Target Response, page 16
The fire door was on the left-hand side of the lobby. Steve went through it into the empty stairwell and started the long climb.
It was an effort. He was in top shape and ordinarily he could have scaled five floors’ worth of stairs without much accelerating his heart rate. But his Crestfield ordeal and the succeeding days on the run had taken a lot out of him.
By the time he reached the fifth-floor landing he was breathing hard. His wounded hand throbbed fiercely. Each time it throbbed it sent pain waves hammering through him. He paused for a moment to catch his breath.
Steve reached under his sport coat, loosening the .45 in the shoulder sling under his left arm, in case he needed to get at it quickly.
Cracking the door open a hair, he peered into the fifth-floor hall, a long corridor lit by overhead fluorescent lights that were reflected as pale blurs in the linoleum floor. Offices lined the hall on both sides, their doors closed. Most of them had long since closed for the day, their occupants having gone home.
A light shone behind the frosted-glass door of an office at the end of the left-hand side of the corridor as seen from Steve’s vantage point in the stairwell.
That was the office of Holloman Research Institute, the front maintained by Doc Wenzle to cover his covert role as Dog Team handler and case officer.
Steve started to open the fire door, then ducked back when he saw the HRI outer door open. He held the door open a hairline crack so he could see what was happening.
A man came out of the office. He wore a dark narrow-brim hat and a tan raincoat. He was a stranger to Steve.
The stranger left the outer door ajar. Steve’s sight line from the landing would not permit him to see inside the office. The man in the tan raincoat crossed to the elevators, pressing the DOWN button.
A moment later, the door of one of the two elevators slid open. The man in the tan raincoat got in. He stood facing the hall, eyeing the HRI office, holding the elevator car in place by pressing its OPEN DOOR button.
A second man came out of the office. He wore a soft-fabric fisherman’s hat and a brown leather jacket. He eased the outer door closed and walked briskly across the hall to the elevator and got in.
The door closed and the elevator car started downward.
Steve emerged from the landing and went down the hall to the HRI office. The outer door was open a few inches. Reaching for it, Steve smelled the reek of gasoline fumes.
He reached under his jacket, snaking out the .45. He opened the door wider, holding the gun leveled as he stepped inside.
The smell of gasoline was stronger now, choking, almost overpowering.
Beyond the outer door lay a small anteroom with a couple of plastic chairs and a side table with some magazines lined up alongside one of the walls. At the far end of the anteroom stood Wenzle’s suite of offices.
Wenzle’s office door was open. Inside, the lights were on.
Doc Wenzle was in. But he was out, too—permanently.
Steve had gotten there a little too late.
Wenzle sat slumped behind his desk, leaning forward, head and shoulders sprawled flat across the desktop. A bullet hole in his forehead had spilled a large quantity of blood on the desk.
The smell of blood was an undertone in the stink of gas fumes permeating the office. The reek of gas was so strong there that it stung Steve’s eyes and burned his nostrils and the back of his throat.
The carpeted floor was stained dark with the stuff, saturated; visible fumes rose from it. It smelled like someone had emptied several gallons of gas in the room.
Steve started forward, stepping through the inner door. As soon as he crossed the threshold, a click sounded.
He jumped back behind the wall on one side of the doorway.
A spot of blue flame appeared on the carpet, spreading outward in a circle toward the edges of the room.
A whoomping noise followed, cueing the floor to suddenly burst into flame. Within seconds the inner office was an inferno, a fiery furnace.
Steve realized that upon entering the room he must have tripped some sort of electric-eye triggering device, causing it to detonate into flames that torched the gas-saturated space.
Heat from the conflagration poured out of the doorway. The inner office was a mass of yellow-red flames, blurring the image of the desk and Doc Wenzle’s dead body slumped across it.
Nothing Steve could do for Doc now, the poor old bastard.
Greedy arms of flame reached beyond the door frame, seeking to make inroads on the outer office.
