Damage Control (47 page)

Their heads turned in unison, and they seemed to get it at the same instant.

“If any of you are armed, this club is exactly the last place you want to be right now. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“What?” the leader said. “Is it like the president or something?”

Knapp ignored the question. “Here are your choices, gentlemen. You can go someplace else, or you can submit to a search right here on the street. If I find a firearm on any of you, I’ll arrest you all, and your mamas won’t see their boys for about fifteen years. Which way do you want to go?”

Simple, respectful, and face saving.

“Come on, Antoine,” one of them said. “This place sucks anyway.”

Antoine held Knapp’s gaze for just long enough to communicate his lack of fear. Then he walked away, taking his friends with him.

“Nicely done, Agent Knapp,” Robinson said.

They returned to their posts. “Every time we do one of these late-night OTRs, I’m amazed by the number of people who keep vampire hours. Don’t these kids have jobs to wake up for?”

Robinson chuckled. “I figure they all drive buses or hazmat trucks.”

With the Antoine non-confrontation behind them, Knapp told himself to relax, but in the world of gang-bangers, you always had to be on your toes for the retaliatory strike. He couldn’t imagine that Antoine and his crew would be in the mood to take on federal agents, but you never knew.

He just wanted to get the hell out of here.

“Look left,” Robinson said.

Half a block away, a scrawny, filthy little man was doing his best to navigate a shopping cart around the corner to join their little slice of the world. The cart overflowed with blankets and assorted stuff—the totality of his worldly possessions, Knapp imagined. Aged somewhere between thirty and eighty, this guy had the look of a man who’d been homeless for decades. There was a hunched movement to the chronically homeless that spoke of a departure of all hope. It would be heartbreaking if they didn’t smell so bad.

“If Cowgirl sees him, you know she’ll offer him a ride,” Robinson quipped.

Knapp laughed. “And Champion will give him a job. Couldn’t do worse than some of his other appointments.” Knapp didn’t share the first family’s attraction to the downtrodden, but he admired it. It was the one passion of the president’s that seemed to come from an honest place.

Knapp didn’t want to take action against this wretched guy, but if he got too close, he’d have to do something. Though heroic to socialists and poets, the preponderance of homeless folks were, in Knapp’s experience, nut jobs, harmless at the surface, but inherently unstable. They posed a hazard that needed to be managed.

He felt genuine relief when the guy parked himself on a sidewalk grate and started to set up camp.

Knapp’s earpiece popped as somebody broke squelch on the radio. “Lansing, Binks. Bring the follow car to the front. Cowgirl’s moving in about three.”

“Thank God,” Knapp said aloud but off the air. Finally.

He and Robinson shifted from their positions flanking the doors of the Wild Times to new positions flanking the doors to Cowgirl’s chariot. He double-checked to make sure that his coat was open and his weapon available. A scan of the sidewalk showed more of what they’d been seeing all night.

When the follow car appeared from the end of the block and pulled in behind the chariot, Knapp brought his left hand to his mouth and pressed the button on his wrist mike. “Binks, Knapp,” he said. “We’re set outside.”

“Cowgirl is moving now.”

This was it, the moment of greatest vulnerability. Ask Squeaky Fromme, Sara Jane Moore, or John Hinckley. These few seconds when the protectee is exposed are the moments of opportunity for suicidal bad guys to take their best shot.

Robinson pulled open the Suburban’s door and cheated his body forward to scan for threats from that end of the street, and Knapp cheated to the rear to scan the direction of the homeless guy and the real estate beyond him. He noted with some unease that the guy was paying attention in a way that he hadn’t before. His eyes seemed somehow sharper.

Knapp’s inner alarm clanged.

Ahead and to his left, the double doors swung out, revealing a unmistakably unhappy Cowgirl, who seemed to be resisting her departure. She wasn’t quite yelling yet, but assuming that past was precedent, the yelling would come soon.

Movement to his right brought Knapp’s attention back around to the homeless man, who suddenly looked less homeless as he shot to his feet and hurled something at the chariot.

Knapp fought the urge to intercept the throw, and instead drew his sidearm as he shouted “Grenade!”

He’d just leveled his sights on the attacker when an explosion ripped the chariot apart from the inside, the pressure wave rattling his brain and shoving him face first onto the concrete. He didn’t know if he’d fired a shot, but if he had, it missed, because the homeless guy was still standing.

He’d produced a submachine gun from somewhere—a P90, Knapp thought, but he wasn’t sure—and he was going to town, blasting the night on full-auto.

Behind him, he knew that Campbell and Binks would be shielding Cowgirl with their bodies as they hustled her toward the follow car. In his ear, he heard Lansing shouting, “Shots fired! Shots fired! Agents down!”

Once Knapp found his balance, he rolled to a knee and fired three bullets at the attacker’s center of mass. The man remained unfazed and focused, shooting steadily at the First Lady.

Body armor,
Knapp thought. He took aim at the attacker’s head and fired three more times. The attacker collapsed.

But the shooting continued, seemingly from every compass point. Had passersby joined the fight? What the hell—

Binks and Campbell were still ten feet from the follow car when head shots killed them both within a second of each other. They collapsed to the street, bringing Cowgirl with them. She curled into a fetal ball and started to scream.

Past her, and over her head, bullets raked the doors of the follow car. Going that way was no longer an option.

Keeping low, Knapp let his SIG drop to the pavement as he reached for his slung MP5. This wasn’t time for aimed shots; it was time for covering fire. At this moment, the First Lady of the United States was far more important than any other innocents in this crowd. He held the weapon as a pistol in his left hand as he raked the direction he thought the new shots were coming from.

With his right hand, he grabbed Cowgirl by the neck of her blouse and pulled. “Back into the club!” he commanded as he draped his body over hers.

To others it might have looked as though she was carrying him on her back as he hustled her toward the front doors of the club, past the burning chariot and around the body of Charlie Robinson, who’d been torn apart by the blast.

Knapp was still five steps away when searing heat tore through his midsection, driving the breath from his lungs and making him stagger.

He’d taken that bullet for Cowgirl. He’d done his job. Now he just had to finish it.

He had to get her inside.

The next two bullets took him in the hip and the elbow.

He was done, and he knew it.

“Inside!” he yelled and he pushed the first lady as hard as he could.

He saw her step through the doors the instant before a bullet sheared his throat.

John Gilstrap is the acclaimed author of eight thrillers:
Threat Warning
,
Hostage Zero
,
No Mercy
,
Six Minutes to Freedom
,
Scott Free
,
Even Steven
,
At All Costs
, and
Nathan’s Run
. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages. A safety and environmental expert and former firefighter, he holds a master’s degree from the University of Southern California and a bachelor’s degree from the College of William and Mary in Virginia. John has also adapted four books for the big screen:
Red Dragon
(uncredited) from the Thomas Harris novel,
Word of Honor
from the Nelson DeMille novel, and
Young Men and Fire
, from the Norman Maclean book. He lives in Fairfax, Virginia (near Washington, D.C.). Please visit
www.johngilstrap.com
.

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