Target Response (15 page)

Steve sighed, knowing he was going to have to do it the hard way. Like always, he said to himself sourly with a wry, twisted grin. Even at the best of times, a twisted grin was all the taut flesh of his reconstructed face would allow.

And this sure as hell was a long way off from the best of times.

Steve slid off the horse, getting down on its left side, keeping the reins wrapped around his right hand. He gentled the horse, talking low voiced to it, patting it. The insides of his thighs were raw and aching from having gripped the animal’s flanks so long and so hard to stay on it.

Lights shone from two lamps mounted over the front door, and some footlights scattered along the curve of the driveway illuminated the road. Spotlights were mounted under the eaves on the front corners of the mansion. The big front lawn was thick with shadow, wet with slushy snow.

Steve tied the reins to the branch of a bush at the edge of the lawn. He might need the horse and didn’t want to risk its escaping. Turning, he started across the lawn toward the Suburban.

He kept the big, boxy dark green machine between him and the house, using it for cover. He moved crouched forward, bent almost double.

It was nerve-wracking, though, to be exposed out in the open like this with minimal cover. If there should be an ambusher in the house, or if Olcott and Lillian or any of the others should return—

They’d get their damned heads shot off, Steve told himself. To hell with those bastards!

The gun, a talisman of death-dealing potency, in his fist, he closed unmolested on the Suburban.

At first glance it looked okay. No tires shot out, no bullet holes in the hood, sides, or rear. The Moray group must not have thought he’d be coming back for it.

He’d had the place under observation for a fair amount of time but not always. There was a chance they might have gimmicked it while he wasn’t watching. If so they wouldn’t have had much time to rig a complicated device to the starter or under the hood. The likeliest threat would come from a slap-on magnetic explosive device or tracking apparatus. Something that could be attached behind the bumpers or along the undercarriage.

The driver’s-side door, locked, showed no sign of having been tampered with. Neither did the hood.

Steve sat on his heels beside the Suburban. He eyed the house. No signs of movement in the front windows. No shapes, silhouettes, blurs.

He felt around inside the left front wheel well for a mine, bomb, tracking device, or anything else that shouldn’t be there. Didn’t find any. He did the same for the left rear well, too, with equal lack of results.

He wriggled under the rear of the Suburban on his back and crawled underneath it. Light from the front of the house failed to dispel black darkness along the undercarriage.

He felt around for a bomb or tracking device, not neglecting the right-side wheel wells. His right hand was stiff with cold. He whacked his fingers against his side to restore circulation and rubbed his fingertips against his thigh to warm them and restore some feeling.

The underside of the vehicle seemed clean as far as he could tell.

Steve crawled out from under the Suburban and duckwalked around to the driver’s side, crouching to avoid presenting a target. He dug into his pocket, pulled out his key ring.

Thick, too clumsy fingers went through the keys. He pressed the button of the electronic keying device, automatically unlocking the doors. Steve winced at the telltale
boink-boink
noise.

There was no worry about triggering the overhead dome light in the cab when he opened the driver’s-side door. He routinely kept the dome light switched off to prevent its lighting automatically and outlining him in the cab at night. A safety precaution.

Steve got behind the driver’s wheel, leaving the door open in case he had to abandon the vehicle in a hurry. He ducked low in the seat, keeping his head below the bottom of the window frames.

The ignition lock and dashboard seemed untampered with. Steve fumbled the key in the ignition to start the engine, half expecting to be blown sky-high by a bomb he hadn’t found.

The engine turned over and came to life.

Steve’s taut nerves vibrated from the strain of being pitched to maximum alertness in the breathless hush of anticipation. Not knowing whether his actions would cue a shattering barrage of gunfire from hidden lurkers.

He threw the machine into gear and stepped on the gas, steering one-handed. He reached reflexively with his left hand to pull the door shut. White-hot agony wired from wounded hand to brain set off fireworks inside his head.

Working mostly right-handed, he wheeled the truck around, driving up over the curb with a double bump onto and across the lawn.

Steve drove in a straight line to where he had tied the horse’s reins to a bush. He halted, engine running, lights dark. He got out, looking back at the house. It looked empty, abandoned.

He got out of the pickup, leaving the engine running. He untied the horse’s reins and slapped its rump. The gray took off running.

Steve jumped back in the cab and did the same.

The pale horse, misty breath streaming from its snout as it galloped across the mansion’s front lawn in the wet snowfall, made an eerie, haunting image.

