She stood for the briefest of moments, her breath coming in broken gasps, Viv pressing against her leg in the cramped area behind the storefront counter. Then she heard a loud thump outside the storage room, another, and knew her pursuers were trying to break their way in through the door. One chance left, and not much time. She tossed down the receiver and grabbed her purse off the counter, snapping open its clasp, reaching inside.
At the rear of the shop, a crackle of automatic gunfire, then the sound of the back door bursting open. Steel or not, the bullets would have destroyed the simple cylinder lock in its knob.
She groped in the purse for her cellular phone, pulled it out, flipped open its earpiece. There were footsteps behind her now, hurrying through the storeroom. Only seconds left. Julia’s heart racing, she fingered the cellular’s ON button, listened to the inane electronic theme that sounded when it was powering up, waited with maddening helplessness for the little smiley face welcome image to pop up on the LCD screen—
She had enough time to see the figure of a tall, broad man appear outside the storefront entrance,
That was when Viv leaped out from behind the counter.
Kuhl had kept his stubby MP5 subsonic extended as he kicked in the rescue center’s door, ordering Lido forward with the German commands demonstrated by Anagkazo.
The sight of a greyhound dashing out around the end of the counter caused him some small surprise and perhaps even a cold flash of appreciation for its pluck. But his cardinal rule was to be ready for the unexpected… why else had he acquired the Schutzhund dogs?
The grey leaped at his alpha in a blur of speed and collided with it midair, knocking it down onto the floor with its own momentum, snapping at it with a kind of rumbling growl. Its teeth sank into the alpha’s shaggy black hide and slicked its breast and neck with blood.
Kuhl swung his carbine at the greyhound from where he stood in the door, squeezed off a rapid three-round burst. Crimson spurting from its flank, the grey emitted a shrill yelping scream that sounded almost human, rolled from his alpha in a flail of limbs, and then lay heaped on the floor.
The situation remedied, Kuhl shifted his attention to his target. She stood behind the counter, staring at the greyhound’s still, blood-splashed form with mute horror. There was a cell phone gripped in her right hand.
Kuhl did not pause. He held his MP5 straight out and crossed the room toward her, simultaneously calling Sorge and Arek from the parking area. Back on all fours near the sprawled grey, his lead dog seemed essentially unharmed despite the deep bites it had sustained.
Kuhl ordered the alpha forward again.
Go on, over.
Lido reared toward the four-foot counter, bounded over it, and fell upon the Gordian daughter — a leaping drive that knocked her back against the wall and then down onto the floor under his mammoth weight. Fixing its eyes on her right hand, interpreting the phone it gripped as a possible weapon, the alpha took quick action to disarm her and buried its fangs in her wrist.
She produced a sharp cry of pain, her blood mixing with the alpha’s saliva, smearing its teeth and gums with red-laced foam.
Kuhl saw the open cell phone drop from her hand and go clattering to the floor as the great canine held her arm in its bite. He came around the counter, slid the phone out of her reach with his booted toe, and reached down for it.
It was an UpLink, he noted aridly.
Kuhl examined its backlit main display screen and determined there was no active connection. Then he pressed the mouse key and went through its menu selections until he found the call history feature. The Gordian daughter’s recently dialed phone numbers appeared in the order the calls had been placed. Satisfied that the last she had made was not a 911, he highlighted the number and pressed SEND to determine who the recipient might have been.
An answering machine picked up after two rings, its greeting in the Gordian child’s voice — her home phone. Kuhl disconnected. Most likely the purpose of her call had been to remotely check incoming messages, but he wanted to assure himself she had not left a message intended to alert anyone who might discover it as to precisely what had occurred here.
When they learned, it would be at his will.
Poised over his captive behind the shop counter, Kuhl turned his MP5 down at her, peripherally aware his men had gathered in the small back room to his right. Sorge and Arek sat at wait behind him.
“Give me your remote play-back code,” he told her.
Silent in her pain, her eyes bright with defiance, she glared at him over the barrel of the submachine gun. Blood dripped from her arm over the alpha’s clamped, bristling jaws.
There was, Kuhl realized, much of the father in her.
He pushed his weapon closer to her face, decided to make a threat of what already had been done.
“The code,” he said. “Give it to me, or I will order the woman and infant in the house downhill killed.”
She kept looking up at Kuhl, her eyes boring into his own.
“I do not bluff,” he said.
A flicker of hesitation on her features. A blink. Then her silence broke.
“Six-four-eight-two,” she said.
Kuhl recalled the home phone number, interrupted her recorded greeting with the code. There were no incoming messages stored in the machine.
Good, he thought. His assumption had been correct. She hadn’t had time for hasty warnings.
Kuhl hit the END button again, moved the scroll bar down to the next listed number, and then dialed it as an added precaution. He listened to a prerecorded announcement for the business hours of a sporting goods shop. Yet another prosaic call.
“The people down at the house,” the Gordian daughter said in a croaking voice. Her arm still locked in the alpha’s mouth. “I don’t know what you want from me… but promise you won’t hurt them.”
Kuhl said nothing. He motioned to his men.
They closed in around her, rifles leveled.
“Wait, please.” A single tear spilled from the corner of her eye and tracked down her cheek. “My dog… at least let me take a look at the dog… I can’t just leave her—”
Kuhl interrupted her with a shake of his head.
“No, my caged robin,” he said. His face set. “No promises, no negotiation.”
TEN
It was nine o’clock when Rob Howell finally saw the wood-burned sign marking his hidden drive in front of him. As he sloshed his Camaro toward the foot of the drive, Rob glanced up at the utility pole near the PG&E routing station across the road and didn’t see any downed or sagging phone wires, but knew he couldn’t draw any conclusions from that alone. A service outage could have occurred elsewhere in the grid, or resulted from a loose contact that would be discernible only on close inspection.
What couldn’t have been more evident was that the area had been under heavy showers for a while. The concrete circle around the station where utility workers would sometimes park had been set off the road at a slight incline, and Rob didn’t remember ever noticing a significant rain buildup on its surface. But a deep sheet of water had covered and overflowed the empty apron, gurgling down its lip to swell the drainage culvert at the margin of the blacktop.
