As he ran, Merritt clutched at his back for the sawed-off shotgun strapped there. He was still tugging on its rubberized pistol grip, trying to free it from the melted mass of his web belt, when he kicked in the wooden pool gate. Metal gate hardware clattered across the paving stones—but he was already smashing through a field of teak wood patio chairs and flipping tables in his quest for the French doors. Almost there. He was vaguely aware of spotlights focusing on him from the house, but he didn’t give a damn what Sobol was up to. He might drop dead once he got there, but he was getting inside that house.
He whipped out his Mark V knife and slashed the melted bits of the web belt from the shotgun. To save time he hurled the knife ahead, where it stuck quivering in the door frame. He drew the Remington 870 shotgun into his gloved hands and chambered a round with a satisfying click-clack.
Merritt hit the door hard with his booted foot—and damn near shattered his shinbone. His forward momentum sent him hurtling into the door, where his knee came up into his mouth—driving a sharp nail of pain straight to the center of his skull. He staggered back and reflexively wiped the back of his glove across his mouth. It came back covered with blood. His front teeth felt loose.
Doesn’t matter.
Merritt leveled the shotgun at the door handles and blasted a foot-wide hole in their place. He chambered another breaching round and quickly blasted similar holes at the top and bottom where the doors met—the most likely spot for reinforcing bolts.
Hundreds of yards away, the FBI camp was pandemonium. Agents and police scrambled to gather rescue gear while others scrambled to order no one to go anywhere near the site of the attack. It was a disorganized mess. Somewhere in the chaos Trear heard distant shotgun blasts.
He shouted, “Who’s shooting? Decker, order them to cease fire!”
“Com is down.”
Merritt rammed his shoulder into the French doors, bashing them in. He stumbled into a neo-mission-style entertainment room with wide-plank wooden floors. There was a sunken area of sectional sofas in front of a large plasma screen television. The lights here blazed brilliantly, practically blinding him. Nonetheless he craned his neck and weaved from side to side. He knew what he had to do.
The bomb disposal team was taken out by weaponized acoustics, and he wasn’t going to let that happen to him. Merritt raised his shotgun and noticed half a dozen different sensors spaced along the ceiling over each wall—behind the brilliant lights.
A clear and commanding voice called from the doorway leading farther into the house. “You don’t belong here!”
Merritt’s response came out reflexively. “Fuck you, Sobol.”
Merritt heard footsteps approaching him over the wooden floor. It was uncanny. There was definitely the sense that someone was there. A change in the echoes of the room. That’s when Merritt felt as much as heard the deepest sound he’d ever experienced pass over and through him. The nearby coffee table started vibrating so badly that the glass panels fell out of it.
Merritt twisted to look back up at the ceiling and noticed a reflected LED light pulsating on the back of one of the round sensor pods. He raised the shotgun just as an ungodly feeling of horror gripped him. His intestines were trying to strangle him, and he felt his eyes preparing to explode. He screamed in agony and fired the shotgun.
Immediately the pain stopped. Merritt paused for a second to lean over and vomit on the floor, but he was immediately back up. His eyes and nose were bleeding, but he wiped it away and swiveled around to blast another Hatton round into an identical sensor on the far wall. Then the interior wall. He swayed as he pulled more shotgun shells from his cargo pants pockets and started reloading the Remington. Blood dripped onto his fingers from his nose.
“You son of a bitch! I’m going to shut you down, Sobol!” Merritt slid a shell into the magazine. “You hear me?” His words echoed in the big house.
A voice right behind him said, “There’s no need to shout. I can hear you.”
Merritt jumped and turned around, letting loose a shotgun blast into the wall behind him.
The voice was still there, just inches from his face. “I see you got past the firewall.”
How the hell was this possible? The sound was appearing in midair. No stereo could possibly do that. Merritt scanned the arrays of sensors again, but none were visibly active.
The voice was right in his ear, whispering. “They knew you would die, but they sent you, anyway.”
