Barter didn’t reply.
“Against all enemies…” Sam prodded.
Barter was silent.
“Against all enemies…” Sam said again.
Barter said nothing.
“Foreign, and…”
“And fucking domestic, Goddammit!”
A small smile found its way to Sam’s lips. A line had been crossed. It was as much of a mea culpa as she’d ever need.
She looked at his face. Red, flushed cheeks, eyes narrowed, mouth set with renewed resolve.
“Foreign and domestic,” Sam repeated slowly. “I’m curious. Which category was Janice Everman?”
A quizzical look crossed Barter’s face, but just for a fraction of a second. It evaporated, leaving anger and hardness in its wake.
Sam turned to the nearest guard. “Your boss ordered a hit on a federal employee,” she said in a stage whisper.
The guard’s eyes darted between Sam and Barter. Sam saw uncertainty in his eyes. Which was important. It meant that the men guarding Barter’s house were mere watch dogs, not privy to the dirtier truths, not trusted to perform the assassinations Barter had ordered.
“You’re misinformed, I’m afraid,” Barter said, menace in his voice.
“Really?” Sam asked, affected surprise on her face. “So Janice Everman didn’t oppose your little operation? Threaten to voice her opinion to Congress, out in the open where all the liberals and appeasers and pussies would get their panties all bunched up? Maybe shut down your private little war?”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about,” Barter hissed.
Sam turned to the guard again. “He’s probably right,” she said. “I probably just showed up here on a hunch. And you guys just happened to be standing guard in the street. Makes perfect sense.”
Confusion registered on the guard’s face. Which was progress.
Barter shifted his weight, re-gripped the pistol, steeled himself. “You have no idea what’s at stake here,” he growled.
Sam ignored him. “And there’s probably no backup on the way,” she said, still talking to the guard. “Just little old me, alone in the big bad world. Completely at your mercy.”
“Shut your goddamned mouth!” Barter roared.
Silence followed.
Then Sam laughed. She looked back at Barter. “No sense getting riled up, Clark. You’re the one with the gun. You even have it aimed at the right spot now. Fire away.”
He shook his head. “You have no idea the damage you’re causing.”
Sam smiled. She was staring at the business end of a lot of firepower, but she was winning. Because Barter was talking instead of shooting.
“Maybe you’re right, Clark. Maybe I have no idea what’s going on. But I bet Jonathan France did. And David Swaringen, too.”
“Where the fuck do you get off, accusing me?” Barter shouted.
Sam chuckled. Cornering egos was always entertaining. They followed a predictable script. Bluff, bluster, deny, make counter-accusations. So far, Barter was hitting all the notes.
Which was a good thing. Because she was betting her life.
“Maybe they got cold feet,” she said. “Or maybe you were afraid they might let something slip. Loose ends.”
Barter eyed her. The pistol shook in his grip. Just a little bit. But every little bit helped. He tightened his finger around the trigger.
“Did you notice anything?” she asked the guard in her stage whisper, her eyes still locked on Barter’s. “No surprise on your boss’s face. None whatsoever. Those two men died just a few hours ago. I don’t think their families have even been notified yet. But your boss already knew about it.”
The guard’s eyes shot to Barter’s face.
Barter’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Sam noticed something, the same detail about Barter’s grip she had seen earlier. Seeing it once was encouraging, but it wasn’t a reliable indicator. Maybe it was something, or maybe it was nothing at all.
But twice was a pattern.
“I get it,” Sam said, calmness in her voice, gently taking control of the conversation. “Sometimes the enemies aren’t foreign. Right, Clark?”
Barter didn’t reply.
“Sometimes they’re domestic. Right here among us. Driving on our streets, shopping in our stores, plotting against us, ready to strap a bomb to their chests. Right?”
Barter’s face tightened. “What the hell would you know about it?”
“You might be surprised.”
“It takes courage to deal with this kind of threat,” Barter said. “Resolve. Commitment. Courage.”
Sam got the sense he was talking to his guards, reassuring them, restoring their confidence. Shoring up his flanks.
Maybe reassuring himself, too.
“Courage?” Sam asked. “What would a guy like you know about courage?”
Barter’s face reddened. His fingers flexed around his gun.
His eyes drifted to something behind her. They focused there. Studied something.
“It’s easy to play God,” Sam pressed, “jerking off behind a desk in some office.”
Barter’s eyes didn’t move. They stayed fixed on the wall behind her, looking at something, taking in its details.
“Maybe you can order death like something off a menu,” she said. “But do you have the stones to do it yourself?”
Barter didn’t move. Neither did his eyes. They stayed fixed, far away but focused.
Sam turned her head to follow them, all the way around to the far wall, directly behind her.
And it suddenly became clear.
She wasn’t fighting wayward ideology. She wasn’t up against some zealot who’d wandered off the reservation.
She was up against a man who was sickened, hobbled, crippled by wounds that would never heal.
And she wasn’t going to win.
On the wall was a portrait of a young man. An American soldier, standing in the desert sunlight, wearing Kevlar and a full beard, brandishing a camouflaged carbine, wearing sunglasses and a smile too old for his years, weariness and wariness in his stance.
