Pandora's Legion

12

Marcus Garvey Jefferson knew very little about the British Army. But he would have appreciated one of Her Majesty’s Forces’ favorite adages: “Time spent on reconnaissance is seldom wasted.”

From the digital photos and Espinoza’s bogus visit, Jefferson and his two accomplices knew much of SSI’s layout before they walked through the doors. It was 10:20—a time chosen to optimize their one-shot option. Presumably most or all of the staffers would still be in the building before any left for lunch.

Jefferson and his brother Hakeem stopped outside the entrance to allow an army officer to enter. They waited a few moments, then pulled the balaclavas over their heads. They already wore latex gloves. Marcus nodded to Hakeem and their accomplice, grinning as he did so. If the imam’s contact was true to his word, they stood to make at least $30,000 for perhaps five minutes’ work. Minimum ten grand for each shooter and everybody splits a grand a head for every corpse.

The raiders strode across the polished floor to the reception desk. They noted that, as before, a uniformed security man sat astride a stool. Rent-a-cop, Hakeem sneered. He had previous dealings with the breed. This one was low-threat — a shade over sixty, more interested in his Field and Stream than doing his job.

Marcus focused his attention on the receptionist. He liked what he saw: pretty, mid-twenties, blue and blonde. Perky. He liked perky, up to a point. But she was not the gate guardian that Carlito had described. That woman was older, obviously more experienced. Miss Perky is prob’ly a temp, he told himself.

Marcus gave a high, guttural bark.

On signal, Hakeem pulled his nickel-plated Smith & Wesson 59 and grabbed the guard by the collar. The third raider, a naturalized citizen of Saudi extraction, produced a small spray can and leapt atop the counter. He quickly coated the lenses of both security cameras with a thick, viscous liquid. Then he unslung his folding-stock AK-47 from beneath his jacket and dropped behind the counter, covering the entrance.

Marcus pushed his Beretta 92 into Miss Perky’s face. He registered her baby blues, now bug-eyed in disbelief, and glimpsed her name tag. Becky Nielsen. In his peripheral vision he glimpsed Ahmed pistol-whipping the guard into submission. With some difficulty the Saudi pulled the man’s revolver from its thumb-break holster and tucked the.357 into his own belt.

Marcus placed himself into his dominance bubble. He knew from experience that violent intimidation went a long way, especially at gunpoint. “All right, bitch! Open that door!” He shoved Becky Nielsen against the wall, beside the keypad.

Speed was essential now. The plan held that if they did not gain entrance to the inner sanctum in two minutes, they would leave.

Becky Nielsen was screaming. She was certain of it. Her mouth was open, but somehow she heard no noise. Marcus knew he had achieved his goal: the girl was thoroughly cowed. Now he just needed to get her to perform a simple exercise. Speaking slowly, enunciating clearly, he said, “O-pen, the dooor.”

In her twenty-three years, Ms. Nielsen had never confronted violence. Her eyes focused on the seemingly huge pistol wielded by the young African American. She had African American friends; she didn’t even like to say “black,” which sounded too much like “colored.” She heard a loud moan and swiveled her gaze to nice old Ray bleeding on the floor. In their brief acquaintance she had learned that they both liked coffee au lait. That was about all she knew of him.

Something stung her cheek. The skin felt suddenly rough, bruised. Nobody had ever struck her. Never. She was stunned and startled, not yet angered. “Do it!” the gunman was shrieking at her again.

“I… I…” She reached for the keypad. Her hands trembling, she tried punching in the five-digit access code: 19199. Twice the nineteenth letter of the alphabet, twice followed by the ninth letter. She missed the one the second time. A red no-go light was illuminated.

“She’s stalling, man!” Hakeem was checking his watch.

Keeping his voice low and controlled, Marcus grasped Becky by the throat. “O-pen the dooor… or I will shoot him.”

The blonde head vaguely nodded. She tried entering the five numbers again, going slowly to concentrate. It was too slow.

“Do him!”

Without hesitation, Hakeem pulled Ray’s Smith & Wesson Model 28 and executed the gray-haired man with one round to the head. The noise pealed off the high ceiling of the lobby. Becky began to scream, but the fear rising in her throat choked it off. It emerged as a desperate cry of helplesness. She realized that she had wet herself.

“You’re next, bitch. Do it right!”

19199. The green light glowed. Hakeem’s watch ticked through the sixty-eighth second.

“Security breach, main entrance!”

Joe Wolf was the first to notice that surveillance of the lobby had gone blank.

“We never should’ve hired that twinkie,” Sandy Carmichael said. Obviously Becky Nielsen had forgotten the rehearsals for such occasions. She had not even attempted to input the 20000 code that would flash audio and visual alarms to every console in the office, let alone to the security firm that would automatically summon the police.

