The Archimedes Effect (36 page)

He had to hurry.

The fence between his house and the next-door neighbor was a two-meter-tall wooden privacy deal. Fortunately, the neighbor had cats and not a dog, and didn’t know that Carruth had dug a hole under the fence, covered it with a thin sheet of Masonite, and spread bark dust over the top on both sides, so it looked just like the rest of the ground. His next-door neighbor wasn’t big on yard work; his side of the fence was thick with weeds, which was good—he had never notice the disguised pit.

He lifted the edge of the doghouse up, reached across the half a meter, and grabbed the edge of the Masonite, pulling it toward himself. A certain amount of the bark dust scraped off the other side and fell into the hole, but there was enough room, even for a big man in a hurry, to wiggle into the hole and undulate underneath the fence. He moved.

He had a bad moment when the back of his belt snagged on the wood, but he jerked free and came out into the neighbor’s yard. He couldn’t cover the hole from this side, but by the time they found it, it shouldn’t matter.

He stayed crouched low and duck-walked along the side of the neighbor’s house. They had a TV going inside, with what sounded like a ball game of some kind on.

Once he rounded the corner and started away from the fence, Carruth came up some and started to sprint. If the fence didn’t hide him from view, he was screwed; there wasn’t any real cover in this backyard, a couple of short bushes and thin-trunked trees, nothing to hide behind until he got to the other side.

He ran, hard. Passed a sliding glass door and caught a quick glimpse of his neighbor and his two teenaged boys watching the big-screen television. He didn’t think they saw him, but that didn’t matter, there wasn’t anything he could do but run.

Well, if they screwed up on this, maybe they would screw up on other stuff. He could hope.

He rounded the corner, ran toward the fence on the other side of the house, and launched himself over the top in a high-speed high jump, not the Fosbury Flop, but with both hands on a four-by-four post and a sideways vault.

He cleared the fence, hit, fell, rolled up, and kept going.

This neighbor did have a dog, a yappy little Pomeranian that went into a conniption. Fortunately, it was inside the house, and not likely anybody on the street would hear it.

He made it across the yard and hopped the next fence. Banged his left knee hard when he didn’t lift it quite high enough, but cleared it and damned near came down in the next neighbor’s swimming pool. It was covered for the season, but that would have been a bitch to get out of had he stepped onto the plastic cover.

The next fence was the last—this was the corner lot. Carruth ran around the pool to it, stopped, stood on his toes, and peeped over it.

Traffic on the street, but nobody standing around in urban camo with weapons he could see. He’d have to chance it.

He made ready to climb up and over.

“Hey! What are you doing?!”

He turned, and saw the house’s owner, a short, florid, fat man in a sweat suit, standing there with a garden hose, washing down a barbecue grill.

Carruth’s gun was in his holster and hidden under his thin Windbreaker, but if he cooked the guy, he might as well go out front and jump up and down to attract the cops. They’d hear the shot half a mile away.

“Chasing a guy broke into my house!” Carruth said. “Better stay inside, he’s got a knife! Cops are on the way!”

He hopped over the fence.

The fat guy washing his grill stared. He knew Carruth to look at, and while he hadn’t seen a burglar running around back here with a knife, it was the kind of thing that he’d have to think about for a while. If there
was
somebody Carruth was chasing and he had a
knife
? Maybe he
should
go inside and wait for the police to arrive and sort it out. A lot safer than facing down a knifer with a garden hose . . .

Carruth turned to his right and started jogging down the sidewalk. If he could get to the next block without being seen, he could maybe swipe a car or—wait, look at that, there was a Metro bus, right there.

He ran toward the bus.

The driver was about to pull away when he saw Carruth running. He stopped and waited.

Carruth climbed up the step. “I’m all out of change,” he said. “Can I buy a pass?”

“Sure, at your local Safeway.”

“Come on, we can do a deal here, can’t we?”

The driver wanted to get on his way. “How long?”

“A week?”

“Thirty dollars for the Short Trip, forty for the Fast Pass.”

Carruth pulled out his wallet and removed two twenties. “The Fast Pass,” he said.

The driver took his money. Carruth took the pass and went to find a seat. A few blocks, and he could get off and find wheels.

After that? Well, that was going to be a problem, wasn’t it?

The shit had definitely hit the fan now.

He sat, and adjusted the big gun on his hip. He needed to hit the road. Go to his storage unit where he had the old clunker car, charge up the battery, grab his go-bag with the new ID and haul-ass money, and get gone. This time tomorrow, with luck, he could be six, eight hundred miles away.

That’s what he should do. But he wanted to do something else before he left. His life had just taken a bad turn, and it wasn’t ever going to be the same again. And it was Lewis’s fault.

Lewis needed to pay for that. Big-time.

 

Half a block up the street from Carruth’s house, in the tricked-out RV that served as a mobile command post, Kent listened to the lieutenant’s report without saying anything.

“Yes, sir. He went out through the crawl space—there’s an access in the bedroom closet. Came up in the side yard, hidden behind a wooden gate, and had a tunnel predug under the fence into the neighbor’s yard. We must have just missed him.”

