by Thomas Perry
The only place for an office was the ground floor. It had open work spaces for Sam, Remi, Selma, and up to four researchers. There were more guest bedrooms, a lab, and a fourteen-foot-long saltwater aquarium with plants and animals from the California coast.
As Remi and Zoltán took their evening jog home, she looked out beyond the cove and saw two yachts she had not noticed there earlier. They sat offshore about a half mile and, from her perspective on the path above the beach, they looked as though they were almost touching. They were both big, fast cruisers in the 130-foot class, a kind of yacht that she had seen European celebrities charter in the western Mediterranean. They were commonly capable of about sixty knots, and a few were faster. She’d seen a few like them in the San Diego Harbor in the past couple years, but they were extremely expensive and better suited for speeding people between the Greek islands or along the French Riviera than plying the Pacific.
She and Zoltán were past the hotel now and beginning to make their way up to the street that led to the higher wooded plateau where their house stood. She could see it from where they were, perched up on the hillside, its walls of windows facing the ocean on three sides. The lights in the house were warm and welcoming to her. Sam had designed and installed a system of individual sensors that automatically turned on a few lights on each floor at dusk. Because there were few interior walls, that gave most of the house a golden glow.
Remi kept trotting up the hill, which was the hardest part of her daily run, when she noticed that, all at once, Zoltán became oddly agitated. He leapt forward and then stopped abruptly at her feet and stared ahead with his amber-and-black German shepherd eyes. Remi stopped and stood beside him, trying to determine what he was staring at. Something ahead on the winding street was worrying him.
Remi was concerned and now even more impatient to get home. She knew enough about Zoltán’s sense of smell, his training, and his predator’s ability to detect the presence of living things hidden from human view to know he was evaluating something he considered unusual and important. She considered putting his leash on. Maybe she had discovered a situation where he was unreliable. She’d heard stories of shepherds going after postal workers because of the smell of dry-cleaning fluid on their uniforms. It could be something like that. Actually, no, it couldn’t. He was exquisitely trained, and using the leash would have seemed to her to show a lack of faith in him.
While she was waiting for him, Zoltán began to move forward again. He didn’t trot, as he had before. His head was low, his nose sniffing the air and his eyes fixed on something Remi couldn’t see. His shoulders flexed as he began to stalk. His whole body went lower now, compact like a compressed spring.
Remi didn’t talk to calm Zoltán or rein him in. He wasn’t investigating now. He was sure there was a threat. She walked along behind him, marveling at his single-minded concentration. He stopped again, and then she heard the sound. She felt it in her body, the nerves in her hands, because she had heard the same sound so many times when she pushed a loaded magazine up between the grips and into the receiver and it clicks into place. She heard the slide being pulled back to allow a round to pop up into the chamber.
Zoltán took four steps at a dead run and leapt into the foliage ahead. He came down halfway into a privet hedge, gripping a man’s arm in his teeth. He shook it until the man lost his grip and the gun clattered on the pavement. Zoltán charged forward, pushing the man backward so he couldn’t retrieve his weapon.
Remi ran forward, kicked the gun off the road into the darkness, and kept going. Now Zoltán was ahead of her again, running toward the house. He didn’t wait for the driveway but instead took the shortcut through the pine woods, and she followed him. He tore ahead of her in the darkness, running silently on the thick layer of needles. Twice as she ran, she saw him veer off, heard him tear into something with a growl, and then heard the scream of a human voice join his snarl. She sprinted to catch up and then she saw a silhouette. It was the shape of a man making a quick dash across the path. Zoltán collided with him, not changing his pace and throwing his big body against the man, shunting him aside onto the ground.
Then Remi and Zoltán were through the woods and running across the lawn, then up the concrete walkway, then up the steps. She heard the men running after her, and they were fast, only a couple of steps behind her now. Zoltán turned, growling, and charged. She heard the sounds of the fighting as she flung the door open and Zoltán ran inside with her. She slammed the door and as she slipped the bolt she let out a scream: “Sam!” There was a thud against the door as someone tried to shoulder it open.
