Target Omega

CHAPTER SEVEN

A careful man is more likely to remain alive.

Cal Lowbridge was fastidious. He always carried a firearm, sometimes two, wherever he went. He carried his firearms hot but made sure to always safely lock away any weapons he wasn’t using, magazine out, no round in the chamber.

Lowbridge was always checking his surroundings, his head seemingly on a perpetual swivel. Little escaped his attention. He rarely took the same route to a destination and constantly checked his rear- and side-view mirrors. Before parking his car, he circled the block at least once, sometimes doubling back twice to see if he was being followed. He never parked his car in the same spot and never near thick foliage. Both of his personal vehicles had remote keyless ignitions.

His apartment was protected by a cutting-edge security system installed by a civilian contractor who had once worked in the same capacity for the FBI. Best of all, he had Loki, his agile Doberman, who seemed to have bionic ears and treated nearly everyone but Lowbridge as a mortal threat.

Lowbridge was a celebrated insomniac. That in itself didn’t present much of a problem, except that wherever he was detailed he was always being volunteered for first watch. Like most former SEALs, he had gone without sleep for at least forty-eight hours on multiple occasions. Unlike most former SEALs, he’d begun doing so long before he’d joined the teams and continued long after he’d left.

Lowbridge’s baseline insomnia was compounded this particular night by his struggle to adjust to the time change from the preceding three days in Pakistan. Jerri, his long-suffering (as she continually reminded him) girlfriend, left the apartment at ten thirty P.M. to work the night shift as a charge nurse at Sentara Northern Virginia Medical Center. He watched a movie, read parts of two opaque novels, and cleaned Jerri’s fish tank after she left. He was wide-awake at two thirty A.M. with no prospect of sleep on the horizon.

Fortunately, Loki seemed to share his master’s affliction and was pleased to accompany him on a walk through the neighborhood. Lowbridge inserted a magazine into his Beretta 92S, chambered a round, and stuck the weapon in his pocket holster. Before leaving the apartment he checked the stove, turned off all but one light, set the security alarm, and locked the door. He climbed down a flight of stairs, paused at the doorway, and looked up and down the sidewalk. He noted the locations and makes of the vehicles parked at the curb and, verifying that there was no one silhouetted along the rooftops of adjacent apartment complexes, permitted Loki to precede him out of the building.

The night was warm, humid, and still. The only sound came from the faint buzzing of an overhead streetlamp. There were just two lights on in the windows of the rows of apartment buildings lining the entire block, no pedestrians on the sidewalks, and no motorists on the street. Perfect for walking an obedient yet aggressive dog.

Lowbridge walked slowly and with a slight limp, a consequence of an exceedingly tiny but painful piece of shrapnel in his thigh, acquired during the assignment in Pakistan. Calhoun, the corpsman, had removed the offending piece of metal, disinfected the wound, and given Lowbridge an antibiotic shortly after the team’s extraction. He was given a clean bill of health upon arrival just outside Fort Belvoir for debrief and told to expect some stiffness and soreness for a while. Within a week or two he would be back to normal.

With no pedestrians, vehicles, or small animals to distract him, Loki was content to walk slowly at his master’s side. Lowbridge paused at the end of the block and contemplated which direction to proceed. He decided to go right for no other reason than Loki had already begun moving in that direction. Loki’s decision was based on his favorite oak, which he carefully inspected before marking his territory once again, part of an ongoing turf war with the seemingly incontinent black Lab that resided with his elderly owner in the duplex across the street.

Loki returned to Lowbridge’s side and the pair made another right turn onto a largely unoccupied street where several houses had been left in midconstruction due to a persistent softness in the housing market. Jerri and Lowbridge had inspected one of the houses with an eye toward financing its completion and moving in. Cal estimated he had another year, at most, in Omega. He’d lost no more than half a step, but in his business that loss could be fatal. He’d had some feelers from security firms and private military contractors. Very good money. He’d long ago begun preparing for the transition, accumulating a decent savings. Leaving the team — the camaraderie, the sense of purpose — would be hard, but Jerri’s biological clock (as she frequently reminded him) was ticking.

Loki nuzzled Lowbridge’s hand in search of some treats. Cal dug into his left pocket for a biscuit, when Loki’s ears perked and he began to emit a growl that immediately turned into a soft, plaintive yelp as a geyser of blood erupted from the top of his skull and he fell on his side. Almost simultaneously, the hot sharpness of ballistic metal pierced the left side of Lowbridge’s neck just below the jawbone. Astonished by the skill of his assassin, in the milliseconds before death the fastidious operator chastised himself for not thinking it peculiar that the neighborhood’s nocturnal insects had remained still on this warm and humid night.