Authors: Patrick Lee
Travis threw himself forward at the man bringing up his gun. The two of them were lined up in a perfect face-off. Travis crossed the five-foot reach of space between them in the time it took the gun to come up to chest level. He got his left hand around the silencer, yanked the weapon down and away from pointing at the others, and punched the guy in the throat with all the force his weight and momentum could provide. Which turned out to be enough. The guy’s hand came off the gun with a reflexive jerk. And then Travis was twisting, holding the pistol, going right past the guy and beyond the arc of the others. Not trying to check his speed. Not even trying to stay on his feet.
He took one more step before his balance outran him, and then he was falling, completing his spin as he dropped. Still holding the Beretta in his left hand by its silencer. He brought his right hand up and took the weapon by the grip. Raised it to sight in on one of the still-armed gunmen. His angle of fire, as he fell, was tilted radically upward. If he missed, the bullet would hit only the ceiling—there was no more of the building above this floor.
He fired. He didn’t miss. The shot hit the man at the base of his skull and blew it open.
Then Travis’s ass hit the floor painfully and his gun arm dropped beyond his control.
By then, everyone was moving. Things were happening too quickly for him to keep track of. He saw Paige and Bethany ducking and running toward him, getting out of the kill zone that was about to open up between the gunmen and the oncoming agents in the hall. He could hear the agents’ footsteps, as well as those of the other teams, still out of sight somewhere behind him. He could see the gunmen scattering, ducking—no doubt they could see the agents now. One man slammed into the leather chair that held the two cylinders. The chair pitched forward, spilling the cylinders onto the carpet. They rolled in different directions—neither one toward Travis.
Travis raised the Beretta again, looking for a target, when it occurred to him what he was doing. He was holding a pistol, in a room containing a former president, into which Secret Service agents were about to flood.
Not a good way to stay alive.
He cocked his wrist and threw the gun sideways, saw it hit the carpet and spin into the gap beneath the couch. At the same time he saw Paige and Bethany diving toward him, and even as they hit the ground the shooting started.
T
ravis saw within seconds that it wasn’t going to shake out in their favor. Finn and his men had fallen back to defensive positions in adjoining rooms, leaving Garner alone where he stood. The Secret Service agents were already converging on him, unloading suppressing fire at the doorways through which the others had retreated.
But not engaging them.
Not attacking.
That wasn’t their job.
Their job was to get Garner out of harm’s way, and they would do it in probably fifteen seconds. Twenty at the most. They would surround him and hustle him out, down the entry hall and out into the larger corridor. Probably right out of the building after that. They would maintain fire to cover the retreat from the residence, but that would be it. Not even Garner could order them to do otherwise. In the heat of it all, they wouldn’t even be listening to him.
Well under half a minute from right now, Travis knew, the three of them would be left alone with Finn’s remaining people—nearly all of them still alive.
Travis was lying facedown on the floor now, hands outstretched and empty. Paige and Bethany, right beside him, were in the same position.
Travis turned his head and saw two agents pass by on the inside wall of the living room. They were firing three-shot bursts.
The rest of the action was going on where Travis couldn’t see it. He couldn’t tell if Finn’s people were shooting. Their silenced fire would’ve been impossible to make out against the other shots.
Paige turned to him, her eyes intense. She understood the trouble they were in as well as he did. Then she looked past him. He turned to follow her gaze, and saw one of the cylinders.
It was ten feet away, under the coffee table.
He looked for the other one. Couldn’t see it anywhere. Given the direction it’d rolled, it had to be closer to Finn’s position now. It wasn’t even worth thinking about.
Travis looked at the nearer one. If he could get to it and get the iris open, no special care would be needed to position it. The ruin of this building had thick steel gridwork for subflooring instead of concrete and rebar. The grids were completely rusted, but because they were such a heavy gauge—inch-thick steel rods crisscrossing at three-inch intervals—they were still very strong. No matter where he opened the iris, there would be a solid surface to crawl onto on the other side.
It would take him two seconds to reach the cylinder, starting from his prone position.
Paige saw what he was thinking. “You can’t!” Her voice was just audible under the shooting. “The agents will think you’re going for a weapon!”
He craned his neck around to look at them. They’d reached Garner. They’d boxed him in. Two or three of them, with their free hands, had grabbed hold of the man’s arms. They were dragging him toward the hall. Garner
was
shouting something at them, as Travis had imagined. It was about as effective as he’d imagined, too. Ten more seconds and they’d be gone. They were still shooting at the doorways through which Finn and his people had ducked. Sporadic fire, meant only for deterrence.
One of the agents had his eyes fixed on Travis and Paige and Bethany, even as his MP5 stayed trained on the doorways. He could swing the weapon toward the three of them, where they lay, about as quickly as he could decide they were a threat.
Travis wouldn’t get halfway to the cylinder if he went for it.
He judged the agents’ progress toward the mouth of the entry hall, beyond which they wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. Five seconds now, at most.
He looked at the doorways. Finn and the others were somewhere beyond them. Travis had no doubt that Finn, at least, was running the same calculation he was: gauging the straight-razor margin of time between the agents’ departure from the suite and the earliest moment that Travis could reach the cylinder and trigger the iris.
It would take some number of seconds, and some number of seconds would be available. One of those numbers would turn out to be larger than the other. In the end it would be that simple.
In the last few feet before the mouth of the hallway, the Secret Service agents began to run. They hauled Garner along, barely on his feet.
And then they were gone, out of Travis’s view, into the hall.
