The Trigger Read online

  Barbara's sedan headed south, and they followed, the height of the truck cab allowing Gordon to lag a few car lengths behind. This was the part that worried him the most - the family still on the street, and him with no idea where the White Kings were, or if they were bold enough to attack in daylight. Every vehicle that drew near to the Saturn was a potential threat, and the margin for recognizing and responding to a real threat seemed wholly inadequate. All through the short drive, Gordon was sorely tempted to activate the Trigger preemptively. Only the near-certainty that doing so would leave a trail of chaos and injured innocents stopped him.

  Instead, he brought the truck up in the outside lane and rode in the Saturn's blind spot, denying that place to any other vehicle, and giving himself and Lee a clear view of any cars that might pull up behind or beside her sister. When Barbara turned off the boulevard onto a one-lane, one-way street, Gordon followed, again falling back a few car lengths.

  'This is her street, coming up on the right,' Lee said.

  Turn on the generator,' he said, tightlipped. 'Just in case there's someone waiting for that car to show up.' He opened his window in time to catch the muted cough of the DuoCat turning over, then hauled firmly on the wheel to make the turn onto Seaton Road.

  'Which house is hers?'

  'Fourth one on the left - the white salt-box, before the yellow duplex.'

  'See anything out of place?'

  'No.'

  'Keep looking,' he said, studying the big rear-view mirror. 'I hope she called ahead to tell the kids to expect her.'

  'Looks like she did - here they come.' A slender girl and a taller, wider teenaged boy had appeared on the stoop and were already running across the postage-stamp lawn toward Barbara's car, its brake lights glowing bright red.

  'No one behind us,' said Gordon. 'See anyone in any of those parked cars ahead?'

  Her fingers were nervously caressing the rheostat. 'Nothing.'

  In a few seconds, the children had clambered into the back seat, and the Saturn began to accelerate. 'Don't relax,' he said. That next intersection would be a good place to box them in.'

  But they rejoined the busy boulevard and turned east toward Mayfield Heights without incident. Gordon allowed himself a glance at his companion, and found her visibly perspiring. 'A little tense?'

  'I kept thinking someone was going to sit up in one of those cars, and I'd freeze up and have to watch them being shot to death in front of me.'

  He smiled. 'You should have played more Doom when you were a kid - honed those combat reflexes.'

  'I hated that game.'

  'Ask me if I'm surprised.' He looked in the rear-view mirror again. 'No one followed us out of the subdivision. Unless we're just unlucky enough to bump into the bad guys -'

  'Let's pretend we're superstitious, and not sit here generating failure scenarios for the cosmos to borrow,'

  'Fair enough,' said Gordon. 'Okay, I see the motel sign. I'm going to go ahead and pass her now, so I can drop you off. I'll wait until she leaves to go back to work, and then come in and talk to Tony. Make sure she parks away from the street, tail-first. And tell her to take a taxi here after work, or get a ride. I don't see these thugs as having a lot of ambition, and I know a Saturn's about as invisible a car as there is, but let's not assume they're idiots as well as thugs.'

  Three hours later, Gordon and Lee were parked at the curb near the west end of Seaton Road. Their nervousness had been replaced by a quiet, almost fatalistic determination. They had enlisted Tony in their conspiracy, and - as Gordon had suspected he could - the youth had told them much more than he had admitted to the police. With his help, they knew what cars they were looking for: a white Camaro convertible, and a forest-green Eddie Bauer Explorer.

  They make a big entrance every morning at the school parking lot, honking, burning rubber,' Tony had told them. The Camaro belongs to Frosty - Steven Frost. The four-by-four is John Nolan's. They have permanent parking spots together in the first row -everybody knows, and nobody else dares to park there. They sit there revving their engines for five minutes, and there's twenty girls - all lookers - down there surrounding them by the time they're done. I don't get it.'

  Also thanks to Tony's help, they were confident that they were not looking in vain.

