LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      CHAPTER THREE

      9:03 p.m.

      Bethesda Navy Medical Center – Bethesda, Maryland

      The light of the laptop computer flickered in the semi-darkness of the private hospital room. Luke sat slumped in an uncomfortable armchair, staring at the screen, a pair of white ear buds extending from the computer to his ears.

      He was almost breathless with gratitude and relief. His chest hurt from gasping for air the past four or five hours. He sometimes thought about crying, but he hadn’t done so yet. Maybe later.

      There were two beds in the room. Luke had pulled some strings, and now Becca and Gunner lay in the beds, sleeping deeply. They were under sedation, but it didn’t matter. Neither of them had slept a wink between the time they were abducted and the moment when Luke stormed the safe house.

      They had spent eighteen hours in sheer terror. Now they were out cold. And they were going to be out for a good long while.

      Neither one of them had been hurt. True, they were going to carry emotional scars from this, but physically, they were fine. The bad guys did not harm the merchandise. Maybe Don Morris’s hand had been in there somewhere, protecting them.

      He gave a brief thought to Don. Now that events had played out, it seemed right to do so. Don had been Luke’s greatest mentor. Since the time Luke joined Delta Force at twenty-seven years old, until early this morning, twelve years later, Don had been a constant presence in Luke’s life. When Don first created the FBI Special Response Team, he had made a place for Luke. More than that – he had recruited Luke, wined him, dined him, and stole him away from Delta.

      But Don had turned at some point, and Luke never saw it coming. Don had been among the conspirators who had tried to topple the government. One day, Luke might understand Don’s reasoning for all this, but not today.

      On the computer screen in front of him, a live stream played from the packed media room of what they were calling “the New White House.” The room had at most a hundred seats. It had a gradual slope, upward from the front, as though it doubled as a movie theater. Every seat was taken. Every space along the back wall was taken. Dense throngs of people stood in the wings on both sides of the stage.

      Images of the house itself briefly appeared on the screen. It was the beautiful, turreted and gabled Queen Anne–style 1850s mansion on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC. And it was indeed white, for the most part.

      Luke knew something about it. For decades, it had been the official residence of the Vice President of the United States. Now, and for the foreseeable future, it was the home and office of the President.

      The screen cut back to the media room. As Luke watched, the President herself came to the podium: Susan Hopkins, the former Vice President, who had taken the oath of office this very morning. This was her first address to the American people as President. She wore a dark blue suit, her blonde hair in a bob. The suit seemed bulky, which meant she was wearing bulletproof material beneath it.

      Her eyes were somehow both stern and soft – her media people had probably coached her to look angry, brave, and hopeful all at once. A top-flight makeup artist had covered the burns on her face. Unless you knew where to look, you wouldn’t even see them. Susan, as she had been her entire life, was the most beautiful woman in the room.

      Her resume thus far was impressive. It included teenage supermodel, young wife of a technology billionaire, mom, United States Senator from California, Vice President, and now, suddenly, President. The former President, Thomas Hayes, had died in a fiery underground inferno, and Susan herself was lucky to be alive.

      Luke had saved her life yesterday, twice.

      He undid the mute feature on his computer.

      She was surrounded by bulletproof glass panels. Ten Secret Service agents stood on the stage with her. The crowd of reporters in the room was giving her a standing ovation. The TV announcers were speaking in hushed tones. The camera panned, finding Susan’s husband, Pierre, and their two daughters.

      Back to the President: she was holding her hands up, asking for quiet. Despite herself, she broke into a bright smile. The crowd erupted again. That was the Susan Hopkins they knew: the enthusiastic, gung-ho queen of daytime talk shows, of ribbon-cutting

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