Текст книги "Gideon's War / Hard Target"

Автор книги: Howard Gordon

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Текущая страница: 35 (всего у книги 38 страниц)

The lower on the list of importance you were, the earlier you had to get to the Capitol. Mere billionaires and war heroes and Olympic gold medalists had to reach the assembly point in the Russell Building four hours in advance. Kate, being one step up the ladder, was required to come three hours in advance.

But the limo barely moved in the DC traffic. She could see the dome of the Capitol in the distance. Was there an invisible bull’s-eye painted on it? She felt her leg jiggling nervously.

She wished Gideon would call.

45

TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

Doctor, I’ve found some medical supplies if you could take a look?” Tillman said, nodding toward the adjoining kitchen.

The man narrowed his eyes. “We don’t keep medical supplies in the kitchen.”

Verhoven looked up suspiciously. “What did you find?”

“There’s bandages I think you overlooked.” He pointed his gun toward the kitchen. “Let’s go, Doctor.”

“I’m not leaving the girls.”

“Let’s not get into a pissing contest,” Tillman said softly. Then he gave Klotz a hard stare.

Klotz looked for a moment as though he was making a decision. Then he nodded curtly and walked quickly toward the kitchen.

Tillman hurried after him, but still he was unable to get there before Klotz disappeared behind the wall. When he entered the room, Klotz was leaning against the counter, his face blank, hands behind his back.

Tillman walked in and stood by the door for a moment. It was a nice modern kitchen—granite countertops, an island in the center of the room. Everything was spotless and neatly organized, pans hanging from the ceiling, knives stored in a wooden block. A pan for every hook on the ceiling, a knife for every slot in the block. Except one.

Tillman stood on the far side of the island, keeping his distance from Shanelle Klotz’s husband. He leaned forward and spoke as softly as he e kkkkkkkkkk, hacould. “The man in the other room is very upset right now. He believes deeply in the cause that has brought him into your home. He wants very much to succeed. But he also loves his wife. He’s in a very agitated state right now. It’s important that we all stay calm.”

Klotz glared at him.

Tillman walked around the island so that he was close enough to Klotz that he could speak without any chance of being heard by Verhoven.

“As you’ve probably figured out,” he whispered, “an attack is planned on the State of the Union address today. I am here to make sure that doesn’t happen.”

Klotz closed his eyes, relief visibly flooding across his face. “Oh, thank God,” he whispered. “You’re a federal agent?”

“I wish it were that simple,” Tillman said. “Suffice it to say, I’m working for the good guys.”

“You’re a cop?”

“Let’s just stick to the important things here. First, we need you to play nice. Whatever I tell you to do, just do it. No smart remarks, no knives hidden up your sleeves.” He reached out and clamped his fingers around Klotz’s left arm. With the other hand he pulled a seven-inch boning knife out of the doctor’s sleeve, slid it back into the empty spot on the knife block.

“Shit,” Klotz said. “Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize for defending your family,” Tillman said. “Second thing, we need to reach the people who are doing the operation. We don’t know who they are, or where they are. But they’re going to be in touch with us here. So whatever happens, just go along with it.”

Klotz narrowed his eyes. “Do you have any proof of what you’re saying? You could just be feeding me a line so I won’t fight you.”

Tillman looked at him directly and said, “Sir, to be blunt, you don’t really have a choice. I’m your only chance of getting out of here. Now, I need to know what detail your wife is working.”

“I don’t know.”

“She didn’t tell you?”

“Look around. You see what kind of security my wife is into. That information is classified, and she doesn’t tell anyone, especially her family.”

Tillman looked closely at the doctor and realized he believed the man. “Okay. Then we’re just going to have to sit tight. But we can’t have Lorene dying on us here while we’re waiting. You need to think of something to help her survive.”

“I can’t do surgery here! Even if I had good imaging so I knew where the fragments were, I’m not a renal specialist. I mean you’re talking about very tricky vascular surgery.”

“Then you need to think of something. The healthier that woman is, the safer your little girls are. I’ve got two used IV bags in the car, but I’ve already run two units of saline and two units of plasma through her. I’m out of fluids.”

Klotz looked thougkay tiohtful. “I think I’ve got a few bottles of sterile saline up in the safe room. It’s just for irrigating wounds, but . . .” Klotz rubbed his face. “I mean in theory we could mix in some sugar and put it in the IV bag, push the fluids, kick her energy up and get her stabilized temporarily. But we’re likely to contaminate the saline. If we do that we could give her a systemic infection that might kill her.”