Merritt jumped away, twisting his gloved finger in his ear as though an insect had flown into it. “Son of a—”
Merritt let the shotgun hang from its shoulder strap while he drew one of his twin P14-45 pistols. The voice continued in his ear, but there was no pain. No agonizing constriction of his intestines.
“They’re willing to sacrifice you to find out what I’m capable of.”
“Keep talking, asshole.” Merritt stood in formal range stance—aiming at the ceiling sensors. He started shooting them out, one by one, waiting a second after each shot.
“Did they even tell you—”
The fourth shot cut him off. A reflective, white plastic panel shattered as the bullet hit it. The voice was gone. Merritt shot out another identical sensor on the far wall, then flipped the safety on the pistol, holstering it. “Blah, blah, blah.”
Merritt noticed his reflection in a mirror over the mantel as he walked farther into the room. His whole face was crimson red and covered in blisters, with the headset melted onto his cheek. His Pro-Tec helmet had protected his scalp, but the whites of his eyes were shockingly blood red—and blood trailed down from his nose over his burnt chin. The Nomex hood and suit had kept him alive, but he might soon be entering cataleptic shock. The dizziness came at him in waves. He felt the rage building in him again. His men had had much worse.
Merritt heard a slight tick sound and a sizzle of static electricity. He spun around to see the plasma-screen television come to life. A 3-D graphic of the mansion as seen from the air resolved on-screen. It looked like a briefing schematic.
“You’re here for the server room. It’s down the hall, to the left, and to the left again. I’m sure they gave you a map, but in case it burned up, here are directions….” The 3-D graphic leaped into action, with the camera performing a virtual fly-through, coming down on the mansion from above, straight through the doors Merritt had entered by. The camera flew down the adjoining hall, banked left, then sailed through the billiard room, left, and up to the cellar door—which flung open as the camera went down into blackness. It was like a first-person video game.
Merritt grabbed an end table nearby, clearing off the lamp standing on it.
Sobol’s voice continued, oblivious. “Did you want me to replay that? Yes or no.”
The face of the plasma-screen television shattered under the impact of the heavy end table, and the entire thing keeled over backward on its stand—sending up a puff of electrical smoke as it died hitting the floor.
“No more mind games.” Merritt strode past it and grabbed a piece of the sectional sofa, pulling it up with great effort from the sunken area onto the main floor level. He shouldered it in front of him as he advanced toward the doorway leading farther into the house. He held the shotgun in his free hand.
The dimensions of Sobol’s house went beyond anything Merritt would consider a home. To him it felt more like a university building. He guessed these were twelve-to sixteen-foot ceilings, and the doors and adjoining hallways were all two or three times wider and taller than necessary. The hall adjoining the entertainment area was easily ten feet wide, with terra cotta tile flooring in two-foot squares. The hall could pass as a serviceable elevator lobby for the Biltmore. It ran along the center of the house and was braced here and there with gargantuan furniture—angry-looking armoires and iron-studded cabinets done in something akin to Spanish Inquisition style. They looked large enough to serve as a redoubt in the event of Indian attack.
As he stood at the entrance to the wide ha
llway, Merritt leaned right and left to glimpse a little of what lay ahead. He couldn’t see into any of the doorways. He pushed the sofa section onward, down the left side of the hall. The sofa’s metal-studded feet scraped the tile like nails on a chalkboard.
Suddenly the floor dropped away beneath the sofa section, and Merritt caught himself just before pitching forward into the yawning blackness below the trapdoor. The sofa splashed into a water-filled pit, and then the floor section snapped up, almost hitting Merritt in the face. He heard a latch click, locking the floor in place. It was obviously meant to prevent escape from the pit once a victim fell in.
Merritt pounded the trapdoor with the butt of his shotgun. The floor seemed firm. He didn’t want to take any chances, so he backed up to get a running start. He sprinted and leaped over the farthest seam of the trapdoor, landing in a tumble he purposely shortened by rolling hard into an armoire the size and height of a squatter’s shack. In a moment he was up and ready with the shotgun.
