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  “We’ll deal with it,” he said calmly. “Just stay alert and keep your prisoners under control. They’re going to give us what we want, you know that.”

  “They had damned well better.”

  With that, Jimmy broke the connection.

  Foster grimaced and used the radio to call the second floor, saying, “Chad, check in.”

  “We’re here,” a voice came back. “No problems so far. We have seventeen prisoners, and I’m pretty sure they’re all accounted for.”

  “We need better than pretty sure,” Foster snapped. “Sweep the floor until you’re certain.”

  “We’ve done that. I’m certain now.” Chad’s voice showed the strain they were all under. “It was just a figure of speech, Matthias. You don’t need to worry about us. I heard shooting up on the third floor a little while ago, though. Something happened up there, and it didn’t sound good.”

  “I know,” Foster said. Actually, he hadn’t been able to narrow it down until now where the shots had come from, but he trusted Chad’s report that the trouble had been on the third floor. “Is it still going on?”

  “Nope. Quiet up there now. Should one of us go—”

  “No!” Foster said. “You stay right where you are. We can’t start running around all over the building. Things will get crazy if we do. We need to stick to the plan.”

  “Got it.”

  Foster broke the connection this time. He switched the radio to the band he had assigned to the men on the third floor and said, “Jeremy? You there?”

  This time there was no answer.

  Foster had sent three men to the third floor to round up everyone who was in the Special Collections rooms. That had seemed like enough. He had to think for a second to remember who had been with Jeremy. When he did, he said into the radio, “Seth? Darrell?”

  Still no response except silence.

  Foster lowered the radio. It might not be working, he told himself. It was still possible that everything was all right up there.

  But not likely, he thought. Not likely at all. And there was only one way to find out whether it was or not.

  He looked at Natalie and said, “I’m going up there.”

  “We can’t afford to lose you, Matthias,” she said as she shook her head. “Let me go. I . . . I owe it to you for letting things get out of hand earlier.”

  “You don’t owe me anything,” he told her. “You’ve done everything I’ve asked you to.”

  “I should have pulled the trigger as soon as I shoved this gun into Jake’s side.”

  “He might have still been able to kill me if you had.”

  She couldn’t argue with that, but she still said, “I want to go. I won’t let you down.”

  It was true that, looking at the situation from a completely pragmatic viewpoint, he could afford to lose her more than any of the others. Even though she had trained for this mission as hard as anyone else, she wasn’t as good at handling violence as the men were.

  However, she had an advantage none of the rest of them did: Foster knew good and well that if she ran into Jake Rivers, he would hesitate before pulling the trigger on her. That hesitation, even if it was just a split second, might be enough to make all the difference.

  “All right,” he said. “Go ahead. But be careful. And if you see Rivers . . .”

  “Don’t worry. I know what to do.”

  He just hoped she could actually do it.

  * * *

  A middle-aged woman with graying brown hair rushed at Jake as soon as he stepped out of the stairwell. He had to restrain the impulse to point the pistol at her. It was like one of those drills where you moved through a fake village and cardboard cutouts popped up without warning, giving you only a second to decide if they were innocent civilians or legitimate targets.

  He lifted the gun in both hands and pointed it toward the ceiling, giving the woman the chance to rush up to him and throw her arms around him.

  “Oh, thank God, thank God!” she said. “I thought we were all going to die!” After hugging Jake tightly for a moment, she leaned back a little and went on, “Are you a policeman? A soldier?”

  He smiled and said, “A grad student, ma’am.”

  She stared at him in amazement. His answer clearly seemed unbelievable to her. Finally she said, “You’re not one of those . . . terrorists?”

  “No, ma’am.” He looked around, saw several more people peeking over desks. “Are any of you hurt?”

  “N-no. When that man showed up, all of us cooperated with him. Maybe we shouldn’t have—”

  “No, you did the right thing,” Jake told her. “You’re not trained or equipped to deal with something like this.”

  “What’s happened? We heard shots, and what sounded like an explosion . . .” She shuddered. “That terrible man said he and his friends were going to kill all of us if they didn’t get what they wanted.”

  “That was the idea,” Jake said, “but we all have something to say about that. The bad guys don’t win unless we let them.”

  The woman frowned and commented, “I must say, that doesn’t sound like what I usually hear the students here at Kelton talking about.”

  “I’m not the usual student.” Jake motioned with his free hand to the other office workers who had been terrorized. “Come on, folks.” He turned his head to look at the door to the stairs. “You, too, Pierce.”

  Pierce came out of the stairwell and asked, “What are we going to do now, Jake?”

  Instead of answering him, Jake asked the older woman, “Is there a way to get to the roof from in here? Guys have to be able to get up there to work on the air-conditioning system and such.”

  She shook her head and said, “Not from in here, I’m afraid. Maintenance workers have to bring in one of those tall lifts if they need to work on anything on the roof. I’ve seen them do it many times.”

  Jake bit back a curse. He had been hoping that he could take all the hostages from the third and fourth floors up to the roof and signal for the authorities to evac them with a chopper. Evidently, though, that wasn’t going to happen.

