Turn the page for an exclusive preview
of John Gilstrap’s next exciting thriller starring Jonathan Grave
and featuring the return of Irene Rivers . . .
THREAT WARNING
Coming from Pinnacle in July 2011!
Colleen Devlin tried her best to blend
in with the commuting crowd, hoping that the long black coat and
the stocking cap pulled tight around her ears wouldn’t provoke some
cop or citizen do-gooder to intervene. After all the training and
all the talking, it was finally time to pull the trigger.
Literally.
The frigid wind off the Potomac River
braced her for what lay ahead, as if by chilling her skin she could
likewise chill her nerves. It wasn’t that she was afraid of
dying—if it came to that, she’d do what she had to do—but rather
that she was afraid of failure. Brother Michael had prepared them
for the variables of battle, the thousand complications that render
the most careful planning useless once the violence begins. If that
happened—when that
happened—she prayed that she would have the resolve and the
resourcefulness to adapt. It was about keeping her
head.
The Army of God was counting on her.
They’d blessed her with their faith, their trust in her abilities.
There could be no greater sin than to let them down.
She moved as she imagined a commuter
would, her eyes ahead and her stride purposeful, a lone pedestrian
on this cold November evening, strolling on the sidewalk, separated
from the sea of oncoming headlights by a waist-high Jersey barrier.
Two hours from now, or two hours ago, the traffic here on the
Woodrow Wilson Bridge, one of only two crossings on the Capital
Beltway that linked Virginia and Maryland, would have been breezing
along at sixty miles an hour, creating a windstorm of its own. Here
at six-fifteen, however, the rush hour traffic moved at barely a
crawl, a walker’s pace, as the money worshippers left their
resource-guzzling offices via their resource-guzzling automobiles
to eat dinner with their families in their resource-guzzling homes.
Colleen’s eyes watered from the cold, distorting the approaching
train of headlights into as many shimmering stars, an endless
serpent of greed. They were all Users. And they were in for one
heck of a surprise.
Colleen’s Bushmaster 5.56 mm assault
rifle felt like raw power, slung muzzle-down from her right armpit.
She affected a limp to keep it from poking out through the vent of
her coat. Loaded with a thirty-round magazine to which a second
thirty-round mag was taped for quick reloading, her most
devastating damage would be inflicted in the first fifteen seconds.
The first mag would be spent in three-round bursts aimed at the
drivers’ half of the windshields, followed immediately by the
second mag, which would be expended in a spray-and-slay raking
motion. These shots would be unaimed and random, with the muzzle
always a tick or two below horizontal to increase the likelihood of
scoring hits.
The remaining two mags in the pockets
of her wellconcealed ballistic vest would be used only in support
of her escape. If that
didn’t go well—if capture seemed imminent—she’d . . . well, she
wouldn’t need more than one bullet for that, would
she?
This is what God must feel like,
Colleen thought, and then she was instantly sorry for the
blasphemy. But it was true. People would live or die at her whim.
The ultimate power lay in her hands.
Her Bluetooth earpiece buzzed,
startling her. She pressed the connect button. “Yes,” she
said.
“Are you in position?” It was Brother
Stephen. The fact of his call meant that he had taken up position
on the opposite end of the bridge, the Maryland end.
Colleen felt her heart rate double. “I
am,” she said. “It’s beautiful.”
“I’ll see you at the farm when it’s
over.”
The line went dead. It was
time.
Colleen threw open her coat and
brought the weapon to her shoulder.
Man, you should have seen the look on
the first driver’s face.
Jonathan Grave shifted his BMW M6 into
neutral to give his clutch leg a rest. “Next time I say yes to
tickets,” he said, “remind me that I hate traffic.”
Next to him, Father Dom D’Angelo
shrugged. “I offered to drive.”
“You drive a piece of shit.” He
flashed a smile. “No offense.”
Dom laughed. “The diocese looks
askance at priests who drive sports cars.”