He felt the humming sound of the acoustic weapons powering up. He glanced right and left up near the ceiling and found the nearest acoustic pod. A blast from the shotgun took it clean off the wall. He found its twin behind him and blasted that as well. He collected his breath in the resulting silence.
Suddenly a voice in front of him said, “Slap a pair of tits and a ponytail on you, and we’ve got ourselves a game.”
Merritt just gave Sobol’s voice the finger. Let him talk. Merritt had to conserve ammunition.
It was time to orient himself. He pulled a laminated floor plan card of Sobol’s house from his chest pocket. It was warped from the heat of the fire but still legible. Merritt found his location and realized he wasn’t far from the cellar door—and the pit that swallowed the bomb disposal robot. Merritt looked up and noticed the silence.
“What’s the matter, Sobol? Run out of things to say?”
The voice spoke from the same place—right in front of him. “I didn’t catch that.”
“I said, cat got your tongue?”
“I didn’t catch that.”
It couldn’t really understand him. This was all an elaborate technological trick. A logic tree with weaponry.
“Dead retard.” Merritt pocketed the card and put a shoulder behind the heavy armoire, trying to push it ahead of him. It insisted on being stationary. He took a step back to look at it. He’d seen railroad trestles built with less wood. It looked a century old and its shelves were lined with Talavera plates and wooden carvings of Dia de los Muertos figurines. Merritt smiled humorlessly at the little skeletons cavorting and going about their daily business—apparently unaffected by their demise. Real cute.
He grabbed a bronze candlestick off the shelf and looked ahead of him. A twenty-foot stretch of barren hall lay before him. After that, he’d be at the doorway opening onto the billiards room—which led to the cellar door.
He slung the shotgun and got down onto his belly, spreading his weight over the tile floor. He turned back to rap the hollow floor behind him—to get a sense for its sound. Then he rapped the floor under him. Solid. Very different sound. Merritt faced forward again, and he started crawling, cautiously rapping on the floor with the heavy candlestick as he went.
Merritt was halfway along the open stretch of hall when Sobol’s voice spoke again a foot or so in front of Merritt’s face. “I hate to interrupt, but now I have to kill you.”
Merritt heard something from deep inside the house. It sounded like a sump pump—only many times larger than the one in Merritt’s house. The sound of water coursing through pipes came to his ears, and suddenly water began to silently spread out across the floor from an unseen vent beneath the baseboards. Then Merritt glanced left, right, and back behind him. The water was coming at him from ahead and behind—spreading out from the walls across the tile floor about a half-inch deep. Merritt got up into a crouch, not sure what to do next. He’d never reach the armoire before the water overtook him.
And what could the water do, anyway? Sobol could never fill this room—there were six or seven doorways leading into it. Merritt started scanning the walls for hidden danger. And he quickly found it.
Ahead of him, one of the electrical outlets in the wall suddenly extended out and down onto the floor. It was mounted on the end of a curved bar. A zap and pop were audible as the socket hit the surface of the water—which was now electrified.
“Shit!” Merritt leaped to his feet and looked around for something to stand on. Nothing. He quickly flipped the shotgun from his back and blasted two holes in the lath and plaster wall near him—one about a foot from the floor, and another at hand-holding height. He let the shotgun fall on its shoulder strap as he jumped, latching on to the jagged edges of the holes just as water collided beneath him from both directions.
Merritt almost lost his grip as the thin slats of broken wood snapped under his weight. But he soon found studs and cross-braces to cling to. He took a deep breath and leaned his burnt face against the cool plaster. He was really starting to feel the pain of his burns now. Second-degree burns were the worst for pain. He collected himself, then glanced beneath him.
The water was now about three inches deep on the floor and was draining through the seams of several pits. The cascade of water echoed below the floor. More water was constantly being pumped in, but it appeared to have found equilibrium. The humming sound of the electrified surface was unnerving.
Merritt looked ahead. He was only eight feet or so from the billiard room doorway, and there was a step up—so the water was not rushing into it.