  They had told him as little as possible about what they were planning, but, even so, the hard part had been persuading him to stay behind. With the reckless arrogance of young men everywhere, he was eager to be part of the hunt, picturing himself in the moment of victory, tasting his tormentors' humiliation, craving his redemption. Only Lee and Gordon's combined resistance blunted his eagerness.

  'You need to stay with your family, and comfort and protect them,' they had told him. 'We can't do that job as well as you can, and you can't do our job as well as we can.'

  But he had remained dissatisfied, until he found a way to play a part.

  'You want to be sure that they show up at the house tonight, right? You're staking out the place in case they come back.'

  Gordon had confirmed that much to him.

  Then call me when you're set up there,' Tony had said. 'I'll make sure. I know what will bring them out.'

  That call had been made half an hour ago. Now twilight was settling over Seaton Road. Children were disappearing from the yards, and adults from front stoops and porches. Security lights came on at side doors and in back yards, and dogs came inside for the night. Blinds and drapes were drawn as a defense against the dark, hiding the bluish glow from televisions and computer monitors. Two of the three streetlamps began to glow dully. By the time they warmed to full brightness, the street was deserted, abandoned to the creatures that owned the dark.

  Holding hands in silence, Gordon and Lee waited for them to emerge.

  Time crawled. They heard a distant siren, and then another.

  'Car wreck,' Gordon said under his breath. 'Or a fire.'

  He watched in his rear-view mirror as a car turned onto Seaton Road, heading toward them. Its headlights momentarily blinded him, and he held up a hand to shield his eyes and hide his face. 'Wait,' he said, feeling Lee's urgency beside him. As the car trundled past, he saw that it was a red four-door sedan. It turned into a narrow driveway further down the street and disappeared into a carport.

  A scruffy dog padded across the circle of light cast by the nearest streetlamp.

  'Would this be a good time for you to explain what a sister of yours is doing living in a neighborhood like this?'

  'Half-sister.'

  'Go on.'

  Thayer sighed. 'My father visited Cleveland thirty-odd years ago on business and carelessly left some sperm cells behind.'

  'Ow.'

  'Barbara's mother didn't use up all her bad judgement sleeping with my father - she let my father's lawyers inveigle her into signing a support agreement that might have sounded generous, but wasn't even fair. Even at that, the annuity was a magnet for deadbeats - two husbands, two live-ins, two more babies. Then Barbara got twenty-five thousand dollars when she turned eighteen - supposedly for college, but not nearly enough. She bought a car instead. She still drives it.'

  'So she wasn't exactly brought into the family fold.'

  'No. Mom never has acknowledged her. My father does so grudgingly. I'm easily the closest to her - maybe because I'm pretty much an outcast myself. Joy is the Good Daughter, doesn't want to make Mom angry or Father uncomfortable. She has too much to lose.'

  The sound of a helicopter beat down on Seaton Road from somewhere up above.

  'Are we going to wait for them to start shooting?' she whispered.

  'Only if that's what it takes to be sure it's them,' he whispered back. They already started shooting, remember?'

  A car turned onto Seaton at the far end, starting the wrong way down the one-way street. Gordon pushed Lee down, then ducked down behind the dash himself before the approaching headlights could give them away. Gordon tracked its progress by the moving shadow of the windshield pillar, and sat up
just in time to see a minivan slide past.

  'False alarm,' he said. 'Just someone looking lost.'

  Another siren keened in the night.

  A car with squeaky brakes appeared and parked on the street, six car lengths ahead of the truck.

  In the moments between, time seemed to have stopped.

  The generator's going to give us away,' she whispered.

  'Sssh,' he said, and squeezed her hand. They'll never hear it. This kind likes their cars loud and their music louder.'

  'I don't think they're coming.'

  They're coming. It's a head game. They think they've got Tony sweating, while they're off somewhere juicing themselves up for sport.'

  'How do you know so much about this?'

  'I had exceptionally poor judgement when it came to friends, once upon a time.'

