CHAPTER 3
WEST OF MANASSAS
VIRGINIA
USA
RAPP’S cell phone began to vibrate and he pulled it from his pocket.
“Problem?” Kennedy asked from inside the closet. She was searching Claudia’s drawers for something called an obi belt while polishing off her second glass of wine. It was more than he could remember seeing her drink in their entire relationship. And why not? Neither of their prospects looked particularly sunny. And his had just taken a turn for the worse.
“I just got a breach warning. The power’s been cut to the subdivision’s main gate.”
“I’d hoped you could be on your way before this happened. I imagine the president’s anxious to talk to you.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Can I assume you have a plan for something like this?”
He did. The default state of that gate was locked, so cutting the power wasn’t going to accomplish much. The incursion team would know that, though, and were probably just using the move as a diversion. In all likelihood, they had people in position all around the property and in the woods behind it. While the specific security measures built into his house weren’t widely known, the general level of it was an open secret. They wouldn’t want to risk a frontal assault and instead would purposely trigger an alarm in an effort to flush him out. And it was going to work. In the most literal and infuriating way imaginable.
“Yeah,” he said at a volume that caused his voice to get swallowed by the room’s white-noise generator. “Could you let Claudia know what’s happened and put her stuff in FedEx for me?”
“If I’m not in prison,” Kennedy said, pouring herself another glass. And not her normal two fingers. If the operators closing in on his property didn’t move fast, they’d find her passed out on the sofa.
Rapp scrolled through images from the neighborhood’s security cameras, pausing on one that depicted men in tactical gear coming over the southern perimeter fence. Through the rain, it was hard to see detail, but it wasn’t necessary. There was no point in trying to get a head count. They looked like swarming ants.
It’d take about seven minutes to reach his property, where they’d dig in. If he didn’t make an obvious break for it, they’d lay in an old-fashioned siege. Time, supply lines, and numbers were on their side.
He started for the door but before passing through the hallway he turned back toward Kennedy. “It’s been interesting.”
She smiled and raised her glass. “That it has.”
The rain was really pounding when Rapp stepped outside. If anything, it was coming down harder than when they’d arrived. Even with the powerful security lights, the perimeter wall was just a haze. Puddles had overflowed their customary depressions in the flagstone courtyard and water was rushing toward strategically positioned drains. Once again, he’d gotten lucky. Surveillance drones would be grounded by the weather, and dogs—much more dangerous than humans in these kinds of situations—would be neutralized. He was concerned about the number of men waiting for him in the woods behind his house, though. Was it twenty? Fifty? A hundred? As Kennedy was fond of pointing out, the president of the United States had a lot of resources. Far more than the terrorists and old enemies that the house was designed to turn back.
Rapp was soaked through by the time he reached an island of dense landscaping on the house’s west lawn. He fought his way through the foliage, struggling to maintain forward momentum as the branches grabbed at him from all sides. Water was running in a thick stream from the bridge of his nose when he reached the center and dropped to his knees. At least it wasn’t cold. Temperatures were still in the high seventies but would drop into the mid-sixties later that night. By that time, though, he’d either be safe and dry or on his way to sunny Guantanamo Bay.
After scooping away a few handfuls of muddy leaves, he found the metal hatch he was looking for. The wheel that opened it was stuck but that was a feature, not a bug. He’d been worried that Anna might happen upon it while searching for the soccer ball that always seemed to get away from her. A little more digging turned up a steel bar that he threaded through the wheel for additional leverage.
Rapp had bitched endlessly about the exorbitant cost of ensuring that his walled property didn’t turn into Virginia’s largest swimming pool in the rain. About halfway through the excavation, his attitude had done a one-eighty. The engineer working on the project had been more than a little surprised when Rapp suddenly demanded a much larger drainage pipe than necessary. When he’d then insisted that it include an access point big enough for a human to get inside, she’d thought he’d completely lost his mind. In the end, though, as long as the checks cleared no one seemed all that interested in complaining.