Kill Shot

“I’ll head to Minneapolis to see if I can learn anything at the VA hospital,” Bolan said. “The electronic records may have been destroyed, but maybe there’s still some information hidden in the physical records.”

Bridgeport, Connecticut

THE FEAR EVERYONE ACROSS the United States felt as noon approached the following day hung over the country like the shimmering haze created by the unseasonably warm spring weather. Much of the country had, in fact, shut down, and work ground to a halt because many people were too afraid to leave their houses.

Jim Parkinson counted himself among the fearful who remained indoors as noon approached, though that wasn’t too difficult for him since he worked at home. Parkinson really wasn’t afraid of the squads of snipers that seemed to have descended on the entire nation. In fact, he was secretly grateful; the chaos couldn’t have come at a better time. For the previous decade Parkinson, a British expatriate, had been embezzling huge sums of money from the publishing house for which he worked, for which he’d been the CEO for twenty years. About ten years earlier he’d been punted aside, replaced by a much younger man and given the lofty title of “Senior Vice President of Global Publishing.”

Senior vice president of nothing, Parkinson thought. If he went into the offices once per month it was a busy month, and if he skipped his monthly visit, he was dead certain that no one missed his presence. He’d been replaced because the then-new owners of the company had wanted to hire someone who was more resourceful. It was at that moment that Parkinson decided to show them the meaning of the word resourceful. No one knew the intricacies of the publishing house’s finances like Parkinson—he’d been the one who set up the system back when he’d been the company’s original comptroller. He was the only person who really understood how it worked, and he also knew how to skim large amounts of money without anyone ever finding out. For the past decade he’d been siphoning off over $1 million per year and laundering it through a dummy corporation in the Cayman Islands.

Now, with the country roiling from the turmoil caused by the previous day’s sniper attacks, he had the perfect opportunity to bail out, go spend the rest of his days sipping icy rum cocktails on a sandy beach of his choosing. He was at that very moment checking flight schedules, planning to get out of the country before all flights in and out were canceled. In his address to the nation the previous night, the President had said that he intended for business as usual to continue, but there were rumors that the federal government was making plans very much counter to the President’s public statements. Parkinson had heard that those plans included shutting down all international airports.

Parkinson looked at the clock on the right side of the lower toolbar on his computer screen and saw that it was one minute until noon. He sat at the kitchen table of his seventh-story apartment where he had a terrific view of Bridgeport Harbor, sipping a cup of coffee while he scheduled his flight. At exactly noon he looked outside to see if he could detect any action. He saw nothing out of the ordinary. He didn’t see anyone dying, and he didn’t see any terrorist snipers. Most importantly for him, he didn’t see the man on the roof of the building across the street, aiming a high-powered rifle at his kitchen window. And he didn’t see the .30-caliber bullet that sped directly at his forehead, spraying his brains across the stainless-steel appliances and leaving more than $10 million orphaned in the account of a fictional company headquartered in the Caymen Islands.

Kansas City, Missouri

PETER SCHLETTY DOUBTED his career path. He’d wanted to be a cop since he was old enough to know what a cop was. He’d excelled in the police academy and had landed a sweet job with the Kansas City Police Department upon graduating. Up until a couple of days prior, it had been the job of his dreams. Schletty was an exceptionally intelligent person, with an IQ of 165. This made him smarter than ninety percent of the world’s civilians and smarter than ninety-nine point ninety-nine percent of all police officers.

In some ways his intelligence had been a hindrance in his career as an officer because it caused him to question exceptionally stupid orders, but overall it had put him on the fast track for advancement because, frankly, most of his colleagues could politely be described as dolts. In his less charitable moments, Schletty conjured the word retards, but his politic sensibilities kept him from ever uttering such insensitive terminology aloud.

Instead, he just kept such commentary to himself and went about his work with the utmost skill and dedication. As a result, he’d found himself on the career fast track, rising through the ranks faster than most of his compatriots, earning their respect in the process. Until the past couple of days he’d felt he earned that respect, but the insane events of the past two days had caused him to doubt his own abilities.

