No Mercy (15 page)

Charlie Warren felt Garino shift uncomfortably in the driver's seat. He knew what question was coming before the driver had a chance to ask it. "You sure you want to keep waiting?"

Charlie checked his watch. It was 9:20. "Ivan set H-Hour for 10:30. We go in at 10:10." It was the third time he'd answered the same question. "The plan hasn't changed. The plan isn't going to change."

"I just don't want to be late," Garino said.

Glick concurred from the backseat. "He's got a point, Charlie. We wait too long, we run the risk of something going wrong approach of the movies was suicide in real life, as was running and ducking. In low light, a moving target was easier to detect than a stationary one. It's why ambushers have the advantage over ambushees.

"Over here, assholes!" Boxers yelled, and he emptied half a magazine toward the spot where the enemy had last formed a line. It was a damned risky way of getting your enemies to reveal themselves, but Boxers had never been averse to risk.

The attackers opened up with everything they had, ripping the night apart with noise and light, thus sealing their fate. Jonathan knew his cue. A shooter's face resided three feet behind a muzzle flash. He picked a flash, and squeezed off a burst. When that rifle dropped, he found another flash and repeated the process, although without a hit, he thought.

Predictably, the rifle fire turned, and Jonathan dove to the ground under a storm of bullets that shredded the foliage around him. He tried to make himself disappear into the ground behind a hardwood. He could feel the impact of bullets through the trunk.

Moments earlier, in the lodge, the Hughes family had gathered around the computer screen to watch. The heat signatures from six separate vehicles lined up along the ridge that ran behind the cabin.

"How could he have left us like this?" Julie railed. "We even talked about it. How could he do this?"

Thomas barked, "What the
fuck
difference does it make now?" She looked like she'd been slapped, and he enjoyed it. "They're there and we're here."

They'd taken off their night vision to keep from whiting them out with the computer screen, and in the blue glow, Thomas watched his father rub his neck the way he always did when he was contemplating a problem.

In the distance, they heard three quick shots, and then a second later, three explosions that seemed to trigger the rolling fusillade that was Jonathan's firefight.

Thomas climbed from behind the blanket-formed light lock and darted to the front window. He replaced the goggles and looked toward the shooting. "Sounds like they're tearing 'em up," he said. He looked back to his family. "It's really happening." He brought his rifle up and waited.

Behind him, Julie huddled with Stephenson, and that pissed Thomas off. He wanted his father to quit coddling her and take command. He wanted him to step up like Scorpion and issue orders for everyone.

Thomas hated the fact that they were hiding--cowering--as Scorpion did the dirty work. It was shameful. When this was over--

"Oh, God," Stephenson said from the light lock. "They're swarming down the hill in the rear. The picture just refreshed. My God, there are so many!"

Thomas moved back to the light lock to see for himself. He could see people now. His eyes went first to the fighters who were engaging Scorpion, frozen in time as they faced off almost nose to nose. Then he saw the swarm of images on their way down the hill.

He counted them. Jesus, could that possibly be right? Could there possibly be twenty attackers, plus the ones with Scorpion? They were still a long way off--a half mile or more, probably--but they were on their way in a wide loop that looked like a noose around the cabin. "We need to get ready," he said. "We need to get downstairs." He shouted, "Gail! Jesse! They're on their way!" He started for the stairs.

Julie grabbed him to make him are you doing this?" Venice demanded.

The intruder refused to answer. At gunpoint, she'd been forced to bind her own ankles with duct tape to the legs of a guest chair in her office, and then to tape her own left wrist to the arm of the same chair. When the intruder was satisfied with her work, he then bound her right wrist and revisited the other three points of bondage with much tighter, more aggressive loops. Finally, he fastened her elbows, eliminating movement.

When that was done, the man, whom she now recognized from her Internet searches to be Carlyle Industries' security chief and from Mama's description as the man who'd approached Roman, slid behind her desk and squinted at her computer screen.

"For heaven's sake!" Venice barked. "Would you please say
something
?"

Charlie Warren's head didn't move as his gaze shifted to her. "Watch the attitude, Ms. Alexander. You are two strips of tape away from suffocation." A smile bloomed on his handsome face. "There's also that fine son of yours to worry about. Much too young to die."

Something inside Venice dissolved. "You wouldn't."

"Maybe I already have." He transformed his voice to a mocking falsetto. "Ow! Ow, you're hurting me! Please stop! Mommeee!"

Enraged and terrified, Venice pulled at her bonds.

Charlie Warren laughed. "You know I'll just shoot you if you wriggle free, right? Go for it." He squinted as he watched the images on the screen. "Ooh, looks like they're in trouble."

The world tilted inside Venice's head. The image of Roman yelling out to her was so real, so vivid. Could this man really do such unspeakable things to a child?

Of course he could. Look what they did to Tibor and to Ellen. When the stakes were high enough, she realized, cruelty had no limits. This man in her chair, behind her computer screen, was a monster.

