Scott Matthews - The Assassin's list

With a shake of his head, he got up, refilled his glass, and took a salmon steak out of the refrigerator. He splashed lemon-dill sauce over the salmon, started water to boil in a saucepan for rice and put the oven on broil.

As he sat on a stool at the kitchen counter, he thought about his new client. Richard Martin was a good man as far as he could tell. He was doing important research, and thought he’d hired the best security service his company could afford. Still, his secretary had been murdered in his office. Now his brother-in-law was dead. None of it made much sense.

He was missing something. The part of the puzzle that troubled him most was ISIS. If Sam Newman didn’t have a reason to shut off the security system, neither did ISIS. There had been no apology for the system malfunction, if that’s what it was, just an attitude that was strangely disconnected. If Martin Research was one of my major clients, Drake thought, I would sure as hell be more involved in the investigation. Maybe tomorrow he would see it differently, but right now he was trying to see to the bottom of a very muddy pond.

After dinner, he went outside and sat on the covered front porch that spread across the front of the house. From there, he could see down to the road and beyond to the Cascade mountain range in the east. To the south, the neighboring vineyards were identified by green rows of grape vines stretching across their acres. For him, it was like being at the beach, mesmerized by the waves.

When the shadows started to lengthen, Lancer finished patrolling his domain for the day and returned to the porch. Drake was asleep in one of the two Adirondack chairs, his chin down on his chest. After standing next to his master patiently, Lancer finally licked his left ear and growled softly. His master opened his eyes and smiled.

“You might cut a guy a little slack. You do this all day, if you want. I try it for a few moments, and you wake me up. I get the message. Tomorrow, when I’m rested and run your butt into the ground, you’re going to wish you had let me sleep.”

At 2:00 a.m., Lancer was again trying to wake Drake, his muzzle nudging Drake’s left shoulder insistently.

Drake was awake instantly. He recognized his dog’s signal there was a threat outside somewhere. He quickly pulled on a pair of jeans, a T-shirt and his running shoes in the dark. From the dresser next to his bed, he took his Kimber.45 in its soft leather holster and stuck it in his jeans. He also put his Harsey tactical folding knife in his right front pocket. When he was ready, he extended his right hand palm down and waited for Lancer to touch his nose in its middle. When Lancer returned the ready signal, Drake snapped his fingers softly with the search signal.

He knew Lancer would silently locate the threat, inside or out, and wait for his command before taking any action. It was up to Drake to decide what that action needed to be.

Drake followed his dog through the house to the front door. Lancer stood pointing outside. From his still and steady stare, Drake knew the intruder was somewhere in front of the house.

He reached down to pat Lancer and considered his options. He could wait for something to happen, turn on the floodlights, or slip outside to identify the intruder. Since Lancer rarely alerted him to the occasional black bear that wandered across the farm, it wasn’t likely the visitor was four legged. Using the floodlights would probably scare the intruder away before Drake had a chance to see who it was. That left slipping outside, and choosing action over anxiety.

He turned and ran to the stairs leading from the kitchen to the basement, and then to the tunnel and the winery building. In less than a minute, Drake cracked open the side door on the north end of the building and peered out into the darkness. Over the pounding in his ears, the first sign of an adrenaline rush, he heard a car somewhere in the distance and a whisper of breeze in the tops of the tall fir trees behind the building, but nothing in or around his house.

Thirty yards across an open grassy area, a small copse of oak trees stood on the northern edge of his property. From there, he’d be able to see ninety percent of the sloping ground in front of the house. Drake kept Lancer at the heel, and ran across to the oak trees. The short, early summer grass absorbed the sound of their movement and cushioned his knee when he knelt in the trees’ cover to search for the intruder. When he reached out to Lancer, he felt the raised hair on the back of his neck.

Drake looked for any movement around the house. Lancer’s body stiffened against his leg and turned to the right, toward the gravel driveway leading up to the house. Drake focused his eyes in that direction and spotted three men moving single file in the grass along the driveway. With the light of a thin crescent moon, he could see that the two men in front carried rifles. The third man had something shorter, stockier, maybe a MP5 submachine gun.

When the group reached the point where the driveway began its sweep to circle in front of the house, they paused for a moment, then separated. Two men broke off from the group to circle the house, while the third crept toward the front. Drake thought the third man was the leader, from the way he directed the other two with a wave of his hand. By separating, they gave him a chance to pick them off one at a time. He felt his training take over and, magnified by the rush of adrenaline, a sense of confidence he hadn’t experienced in a long time. He didn’t welcome the confrontation, but he knew his chances of prevailing were as good as theirs.

Drake moved down through the oak trees, keeping his eyes on the man circling the house on the north side. When the man stopped beneath his bedroom window, Drake gave Lancer a finger-down, palm-back signal in front of his nose. Lancer would stay and protect his back as he crept forward to deal with intruder number one.

With a slow, deep breath, Drake moved within a yard of his first target. The man was looking to his right and left, carrying an AK 47 at port arms. A bulge beneath its barrel identified a grenade launcher. Whoever these guys were, they weren’t here for a routine burglary. Nothing he owned was worth killing for, and no one knew enough about his military training to bring this kind of fire power.

Drake leaped forward and drove his right fist into the man’s kidney. As the intruder bent backwards from the blow, he swung his left forearm around his neck and his right hand behind his head. When he was able to hook his left hand in the crook of his right elbow, he pulled back in a stranglehold. The man dropped his rifle but fought to escape. Drake pulled him backwards off balance and whispered in his ear.

“Keep fighting and I’ll break your neck. Who sent you?”

The man answered by throwing his left elbow over his shoulder at Drake’s head, violently wrenching his body from side to side.

Drake tightened his hold, to choke out his attacker.

“Keep fighting, and you’re going to take a long nap.”

The man dropped to his knees and tried to pull Drake over his shoulders. The maneuver was a military move taught in third-world countries, and when he whispered “Allahu Akbar, ” Drake realized the man was prepared to die before surrendering.

“One last chance before I break your neck.”

When the man threw his hands back to claw at Drake’s face, Drake powered his right forearm down and pulled quickly back on his left, breaking the man’s neck.

As the body went limp, he softly snapped his fingers for Lancer to join him. The man circling the house on the other side wouldn’t stay there long before getting a signal to enter.

Drake ran quietly across the parking area at the back of the house and peered around its corner. The second man was standing with his back to the house, looking to his left, waiting for a signal from his leader. In the shadows, Drake saw the man wore the same dark clothing and carried the same weapon as the first man. What were they after? Perhaps he could learn the answer from this second man.