“We need her alive today. Tomorrow will take care of itself.”

“I take my oath as a physician seriously. First do no harm. I can’t risk—”

Tillman whispered through clenched teeth. “Those pieces of shit in there are trying to kill a whole lot of people. Including your two daughters. To hell with her. If I have my way, that woman will be dead by the end of the day anyway.”

Klotz’s face went stiff. “All right,” he said finally, “go get the IV bags out of your car. I’ll see what I can jury-rig.”

Tillman poked him with his gun. “Back in the living room.”

Verhoven looked up expectantly when both men returned to the room.

“Nope, I was wrong about the bandages, Colonel,” Tillman said. “But I think the good doctor and I have worked out a solution . . .”

Gideon asked the cop if he was hungry.

“I’m fine,” Officer Millwood said.

“I’ve got a couple granola bars in my jacket.”

“I’m fine,” the cop repeated.

“Look, I know you’re not happy waiting here with me, but I think things would go a lot better if you just trusted me and had something to eat.”

“Why should I trust you?”

“You heard what’s going on in that house. Do you think I made it up?”

“I haven’t heard anything except a couple people holding an innocent family hostage.”

Gideon sighed. He had been sitting with the cop for nearly six hours, and in that time very little had happened. Around him the neighborhood had come alive, as kids and parents came out for the school bus, and then, with the kids gone, moms and dogs came out for their walks, then the cleaning ladies arrived. Luckily, Officer Millwood still had another two hours left in his shift, and though the desk sergeant had called once, there were no emergencies that required his response.

He wished Tillman could radio him, but he understood there was no opportunity to place the transmitter in his ear. Instead he made do with bits of muffled conversation picked up from the mike in Tillman’s pocket. It wasn’t perfect, but at least it kept him updated. He learned they had hooked up Lorene to an IV. Gideon knew it would buy them another hour or two. But did they have that much time? The State of the Union address was just a few hours away, and every minute they waited was another minute closer to the attack. On the other hand, even if Tillman left the house now, they had little to go on except the name of the Secret Service agent. That might be enough in normal circumstances, but it wouldn’t get them pe w n, ast security to do anything about it, and it certainly wouldn’t convince Dahlgren. Time was ticking, but right now the balance favored waiting. Soon, however, Gideon knew, the balance would shift.

“What are we waiting for?” he asked no one in particular.

“That’s what I’m wondering,” said Officer Millwood.

Gideon turned to him. It was the first agreeable comment the cop had made. Maybe it meant the ice was melting.

But before he could respond, he was pulled from his reflections by a faint sound through his earpiece. A phone was ringing at the Klotz house. He heard Verhoven say, “Answer the phone. It’s your wife.”

46

WASHINGTON, DC

Ten minutes earlier, when the temperature in the House chamber had reached sixty-one, Collier opened the door, looked out at the Secret Service guard, and said, “I think you better call Special Agent Klotz. We’ve got a temperature control problem here.”

The agent nodded, then summoned her on the mic in his sleeve.

When Shanelle Klotz entered the room, Wilmot explained that the heating problem was worse than expected, and that the chamber would be roughly the temperature of a meat locker within the hour.

“What do you need to do to fix it?” she asked.

“I’ll need to check the panel in the hall while John feeds data into the controller. I figured you’d want to be here while I go out in the hall.”

Agent Klotz nodded, then leaned out into the hallway. “Mr. Wilmot is going to come out here. I’ll be inside.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the agent said.

Wilmot came out with the voltmeter, looked up and down the hallway, and waited for the door to close. Other than himself and the Secret Service agent, the hallway was empty.

“It’s down this way, bud,” he said, pointing to his left. “Did you need to come with me?”

“Yes, I do, sir,” the agent said.

Wilmot started walking. “Oh, shoot, wrong panel,” he said, turning abruptly.

This put him within arm’s reach of the agent. Wilmot pretended to stumble, reaching out as though to keep the agent from bumping into him.

The device in his hand appeared to be a voltmeter. But it was not. In fact, it was a stun gun. A normal stun gun emits around 50,000 volts of electricity at a mere .01 milliamps. This stun gun, however, contained a very different capacitor and transformer than the normal commercial variety and produced roughly three amps.

Wilmot jammed the two nearly invisible spikes on the end of the voltmeter into the agent’s chest and pressed the on button, dumping the entire contents of the capacitor into the agent’s flesh. The amperage of the charge—enough to briefly power a toaster—was sufficith=========ight=ent to stop the agent’s heart in midbeat.

