The King of Plagues

way I drove the elevator to my floor.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, drinking our coffee, thinking it through.

“Your plot,” I said, “did it involve bringing in oil or rubber in large quantities? Or pallets of tires?”

He gave me a shrewd look and for a moment I could see the brains behind the bestseller bluster. “You’re talking about the black clouds? Yeah, I saw that on TV and thought it was odd.”

“Not part of your story?”

“No.”

“Any religious themes in your plot?”

“Just the usual stuff. Fundamentalist Shiites. Not very original, I’m afraid, and I’d probably have changed it in the writing. The genre’s moving away from using Muslims as the go-to bad guys.”

I said nothing.

Hanler sipped his coffee and stared up at the ceiling. “It would be kind of weird if a writer was involved in this sort of thing,” he said. “We cook up the worst possible catastrophes. Brilliant crimes, terrorist campaigns, mass murders. We get inside the heads of serial killers and extremists. Good thing we’re the good guys.”

“If all of you are,” I said.

“Yeah, there’s that. Sorry this wasn’t more useful. And I hope like hell that I didn’t waste your time.”

Me, too, I almost said aloud.

We stood and shook hands. Hanler eyed me for a moment. “Look, Joe, if it turns out that it was one of the people at ThrillerFest or someone from the T-Town group, someone who used my idea …”

“Yeah?”

“Put the son of a bitch down like a rabid dog.”

“Why? For stealing your idea?”

“No,” he said without humor. “Because it means that I’m partly responsible, however far removed, for the deaths of four thousand people. I have trouble sleeping at night as it is. I think knowing that for sure … Christ, I think that might kill me.” He sighed and smiled a weary smile. “Come on; let me buy you one for the road. And something for Circe and your pal.”

And that fast everything went all to hell.

There was a series of firecracker pops somewhere outside and the whole front set of windows of the Starbucks exploded inward.

Chapter Fifty-three

Starbucks

Southampton, Pennsylvania

December 19, 5:43 P.M. EST

A barrage of heavy-caliber bullets tore into the coffeehouse, tearing apart the counter, shattering the big urns of hot coffee, sending stacks of paper cups flying, and ripping apart the spot where I’d been standing a split second before.

The heavy front glass was thick enough to have deflected the first rounds; otherwise I’d be dead. Instead I hooked an arm around Hanler and a young woman wearing a Grinch sweatshirt. I felt two hard jerks at the flaps of my sports coat and knew that a couple of rounds had missed me by inches. We hit the deck just as the first screams rose, louder than the gunfire. Then a second window blew and suddenly I was screaming myself as glass splinters rained down on my head. I shielded my eyes with my arm.

“Down! Down! Get down!” I roared.

I pivoted and looked out from under my bent arm. Most of the customers were already in motion, dodging and ducking, leaping over counters and pitching themselves behind the overstuffed chairs. But a few stood there with slack mouths and eyes like deer on a highway … and the bullets tore them to rags. A college jock with a Rutgers ski cap flew backward into a display of stocking stuffers, his white parka blooming with red flowers. As he fell his outflung arms knocked down an old man and a teenage girl, sending them sprawling and saving their lives by accident as the heavy-caliber rounds swarmed the air.

Even through the thunder of gunfire I could hear Ghost barking like crazy, but I couldn’t tell if he was hurt.

“Hanler! Crawl behind the counter! Hanler!” I yelled, but Marty Hanler didn’t reply, and he didn’t move. He lay facedown on the floor and blood spread from beneath him in a growing crimson pool. Damn.

“He’s over there!”

The yell came from the shattered window and a split second later a line of bullets pocked the floor near my head. I used my right foot to shove the screaming young woman out of the way as I rolled in the other direction. I tore open my sports coat, found the knurled grips of my Beretta, racked the slide as I rolled to a kneeling position, and brought the weapon up in a two-handed grip. The first of the shooters stepped through the window. He wore heavy body armor and had a scarf wrapped around his nose and mouth and wore ski goggles. He held a Colt AR-15 Tactical Carbine, firing at anything that moved.

I gave him a double tap.

The first round punched into his sternum—it didn’t penetrate his vest, but it froze him into the moment—and I put the next round through his right eye. The impact snapped his head back and probably broke his neck, and it painted the two men behind with blood and brains. I shot the second one in the mouth as he tried to yell.

The third shooter swept the room with an AR-15 that had an oversized hundred-round drum magazine. Bullets chopped the floor and turned tables into clouds of splinters.

And … oh Christ—Rudy and Circe! They were still outside.

If they were still alive.

Rudy didn’t carry a gun, but he had common sense, good survival instincts, and a cell phone. I hoped he was hiding under my car calling for backup.

The counter above me disintegrated into a storm cloud of splinters and I threw myself forward and down, one arm hooked over my face to protect my eyes as I went onto my side and fired blind. I put half a magazine through the flying debris and the chatter from the assault rifle abruptly stopped.

“He’s over behind the counter!” a man yelled from the other side of the store.

Suddenly three other long guns opened up from the far end of the store, blasting the side window and running lines of destruction along the floor. People screamed as bullets found them, punching through heavy winter coats, tearing chunks out of legs and arms, and splashing the floor with red.

This was going from bad to absolute frigging disaster. Adrenaline was pumping through me by the quart, but at the moment it was triggering more of the flight impulse than the desire to fight all these guys. I was scared out of my mind; I’ll admit it to anyone.

“Grenade, grenade!”

I didn’t know if someone was calling for a frag or telling his comrades that he was throwing one, but I did not want to wait around to find out. I came up firing and put the rest of the mag downrange, forcing them back for a second. The grenade dropped from dead fingers and fell outside the store.

There was a huge whump! and a dozen car alarms began to blare.

Any hope I had that the blast had taken out the rest of the shooters was blown to hell as they opened up again. And I prayed that Rudy and Circe were nowhere near that grenade when it blew.

I had only one spare magazine and I swapped it out as I flung myself to the left, hitting the base of the front wall. Broken glass covered the floor, and as I slid out of the line of fire the jagged shards tore through my trousers and bit into my left thigh like a swarm of piranha.

The third shooter—the one I hit while firing blind—was down but not dead. He lay partly inside the coffee