And an American flag, folded in the shape of a triangle, ensconced behind glass and oak in a display case, white stars against a blue background. It had last been unfurled when it was draped across the young man’s casket. Sam was sure of it.
It was over. Sam had guessed wrong. She had gambled and lost.
Because Barter had no limits.
Because he had nothing left to lose.
She looked back at him, at his eyes.
They returned to her. Calmness settled over him. And certainty. A sort of transcendent peace softened his face as he met her gaze.
He pulled the trigger.
43
There was no time for thought. Sam’s subconscious mind moved her body before her frontal cortex even knew why.
And it moved her in the proper direction.
To her right.
To Barter’s left.
Opposite the direction he pulled the barrel of the stubby little revolver, every time he applied pressure to the trigger.
Once, you couldn’t be sure. But twice was a pattern.
And the third time was for all the marbles.
Sam had been wrong about Barter. But she was right about his trigger finger. It’s what saved her life.
The big, angry slug grazed the flesh of her left arm as she dove to the right.
Then chaos.
The guards’ uncertainty bought her a precious second. She hit the ground, skidded across the floor to the nearest guard’s feet, rolled onto her back, and scissored her legs around his arms. She arched her back, crossed her ankles together for leverage, extended her hips, twisted. Her legs met resistance, which gave way in a sudden, sickening crunch as she dislocated the man’s elbow.
He howled. His weapon fell from his hands and dangled from the strap around his neck.
She twisted harder, pressing her palms into the floor, sliding
her torso into his lower legs, curling him in on himself, bringing him down to the floor.
He fell on her. She grabbed his torso and rolled beneath him.
His body absorbed the first volley of shots. Some impacted his bulletproof vest. Others definitely did not. She heard his breath leave in a gasp, and heard a nauseating, familiar gurgling.
She ripped the rifle from around his neck and wrapped him in an embrace, her hands clasped around the rifle, behind the dying man’s back. She released the safety and fired unaimed bursts in the vicinity of the other three guards.
She got lucky. One screamed. His knee exploded, and his leg folded the wrong way. He fell to the floor.
Sam aimed at a moving shadow, her arms still gripping the rifle around the torso of the dying guard, her human shield.
She squeezed the trigger. Miss.
The lame guard rolled toward her. He raised his weapon. Flame spat from the muzzle. Sam retreated beneath her human shield, felt the rounds impact his torso.
She aimed again, held her breath, pulled the trigger, hit the lame guard in the upper thigh.
A fountain of blood gushed from the new wound. Femoral artery. Certain death. But not fast enough, under the circumstances. Sam finished him with a burst to his head.
Two down.
Motion caught her eye. Barter, lumbering from the room, his large frame disappearing down a hallway.
More gunfire. Rounds peppered the hardwood floor beyond Sam’s head, walked their way back toward her. She slid beneath the dead guard and held her breath.
The dead man’s head exploded just inches from her face. With surreal clarity, she saw it stretch, expand, deform, shatter as a 5.56mm NATO round tore its way through his skull. Blood and brains and bone and gore splattered her face, filled her mouth and nostrils. She howled and spat in fear and disgust, threw her body out from underneath the corpse with panicked abandon, scrambled away, slipped and fell on the blood-soaked gore.
Which saved her life again. An angry squadron of hot, supersonic slugs tore above her, through the space she’d just occupied.
She rolled toward the gunshots, squeezed the trigger, eyes still blinded by shards of the dead man’s face. She wiped her face with her sleeve, aimed, fired again.
And hit. A third man, short and wiry, dropped to the floor, clutching desperately at his throat, suffering unspeakable agony. Sam squeezed the trigger again and put him out of his misery.
Three down.
Silence.
There might have been footsteps upstairs, heavy and hurried, reverberating through the floorboards beneath her.
Or not.
Sam couldn’t be sure either way. She heard nothing but the ringing in her ears.
She rose, took stock. No wounds, as far as she could tell, which was less of a miracle than it seemed. A firefight was much different than a leisurely day at the firing range, and missing your target was a lot more common than hitting, especially if you were green and untested. Like Barter’s guards.
Three of them lay dead on the floor, leaking goop and fluid.
Two more lay dead outside, next to the truck.
Which left one guard, by Sam’s count. And Clark Barter.
She heard motion upstairs. This time, it was unambiguous. Like someone was moving furniture around. Which they probably were.
But Sam took no chances. She took her time clearing the bottom floor, heart still pounding, senses still on high alert despite her growing nausea, caused by the stench of blood and guts turning to paste all over her head and torso.
It had been a race, and then a waiting game, and now it was a race again. She needed to clear the house before Barter’s reinforcements arrived. They’d take one look at the scene and decide to shoot first and ask questions later.
She needed Dan to hurry the hell up. She was beginning to wonder if he was coming, if he was bringing help. And she had no way to get in touch with him.
Which left her in an absurd position. Her own Little Bighorn. Waterloo, maybe. About to be surrounded and grossly outnumbered, unless things broke just right.