Let the horse run free for a while. There were enough evergreens for it to forage, so it wouldn’t starve. Sooner or later someone would call it in. He’d do it himself as soon as he got the chance.

Horses, Steve liked. People not so much. Less now than ever.

He drove away, cutting across the lawn at a tangent to reenter the driveway near where it exited the property.

He turned left on Crestline Drive and drove north, going a quarter mile or so before turning on the headlights.

Like the pale horse, Steve was taking it on the run.

Clan Moray had put a hurting on him. They’d drawn first blood, maiming his left hand, appropriating his gun and knife.

But he’d hit back hard. Thanks to him the Moray group now had four members in the grave: Ludlow the chauffeur, Bertha the cook, Teela—and Skye.

A macabre notion came to Steve. He’d brought Skye to a climax twice today, once in lust and again in death.

The Final Climax.

What had Jules said?

“Call us the Dogcatchers.”

He’d forgotten that sometimes dogcatchers get bitten.

Above all, now, a single burning question continued to plague Steve’s mind:

Who the hell were the Morays, anyhow?

“It’s all clear. Come on up,” Doc Wenzle said.

“I’m on the way,” Steve said. He broke the connection and switched off his cell phone.

At eight p.m. Steve stood in the recessed doorway of a defunct shop watching the front of the Gall Building in downtown Washington, D.C.

It was now Wednesday of the week following the Saturday of his rumble with the Morays. In the time since then he’d lost weight; his face was a bit grimmer and the light in his dark blue eyes colder and more intense.

After escaping the death trap at Crestfield manor, Steve had gone black. He’d dropped off the board, arbitrarily severing all contacts with friends, associates, and officialdom.

It wasn’t that hard for Steve to step into limbo. As an active-duty Dog Team assassin his life was already compartmentalized. He had few friends and only a handful of professional associates. His parents and kinfolk back in Arizona all believed he was dead, killed five years ago while on Army duty in Iraq.

His faked death was part of his Dog Team cover. It had been done to protect his loved ones from vengeful retaliation by terrorists, spies, warlords, international criminals, and other malefactors who’d been stung by the sanctioned killings he’d carried out as part of the Army’s ultrasecret assassination arm.

Steve was a skilled clandestine operator. But going black now took him to a whole new level of secrecy.

The Morays knew too much—about him and the Dog Team. The killer clan weren’t military but they had information that should have been restricted to a select handful of U.S. Army covert agents and their equally elusive enablers in the service’s higher echelons.

The Dog Team’s security was compromised. The team may have been penetrated, hiding one or more double agents within its ranks. So Steve feared, and that fear was not for himself.

It was for the team, the Army, and the dire consequences for the nation itself should the assassination unit’s existence become public. Until he had sorted out the situation and gotten some hard answers, Steve knew he must tread very carefully.

Instead of immediately reporting the attack to his handlers and case officers in the team, Steve vanished, cutting all contact with them.

He had to assume that his dossier was in the hands of the enemy. The enemy’s identity was a mystery. Their agents were the Morays, that much Steve knew.

But behind the Morays lay the hidden hand of…who?

To find out, Steve had to stay alive. To do that, he must for the moment cut all connections with his previous life.

He had not returned to his house on Hessian Hill since Saturday night, when he had fled Crestfield. The Morays knew where he lived. It was a sure bet that they’d have his place staked out in readiness for his return there.

That was only the beginning. Did the enemy have his dossier? Steve had to assume that they did. The Morays could not have learned the details of the hideout gun Steve routinely carried holstered at the small of his back, or the throwing knife he kept up his left sleeve.

That was inside stuff that someone had to have tipped to them.

If his dossier was compromised, then his pattern was known. All human beings, all living creatures, have patterns. Where they go, whom they know, what they eat and drink, whom they sleep with, what they wear, and countless other bits of information that make up the sum total of one’s behavior.

The wise hunter first learns the pattern of the prey: whether the animal is social or solitary, whether it moves by night or day, where it nests, what it feeds on and how, what path it takes to the water hole, and so on.

Once the pattern is known, the hunter has a blueprint for a successful kill.

Steve, in his capacity as first a Special Forces combat soldier and second a Dog Team assassin, had certainly stalked and slain enough targeted men—and women—to know that the pattern is the key to the kill.

