State of War

40

Ames was back at the monitors drinking a cup of coffee when the truck blew up. He was looking right at it when it turned into a fireball, washing out the filters on the cameras with a bright white glare. He could feel the room vibrate, and heard the sound echo around him.

He set his coffee cup down carefully and rubbed at his eyes, still staring at his monitors.

When the images cleared, he saw what was left of the flatbed, mostly just the frame and wheels, burning like mad. Even the tires were on fire.

Of the men who had been there, there was no sign.

Blown halfway to Mexico, no doubt.

What could have happened? A fuel leak? Maybe the truck had been hauling explosives? No. He shook his head. He had seen that the thing was empty.

He shook his head, then took a sip of his coffee. What should he do about this? Anything? The men were beyond help, that was for sure. He hadn’t seen them for a few minutes, had assumed they had climbed back inside, unable to fix whatever was wrong. If they had — and they must have, because he didn’t see them running around out there — they were toast.

He could call the state police, he supposed, and report it, but he didn’t really want to have his presence noted. Even out here, somebody passing by would spot it soon enough and call it in. Yes, he was curious — but not enough to talk to the police. It didn’t concern him, and it wasn’t worth giving up the privacy and secrecy he had worked so hard to establish here.

Besides, the men in that truck were beyond help. There was nothing he or anyone else could do for them now. At least they probably never knew what hit them.

Where there had been a slab of concrete and steel rods, there was now a crater. But there was still dirt to be removed.

“Reaves, Holder, front and center!” Fernandez yelled. “Get those supersuits in gear!”

The pair of exosuited troopers moved forward, not quite a zombielike lurch, but not as smooth as a normal man’s walk, either. Accompanied by the hums of motors and hydraulics, they started moving dirt again.

“He surely heard our explosion,” Michaels said, pointing to the crater.

“If he is down there, I’d say he did,” Howard said. “That was unavoidable, which is why we had the decoy timed to go off at the exact same moment. The question is, did it work?”

“I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

Ames watched the truck burn for a while, but there weren’t any more explosions, and he lost interest after a few minutes. He decided to get something to eat and go back to bed. One cup of coffee wouldn’t keep him from sleeping.

He loaded a fresh set of tapes into his recording devices, though. He’d check them in the morning, see how long it took the state patrol to arrive, and what they did while they were there. He also wanted to be sure they all left when they were finished. He didn’t want any stragglers anywhere on his property.

“We’re through, sir,” Reaves said.

Behind Reaves, Holder kept one augmented hand locked onto the trooper’s suit, preventing him from falling into the hole he’d just dug.

Howard nodded. “Lieutenant, the rope ladder.”

Julio came forward, unrolling the nylon and cross-slat device.

“It looks like it’s a good twenty feet to the landing, sir,” Fernandez said. “We’re going to be dangling.”

“No problem,” Howard said.

Michaels said, “Good. Let’s go find this guy, shall we?”

“Yes, sir, Commander. My thoughts exactly.”

Ames sat in the kitchen, eating a duck-egg omelet and black rye toast with marionberry jam. He paused, a bite halfway to his mouth.

What was that?

He listened carefully.

Nothing but the hum of the refrigerators. He waited a few seconds but heard nothing else.

One of the problems with a place this big and old was that it was full of creaky, groany things. Even this far under the surface, some of the heat must seep down enough to cause expansion and contraction. Unless there were resident ghosts, nobody was here but him. He was safer here than in a bank vault — nobody had a combination to his doors.

He finished his snack, washed and dried the dishes, and headed back to the bedroom. You didn’t want to go off and leave food caked on a plate when you might not be back for six or eight months. He hadn’t seen any ants, and they weren’t supposed to be able to get in here. On the other hand, they had found a roach on one of the space stations a couple years back, so why tempt fate?

He sat on the bed and started to pull his shoes off when he heard another noise.

One of his sensors had gone off.

The weird thing was, it wasn’t one of his perimeter alarms. Instead, it was a flashing red light that indicated a clogged air filter in one of the ventilator shafts.