The agent spasmed so hard that his head smashed against the wall, making a sound like a machete cracking open a coconut. The agent was dead by the time his body hit the floor. Wilmot pulled the agent’s SIG out of its holster, dragged him fifteen feet by one leg, then rapped smartly on the door.

When Shanelle Klotz opened the door, Wilmot grabbed her by the throat and propelled her back into the room, the SIG pressed into her face.

According to her records—which Wilmot had studied with great care—she had received the intense self-defense training given to all Secret Service agents. But he was more than a foot taller and outweighed her by 130 pounds.

She didn’t have time to scream or grab her weapon before Collier had disarmed her and wrapped duct tape around her mouth. She struggled wildly with Collier as Wilmot quickly dragged the dead agent back into the control room, but by then it was too late. Wilmot closed the door and pointed his pistol at her face again.

“If our plan was to kill you,” he said, “you’d already be dead. So you might as well calm down and find out what we have in mind.”

She continued to struggle as Wilmot slipped flex cuffs over her arms and wrists. Soon she seemed to see the futility of further struggle so she stopped fighting. Wilmot could see she wasn’t beaten, though—she was just conserving her energy and appraising her situation, looking for an opportunity to turn the tables. Her eyes still burned with controlled anger. The more he saw of her, the more he liked her.

“Phone,” he said. “Unless you want your little girls hurt.”

Her eyes widened, and Wilmot could tell he had gotten to her. Wilmot had spent a substantial amount on private investigators for this operation. He had read her psychological profile and chosen her because she was a mother of young children.

Collier pulled her cell phone off Shanelle Klotz’s belt and plugged it into a thin cable that was already attached to the USB port in the HVAC system controller.

“We recognize,” Collier said, “that the Secret Service jams all cell phone frequencies here during the State of the Union address. But the hard line to the diagnostic computer at National Heat & Air works just fine. It’s part of the secure comm links that connect the Capitol to the government’s secure backbone. So we’re able to dial out on that line using the SIM card identifier on your phone. My friend John here could bore you to tears with the technical details. But the bottom line is that whoever picks up the phone on the other end will see your name on the caller ID.”

Collier dialed her security password into the phone and then said, “According to my information, you’ve got your home number on speed dial number two.”

He held down the two key. When it began to ring, he switched to speaker and held the phone out toward Special Agent Klotz’s face.

After three rings, a man’s voice, sounding terribly frightened, said, “Sweetheart? Is that you?”

“Hello, Dr. Klotz,” Wilmot said. “At the moment, I have your wife standing right next to me. She has duct tape over her moutn t belh and her legs and arms are cuffed. But she’s listening very carefully. Right now I need you to give her an honest and clear assessment of your situation.”

Wilmot could hear the Secret Service agent’s husband breathing on the other end—a rapid, near-hysterical panting. “Sweetheart? Are you there? There are . . . there are two men and a woman in our house. They’re heavily armed. Not just guns. They have plastic explosives and stuff. They seem to have defeated the alarm, so there are no police here or anything. These are . . . I don’t know, I mean, these are really—these are really serious people.”

Shanelle Klotz looked furious. Her eyes were wide with anger and fear.

Wilmot put his finger over his lips. “Talk to him, Agent Klotz,” he said. “But just understand that if you make a big fuss, your husband and your daughters will be killed.”

Collier ripped the tape off her face.

“Nathan,” she said, “You know I can’t—” She couldn’t finish her sentence.

“Please, sweetheart! Do what they say!” Her husband’s voice was high and tremulous. “They have the girls.”

Shanelle Klotz stared straight ahead, looking at the blank wall. Her face was hard, but tears were running out of her eyes.

“All we want you to do, Agent Klotz, is open a door for us,” Wilmot said.

Shanelle Klotz didn’t speak for several seconds. Then, finally, she said, “I can’t, Nathan. I swore an oath.”

Wilmot was astonished. Knowing how he felt about his own son, he couldn’t believe a mother would be so callous with the life of her child. It had never once crossed his mind that a woman might make the decision that she had made. It was the reason he had chosen her. And now, President Wade was scheduled to make his speech in one hour and forty minutes.

In the living room of the Klotz home, Tillman was a little surprised to see Lorene Verhoven stand up suddenly from the couch where she had been lying. Although she looked half dead, the manic shine remained in her wild eyes.

She walked slowly to the phone, took it from her husband’s grasp, switched off the speakerphone, and held the phone to her ear. Then she took the hand of Klotz’s younger daughter.

