Читать книгу Salvador Strike - Don Pendleton - Страница 7

Herndon, Virginia

Gary Marciano, federal prosecutor for the Attorney General of the United States, studied the early-morning edition of the newspaper with immense satisfaction.

Over his bowl of sliced bananas on oatmeal topped with milk and honey, Marciano reread the bold, front page headline: National Gang Members Charged with RICO Violations. At last! Several key members of MS-13 were in custody and based on the pages of testimony by his key witness—testimony submitted and leading to indictments by a federal grand jury last week—these domestic terror mongers wouldn’t be spreading any more violence or bloodshed for a long time, if ever again. The suburban neighborhoods of Virginia, Florida and California would be safer with those bastards out of the picture.

Marciano thought of Ysidro Perez, the one brave soul who decided to get his life together and make a stand. With no thought for his own safety, Perez voluntarily stepped out on his homeboys in Virginia—a cell dubbed the Hillbangers by local law enforcement—to report on their activities and betray the sacred trust extended to him. Perez’s testimony had eventually led to not only the arrest of his leader, Mario Guerra, but six other high-ranking members from various cells throughout the United States.

And that’s only the beginning, Marciano thought.

The prosecutor dropped the paper on the table and turned to finishing his breakfast. The Bulova watch on his wrist, a Christmas present from his wife, told him he had only a few minutes before he had to leave for his office. Rush-hour traffic had grown worse over the past couple of years, as well as the construction of new homes in what had once been a quiet development, which ultimately tacked more than twenty minutes onto what had once been a ten-minute commute. It took him nearly a half hour to drive barely ten miles.

Sad, that’s what it was.

Marciano finished about half of his breakfast and then rose, scraped the remainder into the garbage can and rinsed out the bowl. He left it in the sink, confident Caroline would take care of it like she always did. Faithful and diligent, his adoring wife had stayed home with their three kids during their early years, but when the youngest finally reached seventh grade, she took a job selling real estate in a booming market. Marciano knew she was a shoo-in for such a position; it suited Caroline’s impeccable tastes and uncanny ability to match the right perspective buyer with the right place.

They didn’t really need the money. Investment proceeds from the sale and dissolution of his private practice with several equal partners in a Washington law firm had provided a more than adequate windfall. But Marciano couldn’t stop practicing law any more than a fish could stop swimming. So with a change in administration at the White House and the appointment of a close friend to Attorney General, Marciano transformed his practice from protecting major corporations from exploitation to going up against those who challenged the law of the land.

“So you view yourself as a crusader?” a member of the press had asked him right after the AG announced his appointment.

“Not at all,” he replied with a smile. “I’m simply a concerned citizen.”

That had brought a titter from the wall-to-wall bodies packing the press room at the Justice Department and a commendation from his boss on the way he’d handled the questioners in such a suave fashion.

Now entering his third year with the Attorney General, Marciano had made a number of influential friends, not least among them a man he’d truly come to admire and respect: Hal Brognola. Marciano had worked with plenty of federal agents in his time, but he’d never met anyone quite like that one. Brognola had an insight and knowledge into the workings of the criminal underworld like it was nobody’s business. Brognola was older—probably much older than he looked—and Marciano had always assumed he was semiretired, since he hardly ever saw the guy. Still, if he needed advice or wanted a fresh approach to a prosecutorial problem, Brognola was the first guy he would go to and that was saying a lot since, to his knowledge, the man had no law degree of any kind other than from the school of hard knocks. Yes, indeed, the guy had been around a very long time.

“Honey, I’m leaving!” Marciano called to his wife as he snatched his leather valise off the side table in the entryway of their two-story home.

Caroline had found the place when it got listed with her agency, and while taking a couple through it she fell in love. Marciano liked their private place by a lake in the foothills of the Shenandoah, but the trip had become impractical when his firm grew in size and clientele base, so Caroline convinced him to move to Herndon. He didn’t really like the additional upkeep required by the neighborhood association, and he wasn’t much for gardening or landscaping, but it did afford him an opportunity to spend quality time with Caroline so he didn’t really mind.

Marciano opened the heavy front door of his house and a loud thumping sound greeted him. The steady beat came from some kind of sound system inside the late-model Lincoln SUV with heavy window tinting parked at the curb. Marciano took a couple of hesitant steps through the doorway and closed it securely behind him. As he proceeded down the flagstone pathway that curved toward the driveway where his BMW sat idling, he noticed the rear-seat window of the SUV roll down.

He instantly recognized the object that protruded from the interior, but just a moment too late to really do anything about it.

Gunfire resounded through the chill morning air as a torrent of hot lead spit from the muzzle of the submachine gun. Slugs ripped through Marciano’s double-breasted pinstripe suit and lodged deep in his flesh, his body dancing under the impact of each round. Some of the bullets hit center mass while others grazed him deeply and in enough volume to actually tear chunks of flesh from the bones of his arms and legs. Marciano never saw his shooter; he also never saw the trio of young Hispanic males in gray hooded sweatshirts marked with the symbol of MS-13 as they emerged from the backseat of the SUV.

The young men made their way up the flagstone path, kicked in the front door and fanned out to scour the house. They would complete their work in short order, gunning down Caroline Marciano with the same butchery as her husband and then set fire to the home. These events would signal the fate of the U.S. Attorney General’s case, as about the same time police units responded to reports of gunfire coming from the area of the Marciano residence, a federal game warden would discover the butchered remains of a headless and handless victim in a wildlife marshland at the edge of Riverbend Regional Park—remains the coroner took several days to identify as those of Ysidro Perez.