What made it weird was that he had the filters cleaned and checked regularly. Out here in the desert, he had to. The only way that filter could be clogged this soon was if he’d left the door open behind him.

He stopped, felt a chill frost him.

Or if someone else had found another way in.

Michaels looked at General Howard.

Howard was studying a map on his flatscreen. After a moment he gestured down a hallway. “If Ames is still here, he should be over in that direction. The bedroom closest to the sensor room is only a hundred meters or so that way. That’s where I’d be staying, anyway.”

Michaels nodded.

Howard and his men carried 9mm subguns, along with their sidearms. Michaels had a pistol, one of the issue H&K tacticals, with instructions not to shoot unless somebody was in his face shooting at him. If Howard, Julio, and the two troopers all got outshot by one lawyer, the pistol probably wasn’t going to do him all that much good anyhow.

“Spread out,” Howard ordered. “And be quiet. Hand signals from now on.”

Ames held his pistol pointed at the floor, his finger outside the trigger guard, and moved carefully down the hall. He had to be imagining this, right?

Maybe. But something isn’t right. First a truck pulls up, then explodes like a big bomb, then you get a clogged filter warning light. Maybe those two things are connected?

He didn’t like coincidences.

Assume for the moment a worst-case scenario: Somebody was in here. If that was true, then it was bad news, very bad news. Because that would mean they had come specifically for him. That they were organized, well-informed, and extremely resourceful, not only to have found him, but to have mounted an assault and gotten inside undetected.

No. That shouldn’t be possible. They shouldn’t have been able to bypass his sensors, and couldn’t have gotten in if they had. No way.

Maybe there’s a secret entrance you don’t know about?

No. He had seen the plans. He had explored every foot of the place. There were no secret doors he didn’t know about.

He stopped and listened.

Nothing.

He tried to reassure himself. The filter was wonky, or the warning system was. It had to be. It certainly made much more sense.

Maybe. But he was not going to start taking chances now. He’d check everything out, carefully, and if there was any sign at all that he wasn’t alone, he’d run. Simple as that.

He felt better.

Then he turned a corner and saw the soldier with the submachine gun coming toward him—

“Target!” Julio said.

No sooner was that word out of his mouth than the target opened up with a weapon. Howard couldn’t see either the man or the gun, and the helmet’s sound suppressors damped the noise, but it sounded like a handgun. Three quick shots—bam-bam-bam! — fired almost as one.

Instinctively, Howard moved to the wall, seeking cover.

Julio, four meters ahead on point, returned fire with his subgun, a pair of three-round bursts.

Behind Howard, Michaels hit the floor and went prone. Reaves and Holder crouched, weapons seeking targets.

“He’s gone!” Julio yelled.

“You hit?”

“Negative, sir.”

“You hit him?”

“I don’t think so. He boogied awful fast.”

They moved up, but the corridor was indeed empty. There wasn’t any blood on the floor.

“Okay, he knows we’re here. Move in. Crank up that heat sensor, see if we can spot him that way. Commander, you bring up the rear.”

Michaels didn’t argue. He was smart enough to know what he didn’t know.

The five of them moved, Julio clearing the way, waving a little handheld device that should be able to pick up a man’s body heat.

Ames was not immediately evident.

“Easy does it, Lieutenant.”

“Always, General Howard, sir.”

Ames clutched his pistol, his hands sweaty on the wood and steel. He had some kind of assault team, military guys, right here with him! What was he going to do?

Who were they?

He didn’t even have a spare magazine for his gun. How many rounds had he fired? Two? Three?

Panic flowed in him.

The voice of reason tried to rise through the surge: What are you doing, fool?! Put the gun down and raise your hands! Let them arrest you! You’re a brilliant attorney, for God’s sake! They can’t have anything on you that will hold up in court! And once in court, you’ll have them outnumbered and outgunned.

Ames forced himself to take a deep breath. Yes. That was true. But — What if they hadn’t come to arrest him? What if this was some kind of black op deal? What if they were assassins?

They sure weren’t ordinary cops. Nobody had yelled, “Police, freeze!” or anything like that. Yes, he had shot at them, but they shot back in a hurry, and nobody had said a thing.

