He glanced around through the gloom. He could feel enemies closing in.
The team that had accompanied Skylar to Harpers Ferry was heading this way, but they were still thirty minutes out. And Jack was going into that cabin as soon as the last of law enforcement cleared out.
“We stopped Operation Anarchy,” Skylar said. “You should be proud of that.”
“You, too.”
A few of the assassins had made it into the woods around Harpers Ferry and eluded capture — for now. But they had to be desperately focused on getting as far away from Washington as possible, not completing their mission. They had to realize that all prominent federal officials in the District were deep in protective holes and weren’t coming out anytime soon. Their targets were protected, and they had become the prey. Their only reasonable strategy at this point was to run.
Two men finally emerged from the cabin, walked to separate cars, waved to each other, and then headed down the long driveway toward the main road.
“Ready?” Jack asked when both cars had disappeared, pulling out his gun and chambering the first bullet.
“Yup.”
They broke from the tree line and jogged toward the cabin through the quiet dusk, side by side. All seemed calm.
But when they reached the front porch, shots rang out from the tree line on the other side of the clearing, and bullets began smashing into the front wall of the house all around them.
Skylar grabbed the knob of the front door and desperately tried turning it, but the police had locked it tight. “Follow me!” she yelled, heading for a large window beside the door. She dove through it, shattering the glass.
Jack lunged through it right behind her as bullets peppered the front of the cabin, and he tumbled to the floor beside her.
As they crawled across the floor and took cover behind the inside wall, the barrage intensified.
Baxter followed Dorn out of the heavily armored black limousine and onto the tarmac at Andrews Air Force Base. But they were quickly separated as a swarm of Secret Service agents surrounded the president.
The agent in charge at the White House had begged Dorn not to make the trip out here because of what had happened in Harpers Ferry earlier in the day. But Dorn would not be deterred, even when the director had called personally and pleaded with him to stay put.
Baxter understood what Dorn was doing. His unwavering commitment to meeting Shannon out here on this cold, rainy evening had less to do with the guilt he felt for the kidnapping ordeal she’d just endured — and much more to do with politics.
The kidnappers had promised all along not to alert the press as to what was happening. But ultimately, and probably predictably, Baxter realized, they’d broken the deal.
Someone, as yet unidentified, had called the Associated Press’s Washington Bureau chief a few hours ago and tipped her off. Within minutes the story had gone nationwide, and now it was on TV screens everywhere. President Dorn had an illegitimate daughter who’d been kidnapped and held for ransom — but was now being released.
Rumors raced across Twitter and Facebook that the young woman was an aspiring country singer from Nashville who performed under the stage name Leigh-Ann Goodyear, and that she hadn’t even known President Dorn was her father until an hour ago. And that he hadn’t known she even existed. None of that had been confirmed, but the public was swallowing every sound bite as the whole truth and nothing but the truth as the story unfolded in front of them. It was sweeping across the nation like a western wildfire racing through a tinder-dry forest, and people across the nation and around the world were glued to their screens in anticipation of a father and daughter of such high profile meeting for the first time right in front of them.
Dorn had quickly decided that the only thing he could do to save face was meet Shannon at Andrews. And no one was going to stop him. He was determined to turn a negative into a positive despite any danger from Operation Anarchy, which the Secret Service believed might still exist.
Baxter watched Dorn wade through his massive security team as the Gulfstream door opened and a pretty blond appeared.
She was wrapped in a blanket and shivering badly, Baxter could see, even from fifty feet away as he held a magazine over his head to shield himself from the intensifying rain.
The agents tried to keep Dorn in check, but he fought his way through them like a knight in shining armor, then climbed the stairs, wrapped his arms around Shannon, and pulled her close as she sobbed into his chest.
Baxter shook his head as a mother lode of cameras on the ground around the parked jet flashed so often it seemed to him that dawn had suddenly broken. The presidential floor model had done it again. David Dorn had snatched victory out of the jaws of disaster.
Baxter’s eyes narrowed as he glanced at Shannon when they stepped back from their hug. The young woman didn’t look well at all. But after what she’d just been through, that was to be expected.
“We can’t stay here!” Skylar yelled as bullets smashed continuously into the living room through the broken windows, ripping apart furniture and shredding drapes, destroying prints hanging from the walls, and ricocheting viciously off the big stone fireplace built into the wall behind them. “Find the Order fast, and then we make a break for the woods!” she shouted as she returned fire through the blown-out window she was hunched down beside. “We’re sitting ducks in here.” She stabbed toward the hallway behind them with her pistol. “The bedrooms are back there. Your father’s was the first one on the left. It’s got to be in there. Go, Jack!”
Jack crawled toward the back of the house as fast as he could. When he reached the hallway, where he was protected from the bullets, he scrambled to his feet and raced for the first bedroom on the left. There was one window in there, and he stayed away from it in case people outside started firing through it.
He left the light off, too, as he quickly turned the room inside out searching for the precious document. The dim lighting made the search more difficult, especially as he rooted through the clothes and boxes in the closet, but turning the bulb on would make him so vulnerable.
Finding nothing in the closet, he thrust his hand inside the pillowcases and reached beneath the covers. Then he threw the mattress from the bed and tossed the box spring aside. He dumped the contents of the nightstand drawer on the floor. He rifled through the small desk in one corner of the room.
But he found nothing.
As he shoved the last drawer back into the desk and rose up, an eerie feeling came over him. As he stared at the print of a forest scene hanging on the far wall, everything else in the bedroom disappeared. Even the sounds of the bullets faded from his ears.
As a young boy he’d walked into Bill’s study one day and surprised his father hanging a picture on the wall. Rehanging, Jack realized now. Bill had made some excuse about how it had fallen from its nail, but that had struck Jack as strange, because he hadn’t heard anything fall as he was walking toward the study, and the frame looked undamaged. And Bill had seemed nervous, which he never was.
Jack put his pistol down on the nightstand and hurried to the print. As he lifted the frame from the wall, a single piece of faded paper fell from behind it and dropped to the floor. He put the print down and picked up the paper. It was the Order.
“Good job,” a gruff voice said. “My boss is gonna be real happy about that.”
Jack whipped around. A man holding a shotgun stood in the doorway, smiling smugly.