Mary Lou might’ve done it. If it were just her and Haley, she would have done it. But she would not let him kill Ihbraham. No, sir.
“Go to hell,” she told him, and hung up the phone.
“Perhaps we should move downstairs,” Ihbraham said. He was carrying both Haley and Amanda, and watching her from the door to the bathroom.
Whitney was watching her, too. Everyone was looking to her for what they should do next.
“Yeah,” Mary Lou said. The smoke was thick at the ceiling. “Let’s move downstairs.”
Sam didn’t slow as they went past the drive that led to the Turlingtons’ gatehouse.
“There’s no physical gate, just a guardhouse with one of those flimsy arms blocking the driveway. I saw no cars stopped,” Alyssa reported. “No sign of Noah and Claire, no sign that anything is wrong at all.”
The brush at the side of the road already concealed them from the gatehouse. It was jungle-thick growth, typical of this part of Florida but definitely suffering from the recent lack of rain.
Sam pulled off the road and got out of the car. Jesus, he was wearing a freaking white shirt. He yanked it over his head. Better to be half naked than a flipping neon target. He kicked off his shoes and stripped off his socks, too, preferring bare feet to slipping around in the underbrush.
Alyssa, too, was attempting to cammy-up. She’d opened the trunk and pulled a green T-shirt out of her bag, changing into it right there by the side of the road.
They had one little handgun between them. Sam handed it to Alyssa. It was hers, after all. She gave him a Swiss army knife in exchange.
“Gee, thanks.”
Was that smoke he smelled? He started through the brush. The ground was soggy, parts of it brackish puddles of stinking mud. If not for the drought, this entire area would have been a knee-deep or even hip-deep swamp.
Alyssa followed, slipping her shoulder holster on and securing the weapon. Yeah, jeez, don’t drop that thing here.
But she wanted her hands free for a different reason. She reached down into the thick mud and grabbed several handfuls, smearing the tar-colored substance down his back and arms. “Hold up, white boy,” she said. “I need to get your front.”
“I’m tan,” he said.
“Not tan enough,” she told him, streaking his chest with black and rubbing both his face and hers with the dirt, too. “I like your body just fine without any bullet holes in it, thanks.”
Then they were moving again, this time with her in the front, weapon back in her hand.
“Alyssa—”
“I’ve got the weapon that can do the most damage,” she told him. “I’m on point, unless you can throw that Girl Scout knife faster and farther than a bullet.”
“No,” Sam said. “I wasn’t going to . . . I just wanted to tell you that I’m glad you’re here.”
They’d reached a chain-link fence.
“And to be careful,” he added as he quickly plucked what looked like a long strand of grass from the surrounding vegetation. He held it against the fence to see if the thing was electrified. But there was no jolt.
“Aha,” she said. “Well, you be careful, too.”
“Always am.”
It was just a regular old fence with a little barbed wire at the top. Pretty flipping ineffective in terms of security.
Both he and Alyssa were over it in a matter of seconds.
And, in moments, there they were. Within sight of the gatehouse.
From this angle, things didn’t look quite so normal. Two bodies—the guards, Sam presumed—had been dragged outside the door. He could see bullet holes in the windows.
The entire building was about the size of a one-car garage. There were windows all around, so you could see clear through it, almost like a ranger station or an air traffic control tower. Anyone inside had a 360-degree view of the surrounding area. And not a whole hell of a lot of cover should an army of terrorists attack.
Sam needed to have a serious talk with the owner of this compound about the clown who had designed his security.
Two men were inside the structure, both of them armed with what looked like some kind of room brooms.
The range on that type of little semiautomatic wasn’t that extensive, but up close it was deadly.
There were quite a few yards of clearing between the brush and the guardhouse—enough so that they would have to step out of hiding in order to get close enough to make Alyssa’s little popgun anything more than an annoyance.
“We need a diversion,” she whispered.
Sam nodded. “Okay. I’ll go back and get the car—”
But she’d started running forward, because—holy fuck—a car already was approaching the gatehouse.
It was—Jesus, no—Noah and Claire.
The smoke was just as bad down on the ground floor.
