Home Invasion (6 page)

Ford’s right hand went behind his back and plucked the gun from its concealed holster. At the same time, his left grasped the door handle and tried to twist it.

Locked. The handle didn’t budge.

The door had one of those card key locks. Parker had his gun out by now, too, and as he leveled it at the lock, he said, “Step back.”

“That won’t work,” Ford said as another yelp came from inside the room, followed by what sounded like a chair being overturned. “You’ll just wind up with a smashed lock and a door that still won’t open.”

Parker glanced at him. “How do you know that?”

“Those guys on TV proved it. You know, the goofy one and the one with the beret.”

“Then what do we do?”

Somebody inside the room screamed, “Help!”

Ford glanced both ways along the corridor. “You take 625, I’ll take 629. See if anybody will open up.”

They went opposite directions along the hall. Ford pounded on the door of 629 while Parker did the same on 625. “Police!” Ford yelled. “Emergency!”

The first part was a lie. The second part certainly wasn’t.

Nobody answered his knock, but Parker shouted, “Fargo! Down here!”

Moving fast for such a big man, Ford reached the open door of 625 in a couple of leaps. Parker was already in the room, heading for the sliding glass door that opened onto the balcony. Ford followed him, rushing past a fat, middle-aged man who looked terrified to have a couple of armed strangers running through his room.

Parker threw the glass door aside and lunged out onto the balcony. Ford was right behind him.

“You know this is crazy, don’t you?” Parker flung over his shoulder.

“Fastest way in there,” Ford replied.

As a matter of fact, adrenaline was thundering through his veins and he felt great. For a lot of his career with the Company, he had been a handler, not a field agent. That aspect of the job had its rewards, but it was nothing like being on the ground and feeling like you were actually accomplishing something.

The gap between balconies was about eight feet, plenty wide enough to discourage anybody who might be crazy enough to try to jump from one to another.

Parker barely slowed down, though, as he rested his free hand on the railing, vaulted up, slapped a foot down onto the top of the rail, and pushed off.

With six stories worth of empty air beneath him, he sailed across the gap, clearing the railing on the other balcony by perhaps a foot. He went down to hands and knees when he landed but managed to hang on to the gun.

Ford was right behind him, and as the bigger agent made the leap, reason overwhelmed adrenaline and reminded him of what a big, bloody mess he would make down there by the pool if he failed to reach the other balcony.

It would ruin the rest of the afternoon for the beautiful people around the pool, that was for sure.

Ford didn’t completely clear the railing, but he got a foot on it and leaned forward desperately, letting his weight and momentum carry him onto the balcony of 627, where he landed in an awkward heap and rolled across the cement floor, scraping and bruising himself in the process.

He came up on a knee in time to see Parker charging into the room where a struggle was going on. The little blond guy who was their target appeared to be trying to fight off a couple of ugly bruisers who had hired killer written all over them. They must not have been all that good at their job, though, or else the kid would already be dead by now.

Instead, the target had backed into a corner between the bed and the wall and was flailing away at one of the intruders with what was left of a broken chair. He wasn’t big enough to have broken it himself, so he must have grabbed it during the fight.

“Get away from him!” Parker yelled as he leveled his gun at the two attackers. The one closest to him wheeled around suddenly and launched a spinning high kick that caught Parker on the wrist and knocked the weapon out of his hand.

Parker didn’t let that stop him. He stepped forward swiftly while the guy was still off-balance and grabbed his leg, wrapping his right arm around it. He used his left fist to hammer a blow into the side of the man’s head and then heaved on the leg. The man wound up on his butt.

Meanwhile, Ford had made it into the room, too. He pointed his gun at the second would-be assassin as that man grabbed the broken chair leg away from the kid and tried to jab the jagged end of it into his throat. The young man twisted away just in time to avoid the thrust.

Ford wasn’t going to give the guy a second chance. He fired across the bed, putting a round through the man’s forearm.