  She looked away to her rear-view mirror. 'I hate this.'

  'Just wait,' he said.

  The creeping, interminable minutes had finally carried them close to midnight when Gordon heard a short-pipe dual exhaust clear its rumbling throat.

  'Convertible at the corner,' he said, touching the shoulder of his dozing companion.

  'What?'

  Then the Explorer glided into view, following close behind the Camaro. 'Here they come,' Gordon said. 'Get down.' Heeding his own admonition, he ducked out of the glare of the Camaro's headlights. His right hand fended off Lee's left and claimed the Trigger controls. 'Let me,' he whispered.

  It seemed to take forever for the two vehicles to pass where Gordon and Lee were parked. The bass grumble of the Camaro seemed to stop right outside Gordon's window, which he had left open a few centimeters for both air and sound cues. For an agonizing minute, he feared that they'd become the target - that the gang had become either wary of the truck, or curious about its contents.

  Fragments of an animated conversation, thick with slang and profanity and punctuated with wild laughter, reached him through the cracked window. Gordon strained to decode what he was hearing, and suddenly realized that behind their bluster, they were spooked by Barbara's house being completely dark. While sneering at Tony's supposed cowardice, they were hanging back, wondering about an ambush.

  It was for just such a possibility that he had taken the home security remote from Barbara's car while she was inside Lee's motel room. The system was unsophisticated, but he did not require much from it - merely a way of drawing them in, the equivalent of a pebble tossed in the dark. Digging in his jacket pocket with his free hand, he found the remote and pressed the top button. Almost instantly, the porch and living-room lights came on.

  That was all it took to goad the gang into action. There was a whoop and a shout from inside the Camaro, and it surged forward, tires squealing and smoking. 'Stay down,' he whispered sternly to Lee, then sat up as the Explorer passed.

  With cool deliberation, Gordon assessed the situation in the street ahead. There were four White Kings in the convertible. One was standing up in the back seat, shouting unintelligible taunts toward the house and waving a pair of pistols in the air. Another gang member was hanging out of the right-side window of the Explorer, clinging to the roof and cradling some sort of larger weapon. In moments, both vehicles would be directly opposite the house.

  Gordon waited no longer. A single long thumbpress started the generator. The collimator atop the Trigger was already pointing down the street toward his targets. With a slight twist of his wrist, he brought the Trigger to life, dialing up the power one click at a time.

  There was one short burst of gunfire, the hollow popping of a small-caliber automatic - Gordon thought it came from the Explorer. The glass panes in the storm door of Barbara's house disintegrated as though smashed with a hammer. A second gun, its bark deeper, harsher, spoke once, twice. He heard gleeful laughter.

  In the next moment, everything turned. The Explorer was suddenly lit brilliantly from within by yellow-white fire, almost as though several flares had gone off in the middle of the back seat. There was barely any sound from the eruptions, no more than the dull whump of a pillow whipped against a mattress. But the laughter and taunting cries turned to screams as the vehicle swerved sharply, then screeched to a halt. Gordon could clearly see the contortions of the passengers as they tried to escape the fire and flee the vehicle.

  At the same time, the Camaro began to speed up. But it had not traveled more than a few car lengths when its trunk erupted in a fireball so intense that Gordon felt the heat of it on his face. Moments later, the Camaro careened into a parked pickup truck with the sickening sound of rending metal and shattering plastic.

  'As ye sow -' he said grimly. 'Now maybe the police will take notice.'

  Lee, now sitting upright beside him, wide-eyed and white-knuckled, said nothing.

  As the flames climbed higher and the screaming continued unabated, Gordon started the truck's engine. The burning vehicles had Seaton Road blocked, so he used the first driveway to turn the truck and trailer around. He left the truck's lights off until he reached the corner and turned right. From that point on, they could pretend innocence.

  'That was horrible,' she said, hoarse and dry-voiced.

  'More horrible than burying your sister, or one of her kids?' he said.

  'I feel dirty.'