Both Amanda and Haley were coughing and crying. The heat was incredible.
Ihbraham had filled the bathtub with water and had soaked towels that they all draped over their heads.
“If we opened a window,” he said, “we can get some fresh air.”
“They’re not going to let us anywhere near the windows,” Whitney said.
All three of the men with the guns were out front. Mary Lou hadn’t seen Bob’s golden hair, though. Wherever he was, he was keeping out of sight.
“Let’s get to the garage,” Mary Lou decided. The phone charger was there, in Whitney’s car. Like the girl said, there was no guarantee there would be cell service, but, Lord, they had to try.
Alyssa was up on her feet, weapon out, moving swiftly toward the gatehouse.
She heard more than saw Sam follow—he angled away from her, running hard, shouting at the top of his lungs.
He was trying to draw the gunmen’s fire away from Noah’s car, away from Alyssa, trying to buy her the time she needed to get within range, to aim and shoot.
She kept her eyes on her targets as she squeezed off one shot and then another, but she heard the gunfire and she knew she’d been just a heartbeat too late.
She saw Noah and Claire ducking, she saw her targets punched back and falling.
She saw Sam get hit, too, saw the force of a bullet spin him full around before he slammed into the ground.
“No!” The word was ripped from her, even as she did her job the way she’d been trained and moved toward the gunmen to make sure they weren’t going to pop back up. But she’d taken head shots and no one was going anywhere.
Noah was out of the car, running toward Sam.
Alyssa beat him over there.
“Fuck,” Sam said.
She had never heard a more wonderful word in her entire life. All she could think was Thank God. Thank God he was alive, thank God he was talking, thank God.
“Fuck!” he said again through clenched teeth.
“Ringo!” Noah said, down on his knees beside them. “Holy shit! Holy shit!”
“Give me your shirt,” Alyssa ordered Sam’s cousin, and he stripped off his jacket and his white dress shirt. He had a T-shirt on underneath, and she pointed to it. “That’s even better.”
Sam had been hit in the side of his abdomen. He was bleeding badly, but the entry wound was clean and small, and there was no gaping exit wound in his back. Which was either good news or bad news. Either the bullet that hit him was spent, or it had ricocheted around inside of him, doing serious damage to his internal organs, possibly even hitting his spine.
“Can you move your legs?” Alyssa asked him as Noah gave her his T-shirt. She folded it up and was hesitating to press it against Sam’s wound. She knew from experience how much that was going to hurt.
He answered her by pushing himself onto his hands and knees and then standing up. “Fire,” he said.
She looked up. Whatever was burning was huge. Thick black smoke rolled up into the sky.
Sam took the T-shirt from her and pressed it against himself.
“Fuck!” He staggered slightly, and Alyssa put her a
rm around him on one side, Noah on the other.
“We need to get him to the hospital,” she said.
“Like hell we do,” Sam countered, shaking them both off. Noah had put his dress shirt back on and draped his tie around his neck, and Sam now pulled the tie off of him. He used it to bind the makeshift bandage into place. “We need to get up to that house. Haley’s probably in there.”
Claire was out of the car now, too.
“That’s not going to stop the bleeding,” Alyssa told Sam.
“It’ll do for now” was his terse reply.
“What the fuck is going on?” Noah asked, sounding remarkably like Sam.
“Are those men dead?” Claire asked.
Noah was staring after Sam, who was heading toward the gatehouse. “And, Jesus, what’s with the bare feet?”
“The bad guys got here first,” Alyssa told them. “Yes, they’re dead, and Sam didn’t want to wear dress shoes in the woods—he was afraid he’d slip.”
“Hey,” Sam shouted from inside the guardhouse, and she dashed over to join him. He had a phone handset to his ear. “There’s a direct phone line to the house. At least that’s what the little label says this is. Everything else is out but . . . Hey, Mary Lou. Halle-fucking-lujah. It’s Sam. We’ve taken back the gate. What’s your status up there? Where’s the fire? Is Haley all right?”
“There’s no phone line going out?” Alyssa asked as she picked the semiautomatics up off the floor. “Ask if they have a working phone up at the house.”
