“Marty! Open the damn gate.”
Nothing.
“Shit,” Smith muttered.
What the hell was going on? The intercom wasn’t broken — Marty was physically unable to tolerate electronics that weren’t state of the art and in perfect operating condition.
“Do you think there’s a problem?” Randi said. “Is this why he told us to bring guns?”
Smith shrugged and then let out a long breath — something he did a lot when Marty was involved. “We’re going to have to go in.”
“I have a better idea. Let’s call the police and let them do it.”
Her reluctance was understandable. Marty cherished his privacy enough to spend a fair amount of time and money on a custom security measures that included air horns, stink bombs, and the dreaded fish catapult. It was the latter that had finally caused UPS, FedEx, and the post office to stop serving his address.
Smith just shook his head miserably and began climbing over the tall hedge that acted as a surprisingly effective fence. He dropped into an untended flower bed on the other side and waited a disconcertingly long time before Randi landed gracefully next to him.
Pulling the Glock she’d lent him, he examined the expansive yard and confirmed that it was exactly as he remembered: half dead and half overgrown into a jungle-like mess. Apparently Marty hadn’t been able to coerce his gardeners to come back either.
“House looks fine,” Randi observed. “No broken windows. No damage to the door that I can see from here.”
Smith nodded. “You go left. I’ll go straight.”
He’d made it less than four meters when a mechanical whirring became audible just in front of him. His heart sank when he saw a potted plant start to flip backward on a hinge. If it was the catapult, Marty was going to wish he’d never been born.
It wasn’t. Instead of rubber tubing and out-of-date seafood, the mechanism in front of him had two serious-looking barrels sticking through heavy steel armor.
“Jesus!” he shouted and hit the ground just as one of them opened up.
He rolled immediately to his feet and sprinted left, seeing Randi firing uselessly at the mechanical bunker that was, thank God, just a little too slow to track him.
It quickly lost interest in him and targeted Randi, who broke into a run only to be hit with a fire hose that took her feet out from under her. She was obviously dazed and just lay there in the mud as Smith angled toward her, diving when he was still a meter and a half away. He landed harder on top of her than he’d planned, but his momentum was enough to roll them both behind a tree. The staccato bark of the gun when silent as it lost line of sight on its targets.
“Are you okay?”
She choked and a stream of water flowed from her mouth. “I…I told you we should let the police handle this.”
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on or who the hell installed real weapons, but we need to find out without getting any cops killed.”
She gestured toward a large concrete planter halfway between them and the front door. “If you can keep the bunker busy, maybe I could make it to there.”
The planter looked new and a little out of place. “Too obvious.”
“Drawing us in?”
He nodded. “I think I can outrun the gun. I’m going to go back the way I came and when I do, you go for the east side of the house. See if you can get in though one of the windows.”
“On three,” she agreed.
They burst from cover in unison, the crunch of their footsteps immediately drowned out by the gun opening up again. Smith was right about being able to outrun it, but only barely and only at a full sprint. He passed behind a small stand of trees and came to a section of the yard that looked suspiciously healthy and well laid out.
When he tried to stop he discovered that his suspicion was well founded. The plants were fake, resting on a slick sheet of plastic hidden beneath a thin layer of mulch. He landed on his back and slid uncontrollably toward a dense bush that almost certainly contained something unpleasant.
The knife Randi had insisted on giving him was sheathed on his forearm and he rolled onto his stomach, slamming it through the plastic with enough force to bring him to a stop next to a tiered fountain full of green sludge.
With no other option, he took cover behind it, tensing as he waited for it to blow up, tip over on him, or fly away. When none of those things happened, he risked a quick peek around its edge at Randi, who was still trying to get to the edge of the house.
She had what looked like an open line and her hesitant pace suggested that he wasn’t the only one who thought it was too easy. It looked like she was going to make it right up to the moment when she suddenly disappeared into the earth.
“Randi!”
No answer.
Smith grabbed a faded lawn gnome and threw it into the open. When the machine gun started tracking it, he slipped around the fountain and leapt over a rusting wheelbarrow in an effort to get to her.
He was less than halfway there when a familiar mechanical whirring started at his two o’clock. This time, there was nowhere to hide. The roar of the second gun filled his ears just before an impact sent him headlong into the dirt.
He reached for his chest and his hand came away bright red. Dead center of mass. He closed his eyes and the breath escaped him.
He’d always known that one day Marty would be the death of him.
Randi Russell stood on the mattresses stacked at the bottom of the concrete-lined pit and looked at the steel doors that had closed above her. She’d heard a second machine gun come online a few seconds after she’d fallen but now everything was silent.
“Jon!” she shouted. “Jon! Can you hear me?”
It wasn’t Smith who answered, though. Instead, a section of wall next to her slid aside, exposing a computer monitor with Marty’s Zellerbach’s disembodied face centered in it.
“Randi! How could you possibly still look so hot after all that? Is there no limit to your sexiness?”
“Marty?”
“I should have known I couldn’t sucker you with the planter. You wouldn’t believe the thing I built back there. It’s based on an orb spider’s—”
She rushed the screen and slammed her hands on both sides, trying to ignore the half-drowned, mud-splattered reflection in the glass. “I’m going to kill you, Marty. And that’s not a figure of speech. I am actually going to murder you and then hide your body somewhere no one will ever find it.”
“What?” he said, sounding genuinely surprised by her anger. “You do this for a living. Would I get mad if you asked me to fix your router?”
“Where’s Jon? Is he okay?”
“Oh, he’s just lying there milking it…Wait. No, he’s up now. Hmmm. He looks a little pissed, too.”
“You were shooting at him with a machine gun, Marty!”
“Don’t be so melodramatic. The right barrel had blanks in it and the left one’s a paintball gun. Man, you guys are pretty quick. I’m going to have to replace the turret motors with something more powerful. Or maybe it’s just the rain we’ve been having. Some rust could have gotten in there and—”
“Marty…” she said, trying to sound calm through clenched teeth.
“What exactly was it that you didn’t like about the planter, Randi? What if I made it a statue? Maybe me on a horse. That would be—”
“Shut up, Marty! Shut up, shut up! And get me the hell out of here!”
37
James Whitfield sat in the windowless room at the back of his house, illumination coming only from a small lamp hovering over his desk.
Arrogance.
With age was supposed to come wisdom, and for the most part it had. But now he’d made grave, and uncharacteristically amateurish, mistakes. Not only had he drawn conclusions with insufficient facts, he’d erred on the side of underestimating an opponent instead of the other way around. In his younger years battling the KGB, he’d be dead. A fate that would have been richly deserved.