“Hi, honey,” she said, smiling at the little girl. “What’s your name?”

“Wendy,” the girl said.

“Wendy. That’s a nice name.” Lorene spoke in a feverish hush. “Just like the girl in Peter Pan, the one that always took care of everybody. Do you take care of your dollies?”

The girl nodded. “Yes.”

“And does your mommy take care of you like you take care of your dollies?”

“Yes.”

Lorene took the girl’s hand and said, “Come with me for a minute, honey. You and me are going to have a little girl talk with your mommy, okay? Away from all these scary men with guns. Is 221 >

The girl looked at her father. Her father looked at Tillman. Tillman nodded. Klotz nodded at the girl, who smiled, reassured by that simple nod that everything was okay.

Tillman couldn’t remember ever having been that trusting. Maybe he had been. But he sure didn’t remember it.

“Will you help me walk, honey?” Lorene said. “I don’t walk so good right now.”

“Yes.”

“Thank you, honey.”

Lorene and the little girl walked slowly, painfully, to the stairs, the little girl’s tiny arm wrapped around Lorene’s waist, then ascended toward the upstairs. After a moment they were gone.

Please, Tillman prayed, don’t let anything happen to that little girl.

It took a while before the woman on the other end of the phone line began speaking again. “Hello, Agent Klotz,” the woman said. Wilmot had never heard her voice before, but he knew it had to be Verhoven’s wife.

Shanelle Klotz was looking at the phone in Collier’s hand like you might look at a snake. “Hello,” she said softly.

“My name is Lorene Verhoven,” the woman said. “At least that’s what I call myself now. The name my mother gave me was Alice. This little girl Wendy here—I can see in her trusting beautiful little face, that she believes in her mother.”

Shanelle Klotz’s hands were trembling, balled into fists. But she didn’t speak.

“Me, I changed the name my mother gave me a long time ago. See, I never did trust my mother. My mother was a whore. I don’t hold that against her, I’m just reporting that as a fact. She had a hard life. Men came to her and said terrible things to her, did terrible things to her . . . and she just took it. Never said boo to those men. But when the men were gone, when the doors were closed, when the locks were turned, when everything was safe . . . all that pain and anger would come out. The things she did to me when the doors were closed and we were alone—well, I could tell you about them . . . but I wouldn’t want your little girl to have to hear those things.”

Wilmot heard Lorene Verhoven draw a long, deep breath.

“Being a mother is a sacred trust,” Lorene said. “I have frankly never trusted myself to take on that responsibility. I know the things I’m capable of. I do. Things with knives, things with sticks, things with cigarettes and hammers and pins and broken glasses. You’d be amazed the pain you can cause with things you can find in any old bedroom.”

Lorene sighed.

“Oh, Wendy, you sweet little girl. Look at your pretty hair! I love your hair. It’s so soft and wavy.”

“Lady, why are you crying?” said a tiny little girlish voice.

“It’s okay, sweetie,” Lorene Verhoven said. “Don’t you worry about me. I’m gonna be fine.”

A choking animal noise escaped briefly fro th o tm Shanelle Klotz’s throat. “Don’t!” she rasped. “Don’t you—”

“Here’s the thing,” Lorene Verhoven said, her voice suddenly cracking like a whip. “I’ve told you my name. You understand what that means, Agent Klotz? I have made peace with my fate. My husband is a visionary, and he has brought me to this place as part of a great undertaking. On this day I have a chance to do something historic, something bigger than I could ever accomplish on my own. It’s a culmination. It’s a punctuation on the sentence of my insignificant life. So I don’t care if your daughter can pick me out of a lineup. I don’t care if she knows my name. Her silence is unnecessary. We’re way past that. Nothing would please me more, when this is over, than if this sweet child were to walk out of this house as clean and pure and unspoiled and lively as she was when she walked in yesterday. But we all have our parts to play. Hers is not yet written. It could be very painful, very cruel, and very short. My fate is sealed. But her fate? Her fate is in your hands.”

“You bitch,” Shanelle Klotz hissed. “Don’t you dare hurt my child.”

Lorene said nothing, allowing the excruciating silence to speak for her.

Then there was a sharp, childish wail from the phone. “Ow!” the girl said. “You’re hurting my arm!”

“No, sweetheart,” Lorene said softly. “I haven’t even begun to hurt you.”

And in the blink of an eye, the fight went out of Special Agent Shanelle Klotz’s face and her entire body sagged.

“Okay,” Shanelle Klotz whispered. “Whatever you want. Just don’t hurt my girls.”

