She tried the window. Locked, and bolted shut.
Breaking the glass was a bad idea. She didn’t want to attract attention. But in the absence of a giant wrench to unscrew the window from its housing, she didn’t have much choice. She used the muzzle of her pistol to spider the pane. Then she used her purse to push against it, hoping to flex the window outward, maybe remove the whole thing from its housing without shattering it to pieces.
She failed miserably. The cheap window glass flew everywhere, shattering on the concrete outside. She cursed.
But there was no turning back now. She used her pistol to clear away the shards of glass around the edge of the window frame, leaped up, pulled her body into the opening, and squeezed out of the window. Glass pierced her forearms and midsection as she wriggled free. Her wounded side registered its strident protest. She cursed softly under her breath.
She looked around. Dumpsters, accumulated trash, loose paper, a stray cat or two. Just like alleys the world over.
Sam crept to the corner of the building and paused, fighting to control her breathing, listening intently for signs of motion. She peered around the corner of the building.
Another agent. Tall, short hair, curly wire protruding from an earpiece, handgun drawn, watching the front entrance of the building. His back faced Sam. His head swiveled about, alert and searching.
Sam studied the movement of his head as it scanned back and forth.
Almost.
Not yet.
Now.
When his scan was furthest from her, she darted across the alleyway. She took cover behind an adjacent building, pistol trained at the corner, forcing herself to take deep, quiet breaths.
One minute passed, then two. No one rounded the corner after her.
Sam backed away carefully, making her way along the back wall of the building adjacent to Swaringen’s, weapon ready, head on a swivel.
After a brief eternity, a door appeared on her left. To a parking garage.
Sam tried the door. It opened, and she breathed a sigh of relief. She crept inside the garage, searching for a particular kind of vehicle, a late-model domestic, her hand sifting through items in her Prada bag until it closed around the object she wanted: a universal key fob. Not truly universal, because Homeland had only been able to strong-arm domestic automakers into surrendering entry codes. Foreign manufacturers had told DHS to get stuffed. Hence her search for an American car, which she otherwise wouldn’t be caught dead driving.
She sidled up next to a ridiculously large pickup truck and pushed the button on her device. The truck chirped, flashed its lights, unlocked its doors.
Sam looked around, climbed in, pushed the keyless start button, and held her breath. The big diesel engine came to life.
Sam put the truck in gear, drove out of the garage, turned away from Swaringen’s building, checked her mirrors.
Safe.
For the moment.
41
The Baltimore-Washington Parkway was rarely a pleasant experience. It connected some of the worst sections of DC to some of the worst sections of Baltimore, and it did so via a pothole-riddled span of ancient asphalt that was nothing short of hazardous. There were too few lanes, access was poorly designed, and sharp on-ramps meant merging traffic met the speeding flow at a crawl. The road sucked, and there had been a time when Sam had made a major life decision or two to avoid it.
But today’s major life decision had the opposite effect. She found herself stuck in a line of crawling cars.
It was murder on her psyche. She checked the truck’s dashboard clock about twice a minute, calculating and recalculating the time it might take for NSA to decrypt the iMessage Dan had sent her, wondering how long it would take the facial recognition algorithms to alert NSA watchers of her whereabouts, wondering whether the truck’s rightful owner had yet noticed its absence, and if so, how long it might take for the registration number to show up in the automated license plate monitoring system.
She turned on the hazard lights, moved over onto the left shoulder, and put her foot down, honking intermittently. Half an hour, she estimated, moving at the improved pace available by driving half off the road, barring unforeseen holdups, such as traffic cops and mentally-challenged commuters.
She wanted desperately to confer with Dan, to confirm his understanding of her plan, to iron out the details, to make sure the right people were heading to the right places. She also wanted confirmation of her educated guesses. She felt an acute need for what every field agent craves: sound intelligence and solid backup.
She felt extremely alone. Which was often what she preferred. But today it made her feel naked, exposed, vulnerable. It felt like extreme, raw risk. The kind she’d promised Brock she’d no longer take. The kind she’d decided had no place in her post-death life.
“Hell,” she said by way of summary, uncomfortably aware of the storm of butterflies in her stomach, uncomfortably aware that she hadn’t worn her bulletproof vest when she left Homeland the previous evening, uncomfortably aware of the seconds ticking away.
Because it really came down to timing. She needed them to decode Dan’s message quickly, but not too quickly. She needed them to mount a response, which would take time, but she needed that response to be less than overwhelming, less than insurmountable, which implied less preparation time rather than more.
She needed a little bit of surprise, but not too much.
She also needed them to take the bait.
And she needed to give Dan enough time to get things together on his end.
She looked at the clock again, its inexorable march mocking her, competing factors weighing in her head, a hundred unknowable variables swarming through her calculus like pests, acutely aware that chaos would weigh just as heavily on the outcome as skill, effort, and cunning.
She put a little more pressure on the gas pedal and barreled onward, toward the belly of the beast.
Preparations were indeed underway. A stern-faced man of stocky build supervised them.