They had gone to great lengths to track him here — extraordinary measures, really, just to sneak up on him. They had blown up a truck to cover themselves breaking in. And they were armed to the teeth.

Who were they? How could he get past them to the escape hatch?

Would there be others aboveground, waiting for him?

Giving up was the smart thing, right?

But if he put down his gun and raised his hands, what if they just smiled and then cut him to bloody pieces? He’d be dead, and he’d never even know who had killed him, or why…

He shook his head. No, he couldn’t just surrender. Not yet. He had to find out more about them, make sure it was safe first.

And to do that, he had to stay alive.

Michaels held his pistol pointed at the floor, standing fifty feet behind the last of the others. His breathing was fast, but he found he wasn’t afraid. Nervous, yes, and excited, but not frightened.

The place was a maze of corridors and doorways, and they moved carefully through it, Fernandez and Howard slipping into rooms along the way to check them out while Michaels stayed in the hall.

It was a big place, a lot of spots where a man could hide. Even with the sensors, they might miss him. And wouldn’t that be a snafu. It was good that he was thinking of retiring, because they would surely fire him if this didn’t end well.

Ames didn’t know how many of them there were, could be ten, could be fifty. He couldn’t shoot it out with them. They were obviously better armed, and however many of them there were, he was outnumbered. If he wasn’t going to give himself up, then the only other option was to hide and wait for an opportunity to escape.

After that? Well, he’d worry about that if he got that far.

His advantage was that he knew the place better than they possibly could, even if they had the floor plans. They couldn’t know where stuff was stacked, where he had put supplies, rearranged furniture, like that. If he could hide somewhere they wouldn’t immediately look, get behind them, go down one of the other halls or levels, he could maybe slip by. It was his best chance.

The main kitchen was a good place. Lots of bins, coolers, pantries. If they did find him, he could still try to surrender. If they were law enforcement of some kind, they ought not shoot him if he surrendered.

It was a chance, anyway, and right now it looked like the only one he had.

“Got a hot spot in there,” Julio said. He pointed to an open doorway. “Looks like a kitchen.”

Howard moved up. “Clear the left, I’ll take the right. Reaves, watch the door, Holder, cover that next hallway, just ahead. Commander, if you would stay right there and make sure he doesn’t somehow get behind us?”

Michaels nodded. “Got it.”

“Okay, Julio, on three. One… two… three!”

Julio went in first, low and to the left, and Howard was right behind him, higher, and covering the other half of the large room.

It was a kitchen, sure enough. A big one, with three stoves, refrigerators, sinks, tables, and institutional-sized food trays and bins.

Julio nodded at the stoves. The two of them edged that way, guns ready.

Julio put one hand on the stove. “There’s the heat source. He must have had a late supper.”

“Sensor getting anything else?”

“Negative.”

“Okay. Get Reaves and Holder in here, let them search. We’ll move on.”

Ames heard the voices, and even though they were muffled because of his hiding place in the walk-in fridge, he recognized one of them.

It was John Howard, the leader of Net Force’s military arm.

Ah. That made sense, sort of. Somehow, they had connected him to Junior. Maybe he hadn’t died right away when he’d been shot. Ames grinned. Maybe Junior wasn’t even dead at all. It could be some kind of misinformation campaign. Maybe Junior was alive and well and singing like a flock of canaries…

The fact that it was Net Force changed things. In his lawsuit, he claimed that all the Net Force personnel were violence-prone, trigger-happy vigilantes who went out of their way to find trouble and used deadly force whenever possible, but he knew that wasn’t true. And up until now he hadn’t cared.

Now, however, it mattered.

He’d read the reports himself. He had to in order to be able to spin them for a jury. And he knew that he could lay his weapon down and walk out of that refrigerator and be as safe as he would in his own offices.

Except that they would take him to jail. And if Net Force was out there, they had something concrete, even though he had no idea what it possibly could be. They’d crossed the lines before, he knew, but he also knew that his own lawsuit had turned a very bright spotlight on their actions. There was no way they’d be coming for him as part of a bluff. No way.

