He dumped the burning contents of the garbage container into the kitchen’s restaurant-sized stainless steel sink and opened the faucet as far as he could, not pausing a moment to witness the fire’s demise. Instead, he hurriedly pulled open the rest of the doors and cabinets surrounding him, searching for a pair of scissors, a fire wand, and tape, all of which he found in short order.
He considered several kitchen knives, but they were poorly balanced and would bounce off the body armor the Russians were no doubt wearing, assuming he could throw them with any accuracy in the first place. He finally selected a small but lethal steak knife and taped it to his thigh, outside of his pants, testing first to be sure it wouldn’t obstruct or stab him as he ran.
Carr briefly considered crafting homemade body armor to put over his heart, but this would take far too much time given the power of the weapons he was up against. Thick frying pans were all around him, but one of these wouldn’t be nearly enough. He’d have to find some old-fashioned paperback books and tape a stack of three or four of them to the pan, and then tape the entire mess under his shirt. If the Russians would promise to only shoot at his heart, this would be worth the trouble, but he suspected they would cheat and go for his head.
Carr moved to the nearby liquor cabinet and removed two bottles of brandy, pouring out a third of the contents of each and filling them back to the top with the higher-proof rubbing alcohol. He then cut two long pieces of the bathing suit and shoved the ends of the polyester strips inside each bottle, tightening the caps to keep them in place. Unlike cotton, which would need to be doused in alcohol to make a good fuse, polyester would ignite quickly and burn even after a flame was removed. This would let him light the tail hanging outside of the bottles without having to use the fire bombs right away.
Satisfied that he had been able to whip up the two Molotov cocktails in little more than a minute, he zippered them into cozy side compartments on opposite ends of the overnight bag, confirmed that the middle compartment still contained a can of hairspray and a fire wand, and ran from the kitchen.
He could have taken any number of weapons that would have been helpful in close quarters but deemed these not worth the time and effort. He would also have loved to explore other rooms, especially the garage, but he was well out of time.
He quickly made it to the front of the mansion as the alarms continued to stab at his eardrums like ice picks.
53
Carr raced from the front of the residence toward the front of the guest house like he was being chased by a tribe of cannibals. From what he had seen in the panic room monitors, he was out of sight of the Russians. They would also be stressed out by the alarms he had triggered, causing them a delay while they pondered these new circumstances.
The three soldiers who had begun to move toward the back of the guest house would be entirely focused on their imminent operation. He was out of view of their expected approach, and would stay that way as long as they didn’t guess he would be bold enough to sprint to the site in the open, like a streaker looking for maximum attention.
If they did consider this possibility, he would fall dead without ever knowing what hit him. A bold, risky strategy, made easier because it was also his only strategy. At least if he wanted to get to Estrada in time to have any chance of saving him.
As he neared the guest house he put on the brakes and began a more stealthy approach, relieved to still be alive after his reckless dash through wide open spaces. He spotted the three Russians nearing the house, but he made sure to stay out of sight. His timing couldn’t have been more perfect.
As Carr inched closer, Greshnev and his two comrades converged on the back door. The Russians were well aware that the pilot had been put on alert by the smoke alarms shrieking in the mansion and had changed strategy. Instead of a quiet approach and a surprise attack, they sent several long bursts of automatic fire through the door, just in case the pilot had thought lying in wait for them to enter was a smart move.
Carr was confident Estrada was experienced enough to know better. If not, the pilot was now nothing more than a bloody mass of hamburger.
Carr felt his only chance was to torch the place, in multiple locations, despite the risk to Estrada. He would throw a fire bomb through a window on either side of the house and then start additional fires around the perimeter using the two remaining items in his bag. If he held the fire wand in front of the hairspray, he could shoot a stream of fire seven to ten feet long.
When the flames began to quickly spread throughout the house, the men inside would feel an urgent need to leave. The soldiers who had been left behind to patrol the tree line would assume that Carr was waiting to attack their comrades as they exited the burning deathtrap, and would rush to eliminate Carr before this could happen.
But the lieutenant had no intention of being anywhere near where they expected him to be. As soon as the fires took hold, Carr would circle around to the woods, hoping to sneak up behind the man farthest out, who with any luck would have blinders on, his attention focused squarely on the burning building and his comrades inside, and unable to hear Carr’s quiet approach over the shrieks of the smoke alarms.
The odds of this plan working the way Carr had drawn it up in his imagination were very low, but it was the best chance he had. He had been in situations just as bad before, and had always found a way to win, whether due to luck, an uncanny ability to change tactics as circumstances dictated, or improvisational skills that were second to none.
This had better not be the exception. Too much was riding on him.
Carr was preparing to light the first Molotov cocktail when several gunshots rang out from inside.
A surge of excitement washed through him as he realized the shots hadn’t come from the weapons the Russians were using. Which meant they had to have come from Roberto Estrada. The pilot was armed!
Two bursts of machine gun fire followed immediately. To Carr’s discerning ears they seemed to be slightly offset and coming from two separate locations.
Only two? Had Estrada managed to remove the third soldier from the game?
