The Archimedes Effect

34

Washington, D.C.

The roar of the BMF revolver was a noise to rival Thor’s hammer smashing a mountain of granite, a scream that stunned both the ear and the mind. He wasn’t worried about his hearing or ballistics at this point—it was his ass on the line. They were here, they knew who he was. All bets were off.

He pointed the handgun at the front door, not bothering to aim, and squeezed the trigger again, and the second blast from the firing chamber blew sideways hard enough from the cylinder to blast paint chips off the door frame in the hall where he stood.

If that didn’t make them duck, nothing would.

Even with his ears ringing from the shots, he heard: “Holy shit! He’s got a fucking cannon in there! Get down!”

He assumed they had both the front and back covered, and there was only one way out. He ran to the bedroom and jerked open the door to his closet. He had a moment of regret when he looked at all the stuff he’d have to leave behind, but that’s all he had time for, that brief moment. He could buy new stuff if he got away. If not, he wouldn’t need it anyway. He’d either be dead or on his way up the river for a long damn time.

How had they found him? Only one way he could see—the same way they had known to set a trap at the Army base. Somebody had ratted him out, and there was only one person who could have done it.

Why? Had she gotten spooked over something and wanted to throw him to the wolves so they wouldn’t follow her? Had that business with the terrorist’s brother rattled her? She seemed so cool and so smart, he’d never figured on that. Was she getting greedy now that the payout was getting closer?

And how stupid did she think he was, that he wouldn’t eventually figure it out that she’d given him up?

Unless maybe the reason they had hung back at the base, and weren’t storming in here like gangbusters, was because she’d told them something else? Like maybe he was suicidal? She didn’t want him alive and talking, did she?

Crap. What a screwup this was.

There were D.C. cops, FBI, and at least a couple goddamn Net Force logos out front, all of them armed, some with subguns, some with LTL beanbag guns and tasers. He had to assume there were that many of them in the backyard, too. They wanted him alive, obviously, the way they were waving those beanbaggers and electrical shockers, but once he’d cooked off a few more rounds from the honker, they’d rethink that. If it was him leading the assault and somebody coughed as loud as the BMF at him? The take-him-alive plan would be right out, and it’d be into just shoot the bastard first chance, and game over.

One against eight. Not good odds, even if he’d had the element of surprise—and he sure as hell didn’t have that.

He had one chance, and it wasn’t much. His only hope was that he had rattled them before they had a chance to get everybody into position. If not, he was probably a dead man, because he wasn’t going to just give up.

The trapdoor to the crawl space was in the floor of the closet. He jerked it up, grabbed the flashlight hung on the nail on the back wall, and dropped into the opening. They’d find the door eventually, but it was covered with carpet to match the closet’s floor, and he tugged it back into place. It would take them a few minutes to get into the house and realize he wasn’t there. A few more minutes to find the crawl space, if he was lucky.

After hearing his gun, nobody would want to be the first guy through the door, just in case he was sitting there maybe wanting to go out in a blaze of glory and see how many he could take with him.

The crawl space was just that, less than a meter high, and he dropped prone and started ass and elbows and knees working. He’d done a modification to the house when he’d rented it, built an exit to the side that opened up in the narrow corridor that had once been a dog run. There was even an old doghouse there, and Carruth had taken out one wall of it and shoved it against the side of the house, to cover the trapdoor leading to the yard.

The place was dirty, full of spiderwebs and God knew what other bugs, but that wasn’t high on his list of worries at the moment.

He came out inside the doghouse, which was big enough to hold a St. Bernard. He looked out through the door, didn’t see anybody in the backyard looking his way, and that was because there was a wooden gate to the dog run and it was closed and padlocked. That would change soon. They’d be watching the back door, checking windows, and looking at the gate to the dog run. With a six-foot-high fence running down the side of the yard, they’d figure they’d see him if he hopped it. Sooner or later, though, somebody would get a bolt-cutter for the locked gate and come to check the side of the house.

He had to hurry.

The fence between his house and the next-door neighbor was a two-meter-tall wooden privacy deal. Fortunately, the neighbor had cats and not a dog, and didn’t know that Carruth had dug a hole under the fence, covered it with a thin sheet of Masonite, and spread bark dust over the top on both sides, so it looked just like the rest of the ground. His next-door neighbor wasn’t big on yard work; his side of the fence was thick with weeds, which was good—he had never notice the disguised pit.

No time to sit around here thinking how clever you were to do that, Carruth. Git!

He lifted the edge of the doghouse up, reached across the half a meter, and grabbed the edge of the Masonite, pulling it toward himself. A certain amount of the bark dust scraped off the other side and fell into the hole, but there was enough room, even for a big man in a hurry, to wiggle into the hole and undulate underneath the fence. He moved.

He had a bad moment when the back of his belt snagged on the wood, but he jerked free and came out into the neighbor’s yard. He couldn’t cover the hole from this side, but by the time they found it, it shouldn’t matter.

He stayed crouched low and duck-walked along the side of the neighbor’s house. They had a TV going inside, with what sounded like a ball game of some kind on.

Once he rounded the corner and started away from the fence, Carruth came up some and started to sprint. If the fence didn’t hide him from view, he was screwed; there wasn’t any real cover in this backyard, a couple of short bushes and thin-trunked trees, nothing to hide behind until he got to the other side.

He ran, hard. Passed a sliding glass door and caught a quick glimpse of his neighbor and his two teenaged boys watching the big-screen television. He didn’t think they saw him, but that didn’t matter, there wasn’t anything he could do but run.

