by Patrick Lee
“I don’t know about that,” Garner said. “I was thinking I might just stand here and watch the minute hand tick a few times. If I don’t show up on the call, that in itself raises a few flags. I don’t imagine you and your people want any flags going up, if you expect to keep whatever you’re doing secret for another four months.”
Travis saw something flicker through Finn’s expression at that line. Something like amusement. It vanished as quickly as it’d appeared.
“Here’s your problem,” Currey said. “From this point forward, your goal is to build a base of support against us. To do that, you need to convince rational people of something no rational person can believe without proof. If you had one of the cylinders, it’d be easy for you. You could show people what’s on the other side. But you’ve lost that advantage now. So who’s going to believe you? It won’t carry much weight that you’re a former president, when the people contradicting your claim include the sitting president and his entire cabinet, among many others.”
Travis watched the resolve fade from Garner’s eyes. Watched something darker take its place.
“It’s over, Rich,” Currey said. “All that’s left is to acknowledge it. And the sooner, the better—at least for you. We’d be happy to leave you alone, once you’ve cooperated. It’s not in our interests to stir up any headlines just now.”
Garner looked at Paige, right beside him, then at Bethany and Travis.
“What happens to the others?” Garner said. “And don’t bullshit me, Walter. I’ll be able to tell.”
“I know it,” Currey said. There was a long pause, and then he said, “All right, fine. They die. They go to Rockport Army Depot on Long Island, they get interrogated by some friends of ours there, and then they get a bullet to the temple each. Sound like the truth? The thing is, that part happens regardless of the outcome. You can’t help them. You need to take care of yourself, now. So do it. Get on the call and make it right. I’ll get out of the way so you can.”
The line clicked dead.
Finn pressed the button to hang up the phone, then held it out to Garner.
The wall clock showed thirty seconds left. In all likelihood, Travis knew, the other parties had already called in and were waiting.
Garner didn’t take the phone. He looked at the three of them again, beside him along the wall. His eyes stayed on each one for a few seconds. Then he looked down, straight in front of himself. Travis saw his eyes track across the floor in an arc, just below the feet of the six gunmen. It almost seemed that he was getting a sense of the men, without appearing to do so. Travis wondered why. He did the same himself. He took in their posture. They were alert but not poised. Their weapons had dropped to their sides over the past couple minutes—but they could be aimed again in a quarter second, so Travis couldn’t see how it mattered. Maybe Garner’s assessment was only the manifestation of a wish that he could do something. Nothing more than that. Already he was staring down at his hands, folded before him. Looking hopeless. Looking like he’d made up his mind.
He took the phone from Finn.
“Keep it on speaker,” Finn said.
Garner nodded.
“Sir, don’t do this,” Paige said.
She looked at Garner, but the man could no longer meet her eyes. He punched a number into the phone. It began to ring.
“Mr. President…” Paige said. Travis heard her voice crack. It had nothing to do with fear, he knew. It was simply disappointment to a crushing degree. Paige had known Garner for some time, and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Or didn’t want to, at least.
The ringing stopped and a recording came on. It told Garner to enter something called a bridge code. He entered it. There was a tone and a series of clicks. Travis guessed the same recorded voice was letting the others on the call know that Garner had joined.
A tear overran one of Paige’s eyes and drew a long track down her cheek.
Then the line opened and several voices were speaking at once, saying hello and asking if everyone was on.
“Gentlemen,” Garner said.
The voices went quiet.
Garner took a breath. Continued avoiding Paige’s stare. He let the breath out slowly.
“Gentlemen, I seem to have inconvenienced you for nothing. I’ve just spoken at length with President Currey, and I’m now confident that he has control of what I planned to discuss with you. It’s not something any of us needs to worry about. And I’m sorry to cut it short, but that’ll be it.”
He turned the phone off. Lowered his head.
Finn looked more relieved than happy. Travis could almost see sympathy for Garner in his expression.
“You’re a realist,” Finn said. “I could always see that in you. There’s no shame in it. You’re a man who understands his options, that’s all.”
He took the phone from Garner.
Garner didn’t look at him, but after a second he finally met Paige’s eyes.
“You probably want to slap my face as hard as you can,” Garner said.
“Don’t tempt me,” Paige said.
“No, I think you should do it. You’ll feel better. So will I.”
For a moment she only stared at him. His face was devoid of anything but pity, maybe for himself more than the three of them.
And then Paige slapped him. It had to be the hardest open-handed hit Travis had ever seen. The sound of it, loud and sharp as a whip-crack, echoed off the windows, the opposite wall, the stone floor of the hallway nearby. It rocked Garner’s head sideways, throwing his balance off enough to make him take a step.
When he looked back at Paige, there was blood on his lip.
But he was smiling.
A strange kind of smile. Like he was in on a joke no one else understood yet. He turned to Finn. The smile hardened. Became colder.
Finn looked puzzled for maybe half a second.
And then he looked scared.
“I understand my options better than you do,” Garner said.