The sun was up. He was unaccustomed to being home during daylight. He normally went to work well before sunrise and returned home well after sunset. Because he believed in what he was doing. Because he did it well. And because it was that important.
And it was under attack, by people who didn’t understand what they were doing, who didn’t know what was at stake, who weren’t qualified to make the kinds of decisions they were trying to make.
His men had established a perimeter. A wall separated the building from the world, and another wall of highly trained, supremely skilled, unquestioningly loyal citizen-soldiers provided further buffer. Half a dozen of them, his on-call rapid response force, with more on the way.
They guarded a residence. His residence.
But on this day, it felt more like a fortress.
There would be no quarter given. It would end today. And things would return to normal. Business as usual.
Because it was a business of supreme importance.
Sam’s mind raced through contingencies as her stolen truck raced through traffic on Highway 50. The mental exercise was meant to reduce her anxiety, to increase her feeling of preparedness, but it had the opposite effect. Her thoughts blitzed through punches and counterpunches, possibilities and probabilities, scenarios, branches, and sequels. Her stomach knotted tighter with each spin through her possible futures, evidence of the horrendous odds she knew awaited.
But there was no other option.
If she succeeded, she would likely decapitate the beast.
If she failed, they would sense victory. Which would be the mechanism of their defeat.
But only if Dan came through, in either case.
Total victory on one hand.
Pyrrhic victory on the other. The kind of win she probably wouldn’t survive.
So events had conspired to re-order her life priorities once again. As in, events had prioritized themselves over her life.
The Powder Mill Road exit
snuck up on her. It jolted her from theory to reality, from abstract to in-your-face. A fresh wave of sickening adrenaline landed in her gut.
She steered the giant truck toward the exit, plowing across lanes of traffic frozen in place, earning honks and gestures and curses, which failed to pierce her focus. She made the exit, but barely, and only by driving across the grass.
She turned east. The road took her around a gentle arc to the north, circumscribing Snowden Pond, a mid-level yuppie haven. It was familiar territory. She’d dated a man once who lived here. He was her boss, and he was also married, but it was a long time ago and she wasn’t terribly sober or terribly hung up on details. At the time, she’d never have guessed that her lack of judgment and restraint would provide her with critical terrain knowledge for a future op.
Crazy life, she thought idly, rechecking the magazine in her hefty .45, accelerating the big truck around the wide bend. Dense Maryland forest flashed by on either side.
An intersection loomed. Laurel Bowie Road. Getting closer. Her heart beat fast and hard. More butterflies tore up her insides.
She made a cursory check for traffic and careened left, slowing just enough to keep the truck on the pavement. Mostly.
She hammered down on the accelerator, hearing the beastly rattle of the unnecessarily large engine, grateful for the first time in her life that giant penis-extender pickup trucks had become vogue. She was going to need every last pound of steel, and every last pound-foot of torque under the hood.
A church appeared ahead on the right. It had been a signpost in a previous life, a harbinger of forbidden flesh, a reminder that she wasn’t living a family values kind of life as she snuck to her boss’s house while his wife was away.
Today, the church was again a signpost, but a more pragmatic one. She slowed the truck, peeled her eye for the semi-hidden lane on the left, and turned onto a narrow, winding, brick-lined drive leading up into the forest.
Sam knew the street name. Old Laurel Springfield Road. Where the rich people lived. Big houses, with gates and fences around them, modern nobility, isolated from the hoi polloi, as if the proletarian condition were beyond merely distasteful, but also contagious.
Executives, stock market winners, surgeons, lawyers.
And tyrants.
She had memorized the house number, but just as she expected, it wasn’t necessary. Because this particular tyrant’s fortress was surrounded by eager young men with guns and training and a keen desire to use both.
She drove at a normal speed up the lane, until she was just a hundred yards from her target’s front gate, which was tall and iron and undoubtedly expensive, but insufficient to the task ahead.
Sam matted the accelerator and reefed the hulking behemoth hard to the left, ignoring the shouts of the agents flanking the drive, aligning the nose of the truck with the center of the gate, where the two pieces swung together and latched.
She tensed her body, braced for impact.
It was anticlimactic. The gates exploded from their hinges, no match for the giant stolen man-toy.
But Sam wasn’t finished. She had no intention of ringing the doorbell. She kept the accelerator on the floor, searched for a weak spot in the structure, cursed its solid stone construction. She steered toward an oversized bay window, flanked by roof-high evergreens, hoping she’d picked up enough speed, hoping the impact wouldn’t kill her.
She held her breath and closed her eyes.
Then the world exploded.
42
Sam smelled pulverized rock, drywall powder, and sawdust. She had a metallic taste in her mouth. Blood. From her lip, split open by the air bag. The big diesel engine still banged away, unfazed by the calamity that had befallen the grille, now a rumpled mess of twisted metal.
Shouts sounded over the idling engine.
Sam snapped to her senses. She scanned frantically for her Kimber. On the floor, over on the passenger side. She twisted her head to see out the back of the truck. The two agents at the gate were charging across the lawn, pistols drawn, yelling commands.
