CHAPTER TWO

Brown stood in the small control room just off the kitchen.

On the table behind him sat an M16 rifle and a Beretta nine-millimeter semi-automatic, both fully loaded. There were three hand grenades and a ventilator mask. There was also a black Motorola walkie-talkie.

A bank of six small closed-circuit TV screens was mounted on the wall above the table. The images came to him in black and white. Each screen gave Brown a real-time feed from cameras planted at strategic points around the house.

From here, he could see the outside of the sliding glass doors as well as the top of the ramp to the boat dock; the dock itself and the approach to it from the water; the outside of the double-reinforced steel door on the side of the house; the foyer on the inside of that door; the upstairs hallway and its street-facing window; and last but not least, the windowless interrogation room upstairs where Luke Stone’s wife and son sat quietly strapped to their chairs, hoods covering their heads.

There was no way to take this house by surprise. With the keyboard on the desk, he took manual control of the camera on the dock. He raised the camera just a hair until the fishing boat out on the bay was centered, then he zoomed in. He spotted three flak-jacketed cops outside on the gunwales. They were pulling anchor. In a minute, that boat was going to come zooming in here.

Brown switched to the back porch view. He turned that camera to face the side of the house. He could just get the front grille of the cable van across the street. No matter. He had a man at the upstairs window with the van in his gun sights.

Brown sighed. He supposed the right thing to do would be to raise these cops on the radio and tell them he knew what they were doing. He could bring the woman and boy downstairs, and stand them up right in front of the sliding glass door so everybody could see what was on offer.

Rather than start with a firefight and bloodbath, he could skip straight to fruitless negotiations. He might even spare a few lives that way.

He smiled to himself. But that would spoil all the fun, wouldn’t it?

He checked the foyer view. He had three men downstairs, the two Beards and a man he thought of as the Australian. One man covered the steel door, and two men covered the rear sliding glass door. That glass door and the porch outside of it were the main vulnerabilities. But there was no reason the cops would ever get that far.

He reached behind him and picked up the walkie-talkie.

“Mr. Smith?” he said to the man crouched near the open upstairs window.

“Mr. Brown?” came a sarcastic voice. Smith was young enough that he still thought aliases were funny. On the TV screen, Smith gave a wave of his hand.

“What’s the van doing?”

“It’s rocking and rolling. Looks like they’re having an orgy in there.”

“Okay. Keep your eyes open. Do not… I repeat… Do not let anyone reach the porch. I don’t need to hear from you. You have authorization to engage. Copy?”

“I copy that,” Smith said. “Fire at will, baby.”

“Good man,” Brown said. “Maybe I’ll see you in hell.”

Just then, the sound of a heavy vehicle came in from the street. Brown ducked low. He crawled into the kitchen and crouched by the window. Outside, an armored car pulled up in front of the house. The heavy back door clunked open, and big men in body armor began to pile out.

A second passed. Two seconds. Three. Eight men had gathered on the street.

Smith opened up from the skies above.

Duh-duh-duh-duh-duh-duh.

The power of the gunshots made the floorboards vibrate.

Two of the cops hit the ground instantly. Others ducked back inside the truck, or behind it. Behind the armored car, three men burst out of the cable TV van. Smith lit them up. One of them, caught by a rain of bullets, did a crazy dance in the street.

“Excellent, Mr. Smith,” Brown said into the Motorola.

One of the police had gotten halfway across the street before he was shot. Now he was crawling toward the near sidewalk, maybe hoping to reach the shrubbery in front of the house. He wore body armor. He was probably hit where the gaps were, but he might still be a threat.

“You’ve got one on the ground still coming! I want him out of the game.”

Almost immediately, a hail of bullets struck the man, making his body twitch and shudder. Brown saw the kill shot in slow motion. It hit the man in the gap at the back of his neck, between the top of his torso armor and the bottom of his helmet. A spray cloud of blood filled the air and the man went completely still.

“Nice shooting, Mr. Smith. Lovely shooting. Now keep them all locked down.”

Brown slipped back into the command room. The fishing boat was pulling up. Before it even reached the dock, a team of black-jacketed and helmeted men began to jump across.

“Masks on downstairs!” Brown said. “Incoming through that sliding door. Prepare to return fire.”

“Affirmative,” someone said.

The invaders took up positions on the dock. They carried heavy armored ballistic shields and got low behind them. A man popped up and raised a tear gas gun. Brown reached for his own mask and watched the projectile fly toward the house. It hit the glass door and punched through into the main room.