Tillman heard the cry of the little girl and raced toward the stairs. But by the time he’d reached the bottom of the stairs, Lorene and the little girl were walking back down the stairs, hand in hand. Lorene’s eyeliner was dripping down the sides of her face.

“I’m sorry,” Lorene whispered to the little girl. “I didn’t mean to grab your arm so hard. I made a mistake.”

“It’s okay,” Wendy said, wiping at the tears on Lorene’s face. “I know you didn’t mean to.”

Lorene kissed the girl on the head. “You’re so sweet.”

Tillman lowered his shotgun and took a couple of steps backward.

When she got to the bottom of the stairs, Lorene held up the phone and smiled an odd empty smile.

“It’s done,” she said.

47

WASHINGTON, DC

The United States Secret Service is an organization in which paranoia is considered a virtue. The Secret Service has considered the possibility that assassins attending the State of the Union address might, among other things: wear clothes woven from explosive fabric; have plastic or ceramic guns concealed in their rectums; caidttttttttttairsrry knives made entirely of glass or obsidian; and carry exploding pacemakers inside their chests, which would shower the room with Strontium 90, Cesium 137, Cobalt 60, or perhaps even Plutonium 239. If you have a pacemaker and plan to attend the next State of the Union address, expect to provide the Secret Service with the name of your doctor as well as the manufacturer, the model, and the serial number of your pacemaker at least two weeks prior to the event. They are that careful.

So it has not escaped the notice of the Secret Service that the heating system of the Capitol would be a fine device for pumping irritants, poison gas, or radioactive material into a room containing roughly six hundred of the most important people in America.

For each potential threat that might menace any major event, the Secret Service develops a written protocol. There is, for instance, a thirteen-page document filed away in the Secret Service headquarters that details the steps for foiling the deployment of an exploding radioactive pacemaker. The Secret Service has developed hundreds of protocols. To prevent airborne attacks through the HVAC system, there is a document that lists thirty-one so-called “Action Events,” including specific team member assignments, seventeen on the “Prevent List” and fourteen on the “React List.” Action Event number eleven on the “Prevent List” requires that before anyone enters the room with access to the gas furnace and blowers, authorization from the supervising agent of the protection detail be given. Furthermore, two armed guards are to accompany any technicians entering the HVAC Access Room. If any compressed gases are to be connected to the system, those gases are to undergo an additional and final inspection by a designated specialist and supervised by the senior facility specialist—who, in this instance, was Special Agent Shanelle Klotz.

“Before we go to into the Access Room,” Wilmot said to Shanelle Klotz, “let’s review our protocol. Here’s how this is going to work . . .”

Three minutes later they arrived at the door where two agents waited for them.

Shanelle nodded curtly to them and said, “One of you come in, the other stay outside on the door.”

The agent followed them into the room. Wilmot waited until the door was closed, then hit him in the head with a pipe wrench. As the agent felt to his knees, Collier looped tape around his mouth, then flex-cuffed him.

“You told me you weren’t going to hurt him,” Agent Klotz said.

“I lied,” Wilmot said.

Collier looked at his watch. “Fifty-three minutes.”

“Go outside and tell the guy on the door that everything’s copacetic for now, so he can go back to his regular assignment.”

Shanelle Klotz opened the door. “We’re good here. You can go back to your post.”

“Yes, ma’am.” The agent, a large man in a gray suit, lumbered up the hallway and disappeared.

“Agent Klotz,” Wilmot said, “I want you to understand that we have an extremely clear picture of how you do your job here. We know the emergency phrases, password sequences, authentication procedures, the chain of command—the whole bit. We know that today if you use the phras he Athe phrase ‘par for the course’ during a conversation with another agent, you have just signaled to him that an attack on the president is unfolding. So, unless you want Wendy to suffer whatever that maniac Lorene Verhoven has in store for her, I suggest you avoid saying ‘par for the course’ to anyone today.”

Wilmot had a certain amount of information about the Secret Service protection detail, but there were distinct holes. The trick to managing Shanelle Klotz was to use the little details he did know to make it seem as though he knew everything there was to know. The more she thought he knew, the less likely she was to do something stupid.

As he was talking, Shanelle said, “Well, then you know we need to make one final check of these tanks full of, what, nerve gas? Ricin? Zyklon B?”

“Just for your own peace of mind,” Wilmot said, “I want you to know that what we are doing is staging a massive protest. These tanks contain CS gas. I’m sure you know what it is.”

“Tear gas.”