Zoltán barked, and Remi screamed again as she ran deeper into the house. “Sam!”
On the ocean end of the first floor, where the open office space was, Selma called out, “Remi! What’s wrong?”
“Men are here! They chased me and tried to ambush me on the path in the woods.”
Selma ran to Remi, then stopped and stared at Zoltán in horror. Remi looked too and saw that his muzzle was dripping blood. He turned to stare at the door and crouched, his teeth bared.
As they looked, the whole house went black. There was the sound of men running up the steps and then a loud boom as they swung something that sounded like a battering ram against the steel door. The impact set off the battery-operated alarm system, so there was a loud, pulsing tone that kept on as the ram hit again with another boom.
The house’s emergency generator was running now, and a few low-watt lights came on, so they could see. Boom! There was a whining sound as the vibration from the battering ram turned on the motor that lowered the steel shutters on the first floor. Now the whole floor was lit only by those few bulbs, deprived of the moonlight and the glow from the rest of La Jolla’s electric lights.
Then Sam was in the room with them. He went to the metal control box built into the wall, opened it, turned on the monitor for the cameras over the door, and looked for just a second. “Selma, call the police.”
He used the intercom to speak to the men outside. “You, on the porch. Get the battering ram out of here or you’ll regret it.”
Boom! The men seemed to try harder. They stepped back, then forward again and swung the heavy steel cylinder. Boom! Remi could see the door bump inward without giving way.
Sam reached for a covered switch in the control box and flipped it on. In the monitor, Sam and Remi could see the men on the porch react to a hissing sound. When they looked up, they dropped the battering ram, covered their eyes and faces with their hands, and blindly staggered off the porch.
“What’s that?” Remi asked.
“Pepper spray. It’s one of the things I added to the security system.”
“That kind of paid for itself, didn’t it?” she said as she watched men from the woods hurry onto the lawn to pull the injured back to the cover of the pines.
Selma called out, “The phones are dead.”
“Use your cell.”
“They seem to be jamming 850 megahertz.” Selma took another phone out of her desk and they recognized it as one of the ones they’d used in Europe. “Some kind of device. 1900 megahertz too. 2100 and 2500.”
“Then send someone you know an e-mail to call the cops for us.”
“The Wi-Fi is jammed too. I can’t get online. I can’t use the phone line because it’s dead.”
“All right. Of course,” Sam said. He manipulated a toggle on his control board to alter the aim of the surveillance cameras. “Wow. We’re in trouble,” he said. “Look at all the men out there.”
“Are Pete and Wendy home?” asked Remi.
“I’ll go tell them what’s up,” said Selma.
Sam said, “Tell them to open the gun safe and bring us—”
“I’ll do that,” said Remi, already running for the stairs. She took them two and three at a time, but Zoltán seemed to have no trouble staying ahead of her. She reached the second floor and met Pete and Wendy on the way to the third. “Hold it!” she said. “I need you upstai
rs for a minute.”
Pete and Wendy followed Remi upstairs to the fourth floor. There was the big bedroom suite straight ahead from the staircase and to the left were the two big closets. Between the two was a plain panel on the wall that would have escaped notice unless you knew it was there. Remi pushed a spot on it and it opened like a door. Inside was a narrow corridor that held two gun safes and a third safe that looked as though it had come from a small bank. Remi quickly worked the combinations of the gun safes.
Remi said, “Wendy, get five Glock 19 pistols—one for everybody—and two extra magazines each. Then take as much nine-millimeter ammo as you can carry and go to the first floor. You can leave the two for Pete and me.”
“What’s going on?” asked Wendy.
“Not sure yet. I think it’s the people we thought we left in Europe. Pete, get some long guns and ammo—a couple of short-barreled shotguns and the two semiauto .308s. Lots of ammo.”