Why hadn't he killed her already? He
needed
her to be alive. But why?

Her role was a tactical one, she realized. He needed her alive for a specific reason. She reran the events of the past week and she landed on her answer. "I'm your insurance policy," she announced.

His gaze shifted again from the screen.

"You need me alive as a bargaining chip in case Ivan Patrick fails. If Digger--if Jonathan lives through the attack, you're going to use me to get your weapons back."

The man tried to maintain a poker face, but she could see that she'd nailed it.

In an unexpected burst of bravado, she added, "And you are Charles Warren, security director for Carlyle Industries. Your picture is on the Web site. That's probably not very smart."

"I'd be careful," Charlie warned, looking back to the screen. "Start thinking too hard and I'll have no choice but to kill you."

"You're going to kill me anyway." She wanted to sound bold, but angered herself with a tiny catch in her voice.

The man smiled. "Maybe I should get it over with."

Venice smiled back. "You can't. Not yet. Jonathan wouldn't do anything to help you unless he had--what does he call it? Proof of life. Like the mo" Jonathan panted into his radio. When he got no reply, he tried again. "Gail, how are you holding out up there?"

Still nothing. What the hell was going on with the radios? First it was Venice and now the Hugheses. Without either of them, he was blind out here.

It sounded like they were locked in one hell of a war.

Dom hated being outside the loop on Digger's escapades. Tonight in particular, he had the sense that his old friend was in over his head, and he wanted to
do
something. The fact that Venice was ignoring her phone made it even worse.

He stayed out of it because Digger wanted it that way, probably to save him from the burden of the violence, but Dom sensed that there was also an element of shame. Noble rationale notwithstanding, he hated being left outside the circle.

He couldn't take it anymore. As a
Seinfeld
episode reran on the rectory television, he realized that he no longer cared what Digger thought. Dom's rightful place tonight was at the firehouse helping Venice cope with the stress of being Digger's link to the world. If that pissed her boss off, then let him be pissed.

Grabbing a gray jacket to ward against the chilly evening, he called to Father Timothy and told him he was going for a walk.

The breeze off the water made the night feel more like March than April. He shot the collar of his jacket and stuffed his hands into the front pockets as he made his way down the hill toward the firehouse, two blocks away. Scanning the dark, empty streets, it was hard to imagine the madhouse it was going to be in two short months when the tourists returned. He made a mental note to remind the Town Council to repair the streetlights. On a moonless night like this, footing was treacherous for anyone who didn't know the lay of the land. After years of practice, Dom knew to expect the loose bricks in the sidewalk near the corner at Second Street, and he adjusted his stride accordingly.

Passing the darkened silhouette of St. Kate's on his left, he fought the urge to double-check the sanctuary doors. He wasn't a fan of locked churches anyway. If the fear of mortal sin still prevailed in society, he'd have left the doors open to serve the homeless. He considered it a failure of the modern church that such kindness was no longer possible in today's world.

Just past the church and its grounds rose the six-foot colonial-style brick wall that surrounded the parking lot and back doors of the firehouse. Jonathan had erected the wall within months of purchasing the property as a means to keep people from turning into his parking lot from Church Street, and to provide some element of privacy.

Approaching First Street at the bottom of the hill and the marina that lay across, the temperature dropped another five degrees. Dom had always loved this view of the water through the forest of darkened masts, swaying in the gentle waves of the river.

He turned the corner and knew that the peace would not last. In the otherwise deserted streets, a heavily jacketed man sat across from the firehouse on a public bench in the tiny Veteran's Park among last summer's flower carcasses. The newspaper he held spread above his lap could not possibly be legible in the yellow glow of the single streetlight across the street.

"Hello," Dom said with his most priestly smile.

The man looked startled at first, then grunted a quick, "Good evening, Father," before he returned to his paper.

Dom noted the formality and ct least a Catholic.

There are no coincidences.

It all felt very wrong. Over the span of a second or two, he inventoried the status quo, beginning with the fact that Digger was in the middle of an uncontrolled shit storm. Add to that the fact that Venice didn't answer her phone--Venice
always
answered her phone--and cap it with a stranger sitting in a place where no reasonable man would be, reading in light that allowed him to see virtually nothing.

Something bad was about to happen.

No coincidences.

Maybe something bad was already happening.

Dom said nothing more to the man. He just kept walking. He turned left at the corner of Gibbon Creek Road, at the far end of the firehouse, and fought the urge to quicken his pace as he turned left again and entered the alley formed by the portion of Jonathan's brick wall that separated his parking lot from St. Kate's. The night felt suddenly colder, and Dom found himself wishing that he'd grabbed a heavier jacket.