Carr was elated. He had hoped that Estrada might have access to a gun hidden away inside the guest house, but it had seemed like too much to ask for, so he had gone forward assuming this wouldn’t be the case.
But the fact that Estrada had turned out to be armed wasn’t entirely unexpected. He hadn’t been while piloting the helo, and the main residence had been scoured clean of guns, but this clearly hadn’t been the case when it came to the guest house.
Carr instantly changed strategies to account for this new development. The intruders in the house were now more distracted than he had dared to hope for. So instead of torching the house from the outside, he would rush inside and torch it from within, playing the situation by ear.
Fortune favors the bold, he mouthed to himself as he lit the strip of fabric that dangled from the top of one bottle and moved briskly through the front door, bringing the overnight bag with him.
He moved forward to an opening between rooms and crouched at the edge of a sofa, taking in the scene in the next room in one practiced glance, spying all three Russians at once.
One was sprawled on the ground at the bottom of a broad staircase, marinating in his own blood. Sergei Greshnev was near the top of the stairs, proceeding with great caution, while the last Russian held a position just a few stairs up from the landing, his gun facing forward.
A trail of blood began near the top stair and disappeared around the corner into a hallway.
Carr had a good guess as to how it had all played out. The Russians had most likely been going room to room on the first floor. One had passed by the stairway and Estrada had been waiting for this chance, lying across a stair a few from the top, which had given him the best angle to plant a bullet in the Russian’s head from above.
The two other Russians had responded with bursts of gunfire, which had wounded Estrada as he slinked up the stairs to the temporary safety
of the hallway and parts beyond. The remaining two Russians were understandably careful about charging after a wounded, cornered animal, especially one who had proven his lethality.
Carr crept closer as Greshnev signaled his plan to the soldier near the bottom landing. The captain had no intention of rounding the corner into the hall. Instead, he would move his weapon around the edge and spray a curtain of death, guaranteeing he could follow the submachine gun into the hall without fear of attack.
Carr hastily removed the second Molotov cocktail and lit the fabric, setting both bottles down carefully beside him. The moment the muzzle of Greshnev’s weapon snaked into the hall, Carr acted. He rose up and flung one of the bottles against the wall, just over the head of the soldier near the landing. The glass shattered, and the dense spray of alcohol that resulted ignited faster than the eye could follow, creating a wall of fire that rained down on the Russian soldier.
He shrieked in horror as his face was instantly blistered from the heat and his hair and upper clothing caught fire, but his screams were drowned out by a long burst from Greshnev’s weapon.
Carr’s timing had been excellent once again. He rushed forward with the second Molotov, already lit, and set it on the hardwood floor a few yards from his victim, who was slapping wildly at his head to kill the flames, and then dived at the man, the steak knife he had freed from his thigh in his right hand.
Carr hit the human torch from behind, acquiring burns of his own as he held the Russian steady and slit his throat in one smooth but violent motion. Blood erupted from the man’s throat, dousing some of the flames that were now rising around them.
As Jordan released the body, Greshnev realized what had happened and fired at him from the top stair. Jordan dived to the left to get out of the Russian’s limited range, landing next to the Molotov as he had planned. As Greshnev began to descend to get a better angle on the American, Carr flung the second fire bomb up the stairs, forcing the captain to throw himself flat across two stairs to avoid the resulting spray of fire.
As the bottle was bursting into flame at the top of the stairway, Jordan snatched up the weapon belonging to the man he had killed and raced across the threshold into the kitchen, throwing himself behind a granite-faced counter.
He immediately began shooting toward Greshnev, knowing he couldn’t hit him from this angle but wanting to give him something to think about.
The upper stairs and hallway were now burning behind Greshnev, as was the landing below. So much had happened so quickly, and the Russian was so surprised and enraged that Carr was on the scene and was mounting such a lethal offensive, that he temporarily forgot about the wounded pilot.
But the wounded pilot didn’t forget about him.
As Greshnev moved down the stairs to get free of the growing flames and to engage Carr, Estrada leaped across a wall of fire behind the Russian and put a bullet into the back of his head.
Greshnev slid down the stairs as Estrada ducked down again and tried to assess the situation.
“That’s all of them, Roberto!” shouted Carr. “Get yourself clear of the fire!” he added, but this last was drowned out as the home’s smoke detectors came to life with a vengeance. Carr felt lucky they had waited as long as they had, since a full thirty seconds had passed since he had thrown the first Molotov.
The pilot didn’t need to hear Carr’s directive to know what to do. Putting his arms in front of his face as a shield, he sped down the stairs and through the fire now raging at the landing, miraculously not tripping over the growing collection of bodies that had accumulated there.
Carr put two rounds into the smoke detector in the center of the room, lessening the decibel level somewhat, but others in the house continued to scream.
“We may have more unwanted visitors to deal with in a few minutes!” he shouted as he joined Estrada ten yards on the other side of the growing wall of flame.
The pilot’s shirt was soaked in blood from a bullet that had gone through his left arm. Carr had been nicked twice on the outer side of his right leg and was also bleeding liberally, although neither of Carr’s wounds were a cause for concern.