Steve scurried back into the hall. He was too late to help Wenzle but maybe not too late to stop Doc’s killers.
No taking the elevators, not now when there was a fire. But he pressed the elevator’s UP button anyway, as a kind of safety precaution.
Steve rushed to the fire door, hammered the palm heel of his right hand against the wall-mounted fire alarm, breaking the glass and triggering the alert. Shrill fire bells jangled throughout the building, filling it with noise.
Steve hurried down the stairs, all five flights. It was a nightmare sequence, one that seemed like it would never end. Down one flight of stairs, then another, then hit the next landing below to resume the process all over again.
No matter how good shape you’re in, you can go down a staircase only so fast without running the risk of falling and maybe breaking an ankle or a leg.
The descent seemed interminable, but in reality it couldn’t have taken a moment or more before Steve reached the ground-floor landing.
He reached for the knob of the fire door with his left hand, pain screaming along the nerves of the injured hand and arm as he un-sealed it. He had to use his left—in his right was the .45, ready for action.
Steve kicked the fire door wide open, so that it swung back on its hinges and slammed into the outer wall.
Sure enough, just as he’d suspected, one of Doc Wenzle’s killers lurked in the hall, waiting for him.
It was the guy in the brown leather jacket. He stood facing the elevator doors, gun in hand. He’d fallen for Steve’s little trick of pressing the elevator button as if summoning the car to the fifth floor.
The guy turned around when the fire door crashed open but he was way behind the curve; Steve already had his gun in action and blasting.
Steve pumped a couple of slugs in the gunman, chopping him in the middle. The gunman spun and fell crashing to the floor.
It was a setup, Steve realized. The killers had come not only to eliminate Doc Wenzle but also Steve, a two-for-one play. They must have known Steve was coming up and gimmicked the scene to entrap him, too.
Too bad for them that Steve was shooting their ambush to pieces.
Gunfire boomed as a couple of slugs tore into the wall near Steve, missing him.
The second killer, the one in the tan raincoat, stood at the front of the lobby, throwing lead in Steve’s direction. The gunfire was meant to cover the shooter’s exit as he threw open the street door and exited the building.
Steve stopped long enough to put a bullet in the fallen gunman’s head, splashing his face into wet redness—just in case he wasn’t dead but still had enough life left in him to work the gun still clutched in his hand.
Steve crossed the lobby, throwing open the street door. He hesitated a beat before exiting.
Bullets ripped through the glass door, starring it in several places.
They’d been fired by the guy in the tan raincoat, who stood to the left on the sidewalk about twenty feet away.
A couple of paces away from him stood a passerby, a middle-aged woman in a brown topcoat who’d apparently happened by at the moment of the shooting. Wide, startled eyes were black buttons pasted on her doughy-white, double-chinned face.
Steve stepped outside, angling for a shot at the gunman, but the latter dashed behind the matron, sending her sprawling to the pavement in the process.
He ran, turning left and ducking into an alley between the Gall Building and a neighboring structure.
The matron recovered from her temporary paralysis from fear to open her mouth and set to shrieking. She had a hell of a set of lungs on her and unleashed an operatic aria of screams.
Ignoring her, Steve rushed past her along the sidewalk, stopping just short of the alley mouth. Ducking low, he stuck his head and gun hand around the corner of the wall at about waist height.
The guy in the tan raincoat fired at him, blasting several shots.
He jumped back, hiding behind the cover of a Dumpster an instant before Steve returned fire.
A booming blast sounded high overhead.
The fifth floor of the Gall Building, already a mass of flames, suddenly erupted in a massive explosion.
Had the killers planted an explosive device as well as a firebomb in Wenzle’s office? Or had the blaze touched off some built-in fail-safe device designed to protect the Dog Team’s secret files from exposure by obliterating them?
Steve didn’t know, and in either case the result would have been the same. The concussive bomb blast blew out all the windows on the fifth floor, raining flaming debris on the street scene below.