Idiot cops should have cleared this house—ought not be risking civilian casualties—first thing they shoulda done was get the families on both sides of my house out and away.

Well, if they screwed up on this, maybe they would screw up on other stuff. He could hope.

He rounded the corner, ran toward the fence on the other side of the house, and launched himself over the top in a high-speed high jump, not the Fosbury Flop, but with both hands on a four-by-four post and a sideways vault.

He cleared the fence, hit, fell, rolled up, and kept going.

This neighbor did have a dog, a yappy little Pomeranian that went into a conniption. Fortunately, it was inside the house, and not likely anybody on the street would hear it.

He made it across the yard and hopped the next fence. Banged his left knee hard when he didn’t lift it quite high enough, but cleared it and damned near came down in the next neighbor’s swimming pool. It was covered for the season, but that would have been a bitch to get out of had he stepped onto the plastic cover.

The next fence was the last—this was the corner lot. Carruth ran around the pool to it, stopped, stood on his toes, and peeped over it.

Traffic on the street, but nobody standing around in urban camo with weapons he could see. He’d have to chance it.

He made ready to climb up and over.

“Hey! What are you doing?!”

He turned, and saw the house’s owner, a short, florid, fat man in a sweat suit, standing there with a garden hose, washing down a barbecue grill.

Carruth’s gun was in his holster and hidden under his thin Windbreaker, but if he cooked the guy, he might as well go out front and jump up and down to attract the cops. They’d hear the shot half a mile away.

“Chasing a guy broke into my house!” Carruth said. “Better stay inside, he’s got a knife! Cops are on the way!”

He hopped over the fence.

The fat guy washing his grill stared. He knew Carruth to look at, and while he hadn’t seen a burglar running around back here with a knife, it was the kind of thing that he’d have to think about for a while. If there was somebody Carruth was chasing and he had a knife? Maybe he should go inside and wait for the police to arrive and sort it out. A lot safer than facing down a knifer with a garden hose . . .

Carruth turned to his right and started jogging down the sidewalk. If he could get to the next block without being seen, he could maybe swipe a car or—wait, look at that, there was a Metro bus, right there.

He ran toward the bus.

The driver was about to pull away when he saw Carruth running. He stopped and waited.

Carruth climbed up the step. “I’m all out of change,” he said. “Can I buy a pass?”

“Sure, at your local Safeway.”

“Come on, we can do a deal here, can’t we?”

The driver wanted to get on his way. “How long?”

“A week?”

“Thirty dollars for the Short Trip, forty for the Fast Pass.”

Carruth pulled out his wallet and removed two twenties. “The Fast Pass,” he said.

The driver took his money. Carruth took the pass and went to find a seat. A few blocks, and he could get off and find wheels.

After that? Well, that was going to be a problem, wasn’t it?

The shit had definitely hit the fan now.

He sat, and adjusted the big gun on his hip. He needed to hit the road. Go to his storage unit where he had the old clunker car, charge up the battery, grab his go-bag with the new ID and haul-ass money, and get gone. This time tomorrow, with luck, he could be six, eight hundred miles away.

That’s what he should do. But he wanted to do something else before he left. His life had just taken a bad turn, and it wasn’t ever going to be the same again. And it was Lewis’s fault.

Lewis needed to pay for that. Big-time.

Half a block up the street from Carruth’s house, in the tricked-out RV that served as a mobile command post, Kent listened to the lieutenant’s report without saying anything.

“Yes, sir. He went out through the crawl space—there’s an access in the bedroom closet. Came up in the side yard, hidden behind a wooden gate, and had a tunnel predug under the fence into the neighbor’s yard. We must have just missed him.”

Kent nodded. If he’d been leading the op, it probably wouldn’t have gone any better. The operation had been run by the FBI with backup from the Metro police, and Net Force’s team was just here as “ride-along guests”—though they were armed guests. Given that they were Marines, albeit a special unit, operating on U.S. soil, even like this, was iffy. The Posse Comitatus Act had been around since the 1870s, passed during the Administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines went over there and kicked ass. At home, the civilian authorities were supposed to catch the bad guys. If the cops weren’t enough, there was the National Guard. Military units were not supposed to police American soil, save in very specific circumstances. And the last time he looked, martial law hadn’t been declared.

The old law was slowly changing, given the war on terrorism and all, but it hadn’t been really tested yet. The guy they were after was a civilian, and he’d be prosecuted as a civilian—if they ever caught him. Hard to justify calling out the Marines to bring him in . . .

They’d had the front, back, and one side of the house covered immediately, and when that handgun went off—two rounds blew holes through the front door of the house and sent the slugs, fortunately, into a thick tree near the front walk—everybody ducked. They all knew that this guy had killed a couple of police officers and several Army guys and he had nothing to lose by taking a few more with him if they got careless. And there was that story about him being a walking bomb, too.

By the time they got back to cover the side of the place, Carruth would have already been gone. Didn’t sound to Kent like a man who was in a hurry to die, but there was that possibility.

He reached for his virgil, to call Thorn. This wasn’t the first time an operation had turned into a snafu and the bad guy had gotten away, and it wasn’t even Net Force’s fault, but still, Kent hated to make the call.

Not as much as he hated losing the bad guy, though.

And this way of doing things? Sitting in the RV as an observer? That stunk. If his troops weren’t going to be able to go out and do what they had been trained to do, what was the point?

Well, he could sort that out later.

He reached for his virgil.