Todd turned back, bringing up his pistol, and fired one shot a split second later, catching the first guard in the left eye, his head snapping back, and his arms flying outward as he crumpled in the driveway. The entire time elapsed from the moment the two guards had first appeared until they lay dead, was less than ten seconds, the two silenced shots inaudible more than twenty feet away.
Carol was out of the car and across the driveway by the time Todd had reached the front door. He stood to one side as she came up onto the porch. He nodded.
Holding the gun at her side, she tried the doorknob. It wasn’t locked. She opened the door and Todd slipped past her inside the main stair hall.
A woman in a pretty print dress was just coming down the stairs. Without hesitation Todd shot her, the bullet smacking into her chest just below her left breast, piercing her heart, killing her instantly. Her legs collapsed beneath her, and she tumbled halfway down the stairs, her eyes open, and her lips parted for a scream she hadn’t been able to utter.
The meeting was to be held either in Innes’s study or in the breakfast room. Both were at the back of the house, making it unlikely that anyone witnessed what had happened out front in the driveway.
Todd started down the corridor to the left of the staircase, Carol directly behind him. She did not close the door, nor had they closedthe Peugeot’s doors or shut off its ignition-all steps to save them precious seconds if need be.
The corridor was one step up from the stair hall. To the right was the living room, to the left a drawing room, its French doors slightly ajar. Todd hesitated as Carol stepped around him and ducked inside, sweeping her gun from left to right.
She shook her head and rejoined him just as the door at the far end of the corridor opened and they could hear voices.
“It’s simply a matter of procedures now, but you must understand the importance,” someone said from within the room.
A fat, academic-looking man with thick glasses stepped out, clutching a bulging file folder. He started to say something to the others in the room when he realized that someone was in the corridor. He brought up his right arm as if to fend off a blow, as Todd fired two shots, the first catching Reisberg in the face, destroying the bridge of his nose, the second hitting his chest, driving him back against the door frame.
Pandemonium broke out in the breakfast room. Todd raced the rest of the way down the corridor without a word, confident that Carol was right behind him as backup.
Turning the corner he stepped over Reisberg’s body, his eyes automatically scanning the small room, right to left.
Paul Innes, his tie loose, was shouting into a telephone. Todd shot him in the side of the head, the telephone flying out of his hand as he crashed sideways into the long glass buffet table. A glass door leading out to the rose garden crashed open and Todd switched his aim left, firing one shot that went wide and to the right, just as Robert Highnote disappeared across the narrow veranda.
“Get him,” Todd whispered, and Carol stepped behind him, and rushed across the room.
Melvin Quarmby had snatched up the sterling silver coffee server and he threw it at Todd in a final desperate act. Todd easily sidestepped it, and fired one shot, this one catching the NSA counsel in the throat, destroying his windpipe and severing a carotid artery. The man fell backward as he clawed at the fatal wound.
There was an unsilenced shot outside. Todd reached the glass doorin time to see Carol sitting down hard in the snow, clutching her left shoulder with her right hand.
Highnote was racing across the rose garden with surprising speed and agility for a man of his age. Todd crouched in the classic shooter’s stance, followed Highnote’s retreating figure and squeezed off a single shot, the bullet catching Highnote high in the back, his body falling forward and lying still.
Carol was just getting to her feet when Todd reached her. “Are you all right?” he asked.
She nodded, grim-lipped. “Are we finished here?”
“Yes,” Todd nodded. “It’s time to go.”
Chapter 20
Stephanie had wanted to leave the hotel immediately, but McAllister convinced her that they would run less of a risk of being spotted if they waited a couple of hours until normal workday traffic began. They wouldn’t stand out as the only ones on the street. They checked out a few minutes after seven-thirty, paying their bill and walking three blocks down to New York Avenue directly across from the sprawling Washington Convention Center.
The dawn was gray and overcast. Traffic was extremely heavy and still ran with headlights. The gaily lit Christmas decorations seemed somehow out of place, especially considering Stephanie’s dark mood. She had convinced herself that something terrible had happened to her father, and McAllister had no real idea what he could or should say to her, because he thought there was a better than fair possibility she was correct.
They found a cab almost immediately, the driver a young black man with Walkman headphones half over his ears, beating a rhythm on the steering wheel. “Can you take us to the BaltimoreWashington Airport?” McAllister asked when he and Stephanie got in the backseat.
The driver looked at their images in his rearview mirror. “Man, in this shit?” he asked, indicating the thick traffic.
“A hundred dollars,” McAllister said. “We’ve got a plane to catch, and we can’t afford to screw around.”
The driver grinned, hitting the button on his trip meter as he pulled out into traffic. He reached down with his right hand and turned up the volume on his Walkman, his head bobbing with the music that was suddenly so loud McAllister and Stephanie could hear it in the backseat.
McAllister looked over his shoulder a couple of blocks later to seeif they had picked up a tail. He decided after a few moments of watching traffic, that they had not, and he sat back. They’d done the impossible, so far, he thought. But from this moment on it was going to start getting difficult. Stephanie was holding his hand, her palms cold and wet, her entire body shivering. She looked into his eyes. “If something has happened to him, I don’t know what I’ll do,” she said, her voice cracking. “Someone from the Agency and probably the FBI was sent up to interview him,” McAllister said. “But I don’t think they’d do anything more than ask a few questions.”
“He wouldn’t have told them anything.”
“Of course not.”
“It’s not them I’m worried about, David. It’s the Russians, or the Mafia.”
“There is no reason for them to go to him,” McAllister said, not really believing it himself. “It’s me they’re after.”
“And me, because I’m helping you.”
“But they’re not after my wife. There’s no reason to suspect they’d go after your father.”
“God, I wish I could believe you,” Stephanie whispered, sitting back. “I wish it was that easy.”
He let it rest for the moment. Trust your instincts, she had told him.
I think that something did happen to you in the Lubyanka. Something that changed you, something that made you unsure of your own abilities. But deep in your gut you know what moves to make, you know how to protect yourself… Let yourselfgo, David. Let your old habits, your old instincts take over…. You have the tradecraft, use it.
“He doesn’t know anything,” she said softly. “I didn’t tell him what we were doing, just that we were together.” He squeezed her hand. “It may be that we won’t be able to get to him.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, her eyes wild. “You’re on the run. Dexter Kingman might figure that you’d try to contact your father. They could be watching the place, waiting for you to show up.”
“Then why didn’t they put a tap on his phone?” she asked. “There was no answer last night and again this morning.”
“Because they knew that even if you did call him, you wouldn’t reveal your location.”
She suddenly saw what he was driving at. “They could have shunted his incoming calls to a dead number, making me believe that something had happened to my father. Bait. It could be a trap.”
McAllister nodded, thinking that in a way it would be much easier on her if that were the case, and yet