A different man popped up and fired another canister. Then a third man fired yet another. All the tear gas canisters burst through the glass and into the house. The glass door was gone. On Brown’s screen, the area near the foyer began to fill with smoke.

“Status downstairs?” Brown said. A few seconds passed.

“Status!”

“No worries, matey,” the Australian said. “A little smoke, so what? We’ve got our masks on.”

“Fire when ready,” Brown said.

He watched as the men at the sliding door opened fire toward the dock. The invaders were pinned down out there. They couldn’t get up from behind their ballistic shields. And Brown’s men had stacks of ammunition ready.

“Good shooting, boys,” he said into the walkie-talkie. “Be sure to sink their boat while you’re at it.”

Brown smirked to himself. They could hold out here for days.

*

It was a rout. There were men down all over the place.

Luke walked toward the house, scanning carefully. The worst of the shooting was coming from a man in the upstairs window. He was making Swiss cheese out of these cops. Luke was close to the side of the house. From his angle he didn’t have a shot, but the man also probably couldn’t see him.

As Luke watched, the bad guy finished a downed cop with a kill shot to the back of the neck.

“Ed, how’s your look on that upstairs shooter?”

“I can put one right down his throat. Pretty sure he doesn’t see me over here.”

Luke nodded. “Let’s do that first. It’s getting messy out here.”

“You sure you want that?” Ed said.

Luke studied the upstairs. The windowless room was on the far side of the house from the sniper’s nest.

“I’m still banking they’re in that room with no windows,” he said.

Please.

“Just say the word,” Ed said.

“Go.”

Luke heard the distinctive hollow report of the grenade launcher.

Doonk!

A missile flew from behind the line of cars across the street. It had no arc – just a sharp flat line zooming up on a diagonal. It hit right where the window was. A split second passed, then:

BANG.

The side of the house blew outward, chunks of wood, glass, steel, and fiberglass. The gun in the window went silent.

“Nice, Ed. Real nice. Now give me that hole in the wall.”

“What do you say?” Ed said.

“Pretty please.”

Luke raced around and ducked behind a car.

Doonk!

Another flat line zoomed by, four feet above the ground. It hit the side of the house like a car crash, and punched a gaping wound through the wall. A fireball erupted inside, spitting smoke and debris.

Luke nearly jumped up.

“Hold on,” Ed said. “One more on its way.”

Ed fired again, and this one went deep into the house. Red and orange flared through the hole. The ground trembled. Okay. It was time to go.

Luke climbed to his feet and started running.

*

The first explosion was above his head. The entire house shook from it. Brown glanced at the upstairs hallway on his screen.

The far end of it was gone. The spot where Smith had been stationed was no longer there. There was just a ragged hole where the window and Mr. Smith used to be.

“Mr. Smith?” Brown said. “Mr. Smith, are you there?”

No answer.

“Anybody see where that came from?”

“You’re the eyes, Yank,” came a voice.

They had trouble.

A few seconds later, a rocket hit the front of the house. The shockwave knocked Brown off his feet. The walls were collapsing. The kitchen ceiling suddenly caved in. Brown lay on the floor among falling junk. This had gone the opposite of what he expected. Cops rammed down doors – they didn’t fire rockets through walls.

Another rocket hit, this one deep inside the house. Brown covered his head. Everything shook. The whole house could come down.

A moment passed. Someone was screaming now. Otherwise, it was quiet. Brown jumped up and ran for the stairs. On the way out of the room, he grabbed his handgun and one grenade.

He passed through the main room. It was carnage, a slaughterhouse. The room was on fire. One of the Beards was dead. More than dead – blown to shredded pieces all over the place. The Australian had panicked and taken his mask off. His face was covered in dark blood, but Brown couldn’t tell where he was hit.

“I can’t see!” the man screamed. “I can’t see!”

His eyes were wide open.

A man in body armor and helmet stepped calmly through the shattered wall. He quieted the Australian with an ugly blat of automatic gunfire. The Australian’s head popped apart like a cherry tomato. He stood without a head for a second or two, and then dropped bonelessly to the floor.

The second Beard lay on the ground near the back door, the double-steel reinforced door which Brown had been so delighted about just a few moments ago. The cops were never going to get through that door. Beard #2 was cut up from the explosion, but still in the fight. He dragged himself to the wall, propped himself upright, and reached for the gun strapped at his shoulder.

The intruder shot Beard #2 in the face at point-blank range. Blood and bone and gray matter splattered against the wall.

Brown turned and stormed up the stairs.

*

The air was thick with smoke, but Luke saw the man bolt for the stairs. He glanced around the room. Everyone else was dead.

