City of Endless Night (Pendergast #17)(26)
He remained in the dark, waiting.
“Son of a bitch,” the guard muttered, and then did exactly as expected—he released the dog and said: “Go find the snake. Go find it.”
The dog, scenting the man in the cabana, naturally made a beeline for him and charged through the door, where he was met with the flashing point of the SOG. The dog fell forward silently.
“Sadie? Sadie? What the hell?” The guard pulled his sidearm and, gripping it, ran into the cabana, only to be met with the same knife to the throat. The pistol fired as the man went down.
Now, this was an unfortunate development. The alarm would be raised prematurely. But knowing the psychology of his target—the man’s macho instincts, his brutal toughness, his loathing of cowardly behavior—he felt sure that one gunshot wouldn’t be enough to send him into the panic room. No: the man would arm himself, call his guards, figure out what was going on, and stay put—for the time being.
He was well along on his plan, with three men and two dogs down, which was exactly half the security complement. But he now had to move much faster, before the remainder could discover the extent of their losses, organize themselves, and close ranks in defense of the target.
All this consideration took less than a second in the intruder’s mind. He snatched up the dying guard’s radio and jumped over the body, still flopping and gurgling. Removing another magnet from his pocket and a piece of sticky tape, he taped down the TRANSMIT button of the man’s radio, slapped the magnet on, and dropped them onto the lawn. The sound of the gunshot had of course alerted the other security guards, and his radio had burst into overlapping queries as the guards tried to check in with each other, figure out where each was, and determine who if anyone might be missing. With the magnet and tape, he had at least rendered their main channel useless with loud static, and with the other guard’s radio he did the same to the emergency backup channel. That would sow confusion for at least a few minutes until the remaining guards found and agreed on a clear channel.
A few minutes were all he needed.
The klieg lights were snapping on. A siren sounded. He had to move very fast. There was no longer any point in stealth: he heaved a piece of porch furniture through the sliding glass doors, setting off another alarm, and then he leapt through the breach and raced across the living room to the stairs, taking them three at a time to the second floor.
“Hey!” He heard a guard running behind him.
He stopped, whirled about, dropped to one knee, and fired his Glock, taking off the top of the guard’s head and then dropping a second guard who came tearing around the corner after him.
Five guards, two dogs.
Sprinting along the second-floor corridor, he reached the target’s bedroom door. It was made of solid steel and was, as expected, locked. Reaching into his backpack, he slapped a pre-prepared packet of C-4 with detonator and sticky pad onto the lock, ran around the corner, and entered the wife’s room. They had recently divorced, and the steel door to her empty room was wide open, as he’d expected. The panic room stood between the target and his wife’s room, and each had their own door into it. The panic room’s door lay behind a panel on the wall, which he yanked open. The door beyond was shut, but it wasn’t yet in full lockdown mode and could be opened—unlike the target’s huge steel bedroom door—with a single charge of C-4. He slapped a second charge on the wife’s panic room door, retreated to a safe distance, and then, with a remote detonator, blew both charges simultaneously—the target’s bedroom door and the wife’s panic room door—so they sounded like one charge. The charge on the steel bedroom door wasn’t strong enough to blow it open—it was merely intended to scare the shit out of the owner.
But the charge on the panic room door was heavier, and it did indeed knock the unsecured but locked door open. The intruder slipped inside the panic room, where the air was filled with smoke and dust. The lights were off. He quickly took up a position just next to the door in the far wall of the little room: that is, the door leading into the target’s bedroom. Almost immediately he heard the target opening the door and stumbling inside, in terror and confusion due to the ineffectual explosion he’d just heard outside his bedroom door. The man turned, pulled shut the door, and slammed home the bolts. Then he scrabbled along the wall, found the switch, and turned on the lights.
And then he stared at the intruder already inside the panic room, his eyes widening. Yes, indeed, the target had just locked himself inside the panic room with his about-to-be killer. The intruder deeply enjoyed this moment of irony. The target was dressed only in boxer shorts, his comb-over askew, eyes bloodshot and bulging, slack jowls quivering, belly protruding. He still carried the sour reek of vodka.
“Mr. Viktor Alexeievich Bogachyov, I presume?”
The victim stared at him in abject terror. “What…who…are you…and for God’s sake—why?”
“Why not?” said the intruder, raising the SOG knife.
*
Two minutes and fifteen seconds later, the intruder slipped over the stone wall and dropped down onto the other side. He could hear, from the compound, the sounds of multiple alarms and, beyond that, in the distance, approaching police sirens. He had killed the last guard on the way out, but in his kindness had spared the dog, who proved to be more intelligent than the humans and had fallen quivering and whining at his feet, urinating on himself—and thereby saving his own life.