Yesterday there had been a murder in Kansas City. That was not unusual—the city had a fairly high murder rate, double the national average, in fact. But yesterday’s murder had been unlike any since Schletty had joined the force in that it had been part of a coordinated murder spree that had occurred across the entire country, from Maine to Hawaii.

Yesterday’s murders had all occurred exactly at the stroke of noon, and at noon eastern time this day another wave of murders had occurred on the East Coast. In all, at least 127 people had been killed in the eastern time zone. Given that, it didn’t take an IQ of 165, Schletty knew, to predict that a whole shitload of people were about to be assassinated in the central time zone. It was 11:58 a.m. central time, meaning that Schletty had two minutes to identify possible perpetrators to be of any use at all to the people he was supposed to protect and serve.

At that moment, Schletty wished he was an accountant or a store clerk instead of a cop.

SCHLETTY RODE SHOTGUN in a squad car that at that moment was crossing the Interstate 435 Bridge over the Missouri River. He usually sat at a desk; these days his duties were mostly supervisory, but after yesterday’s shootings he ordered every officer on his staff out on the street, including himself. He had no idea what he was looking for, but he knew it was probably something he had never seen before. And that’s exactly what he saw. At first it looked like a lump of metal on the girder of the bridge, but on closer inspection, he realized it was a man wearing material designed to make him invisible against the bridge—he wore a gray duster decorated with rust-colored patches designed to blend in with the bridge’s girders.

Schletty could make out some sort of long item in the man’s hands. Before he could point out the man’s location to the driver of the squad car, flame erupted from the item in the man’s hand. Schletty saw a car ahead of him careen out of control, crash into the guard rail and flip over into the Missouri River. Schletty watched the figure on the bridge rappel down the girder toward the base of the bridge. He lost sight of the figure.

“Floor it,” he told the officer driving the car.

“But sir,” the officer said, “we need to stop to help the crash victim.”

“He’s beyond help,” Schletty said. He’d seen the shot hit its target and knew that even if they could get to the victim in the car, he was almost certainly dead from the gunshot wound. “We need to find the shooter.”

“Shooter?” the officer asked.

“Yeah,” Schletty said. “He’s down at the base of the bridge.”

The officer turned on the lights and siren and accelerated around traffic. Just as they got to the south side of the bridge, Schletty saw a gray late-model Impala leaving the small parking area at the base of the bridge. The officer driving saw it, too; Schletty didn’t have to tell the man to pursue the vehicle.

The squad car was unable to exit the freeway and drive down to the road that ran parallel to the river for another quarter of a mile, giving the shooter a good head start. Schletty’s driver was good; he drove down the embankment along the freeway, crashed through the fence that kept animals off the freeway and slid sideways onto River Front Road, about half a mile behind the Impala. The squad car was an aging Crown Victoria and on its last legs, but it still had some snort and within a mile the officer had the speedometer past 100 mph and was closing in on the Impala.

They’d just about closed in on the Impala when gunfire erupted from both sides of the road from at least four shooters. Schletty and his driver never stood a chance. As the officer driving died, his last earthly act was to push the accelerator all the way to the floorboards. The old Crown Vic accelerated hard, clipping the Impala in the left rear quarter panel and causing it to spin out of control. The Impala spun into the ditch, rolled through the air twice then crashed into a small stand of trees.

Kansas City, Missouri

MACK BOLAN PUT AWAY HIS cell phone and turned to the man beside him. Jack Grimaldi manned the controls of the Cirrus Vision SF50 jet that was taking the Executioner to Minneapolis.

“Change of plans, Jack,” Bolan said. “We’re going to Kansas City.”

Without questioning the order, Grimaldi altered course. He’d been flying the soldier to and from battlefields around the world for years, as often as not fighting alongside him during those battles. Grimaldi trusted the Executioner like no other man on Earth, and if Bolan needed to go to Kansas City, Grimaldi would do whatever it took to get him there. But the pilot was curious.