“Yeah, well, they call it tear gas. But it makes you throw up is what it really does.”

“So you’re not trying to kill anybody?”

Wilmot shook his head. “This government is out of control. We believe that a massive shake-up is needed, and this action we’re taking here is going to show how weak and silly and vulnerable our nation’s government is. But we’re not here to kill people. So you don’t need to be wrestling with the question of whether or not to sacrifice your family to save all those fat cats out there. You’d just be throwing away your husband’s and children’s lives for nothing.”

Wilmot wasn’t sure whether the agent would swallow his lie or not. But it was worth a try. He knew getting someone to believe something—even if it was impossible—was often the difference between making him take action and succumbing to inertia. If his lie made her think for a fraction of a second longer about trying to stop them—well, that fraction of a second could be the difference between the success or failure of the operation.”

“I’m not sure if I believe you,” Shanelle Klotz said.

“I don’t give a damn if you do or if you don’t,” he said. “Call the guy with the sniffer dog. Let’s get this last thing over with.”

Klotz talked into her sleeve.

“Fifty-one minutes,” Collier said.

48

TYSONS CORNER, VIRGINIA

As soon as she said “It’s done,” Lorene wobbled and clutched at the stair railing. The phone slipped from her hands, and she fell backward, sliding down the wall. She left a long smear of blood on the cream-colored paint.

Verhoven rushed to her side. “Lorene!” he shouted. “Lorene!”

Lorene’s head lolled forward.

Rheiiiiiiiii D‡20;Lorene!”

Lorene emitted a soft snoring sound. Tillman had heard that sound before. It was the sound of somebody who was not going to make it unless they got help damn quickly.

Whatever the doctor had done, it wasn’t enough. The IV had given her a short burst of energy. But she’d burned through it fast, and now she was in bad shape.

Verhoven crouched over his wife, shaking her. She didn’t respond. His face hardened, and Tillman saw something in his eyes that he knew meant things were about to end badly here.

“What did you do?” Verhoven shouted at Dr. Klotz. “What the hell did you do?”

“Hold on, hold on,” Tillman said, grabbing Verhoven’s shoulder. “We both watched him. He didn’t do anything. Sugar and saline, that’s all it was. She’s just weak. She’s going into shock. We need to lay her down and—”

Verhoven lifted his AR and pointed it at Dr. Klotz.

Tillman saw the fury and hopelessness on Verhoven’s face and knew he was going to take out his rage on the doctor. Like an impotent thug, he would strike out at the closest object to his wrath.

Tillman still didn’t know the exact location of the attack, or what its precise nature would be. But he knew that a Secret Service agent named Shanelle Klotz had been roped into doing something to further the plot. If he and Gideon could find out where she was stationed, they could stop the attack.

In short, it had to be enough. There was no time to mull over his options.

Tillman fired point-blank into Verhoven, racked the 870, fired again.

The shotgun tore huge pieces of meat out of Jim Verhoven’s body, exposing blue loops of viscera. He pitched over backward, torso in one direction, legs in another.

The horrific banging of the guns must have revived Lorene. She sat up, looking around in puzzlement. It took her a moment to figure out what had happened—her husband on the floor, a wisp of smoke rising from the barrel of Tillman’s shotgun.

She clawed at her Glock. “You motherfucker! You lying bastard!” she shouted. “You betrayed us!”

“I was never with you in the first place,” Tillman said.

She continued to claw at her Glock. Because she was crunched up against the stair railing, however, she couldn’t quite pull her gun from its holster.

“Don’t do it,” Tillman said, racking another round of buckshot into the 870. “Don’t.”

Her wide, crazed eyes stared straight into Tillman’s as she finally freed the Glock. She was smiling now, a broad fierce feral grin. She knew what was coming. But in some way she must have welcomed it—this, the culmination of everything her sad life had been aiming toward.

“Don’t,” Tillman repeated.

She pushed herself slowly to her feet, laughed at him, and raised the Glock.

He fired, racked, fired, racked, fired again.

< Qp>

What was left of Lorene Verhoven fell slowly to the ground. Her shirt caught on the newel post at the bottom of the stair railing and tore free. She fell and hung there from the newel post, shirtless, her back bare and exposed. There were scars everywhere. Cuts, burns, thick ridges of pink skin—a topographical map of a stolen childhood.

“Come on,” Tillman said to Klotz. “We need to get your girls out of here.”

Klotz stood rooted to the floor until Tillman shoved him with the butt of his gun. Then he teetered forward, grabbed his daughters, and ran for the door.