Eighteen people were present at SSI headquarters that morning. One was dead, one now paralyzed with fear. Several of the eleven men picked up the nearest phone and dialed 911. None of them were armed.

Wolf immediately ran to the rear of the building, intending to open the “toy box.” The walk-in gun vault contained rifles, pistols, and submachine guns. He fervently prayed to Saint Christopher that at least one had a loaded magazine.

In the executive offices, Michael Derringer learned of the threat and stood motionless for an eternal three seconds. Then he strode to his corner gun rack and pulled down a Browning Superposed, the world’s first over-under shotgun. It was a collector’s item, beautifully engraved by a factory artisan in the 1930s. Derringer had only taken it to the skeet range a few times. He would never take it hunting. Now he scrambled to find some twelve-gauge shells — any kind. Four rounds of birdshot beat a sharp pencil all to hell.

Lieutenant Colonel David Main had attended two wars and numerous firefights. He had his army briefcase and a Benchmade knife with a three-inch blade.

Joe Wolf, retired FBI agent, had a Sig 228 in the company safe.

Sandra Carmichael had a compact .45 Kimber Ultra Carry in her purse.

Things were going well. If Imam Mustafah was true to his word— and he always had been — Marcus and Hakeem stood to make ten grand apiece for a few minutes’ work. It was almost too good to be true: shoot up the place, destroy computers and anything else worthwhile, and split before the heat rolled in. Ahmed didn’t seem concerned with money. He was one of those true believers.

Into the anteroom, Marcus made straight for the door that Carlito had described. The gunman shoved his hostage through the portal, then brought her up short. “Where’s the computer room?” If he didn’t find living targets right away, he would destroy as many hard drives as possible.

Becky had been pushed over the brink. She collapsed in a heap at Marcus’s feet, sobbing loudly, uncontrollably. Without blinking, he shot her in the back of the head and moved on. A twenty-cent bullet gets you a grand. Bitchin’.

At the next door Marcus went left and Hakeem went right. It was the misfortune of a visiting consultant to encounter Hakeem, who shot the man in the chest. Struck by a 115-grain bullet, he staggered backwards, tripped over a wastebasket, and fell to the tile floor. Hakeem stepped over him and continued down the hall.

It was his misfortune to encounter Sandra Carmichael.

Hakeem made the tactical error of leading with his gun hand around the door sill, and the nickel plated Model 59 gave her all the warning she needed. Crouched behind a steel desk, Carmichael raised her sights to chest level and waited, finger on the Kimber’s trigger.

Hakeem Jefferson saw the open door and swung left into the room. He did not realize he had been shot until he found himself on his back, looking up at the fluorescent lights. Two 200-grain slugs had punched through his sternum into his heart; the second round of the double tap had clipped the aorta. He raised his head off the floor, trying to focus on whoever had decked him. He saw a light-haired woman behind a desk about twenty feet away. Then the world went fuzzy, gray, dark, black.

Sandy returned her focus to the door, expecting another shooter. When none appeared, she took stock of herself. She was mildly surprised to find her pulse only slightly elevated, breathing under control. She quickly tested her peripheral vision; little of the tunneling she had been told to expect.

Way down deep she felt a tiny electric thrill. Then she moved down the hall, trying to control her breathing. Her thoughts went to David Main, somewhere amid the shooting.

In the armory, Joe Wolf seized his Sig 228 and searched ravenously for a loaded magazine. Finding none, he dumped a box of 9mm cartridges on the bench. He scooped up several rounds, dropped a few, and loaded the others into the magazine. Working quickly, he forced himself to concentrate as he thumbed the ammunition into the double-column mag. He stopped at ten and put the others in his suit pocket. Then he chambered a round and flipped the decocker, rendering the Sig safe. He was acutely aware that he had not shot a pistol since retiring.

More gunfire. More screams. The sounds of panicked people running.

Wolf turned into the hallway leading to the financial offices. Two men dashed past him; he recognized them from the research division. More gunshots; a woman shrieked.

SSI’s domestic ops chief flipped off the safety and began checking each cubicle, “slicing the pie” as he methodically searched each wedge-shaped segment that came into view. It was slow going if done properly.

At the third cubicle he found a woman’s body. She was a fifty-two-year-old grandmother named Harriet. Wolf knew her as an excellent accountant. He choked down the anger he felt rising inside him and stepped into the hall.

Forty-five feet away, Marcus Jefferson walked calmly away, pistol raised, ready to shoot.

The cop in Joe Wolf urged him to issue a verbal challenge. Then he thought of Harriet. He put his front sight between the gunman’s shoulder blades and pressed the trigger. The eight-pound double action conspired with lack of practice to force the muzzle downward and left. The first round struck the wall at waist height.

