Private L.A. (Private 6)

My first shot caught Kelleher in the side of the neck, blew him back onto the table. My second shot glanced off Hernandez’s rising gun, severed the tritium bead, and entered his skull through the right eye socket.

Ignoring their bodies falling, ignoring the jerky movements of chaos rising all around me, the screams of panic and the muzzle blast ringing in my ears, I felt as if my gun sought Cobb of its own accord, as if I were nothing but a part of the weapon and not its controller at all.

Cobb stood facing me next to the last booth in the restaurant before a hallway. A terrified young family cowered in the booth beside him. He grinned at me. A thin metal ring and post hung from his teeth.

He held grenades.

Two of them.

“Drop the gun, Mr. Morgan,” he said, around the pin that locked the flip trigger on the explosive. “Or many, many people will die.”

Chapter 108

AT A GLANCE I could tell the grenades were not US made, but Russian, old Soviet F1s, the kind the Taliban used to lob at patrols in the high country north of Kandahar when they were really hard up for weapons.

I knew this because fellow pilots liked to talk, and we’d hear from the patrols we were ferrying in and out of enemy terrain. The F1 is distinctive, with a long stainless spoon and a pin safety system exactly like the one dangling from Cobb’s teeth. The F1 is also obsolete, no longer manufactured, even back then, which meant that Cobb’s explosives were old, probably thirty, maybe forty years old. Another thing I’d learned about F1s in Afghanistan? The older they got, the higher the chance of a malfunction. That was why the Taliban hated using them. They much preferred the M10s we gave them back in the eighties when the Taliban was called the Mujahideen.

So I put the laser sight right in the middle of his forehead. Cobb spat out the pin, said, “You shoot me, you take out Mommy here and the two kids and forty other people. So put it down, chopper boy.”

“Not a chance, atrocity boy,” I said.

“These little lemons throw shrapnel for two hundred meters,” Cobb said, yanking the second pin with his teeth, spitting it out. “Know how I know that?”

“Because you’ve got the scars to prove it,” I said.

“I do,” Cobb said. “So I’m not afraid to go this way. I’ve been here before.”

Cobb looked beyond me. He roared at the terrified patrons and waitstaff. “Anyone makes a move for their cell phone, and I will lob this right into your lap.”

He began to back up, and I realized there was an emergency exit in the hall behind him. I took a step for every one of his, moving past the dead bodies of his men, oblivious to the crying and terror all around me, intent on keeping the red dot of the laser sight slightly above and between his eyes.

“How do you know who I am?” Cobb asked as he moved fully into the hallway. “They erased me. They erased all of us.”

“A ghost named Carpenter told us who you were, what you did.”

He recognized that name, turned bitter. “How’d you find us?”

I stepped into the hall after him, released one hand from the pistol and waved it behind me, telling the patrons to get the hell out of the restaurant. The whole time I kept talking: “One of your men got greedy, transferred the ten million we were tracking into his personal account in Mexico. We were able to track that account to a computer with an IPO address in the garage where you set up the phony demolition company.”

Cobb’s face tightened. “Fucking Watson. Fucking greedy little—”

“He’s dead,” I lied. “Both your men at the garage are dead. Your two men here are dead. And Johnson’s on ice in a morgue locker. You’re the sole survivor, Captain Cobb.”

Cobb’s back was to the emergency exit now. Behind me I could hear people gathering courage and fleeing. “Give it up,” I said, wanting his undivided attention. “You go out that door, you’re dying like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.”

“How’s that?” Cobb asked.

“FBI, LAPD, Sheriff’s snipers are waiting for you to step outside.”

He hesitated and then grinned at me the way recon scouts used to aboard my helicopter as I landed them in a fire zone, smirking in the face of death.

“I think you’re full of shit,” Cobb said. “There’s no one out there. If there was, it wouldn’t have been you they sent inside.”

He pressed his butt against the lever. The door clicked, opened two inches. Light poured in. Cobb shifted his head to look outside, opened the door farther. His face was silhouetted now. The laser sight trembled on his temple.

Chapter 109

MY FINGER TIGHTENED on the trigger as my mind whirled with thoughts, options, and dire consequences.