STRAIGHT-FALLING RAIN drummed the roof and the skylights, a fateful funereal drone, as the rayshaw ascended fast, dodging left to right, right to left, which was the closest that he could get to a serpentine evasion on a staircase. The killer couldn’t have shot accurately while staggering upward in such a fashion; but it was odd that he didn’t shoot at all, that he came as if with no intent of conquering but with every intent of dying.
Dougal rose from behind the sideboard, fired the shotgun, the recoil knocking bone on bone in his shoulder.
The climber took the blast in the chest and abdomen. He dropped his pistol and went to his knees without a scream, not as if he had been hit, but as if he were instead a penitent seized by a sudden need to kneel and pray. At once, impossibly, he clambered to his feet, still coming although with diminished energy, staying to the inner curve of the staircase and against the railing. Maybe he wore a light bulletproof vest under his clothes, enough to spare him from most of the buckshot, or maybe he felt neither fear nor pain.
Rising higher above the sideboard, Dougal fired a second round, and the attacker was flung backward, headless, his body tumbling step to step like the straw-stuffed shape of a scarecrow wind-shorn from its crossed staves and blown to ruination.
Under cover of the first assailant, a second had raced upward, this time not bothering to attempt evasion. Staying to the outward curve of the stairs, passing the collapsing corpse, he could have squeezed off a few rounds while moving, to lend himself cover and with a greater hope of accuracy, but he held his fire.
Dougal rose higher still as the would-be killer drew near, and the third shell in the three-round magazine had such wicked impact that there was no kneeling and getting up this time, only a wild and final plummet.
Into the echo of the shotgun roar came the rattle of a fully automatic weapon. A third man, from whom the first two had meant to distract Dougal, assumed substance out of the half light in the living room, wielding an Uzi, chopping stair railing and sideboard barricade and Dougal, who dropped to the floor in a white flare of pain that bleached away the scene before him and that receded to a pinpoint of light in a great darkness, as he heard himself say his lost sister’s name, “Justine?”
27
* * *
AS JANE INSTRUCTED, the Shennecks remained in their chairs while she went to the open safe and found the clear plastic box containing the six flash drives in six labeled slots. She believed she had what she needed, because it was beyond unlikely that the scientist had labeled blank flash drives to trick her in expectation of her invasion of his home. Besides, this would-be maker of a new world, who was a man of stone and steel when planning the deaths of thousands, proved in the heat of action to have a spine of butter.
The safe also contained stacks of cash, as had Overton’s safe in Beverly Hills, plus plastic numismatic cases containing one-ounce gold coins, hundreds of them, and the recorder that stored the video taken by the house security cameras. She ignored the cash and coins, but confiscated the disc from the recorder.
She thought that the words with which Shenneck had used the voice-recognition system to open the safe must be lines of verse, but she wouldn’t give the bastard even the small satisfaction of asking. At the same time that he was a mass murderer by remote control, he was a perpetual adolescent fond of jokes and little games, and she could imagine him preening as he explained why he’d chosen that poem and poet.
As she tucked the flash drives and the disc in a jacket pocket, a shotgun blast silenced the rain for an instant, and then another, a third, followed by the chatter of automatic weapons’ fire. Shenneck cried out in alarm, and his wife slid off her chair to huddle behind it in the corner.
Jane hurried to the hall door, which stood open. When the gunfire ceased, she crouched and looked out there, to the right, where Dougal sprawled at the head of the stairs, as still as a man who needed casketing.
She could allow herself grief in modest measure, but not yet anger. She retreated to the study, stepped to the side of the open door, her back to the wall. Fished a disposable phone from an inner jacket pocket. Entered the number she’d memorized. Pressed SEND.
Standing by at Valley Air, Ronnie Fuentes answered: “It’s me.”
Jane kept her voice low. “Bad weather.”
Another gunshot, just one this time.
“No wind. Still can do,” Ronnie said.
“He’s down.”
“All the way?”
“Don’t know.”
“Six minutes max.”
They disconnected.
She wondered if that last shot had been one of the rayshaws administering the coup de grace to Dougal.
She pocketed the phone.
Still with her back to the wall, she held the gun in two hands, muzzle toward the ceiling, waiting for what would come next.
Bertold Shenneck watched her, walleyed.
Having deduced the meaning of Jane’s side of the telephone conversation, Inga Shenneck rose to her feet in the corner. “So you’re alone now.”
“Park your ass in that chair,” Jane whispered savagely.
Inga did as told, but facing the room rather than the corner, and with a smile as thin as the curved blade of a mezzaluna.
28
* * *
STREAMING RAIN, PROCEEDING from the trashed family room into the front of the house, as dead-eyed and grim as a forcibly drowned victim risen from a watery grave and bent on supernatural revenge, Nathan Silverman left his duty pistol holstered and instead drew the untraceable .45 Kimber from his belt. He stopped behind the man, the hollow man, who was wielding the Uzi, and just then the automatic carbine spat out its last round.
The hollow man lowered the gun and ejected the spent case and stood staring up at the head of the stairs as he fished a fresh magazine from under his jacket. He slapped it into the Uzi and chambered a first round.
Silverman shot him in the back of the head. He stepped around the gunman, leaving the Uzi on the floor. Seven bullets remained with which to finish the job that Booth Kohl—Randolph Hendrickson, Booth Hendrickson, Randolph Kohl—had given him when his phone had rung minutes earlier, as he’d stood among the dead at the front gate.
Silence settled over all, but for the restless rataplan of rain. The house seemed to be submerged and under great pressure, as if it were a submarine exceeding the maximum depth for which it had been designed. The light came watery and gray through the windows, and the shadows appeared to undulate like kelp leaves stirred by lazy currents. As Silverman climbed the stairs, the air felt thick, and thicker with each inhalation.
29
* * *
JANE IN SHENNECK’S STUDY, her back to the wall, the open door to her right. The genius at his desk with his face in his hands, like a child who believes the monster emerging from the closet will leave him untouched as long as he doesn’t look at it. Inga in the corner, watching with feral interest, mane of pale golden hair like that of some stone-temple goddess half human and half lioness.
The lightning seemed to have passed, and the thunder. But for the thudding of Jane’s heart, the only sound was the million-footed rain jittering across the roof.
From the hallway came a voice. “FBI. FBI. It’s over now. Jane? Jane Hawk? Are you here? Are you all right?”
Three thousand miles from Quantico, four months from the life of which she had been stripped, she heard Nathan Silverman and felt relief and stepped away from the wall. Then she warned herself that, in the quick of action, reason must rule over emotion, and she took back the step she’d taken, pressing against the wall once more.