The man howled in pain and dropped the chair leg. He whirled toward Ford, leaped onto the bed, and bounced off it like it was a trampoline, using it to send him into the air in a diving tackle. Ford pulled the trigger again but didn’t know if the shot hit the man. It certainly didn’t slow him down if it did. He crashed into Ford with the impact of a freight train.

Ford went over backwards and the man landed on top of him, driving the air out of his lungs. Gasping for breath, Ford slapped around on the floor for the gun he had just dropped but failed to locate it. He grabbed the phone, though, which had been knocked off the table where it usually sat, and smashed it on the man’s head in an explosion of plastic and electronics.

That stunned the man enough for Ford to throw him off. Ford rolled onto his side and dragged air into his lungs. He spotted his gun lying on the carpet and scooped it up just as the man he’d been fighting with pulled a big, ugly revolver from somewhere. Maybe the two men had been trying to eliminate the target quietly at first, with a minimum of fuss, but that ship was
way
out of the harbor by now.

The hell with this,
Fargo thought. He emptied the pistol into the man’s chest before the guy could pull the trigger.

A bullet hitting a man’s body usually wouldn’t knock him down unless it was an extremely heavy caliber. That was something else those guys on TV had proven.

But seven bullets, even of a smaller caliber, pounding into a guy’s chest in the space of three seconds would certainly make him stagger backwards, and that’s what happened now. With blood welling from the bullet holes, the man went back three steps through the open sliding glass door and then three more steps across the balcony. The backs of his thighs hit the railing, and inertia did the rest.

The guy flipped right over it and plummeted toward the ground, screaming as he fell.

Ford had time to mutter, “Look out below,” before a loud thud silenced the scream.

He rolled over and reached in his pocket for a fresh magazine as he dumped the empty. On the other side of the room, Parker and the other killer were trading martial arts blows, their arms and legs moving almost too fast for Ford’s eyes to follow them.

The blond kid who was the object of all this attention was making a beeline for the door into the corridor, taking off for the tall and uncut.

Ford couldn’t really blame him for that, but he couldn’t afford to let the target get away, either. He scrambled to his feet and went after the kid, ramming home the fresh magazine as he did so.

A shot blasted in the hall.

By now there was a lot of yelling, cursing, and screaming going on all up and down the corridor, as the hotel guests thought—and rightfully so—that somebody was on a shooting rampage. As Ford stepped out into the hall, he saw the kid stumbling around and clutching a bloody arm. Another shot rang out, chipping wood and plaster from the wall near Ford. He saw the shooter, down in the alcove where the elevators were located, and returned the fire, forcing the man to duck back.

Ford grabbed the target’s arm and slung him back into 627. “Stay there!” he bellowed.

Then Ford went to a knee and traded fast shots with the gunman at the elevators.

The kid scampered out of the room behind him and started running the other way along the hall, pushing past people who came out of their rooms to see what was going on. Ford glanced back and saw him fleeing, but there was nothing he could do except bite back a curse. He had his hands full with this firefight.

Inside the room, Parker yelled, “Stop!”

Ford looked back again, saw that his partner had managed to retrieve his gun. The other assassin didn’t want any part of it now that the target was gone. He turned and ran toward the balcony. Parker fired a warning shot, but the guy never slowed down.

He bounded across the balcony, leaped onto the railing, and dived off.

Committing suicide because he had failed in his mission? Ford didn’t think so. Parker comfirmed that when he ran onto the balcony, looked down, and said, “Son of a bitch! Right into the pool!”

It took either a lunatic or somebody who was damned good to dive six stories into a hotel swimming pool and survive. This man must have fallen into one of those categories, although at this point, Ford didn’t know if he had actually survived.

The shooting in the hall stopped. Ford heard a door slam open and then closed. There was a stairwell beside the elevators. From the sound of it, the third man was fleeing, too.

Ford was leery of a trap, but he came to his feet and advanced toward the elevator alcove, staying close to the wall and holding his gun ready. He went around the corner in a hurry and tracked the weapon from side to side.