Marcus jumped at the unexpected sound. He pivoted on one foot, turning to face the threat.

With the Sig now cocked, the second round was single action. Wolf stroked the four-pound trigger but the difference in pressure spoiled his aim. His next round went as he fought the recoil from the first. It missed Marcus’ right shoulder by two inches.

The raider’s Beretta came around, pointing at the white man’s chest. Wolf knew he had no time for a third shot and threw himself sideways into the right-hand cubicle. A 9mm round snapped past his left arm.

Rolling to an upright position, Wolf leaned toward the entrance, intending to steady himself on the corner when he heard more shooting. Multiple rounds — a prolonged exchange — then momentary silence.

As Marcus advanced on the latest defender, he sensed that he was winning. This dude, whoever he was, had flubbed a dead-meat setup.

Two blasts impacted Marcus’s back, lurching him forward. He caught himself on his right foot and spun to face the new threat.

Michael Derringer instantly knew his mistake. Dashing to the nearest shootout, he had caught a perpetrator from behind and fired both barrels of his 12-gauge, aiming at the man’s torso. Both patterns of birdshot struck where intended, but they were not lethal.

Derringer ducked behind the doorway. He thumbed the release, bent the barrels downward and saw the empties ejected. He reached for the reloads in his pocket and tried to control his hands. One cartridge slipped into the upper barrel; the other resisted his fumbling efforts. He looked up again. The shooter was still upright, turning toward the late arrival.

The shotgunner backpedalled, removing himself from view and temporarily stabilizing the fight. The damnable second round would not drop into the Browning’s lower barrel. Derringer let it go and closed the action, acutely aware of the fight-or-flight conflict raging behind his eyes. He wanted to turn and run.

Pride and survival fought for dominance of Michael Derringer’s brain while the gunfight continued apace.

Joe Wolf poked his head around the corner of the cubicle. The assailant had turned away from him, slowly advancing on the doorway down the hall. There had been other shots — somebody else had engaged the man — but Wolf saw only the masked intruder.

With a temporary advantage, the lawman in Joseph Matthew Wolf shouted the oft-used phrase. “Freeze! FBI!”

Marcus swiveled his head, saw the man behind the partition again, and realized a no-win situation. Fully exposed in the hallway, he ignored the challenge, lowered his head, and charged eight steps to the cover of the doorsill.

He made it. For whatever reason, the man with the pistol did not try to shoot him in the back again.

The man with the shotgun centered the bead sight on Marcus’s nose and, from eighteen feet away, mashed both triggers. One chamber emitted a soft click. The other detonated the primer on an ounce and a quarter of number 7½ birdshot.

When Ahmed heard more shooting in the rooms behind him, he suspected the worst. With a parting glance at the double doors in the lobby, he went through the security door that Hakeem had kept open with a chair. The Saudi-American sprinted down the first corridor to the left, noting spent brass on the floor, and began hunting. He glimpsed movement farther down the hall: a man and a woman, a green uniform. He spun on the targets and triggered a quick burst from his AK. The rounds impacted a conference room, sending shards of glass tingling to the floor.

Behind the thin wall, Dave Main leapt on Sandy Carmichael. He covered her body with his own, taking some of the glass pieces on his back. Beneath him, his erstwhile classmate struggled against his weight. “Lemme up, goddammit!”

“Sandy, stay down!” Main raised his head, only then noticing her compact .45 Kimber. He reached for the pistol. “Gimme the gun! Gimme the gun!”

Lieutenant Colonel Sandra Carmichael, U.S. Army (retired), was in no mood to negotiate. She tightened her grip on the weapon and tried to elbow Colonel Main off her. Another burst of automatic fire stuttered across the wall, eighteen inches over their heads. The shooter knew they would be on the floor.

“Sandy, he’s coming!”

“Get off me then!”

The shooter had to be close. Main did the only thing he could. He rolled off Carmichael’s slender frame, low-crawled six feet and risked a peek over the ledge.

Ahmed saw the head pop up to his left front. He swung the muzzle and fired again. The Kalashnikov’s bark rang painfully off the walls, though he had inserted soft earplugs. Four rounds punched through the imitation wood paneling to Main’s left as he dived for cover again. Sumbitch missed from fifteen feet!

But now there was nowhere to go.

Sandy Carmichael saw Main duck the next burst and knew she had to shoot. She inhaled deeply, got both hands around the Kimber, and popped up, looking for her sights.

She found them. Front sight’s elevated, but he’s close. She pressed the trigger twice. Got ‘im!

The .45-caliber rounds left the three-inch barrel at 800 fps. Both struck within four inches of one another. The AK gunner reeled visibly from the impact but kept his feet.