Merritt began ripping out lath slats and kicking in the plaster wall ahead of him. His bulletproof gloves and armored knuckle plates helped as he repeatedly punched the cracked edge of the rapidly expanding hole. The debris fell into the buzzing water below.
It took him a good five minutes, but he was soon at the edge of the billiard room doorway. He leaned over to gaze inside. It contained twin pool tables and a bar that would suffice for a small town. He immediately considered the many ways this room could kill him. High-speed billiard balls fired from an antique cannon. Molotov cocktails of twenty-year-old scotch. Asbestos poisoning. Choking hazards. He couldn’t begin to guess.
Even at this distance, Merritt could see one of the acoustic weapon sensors up near the ceiling. He unholstered his pistol with his right hand while holding on to a wooden beam with the other. He raised the gun, aimed carefully, and sent three shots into the pod. Parts of it fell to the carpeted floor at the foot of the bar.
Merritt stared at the room. What the hell…
He unhooked a flash-bang grenade from his web harness. The grenade handle was melted onto the webbing, but he managed to pull it off. He struggled to remove the pin while still holding on to the beam. Most people thought you could pull the pin with your teeth, but that was a great way to crack a tooth or blast your head off—or both. He finally wrapped his hand around the beam and pulled the pin out with his forefinger. He tossed the grenade into the center of the nearest pool table—then he ducked around the corner.
The blast was deafening even at this distance. The beams of the house shook, and he heard lots of shattering glass. He hoped it would confuse any infrared or acoustical sensors. Merritt swung around the corner and ran headlong toward the nearest table—whose felt top was scorched and smoking from the blast.
Merritt lunged onto the tabletop and rolled over its far edge. Then he rolled over the next one as well, landing like a cat, crouched and ready for action with the shotgun. He covered the last ten feet to the opposite doorway and slammed his body against the wall there. He was breathing hard—but then again his heart had been beating 180 times a minute since he entered the house.
The telltale sound of acoustical weapons powering up reached him. He aimed upward and blasted the pod into plastic confetti that rained down on him. He scanned the ceiling, but none of the other pods seemed threatening.
The cellar door was four feet ahead and to his left. The floor bef
ore it was terra cotta tile—but he knew it concealed the pit that had swallowed the FBI’s bomb disposal robot. He looked for seams, but the pit was well concealed.
Merritt stood back at the edge of the short hall, then leaned forward and depressed the cellar’s lever door handle with the shotgun barrel.
Suddenly a four-foot section of floor in front of the cellar door fell away, revealing a brick-lined pit splashing with water. The tip of a robot arm extended above the water’s surface. Merritt quickly jumped to the far side of the pit, then leaned forward and grabbed the cellar door handle. He pried the door open as it resisted. He shoved the shotgun behind the door, pointing at the top hinge.
BOOM!
The top of the door fell away from the wall, and with a little twisting and kicking, the other hinge ripped off. The door fell into the pit, smacking the water with its flat face.
Merritt looked into the doorway and could see the top of a flight of steps leading downward. A barred gate blocked his path. They were stainless steel bars, like the kind found on the inner door of a bank vault. A numeric keypad was set into the steel strike plate.
The voice spoke, this time right behind Merritt’s head. “Dave, Stop. Stop, Dave.”
“Fuck off, Sobol.” Merritt concentrated on the keypad in the strike plate. He was no security specialist, and he knew it was probably booby-trapped. He aimed the shotgun at an angle and squeezed off a Hatton round into the strike plate. The lead and wax slug disintegrated into a pall of smoke. Merritt waved it away and looked at the strike plate. The keypad was entirely gone—leaving behind only a small round hole where its electronics entered the steel gate mechanism. Otherwise the strike plate was undamaged. Hot lead was useless against it.
Merritt unholstered his second P14 pistol. He’d give hot copper a try. Merritt aimed at the strike plate, then fired repeatedly at the same spot. Bullet holes appeared in the far wall as they ricocheted. After the last shot, he inspected the damage. Fourteen shots and he had successfully dulled the finish—barely.
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