Pete and Wendy hurried from the fourth floor to the narrow stairway down to the third floor, their arms piled with weapons and boxes of ammunition. Remi closed the two safes without relocking them and then closed the panel that hid them. She went into the bedroom, not looking at Zoltán but feeling him coming in with her. She said, “Ül, Zoltán.” He sat. She petted his big head. She backed out and closed the door.
She picked up the Glock that Wendy had left her, released the magazine to be sure it was loaded, then put the two spares into the waistband of her shorts and ran down the stairs to the third floor, whirled to go down the next flight to the second floor, and got halfway down when she saw something through a window that made her freeze.
There was a ladder leaning against the side of the house, the end of it just above the top of a second-floor window. A man in a black turtleneck and black jeans scrambled up the ladder in plain sight. He reached the floor, pulled out a hammer, and smashed a large pane of glass, then prepared to step from the ladder onto the empty frame. Remi ran to the nearest window, raised her arms above her head and lifted the long wooden curtain rod off its hooks, dipped it once on each side to let the curtains slide off the ends and ran to the broken window. The man saw her coming and reached for the rifle sling across his chest to bring his automatic weapon to his hand, but Remi was faster. As she ran toward him she aimed her pole out the window into the man’s chest. He tried to brush it away, but that caused him to take his hand off the ladder and forget his weapon. Remi pushed him backward off the ladder, then used the pole to push the ladder over after him.
She looked down out the window and saw that a man had run to the aid of the fallen climber and another was picking up the aluminum ladder. When they saw Remi, they fired several shots in her direction. She ran to the opposite side of the second floor, holding on to the curtain rod, and hurried around the stairway.
It was as she had feared. Another man was on a ladder outside the window on that side. He used a tool that looked like a hatchet to break the glass. Remi was already moving, so this time it was easier to catch him before he was ready. She jabbed the long wooden pole through the broken window, still running. But this man still had the hatchet in his hand and he flung it through the window at her. She ducked to the side and it spun past her head and hit something behind her, but she managed to plant the pole in the man’s chest and kept running until he went over backward, clinging to his ladder.
Remi saw the control panel for the second floor’s systems. She dropped her curtain rod, ran to it, opened the cover, and turned on the switch for the second floor’s steel shutters. The lights dimmed, the motor gave a sickly groan, and the shutters came down only about a foot and then stopped.
Downstairs she could hear the booming of the battering ram again. She ran to the head of the stairs and looked down. Sam, Pete, Selma, and Wendy had pushed a lot of heavy furniture against the front door. A pair of desks were on their sides with some steel filing cabinets lying horizontally behind them. The four defenders stood in a twenty-foot circle, watching the door. Pete was on the left, aiming a shotgun, with Wendy on the right pressing the other shotgun to her shoulder, and Selma was at Wendy’s shoulder, aiming a pistol with both hands. Sam was in the center with one of Remi’s Les Baer Semi-Auto Match rifles. The sturdy steel front door had buckled a little from the constant pounding, and Remi could tell they were almost ready to bend backward enough to let the bolt slip.
As she watched and listened, the battering stopped. Then, from outside, came the sound of a car engine. It grew louder as it came closer, then louder still. It roared for a couple of seconds and then—Bang!—the car hit and the front door swung open. The desks and filing cabinets slid inward across the floor as a high-riding pickup, with a crash barrier mounted in front of its grille, appeared in the opening.
Sam had fired a couple of shots as soon as the door had flown open and there were holes on the driver’s side of the windshield, but there was no driver. Clearly the pedal had been jammed down with a weight or a stick and the truck aimed at the door.
Men in black clothes appeared a few yards back from the door, hidden by the high bed of the truck, and fired bursts into the house with automatic weapons.
Sam called out, “Get upstairs!”
Pete, Wendy, and Selma, firing at the open doorway, backed their way to the staircase near the center of the house. Sam fired well-placed rounds with the rifle whenever he could see an arm, a leg, or a weapon protrude from behind the pickup. As he did, he backed toward the stairs after the others.
