Full Black

CHAPTER 5

Ralston’s breathing all but stopped. Making sure he didn’t bang into any of the dining-room furniture and give himself away, he slipped across the room as fast as he could to the open double doors on the other side. Pressing himself against the wall, he gripped the knife tighter and waited.

He didn’t have to wait long. From out in the hallway, he could hear a man’s voice. He was whispering and in some sort of a foreign language. It sounded to Ralston like Eastern European, maybe Russian, but he couldn’t be sure.

When the man repeated himself, Ralston realized he was speaking over a radio. Was he trying to raise the driver outside? Or were there more men inside the house?

Either way, it wasn’t good. Ralston needed to get to Salomon. He could hear the man’s footfalls upon the wood floor of the hallway growing closer.

Ralston had two choices. He could face the man head-on, or he could wait until the man had passed and take him from behind. Shots had been fired and at least one person inside the house had already been killed. Ralston was literally bringing a knife to a gunfight, so he slipped off his shoes and settled on the latter course of action. Three seconds later, the man moved past the dining room doors.

He was huge-just as the man outside had been-six-foot-three, at least, and well over 250 pounds. He had wide shoulders, draped in what even the home’s semidarkness couldn’t hide was a very cheap suit. His feet were shod in the long, box-toed dress shoes so popular with Europeans. In one hand he carried a radio and in the other a suppressed pistol.

His hair was crew-cut short and the back of his head looked just like a Russian’s. From the base of his neck to the crown of his head, it was flat as a board. It was a cultural attribute that most Russian men, tightly swaddled and picked up seldom by their mothers, shared.

As the Russian passed, Ralston slipped into the hallway behind him. The intruder had no idea he was there until it was too late.

In one fluid motion, Ralston grabbed across the man’s forehead, yanked his head to the left, and with his right hand plunged the filleting knife into the anterior triangle between the top of the clavicle and the side of the neck. It severed the man’s internal jugular vein and carotid artery. He then swept the blade across, severing the trachea. All that could be heard was a hiss, like air being let out of a tire.

Ralston put all of his weight on the man to prevent him from using his last seconds of life to fight back and rode him down to the floor. Convinced he was no longer a threat, he dragged him off to the side, next to a cupboard, and left him there to bleed out.

It was a black art, the taking of life, and one that Luke Ralston was all too well versed in.

Dropping the knife, he picked up the intruder’s suppressed Walther P99 and did a press check. Satisfied that a round was chambered and the weapon was hot, he turned the volume down on the radio, tucked it into his back pocket, and went off in search of Salomon.

The problem, though, was twofold. Were there any more intruders in the house and where should he begin looking for Salomon? He decided to start with the producer’s office.

To get there, he had to pass through the entry hall with its wide double staircase. There was nothing for cover and Ralston used the darkness and shadows as best he could. The living room, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and ambient moonlight spilling from outside, was even worse, but he made it through both without incident.

The entrance to Larry Salomon’s office was down a short hall just past the living room. The hairs on the back of Ralston’s neck were standing on end before he even got to the door.

With the weapon up and at the ready, he button-hooked into the room and tried to take it all in.

Everything was different. The office looked as if it had been turned into some sort of war room. Whiteboards and bulletin boards were leaning against the walls and a large, rolling chalkboard was off to one side. Salomon’s imposing glass-and-steel desk now sat cheek-by-jowl with two additional, smaller desks, which were topped with high-end Apple computer systems and what Ralston recognized as editing equipment. There were stacks of cardboard filing boxes filled with reams and reams of papers and documents.

There were more pillars of books, some stacked three feet high and surrounded by yellow Post-it notes on a pair of matching drafting tables. And then there was another body.

The man appeared to be in his midforties, doughy, with salt-and-pepper hair and a matching beard. He wore jeans, loafers, and an Oxford cloth shirt. He had been shot in the back of the head execution-style. Ralston rolled him over to see who he was. As with the body in the kitchen, he didn’t recognize the man.

Exiting the office, he went down the hall to the back stairs. If Salomon had retained any of the emergency response advice he had dispensed to him dozens of times, perhaps he would have headed straight upstairs. If so, maybe it had bought him some time, especially if he’d heard the shots and had been able to figure out what was going on.

Reaching the top of the stairs, Ralston crouched down and stole a quick peek around the doorframe. The hallway was empty.

Stepping into the hall, he moved as quickly as he could toward Salomon’s bedroom. He stopped only for open doors, and even then, it was for just long enough to make sure there were no threats on the other side.

He was fifteen feet away from the master bedroom, when a figure stepped into the hall and fired.

The bullet came so close to the side of Ralston’s head that it actually set his right ear ringing. On instinct, having fired hundreds of thousands of rounds during his Spec Ops career, he depressed the trigger of his own weapon twice in quick succession and dropped the shooter onto the carpeted floor of the hallway.

Ralston advanced on the man and kicked the suppressed pistol away before checking to see if he was still alive. One round had entered just below his nose; the other had entered through his throat. He was big and dressed in a cheap suit just like his partner downstairs. The back of his head was flat as well. What the hell was going on? Who were these people? Why were there Russians in the house?

Ralston’s questions were interrupted by the sound of a sharp crack from inside Salomon’s bedroom. It wasn’t the crack of a pistol. It was the crack of molding as drywall was being ripped away.

It told him two things. Salomon was still alive, but he had only seconds left to live.