Veil of Civility: A Black Shuck Thriller (Declan McIver Series) (8 page)

6:56 p.m. Eastern Time – Friday

Briton-Adams mansion

Forest, Virginia

Being hired by Sweat Security to operate the gate and man the tiny sunroom that had been erected to temporarily serve as a guard house for the Briton-Adams mansion was the best Chris Evans could hope for after losing his job at the White Rock Intermet Foundry. The last three years had been marked by long periods of unemployment after the plant he'd worked in for twenty-two years had closed; in the current slow economy, a forty-eight-year-old father of three without a college education wasn't exactly at the top of the hiring list.

Putting his feet up on the particle board desk, Chris spread a copy of the
Lynchburg News & Advance
open in front of him as he leaned back in the black leather office chair that had been borrowed from the mansion's study. The chair creaked under his two hundred and fifty pound frame. Working a toothpick through his teeth with his tongue, he looked over the inside front page of the paper. A full page spread with pictures of the newly completed construction at Liberty University and the guests expected to attend that night's gala unveiling kept his attention for a moment before he moved on to the sports page.

His experience as an MP with the Marine Corp Reserve and his lack of a criminal record meant he'd met the base qualifications for the job and had been hired as part of the three man team that was providing the security for the mansion while Abaddon Kafni was staying at the property.

The Briton-Adams mansion was a three story brick plantation house that had been constructed in the late nineteen-thirties by a wealthy industrialist named Morgan Adams on a high knoll two hundred yards off Cottontown Road in the northeastern part of Bedford County, Virginia. After his death, the house had been sold to pay off his debts and had been bought by the Briton family, who owned it presently.

The Britons were a family from the British West Indies who had played a key role in the development of the area and had owned a large portion of the land that now made up the neighborhoods surrounding their home. As wealthy developers, they had helped in the founding of Liberty University and continued to donate large sums to its projects. Since they spent much of their time traveling, they'd offered their home to the university's latest lightning rod professor, Abaddon Kafni, while he took up his new post and set about finding a permanent residence for his family in the area.

In the eyes of Chris Evans, the Britons were old money suburbanites who didn't have to worry about a slow economy or the closing of a factory. In all probability, they were the kind of people who closed factories and sent the jobs overseas to a country with far lower wages and living standards than the United States.

But it was an easy gig, he reasoned with himself, as he took a drink of coffee. Kafni had his own three man security detail to take care of everything inside the house. The only thing Evans and the other two hired guards had to do was keep a watch over the perimeter of the property and call the police if they noticed anything out of the ordinary. Two weeks on daylight and two weeks on nights was a bit rough, but it was an income and he'd been guaranteed several months of employment while Kafni stayed at the mansion. If Sweat Security's contract was renewed once Kafni moved to a more permanent residence in the area, he'd been assured that he would be a shoo-in for continued employment.

Closing the paper and fighting a yawn, he removed his feet from the desk and sat up just as the headlights of a vehicle coming up the road attracted his attention. Standing and leaning out of the door, he looked east on Cottontown Road as a dark colored truck rounded a bend from the south. Immediately he was struck by the speed the vehicle was traveling, but was prepared to write it off as another crazy teenager with a lead foot until the vehicle began to slow down. As it got closer, Evans recognized it as one of the two black GMC SUVs that Abaddon Kafni and his security team drove. He stepped out of the guard shack with his hand on the radio clipped to his belt. The SUV made a right turn, the driver's side window descending into the door frame as the vehicle came to a stop.

"Open the gate!" someone inside the SUV yelled.

Evans squinted into the darkness and saw the face of Levi Levitt, Kafni's no-nonsense assistant, staring back at him. He ran back to the guard house and hit the button to open the gates.

"There's a white sports car coming in, too. Lock the place down behind us and don't let anyone else through until the police arrive!" Levitt yelled, as he floored the accelerator and the SUV roared up the long straight driveway towards the house. Evans watched the taillights vanish into the mansion's detached garage, then reached for the radio on his belt to alert the other two guards positioned along the north and west sides of the property. Suddenly another set of headlights washed over the guardhouse from the west and a dark red Chevy Suburban made a left hand turn into the drive and accelerated through the gates.

"Hey! You can't go in there!" Evans shouted as he ran out onto the paved drive, radio in hand. He turned as he heard another vehicle approaching. A second dark red Suburban screeched to a halt in front of him, the headlights preventing him from seeing who was inside.

Evans heard the driver's door open, followed by brisk footsteps, then a short man with dark receding hair and a thick beard stood in front of him. He regarded Evans coolly for a moment before raising a suppressed pistol.

“What? No!” exclaimed Evans, frozen to the spot.

"Excuse us," the man said, as he fired three times and stepped away towards the guard shack.

Evans felt the rounds enter his chest as the radio slid from his grasp. He stood still for a moment trying to draw breath, then fell to the wet pavement, still struggling to breathe. The sound of the gate beginning to close and the driver's door of the SUV being shut were the last sounds he heard as he clawed his way towards the guard shack and died, lying in the grass beside the one lane driveway he'd been hired to watch.

