maybe it had bought him some time, especially if he’d heard the shots and had been able to figure out what was going on.
Reaching the top of the stairs, Ralston crouched down and stole a quick peek around the doorframe. The hallway was empty.
Stepping into the hall, he moved as quickly as he could toward Salomon’s bedroom. He stopped only for open doors, and even then, it was for just long enough to make sure there were no threats on the other side.
He was fifteen feet away from the master bedroom, when a figure stepped into the hall and fired.
The bullet came so close to the side of Ralston’s head that it actually set his right ear ringing. On instinct, having fired hundreds of thousands of rounds during his Spec Ops career, he depressed the trigger of his own weapon twice in quick succession and dropped the shooter onto the carpeted floor of the hallway.
Ralston advanced on the man and kicked the suppressed pistol away before checking to see if he was still alive. One round had entered just below his nose; the other had entered through his throat. He was big and dressed in a cheap suit just like his partner downstairs. The back of his head was flat as well. What the hell was going on? Who were these people? Why were there Russians in the house?
Ralston’s questions were interrupted by the sound of a sharp crack from inside Salomon’s bedroom. It wasn’t the crack of a pistol. It was the crack of molding as drywall was being ripped away.
It told him two things. Salomon was still alive, but he had only seconds left to live.
CHAPTER 6
Larry Salomon had expected that a savvy intruder would probably cut his telephone hard line. That was why he always kept a charged cell phone in his panic room. A fixed external antenna had been installed to guarantee reception, but suddenly it wasn’t working either. He was panicked. No matter how many times he dialed 911, he couldn’t get through.
He’d been around enough weapons, even if only on movie sets where blanks were being fired, to know what real gunshots sounded like. Suppressed gunshots, contrary to what many people thought, were still audible. There was no such thing as completely silenced gunfire.
Having changed out of his evening attire, Salomon had been on his way out of his bedroom and back downstairs for one final drink, when he’d heard the first shot. He’d stood paralyzed, wondering what he’d actually heard. Then the second shot came. That’s when he knew.
He had turned and fled back to the master bedroom. He didn’t dare waste even a fraction of a second looking over his shoulder to see if he was being followed. He didn’t need to. His animal instinct for survival told him that he most definitely had someone pursuing him. He also knew that the two gunshots meant his houseguests were dead.
Charging into his walk-in closet cum panic room, he slammed the heavy metal door shut, threw the bolts home, and hit the panic button for the alarm system. He expected the high-pitched piercing shriek of the alarm to kick in instantly. It didn’t, and his fear mounted.
On a small monitor mounted inside the closet, he watched via the hidden bedroom camera as a large man with a gun rushed into the room just behind him. He pressed the panic button again and when the alarm failed to engage, he attempted to call the police, only to discover that neither his landline nor his cell phone were working.
He then watched as the intruder attempted to kick in the closet door. Again and again he kicked, but the steel-reinforced door held. Finally, the man turned and walked out of view. Had he given up?
Salomon’s question was answered when the man passed back under the camera a moment later with a fireplace tool and disappeared from view once again.
The producer strained to see what the man was up to, but the monitor provided only a very limited field of view. The security system, like the panic room, had come with the house and had been installed by the previous owner. Salomon had never really thought about it much. It was only now that he realized that a pan-and-tilt camera would have been infinitely more useful than a static, fixed lens.
It was at that moment that all the power went out. With the phone line cut and his cell phone signal having somehow been jammed, Salomon wasn’t surprised when the emergency generator failed to kick in. Whoever had cut the power knew what he was doing. He was now effectively blind.
He wasn’t, however, deaf, and his heart soon choked his throat when he figured out where the intruder was and what he was doing with the fireplace poker.
The first thud had been somewhat displaced, but Salomon locked on to the second swing of the poker like a sonar operator.
The sounds had come from the far end of the closet. On the other side was the master bath. Using the poker, the intruder was clawing his way through the drywall and into what really wasn’t a true panic room, but rather just a closet with a very heavy door.
It was a poorly thought out feature that provided a false sense of security and would only slow, but not stop, a determined attacker. It dawned on Salomon how much trouble he was in. He was trapped.
Though he couldn’t see the intruder, he could hear huge pieces of drywall being ripped away on the bathroom side of the wall. Any moment now, he feared, the attacker was going to burst through into the closet. Salomon had one ace up his sleeve and he reached for it.
The Mossberg tactical shotgun had been a gift. A friend, moving to New York City, had been afraid to take it with him for fear of running afoul of antigun laws. With its pistol grip, short barrel, and crenelated muzzlebrake Salomon could understand why. He’d kept the weapon around “just in case,” figuring if he ever got in trouble for owning it, he could let his lawyers straighten it out. They could simply claim that it had been taken from one of his film sets as a souvenir and that he had no idea it was actually real.
Of course he’d also have to claim that he didn’t know it was loaded, but a courtroom appearance was the furthest thing from his mind at this point. All he cared about was staying alive.
Racking the slide, he made ready.
As Ralston charged into the bedroom, he heard the blast of a shotgun, and his heart stopped.
Rushing to the door of the master bath, he saw blood and bits of flesh everywhere. Risking a closer look, he stepped into the bathroom and saw a body on the floor and the distinctive door-breacher muzzlebrake of Salomon’s shotgun protruding from the far wall. He leaped out of the bathroom just as the weapon erupted with another roar. Twelve-gauge shot shattered the marble tiles right where he had been standing.
“Damn it, Larry!” Ralston yelled. “Cease fire! It’s me! Luke!”
His ears were ringing even harder now, and he wondered if his hearing would ever fully return. “I need to get into the bathroom and see if he’s dead. Don’t you fucking shoot me,” he ordered. “Okay?”
There was a muffled assent from Salomon. Whether it was muffled because his hearing was shot or because it was coming from behind a wall, Ralston couldn’t be sure. He peeked back into the bathroom and watched as the shotgun was retracted through the blown-out drywall.
Ralston grabbed two towels and threw them down so he didn’t have to walk across the bloody floor in his stocking feet.
The intruder must have been very close when the shotgun went off, as it had blown a huge hole in his chest. Ralston looked for any weapon he might have been carrying and saw another silenced pistol sitting on the edge of the vanity near where the man had been tearing through the wall to get at Salomon.
A good portion of the man’s suit coat and the shirt beneath were shredded. Once Ralston had ascertained that he had no pulse, he began peeling the strips of cloth away around his right armpit. He heard the closet door unlock, and seconds later Salomon was behind him.
“Who the hell are they?” he asked.
“Spetsnaz,” replied Ralston. “Russian Special Forces, I think.”
“How can you tell?”
Ralston lifted the dead man’s arm and pointed to the blue-black Cyrillic tattoo. “That’s how they mark their blood type.”
“What the hell are they doing here? Why would Russian Special Forces soldiers want to kill me?”