Travis moved. Drew his legs up under him, dug his feet into the carpet and lunged. Even as he did, he heard—even felt—the suite go silent as the shooting stopped. The agents were simply hauling ass now, transiting the length of the entry hall as fast as they could physically go. Their footsteps were the only sound—for a second. And then there were other footsteps, nearer by.
Travis hit the coffee table with both hands. Slammed it aside like it weighed nothing, though it was made of solid walnut.
Finn and the others were coming fast. Maybe not through the doorways yet, but close.
Travis got his hands on the cylinder. He landed on his shoulder, twisted and aimed the thing toward Paige and Bethany. He hit the on button and the off (detach/delay—93 sec.) button a fraction of a second apart.
The iris opened a few inches above the floor. The night beyond it was dark and depthless except for streaks of rain at the opening, silvery in the light-bleed from the suite. The projection beam was already intensifying, charging the iris to stay open on its own. Travis had never measured exactly how long that part took. It’d always seemed like just a few seconds. It seemed longer now.
The footsteps were closer. Definitely in the living room. Travis didn’t bother turning to look. Whatever he might see, there was nothing he could do any faster.
Paige was up on all fours and moving. Throwing herself into the beam of light, but not toward the iris. Instead she passed through the light, hit the floor and rolled, and came to a stop with her hand clutching Bethany’s backpack. She twisted back toward the iris and threw the pack with all her force. It went through into the darkness. Travis heard the clatter of the SIG and the shotgun shells as the pack landed on the gridwork.
At the same instant the beam finally vanished, leaving the iris alone.
Paige was waving for Bethany to go through, but Bethany was already moving, fast and lithe. She got her limbs beneath her without rising more than a foot from the floor, and went through the iris in a single movement. No part of her even touched the circle.
Paige was right behind her, and when she was two thirds through the iris, Travis gripped the cylinder in his right hand and tossed it at her backside in an underhand spiral. He was betting it all that she would turn toward him once she’d crossed the threshold. Would turn and have time to catch the thing. He had no choice. His ears told him he was out of time.
P
aige spun on her knee the moment she was through the iris—and flinched, her hands coming up just in time to keep the cylinder from smashing into her face. She blocked it and then got hold of it, pulling it against herself, already forgetting it entirely.
Because Finn and two of his men were right there. Ten feet from Travis. Just passing the visual barrier of the overturned leather chair and the upright one beside it. Their guns already coming up to level.
But Travis was coming up, too. Not with a gun of his own. The Beretta was close by, somewhere under the couch, but the gap was too narrow to easily reach into.
What Travis had instead was the coffee table. He had it right by the middle with both hands, raising it over his head, and he was heaving himself upright from a crouch.
Finn and his men faltered. Whatever they’d expected, this wasn’t it.
Travis extended his arms violently as he stood, and hurled the coffee table at them like a two-handed shot put.
Finn ducked. The man to his left brought his forearms up. The man to his right did nothing at all, and Paige saw the leading edge of the table connect dead-on with his nose. There was an explosion of blood across the bottom half of his face.
Paige missed whatever came next. She could see Travis diving toward the opening now, and pitched herself sideways to clear the way. He came through headfirst, landed on his forearms, twisted and pulled his legs the rest of the way across the margin.
It occurred to Paige that they were nowhere near safe yet. Just the opposite. They were sprawled out in the darkness before the opening, in no position to move quickly or take cover—if there’d been any cover. Finn and his people had been slowed by no more than a few seconds. There was still all the time in the world before the iris slipped shut.
She could see two sets of feet and shins coming already. Rounding the chairs. Pivoting. Crossing the open space. The men wouldn’t even need to look through the iris for their targets. They could simply shove their pistols through and start shooting. They couldn’t miss.
The SIG.
Where the hell was the backpack? When Paige had tossed it through, she’d been thinking only of getting out of the room fast. She spun, trying to guess where—and how far away—it could have ended up on this side.
But she saw the SIG the moment she turned. A small hand was gripping it. And centering it on the iris.
Bethany fired.
Paige looked in time to see a kneecap, five feet beyond the opening, burst inside its pant leg. A man screamed and fell bodily into view. Not Finn. The guy still had his Beretta, but he wasn’t aiming yet. Bethany’s next shot went right through the bridge of his nose. He flopped forward onto the carpet. The second pair of legs dug in to a hard stop. The man vaulted sideways, just missing Bethany’s next round. It cratered one of the suite’s bulletproof windows instead.
By then Paige could see Travis getting to his feet. Reaching to help her up. Bethany was rising too, but staying bent at the waist, keeping the SIG positioned to fire again.
Ten seconds later they settled into a safer position, several yards from the iris at a random angle. The opening looked strange hovering there in the darkness, lighting up the intermittent rain a few feet around it.
Bethany kept the SIG leveled. Nobody appeared at the opening.
The next minute went by like ten, and then the iris slipped shut, and there was nothing but the rain and the chill and the darkness of the ruined city.
A
lmost at once the rain provided a form of guidance. They could hear it hissing where it passed through the rusted bars of the steel grid, but somewhere close by it was making another sound. A hard pinging against something solid, resonant.
The stairs.
Just as in the office building in D.C., the heavy treads of the stairs in this structure had survived the decades of neglect. The three of them had climbed the full thirty flights earlier in the day.
Travis stood. “Let’s go.”
They made their way across the gridwork, stopping a few times to reassess the direction of the pinging. They took careful steps, placing each one tentatively before shifting any weight forward. There were other things than the stairwell that they might encounter. The elevator shaft, for one.