May 3
9836 Watchung Road
Essex County
Short Hills, New Jersey
5:19 P.M. EDT
“You are one lucky son-of-a-bitch, mister.”
Beck Casey blinked open his eyes, looked up into the face of the man kneeling alongside him, felt the relative coolness of air on his bared stomach. His head spun, throbbed painfully.
“Damn lucky this is a brick house, I mean. And lucky the homeowner wanted to cut down the heating bills, too. Lot of insulation packed in the walls, looks like. Pretty smart, cost of energy these days.”
The man straightened, and Beck saw the entwined serpents, winged, on the caduceus stitched into his shirt pocket: a medic of some sort, then.
“Still, those bruises are going to hurt like hell. Looks like three of them, pretty nicely grouped along your belly. I figure the bullets went through the plaster wall inside, got slowed down more by all that nice pink fiberglass before they hit the brickwork and stopped.”
“I’m not shot?” Beck said, confused.
“Spalling,” the medic said. “Force of the bullets knocked out three hefty chunks of brick on the far side, popped you right in the gut. How’s your head feel? You’re growing a big lump there, too.”
Beck touched it with a shaky hand, winced, suddenly remembered.
“My daughter?” he blurted, panic in his tone. “My daughter is in there—”
“I’m here, Dad.”
Katie leaned into view. There was a bandage, a three-inch strip of taped gauze along the right side of her throat, a far bulkier one perched like an awkward crown on the top of her head.
Her shoulders were dappled with splotches of red-brown, Beck noted, a lot of them…
… but she was alive.
Katie’s hand touched her throat. “It’s just … a scratch, Dad. I’m okay.”
“Your head—what happened to your—”
“That one’s a little deeper,” the medic answered for her. “She caught a flyer, a random pellet; skimmed right along her scalp. Close call, though. Lucky thing that shotgun of yours has a good tight choke on the barrel, mister. Kept the shot-pattern from spreading out too far.”
Beck blinked in bewilderment. “I shot Katie?”
“Yep.” The medic winked, the gesture a bit shocking, certainly incongruous in the current circumstances. “Going to make Father’s Day a little awkward, but most family gatherings always get a bit tense, right? By the way, I got a peek at the other guy in there. Nice shooting for a scatter-gun, even if it was at kind of close range.”
“What other guy? I don’t remember shooting any other—”
Another memory blinked back in Beck’s mind, this one the full horrific image that included a man with a knife at his daughter’s throat. The starkly vivid scene left him literally speechless in shock and surprise.
“It was Abu Khaled. He’s in there, on the floor. ’Least, we think it’s him. Hard to tell for certain with the top half of his head blown off.”
This from Jeffrey Connor, his pale face signaling that he was still recovering from a shocked surprise of his own; two of them, in actual fact.
The first had come when the FBI quick-response team he led had burst into what looked like a particularly active slaughterhouse floor, to find what looked like a particularly active crew of slaughterhouse employees working overtime. The FBI agents had added to the butcher’s bill, but it was a relatively minor contribution: Most of the heavy lifting had already been done for them. This was but a minor shock for Connor; he had seen violent death before.
The second surprise was to find his fiancé there, still kneeling amid the carnage.
He had definitely not yet recovered from that. But this shock too was relatively minor, at least at present and in the light of the bigger picture; he had questions, many of them, but all that mattered right now was that Katie was safe.
And here, with him.
Now Connor knelt alongside Katie, both looking down at Beck, both of their shoulders touching.
Beck took that as good news, all things considered.
• • •
Inside, the now very mixed teams of FBI, medics, Short Hills SWAT team members, and no small number of what the latter thought of as interlopers from the East Orange PD were busy cleaning house: Some were warily checking bodies, including the headless torso of a woman; others were attending to the wounded, though there were only three of these.
Supported by an arm around the shoulder of his now-again-likely prospective son-in-law, Beck Casey gingerly limped amid the throng, halting at one of the trio whose wounds were being attended to.
“Think you have your story now, Denny?” Beck asked, in a tone that could in no way be mistaken for sympathy.
Dennis Littrell was on his stomach, supported by elbows and cupping his chin. He rolled his head toward Beck, his gleeful grin eerie.
“Somebody shot me,” he said cheerfully. “In the ass, old friend. After all these years, first time somebody hit the part of me they were actually aiming at, I bet. Took out a fair-sized chunk, but you can bet your own that I’ll be sitting in the studio chair tomorrow night. And Connor, kid—I want a copy of that video.”
“Dream on,” Connor said.
“After all I’ve done for you two kids, you and Katie both? We’ll talk later.”