“What’s in Kansas City?” he asked.

“Another shooting site, but this time a couple of police officers spotted a shooter.”

“Did they catch him?” Grimaldi asked.

“They chased him,” Bolan replied, “but they were ambushed. Both officers were killed.”

“Did they tag any of the bad guys?”

“It doesn’t look like they got any shots off,” Bolan said, “but something happened. The vehicle they were pursuing either crashed, or the pursuing officers managed to initiate a PIT maneuver.” Bolan referred to the police immobilization technique in which a pursuing vehicle nudged the right rear corner of the vehicle being pursued, causing the fleeing vehicle to spin out of control. “Whichever it was, the fleeing vehicle crashed.”

“Any bodies?” Grimaldi asked.

“No such luck. The scene was scrubbed clean by the time backup arrived.”

“How long did it take for backup to show up at the scene?”

“Eight minutes,” Bolan said. “In eight minutes they’d removed all evidence.”

Price had a squad car waiting to take Bolan to the shooting scene when Grimaldi landed the plane at the airport in downtown Kansas City. Grimaldi and Bolan had seen long lines of cars leaving the city, but unlike the previous day when traffic ground to a halt after the wave of shootings, that day the downtown area was a virtual ghost town and the squad car had Bolan to the ambush scene within twenty minutes.

Normally, local officers didn’t particularly like having federal agents involved in an investigation, particularly when a cop had died. They tend to prefer to catch the perpetrators themselves in such situations, but this situation seemed different. While Bolan sensed some hostility from the officers on the scene, it wasn’t the degree he’d expected to encounter. Instead, most of the members of the various law-enforcement agencies on hand—the Kansas City PD, along with the state police and representatives from various heriff’s departments—seemed to appreciate any help they were offered.

The scene looked disturbingly like the one he’d run across the previous day, right down to the team of experts poring over the remains of the vehicle. Again the vehicles had been burned. The team investigating the vehicle he’d chased the day before had discovered that the vehicle had been rigged to explode in the event of a crash, with explosives strategically placed to ensure the maximum amount of destruction. Whoever was behind these incidents wanted to make certain that they left behind as little evidence as possible.

Whoever it was, they were thorough. They’d scrubbed the crime scene clean. The officers in the squad car had been torn apart by a couple of thousand large-caliber bullets, meaning that they’d gotten caught in the cross fire of what had to have been heavy-caliber machine guns, most likely .50-caliber weapons.

Barbara Price had informed Bolan that the man in charge of the operation would be Detective Kevin Maurstad of the Kansas City Police Department. Bolan didn’t know what Maurstad looked like, but he had a pretty good idea that he’d be the big guy in the center of everything, the guy everyone else lined up to talk to. The soldier went up to the man who seemed to have the most control of the chaos and said, “Detective Maurstad?”

The man wheeled around, trying to identify a new irritant. He studied the tall stranger and said, “You must be the yahoo the Feds sent down to help us.”

“Yeah, I’m the yahoo to which you refer,” Bolan said.

Maurstad stood in a defensive stance, as if he expected Bolan to attack him. He relaxed a bit after assessing the soldier. “You don’t look like the usual dipshits they send down here.”

“We’ve been busy,” Bolan offered. “We’re fresh out of the usual dipshits, so they sent me instead. It looks like you’ve got a mess on your hands.”

“Yeah,” Maurstad said, “it’s a class-A clusterfuck, that’s for sure.”

“What have you got so far?” Bolan asked.

“Not a hell of a lot. Two cops shot to hamburger in that squad car over there.” He pointed at a black-and-white police car with a passenger compartment that was completely perforated. “Their squad car was blown to pieces by a .50-caliber machine gun, judging by the holes in the vehicle, most likely a Ma Deuce. There was barely enough left of the officers inside to identify them as human. We policed the area for spent .50-cal shell casings but found nothing.”