Six men had taken over the administration building. Salvador was in charge of them. He was pleased that Lark Barlow had entrusted them with such an important task. Barlow's political stances were what had drawn Salvador into the group in the first place, and then he had stayed for the irresistible crack at millions of dollars. But he still admired Barlow and didn't want to let him down.
Salvador and his flunkies 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 30 hostages there. Then Salvador 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 Salvador 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 more likely to occur, in Salvador's judgment.
Salvador 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. Salvador didn't remember seeing him among the prisoners before, but he couldn't be anybody else. Anger flared inside Salvador 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 Salvador 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 Salvador 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 Salvador'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 blue 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 middle of the lobby. Their guns roared. The older man dropped to one knee and fired two times. Both were chest shots. The slugs exploded the hearts of his targets.
With 4 of the 6 gunmen down, that left just 2. 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 Salvador and the other 3 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 onto 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 onto 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 Jaguar," 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'd cut a hole in a window and gotten in undetected. It was the one place in the whole 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.
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The radio clipped into Jonell Boone's belt crackled. He lifted it and said, "Boone."
Chief Wallace of the Brookhedge 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," Boone said. He and Agent Ferrant of Homeland Defense were studying the library building from a distance. They had to circle a block around the parklike 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. Wallace 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!"
"Just a minute, Wallace," Boone said. "Just what the hell 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?" Boone said, somewhat amazed by the idea.
"We didn't do a damn thing, dude," 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 just shook their heads to indicate 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?" Ferrant asked.
"Just some old guy."
"He was an old man?" Boone'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 22-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 savior.
"Did he tell you his name?" Ferrant asked. Exasperation crept into her voice.
"That's another weird thing," the maintenance man replied. "I asked him about that. He said to call him Jaguar."
"Jaguar?" Ferrant repeated with a disgusted snort. "That's all? Just Jaguar?"
"Just Jaguar."
It was Boone's turn to repeat something, as he said softly, under his breath, "Just Jaguar."
"Wait a minute," Ferrant snapped. "That means something to you."
"A long time ago---and I'm talking about going back 30 years or so---when I was just starting out in the bureau, we used to hear rumors about a guy who went by the code name Jaguar. Nobody knew who he was or if he even really existed. But the stories about him said that he was some kind of free-lance 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."
Ferrant started at Boone for a long moment before she made another disgusted sound and said, "You believed that fairy tale? Some kind of superagent working for our side?"
"Oh, there wasn't anything super about him," Boone said. "He was a guy. A very dangerous guy, sure, but definitely human."
"What else could he be? This isn't some kind of fantasy world, Agent Boone."
"I know that. It's just curious, that's all. Nobody knows what became of Jaguar. Some said the mob or a terrorist group had killed him. Others claimed he'd retired and was living somewhere deep in the woods, figuratively and literally, where he'd never be found again." Boone 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," Ferrant said flatly.
Boone 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!"
One of the campus cops ran up, panting a little as he said, "Agent Boone! We've just gotten word that all the hostages in Eastwell Hall have been freed, and the gunmen who took over the building have been killed!"
Boone's eyebrows rose. He looked over at Ferrant and said, "I don't know who's doing it, Agent, but it seems like someone's cleaning house."
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