Trace

47

Along the narrow streets inside the training camp, five agents armed with Beretta Storm nine-millimeter rifles with Bushnell scopes and tactical lights move in from different directions on a small stucco house with a cement roof.

The house is old and in poor repair, and the small overgrown yard is gaudy with inflated Santas, snowmen, and candy canes. Palm trees are sloppily strung with multicolored lights. Inside the house, a dog barks nonstop. The agents wear their Storms on tactical slings that angle across their bodies and hold the muzzles down at a forty-degree angle. Dressed in black, they are not wearing body armor, which is unusual on a raid.

Rudy Musil waits calmly inside the stucco house behind a high barricade of turned-over tables and upended chairs that block the narrow doorway leading into the kitchen. He is dressed in camouflage pants and tennis shoes and armed with an AR-15 that is not a lightweight search weapon like the Storm but a. high-power combat weapon with a twenty inch barrel that can take out the enemy up to three hundred yards away. He doesn't need a weapon to clear the house because he is in the house.

He moves from the doorway to the broken window over the sink, looking out. He sees movement behind a Dumpster about fifty yards from the house.

He props the AR-15 on the edge of the sink and rests the barrel on the rotting windowsill. Through the scope he finds his first prey crouching behind the Dumpster, just a sliver of his black-clothed body exposed. Rudy squeezes the trigger and the rifle cracks and the agent screams, and then another agent darts out of nowhere and hits the dirt behind a palm tree and Rudy shoots him too. That agent doesn't scream or make any sound that Rudy can hear, and he moves from the window to the barricade in the doorway, angrily kicking and tossing tables and chairs out of his way. He breaks through his own barricade and rushes to the front of the house and smashes out the living room window and begins firing. Within five minutes, all five agents have been slammed with rubber bullets, but they keep on coming until Rudy orders them over the radio to halt.

"You guys are worthless," he says into his radio as he sweats inside the raid house that the training camp uses for simulated combat. "You're dead. Every one of you. Fall in."

He steps outside the front door as the agents in black walk toward the yard festively decorated for Christmas, and Rudy has to give them credit. At least they are not showing their pain, and he knows they hurt like hell where the rubber bullets slammed into their unprotected bodies. You get hit enough times with rubber bullets and you want to break down and cry like a baby, but at least this batch of new recruits is hard-faced and able to take the pain. Rudy presses a small remote control and the CD of the barking dog inside the house stops.

Rudy stands in the doorway and looks at the agents. They are breathing hard and sweating and angry with themselves. "What happened?" Rudy asks. "The answer's easy."

"We fucked up," an agent replies.

"Why?" Rudy asks, the AR-15 down by his side. Sweat streams down his muscular bare chest, and veins rope along his tanned, chiseled arms. "I'm looking for one answer. You did one thing and that's why you're dead."

"We didn't anticipate you having a combat rifle. Maybe assumed you had a handgun," an agent offers, wiping her dripping face on her sleeve and breathing hard from nerves and physical exertion.

"Never assume," Rudy replies loudly to the group. "I might have a fully automatic machine gun in here. I might be firing fifty-caliber rounds in here. But you made one fatal mistake. Come on. You know what it is. We've talked about it."

"We faced off with the boss," someone says, and everybody laughs.

"Communication," Rudy says slowly. "You, Andrews." He looks at an agent whose black fatigues are covered with dirt. "As soon as you took a round in your left shoulder, you should have alerted your comrades that I was firing from the kitchen window behind the house. Did you?"

"No, sir."

"Why not?"

"I guess I've never been shot before, sir."

"Hurts, don't it?"

"Like hell, sir."

"That's right. And you weren't expecting it."

"No, sir. Nobody said we'd get shot with live rounds."

"And that's why we do it down here at Camp Pain and Misery," Rudy says. "When something bad happens in real life, we usually haven't been briefed first, now have we? So you got hit and it hurt like hell and scared the shit out of you, and as a result you didn't get on the radio and warn your comrades. And everybody got killed. Who heard the dog?"

"I did," several agents say.

"You got a fucking dog barking like holy hell," Rudy replies impatiently. "Did you get on the radio and let everybody know? The damn dog is barking, so the guy in the house knows you're coming. A clue, maybe?"

Yes, sir.

"The end," Rudy dismisses them. "Get out of here. I gotta get cleaned up for your funerals."

He steps back into the house and shuts the door. His two-way radiophone vibrated twice from his belt while he was talking to the recruits, and he checks to see who is trying to get hold of him. Both calls are from his computer geek, and Rudy calls him back.

"What's up?" Rudy asks.

"Looks like your guy's about to run out of prednisone. Last filled a prescription twenty-six clays ago at a CVS," and he gives Rudy the address and phone number.

"Problem is," Rudy replies, "I don't think he's in Richmond. So now we've got to figure out where the hell he might get his drugs next. Assuming he'll bother."

"He's been filling his prescription every month at the same Richmond pharmacy. So it looks like he needs the stuff or thinks he does."

"His doc?"

"Dr. Stanley Philpott." He gives Rudy that phone number.

"No record of him filling a prescription anywhere else? Not in South Florida?"

"Just Richmond, and I looked nationally. Like I said, he's got five days left of the most recent prescription, and then he's out of luck. Or should be, unless he's got some other source."

"Good job," Rudy says, opening the refrigerator in the kitchen and grabbing a bottle of water. "I'll follow up."