“Surely God wants his representatives
in better wheels than a Kia,” Jonathan said. “I think I read
somewhere that Satan drives a Kia.” The car in front moved six
feet, and Jonathan eased forward to keep up. “Isn’t rush hour
supposed to go the other way?”
“I have a theory that rush hours just
are,” Dom said. “There’s
no why or rationale to them. Monday night football doesn’t
help.”
The Washington Redskins were scheduled
to do battle with the Dallas Cowboys tonight at FedEx Field, and
Jonathan had scored a couple of club-level seats. A lifelong ’Skins
fan—despite their shameful failures in recent years— Jonathan
remained forever hopeful that a winning season was possible.
Clearly that wasn’t going to happen this year, but games against
the Cowboys were like Super Bowls unto themselves. A win against
them could counter the humiliation of a four-and-twelve
season.
Well, almost.
“If I had to sit in this traffic every
day, I think I’d—”
Sharp, staccato hammering drew his
attention to his left. The instant he heard it, Jonathan recognized
it as automatic weapons fire. Close range, 5.56 millimeter
ammunition—the same NATO round used in every U.S. theater of
operation since the 1970s. He reacted by reflex, cupping Dom’s neck
at the spot where it joined his skull and pushing him toward the
floor. “Down!” he shouted.
Dom said something in protest, but
Jonathan didn’t care. He scanned the horizon for an escape route
for the BMW, established that there weren’t any, then slapped the
transmission into neutral and pulled the parking
brake.
To his left, on the opposite span of
the bridge, he saw a man die. He saw the spray of powdered glass,
followed an instant later by the spray of pulverized brain matter.
Then it happened again to a car adjacent to the first
one.
“Stay on the floor,” Jonathan
commanded. Not waiting for an answer, he shouldered open his door
and rolled out onto the roadway. One clueless idiot blew his horn
at him, clearly unaware that he was part of a mass murder in
progress. Jonathan ripped open the zipper to his jacket with his
left hand while his right hand found the grip of the customized
Colt 1911 .45 that always rode high on his hip, cocked and locked.
He drew it.
Across the way, on the southbound
span, the shooter continued to unload dozens of bullets into the
line of commuters, and on Jonathan’s northbound stretch, people
were just beginning to catch on. They leaned on their horns and
several rammed each other in their haste to get out of the way.
Panic blossomed around him, but for now he didn’t care. If he could
shoot the shooter, the panic would subside on its own. If he could
not, then maybe it would be justified. When there’s nowhere for
victims to run, a man with a rifle can inflict amazing
damage.
This particular shooter was not
moving. Jonathan couldn’t see him yet, but he could tell from the
ripples of gunfire. He weaved through the jammed traffic, scanning
the horizon for a target. As he passed a pickup truck, the driver
threw his door open and yelled, “Hey! What do you
think—”
“Stay out of my way,” Jonathan barked.
“Get down.” What about this situation did people not
understand?
As he turned the corner on the far
side of a paneled van bearing the logo of a pastry company,
Jonathan got his first glimpse of the shooter. He was tall and
skinny and draped in one of those flowing black coats that seemed
to have become the uniform of murderers. From his bone structure,
he could even have been a girl. Jonathan’s mind registered that he
was young and white, but the glare of headlights made features
difficult to discern.
But that didn’t matter because the
shooter was changing magazines, and he was not especially adept at
it. The muzzle of his rifle—a Bushmaster, Jonathan now saw—was
pointed harmlessly to the sky as he fumbled the effort to flip his
quick-load mag. The shooter would never be more
vulnerable.
Jonathan gauged the distance at forty
yards; too far for a reliable shot to the head, so he took aim at
the center of mass—the shooter’s chest—and he squeezed off two
rounds.
Colleen had never seen anything so
beautiful. It was just as Brother Michael had told her it would be.
It was better than any drug. This was power in its rawest form, and
as her bullets raked the Users and sent them to Hell, she found
herself laughing.