Satisfied, he took the stairs at a run. His own breathing sounded loud in his ears.

He was vulnerable here. The stairs were so narrow it would be the perfect time for someone to spray gunfire down on him. No one did.

At the top, the air was clearer than below. To his left was the shattered window and wall where the sniper had taken position. The sniper’s legs were on the floor. His tan work boots pointed in opposite directions. The rest of him was gone.

Luke went right. Instinctively, he ran to the room at the far end of the hall. He dropped his Uzi in the hallway. He took the pump shotgun off his shoulder and dropped that, too. He slid his Glock from its holster.

He turned left and into the room.

Becca and Gunner sat tied to two folding chairs. Their arms were pulled behind their backs. Their hair was wild, as if some funny person had just mussed it with his hand. Indeed, a man stood behind them. He dropped two black hoods to the floor and placed the muzzle of his gun to the back of Becca’s head. He crouched very low, putting Becca in front of him as a human shield.

Becca’s eyes were very wide. Gunner’s were tightly closed. He was weeping uncontrollably. His entire body shook with silent sobs. He had wet his pants.

Was it worth it?

To see them like this, helpless, in terror, had it been worth it? Luke had helped stop a coup d’état the night before. He had saved the new President from almost certain death, but was it worth this?

“Luke?” Becca said, as if she didn’t recognize him.

Of course she didn’t. He pulled his helmet off.

“Luke,” she said. She gasped, maybe in relief. He didn’t know. People made sounds in extreme moments. They didn’t always mean anything.

Luke raised his gun, sighting it directly between Becca’s and Gunner’s heads. The man was good. He wasn’t giving Luke anything to hit. But Luke left the gun pointed there anyway. He watched patiently. The man wouldn’t always be good. No one was good forever.

Luke felt nothing right now, nothing but… dead… calm.

He did not feel relief flooding his system. This wasn’t over yet.

“Luke Stone?” the man said. He grunted. “Amazing. You’re everywhere at once these past couple of days. Is it really you?”

Luke could picture the man’s face from the moment before he ducked behind Becca. He had a thick scar across his left cheek. He had a flat-top haircut. He had the sharp features of someone who had spent his life in the military.

“Who wants to know?” Luke said.

“They call me Brown.”

Luke nodded. A name that wasn’t a name. The name of a ghost. “Well, Brown, how do you want to do this?”

Below them, Luke could hear the police storming the house.

“What options do you see?” Brown said.

Luke stood without moving, his gun waiting for that shot to appear. “I see two options. You can either die right this minute or, if you’re lucky, in prison a long time from now.”

“Or I could blow your lovely wife’s brains all over you.”

Luke didn’t answer. He just pointed that gun. His arm wasn’t tired. It would never get tired. But the cops were coming upstairs in a minute, and that was going to change the equation.

“And you’ll be dead one second later.”

“True,” Brown said. “Or I could do this.”

His free hand dropped a grenade into Becca’s lap.

As Brown dashed away, Luke dropped the gun and dove for it. In one series of motions, he picked up the grenade, flipped it toward the back wall of the room, collapsed the two chairs, and pushed both Becca and Gunner to the ground.

Becca screamed.

Luke gathered them together, rough with it, no time for gentleness. He pushed them closer and closer, mounted them, blanketed them with his body, and with his armor. He tried to make them disappear.

For a split second, nothing happened. Maybe it was a ruse. The grenade was a fake, and now the man called Brown would have the drop on him. He would kill them all.

BOOOOOM!

The explosion came, deafening in the close confines of the room. Luke gathered them closer. The floor shook. Shards of metal sprayed him. He ducked his head low. Bare flesh on his neck was torn away. He covered them and held them.

A moment passed. His little family trembled beneath him, frozen in shock and fear, but alive.

Now it was time to kill that bastard. Luke’s Glock lay on the floor beside him. He grabbed it and jumped to his feet. He turned.

A huge ragged hole had been blown through the back of the room. Through it, Luke could see daylight and blue sky. He could see the dark green water of the bay. And he could see the man called Brown was gone.

Luke approached the hole from an angle, using the remnants of the wall to shield himself. The edges were a shredded mix of wood, broken drywall, and ripped up fiberglass insulation. He expected to see a body on the ground, possibly in several bloody pieces. No. There was no body.

For a split second, Luke thought he saw a splash. A man might have dived into the bay and disappeared. Luke blinked to clear his eyes, then looked again. He wasn’t sure.

Either way, the man called Brown was gone.