leader of this pack had the elliptical eyes, flat nose, and short hair of a white leopard. She also had the well-muscled body of a wrestler, and the smile of a dungeon master who really loved her work. She was a Serbian mercenary named Amina, and she had kicked him in the balls …twice…on that Trans-Siberian train before escaping. Morgan miserably decided that this particular rendezvous was equivalent to a third crotch shot.
Her expression was triumphant as she looked down at him while both tossing her helmet to an attacker behind her and bringing one of the snouted Taser weapons around. She pointed its wickedly tongued prongs between his eyes.
“Electromagnetic particle beam laser,” she said, rolling the English technobabble around her thin lips as if savoring the finest Serbian sljivovica plum brandy. “It will make a domino-sized rectangle in your head.”
Dan thought about interrupting with some pointed questions—about his house, about Zeta HQ, about how she got here, about how all this was pulled off—but the look on her face told him there would be nothing she’d like better than putting a death ray through his skull in mid-query.
“Hurry,” he heard someone else tell her. “Someone must’ve called the cops by now.”
“Ućuti!” she spat—Serbian for shut up. “The police are busy,” she concluded dismissively
That told Morgan two things. She was, indeed, the boss here, but just barely. Her minions were probably hastily hired local help with a minimum of training. That also explained why Morgan was still alive. Not that it mattered, for, in the next second, Amina brought the futuristic looking rifle to her shoulder and stared sadistically down at him over its quadrilateral barrel.
With a sneer she went to pull the trigger, then seemed to get a final wicked idea. “Say hello to…” she started to say in lieu of his last words.
Dan Morgan never got to hear who Amina thought he should say hello to. Before she could finish, there was a whomp behind him, then the Mustang leapt into the air, and, once it was three feet off the ground, exploded.
Chapter 6
All the years of Dan Morgan’s training in military and intelligence fired up his muscle memory like never before. Like many high-prepped people, he felt—even sensed—the unusual explosion a split second before it happened.
Boaz Schneider, his demolitions teacher, had called it the “Bouncing Betty Effect,” referring to the World War II-era German Splittermine, which, when triggered, launched into the air before detonating.
That’s what his car had done, and Morgan was not going to just lie there and let himself be perforated in the following blast. Again calling on the adrenaline-fueled speed he had experienced back in Kirby’s townhouse, he instantly grabbed the still open lip of the mistress tunnel door and pulled himself into the passageway as far as his muscles would allow.
His exploding car did the rest. The door slammed shut behind him so hard it cracked in three places. Under his booted feet, Morgan could feel the steel, glass, and plastic
shrapnel storming against the other side.
Double shot, Morgan thought. It had to be a double assault on the car—one to lift it, the other to detonate it.
Contrary to movies and television, cars rarely burst into flame, even if someone shot the gas tank. No, but if that gas tank were shot by a tracer bullet—a projectile with a small pyro charge in the shell—and from a great enough distance so that the round can ignite from air friction, it just might do the trick. Something sure did the trick here, and Morgan was not going to look this particular exploding gift horse in its fire-belching mouth.
His hands scrambled for his PPK, but came up empty. Sometime in this mess he had lost it and he wasn’t going to go searching for it now. Instead, his hands went right for the Ruger, as he launched himself back toward the partition. No sense waiting for the smoke to clear. The more time he gave any survivors to recover, the less chance he had to stay alive.
Dan Morgan came back out into the alley, his head low but his eyes high, looking for anyone or anything who might do him harm. He saw a bunch of things at once.
First, if it hadn’t already been after the hole-punching and steel-tearing assault by hi-tech weapons, his beautiful ’68 Mustang GT was a lost cause. It looked like a paper model that had been torn flat, with just a few bumps of scorched upholstery still recognizable.
Second, the four assassins between him and the car were splayed like rag dolls that had been tromped on by a bully having a tantrum. Their blood and guts were mostly contained by their uniforms and helmets. Morgan was glad he wasn’t the Emergency Medical Tech or Crime Scene Investigator who’d have to clean them up.
That examination took less than a half-second, after which he jerked his head in the opposite direction. Good timing. The few who had been on the other side of Amina were showing signs of life. Injured, dazed, hair-smoking life, but life nevertheless. They were trying to both get to their feet as well as raise their lasers, pin-shooters, and air cannons.
War of Shadows Page 4