As far as she could tell, every burst
of bullets had hit exactly where she’d wanted it to. Puffs of glass
and puffs of blood. Her senses took all of it in and it nearly
overwhelmed her. Blaring horns and crumpling metal mixed with the
pounding thump of her weapon, echoed half a mile away by the
hammering of Stephen’s gunshots. The tableau of destruction—the
tableau of success—was unlike anything she’d dared to
imagine.
The first magazine emptied itself in
no time at all, it seemed. She leaned into each burst as she pulled
the trigger, bracing herself against the recoil, and each trigger
pull drummed the rifle’s stock into the soft tissue of her
shoulder. After the tenth pull, the receiver locked open, but
Colleen was too into it to notice. When the shots didn’t come, she
nearly fell on her nose.
She’d practiced the first reload
dozens of times. Brother Michael had stressed that that would be
the moment when soldiers would be most exposed. She’d taped two
magazines end-to-end so that when the time came, she’d have only to
thumb the mag release, flip the array in her hand, and then
reinsert it into the slot. On the range, back at the Farm, she’d
learned to do this with her eyes closed. She believed that she
might even be able to do it in her sleep. But out here, in the heat
of the battle, her hands shook and she had difficulty finding the
slot after she’d made the flip.
She unclipped the Bushmaster from its
sling and raised the weapon, pointing it toward the sky. Maybe if
she could see the slot, she could get the mag to seat. She took a
deep breath. She had to settle herself. She needed to—
Something kicked her in the chest,
then kicked her a second time. She staggered back, and as she did,
she lost her grip on the rifle. Despite her efforts to grab it, she
watched it clatter to the ground.
Somehow, she knew that she’d been
shot, and when she looked up, she could see the man who’d done it,
very far away, across three lanes of traffic. He stood in a crouch,
his hands clasped in front of him. They made eye contact, and the
muzzle on the man’s pistol flashed again.
Jonathan knew he’d hit his target.
First of all, he always
hit his target—certainly from this range—and secondly, he saw the
bullets hit their marks, dimpling the fabric of the shooter’s
clothing and causing him to drop his weapon and stagger back a
step.
Yet he didn’t fall. These were kill
shots, yet his target remained standing. Reeling wasn’t enough, not
after being hit with two .45 caliber slugs. He should have dropped
like a sack of bones. That he continued to stand could only mean
that he was wearing body armor. As Jonathan shifted his aim for a
head shot, the shooter looked up and made eye contact. Jesus, he
was only a kid. A teenager. A girl! He hesitated on the trigger
just long enough for the shooter to comprehend that she’d been
made.
The target flinched as Jonathan
squeezed the trigger. The bullet missed its mark by inches, and
then the shooter was on the move, running full-tilt right-to-left,
toward the Virginia side of the bridge. Jonathan followed on his
parallel span, plunging headlong into jammed oncoming vehicles
while his target emerged into the open in the downstream gap formed
by the plug of traffic that she had created.
Cursing himself for his hesitation
before, Jonathan would not make the same mistake with a second
chance. With the shooter in the open, Jonathan stopped running and
readied his aim. This time, there’d be no—
“Freeze!” someone yelled from behind
Jonathan. “Federal officer! Don’t move!”
Jonathan froze, even as his mind
screamed for him to take the shot. The opportunity lost, he broke
his aim and raised his weapon to the sky. He knew all too well that
when a federal officer yells “Don’t move!”—whether FBI, ATF, DEA or
any of the other alphabet agencies—the command was to be taken
literally. Another trait common to federal officers: they were all
very good shots.
“Hold your hands up high, where I can
see them,” the voice commanded.
A step
ahead of you, Jonathan thought. He didn’t move. The
officer would figure it out.
“Drop your weapon!”
Now, here was a potential problem.
