Full Black - Brad Thor [9]
He didn’t have to wait long. From out in the hallway, he could hear a man’s voice. He was whispering and in some sort of a foreign language. It sounded to Ralston like Eastern European, maybe Russian, but he couldn’t be sure.
When the man repeated himself, Ralston realized he was speaking over a radio. Was he trying to raise the driver outside? Or were there more men inside the house?
Either way, it wasn’t good. Ralston needed to get to Salomon. He could hear the man’s footfalls upon the wood floor of the hallway growing closer.
Ralston had two choices. He could face the man head-on, or he could wait until the man had passed and take him from behind. Shots had been fired and at least one person inside the house had already been killed. Ralston was literally bringing a knife to a gunfight, so he slipped off his shoes and settled on the latter course of action. Three seconds later, the man moved past the dining room doors.
He was huge—just as the man outside had been—six-foot-three, at least, and well over 250 pounds. He had wide shoulders, draped in what even the home’s semidarkness couldn’t hide was a very cheap suit. His feet were shod in the long, box-toed dress shoes so popular with Europeans. In one hand he carried a radio and in the other a suppressed pistol.
His hair was crew-cut short and the back of his head looked just like a Russian’s. From the base of his neck to the crown of his head, it was flat as a board. It was a cultural attribute that most Russian men, tightly swaddled and picked up seldom by their mothers, shared.
As the Russian passed, Ralston slipped into the hallway behind him. The intruder had no idea he was there until it was too late.
In one fluid motion, Ralston grabbed across the man’s forehead, yanked his head to the left, and with his right hand plunged the filleting knife into the anterior triangle between the top of the clavicle and the side of the neck. It severed the man’s internal jugular vein and carotid artery. He then swept the blade across, severing the trachea. All that could be heard was a hiss, like air being let out of a tire.
Ralston put all of his weight on the man to prevent him from using his last seconds of life to fight back and rode him down to the floor. Convinced he was no longer a threat, he dragged him off to the side, next to a cupboard, and left him there to bleed out.
It was a black art, the taking of life, and one that Luke Ralston was all too well versed in.
Dropping the knife, he picked up the intruder’s suppressed Walther P99 and did a press check. Satisfied that a round was chambered and the weapon was hot, he turned the volume down on the radio, tucked it into his back pocket, and went off in search of Salomon.
The problem, though, was twofold. Were there any more intruders in the house and where should he begin looking for Salomon? He decided to start with the producer’s office.
To get there, he had to pass through the entry hall with its wide double staircase. There was nothing for cover and Ralston used the darkness and shadows as best he could. The living room, with its floor-to-ceiling glass windows and ambient moonlight spilling from outside, was even worse, but he made it through both without incident.
The entrance to Larry Salomon’s office was down a short hall just past the living room. The hairs on the back of Ralston’s neck were standing on end before he even got to the door.
With the weapon up and at the ready, he button-hooked into the room and tried to take it all in.
Everything was different. The office looked as if it had been turned into some sort of war room. Whiteboards and bulletin boards were leaning against the walls and a large, rolling chalkboard was off to one side. Salomon’s imposing glass-and-steel desk now sat cheek-by-jowl with two additional, smaller desks, which were topped with high-end Apple computer systems and what Ralston recognized as editing equipment. There were stacks of cardboard filing boxes filled with reams and reams of papers and documents.
There were more pillars of books, some stacked three feet high