She cursed. No time to fetch her pistol from the floor. The stopping power of the big handgun would have been extremely handy.
She reached down, lifted her right pant leg, slipped her hand inside her sock, and retrieved the Walther PPK she’d borrowed from the young man whose skull she’d cracked earlier in the morning. Her thumb found the safety lever, and her finger found the trigger.
Then she unlatched her seat belt, slumped her chin onto her chest, and played dead.
The first guard approached, gun drawn, barking at her to exit the vehicle with her hands up, or something similarly asinine.
Sam didn’t move.
The guard shouted some more.
Sam waited.
More shouting. Exasperation and waning patience were evident in the man’s tone. Which was perfect.
He shattered the driver’s side window with the butt of his pistol.
Sam waited for the glass to stop flying.
Then she flung her body away from the window, flattened herself onto the wide bench seat, twisted her torso to free the pistol in her right hand, and shot the man in the face.
One down.
The second guy fired indiscriminately into the cab, running forward toward the open window.
Sam rolled her body onto the floor, twisted onto her back, and curled into a tight somersault, coming to rest on her knees on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat. Her hands slapped at the mat, searching.
Her left hand found it. Her fingers closed around the grip. She felt its gorgeous weight as she lifted it, aimed it toward the sound of the guard’s gunfire. How many rounds had he shot? She hadn’t been counting.
Silence. The man stopped shooting.
Sam heard the click of a magazine release, then the clatter of an empty clip hitting the ground.
Dumbass.
She rose, aimed, and fired.
She wasn’t a great left-handed shot, but she wasn’t terrible, either. A nontrivial portion of the man’s head disappeared in a cloud of red mist.
Sam twisted, pulled the passenger door latch, kicked open the door, and burst through the opening. She rolled through the debris on the floor and came to a halt in a crouch, pistol ready, in the middle of a posh dining room.
The stolen pickup truck had made it halfway inside.
A number of guards had evidently made it all the way inside. Because Sam found herself staring down the barrels of several assault rifles.
Four of them.
Balls.
She dropped her pistol and raised her hands.
A deep, authoritative voice broke the uneasy silence. “Jesus Christ, have you become a pain in my ass.”
Sam regarded the man as she rose to her feet. Large, powerfully built, florid face, fat gut, late fifties or early sixties.
“Deputy Director Clark Barter, I presume,” she said. “Sorry to barge in on you like this.”
Barter raised his pistol. It was an old .38 Special, a dual-action revolver, all brute force and gleaming metal. Plenty of charge behind the slug. Tough to survive if it hit near anything important.
“Think it through, Clark,” Sam said, her voice cool and low, which she found a pleasant surprise under the circumstances.
The race had ended. She had gotten there in time, before NSA could mount a serious response.
Now it was time to slow things down. Because now it was a waiting game.
“Right now it’s just my word against yours,” Sam said. “One fed against another. Nothing to get all bent out of shape over. A beef like this might never even see the light of day.”
Barter cocked the hammer and brought the sight to his eye. She saw the dark abyss inside the barrel of his gun, and a darker abyss in his eyes. He clearly had it in his mind to shoot her in the face.
“But if you kill me,” she went on, “then it becomes something different.” She motioned to the guards — hard and lean and out of breath from th
eir dash inside — and counted them off on her fingers. “One, two, three, four of them, Clark. Four witnesses.”
Barter chuckled, derision on his face. “You have no idea what you’ve stepped in.”
Sam smiled. “I’ve been hearing that a lot lately. Maybe you’d care to explain.”
Barter’s face hardened. “I would not,” he said. Sam saw his index finger whiten between the second and third knuckles. He was applying pressure to the trigger.
Sam noticed something else. Something important. Critical, maybe, depending on which way things went.
Her next words had every possibility of being her last.
“You’re aiming in the wrong place, Clark,” she said.
Barter looked confused.
“You’re too far away to risk a head shot,” Sam said. “Especially with that old thing. Stubby little barrel like that, heavy trigger, you’d be lucky to hit the wall behind me.”
Barter’s eyes narrowed.
“And when’s the last time you practiced?” Sam asked. “Perishable skill, you know.”
Barter bared his teeth in something that bore no resemblance to a smile. “Thank you,” he said with exaggerated courtesy. “I see the error of my ways.” He moved the barrel downward, pointed it at the center of her chest.
Sam’s heart pounded. Her knees felt weak. Her hands shook a little. She hoped no one noticed. “That’s better, Clark,” she said, surprised again at how calm her voice sounded. “But there’s still that tiny little problem.”
Barter’s eyebrows raised in mock curiosity.
“Of murdering a federal agent in front of four witnesses. Four witnesses who are also military servicemen, no less. Subject to a court martial. Am I right?”
Barter sneered. “These men know their duty,” he said, tossing his head toward the guards.
Which told Sam something. It told her that her hunch was right, about his ego. He would rather make a point than make a move.
“Let me guess,” she said. “To support and defend the Constitution?”
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 84