At the height of the workday, there would be as many as fifteen cars parked in the lot on the back side of the firehouse; at this time of night, it was usually barren. Tonight, however, the lot hosted a single vehicle, parked as far from the security light as possible. He thought he could see a silhouette behind the steering wheel, as if someone was watching the back door. He paused there in the mouth of the alley before continuing his stroll back up the hill toward the church.

Dom glanced up at the third floor as he strolled, hoping to see some sign of activity, but the blinds were all pulled, as they so often were when Venice worked alone at night.

Maybe he was overreacting. Jonathan was paranoid as hell that his friends and his staff might be victimized as a result of his work, and he'd years ago insisted that Venice and Dom both have sensors implanted under the skin near their armpits that would allow for easy tracking if the worst happened. He also insisted that they both carry panic buttons--Dom's in the form of a crucifix, and Venice's in the form of a gold pendant--that would kick emergency procedures into gear if needed. Venice had a panic button in her desk that would accomplish the same thing. If she were in the kind of trouble that Dom suspected, wouldn't she have activated the system?

He decided he didn't care. His father had once bestowed upon him some great advice: sometimes, if there is doubt, then there really is no doubt at all.

Dom took a deep breath and found a shadow where he felt most invisible. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed the number for the police department. He briefly thought about calling 9-1-1, but decided against bringing too much attention to what was fundamentally a gut feeling.

The smoky voice that answered the phone could have been male or female. "Fisherman's Cove Police Department. Is this an emergency?"

"No emergency," Dom said. "Is Chief Kramer in his office?"

"Who's calling, please?"

"This is Father D'Angelo with St. Katherine's Parish. I'd like to speak with the chief if I could."

"Good evening, Father. I'm sorry, sir, but the chief is not available at the moment. It's a little late."

Of course it was a little late. After ten-thirty, for hese the mines!"

"No!" Thomas and Stephenson answered together.

"Scorpion might be out there," Thomas added.

He realized they were losing. Throwing Scorpion's instructions to the wind, he'd changed the selector on his rifle from single-shot to three-round burst. The improved volume of fire slowed the attackers down, but as the breech on his weapon locked open for the third time and he inserted his fourth and final magazine, he realized that he was thirty rounds away from being in real trouble. Even as the thought passed through his mind, he fired another two bursts. Make that twenty-four rounds from a world of hurt.

He slid the empty mags across the floor to his mother. "Hurry, Mom!" he shouted. She moved in slow motion, as if in a trance.

There were no targets, per se, to shoot at. Instead, he found himself targeting the sparkles of muzzle flashes along the tree line and in the grass. His father had repositioned to the rear of the house again, where he apparently had all kinds of targets to shoot at, emptying clip after clip of automatic weapons fire through the two windows he commanded.

Out front, the man Thomas had shot would not shut up. He screamed like a wounded animal, begging for someone to help him. If it hadn't been so unnerving, it would have been sad. Twice, as Thomas stuck his weapon through the open widow to take another shot at the tree line, he'd considered helping the poor bastard to a bullet to his head, but both times he stopped himself. What was the point of wasting a bullet on someone who was already hit?

He fired two more bursts. "Mom! Hurry on the reload! I'm almost out! You've got to work faster!"

But she'd either gone deaf or was ignoring him, because she just kept her head down and continued to fumble with the rifle he'd already slid to her. "Jesus, Mom! Hurry." She was unmoved. It was as if she'd set a pace for herself, and was by God going to stick to it.

A two-man team charged forward, and he cut them down.

His breech locked again. Unarmed now, and facing a yardful of attackers, just what the hell was he supposed to do? As the wounded man continued to scream, Thomas heard his father fire another six or seven shots through the back window.

"This is fucking crazy," he mumbled, and he scrambled on hands and knees across the wooden floor to his mother, who was crying as she struggled with the bullets.

"I'm sorry," she snuffled. "I'm trying, I'm really trying."

He snatched the magazine from her, along with the box of bullets, and scooted back toward the window. It felt about half-full. There had to be a better way.

Wait. There
was
a better way.

No, it was crazy.

No, it was the only answer.

Spinning like a propeller on the smooth pine floor, he scrambled back to his mother and grabbed her arm. "Mom, come with me," he said.

She looked horrified. "I can't."

"You
have
to." He tightened his grip and dragged her toward his window.

"Ow!" she hollered. "Thomas, you're hurting me!"

He ignored her, even as he heard his father boom his name from the other room.

Once again at the window, he peeked up long enough to fire again into the night, and then he ducked down again. He was hined. "Someone has to reload.
I
have to reload. I promise I'll do it faster."

"Mom, goddammit, shut up and listen to me. All you have to do is fire out the window. Just for a few seconds."

"I can't."

"And try not to hit me."

That last part flew right by her, unnoticed. "I can't do it, Thomas. Please don't make me."

He leaned in and kissed her on the cheek. "Then don't," he said.

He snapped his night vision back into place, and hefted himself up and over the sill into the night.

The rate of fire outside doubled.