Steve Martini: The Enemy Inside

He cocks his head, looks at me. There is something predatory in his eyes.

The flash preceded by a nanosecond the impact of the bullet. It grazed the fabric at my knee and shattered the right front leg of the chair.

I land sprawled on the floor, my head slamming into the desk. The explosion of the round is still vibrating in my ears as the spent metal cartridge bounces and spins like a top on the tile floor ten feet away.

For a moment I’m dazed. A fine dusting of smoke, along with the sweet smell of nitrates from the gunpowder, permeates the air. I look at the shattered leg of the chair, wondering why it isn’t me, if I’m just lucky or if he’s that good.

Slowly I search with my hand along the inside seam of my right pant leg, hoping I won’t feel the wet warmth of blood spreading through the worsted wool.

“Would you like another?” He holds both of the weapons up and says: “Pick your poison.”

“You’re gonna wreck your furniture,” I tell him.

“No, this time I’ll go for the kneecap.”

“I don’t know where the records are,” I tell him.

“But you know where he is.”

I shrug my head, a grudging concession.

“I’m done talking,” he says.

“The government has him!”

“Where?”

“On a military base.”

“Which one?”

“I don’t know. But I can find out.”

“How?”

“He checks in. He calls me three times a day, my office and my house. He leaves a coded message. If I need to talk to him I pick up, at which point we’d make arrangements to meet.”

He offers a big sigh. “Now that wasn’t so hard, was it?”

The fact is, I’m buying time. If I told him that Betz was at Miramar, there’s a chance he’d kill me and try to figure some way to get onto the base himself. The man has connections. That’s clear. This way he needs me to answer the telephone.

“One thing I do know.”

“What’s that?” he says.

“If you kill him, everything he has, all the information, will be released. I don’t know the details. But it’s set up for the broadest possible dissemination. He told me that much. If anything happens to him, the world is gonna know names, dates, deposits, amounts on hand, everything.”

“You’re sure he didn’t tell you where it was?”

“No. He knows if he gives it up, if he loses that, he’s dead.”

I assume the Impaler already knew this, but it sets him to thinking. “Do you know what kind of arrangements they have for security? The military base. How many guards?”

“US Marshals. I don’t know how many. And probably a regiment of military police.”

“What time does Betz call?”

“Ten in the morning and three in the afternoon at the office. Eight o’clock at night at my house.”

“Get up. Get on your feet,” he says. He waves the gun at me, checks his watch. “There’s too many people at your office. Anybody at the house?”

I shake my head.

“Then it looks like you’re going home. We’ll be going as soon as I can get some backup.”

My head is spinning, as I am still on the floor. It takes a second before I process his words. He wants backup. Does that mean he is alone in the house? I can’t be sure. If he is, he won’t be for long. Once he has help, I am dead.

She had cased the house and its surroundings for the better part of two days, so that by the time Ana arrived at the mansion and saw Madriani’s Jeep parked across the street, she already knew the layout.

She was also familiar with the household schedule. During the period that she had watched the place only three people came and went, a housekeeper who doubled as a cook, a groundskeeper, and the man himself. She recognized him from the picture sent to her by the Asian agents who hired her.

His name was Ying. Though he didn’t look Asian, the contacts told her not to be confused. He was the one.

The housekeeper, a woman who appeared to be in her sixties, lived in. She had a room at the back of the house off the laundry. She went shopping each morning about eleven for food-probably perishables, fresh fruit, and vegetables. The one item Ana could confirm was the fresh baguette of French bread sticking out of the top of the bag each day. She never returned before one. She drove her own car that she parked at the side of the house. This afternoon the car was already gone. There was only the owner’s Bentley parked in the circular drive.

The groundskeeper she could hear, well off in the distance. He was over the rise in the deepest part of the yard. From where she sat in the car he was at least a hundred and fifty meters away. He did not live in the house. He came each morning about seven and left around five.

As she peered from inside the car Ana could make out the man’s head and part of his shoulders through the field glasses every so often when he straightened up. He was wearing a face mesh shield and hearing protectors as he whacked weeds with a gas-powered cutter.

Ana stepped out of the car and moved quickly to the trunk. She popped the lid with the car key and grabbed her bag. It was a fair-sized black tactical duffel with a strong wide strap made of webbing. Inside was the compound bow already strung and five laser-tipped broad-head arrows. She slung the strap over her shoulder, closed the car’s trunk, and checked her watch. The hands were just touching noon.

She stopped for a moment, thought about what she was doing, and then headed across the street, under the massive oak tree. She kept her ear tuned for any change in noise coming from the Weedwacker. When she reached the edge of the circular drive where it curved toward the front door, she stepped up over the curb and onto the grass.

From here Ana moved quickly just outside the edge of a flowerbed that flanked the side of the house. She was careful to keep her feet out of the soft planting soil. Instead she stayed on the tough Bermuda grass where she knew she would leave no shoe prints.

When she reached the back of the house she checked one more time, glancing in the direction of the noise, which was now much louder. The groundskeeper was perhaps fifty meters away.

She had seen him through the glasses when staking out the house. He looked to be about fifty, short and squat; he didn’t appear to represent dangerous brawn. Of course, if he was armed, that would be a different matter.

She laid the duffel on the ground, zipped it open, and uncased the bow with its mounted quiver of five arrows. She was going to hate to lose this equipment. But she would replace it when she got home. The fact that she was going to use the bow and arrows on one more job in the same area dictated that she dispose of it all where no one would find it before she headed for the airport and home. She would not take the chance that a medical examiner might connect the two cases and start looking for records of anyone traveling with such equipment. It was how you stayed alive in her line of work.

She donned the shooting gloves that covered the tips of her fingers. Then she unclipped one of the arrows and carefully laid the shaft on the bow’s arrow rest while fitting the taut bowstring into the grooved nock of the fletched end of the arrow.

Ana was not surprised that for a large, expensive residence, there appeared to be no surveillance cameras or other security detection devices. She had seen this before on regular occasion, usually when the targets were underworld figures, drug dealers, and worse. They wanted no record of their own movements or activities on a memory bank somewhere. Especially if this was being piped to some outside security company. If you weren’t careful you could end up exhibit number one on your own incriminating video.