That would be the smart thing to do, he told himself, as his hand paused on the first heavy dead-bolt knob that gleamed dully in the meager light shed by a single, distant wall source.
But then Bennington remembered Simon Whatley's voice over the Airphone. So Keith Bennington took a deep breath, turned the two hefty bolt knobs, cautiously opened the door a few inches, and whispered, 'Hello?'
No answer.
If anything, the room on the other side of the door was darker than the hallway, and the congressional aide felt a terribly sick feeling in the pit of his stomach.
But the luminous dial on his watch reminded him that his vindictive employer would land in precisely twenty- eight minutes, so, in a burst of mindless courage, he pushed open the door and stepped inside the room.
Keith Bennington became aware of the acrid smell immediately. Unfortunately, he wasn't an animal person, so he had no way of knowing that the pungent aroma far exceeded anything that emanated from the average household pet.
Thus it wasn't until his pupils dilated…
And he saw the ancient tree in the center of the large room…
And he stepped forward in awe to touch its huge trunk…
And heard the soft, heavy thump behind his back, whirled, and found himself staring at a pair of half-lidded yellow eyes with tightly focused black pupils set terribly far apart that hovered in midair…
That he understood the enormity of his error.
He tried to say something that would give credence to the idea that that creature couldn't possibly be in this room, but the words simply froze in his mouth.
When the eyes began to move toward him, Keith Bennington did the only thing that he could think of at that moment. He held the envelope containing the eighty-seven faxed pages that had consumed his life for the past six hours in front of his body in the ludicrous hope that it might somehow, miraculously deflect the attack of the terrifying creature and allow him to live a few seconds longer.
He felt the whiskers of the terrifying beast brush against his hand, and tensed — even as his mind went mercifully numb — for the searing impact of extended claws ripping open his throat and chest and stomach… then stood stunned as the huge panther ripped the envelope out of his hand instead, turned, and then leaped upward and disappeared into the darkness.
Waves of adrenaline flooded Keith Bennington's frozen muscles, but it took the sound of paper tearing high above his head to finally galvanize the terrified young man into action.
Less than three seconds later, and with no memory of how he did it, Bennington stood in the dark hallway fumbling with the heavy dead bolts.
It took him fifteen more seconds to close and dead-bolt the second door, exit the house, get into the car, start the engine, launch the heavy sedan into a tire-spinning U-turn onto the dark, narrow, and extremely wet backcountry road… and another twenty-seven minutes and thirty-two seconds to pull into the entrance of the Rogue Valley International Airport parking lot, take a ticket, park the car, run into the terminal, and plant his trembling body in front of the ARRIVING PASSENGERS door.
The clock over the door read 8:54.
He was still standing there twenty-three minutes later, numbed and glassy-eyed, when Simon Whatley's late-arriving airplane finally touched down and taxied to the terminal.
But only much later that night, as he lay in bed trembling under his electric blanket, did Keith Bennington finally realize that his equally numbed, glassy-eyed, and completely exhausted superior had simply handed him his briefcase and carry-on luggage, followed him out to the car… and during the entire trip home, never once asked about Robert, or the delivery of the agent profiles, or the reason that the district office staff car — not to mention Keith Bennington himself — reeked of human urine.
Chapter Twenty-four
When Henry Lightstone and Bobby LaGrange turned into the small industrial park a little after nine that Wednesday evening, they drove through the dimly lighted complex and pulled into the parking area in front of Bravo Team's rented warehouse.
When Lightstone shut off the engine, they could hear Dwight Stoner's distinctive booming voice, and Larry Paxton yelling something in reply.
'You call this a covert operation?' LaGrange commented as he and his former partner stared at the intensely bright light streaking out from under the roll-up door, around the drawn window and door shades, and through the fairly impressive gaps in the aluminum siding beneath the roof. Compared to this display, the rest of the warehouses in the small industrial complex appeared abandoned.
'Yeah, me too. I guess they're arguing over who gets to put the neon sign up,' Lightstone commented sarcastically as he and LaGrange walked up to the small metal door and knocked.
When Larry Paxton opened the door, a blast of brilliant light nearly drove the two men backward.
'Jesus Christ, Paxton, what the hell — ' Lightstone shielded his eyes to keep from being blinded.
'Get your butts in here before the damned thing escapes,' the Bravo Team leader muttered as he yanked the two men into the warehouse and slammed the door.
'Before what escapes?' Bobby LaGrange's blinking eyes immediately focused on the red warning labels covering several of the wooden crates stacked in the middle of the warehouse floor. Around them, he saw an incredible assortment of haphazardly scattered cardboard boxes, bags, cans, power tools, and lumber that covered most of the concrete floor.
'The goddamned snake,' Larry Paxton replied in a voice that gave the distinct impression of rapidly approaching hysteria.
'You guys let one of those things get loose?' Bobby LaGrange instantly moved to an open section of concrete and began scanning the surrounding piles of cardboard and assorted debris for movement.
'One?' Dwight Stoner's deep booming voice echoed across the cavernous warehouse. 'Yeah, right, that's a laugh.'
Larry Paxton glared at the ex-Oakland Raider turned agent.
'Hey, what happened to the rental car?' Lightstone asked, noticing the shattered windshield and the huge dents on the top of the hood.
'Go ahead, Paxton.' Dwight Stoner waved the snake net in his massive hand encouragingly. 'You're the team leader around here. You tell the man what four highly trained covert federal agents have been doing here the last couple of hours.'
'Things got a little bit out of hand for a while, but we've almost got it under control,' Paxton started to explain when Thomas Woeshack's head popped up from the other side of the pile of terrarium boxes.
'Yeah, you should have been here, Henry. It was awesome! We were trying to hurry and get them all in the terrariums 'cause we don't them to die of hunger or thirst when all of a sudden, we had snake babies! A whole ton of them. And then Mike starts yelling 'Tape the lid shut!' and Larry's screaming 'Oh shit!' over and over again. But before Stoner and I could find the tape, the babies were everywhere. Must've been a hundred of them!'
'You guys let a hundred baby snakes get loose in here?' Henry Lightstone shook his head in amazement as he ran his hand over the huge dents in the car hood.
'Yeah!' Woeshack's eyes gleamed with delight. 'Common Red-bellied Blacksnakes. Really evil-looking! And man, you should've seen Stoner. Soon as those little snakes started coming out through those gaps in Mike's transfer contraption, he jumped right up on that stack of crates, and then the whole stack started hissing and thrashing around like crazy, and he screamed and jumped all the way over there to the rental car and — '
'I think I get the picture.'
Henry Lightstone nodded his head thoughtfully as he picked up a couple of the snake hooks littering the floor and walked back to where Paxton and Bobby LaGrange stood.
'There wasn't no hundred baby snakes.' Larry Paxton switched his supervisory glare to Woeshack. 'According to Jennifer, Common Red-bellied Blacksnakes only have about twelve babies in a batch — '
'I think you mean 'offspring in a litter,'' Lightstone corrected his superior as he handed one of the snake hooks