Which meant he couldn’t turn himself in. Not yet. Not until he’d had some time to think things through, maybe find out what they had — or thought they had — on him, and had a plan for dealing with it. Then he could be caught.

But not until he already had some sort of get-out-of-jail-free card in his pocket.

He frowned, then checked the bullets left in his magazine. Getting away would be a trick, that was for sure, given that more men were coming in here to look for him, and it wouldn’t be a good idea for him to shoot any of them. Move, he decided. Get to the dumbwaiter, go down a level, and sneak past them. It’s the only way. Go!

Michaels had his breathing under control — well, more or less — and he was still ten yards behind John. The two troopers had gone into the huge kitchen to search it. It was beginning to look to Michaels as if they might not find Ames again, which would be a real shame after all the trouble they had gone to.

He was passing a stairwell going down when he heard something.

It wasn’t much, a small click, and it probably didn’t mean anything. He leaned over and looked down the stairs. Nothing to see — wait, what was that? A flash of shadow, as if somebody had passed in front of a light source—

“John.”

Ahead of him, Howard turned. “Yes?”

“I think he might have gone down the stairs!”

Without thinking, Michaels started down.

“Alex, wait—!”

But Michaels was already four steps down and speeding up.

There wasn’t a door at the bottom of the landing, just a wide opening to the next level. Probably didn’t have to worry about fire codes when they built this place.

He was cautious enough not to run full speed through the doorway. He slowed, stuck his head through, and saw a man moving quickly away from him down the corridor, a hundred feet away. Had to be Ames.

Michaels stepped out into the hall, brought his pistol up. “Freeze!” he yelled. “Net Force!”

He was aware of Howard’s boots thumping down the stairs behind him.

Ames turned, saw him, and stared. He had a gun in his right hand, but it was pointed at the floor.

“Don’t shoot!” Ames yelled. “I give up!”

Michaels felt himself relax a hair. Good. He wasn’t sure he could have hit the man that far away with a handgun anyhow.

“Put your weapon down!”

“Okay, take it easy!” Ames bent and started to put his pistol on the floor—

— except that he didn’t. He jerked the gun back up and started shooting—!

Michaels felt the bullets hit him, at least two of them, square in the chest. Even though he was wearing armor, the impact felt like being smashed with a hammer. He lurched to the side, to get out of the way, fired his own pistol in return—

Howard yelled from behind him: “Commander, down!”

Michaels went prone, shoving his pistol out in front of him as he did so.

Howard’s submachine gun roared, the sound of it joining those of Michaels’s and Ames’s weapons.

Ames saw Michaels go down, was sure he had hit him, but then the second man was there, firing—

Why had he shot? Why hadn’t he surrendered, like he said?

But he didn’t have an answer for that. It hadn’t been a decision. It had been a reflex, an action born of something deep within him, something he hadn’t even known had been a part of him until that moment.

Fire blossomed in his chest, in his shoulder, in his leg. He spun away from the hurt, but the pain followed him. He looked down, saw the blood—

More impacts. The gun fell from his suddenly nerveless fingers, clattered on the floor, but he was past worrying about that. He felt weak, too weak to stand. He fell, hit the wall, slid to the floor in a sitting position. He was having trouble breathing…

He saw the two men come toward him. He should do something, but he was suddenly so tired…

I’ll just rest a second here. Get my strength back. Close my eyes for a minute, then I’ll be better…

Howard moved quickly, Michaels now on his feet and following. Ames was down, bleeding. It didn’t look as if he was breathing.

Howard kicked the fallen man’s pistol down the hall, then bent and laid two fingers on Ames’s right carotid.

Nothing.

Julio came running, slid to a stop as Howard shook his head.

Michaels said, “Did I hit him?”

“Hard to say, but I think that one in the leg was yours,” Howard said.

“Good.”

Howard looked at Michaels, wondering.

“That man sent a killer to my house,” Michaels said. “He threatened my child.”

Howard nodded. “Mine, too. God will judge him for his actions, but I’m not sorry He will get the chance sooner rather than later.”

“Amen,” Julio said.