Estrada nodded. “Follow me!” he shouted, moving away from the fires and toward the entrance to one of the rooms on the first floor.
“We need to get out of here!” shouted Carr, spotting another smoke detector and taking it out, lessening the racket still further. “Neither the fire nor the Russians will wait for long.”
“I’m aware,” replied Estrada, entering the bedroom.
The pilot rushed to a closed bathroom door. “Isaac!” he shouted as loudly as he could. “We’re all clear. Carr came to our rescue. Hurry! We need to go.”
Carr’s mouth fell open as Isaac Jordan emerged from the bathroom, a gun in his hand.
“Thanks for the help, Lieutenant,” bellowed Jordan, loudly enough to be heard over the remaining alarms. “I knew there was a reason I wanted you to join my team so badly.”
54
“Why are you contacting me?” Volkov barked through his comm in Russian to Ivan Makarov, one of the men he had pulled from other duties to join him in Utah. “Where’s Sergei?”
“Possibly down!” said Makarov breathlessly. “He and two of the men were mopping up the guest house in preparation for tackling the main residence. Now the guest house is on fire and we can’t establish communications with the captain or his team. Has to be Carr’s work. We’re moving there now to pin him down.”
“No, you idiot!” yelled Volkov. “Never do what seems obvious. Don’t play checkers while Carr’s playing chess. He’ll expect your move and find a way to counter. Assume the team is lost and double-time it into the mansion—while we know Carr isn’t in it.”
“Roger that,” said Makarov.
“Get the girl at all costs,” he said, “but don’t do anything that might put her life at risk. Understood?”
“Confirmed,” said Makarov. “Moving on the mansion now.”
Volkov’s face flushed red with anger and he uttered a stream of expletives.
***
“You seem stressed,” said Jordan. “Everything going okay?”
“You think you’re cute,” said Volkov scornfully. “But we’ll see how cute you are in a moment. We’ve run into a minor delay, but we’ll still get Riley. And we can still move the ball down the field while we wait.”
Volkov paused and had a brief conversation in Russian with a party or parties unknown.
He turned back to Jordan. “So let me tell you about Plan B,” he said. “You think I don’t have leverage without your daughter? Guess again. Don’t forget that more than a hundred of your close friends and associates are now unconscious and at my mercy. As is your facility. You may not believe in an immortal soul, but you do seem to believe in immortal data. So I can kill any of them I choose, and then wipe the saved pattern of their consciousness from your databases.”
Jordan closed his eyes and took a deep breath to calm himself.
“But why stop there?” said Volkov. “I can destroy the emulated brains of your duplicated volunteers—and all associated data. You know, the thousand or so E-Brains you took from their murdered owners. I can make the sleep mode they’re in permanent. Including your chosen thirty-five,” he added, arching an eyebrow. “Am I beginning to get your attention?”
Jordan continued to keep his eyes closed, and his face remained impassive.
“But wait,” said Volkov, “there’s more. Good thing you were so chatty, because I overheard a lot. You have patterns for your wife and sons stored here too, don’t you? The ones you butchered in Turlock. The ones you haven’t had the balls to bring back. I can wipe out their patterns one by one, so you get to witness their deaths a second time. Only this time they’ll have no way of ever coming back.”
Jordan finally opened his eyes. “Enough already!” he barked. “You win, okay? You’re right. You have enough leverage on me without my daughter. So why do you need her? Call it off and let her be, a
nd I’ll do what you want.”
“I can’t do that,” said Volkov. “You’re family’s been gone for eight years. You’re used to your life without them in it. And bringing them back introduces some headaches for you, which is why you haven’t done it yet. Riley is still the best hold on you, something you just demonstrated yet again in your eagerness to protect her. Not to mention that she’s nicely compact and portable.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She’s easy to manage. Good leverage should be uncomplicated and easy to hold onto. You do what we say and she’s treated like royalty. A very simple concept. Much easier to hold Riley accountable for your behavior than an entire facility. Besides, your associates are expert in your technology, so I’d prefer they stay alive.”
Volkov paused. “But I’ve run out of patience. So until we have your daughter, I’m willing to work with what leverage I have. I just issued instructions to my man down below. If you haven’t told me where to find the original Isaac Jordan in the next two minutes, he’s going to start killing your colleagues. One every two minutes until you tell me.”
Volkov issued a command through his comm and a video image of a lovely young woman appeared on his laptop. She was unconscious, and Pavel Safin had propped her up against a wall. Volkov manipulated the laptop further and a stopwatch appeared in the corner of the screen, reading two minutes.
He turned the screen so that it faced Jordan. “Here is the first contestant now,” he said. “The first of your associates to have her life in your hands. But if you don’t cooperate, far from the last,” he added, reaching around to touch the stopwatch on the screen.
The red digital numbers began to quickly count down from two minutes. “So if you have any more clever comments to make,” said Volkov with a sneer, “I suggest you make them in the next one minute and forty-eight seconds.”
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