Nobody. The guy was gone, all right. Ford went to the stairwell door, jerked it open, and listened. He could hear hurrying footsteps echoing up from below.

For a second he thought about grabbing one of the elevators and trying to beat the guy to the ground, but he discarded the idea. There was no guarantee the man would go all the way to the first floor. He could leave the stairwell at any of the other floors and blend into the confused crowd that was growing larger all the time as word of the shooting on six spread through the hotel.

“Fargo, you all right?” Parker asked as he trotted down the hall.

“Yeah, you?”

Parker jerked his head in a nod. “The target?”

“In the wind.” The words tasted bitter in Ford’s mouth.

Parker grimaced and said, “I saw a laptop in there.”

“Grab it and let’s go.”

Parker nodded again, disappeared into 627, and came out with a laptop computer tucked under his arm. “How are we going to get out of here with all this uproar going on?”

“Did that other guy dive into the pool?”

“He did. He climbed out and got away, too.” Parker stared at Ford and shook his head. “Fargo, you’re not thinking about—”

“Do I look insane to you? There’s a walkway from the eighth floor to the top level of the parking garage. Come on.”

With the skill of experienced agents, the two men made it out of the hotel, retrieving their SUV from the parking garage, and driving away just before the police arrived in response to the dozens of 911 calls about a shooting and a man falling from a sixth-floor balcony.

Parker was at the wheel. He drove over the towering Nueces Bay bridge and then over Indian Point Bridge into neighboring Portland. He pulled into a nondescript chain motel where he and Ford had rented a room the day before.

Once they were in the room, Ford set the small laptop on the table and opened it. It was already on and in sleep mode. Ford woke it and pointed at the pornographic desktop that appeared.

“What a sleaze.”

“Never mind that,” Parker said as he leaned over the chair where Ford sat. “How much power is left?”

“Lemme see … fifty-four percent.”

“Hang on, I think I’ve got an AC power cord that’ll fit it.”

Parker fetched the cord from one of his bags and plugged the computer into a wall outlet.

“Now we won’t run out of juice,” Ford said as he started to work. His big, blunt fingers weren’t particularly well-suited for the small keyboard, so he was careful not to push anything he didn’t mean to.

He started exploring the files, taking a quick glance through the directory, then opening the e-mail client. The in-box was almost empty.

“Nothing here but spam,” Ford muttered. “He must save all his important e-mail on a flash drive and then delete it from the computer.”

“It might still be recoverable,” Parker said.

“Yeah, but not by me. We ought to send it back to Langley.”

“Poke around in there some more first.”

“That goes without saying.”

Ford went back to exploring the various files. After a few minutes, he muttered, “Looks like this guy didn’t use the computer for anything except downloading music and porn and games.”

“What’s in that folder?” Parker asked. “The one named CDD?”

“Let’s see.” Ford clicked on it, only to have a dialogue box pop up. “Password protected. You got any idea what his password might be?”

“I don’t even know who
he
is,” Parker said. He shook his head in disgust. “I’m sure the tech guys can crack it, but I was hoping we could get some clue to what’s going on.”

“Yeah, me—” Ford began, then stopped short as the lights in the motel room and the screen on the computer suddenly lit up brighter than usual, then abruptly went dark. The overhead lights came back on after a second. The laptop’s screen flickered a couple of times, but otherwise remained dark. “Damn!”

“What happened?”

“Power surge.” Ford pulled the AC cord loose and flipped the laptop over. His finger pushed the battery release, popping it loose. He held the battery in his hand as seconds dragged by. “Sometimes this works.”

The two men waited grimly for about a minute. Then Ford reinserted the battery, hooked up the power cord, and tried to turn the computer on. The lights indicating that it had power going to it came on, but that was all.

“Damn it,” Ford said again. “I’d be willing to bet that it’s totally fried in there.”

“Maybe the data retrieval guys can take it in the clean room and reconstruct what was on the hard drive.”

“Maybe, but it’ll take a while, and meantime we’re still in the dark, with no clue where to start looking for our target.”