“No!” Jonathan yelled back. “I’m a good guy, not a bad guy, and
this is a three-thousand-dollar pistol. I will not drop it, but I
will lay it on the ground.” Former Unit member and renowned
gunsmith Barry Vance had customized this weapon for him, and he’d
be damned if he was going to ruin genuine artistry. Moving slowly
and keeping his back to the cop so as not to spook him, Jonathan
sank to his knees.
“I said drop the weapon,” the officer demanded.
“Drop it or I will shoot you.”
Jonathan assessed it as a bluff. If
this guy hadn’t already pulled the trigger, he wasn’t going to now
that Jonathan was clearly not a threat. That’s what he told
himself, anyway. The next five seconds proved him to be correct. He
gently placed his weapon on the ground and raised his arms again.
On the opposite span, panic had begun in earnest. People screamed
as realization washed over them.
And the shooter was getting
away.
“Get on your face!” the officer
yelled. His voice cracked from the strain. “Arms out to the
side!”
With his arms still raised, Jonathan
pointed the forefingers of both hands toward the opposite span.
“The shooter’s over there!” he said.
“Now!”
Moron. The cop was so invested in Jonathan
as the bad guy that there’d be no reasoning with him. Jonathan did
as he was told and lowered his belly to the pavement. Partly to
streamline the process, but mostly to steal the officer’s thunder,
he went ahead and placed his hands behind his back,
cuff-ready.
“Don’t you move,” the officer warned
as he approached. “If you so much as blink, I swear to God I’ll
kill you.”
Jonathan listened as the footsteps
halted on his right side, near his hips, he figured. This would be
the time—at this range—when Jonathan could take the guy out if he’d
wanted to; but the officer would be aware of that, too, making it
that much more important for Jonathan to be on his best behavior.
Most of the friendly fire incidents that Jonathan had witnessed
over his years in the military had been tied one way or another to
a bad case of the nerves.
“I see you’ve done this before,” the
cop said as he placed his knee in Jonathan’s back and gripped his
thumbs for control. From the way he fumbled with the cuffs, the guy
gave himself away as one who did not do this very often in the
field.
“Actually, no,” Jonathan grunted
through the pressure on his back. “But I’ve done it enough to
others to know the drill.”
The cop hesitated. “What, you’re going
to tell me you’re a cop?”
“I’m a lot of things,” Jonathan said.
“For tonight, though, I’m a private investigator who was seconds
away from killing the person who shot up the bridge.”
“Right,” the officer scoffed. “That’s
not what I saw.” He ratcheted the cuffs tighter than they needed to
be, then climbed off Jonathan’s back and pulled on his wrists to
bring him up to his knees. He continued to grasp the chain of the
cuffs while he reached into his prisoner’s back pocket for his
wallet.
Jonathan sighed noisily—a growl,
really. “Look, Officer . . .” he waited for the guy to fill in the
blank.
“Agent,” the man corrected. “Special Agent
Clark, United States Secret Service.”
“Special Agent Clark, then. United
States Secret Service. If you got on your radio right now, you
might be able to stop a mass murderer from getting
away.”
“Why be greedy?” the agent quipped.
“I’ve already got one member of the team in custody. You’ll give me
the rest in time.”
Jonathan bowed his head. Surely the
man was being deliberately obtuse. Did he really imagine, even for
a moment, that the destruction here could have been wrought by a
man with a .45? Jonathan didn’t have a lot of respect for cops in
general, but he had a particular hard-on for federal agents whose
bravado outstripped their abilities. It happened a lot. He resigned
himself to losing this battle.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” a
voice boomed from Jonathan’s blind spot. It was Dom
D’Angelo.
“Stand away, Father,” Clark commanded,
clearly noting Dom’s collar. “This is none of your
concern.”
“It absolutely is my concern,” Dom
insisted. “Not only is that man my friend, he is also my driver for
the evening.”
“One step closer,” Clark warned, “and
I’ll arrest you, too.”
Jonathan stared out into the cold
night, blinking his eyes against the wind. There was a killer out
there somewhere, getting away while they dicked around with Agent
Clark.
It was going to be a very long
night.