If he’d said another word it would’ve been lost under the sound of the hallway door slamming inward. Travis snapped his head to the side and saw two men in crisp black suits coming through, with MP5 submachine guns shouldered. In almost the same instant he heard similar crashing impacts from elsewhere in the residence—two other teams coming in somewhere.
He understood at once why Garner had taken note of the six gunmen and their relaxed postures. They were plenty prepared to raise their silenced Berettas if any of their four captives made a move—but the sudden arrival of armed Secret Service agents was a very different matter.
The effect on the six men—not to mention Finn—was immediate. Their heads turned toward the sounds of the various doors breaking in. From where they stood—the six of them in their long arc—they couldn’t see directly down the entry hall. Travis and the other three could: the living-room wall they stood against was an extension of one side of the hall.
But Finn’s gunmen knew exactly who was coming. The part of their brains that would’ve told them to drop a hot potato had figured it out in about a hundredth of a second. The result, Travis saw, was a kind of neural tug-of-war between all possible reactions: killing the captives, finding cover, getting the hell out of this place. Not the kind of decision they could make in the almost comically small amount of time they had to work with.
At least one of the six opted for the first choice. The man nearest to Travis. The guy’s Beretta began to come up toward the four of them, even as the Secret Service men in the hallway advanced at a sprint. They’d reach the living room soon, but not soon enough.
Travis threw himself forward at the man bringing up his gun. The two of them were lined up in a perfect face-off. Travis crossed the five-foot reach of space between them in the time it took the gun to come up to chest level. He got his left hand around the silencer, yanked the weapon down and away from pointing at the others, and punched the guy in the throat with all the force his weight and momentum could provide. Whic
h turned out to be enough. The guy’s hand came off the gun with a reflexive jerk. And then Travis was twisting, holding the pistol, going right past the guy and beyond the arc of the others. Not trying to check his speed. Not even trying to stay on his feet.
He took one more step before his balance outran him, and then he was falling, completing his spin as he dropped. Still holding the Beretta in his left hand by its silencer. He brought his right hand up and took the weapon by the grip. Raised it to sight in on one of the still-armed gunmen. His angle of fire, as he fell, was tilted radically upward. If he missed, the bullet would hit only the ceiling—there was no more of the building above this floor.
He fired. He didn’t miss. The shot hit the man at the base of his skull and blew it open.
Then Travis’s ass hit the floor painfully and his gun arm dropped beyond his control.
By then, everyone was moving. Things were happening too quickly for him to keep track of. He saw Paige and Bethany ducking and running toward him, getting out of the kill zone that was about to open up between the gunmen and the oncoming agents in the hall. He could hear the agents’ footsteps, as well as those of the other teams, still out of sight somewhere behind him. He could see the gunmen scattering, ducking—no doubt they could see the agents now. One man slammed into the leather chair that held the two cylinders. The chair pitched forward, spilling the cylinders onto the carpet. They rolled in different directions—neither one toward Travis.
Travis raised the Beretta again, looking for a target, when it occurred to him what he was doing. He was holding a pistol, in a room containing a former president, into which Secret Service agents were about to flood.
Not a good way to stay alive.
He cocked his wrist and threw the gun sideways, saw it hit the carpet and spin into the gap beneath the couch. At the same time he saw Paige and Bethany diving toward him, and even as they hit the ground the shooting started.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Travis saw within seconds that it wasn’t going to shake out in their favor. Finn and his men had fallen back to defensive positions in adjoining rooms, leaving Garner alone where he stood. The Secret Service agents were already converging on him, unloading suppressing fire at the doorways through which the others had retreated.
But not engaging them.
Not attacking.
That wasn’t their job.
Their job was to get Garner out of harm’s way, and they would do it in probably fifteen seconds. Twenty at the most. They would surround him and hustle him out, down the entry hall and out into the larger corridor. Probably right out of the building after that. They would maintain fire to cover the retreat from the residence, but that would be it. Not even Garner could order them to do otherwise. In the heat of it all, they wouldn’t even be listening to him.
Well under half a minute from right now, Travis knew, the three of them would be left alone with Finn’s remaining people—nearly all of them still alive.
Travis was lying facedown on the floor now, hands outstretched and empty. Paige and Bethany, right beside him, were in the same position.
Travis turned his head and saw two agents pass by on the inside wall of the living room. They were firing three-shot bursts.
The rest of the action was going on where Travis couldn’t see it. He couldn’t tell if Finn’s people were shooting. Their silenced fire would’ve been impossible to make out against the other shots.
Paige turned to him, her eyes intense. She understood the trouble they were in as well as he did. Then she looked past him. He turned to follow her gaze, and saw one of the cylinders.
It was ten feet away, under the coffee table.
He looked for the other one. Couldn’t see it anywhere. Given the direction it’d rolled, it had to be closer to Finn’s position now. It wasn’t even worth thinking about.
