Page 23 of The Grave Artist (Sanchez & Heron #2)

Williamson was instantly on his feet, covering his wife and the boys beside her and flinging his son Marcus, closest to the threat, behind him. The boy actually caught air before Camille fielded him.

“Shooter!” he yelled in a booming baritone.

Williamson carried a .40 Glock—a powerful round—but there were parishioners behind the gunman. At this range, his bullet might tear through his target and strike innocents.

As the shooter’s weapon swept out—a Glock 9mm—Williamson launched himself forward.

While some of the muscle from his college football days had pastured into fat, most remained rock solid.

He slammed headlong into the perp. They both crashed into the pew on the other side of the aisle and sprawled to the floor.

The attacker was scrawny, but he twisted and slugged and kicked like someone possessed—no doubt trying to injure Williamson and get some distance so he could start shooting the other congregants.

Williamson shouted at Camille: “Get the boys out of here! Call it in!”

And he was infinitely grateful she didn’t hesitate but quickly shepherded their children to safety.

As the two men grappled, Williamson began to twist the gunman’s wrist, grunting with the effort as he issued a guttural command through clenched teeth. “Drop it.”

Rather than comply, the shooter used his left hand to pull the gun from his right and swung the muzzle back and forth as he looked for targets.

Some fled the church, but many remained, hiding behind the pews. Williamson had no way to warn them that a 9mm round could penetrate the wooden benches.

And more troubling, Mrs. Abbott, a grandmother who took six-year-old Mary to church when her mother worked, was panicking. She had simply dropped to the middle of the aisle not twenty feet from the gunman, using her body as a human shield to cover her screaming granddaughter.

The shooter noticed and smiled as he shifted to aim his weapon at them.

Williamson cried, “Get out! Run!”

But Mrs. Abbott was paralyzed with fear.

The big agent released his grip on the gunman’s right wrist and caught the left an instant before he pulled the trigger.

Williamson had been in plenty of fights. The familiar mix of sweat and body odor assailed his nostrils as he kept trying to wrestle the gun away. “You don’t ... want to ... do this,” he muttered, between grunts. “It’s not too late.”

The shooter spat in Williamson’s face, then blurted the familiar slur—the last resort of the ignorant and the desperate—after which he redoubled his efforts to point the muzzle toward the Abbotts.

A jerk of the trigger.

The explosion of sound and the muzzle blast so close to Williamson’s face forced his eyes shut and snapped his head back.

The bullet ended up somewhere in the ceiling.

Then a searing wave of pain, breathtaking, as the attacker’s teeth sank into the flesh just below Williamson’s thumb.

He howled in agony, but didn’t let go, and he felt the recoil in his throbbing hand as the man fired another two shots. They too missed their target, one slamming into the altar, the other shattering a stained glass window depicting Jesus on the cross.

Williamson’s left hand was free, and he drew it back to plow the heel of his palm into the man’s nose in an attempt to break the excruciating grip with his teeth. A scream—a satisfying scream—resulted.

The strike didn’t force the gunman to release his bite, and it had unintended consequences. Blood from the man’s freshly broken nose flowed onto Williamson’s right hand and the slippery liquid broke his grip on the shooter’s gun hand.

At that moment, little Mary managed to wriggle out from under her grandmother and scramble to her feet. Before Mrs. Abbott could pull her back down, the gunman aimed at the girl.

It was a shot even an amateur could make.

Williamson shouted, “No!”

A word that was lost in the thunderous blast, which deafened him and brought tears to his eyes. Gunshot residue spattered his forehead and cheeks.

In the ringing roar that followed, Williamson watched the shooter silently slump to the floor.

A .38 special round is roughly the same diameter as a 9mm, but the shell is longer and has more mass—as well as a lot more gunpowder behind it. When the bullet strikes the temple, death is instantaneous.

He knew what type of ammo had killed the shooter because of who had pulled the trigger.

His wife, Camille, a federal prosecutor, was permitted to carry a weapon, and she did with some frequency.

She put away sicarios and OGs and young banger punks from South Central and Mafia wannabes from the docks.

From time to time some foolish—and now incarcerated—soul threatened her or put a price on her head.

The shooter was down, but procedures were baked in. Instantly Williamson was on his feet, securing the man’s weapon, unloading it and locking the slide back before pocketing it and verifying there were no other weapons on him.