“Yeah …”

Parker wheeled around and ran to the door, throwing it open and hurrying out into the motel parking lot. Ford ran after him. He didn’t know what had occurred to his partner, but he trusted Parker’s instincts.

Parker looked at the power lines leading into the hotel, then followed them with his eyes down the street to a pole with a transformer on it.

“Look,” he said.

An electric company truck was parked beside the pole. The lift on the back of the truck had just descended, and a man in coveralls was climbing out of it.

“Come on,” Parker said. He took off at a run toward the truck, reaching to the small of his back for his gun as he did so.

The coverall-clad man saw him coming, reached into one of the garment’s baggy pockets, and brought out a gun of his own. Parker darted to the side as the weapon blasted.

He sent a return shot toward the man at the truck, then had to duck behind a parked pickup as the man fired shot after shot while backing toward the truck’s cab. He yanked the door open, dived in, and the truck lurched into motion. Another man must have been inside at the wheel, keeping the engine running.

The agents’ SUV screeched to a stop beside Parker. “Hop in!” Ford called. He had gone back to get the vehicle rather than following Ford, a hunch telling him that they might have to give chase.

Ford floored the accelerator even before Parker had closed the door on the passenger side. Momentum swung it shut.

“How’d you know?” Ford asked as he took a corner at high speed. The power company truck was a block ahead. It wasn’t built for speed. The SUV, with its high-powered and specially-modified engine, was.

“I figured somebody might have seen us leaving the hotel with that laptop. Did you bring it with you, by the way?”

“Yeah, I ducked back in the room and got it. Might still be something salvageable on it.”

Parker nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Anyway, if they saw us with the laptop, they’d have to figure we’d try to find out what’s on it. They followed us out of Corpus to the motel.”

“They didn’t have any way of knowing that we plugged it into the wall.”

“No, not for sure, but it’s a reasonable assumption.”

Ford frowned. “They can put their hands on an electric company truck and cause a power surge to the motel just on the assumption that we might have the computer plugged in?”

“They didn’t have anything to lose if they were wrong,” Parker pointed out.

“Maybe not, but being able to mount an operation like that on almost zero notice means they’ve got a lot of pull, whoever they are. That sounds almost like something—”

Ford stopped short as he realized where his thoughts were going.

“Yeah,” Parker agreed, his face and voice grim. “It sounds almost like something we could do if we had to.”

Ford still had the SUV moving at a high rate of speed, weaving in and out of traffic, blasting through red lights, cutting into their quarry’s lead. The power company truck caromed off several parked vehicles as it took a couple of turns too fast. Then it roared onto the freeway frontage road, past a couple of strip shopping centers, and onto the freeway itself.

“He’s heading back to Corpus,” Ford said as he followed the truck onto Indian Point Bridge, which stretched for more than a mile over the waters of Nueces Bay. “That’s his mistake. He’s got nowhere to go while he’s on the bridge.”

With a screeching of tires and brakes, cars pulled over to get out of the way of the speeding truck and the pursuing SUV. Ford began to pull even with the truck, coming up on the driver’s side so the passenger couldn’t shoot at them.

The truck swerved toward the SUV, banging into an armored fender. Despite the SUV’s built-in protection, the truck had more weight behind it. The collision forced the SUV toward the railing.

Ford fought the wheel and brought the SUV under control again. He dropped back a little and said, “I’m gonna go around them and block the road. Keep the driver busy.”

“Will do,” Parker said as he lifted his gun.

Ford floored the gas pedal again and sent the SUV surging forward through the gap between the truck and the railing. Parker opened fire from his window, peppering the cab with bullets. He saw the driver hunched low in an attempt to avoid the gunfire.

The SUV roared past the truck, rocketing over the bridge now. Ahead, off to the left, loomed the World War II-era aircraft carrier, USS
Lexington,
now moored permanently at Corpus Christi as a floating museum.