Now that he was the hunted, he must break his pattern. It was not enough for him to shun home, friends, and associates to evade pursuit. Not in today’s high-tech, total surveillance environment.

The necessities of modern life were potential signposts betraying his whereabouts to the foe. The vehicle he drove, his bank card, cell phone, computer password, and Web address—all these things and more could be used to track and locate him.

The Dog Team had supplied him with sets of cell phones equipped with scrambling devices and hardened against electronic eavesdropping by outside interests. But who watches the watchers?

Steve knew that the team-supplied cells contained locator chips that could be activated by the higher-ups without his knowledge or control, even if the cell was set in the
OFF
position.

One needs money to live, but if he used his bank or credit cards the record of the time, date, and nature of his purchases could be flagged and accessed by interested parties.

One needs a car or motor vehicle to get around in, but his Suburban was known and its license plates subject to being seen by any one of the thousands of security and traffic-monitoring cameras scattered throughout Washington, D.C., and its surroundings.

Steve was not without resources, however. He hadn’t been joking when he told the late Skye about his being prepared. Having Plan B to fall back on was second nature to him.

That philosophy extended to his career as a Dog Team assassin. Major Joseph Kilroy, the man who’d recruited Steve for the team and mentored him during his apprenticeship, had made sure to tell Steve the facts of life concerning their peculiar trade. Kilroy was ever mindful of the fate of Dog Team One, the original Dog Team.

Its origins were obscure, its antecedents murky. It may well have begun in the days of the American Revolution or even before, in the time of the French and Indian War. All armies need an assassination component.

The Continental Army in the era of the Founding Fathers had learned that there are some situations that demand not a combat-ready fighting force but rather a single individual skilled in the ways of sudden death.

And so the Dog Team had been formed.

Elite, secretive, necessary, it had existed ever since under various names and identities, seeing action through the nineteenth century, into World Wars I and II and beyond, serving during America’s “police actions” in global hot spots in the mid-twentieth century.

Then something had gone wrong, drastically wrong.

The Vietnam War and its aftermath had generated a dangerous counterreaction in the nation’s liberal political and media elites. These opinion leaders turned against the military, scapegoating it for a war that these same politicians and pundits had created in the first place.

The full truth about the extent and nature of Dog Team One’s lethal activities had never become public knowledge, but enough of the truth had leaked out for the team to become a pariah for publicity-seeking congressional inquisitors and their cheerleaders in the media.

Dog Team One had been deactivated, disbanded, and denounced by the antimilitary crowd. The unit’s high-ranking officers had been forced into retirement. Lower ranking personnel found themselves smeared by a stigma that resulted in career suicide, causing them to leave the service.

It was a disgrace, a shameful finish for a cadre of unsung heroes whose every covert mission held the risks of capture, torture, imprisonment, and death. Many of its members had made the supreme sacrifice.

Human nature being what it is, and politicians and war being what they are, it was not long before wiser heads in Congress and the Pentagon realized that having a military assassination unit was a necessity, and so the new Dog Team was formed.

But history has a way of repeating itself, Kilroy had warned Steve. What had happened before could happen again. Especially in today’s crazily overheated political climate, there was no telling when the reformed Dog Team might be exposed and sacrificed on the unholy altar of political correctness.

One of the first things a soldier learns is to never enter a building without first knowing where the exits are.

The same applied to the Dog Team, Kilroy had told Steve.

“You’ve got to have an exit strategy,” Kilroy had said. “If the political winds change and the big shots decide to throw you to the wolves, don’t be caught without an escape plan.”

For a professional assassin, such an escape plan must encompass many eventualities. Following Kilroy’s advice, Steve had assembled the components necessary to drop out of sight and begin a new life.

They included such things as a numbered offshore banking account with a hefty nest egg and papers and documents necessary for disappearing into a new assumed identity. Prudence alone dictated that such necessary precautions be kept secret from the team’s handlers, case officers, and higher-ups.

Steve never knew that Kilroy’s natural father was the legendary Terry Kovack, Dog Team One’s supreme assassin, and that Kovack’s descent into poverty, deprivation, and death following the public disgracing of the original team had informed Kilroy’s thoughts regarding the wisdom of not putting too much trust in the politicians of the U.S. government.

Or some of the politically minded military careerists in the Pentagon, either.

But Steve knew good advice when he heard it and had acted accordingly. His leap into the black following the encounter with the Morays therefore found Steve not without resources.

