Full Black (4 page)

I
t was at times like these that Luke Ralston wanted to throttle the State of California for not being more cooperative when it came to the carrying of firearms. Here it was the middle of the night, a strange van had followed his car onto a private gated estate, and he was unarmed. While the van and its driver might have had a completely legitimate reason for being there, he doubted it, and he would have very much appreciated having a weapon right now.

Knowing that if the van and its driver were up to no good they would very likely be armed, Ralston proceeded accordingly.

Speed, surprise, and overwhelming violence of action had been drilled into the very fiber of his DNA in his military career. While he couldn’t preemptively attack the van and its driver, he could take immediate control of the situation by using both speed and surprise.

Increasing his speed, he turned on his headlights, engaged the high beams, and raced toward the van.

At that moment, the driver leaped from the van with what appeared to be a shotgun. Ralston pinned the accelerator to the floor.

The weapon exploded with a roar and a round slammed into the front of Ralston’s Porsche. The shooter had been aiming at the headlights. Big mistake.

Ralston continued to pick up speed, aiming right for the driver. As the man pumped his weapon to chamber another round, Ralston killed his lights—plunging the man’s dilated eyes into darkness.

All the shooter could do was aim for the sound of the car that was barreling down on him, which is exactly what happened.

Whether the driver of the van was just that good, or just that lucky, Ralston had no idea, but his second shot exploded with another booming roar and tore a hole right through the windshield. Buckshot would have deflected off the glass. Whoever was shooting at him must have been using slugs. Ralston didn’t need to look over to know that the seat next to him was shredded. A few more inches to the left and he would have been shredded as well.

With the 911’s engine screaming, Ralston readied himself for what was about to happen.

Flipping his lights and high beams back on, he once again flooded the shooter’s eyes with light. There was the roar of the shotgun once more, but it was the last thing the man did before the right front quarter of Ralston’s car struck the man’s lower body.

Rather than being thrown clear, the large man was pulled halfway beneath the car. Ralston fought to maintain control. As if guided by some unseen force that wanted to raise the car and snatch the body from underneath the suspension, the Porsche’s right side tilted up, and Ralston thought for sure the car was going to flip. But just as it had begun to rise, it slammed back down.

Ralston maintained a death grip on the Porsche’s steering wheel as he tried to regain control.

It wasn’t until the car spun through the wet grass and slammed into the side of one of the outbuildings that the horror finally came to a stop. But as that horror ended, a new one began.

Unbuckling his seat belt, Ralston struggled to get out of the car. It was a mess. Adrenaline and fear coursed through his body.

What sounded like a muffled gunshot from inside the house suddenly refocused his mind on the threat that still remained.

It was pointless to waste time searching for the driver’s shotgun. Without a flashlight the chances of rapidly locating it were slim to none. The odds were the same for finding a secondary weapon somewhere in the van. Ralston took off in a sprint. He had to get up to the house and save Salomon.

Whoever was inside had undoubtedly heard the noise of the melee out on the service road. Whether any neighbors in this remote part of the canyon had heard the shotgun blasts and had called the police didn’t matter. By the time they arrived, whatever was happening here would be over. If Salomon was still alive inside, his attackers were going to be doubly determined to complete their objective and to get the hell out. That meant Ralston had to move fast.

Often, high-end home invasions were “inside jobs,” where the perpetrators had firsthand knowledge of the layout of the home. They were able to move quickly, knowing where everything and everyone would be. The one thing these home invaders wouldn’t be prepared for was Ralston, and Ralston knew the layout of the Salomon home well.

Based on where the van had turned around, it was obvious that whoever was inside had been dropped off at or near the home’s service entrance. Add one more point to the inside job column. Approaching the door, he saw that it had been propped open. It seemed that not only was this the way in, but it was also going to be the way out.

The good thing about the door having been propped open was that the alarm, which Salomon never bothered to arm, would have already sounded its quick, three-bell chime. No one heard Ralston as he slipped inside the house.

Near the service entrance was a utility room the size of a small family apartment. Here, all of the home’s mechanics were housed, including eight panels of circuit breakers.

Ralston cut the power, plunging the house into darkness. Once his eyes adjusted, he went for a weapon.

He could have used a golf club, but he preferred something he was more proficient with. In the kitchen, he found exactly what he wanted. It was the perfect tool—not too long, not too short, and incredibly sharp. He pulled the seven-inch fillet knife from the knife block and moved on.

Coming around the corner of the large island in the kitchen, he found what he assumed to be the victim of the muted shot he had heard from outside. He was relieved to see that it wasn’t Salomon.

In his midtwenties, in jeans, a T-shirt, and a pair of Chuck Taylors, he looked like a college kid. Ralston had never seen him before. Who the hell was he? he wondered. A friend? A visiting relative? An employee?

The boy had been shot through the bridge of his nose, right between his eyes. He was lying in a puddle of milk commingling with his own blood. An upturned bowl of cereal lay nearby. Ralston reached down to double-check him. He had no pulse, but was still warm.

Moving quickly, he crossed the kitchen and moved into the darkened dining room. From what he could tell, nothing was out of place. Salomon’s expensive pieces of art still hung on the walls and his box of antique silverware was still proudly displayed on the sideboard. That fact, coupled with the professionalism with which the boy in the kitchen had been dispatched, was making this look less and less like a home invasion and more and more like some sort of hit.