Parker reloaded as Ford opened up a lead on the truck. When he was still a hundred yards or so from the end of the bridge, he slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel, sending the SUV into a sideways skid that brought it to a stop blocking all three lanes of traffic.

The two agents piled out of the vehicle and crouched behind it, guns leveled across the hood at the truck barreling down on them. They opened fire, concentrating their shots on the truck’s front tires, both of which blew with loud explosions. The truck slewed crazily back and forth on the bridge.

“Holy crap!” Ford exclaimed. “He’s not stopping!”

There was no time to move the SUV out of the way. All Ford and Parker could do was turn and run as the electric company truck continued toward the SUV, sparks shooting into the air now from the rims of the front wheels as they grated across the concrete.

The crash was spectacular. Both gas tanks exploded, sending a huge fireball into the air and making clouds of oily black smoke roll over the bay. The force was enough to shake the entire bridge and knock Ford and Parker off their feet.

As they picked themselves up, Ford said, “The laptop was still in there.”

“I know,” Parker said. “Nobody will get anything off of it now.”

“So they did what they set out to do. They just had to blow themselves up to do it.” Ford turned his head to look at the
Lexington
nearby, with its towering superstructure that had once been the target of Japanese pilots determined to crash their planes into it. “Like kamikazes …

In the underground bunker, a man sat in front of a computer, watching the flow of information from around the world. He leaned forward a little in his chair as a report about all the chaos in Corpus Christi, Texas, came in. He picked up a secure phone that rang in an office upstairs.

A man answered. The watcher told him what had happened, and then the man on the other end of the phone asked, “What about Trussell?”

“No word, sir. I assume he’s still out there somewhere.”

“Damn it. All they had to do was kill him and recover that laptop, then let those bunglers from the Agency take the blame”

“Yes, sir. But according to eyewitness reports, Parker and Ford didn’t have the laptop with them when they fled the scene of the crash on the bridge. It must have been in their vehicle. Our people have impounded the wreckage and are searching it now to confirm that. But I think you can tell the boss that part of it has been taken care of, at least”

“I’ll decide what to tell the boss,” the man on the other end said coldly.

“Yes, sir, of course.” The watcher took the chastisement in stride. Everything they did here was for the common good.

“Monitor the situation closely and keep me informed of any further developments. Any time, night or day, you understand”

“Yes, sir”

The watcher heard a sigh from the other end. “They may have destroyed the laptop, but Trussell knows everything that was on it. We have to find him, too, and shut him up for good.”

“Yes, sir,” the watcher said, but the connection was already broken. The other man had been talking to himself there at the end.

Upstairs, he left his office and went up another flight of steps to the second floor, to the residence. He went to a sitting room, where he knew he would find the man he was looking for.

He was there, all right, and he looked up and asked, “What is it, Geoff?”

“A report from Texas, sir. It appears that the laptop computer stolen by Earl Trussell has been destroyed.”

“What about Trussell himself?”

“I’m … sorry, sir. We had an operation set up to take care of Trussell in a manner that would provide culpability for Langley and deniability for us, but it was unsuccessful”

“Failure is unacceptable.” The voice was cold and hard. “I want that little weasel Trussell dead. I’ve got too much else on my plate right now to have to worry about him.”

“Yes, sir, of course, but you really shouldn’t, uh, put such sentiments into words.” He laughed. “Are you saying this place might be bugged, Geoff?
This
place?”

“Well, that’s not likely, of course, but it never hurts to be careful.”

“Don’t tell me about careful. I’ve been careful all my life. That’s how I got where I am today.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Take care of this Trussell problem. The world doesn’t need to know about Casa del Diablo”

“No, sir.”

“I trust you’ll take care of it. “ The President of the United States looked in a mirror and straightened his tie. “Now, I’ve got that state dinner to go to.”

“Yes, sir.”

The President shook his head. “Why does everything seem to happen in Texas? Maybe we should just let the redneck bastards secede if they want to. Good riddance.” He smiled brilliantly, knowing that the media would fawn over him as usual. “How do I look?”