Now, on this Wednesday night less than a week after surviving the attack, Steve was about to resurface.

Which is why he stood in the darkened doorway of a shuttered store across the street from the Gall Building in downtown Washington, D.C.

Steve had contacted one man he was sure he trusted in the organization, Doc Wenzle, his official Dog Team handler.

Tough as an old Army boot, Wenzle was a career officer who had gone undercover to serve as a key component in the Dog Team’s clandestine infrastructure. Wenzle was no medical doctor; the sobriquet “Doc” by which he was known was a tribute to his cunning and professionalism.

In his midsixties, he looked like anything but a military man. Which was the point of the subterfuge. He was rumpled, shaggy, overweight, with a bushy walrus mustache and sloppy personal appearance. He was also a brilliant intelligence officer.

Wenzle operated out of the Gall Building, an aging, slightly frayed office building located in a run-down business district of the nation’s capital. His office was on the fifth floor, a suite of rooms operating under the name of the Holloman Research Institute. The institute was the publisher of “J. D. Holloman’s Information Alert Bulletin,” a monthly e-newsletter that went out over the Internet to subscribers. It featured timely investment and stock tips.

It was all a cover for a Dog Team way station.

There was no J. D. Holloman; rather, Doc Wenzle was J. D. Holloman. The “Information Alert Bulletin” was a real newsletter, incorporating stock market information and market trends that Wenzle gleaned from his intelligence activities. The IAB had several hundred legitimate subscribers, all unaware that it was part of the front of an ongoing covert operation.

The information must have proved accurate enough, though, since most of the subscribers stayed on the active list rather than dropping the newsletter.

Steve had had the Gall Building under observation off and on at irregular intervals for the last twenty-four hours. He detected nothing to indicate that it was the object of enemy activity.

A few moments ago he had phoned Wenzle, using an inexpensive cell he had picked up that afternoon in an electronics hardware store. The cell was unsecured, with no scrambler or encryption devices. Its featureless anonymity made it useful for Steve’s purposes. No one could track him via it; when he was done he would just throw it away.

Steve had said that he had some important information to pass along. Wenzle assured him that the site was secure. Steve was across the street in a deserted doorway where he’d been keeping an eye on the Gall Building for some time as an added precaution. It looked okay, so he got moving.

This was a business district and most of the buildings had been cleared out of their workers by five p.m. It was now almost three hours later. The pedestrian traffic had thinned but not the street traffic, which remained heavy on the two-way street fronting the Gall Building. The nondescript cross street was a well-used artery for the steady flow of workers going home from their jobs in the capital’s nearby extensive government office buildings.

Steve stepped out of the darkened doorway where he’d been sheltering for the last hour or so. It was the entrance to a furniture store that had gone out of business. The store was dark and empty, its display windows masked by brown paper and
FOR RENT
signs. A number of street-level stores and shops along the avenue were similarly shuttered. Times were tough.

Steve waited for a gap in the two-way traffic flow, then darted across the street. He wore a gray-green fur-lined trench coat, unbuttoned for quick access to the guns he wore under his sport jacket. An Army Colt .45 semiautomatic pistol, old but serviceable, was in a shoulder sling holstered under his left arm. A snub-nosed .38 revolver was in his left-hand jacket pocket. A couple of spare clips were in the right-hand pocket of his heavy tweed sport coat.

The weapons and ammo came from one of several dead-drop caches he’d prepared long ago in case of emergencies, caches hidden both here in the city and in and around Rampart County, Virginia. He’d unearthed one of the caches, supplying himself with the handguns, ammo, and several thosand dollars of cash money.

His left hand was wrapped in white gauze bandages. They left his fingers and thumb free but he didn’t have much mobility in them.

In the aftermath of his escape from Crestfield, Steve had had the hand tended by a veterinaran, an acquaintance of his who owed him a favor and whom he’d kept isolated from his Dog Team contacts in anticipation of just such a situation as he now found himself in. After the veterinarian had tended the wound and patched it up, he’d pressed some pain pills on Steve despite Steve’s initial reluctance to accept them. Steve had to stay sharp and didn’t want to dull his senses and reflexes, but the vet convinced him that it was better to have the pills in case he needed them badly than to need them badly and not have them. Steve’s Special Forces training had included learning first-aid treatment for wounds, allowing him to change the bandages and clean the wound with medical supplies the veterinarian had given him.