“Mary Lou, do you have a phone with an outside line?” Sam looked at Alyssa and shook his head no.
“Okay,” she said to Noah and Claire as she went outside, “here’s what we need you to do. Find the nearest neighbor and use their telephone. Call and ask for Max Bhagat or Jules Cassidy. Give them a status report. Tell them we’ve taken the gate, but we’re going to have to leave it unattended so there might be trouble again when they arrive. Tell them there’s a fire at the house—my guess is the tangos are trying to smoke Mary Lou out. Tell them that Sam and I can’t wait for backup.”
She took a pen from her pocket and, using Sam’s technique, took hold of Noah’s arm, writing both Max’s and Jules’s names and phone numbers right on his forearm. He already had this address on his hand, and Alyssa had to smile. “Guess you are Sam’s cousin.”
“We really should take Ringo to the hospital,” Claire said in a very no-nonsense voice as Noah sat down on the ground and took off his shoes.
Alyssa glanced at her. Noah’s wife could have passed as her own sister. Wasn’t that interesting? She wondered inanely if Noah liked chocolate.
“Sam’ll go when he’s ready to go,” she told them. “Wait by the phone for an all clear before you return. Do not come back here until you know it’s safe. You’ve got to promise me that.”
Noah nodded, back on his feet. “That’s not a hard promise to make. Give these to Ringo. They’ve got rubber soles. And promise me you’ll take care of him.”
“If he dies,” Alyssa told them as she took Noah’s shoes, “it’s only going to be because I’ve died, too.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
“Alyssa, I could use your brain over here,” Sam shouted, and she came running into the gatehouse.
Outside, Noah and Claire were getting into their car and backing out, onto the street.
“They’re going to find a phone,” Alyssa reported as she set Nos’s shoes—he still wore Hush Puppies—on the table. “And then they’re going to stay where it’s safe.”
“Thank you,” he said. Good thing someone here was thinking clearly.
Throughout his life, pain and Sam had never stayed strangers for any great length of time. He was always walking around dinged up, as Dot had called it, one way or another. Twisted ankles, sprained knees, black eyes, split lips, broken collarbones, and cracked ribs.
They all hurt to some degree.
Getting shot, however, fucking hurt.
It made it a little hard to concentrate.
And Alyssa had been right about the bleeding. It wasn’t stopping. He had to apply pressure, which he hadn’t been able to do with one hand holding the phone and the other drawing a layout of the house and the yard as Mary Lou described it to him.
“Thank you for taking care of them,” Sam told Alyssa.
She didn’t even glance at the bodies on the floor—her whole attention was on his little pencil drawing. “What’s the situation?”
“We’ve got two shooters, formerly three, up at the house. One’s been taken out, if you can believe that. Mary Lou’s boss is a gun collector, and his teenage daughter’s up there with Mary Lou and Rahman. They’re all hunkered down over here—” He tapped on the right side of the drawing. “—in the garage right now. Rahman went to open the window because the smoke’s thick, and he got shot for his trouble. Whitney—the daughter—actually returned fire. She’s some kind of marksman, and Mary Lou thinks that shooter is dead. And they did manage to get a little air. But just a little.
“Rahman’s alive,” Sam told her, “but he’s bleeding and immobile. Whitney’s daughter, Amanda, is also with them, and she and Haley are having trouble breathing. The heat’s getting intense.
“Mary Lou says the two other shooters faded back into the trees. She doesn’t know where they are, but they’re definitely still there because she stuck a rake up in front of the window and it was shot at.”
“Good thinking,” Alyssa said, looking up at him.
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“So what’s the plan?”
“We go up there,” he said, “and we do the same thing. Only this time we make them shoot at the rake in the window with you in position on the second floor, ready to snipe the snipers.”
“Okay,” she said. “And there’s a rifle and ammunition up there? Because the weapons we have here won’t get that job done.”
“As far as I can tell,” Sam said. “Yeah. We just have to get there. I’m thinking we’ll just drive like hell, right through the front door.”
Alyssa nodded again. “I’ll get the car. You call Mary Lou back and make sure Annie Oakley is told to hold her fire.”