The thought was just solidifying in his mind, when Ralston heard someone step on the warped floorboard that Salomon had never bothered to get fixed.

CHAPTER 5

R
alston’s breathing all but stopped. Making sure he didn’t bang into any of the dining-room furniture and give himself away, he slipped across the room as fast as he could to the open double doors on the other side. Pressing himself against the wall, he gripped the knife tighter and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long. From out in the hallway, he could hear a man’s voice. He was whispering and in some sort of a foreign language. It sounded to Ralston like Eastern European, maybe Russian, but he couldn’t be sure.

When the man repeated himself, Ralston realized he was speaking over a radio. Was he trying to raise the driver outside? Or were there more men inside the house?

Either way, it wasn’t good. Ralston needed to get to Salomon. He could hear the man’s footfalls upon the wood floor of the hallway growing closer.

Ralston had two choices. He could face the man head-on, or he could wait until the man had passed and take him from behind. Shots had been fired and at least one person inside the house had already been killed. Ralston was literally bringing a knife to a gunfight, so he slipped off his shoes and settled on the latter course of action. Three seconds later, the man moved past the dining room doors.

He was huge—just as the man outside had been—six-foot-three, at least, and well over 250 pounds. He had wide shoulders, draped in what even the home’s semidarkness couldn’t hide was a very cheap suit. His feet were shod in the long, box-toed dress shoes so popular with Europeans. In one hand he carried a radio and in the other a suppressed pistol.

His hair was crew-cut short and the back of his head looked just like a Russian’s. From the base of his neck to the crown of his head, it was flat as a board. It was a cultural attribute that most Russian men, tightly swaddled and picked up seldom by their mothers, shared.

As the Russian passed, Ralston slipped into the hallway behind him. The intruder had no idea he was there until it was too late.

In one fluid motion, Ralston grabbed across the man’s forehead, yanked his head to the left, and with his right hand plunged the filleting knife into the anterior triangle between the top of the clavicle and the side of the neck. It severed the man’s internal jugular vein and carotid artery. He then swept the blade across, severing the trachea. All that could be heard was a hiss, like air being let out of a tire.

Ralston put all of his weight on the man to prevent him from using his last seconds of life to fight back and rode him down to the floor. Convinced he was no longer a threat, he dragged him off to the side, next to a cupboard, and left him there to bleed out.

It was a black art, the taking of life, and one that Luke Ralston was all too well versed in.

Dropping the knife, he picked up the intruder’s suppressed Walther P99 and did a press check. Satisfied that a round was chambered and the weapon was hot, he turned the volume down on the radio, tucked it into his back pocket, and went off in search of Salomon.

The problem, though, was twofold. Were there any more intruders in the house and where should he begin looking for Salomon? He decided to start with the producer’s office.

To get there, he had to pass through the entry hall with its wide double staircase. There was nothing for cover and Ralston used the darkness and shadows as best he could. The living room, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and ambient moonlight spilling from outside, was even worse, but he made it through both without incident.

The entrance to Larry Salomon’s office was down a short hall just past the living room. The hairs on the back of Ralston’s neck were standing on end before he even got to the door.

With the weapon up and at the ready, he button-hooked into the room and tried to take it all in.

Everything was different. The office looked as if it had been turned into some sort of war room. Whiteboards and bulletin boards were leaning against the walls and a large, rolling chalkboard was off to one side. Salomon’s imposing glass-and-steel desk now sat cheek-by-jowl with two additional, smaller desks, which were topped with high-end Apple computer systems and what Ralston recognized as editing equipment. There were stacks of cardboard filing boxes filled with reams and reams of papers and documents.

There were more pillars of books, some stacked three feet high and surrounded by yellow Post-it notes on a pair of matching drafting tables. And then there was another body.

The man appeared to be in his midforties, doughy, with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching beard. He wore jeans, loafers, and an Oxford cloth shirt. He had been shot in the back of the head execution-style. Ralston rolled him over to see who he was. As with the body in the kitchen, he didn’t recognize the man.

Exiting the office, he went down the hall to the back stairs. If Salomon had retained any of the emergency response advice he had dispensed to him dozens of times, perhaps he would have headed straight upstairs. If so, maybe it had bought him some time, especially if he’d heard the shots and had been able to figure out what was going on.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Ralston crouched down and stole a quick peek around the doorframe. The hallway was empty.

Stepping into the hall, he moved as quickly as he could toward Salomon’s bedroom. He stopped only for open doors, and even then, it was for just long enough to make sure there were no threats on the other side.

He was fifteen feet away from the master bedroom, when a figure stepped into the hall and fired.

The bullet came so close to the side of Ralston’s head that it actually set his right ear ringing. On instinct, having fired hundreds of thousands of rounds during his Spec Ops career, he depressed the trigger of his own weapon twice in quick succession and dropped the shooter onto the carpeted floor of the hallway.

Ralston advanced on the man and kicked the suppressed pistol away before checking to see if he was still alive. One round had entered just below his nose; the other had entered through his throat. He was big and dressed in a cheap suit just like his partner downstairs. The back of his head was flat as well. What the hell was going on? Who were these people? Why were there Russians in the house?

Ralston’s questions were interrupted by the sound of a sharp crack from inside Salomon’s bedroom. It wasn’t the crack of a pistol. It was the crack of molding as drywall was being ripped away.

It told him two things. Salomon was still alive, but he had only seconds left to live.