She wished she was a bigger believer in teamwork, because it would have given her a bit more hope.
She checked the magazine in the assault rifle she’d stolen from her human shield. She counted six rounds left. Six singles, or two bursts of three. She selected singles and started up the stairs.
It was a wide staircase, with a landing halfway up. Sam cursed beneath her breath. The geometry meant that she would be exposed long before she was in any position to return fire.
She laid down on the stairs. She climbed slowly, feet, knees, elbows, one step at a time, stopping to look and listen with each step.
She made it to the landing.
She could go no further. It felt too exposed. Too foolhardy. Like a great way to die.
She retreated back down.
And stopped dead in her tracks. Voices. Coming from outside. And car engines. And the unmistakable sound of ammunition slamming into place in large-caliber weapons.
Barter’s reinforcements.
Or hers.
Or someone had called the cops, and a SWAT team had shown up.
Or the FBI.
Too many possibilities. Lots of ways to make a wrong decision. Too hard to make a right one. If it was Barter’s thug brigade assembling out in front, peeking through a window would be a quick ticket to martyrdom.
She hesitated. No good decision presented itself. She was trapped. More than a little bit screwed.
Then she heard more voices. They came from upstairs this time, muffled, sealed off, far away.
Not near the stairs.
Sam made up her mind.
Sam walked quietly up the stairs and peered around the corner into the long, wide hallway. Every doorway was open, except for the one at the far end of the hall.
Sam tiptoed toward the closed door.
She paused to check each opening along the way.
Empty.
Until the last open doorway. Which was where she found the muzzle of an assault rifle, and guard number four, young and inexperienced and obviously shaken.
“It’s over,” he said, trying to sound brave. “They’re here. They’re getting ready to come inside.”
Sam felt weariness. And defeat. “Where’s Barter?”
The guard didn’t respond, but his eyes betrayed him. They snapped to the closed bedroom door.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, grateful again that Barter’s troops were untested and unseasoned. The guard should have shot her, no questions asked. Instead, he was letting her make small talk.
The foot soldier shook his head. “Yes, I do.”
“There’s still time. I can help you.”
The guard chortled, bitterness on his face. “I don’t think you can.”
“Last chance,” Sam said.
She saw hesitation in his eyes, but it passed. “I don’t think so,” he said.
Sam shrugged. “Have it your way.”
Her foot moved with lightning speed. It traveled from the floor in a blur. It crashed into the guard’s balls, arriving with all sorts of energy, sounding alarms and triggering ancient biological failsafes. He collapsed to the floor, in too much pain to scream.
Sam smashed the butt of her rifle against the back of his head. And once more. And again, for good measure, because a man who’d just received a devastating kick to the stones was not apt to negotiate when he regained his senses.
She took a deep breath.
No time to screw around.
On to Barter.
She faced the closed door, backed away five paces, tightened her grip on the rifle, and charged.
She slammed her heel into the door, just inside the doorknob.
The jamb shattered.
The door flew inward, crashed into the wall, and rebounded. The chair Barter had shoved beneath the doorknob skittered across the carpet.
Sam didn’t pause. She charged into the room, rolled,
flattened, and came to rest in the prone firing position, rifle trained on Clark Barter’s chest.
He was seated, back against the wall, legs straight out, pistol raised.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam said.
“Fuck you.”
“You were right. I have no idea. No clue what that must be like.”
Barter stared, silent.
“I imagine it’s the worst thing a man can live through. Losing a son.”
He blinked, started to speak, then changed his mind.
“No need for it to end badly,” Sam said. “Sure, you could pull the trigger. But then what? What’s your next move?”
Barter said nothing.
“You could have your troops swarming all over your front lawn right now, and it wouldn’t matter. Because I’m not here alone,” Sam said. “No matter how many men you brought, it won’t be enough.”
And she desperately hoped it was true.
Barter shook his head. “You’re jeopardizing lives,” he said.
“And you’re taking lives. And keeping secrets from the people you’re spying on, the ones you’re supposed to be protecting. Who’s more wrong?”
“You don’t understand,” Barter said. “You have no idea what needs to be done, what it takes to keep this country safe.”
Sam pondered, keeping Barter’s heart in her sights, up and left a little bit from dead center.
“Maybe that’s true,” she finally said. “But what kind of nation do you want it to be when you’re done saving it?”
Barter shook his head, a response on his lips. But he didn’t speak it. Because he heard something.
Sam heard it, too.
A deep, throbbing, wall-shaking thrum. Rattling doors, windows, rafters, teeth, and innards.
Rotor blades, pounding the air into submission. A helicopter, and not a small one. Close by. Dangerously, terrifyingly loud.
And another, on the opposite side of the house.
They grew louder until the noise was impossibly intense, their deep throb vibrating every cell in Sam’s body. The walls thumped and flexed against the onslaught.
More NSA muscle?
Did Barter have access to military hardware?
Had he ordered air support?
Or was it Dan, maybe with Homeland’s hostage rescue team?
The Essential Sam Jameson / Peter Kittredge Box Set: SEVEN bestsellers from international sensation Lars Emmerich Page 85