Travis looked at the nearer one. If he could get to it and get the iris open, no special care would be needed to position it. The ruin of this building had thick steel gridwork for subflooring instead of concrete and rebar. The grids were completely rusted, but because they were such a heavy gauge—inch-thick steel rods crisscrossing at three-inch intervals—they were still very strong. No matter where he opened the iris, there would be a solid surface to crawl onto on the other side.
It would take him two seconds to reach the cylinder, starting from his prone position.
Paige saw what he was thinking. “You can’t!” Her voice was just audible under the shooting. “The agents will think you’re going for a weapon!”
He craned his neck around to look at them. They’d reached Garner. They’d boxed him in. Two or three of them, with their free hands, had grabbed hold of the man’s arms. They were dragging him toward the hall. Garner was shouting something at them, as Travis had imagined. It was about as effective as he’d imagined, too. Ten more seconds and they’d be gone. They were still shooting at the doorways through which Finn and his people had ducked. Sporadic fire, meant only for deterrence.
One of the agents had his eyes fixed on Travis and Paige and Bethany, even as his MP5 stayed trained on the doorways. He could swing the weapon toward the three of them, where they lay, about as quickly as he could decide they were a threat.
Travis wouldn’t get halfway to the cylinder if he went for it.
He judged the agents’ progress toward the mouth of the entry hall, beyond which they wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. Five seconds now, at most.
He looked at the doorways. Finn and the others were somewhere beyond them. Travis had no doubt that Finn, at least, was running the same calculation he was: gauging the straight-razor margin of time between the agents’ departure from the suite and the earliest moment that Travis could reach the cylinder and trigger the iris.
It would take some number of seconds, and some number of seconds would be available. One of those numbers would turn out to be larger than the other. In the end it would be that simple.
In the last few feet before the mouth of the hallway, the Secret Service agents began to run. They hauled Garner along, barely on his feet.
And then they were gone, out of Travis’s view, into the hall.
Travis moved. Drew his legs up under him, dug his feet into the carpet and lunged. Even as he did, he heard—even felt—the suite go silent as the shooting stopped. The agents were simply hauling ass now, transiting the length of the entry hall as fast as they could physically go. Their footsteps were the only sound—for a second. And then there were other footsteps, nearer by.
Travis hit the coffee table with both hands. Slammed it aside like it weighed nothing, though it was made of solid walnut.
Finn and the others were coming fast. Maybe not through the doorways yet, but close.
Travis got his hands on the cylinder. He landed on his shoulder, twisted and aimed the thing toward Paige and Bethany. He hit the on button and the off (detach/delay—93 sec.) button a fraction of a second apart.
The iris opened a few inches above the floor. The night beyond it was dark and depthless except for streaks of rain at the opening, silvery in the light-bleed from the suite. The projection beam was already intensifying, charging the iris to stay open on its own. Travis had never measured exactly how long that part took. It’d always seemed like just a few seconds. It seemed longer now.
The footsteps were closer. Definitely in the living room. Travis didn’t bother turning to look. Whatever he might see, there was nothing he could do any faster.
Paige was up on all fours and moving. Throwing herself into the beam of light, but not toward the iris. Instead she passed through the light, hit the floor and rolled, and came to a stop with her hand clutching Bethany’s backpack. She twisted back toward the iris and threw the pack with all her force. It went through into the darkness. Travis heard the clatter of the SIG and the shotgun shells as the pack landed on the gridwork.
At the same instant the beam finally vanished, leaving the iris alone.
Paige was waving
for Bethany to go through, but Bethany was already moving, fast and lithe. She got her limbs beneath her without rising more than a foot from the floor, and went through the iris in a single movement. No part of her even touched the circle.
Paige was right behind her, and when she was two thirds through the iris, Travis gripped the cylinder in his right hand and tossed it at her backside in an underhand spiral. He was betting it all that she would turn toward him once she’d crossed the threshold. Would turn and have time to catch the thing. He had no choice. His ears told him he was out of time.
Paige spun on her knee the moment she was through the iris—and flinched, her hands coming up just in time to keep the cylinder from smashing into her face. She blocked it and then got hold of it, pulling it against herself, already forgetting it entirely.
Because Finn and two of his men were right there. Ten feet from Travis. Just passing the visual barrier of the overturned leather chair and the upright one beside it. Their guns already coming up to level.
But Travis was coming up, too. Not with a gun of his own. The Beretta was close by, somewhere under the couch, but the gap was too narrow to easily reach into.
What Travis had instead was the coffee table. He had it right by the middle with both hands, raising it over his head, and he was heaving himself upright from a crouch.
Finn and his men faltered. Whatever they’d expected, this wasn’t it.
Travis extended his arms violently as he stood, and hurled the coffee table at them like a two-handed shot put.
Finn ducked. The man to his left brought his forearms up. The man to his right did nothing at all, and Paige saw the leading edge of the table connect dead-on with his nose. There was an explosion of blood across the bottom half of his face.
Paige missed whatever came next. She could see Travis diving toward the opening now, and pitched herself sideways to clear the way. He came through headfirst, landed on his forearms, twisted and pulled his legs the rest of the way across the margin.