Chunks of fiery wreckage and glass shards pelted the sidewalk, none of them hitting Steve.
The terrified matron had stopped screaming long enough to crawl into a doorway and huddle there while the debris came falling down.
A few fireballs plummeted into the alley, lighting it up.
Above, oily black smoke poured out of empty window frames on the fifth floor of the Gall Building.
The debris stopped falling.
Footfalls sounded in the alley, the sound of the guy in the tan raincoat running away.
Steve ducked into the alley after him.
The alley was ten feet wide and sixty feet long, connecting to a parking lot in back of the building. It was lit by a few wall-mounted lights that left much of it in shadow.
Steve wanted to take the gunman alive. He was the only link available to the Morays and the hidden hand that lay behind them.
He blasted a shot at the fleeing man, who was at the midpoint of the alley. The guy flung himself to one side, swallowed up by a broad patch of darkness.
Steve didn’t know whether he’d tagged the other or whether the guy was playing possum, lying low to lure Steve into his gunsights.
The shooter had used the Dumpster for cover earlier; two could play at that game. Crouched low, Steve entered the alley, using the blocky bulk of the Dumpster to stand between him and the shooter.
Black shadow engulfed the stretch of alley where the shooter had disappeared. No motion or sound came from it as Steve advanced soft-footed.
The scuff of shoe leather on concrete pavement sounded nearby behind Steve, raising the hairs on his neck.
Before he could turn around something punched him in the back between his shoulders, hard. Stabbing him.
Someone flipped a switch, zapping him with a massive charge of electricity. The jolt knocked Steve flat onto the paved alley floor.
The crackling charge ripped through him, paralyzing him. He couldn’t move a muscle on his own will, not even to draw a breath!
He writhed in spasms on the pavement, helpless. The gun that had fallen from his hand had skittered across the concrete.
Electrified torment continued for a timeless, endless interval.
Footsteps approached, two figures nearing him, each coming from different directions.
One belonged to the guy in the tan raincoat.
The other?!
The guy in the tan raincoat stooped, picked up Steve’s fallen .45. He held his own gun pointed downward at Steve’s head.
“He’s tamed,” he said.
The electric current was suddenly switched off.
Steve sucked air, gasping for breath.
“Freeze, chum. Move an inch and you get another jolt,” Tan Raincoat said.
The thing that had hit Steve between the shoulder blades was a plug with two sharp-pointed metal prongs. They had penetrated his garments and lodged into his flesh.
At the far end of the prongs was a pair of electric wires fifteen feet long. Their opposite end was connected to a square-shaped, boxy device with a handgrip and trigger.
A Taser!
A nonlethal weapon employed by police to subdue violent, unruly suspects by immobolizing them with a paralyzing electric charge. The Taser fired the dartlike plug with its two flesh-piercing prongs into the suspect. The wires were connected to the Taser, whose massive batteries delivered the man-stopping charge to the victim.
The Taser was now cradled in the soft, fat hands of the no longer screaming matron, the one Steve had mistaken for an innocent passerby. She’d been part of the setup, undoubtedly hiding the Taser under the voluminous folds of her topcoat.
“Nice work, Mabel,” Tan Raincoat said.
“Gets ’em every time,” she said, smirking. “Want I should zap him again?”
“Why not? It’ll take some more of the starch out of him. Just don’t give him a heart attack and kill him. We need him alive—for now.”
“Too bad I can’t say the same for you,” a new voice announced.
It came from a dark figure who had entered the alley unobserved by Tan Raincoat and Mabel as they stood gloating over Steve.
“I don’t need you alive at all, not one little bit,” the stranger said.
He opened up with a pair of semiautomatic pistols, one held in each hand, pouring lead into Tan Raincoat and Mabel, filling the alley with gunfire.
Flashing muzzle flares created a strobe effect as the duo was blasted into oblivion.
The muzzle flares underlit the face of the shooter, revealing him as…
Kilroy!