Sandy was stunned. She knew where the rounds went: mid torso. She could not know that Ahmed wore a typical AK chest pack with extra magazines beneath his windbreaker. They were almost as good as Kevlar.

Failure drill! The Kimber’s sights came up again, seeking a place above the neck line. The man was moving slightly, making a head shot more difficult. She pressed the trigger, felt the compact pistol recoil, and awaited results. The AK barked again. Sandy felt something smack her right arm. She ignored it. She fired again. No good; low left. She fired again.

Then she noticed her slide had locked back. My god, I’m empty!

David Main could stand it no longer. He saw Sandy’s slide locked open, leaving only one choice. Hunching low, he swung right, cleared the cubicle, and charged.

The green shape entered Sandy’s vision as she prepared to fire her seventh round. Ahmed, aware of the closer threat, stepped back, giving himself time to engage the army officer. The muzzle brake came up and around. The 7.62mm bore looked huge. Main leapt from his feet, hands extended.

A gunshot went off. He did not feel any pain.

Main and Ahmed went down together in a tangle, Main grasping for the rifle. Sandy left the cubicle, knowing she had to get close to avoid hitting David. Gotta get close.

Main intended to bash in the assailant’s head with the rifle, but it was unnecessary. Finally the colonel noticed the hole below the corpse’s right ear. The last shot was Sandy’s. He heard her exclaim, “My thumb must’ve hit the slide lock! I’ve got one round left.”

Main looked up, saw Sandy wide-eyed, mouth agape, sucking air. He found his feet, reached for her and took her in both hands. “Honey, are you alright?”

She shook her head as if clearing cobwebs. “David…” Then she handed him the pistol and ran down the hall.

The Arlington police and sheriff’s departments responded quickly but too late to intervene in the shootout at Strategic Solutions. The sirens had convinced Marcus’s driver to stop circling the block and seek employment elsewhere. At least he had the five-hundred-dollar advance. He drove away from the plaza, being careful to obey all traffic regulations.

The backup driver, in a rented station wagon, was not so circumspect. He busted a stop sign and drew the immediate attention of Arlington’s finest. They had no reason to detain the Pakistani until it was realized that he had a forged driver’s license and Immigration was interested in him.

“Where’s Sandy?” Derringer asked his niece.

Sallie Kline said, “Oh, I think she’s still in the restroom. She keeps throwing up.”

“What about you?”

She took a swig of mineral water. “I’m fine, Uncle Mike. Trust me.” The faint tremor in her arms belied the words.

Derringer realized that the young woman was riding the peak of an adrenaline high. Eventually she would crash, but for the moment she was surprisingly composed.

He put an arm around her shoulders. “What do you want to do now, honey?”

Sallie Ann Kline leveled her gaze at SSI’s founder. “Well, this week I’m going to call some numbers Sandy gave me in Arizona. Apparently most of the top instructors are there, including the best pistol shooter who ever lived. I’m going to sign up for a class with Firebase Phoenix or Morrigan Consulting. But for now I’m going home and screw Harold’s wheels off.”

With that, she kissed her uncle and walked to the parking lot. As she left, Derringer heard the detectives talking.

Sergeant Leo Forbus checked his notes. “Well, there were three shooters, all dead. Looks like they were pros: two of ‘em had body armor. Six SSI people dead and four wounded, one critical.”

His partner looked at the last body bag as it trundled out the door. “It would’ve been lots worse. If that Carmichael gal hadn’t been here…”

“Man, she is something else. You know she was an oak leaf colonel?”

“I can believe it. A deputy told her he’d never known a woman who carried a gun, except female cops. You know what she said?”

“What?” asked Forbus.

“She said, ‘Hey, if most women don’t want to defend themselves, it’s no skin off my vagina.’”

David Main sat down beside Sandra Carmichael, who had stopped shaking almost two hours after the climax. He nodded at her right arm in a sling. “How you feeling?”

“Oh, I’ll be alright. There’s a big-ass bruise and contusion but the bullet hit the metal stanchion in the cubicle before it hit me.” She looked at his bandaged neck. “How about you?”

“I got cut by some glass. No big deal.” He looked at the floor, then turned back to her. “Sandy, we need to talk.”

She looked at him through eyes still moist with fear and emotion. “You called me ‘honey.’ You never did that since…”

“Since I got married.” He touched her left hand and she gripped his, hard.

“That’s right.” The Alabama inflection came out “raaaht.” He still liked to hear it.

“Sandy, I love my wife and I adore my kids. But I love you, too. I knew that all along, but today when I thought you would be killed…”

“My god, David, that was the bravest thing I ever saw. Twenty years in the army and I never saw anything like it, how you charged that AK bare-handed.”

“Honey”—he gave her an ironic smile—”what’re we going to do?”

She had no answer, so she rested her head on his shoulder.