  “All right, you’ll all stay here. Find someplace to fort up. A small office, maybe, or just move those desks and filing cabinets around and make a shelter from them. Pierce, you’ll be staying here, too.”

  “I thought I’d stick with you and help you,” the young man objected.

  “You’ve been a big help already,” Jake told him. “I need somebody I can trust to leave here and look after these people.”

  “You trust me? We don’t agree on much of anything, Jake.”

  “You talking about politics?” Jake waved his free hand dismissively. “You’ve heard the old saying about how there are no atheists in foxholes?”

  “What’s a foxhole?” Pierce asked with a puzzled frown.

  Kids these days, Jake thought, ignoring for the moment the fact that he was only three or four years older than Pierce. There was a world of difference in their souls and backgrounds.

  “Never mind. Just know that labels like liberal and conservative don’t mean much when you’re fighting for your life and the lives of innocent people. So yeah, I trust you. I’ve seen what you can do.”

  Pierce nodded. He glanced at the gun in his hand and still seemed to find it difficult to comprehend he was holding a weapon, but he said, “I won’t let you down, Jake. But what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing left for me to do except head back down. I’d hoped to get some of the hostages out of the building to safety, but I don’t see any way of doing that now.” He shrugged. “At least I’ve whittled down the odds quite a bit. Now’s the time to go after Foster, while he’s weakened.”

  “He’s not alone, though,” Pierce pointed out. “He’s still got gunmen around him.”

  Jake nodded. He was all too aware of the truth of what Pierce was saying.

  And one of those allies Foster still had on his side was Natalie Burke . . . or Lucy, as Foster had called her. Jake
couldn’t help but wonder how he had gotten her to fall for his line. Then he realized it didn’t matter. No matter what had happened in the past, Natalie was the enemy now. He had no doubt that she would kill him without hesitating if she got the chance.

  The question was, could he do the same?

  He honestly didn’t know the answer.

  CHAPTER 38

  Six men had taken over the administration building. Carlos was in charge of them. He was pleased that Matthias Foster had entrusted him with such an important job. Foster’s political stances were what had drawn Carlos into the group in the first place, and then he had stayed for the irresistible crack at millions of dollars. But he still admired Foster and didn’t want to let him down.

  Carlos and his cohorts had taken over the lobby area first, then gone from office to office rounding up the men and women who worked in the admin building. The lobby stretched across nearly the entire front of the building, so there was plenty of room to gather the approximately thirty hostages there. Then Carlos set two men guarding them, while he and the other three spread out to the doors. There were more than four entrances, but a member of the maintenance crew was among the prisoners, and Carlos had been able to put a gun to his head and force him to lock all of them. He and his fellows guarded the ones where an attack was most likely to occur, in Carlos’s judgment.

  Carlos stood near the door at the west end of the building, gun in hand, watching through its glass upper half to make sure no one was trying to sneak up on them. When he heard a footstep behind him, he didn’t get in any hurry to turn and look, because he assumed it was one of the other men coming to ask him a question.

  When he did turn his head, he caught just a glimpse of an old man in casual clothes standing there. Carlos didn’t remember seeing him among the prisoners before, but he couldn’t be anybody else. Anger flared inside Carlos because the guards had allowed this old man to wander off, but that lasted only a split second.

  It was replaced by shock as the old man moved in a blur of speed, catching Carlos around the throat with one arm while yanking him back and pushing on the side of his head with the other hand. Nobody that age ought to be so fast and strong—

  That was the last thing Carlos thought, because the next instant his spine snapped and he blacked out. He would die within seconds.

  His killer lowered the body to the floor and turned away from it with Carlos’s gun in his hand. He had his own weapons, of course, but might as well use the other guy’s ammunition if you got the chance.

  It had all happened so fast none of the other terrorists had noticed what was going on. But the man at the main entrance to the building saw the old guy striding toward him, gun in hand, and reacted quickly. He got his own gun halfway up before a pair of rounds shattered his skull, cored through his brain, and blew the back of his head off. He dropped in a loose sprawl.

  Some of the prisoners were screaming now. The two men guarding them charged toward the center of the lobby. Their guns roared. The older man dropped to one knee and fired twice. Both were chest shots. The slugs exploded the hearts of his targets.

  With four of the six gunmen down, that left just two. They were thrown for a loop by the sudden, unexpected violence that had cost the lives of their allies. They couldn’t understand how the old man had even managed to get in here, let alone to kill Carlos and the other three in less time than it took to talk about it.

  So they were scared, and that prompted each of them to grab one of the prisoners for use as a human shield. The one holding on to a terrified young woman pointed his weapon over her shoulder and yelled, “Drop that gun, you old bastard!”

  The old bastard in question fired a single shot that sizzled past the hostage’s right ear and into the open mouth of the gunman hanging on to her. The bullet shattered the man’s spine and dropped him so fast he never had a chance to pull the trigger on his own gun.