They moved on to the next knot gathered around the second wounded person, this one sitting on the floor, back propped against a bullet-pocked wall.
“So … you were wrong, Mr. Casey,” Morgan Jameson said, around the cigarette dangling from a lip. “Cavalry was coming over the hill after all. Could have saved myself a hole in my shoulder. And my pension, too.”
“I’ll buy the tow-truck guy a beer,” Beck said. “I’ll tell your boss you deserve a medal, too.”
Jameson snorted. “’Cuz I’m such a genius tactician, right? Shit—guy with the sunglasses spotted us soon as we came in the door. Great plan I had. But at least I got around to putting a .45 hollow-point through those fancy Ray-Bans of his. Lot of bullets flying around before I did, though. By the way, that smart-mouth girlfriend of yours wasn’t kidding about being a good shot. She did one shitload of damage, let me tell you.”
Beck glanced around the room: no Rachel in sight.
Jameson saw Beck’s frown, understood.
“She might have decided not to complicate things. By hanging around, I mean. You know.”
Beck nodded. He and Connor moved on to the last of the still-living wounded in the room.
“Hello, Ian. You don’t look too well.”
It was a stomach wound, low in Ian Tatum’s gut.
“Ms. Admoni nurses her grudges, it would appear,” Tatum said, his voice surprisingly steady despite what to Beck looked like a grievous wound. “In fairness, though, I did shoot at her first. A dream come true, Beck. From the moment I met her, I had wanted to shoot that infuriating little twit.”
“What’s your part in all this, Ian? Rather, what’s this whole thing all about?”
“Oil, my old friend. It’s all about oil.”
“Details would be nice, Ian. Now would be good, too. I don’t think you’ll be able to provide them for much longer.”
“A death-bed confession? Why not? I’ve always enjoyed trading our little work stories with you, Beck.”
A spasm crossed his features, and for a moment Tatum’s lips clamped tight. When it had passed, his voice was much less steady.
“As I said, my friend: It’s about oil. The oil of our old adversaries, back when we were young and innocent, Beck. The Russians have much oil … but not enough to control the world market, or the price.”
Tatum coughed, and there was a fine mist of crimson in the spray.
“Russia. They are the genteel poor, comparatively, what with the whims of Arab sheiks and Iranian ayatollahs determining the world price of Russia’s only real commodity. With the various sanctions from your country, and the threat of more resulting from our ambitious, adventurous friends in Moscow—well, the Russian economy teeters in the best of times, a situation they were loath to see continue.”
“How does helping Islamic radicals destroy Washington or assassinate a President make Russia richer, Ian? The Middle East would still be in the driver’s seat on oil production.”
Tatum found the will to smile.
“Not if your nation retaliated—struck back in force, Beck. Do you doubt that the fine hand of the Persians were behind these attacks on America? I do not, though I admit that I am as bereft of actual evidence as are your people. I also assume that the … excitable nature of your new President was an additional factor for the Russians. He would be far more likely than his predecessor to turn Tehran into a glowing sea of pretty green glass, don’t you agree?”
“If you’re telling the truth, Ian, Putin was taking a hell of a risk. NSA says this computer virus smells of Russian origin. If that can be proven, all that glowing green glass might well end up what used to be Moscow.”
“Do you really believe that, Beck?” Tatum’s amused voice was but a twitch above a murmur now. “A war with Russia, mushroom clouds everywhere … when practical men in America and Russia have such an appealing villain elsewhere to blame? There will be an accommodation, Beck. There always is, when the stakes are high enough.”
Beck pondered that for a long moment.
Too long, in fact.
“So tell me how you got involved, Ian … Ian? Damn it—”
The attending medic pressed his fingertips firmly to Ian Tatum’s throat.
Then he looked up at Beck Casey and shook his head.
• • •
Elsewhere in the house on Watchung Road, the room-by-room clearing continued apace.
In the room adjoining the one in which Beck Casey had watched Ian Tatum die, one of the two-person search teams—this one, from the Short Hills police—poked and sifted through the materials on a makeshift computer table.
“Did a job on the hard drive, here,” one SWAT member told his colleague. “Stray bullet shot it to hell. Missed the laptop, though. Tag it, and get it to our geek squad before the FBI snatches it, okay? They can all sort out the politics later.”
As he spoke, alongside the tangle of metal, plastic, and wires that had been a disk drive, a new light began to flicker: this from the modem, itself as fortunate as the laptop computer, now awakening from its signal-stricken sleep.
As the two SWAT members watched, a page-image iris’d out from the center of the laptop’s screen, filled it.
“Huh,” the first policeman said. “Looks like the Internet’s back now. Guess somebody finally got a handle on this damn power outage, you know?”