  'Don't. They came there to Tony and his family. They got hurt instead. Simple justice, directly meted out. Would you rather it had been Barbara?'

  She slumped against the door and stared out at the night, glancing nervously at the rear-view mirror when she heard sirens in the distance. 'I just wish Tony hadn't told us their names.'

  * * *

  11: Military

  Cleveland Heights, OH - A minor car crash on a quiet residential street turned into a killer conflagration Monday night when a trunkful of illegal guns and ammunition erupted in flames. Three members of the White Kings race gang, including alleged gang leader Steven 'Frosty' Frost, were killed. Four other gang members were hospitalized with extensive burns and other injuries. State police are investigating the incident which destroyed three cars and caused minor damage to several nearby houses.

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  Committees being one of the least efficient decision-making mechanisms ever devised, it had taken six days of twice-a-day meetings to hammer out the details of what was now called Project Brass Hat. But at last the operational plan had been finalized, the memoranda of agreement drawn up, the executive orders signed, the black-budget draws authorized, and the committee finally dispersed.

  Karl Brohier was on his way back to Columbus to begin ramping up the research effort. Aron Goldstein was on his way to North Sioux City, South Dakota, where the closing of a computer assembly plant had left a technically skilled workforce and a hundred twenty thousand square feet of work floor idle. Grover Wilman was on his way back to the Senate, where the bipartisan Defense Advisory Committee was about to admit a new member to its ultrasecret meetings.

  That left the White House quartet - Breland, Nolby, Carrero, and Stepak - with what looked to be the hardest job: selling Project Brass Hat to the Pentagon. And the key to that was General Roland Stepak, USAF (Ret.), the first secretary of defense since George C.

  Marshall to bring general officer rank and command experience to the office.

  In a twenty-six year career, Stepak had logged nearly ten thousand hours in a variety of aircraft, including the top air superiority and strike fighters in the world. He had been an air combat instructor, an F-22 squadron leader in Namibia, and a wing commander during the Taiwan Interdiction - though, typical for a pilot of his era, he had flown only sixty-two actual combat sorties, and recorded no air-to-air kills. Stepak owed his reputation more to his brand of confidence without ego and leadership without arrogance than to heroism in the air.

  Since leaving the cockpit, he had returned to Keesler to lead the 2nd Air Force in its training mission, returned to Japan as commander of the
fighter-dominated 5th, added a third star to his collar and moved up to commander of the Pacific Air Forces, and finally came home to take over the Air Combat Command at Langley -considered the prestige assignment among the major commands.

  Interspersed with those assignments had been three turns in high-visibility staff positions at the Pentagon, where his diligence and quiet competence won him respect from the headquarters staff. By the end of his second year at Langley, he was considered a dark horse candidate to eventually return to the Pentagon as Air Force Chief of Staff.

  But then his wife of twenty-two years, Peggy Ashford Stepak, learned that the persistent headaches which had plagued her for several months had a tangible cause: brain cancer. The morning after they received the news, the general put in for immediate leave - he had nearly half a year accumulated - and for retirement as of the expiration of his leave. In all but name, he quit on the spot, violating the standing protocols regarding the orderly transfer of command. By noon, he was off the base, out of uniform, and at Peggy's side for the follow-up MRI. It was the single most selfish act of his career.

  The three years which followed were the best of times and the worst of times, as the general and his wife played catch-up on a lifetime of postponed promises and deferred dreams. Peggy's final six months were an agony for both of them, until at last saying good-bye was a small mercy.

  Five years later, President Breland had plucked Stepak from the private anonymity he had fallen into, rescuing him from a lingering grief and an unfocused restlessness. The appointment, and the work that went with it, had renewed Stepak.

  Some days Stepak's countenance still seemed clouded by the darkness of an unspoken regret or a melancholy memory, but it never touched his work. He had been as diligent and thorough in preparing Breland for that morning's meeting with the Joint Chiefs as he would have been preflighting his F-22 for a sortie over the Formosa Strait.