Wildfire (30 page)

At twenty minutes after six, when he finally exited the bathroom with a look of numbed relief on his ashen face, Jason Bascomb learned, to his horror, that his dinner that evening would consist of sharing three tubs of greasy fried chicken, crumbly mashed potatoes, congealed gravy, soggy corn, heavy stale biscuits, and lukewarm Cokes with the four security guards, Maas, Parker, and his two legal assistants.

It was not, by any reasonable definition, a pleasant meal.

By seven-thirty-eight that evening, Jason Bascomb was in an absolutely foul
mood ...
to the point that he had to be warned against going outside and searching the neighborhood for their late arriving and so far anonymous client, who—Bascomb assured everyone remaining in the room, two of the bodyguards having gone outside to watch and wait—would get an earful regarding the incredible absurdity of this entire situation, no matter how much money he'd already paid Little, Warren, Nobles & Kole in retainer fees.

What infuriated Bascomb more than anything else was his gradual realization that Maas and Parker, in spite of their visibly painful and incapacitating injuries, didn't seem to be the least bit discomforted by the two-and-a-half-hour drive, the barely digestible dinner, or their less than luxurious surroundings. If anything, the defense attorney suspected, the two surviving counter-terrorists from Operation Counter Wrench were probably enjoying themselves immensely at his expense.

Which, of course, was absolutely true.

At seven-forty-five one of the outside guards gave the established two-and-two knock, waited until the senior of the inside guards looked through the peephole and opened the front door, and then confirmed what everyone fully expected by now. Their anonymous money man was still a no-show.

"How's it look out there?" the senior member of the guard team asked.

"Pretty damned dark," the outside guard responded. "We're lit up here like a Christmas tree."

"Any movement?"

"Nothing. Bill's making a perimeter check, just to make sure, but the only thing we've heard or seen around here so far is a damned alley cat."

The senior member of the guard team hesitated.

"You guys feeling comfortable out there?"

"Not really."

"Me neither. You want anything?"

"We could do without the porch light."

The inside guard nodded. He reached over and shut off the bright outside light that could easily turn his outside security team into a pair of highly vulnerable silhouettes.

"Keep your eyes open," he warned as he closed and locked the front door.

Finally, at seven-fifty-eight by his own watch, when he no longer had the energy to pace back and forth across the faded and worn carpet, Jason Bascomb III pulled the typewritten note he'd received from Leland Kole—one of the senior managing partners of his law firm—out of his pocket and reread it for the fifth time since he'd left the Arlington federal courthouse almost five hours ago.

Jason,

We have been advised that Ice Chest wants to meet with you and the clients at 7:30 this evening, at the safe house. It is very important that you be there. He will be bringing an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who claims to have damaging information on the federal wildlife agents. I'm told that the information is likely to result in dismissal of all charges against our clients, and may provide an opening for a viable lawsuit against the federal government through the Tort Claims Act.

Note: Ice Chest has received intelligence information that you and our clients are under visual and electronic surveillance. Leave the courtroom immediately and meet your drivers in the underground parking lot. Wait for the decoys to arrive, then proceed immediately to the safe house, using maximum evasive techniques and separate routes for each vehicle.

Important: Until we have better information on this electronic surveillance, all communications between you and me and any other members of the office staff are to be in written form and delivered by bonded messenger. Do not call the office, do not use cellular phones or any other transmitting devices, and do not make any other stops until you reach the safe house. Ice Chest will monitor your arrival, verify that you have not been followed, and then meet with you at 7:30 sharp.

Leland.

"Why would anyone with the slightest shred of dignity chose to call themselves 'Ice Chest,' " Bascomb muttered to the room at large. "And if this is such an important meeting, why the hell didn't they—?"

"He's here," one of the bodyguards announced from the front window where he had been watching the front yard and driveway through a gap in the closed drapes.

"Thank
God!"
Bascomb snarled, elbowing one of his assistants aside as he hurried over and peeked through the edge of the drapes. He was starting toward the front door when the bodyguard grabbed his arm.