7:04 p.m. Eastern Time – Friday

Cottonwood Road

Forest, Virginia

Declan shifted furiously through the gears as he turned right and accelerated onto Cottonwood Road. They flew past the two shopping centers that occupied the corner of Cottonwood and the highway and over a concrete bridge spanning railroad tracks, then large brick homes came into view. Rounding a leftward bend, Declan finally saw the house he was looking for.

Sitting on top of a high knoll on the right side of the road, the Briton-Adams mansion was a well-known local landmark.

"What's that sound?" Declan asked, looking towards the floor.

"It's my phone," said Constance, hearing the tiny beep. Her mascara had run while she was crying and smudged around her eyes. She dabbed at them with a tissue as she said, "That's the sound it makes when it's passing in and out of service."

She leaned over and pulled the Samsung smartphone from her purse, tapping on the display to light up the screen. "See?" she said holding it up. "No signal."

"This close to Lynchburg? That's odd.”

"The tower changes over in Bedford, remember? There's never a signal here for a few miles."

"Yeah, but that's twenty miles down the road," Declan said, reaching for his own phone before realizing it had been in the jacket he'd left inside the Barton Center.

The convertible whined as Declan downshifted and swung into the driveway. He stopped at the closed gates. Pushing the automatic down button, he waited as the driver's window descended with a low hum.

"Where are the guards?" Declan said as he looked around. "Levi said there were three guards at the property."

Constance looked around. "I don't see anyone. Are you sure there's supposed to be someone here?"

Declan didn't answer. Outside of the Barton Center he'd been unable to escape the feeling that Kafni was still in danger. While he couldn't be sure that Kafni had been the target, his instincts told him that was the case. Was it an old skill that had been reawakened by seeing his old friends? He'd learned to trust his feelings in his two decades in the field and if something didn't feel right, he'd learned the hard way that it probably wasn't right. Even though there had been several representatives of the United States government inside the building, none of them had carried the notoriety of the event's keynote speaker. Nor had any of them been the target of six previous assassination attempts or the subject of a handful of
fatwas
calling for their deaths.

Opening the door, he stepped out onto the wet pavement and looked three hundred and sixty degrees around the car. The first thing that drew his attention was a set of muddy tire tracks ten feet away. On closer examination it was obvious that the tracks had been made recently as a vehicle had turned left into the property at high speed and had cut a corner, tearing up the wet grass. Could the vehicle have been the SUV driven by Levi Levitt? From his knowledge of the area, Declan doubted it. While it was possible Levitt had taken a less direct route through one of the neighborhoods south of the property, Declan thought it was highly unlikely. The routes through the neighborhoods were full of turns and Levitt had only been in town for a few days. The risk of getting lost, especially at night, would have been far too great.

He walked towards the guard house. Inside an opened newspaper and a cup of coffee sat on a cheap particle board desk, but no guard was present. He turned and walked out. As his eyes swept the area, he saw a black boot lying on the ground in the high grass near one of the brick columns that supported the gate. Rushing over, he knelt beside a heavy set man with brown curly hair, wearing the same type of navy blue uniform as the security at the Barton Center. He reached down and felt for a pulse with his index and middle fingers, although it was obvious from the man's glassy stare and the entry wounds on his chest that he was deceased. The man's skin was warm to the touch, a sign that he had only recently met his end.

Declan ran back to the driver's side of his car and opened the door. "Do you have a cell signal yet?" he said to his wife, who looked at him wide-eyed from the passenger seat.

"No," she said thumbing the device's screen, “nothing."

"I need you to drive down the road until you get a signal and call the police."

"Declan, what's happened?"

"Tell them to come to the Briton-Adams mansion immediately," he said, ignoring her question. "Tell them the guard's been killed."

Her response seemed to catch in her throat as she watched him reach under the driver's seat. With the sound of tearing Velcro he removed a leather pouch and opened it to reveal the black grip of a Glock pistol. Withdrawing the gun, he released the magazine and checked it before reinserting it into the grip and chambering a round.

"What are you doing?" Constance asked, as her eyes darted between her husband and the gun in his hand.

"I'm going to find Abe. Get going and don't come back until I call you and tell you it's safe."

He slid the pistol into his pocket and pulled off the neck tie he'd been wearing, before jogging towards the gate. He jumped and gripped the top of the gate. Pulling himself up and swinging his legs over, he heard his wife shift her sports car into reverse and exit the driveway. Landing on the wet pavement beyond the gate, he pulled the pistol from his pocket and ran towards the well-lit house on the hill two hundred yards ahead of him.

Reaching the top of the knoll, Declan entered a cluster of dogwood trees that occupied a teardrop shaped yard formed as the driveway forked left and right, meeting at the front door of the mansion fifty yards ahead of him. Nickel sized drops of rain fell from the trees above, soaking his light blue dress shirt as he dodged through the yard using the trees for sporadic cover. Arriving at the edge of the yard, he concealed himself behind the broad trunk of a tree and leaned around in search of anyone outside of the house.