He scanned the church for accomplices. None that he could see. A quick check of the man’s vitals confirmed he was dead.

He then checked the man’s phone to see if there were texts about others he might be working with for coordinated attacks. But he couldn’t access messages in the password-protected device.

Paramedics and LAPD soon arrived to take charge of the scene.

This incident was the spark that gave life to the organization destined to become I-squared.

And yet, the shooting itself was not the genesis.

What spurred him to act came days later when he learned the shooter, John Ray Hobart, had been active on a website.

Williamson had logged on to check it out. The site had a chan chat board and an imageboard that were filled like a hornet’s nest with hateful rants, angry diatribes, disgusting cartoons and pictures. Racism and misogyny-fueled conspiracy theories abounded.

The shooter at the church had been called a hero.

And the site was not even hidden in the corners of the dark web. It was free for anyone to access by using simple search terms.

Williamson sucked in a breath—a rare show of emotion—when he read some of the posts about Hobart and the shooting. Hundreds extolled him as a martyr to the “cause.”

One began: All he was trying to do was kill a bunch of ...

And of course the vile word made yet another appearance. On that page alone he counted it two dozen times.

As a senior agent in Homeland Security, he was more than aware of terrorist threats against the country and the efforts by the federal government to identify and thwart them.

But after the shooting at the church and his discovery of the website and many others like it, Eric Williamson came up with a new concept: micro threats to national security.

Not hatched by enemies overseas or domestic extremist organizations, these were perpetrated by lone actors or small groups.

Each incident might account for only one or two deaths—but those crimes, in the aggregate, were as much a threat to the fabric of America as a coordinated attack planned in some far-flung terrorist enclave.

Williamson wanted a rapid response team that operated independently to find and thwart them before they carried out their deadly plans.

And so began his quest to create a dedicated group. The new unit would devote itself to searching for these micro threats by scouring the web, NCIC, social media and regular news sources for any hint of brewing danger. He would then send the rapid response team to stop it.

Which was why he’d been delighted to score Professor Jake Heron—the best on the web he had ever met. Carmen Sanchez too, who not only had a background in cybercrime but had served on the FBI’s LA field office SWAT team.

Until Williamson had recruited her for Homeland.

Then came Declan. Williamson was the first in the Department of Justice to employ a large language model this way, searching for any traces of a micro threat.

But resistance within the DOJ was fierce, especially from the man who could give the yea or nay to the program he’d proposed, none other than Stanley Reynolds.

A new, streamlined unit that operated independently and moved fast, without involving endless chains of command, was “out of the ordinary.” It threatened both the status quo and his bailiwick.

Reynolds apparently believed, inexplicably, that an outfit like I-squared would endanger his ascension to the top spot at Homeland.

But because of the positive attention garnered after a case Carmen and Jake had recently concluded, somebody over Reynolds’s head had authorized a pilot program to test the concept.

A step forward.

But not enough for Eric Williamson.

He wanted—needed—I-squared to be permanent, and not implemented by executive order, as it had been, but by Congress.

Now it was clear from Reynolds’s message, Williamson had succeeded.

And with some luck, the subcommittee might have also approved the staff expansion he dreamed of. He envisioned Carmen overseeing a dozen field agents. Heron in charge of I-squared’s cyber operation, white hat hackers and penetration testers just like him.

Williamson heard voices just outside his office and looked up to see a man of around thirty and a slightly younger woman, both with dark-blond hair in, respectively, a businessman’s trim and a taut ponytail.

Destiny Baker spoke to them, and she walked to the door. “You free now?”

You bet he was. A nod.

She escorted the two inside.

“Agent Williamson. I’m Steve Mehlman. And this is my associate, Karen Winters. Office of Legislative Counsel.”

The men shook hands, she nodded.

“Please, sit.”

“We can’t stay, sir. We’re only here for some signatures.” The man glanced to Winters, who dug into a shoulder bag and withdrew an 8⒈／⒉ × 11-inch envelope and two sheets of white paper. She gave them to Mehlman, who completed the hand-off to Williamson.

“If you could sign both copies. One’s for your files.”

It was a receipt saying he acknowledged accepting delivery of certain documents listed below.

He looked at the first item on the list and the smile of anticipation faded.

Wait . . . no!

He tore open the envelope and read.

It was the worst news he could possibly imagine.