TWELVE
The sights and sounds of Ward Thurlow being eaten alive by crocodiles filled the conference room of the penthouse suite at the top of the Imperium casino-hotel on the board-walk at Atlantic City, New Jersey.
It was a hell of a show.
The footage was being imaged on a massive flat-screen LED TV hanging on the wall at one end of the conference room.
It was five o’clock on a Friday night, two days after Steve had somehow escaped the trap set for him at the Gall Building.
The Imperium, once one of Atlantic City’s most stellar attractions, had recently fallen on hard times. It consisted of a shoebox-shaped casino building attached to a towering skyscraper hotel.
Like the rest of the gaming industry, the Imperium’s receipts had fallen off drastically due to the depressed economy. Its fiscal woes were compounded by the inept management of its owner, real estate magnate and obnoxious TV personality Dudley Crimp. Dangerously overextended and already in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, Crimp had seen the recession ruin any last chances for him to recoup his fortune.
He had already been forced to take a loan from the White Tiger, a leading yakuza crime clan based in Osaka, Japan. The loan had long since been squandered, and the yakuza’s oyabun, or godfather, was most rudely insistent that Crimp repay the outstanding debt.
The yakuza don’t fool around. Crimp knew that if he wanted to retain possession of all his fingers and toes—and quite possibly his head—he’d better make full restitution to his White Tiger creditors, and quick.
Crimp had therefore been forced to sell his holdings in the Imperium for a song, for pennies not on the dollar but rather on the hundred-dollar bill.
The casino’s new owner had moved into the casino, setting up headquarters in the luxurious penthouse suite that Crimp had built for himself in happier times.
The Imperium’s new czar now sat in the penthouse conference room watching wide-eyed as rogue CIA agent Ward Thurlow was ripped to pieces by ravenous killer crocs.
The mighty master of capital, Simon E. Gunther, sat stiff-faced and motionless, eyes bulging as he watched the awesome carnage.
Gunther was in his late forties but looked ten years younger. A mop of brown curly hair topped a face with a high, bulging forehead, brown eyes, an upturned nose, and a neatly pursed Cupid’s-bow mouth. The snub nose and a scattering of pale freckles on his clean-shaven face added to his boyish aspect.
Gunther, one of Wall Street’s golden boys, had scored notable achievements in the worlds of both high finance and criminal securities fraud. An investment banker for the prestigious brokerage house of Saxbee Mangold, he’d amassed a towering fortune by dint of twenty years of screwing the investors and stealing them blind. His instrument for this massive transfer of wealth from its rightful owners to himself was his overlordship of the Transworld Capital Fund, a Saxbee mutual fund that until recently had numbered among its client union and government pension funds, numerous corporate employee IRA and 401(k) plans and investments from various state treasuries, as well as thousands of mom-and-pop investors who’d trusted their hard-won nest eggs to the fund in hopes of growing them into retirement bonanzas.
The investors had finished out of the money, their Transworld mutual fund holdings now worth only a fraction of what they had been. Most of it had been transferred into secret offshore banking accounts maintained by Gunther and the board of directors of Saxbee Mangold. The plundering had been accomplished with such complex sleight of hand and finesse that government investigators had no idea how and where the money had gone. Not that they were trying too hard to find it. The congressional legislators who’d taken office via huge campaign contributions from Saxbee pressured the investigators to cool it. The rot went clear up to the Oval Office of the White House.
By all rights Gunther should now have been sitting on top of the world. In a manner of speaking he was, occupying as he now did the palatial digs of the penthouse high atop the Imperium’s lofty tower.
But there was trouble in Paradise. Gunther had the fear on him.
A few hours earlier, a small package had been delivered to him at the Imperium by private courier.
The package had been handled according to procedures set down by George Knight, Gunther’s head of security. With hundreds of thousands of people having been defrauded of their life’s savings by Transworld, Gunther might well become the target of a vengeful sorehead who didn’t have the sense to go lie down and die.