  The other prisoner being used as a human shield was a fat, middle-aged man who had probably not been in a fight for decades, if ever. But terror gave him strength and he twisted free, then rammed his shoulder into the chest of the man who had grabbed him. The gunman staggered back a step, and that gave the deadly stranger plenty of room and time to plant two rounds in the middle of his face.

  In a little less than a minute, the terrorists in the administration building had been wiped out and the hostages were free.

  Some of the former prisoners rushed toward the man, who waved them on and pointed toward the door at the west end of the building.

  “Bust that down if you have to, and get out of here,” he told them.

  “We won’t have to break it down,” one of the men said. He wore the uniform of a maintenance worker and still had a ring of keys attached to his belt. The gunmen had failed to take it away from him, which was pretty careless on their part. The maintenance man quickly unlocked the door and flung it open. He looked back at the stranger and asked, “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

  “Just call me Dog,” the man said.

  The maintenance worker and the others all rushed out of the building, only to find themselves suddenly surrounded by SWAT officers in tactical gear and body armor.

  The man who had freed them faded away along a shadowy corridor in the administration building, returning to the back of the building where he had cut a hole in a window and gotten in without anybody seeing him. It was the one place on the entire building that none of the men surrounding it had a good view of.

  Anyway, he was used to moving where he wanted to and getting into places without being seen. He had been doing it for a long, long time.

  * * *

  The radio clipped onto Walt Graham’s belt crackled. He lifted it and said, “Graham.”

  Chief Hartwell of the Greenleaf PD said excitedly, “I’m getting reports that the hostages in the administration building have escaped! I’m on my way over there now.”

  “I’ll meet you there,” Graham said. He and Agent Vega of Homeland Security were studying the library building from a distance. They had to circle a block around the park-like plaza at the center of the campus to reach the administration building.

  By the time they did, they found several dozen former hostages huddled together, surrounded by weapons-toting SWAT officers. Hartwell arrived at the same time and ordered, “Get these people well away from the building! They need to be taken safely beyond the perimeter and debriefed.”

  “Hold on a minute,” Graham said. “What happened in there? How did you get away from those terrorists?”

  “All the terrorists are dead,” a man in the uniform of the college’s maintenance department answered.

  “You overpowered them?” Graham said, somewhat amazed by the idea.

  “We didn’t do anything,” the man replied. “It was that other guy. The old guy.”

  “What old guy?”

  “I don’t know where he came from.” The maintenance man looked around at the other hostages. They shook their heads to indicate that they were just as baffled as he was. “He was just there, all of a sudden, shooting those terrorists. I never saw anybody handle a gun like that. When they were all down, he told us to get out, and believe you me, we weren’t gonna argue with him.”

  “Who was this man you never saw before?” Vega asked.

  “Just some old guy.”

  “He was an old man?” Graham’s voice was sharp as he posed the question.

  “Well, actually . . . come to think of it . . . it’s hard to say.” The maintenance man scratched his chin. “He had mostly gray hair and his face had this well-worn look to it, you know, like he’d been around for a long time, but dang, he moved like a twenty-two-year-old athlete. Even as scared as I was, I could tell that much.”

  Some of the others nodded in agreement, evidently equally impressed with their rescuer.

  “Did he tell you his name?” Vega asked. Exasperation crept into her voice.

  “That’s another funny thing,” the maintenance man replied.
“I asked him about that. He said to call him Dog.”

  “Dog!” Vega repeated with a disgusted snort. “That’s all? Just Dog?”

  “Just Dog.”

  It was Graham’s turn to repeat something, as he said softly, under his breath, “Just Dog.”

  “Wait a minute,” Vega snapped. “That means something to you.”

  “A long time ago—and I’m talking about going back thirty years or more—when I was just starting out in the bureau, we used to hear rumors about a guy who went by the code name Dog. Nobody knew who he was or if he even really existed. But the stories about him said that he was some sort of freelance troubleshooter who answered only to the president. He had been a truck driver, so he roamed around the country in this specially outfitted truck, looking for . . . well, wrongs to right, corny as that sounds. Sometimes the government would point him in a certain direction and turn him loose, like a force of nature, but most of the time he found his own cases. And he did a lot of good for a while, before he dropped completely out of sight.”

  Vega stared at Graham for a long moment before she made another disgusted sound and said, “You believed that fairy tale? Some sort of superagent working for our side?”

  “There was nothing super about him,” Graham said. “He was a guy. A very dangerous guy, sure, but definitely human.”

  “What else would he be? This isn’t some sort of fantasy world, Agent Graham.”

  “I know that. It’s just curious, that’s all. Nobody knows what became of Dog. Some said the mob or a terrorist organization had killed him. Others claimed he’d retired and was living somewhere deep in the woods, figuratively and literally, where he’d never been found again.” Graham paused. “And some said he was still out there after all these years, working behind the scenes to bring down the bad guys. Doing the dirty jobs that nobody else can do because all the rules and regulations tie their hands.”

  “A government-sanctioned vigilante,” Vega said flatly.

  Graham shrugged.

  “I’m just telling you what I’ve heard, that’s all. I don’t know if it’s him or not. But somebody killed those terrorists and freed the hostages—”