“Lys.”
She turned back, her concern for him in her eyes.
“There’s a variable here that you need to know about. Mary Lou spoke to someone she called Bob, on this very telephone. He’s the man from the photo—Donny’s light-haired alien. She says he’s definitely here, but she hasn’t seen him.”
She started to look, maybe for the first time, into the faces of the men she’d killed just moments earlier, while she was saving Noah’s and Claire’s and his lives. Knowing Alyssa, that had to be hard. Sam knew she didn’t want to think of them as people with faces and names, so he stopped her.
“I already checked,” he told her. “No one here is even remotely blond.”
“So he’s out there, too, somewhere,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said. It made her own risk in this so much greater.
Alyssa didn’t even blink. “I’ll get the car.” She handed him one of the room brooms. “Keep your eyes open.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Ready for this, bossman?” Jules sounded really excited about whatever he was going to report over the radio, and Max had a moment of deep regret.
As good as Peggy Ryan was—and she was a solid choice for his replacement—she didn’t have any kind of a relationship with Jules Cassidy. His sexual orientation was a problem for a lot of people, though—not just Peggy. And it wasn’t that she disliked him. He just made her uncomfortable. Because of that, she tried not to notice him, which meant he wouldn’t go far on her team.
And that was a real shame, because Jules had genuine talent.
Of course, if the frustration got too intense for him, he could always resign and join that civilian team of Tom Paoletti’s that everyone in the Spec Op dungeons was speculating wildly about.
Max had to laugh. He wondered if Paoletti eve
n knew about it yet. Damn, the man was still facing treason charges.
“We’ve identified the man in the picture from the San Diego library—the one with Mary Lou Starrett—as Warren Canton,” Jules said. “He was born in Kansas, moved to Saudi Arabia when he was two years old. His father worked for an oil company, had a heart attack and died, and his mother remarried a Saudi national when he was five. He came back to America about once a year to visit grandparents, then came to attend college at Harvard but left after three semesters. In 1990, he completely dropped off the map.
“Except we have some really good people in intel who dug harder and found out that after Harvard, the golden boy took a Grand Tour with a lot of very interesting destinations. Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Azerbaijan, Iraq. It’s possible Warren forsook his Ivy League education in favor of Terrorist School.
“Then, hey ho. Meet Husaam Abdul-Fataah, who’s been on our most wanted list since he sprang to life full-grown in 1995. We have no photos and no real information on this guy, just a couple of stray fingerprints and this whispered name—oh, and his nickname, too: the Ghost. Everyone’s afraid of him—we are, they are. He’s got connections with most of the brand-name terrorist organizations, although his interest appears to be purely monetary. But he’s got a devoted following and an almost mystical reputation for being able to access targets on American soil and at military installations around the world. We thought it might be a supernatural thing—you know, the Ghost—but intel just tossed out a groovy new theory for us to chew on.
“They think that Husaam Abdul-Fataah is an aka for Warren Canton. Blond hair, blue eyes, boy-next-door smile, he can travel in the West and not get looked at twice.
“He’s believed to be behind a number of attacks in addition to Coronado. If we could get Canton to hold still long enough for us to take his fingerprints and prove he is Abdul-Fataah, we would gain huge strides in this war on terrorism. But dude’s pretty slippery. If he is Abdul-Fataah, this is the first photo anyone anywhere has of him—I’m telling you, this is major.
“We’ve got some analysts who are speculating that his MO is to walk away from an attack, in full view of anyone who might be looking for someone named Abdul-Fataah. Which really pisses me off, by the way. This is the flip side of racial profiling. This bastard is taking advantage of our fine, Western propensity for assumption. We hear a name like Abdul-Fataah, and we automatically think terrorist, we think Arab, we think Muslim extremist—forget about the fact that there are only a handful of extremists, as opposed to the millions and millions of law-abiding Muslims who would never harm another human being. And when we hear Abdul-Fataah, we certainly don’t think white American using an alias.” Jules stopped. Cleared his throat. “Forgive me, sir, I, um, just wanted to add a heads-up in case you get there before the rest of us, over.”
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