Remi, who had been watching for more ladders, could hardly bear to see Sam down there alone, trying to delay the intruders. She stepped halfway down the stairs and fired rapidly at the opening with her Glock pistol. She was still firing when Sam reached around her waist, picked her up, and forced her up the stairs with him. They climbed the stairs backward, aiming and firing, keeping the intruders outside. Remi ran out of ammunition just as they made it up to the second floor.
As she reached for another magazine, Remi had one last look before Sam and Pete rolled the grand piano down the stairs. It tipped, turned, and then slid with a crash and a disharmonious vibration of hammers against strings, then jammed in the stairwell. But before it stopped, Remi had seen a dozen armed men rushing in past the broken front door. As she reloaded, Sam and Pete ran back to the gym area to get more objects to block the stairs. The first floor was lost.
THE SECOND FLOOR
SAM AND PETE PUSHED A HEAVY CROSS-TRAINING MACHINE, and then a treadmill, into the stairwell. These helped block the opening so it would be difficult for the intruders to hit anyone if they fired up the stairs, and the weight alone would probably keep them from trying to storm the second floor. Remi finished reloading and stepped back behind an overturned steel weight table and watched the stairway for any sign of activity. All at once, from the floor below, there was a furious rattle of automatic-weapons fire, none of it directed at the stairwell. “What are they doing?”
“Trying to fire upward at us through the floor,” said Sam. “They won’t have much luck because all the floors are reinforced concrete. Otherwise, we couldn’t have a pool up here.”
There was an abrupt noise that sounded as though the firing had grown into a military battle and moved outside. There was a loud, explosive bang. Pete and Wendy looked out the front windows. “Look!” Wendy shouted.
Outside, in the sky above the ocean, the air turned red, then blue, then white as flarelike pieces floated slowly down until they reached the black water, where they met their own reflections and were extinguished. “Fireworks!”
As they watched, a streak of golden sparks shot upward from a raft tethered to a boat out in the cove. When the projectile reached its apex, it blew up in a starburst, the fiery stars leaving behind burning trails like the drooping branches of a willow tree.
“They’re using fireworks to cover the noise!” Selma announced. “Or to explain it. People will think all the shots are part of a celebration.”
“Right,” said Sam. “A big b
lowout at the Fargos’.”
Another shell was fired into the air and its explosion was green. Another explosion replaced it with bright red, then yellow. Each change was punctuated by an initial bang and then a staccato barrage of pops like the rattle of automatic weapons.
Selma shouted, “The window! No you don’t!” There was another man on a ladder at the broken window where Remi had pushed the first man off. Selma held her pistol in both hands and fired four times before she hit him and he fell from the window. Pete picked up the curtain rod Remi had used and pushed the ladder away from the house.
“We’ve got to get the steel shutters deployed on this floor,” said Sam. “Wendy, turn off all the lights. Remi, if you see something down the stairs that looks like part of a human, shoot it. Pete, you watch the windows. If anybody shows up, do what Selma did. Selma, watch my back.”
Sam opened a small steel door in the wall by the front windows. He waited until the lights were off, then engaged the switch. The electric motor groaned, but the shutters descended only another inch or two. Sam took a small hand crank out of the box, knelt to stick it in a socket just above the windowsill, and turned it. The shutter lowered slowly down to the sill. He moved to the next window and knelt again to crank it down. But just as he did, a ladder appeared at the next one.
A man scrambled up the ladder, punched the window in with a hammer, and stuck his arm in holding a Škorpion automatic pistol. Remi shot the arm before he could fire. He dropped the weapon and made his way down a few feet, his arm hanging limp, and Pete pushed the ladder over with the wooden pole.
Sam cranked the shutter down over the window and moved on to the next one. As he cranked, the window next to it burst into a hundred shards as men outside fired at it. Sam shook his head to get rid of the glass in his hair and kept cranking. But after the next window, there was a sudden quiet. He looked up for a second, then ran to the other side of the house and began cranking shutters down.