"Sir, you'd better let us . . . just in case," the muscular young man advised.

Bascomb started to argue and yank his arm loose. But he quickly realized that his strength was no match for a twenty-eight-year-old body builder. Besides, Bascomb quickly rationalized, there was no reason to appear anxious. Especially after what he'd been through during the past five hours.

"I'll meet with him in the kitchen. In
private
," the pompous defense attorney added with a theatrical toss of his head.

Bascomb turned and was starting to walk back to the kitchen when he heard the now familiar two-and-two knock. Unable to ignore his sense of curiosity, he turned back to watch as the senior member of the security team walked up to the door.

The muscular guard started to look through the peephole, hesitated, shook his head irritably, and then unlocked and opened the heavy wooden door.

Two loud thumps echoed through the small room as the impact of the two 10mm hollow-point bullets, throat and head, sent the bodyguard staggering backward in a spray of blood.

In the moments that followed, the theory that a human being responds in an emergency situation in the exact manner that he or she has been trained was amply demonstrated once again.

As the huge form of Riser filled the doorway, the one remaining bodyguard who was still alive—his two outside associates having been quietly dispatched with a knife three and two minutes earlier, respectively— whirled around into a crouched position as he brought his 9mm semiautomatic double-action pistol out of his hip holster with blinding speed. As an ex-Secret Service agent who had spent five years assigned to a Presidential Protection Team, the now privately employed bodyguard had been thoroughly and relentlessly trained to stop a bullet with his vest first and to kill only as a secondary action.

He stopped the first 10mm bullet in his groin—three inches below the lower edge of his vest—which diverted the upward movement of his hands and caused an explosive 9mm round to be discharged through the worn carpet. Bent forward by the impact, the crippled bodyguard died when the second 10mm slug tore through the top of his head.

Roy Parker had been trained in the U.S. Marine Corps to move in, take cover, kill, and keep moving. He reacted to the sudden and violent death of the senior bodyguard by diving forward and scrambling for the man's weapon. Had he not been hampered by a crippled leg, which had been caused by a bullet fired by Special Agent Henry Lightstone six months earlier, he might have made it. Instead, Parker's outstretched hand was less than six inches away from the butt of the bodyguard's 9mm pistol when a 10mm hollow-point punched through the side of his head, just in front of his left ear. A second unnecessary bullet severed his spine at the base of his skull.

Jason Bascomb's two legal assistants had no military, police, or survival training at all, which meant that they both simply stood there, paralyzed and with mouths agape, during the four seconds it took for Riser to kill the two inside guards and Parker. They were still standing there, looking for all the world like highly realistic pop-up targets, when Riser—in a one-two manner that was almost as casual as it was fast—sent two more 10mm bullets tearing into their completely exposed and vulnerable hearts.

Of all the men in the room, dead or alive, Gerd Maas possessed the greatest amount of very practical training and experience in killing and staying alive. Accordingly, he spent those four seconds verifying with a sweep of his cold blue eyes that he had no access to a weapon that would be of any use against a professional killer like the man who had just walked in the doorway and calmly dispatched Jason Bascomb's entire protection team.

So Maas simply sat there in his wheelchair and stared calmly back at the huge man—who, in spite of his size, was so incredibly fast and accurate with his hands and with the sound-suppressed 10mm semiautomatic pistol—with an almost gentle and curious smile on his face.

Like his fellow lawyers, Jason Bascomb III had never fired a gun in his entire life. And the idea of actually having to defend himself against a man with a gun was so foreign and so unlikely for a man in his position that he'd never even given it a moment's thought. And even though he had observed hundreds of bodies shot and stabbed in hundreds of ways, it had always been through videos of crime scenes and photographs of autopsies. The noise and the blood and the smell and the shock had never been real. Thus, aside from his legal education and courtroom practice, the only other halfway useful training that Bascomb had ever acquired was on a stage.

