Perfect Killer by Lewis Perdue Read Free Book Online

second outrider. "Fucking amazing!"
When he received his Congressional Medal of Honor, Braxton still wore a bandage over his postsurgical wounds. Postsurgical evaluation of Braxton indicated no physical or neurological impairment, a finding consistent with a small number of similar wounds carefully cataloged by medical science. Interviews with his instructors at West Point indicated his actions that day in the Mekong Delta had demonstrated far more courage under fire than expected from a student whom they had once considered better suited for logistical and administrative command. Clearly, they said, battle was where the true man had emerged.
Braxton's legend grew through two more tours in Vietnam. He became the frontline commander the army called on when things got tough. Hanoi considered him so effective they marked him for assassination with a $1 million bounty on his head.
Army psychologists noted that Braxton's mania for collecting began about this time.
Now, as Dan Gabriel's footsteps grew closer, the General picked a memory to sustain himself. This time it was the charge he'd led to rescue a trapped squad of Marines at Hue. He felt his body respond as he visualized the terrain, recalled the clash of weapons, and smelled the stench of spent ordnance and open abdominal wounds. But Gabriel's ten more years of relative youth started to show as the men neared their finish line, another red-and-white barrier laid across the road with a guard hut beside it. Discreetly disappearing into the landscaping on both flanks of the gate was a double row of electrified metal fencing crowned with concertina wire.
At that moment, Braxton's wireless phone vibrated on his belt. With Gabriel's footsteps pounding in his ears, Braxton ignored the phone and urged his burning quadriceps into a final burst of energy, carrying him past the finish line inches ahead of Gabriel.
Braxton broke his pace then and allowed Gabriel to shoot past him.
"You peaked a bit too late," Braxton said as he searched for the precisely sportsmanlike tone the situation demanded. He kept the gloating to himself: it offered nothing to be gained.
Gabriel fell in beside the General. "Thanks, sir."
"Soon," Braxton said as he grabbed his phone and looked at the caller ID, "you'll be beating me." He smiled as a short message scrolled across his screen. The rules he had established with her required no voice mails, no trails. "VT86D," read the short text message.
Braxton worked on suppressing the broad smile he felt within. Vanessa Thompson was dead, and along with her one more of the few remaining barriers capable of derailing his presidential run. He looked at his Rolex. "Okay, we have twenty-five minutes before your briefing."
Gabriel looked at the Swiss Army sports watch on his own wrist. The altimeter function he had selected at the bottom of the hill indicated they had climbed a little more than two hundred feet straight up since passing the gate at the bottom of the driveavay. He pressed the watch's time button, then said, "Roger that, General."
They returned salutes from the guards who buzzed them through the last set of gates, which gave on to a Tuscan courtyard filled with exquisitely tended landscaping. The entire complex, named Castello Da Vinci by wealthy financier Kincaid Carothers, had once sat atop a hill overlooking Siena and, according to painstakingly preserved historical records, had been designed in 1502 by Leonardo da Vinci as a fortified sanctuary for his patron Cesare Borgia.
Leonardo's talents as a military architect have received little attention, but he had designed fortifications and invented weapons far ahead of their time. Borgia worried there might come a time when he would need a Renaissance bunker of sorts, and naturally he turned to Leonardo for help.
Carothers, whose company once exercised hegemony over the issuance of American Treasury bonds, had the entire structure disassembled in 1936, stripped, shipped to America, and reassembled. A