So, like everyone else in the room, Bascomb responded instinctively to his training by stepping forward in a mindless daze, extending a pointed finger out at the huge man who had just killed five people before his very eyes, and declaring in a loud, Shakespearean voice:

"You cannot do this!"

In his last moments the ever-theatrical defense attorney had the dubious pleasure of knowing that he had nailed his entire audience with his final performance, because both Riser and Maas had responded to his loud declaration in an identical
manner ...
and their laughter was the last sound—but one—that rang in his ears.

Chapter Nineteen

Henry Lightstone stood at the end of the main dock of the Windbreaker Marina with his hands on his hips and a perplexed expression on his face.

"Any sign of them?" Larry Paxton asked in a quiet voice, trying hard not to wake up anyone who might be sleeping in one of the nearby boats.

"Nope."

"You
sure
we're at the right place?" the assistant special agent in charge asked for the third time, making no attempt to smother a deep yawn as he stared out across the dark glistening expanse of dock-light-illuminated yachts, cruisers, and sailboats.

"Windbreaker Marina. Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Saturday morning, oh-two-hundred hours," Lightstone replied. "Said not to worry, he'd be real easy to find."

"Yeah, well, you couldn't prove that by me," Paxton grumbled, rubbing his eyes in an effort to wake up.

Following the directions provided by Bobby LaGrange, Henry Lightstone's ex-homicide detective partner at the San Diego Police Department, the five federal wildlife agents had arrived at the Windbreaker Marina at one-forty-five in the morning. A half hour later, and after having checked every one of the one-hundred-and-ninety-two boat slips at the marina, they still hadn't found any sign of LaGrange or his brand-new sports fishing boat.

"This isn't like Bobby," Lightstone said, growing concern evident in his voice.

"What, you mean he never got you up in the middle of the night before, or he never left you standing around waiting for him when you guys were working cases together?"

"People always kill each other at one o'clock in the morning," Lightstone said. "It's practically an American tradition. But I was always the one who was late. Bobby always got to the scenes on time."

"Maybe we ought to try the Windsong Marina," Mike Takahara suggested. "The names are similar and it's down the coast a couple of miles." And when Lightstone started to argue, the tech agent added: "Hey, don't forget, it was two o'clock in the morning when you woke him up. And as I recall, you even said he mumbled a lot."

"Yeah, I know, but he was pretty clear about the name of the marina. He even made me repeat it."

"Now Ah understand why he told us to meet him here at two in the friggin' morning." Paxton nodded in sudden understanding. "He probably just wanted to get back at your sorry ass for waking him up like that."

"Yeah, but did he say anything at all about what the boat looks like or what slip he was in?" Takahara pressed.

"Not that I recall. If he did, I must have forgotten."

"That's wonderful, Lightstone, just absolutely wonderful," Dwight Stoner muttered.

"All right, people," Larry Paxton said with a noticeable lack of enthusiasm, "let's give it one more try. And this time try to keep your eyes open for somebody who just might know what the hell's going on around here."

According to the one half-awake and barely functional night shift employee that they'd managed to find so far—a nineteen- or twenty-year-old youth dressed in ragged white overalls and a pair of decomposing open-toed sneakers, who seemed to know absolutely nothing about a boat named the
Lone Granger,
and to care even less—there were exactly one-hundred-and-ninety boats registered in the Windbreak Marina, with about seventy-five anxious applicants on the waiting list. Not having a key to the office where the register was kept (an understandable precaution on the part of the management, as far as Paxton and Lightstone were concerned), or any idea where anyone with such a key might be at two a.m. on a Saturday morning, the scroungy-looking dockworker had been less than helpful.

But in trying to convey what little he apparently knew, the young marina employee
had
managed to explain why the idea of someone going out and buying a brand-new boat, and only
then
going around trying to find a slip to put it in, was one of the standing jokes in southern Florida.

"Trust me," the youth had said with what presumably passed for a sincere expression in Fort Lauderdale. "Unless your buddy's got
really
big bucks, it just ain't gonna happen in his lifetime. No way."