Kent nodded. If he’d been leading the op, it probably wouldn’t have gone any better. The operation had been run by the FBI with backup from the Metro police, and Net Force’s team was just here as “ride-along guests”—though they were armed guests. Given that they were Marines, albeit a special unit, operating on U.S. soil, even like this, was iffy. The Posse Comitatus Act had been around since the 1870s, passed during the Administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. The Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines went over
there
and kicked ass. At home, the civilian authorities were supposed to catch the bad guys. If the cops weren’t enough, there was the National Guard. Military units were not supposed to police American soil, save in very specific circumstances. And the last time he looked, martial law hadn’t been declared.

The old law was slowly changing, given the war on terrorism and all, but it hadn’t been really tested yet. The guy they were after was a civilian, and he’d be prosecuted as a civilian—if they ever caught him. Hard to justify calling out the Marines to bring him in . . .

They’d had the front, back, and one side of the house covered immediately, and when that handgun went off—two rounds blew holes through the front door of the house and sent the slugs, fortunately, into a thick tree near the front walk—everybody ducked. They all knew that this guy had killed a couple of police officers and several Army guys and he had nothing to lose by taking a few more with him if they got careless. And there was that story about him being a walking bomb, too.

By the time they got back to cover the side of the place, Carruth would have already been gone. Didn’t sound to Kent like a man who was in a hurry to die, but there was that possibility.

He reached for his virgil, to call Thorn. This wasn’t the first time an operation had turned into a snafu and the bad guy had gotten away, and it wasn’t even Net Force’s fault, but still, Kent hated to make the call.

Not as much as he hated losing the bad guy, though.

And this way of doing things? Sitting in the RV as an observer? That stunk. If his troops weren’t going to be able to go out and do what they had been trained to do, what was the point?

Well, he could sort that out later.

He reached for his virgil.

However macho and narrow Lewis thought Carruth was, she didn’t think he was completely stupid. When he’d escaped the Army’s trap, she’d known it would only be a matter of time before he realized she had set him up. She had just heard from one of her sources that he’d gotten away from the cops and FBI who’d gone to his house.

Dead, she was safe. If they took him alive, he would serve her to them on a platter.
Eat up, boys. Here’s your main course
. . . .

She still had a chance, a small one, but it was better than none.

She called him on the throwaway cell.

“Yeah?”

“We need to meet.”

“Oh, yeah, damn straight about that.”

“Whatever you’re thinking, it’s wrong,” she said. “Net Force got to you through Stark.”

There was a moment of silence. “What are you talking about?”

It was a risk, speaking on an unscrambled cell, but it was digital and nobody should be looking for the sig. Besides, that was far down in the pile of her worries at this point. She had to sell him on this. She said, “Gridley. The FBI ID’d Stark from dental records and DNA—Gridley found a connection to you. He ran it down. Then he found out about that gun of yours. The gun you shot two cops and an Army guy with and didn’t get rid of. Somehow Gridley figured out where you lived. They followed you. Realized you were going to the base, and set a fast trap to catch you.”

“Bullshit!”

“Think about it. If they’d had time to get ready, you’d be caught.”

This was iffy, and didn’t play that well if you
did
think about it too long, but she was banking on his guilt about the gun keeping his thoughts murky. It could have happened the way she’d said.

The silence lasted longer this time. “Shit,” he finally said.

Did he buy it? Maybe. It didn’t really matter, if he would meet her—and he didn’t show up shooting. “Yeah, my thoughts exactly.”

“What are we gonna do?”

She had him!
“You have to go to ground. I have some money. Enough so you can live for a while. When the deal goes through, I’ll get your cut to you.”

“What are
you
gonna do?”

“They aren’t looking for me.”

“All right. Where?”

Here was the tricky part. It needed to be somewhere that would not make him any more suspicious than he already was. Someplace public, but where nobody would pay any attention to them.

“The Mall,” she said. “In front of the National Archives. That’s between the Natural History Museum and the National Gallery of Art.”

“The old skating rink?”

“No, the lawn, other side of Madison. How soon can you make it?”

“Maybe an hour.”

That was good, it would take her thirty-five, forty minutes this time of day—she didn’t have to cross the river from her place.

“I’ll see you there.”

After they discommed, Lewis sat and took several deep breaths. This was going to be a bitch to pull off, but she didn’t have any choice. The only gun she had was the snub-nosed .38 Special and, fortunately, it wasn’t registered to her. She went and found the gun in her bedside drawer, emptied the cartridges from it, and sprayed it with Break Free. She wiped it down carefully, then wiped the shells with the lubed rag, using it to avoid touching the brass when she reloaded the gun. No prints on anything.

She put on a pair of thin leather gloves, picked up the revolver, and dropped it into the jacket pocket of the coat hung on the bedroom door.

She put a pale blue skirt and white blouse and flats into a shopping bag, along with a darker blue sweater, then dressed in gray sweat pants and shirt, with white running shoes. Put her hair up and under a Baltimore baseball cap, slipped her jacket on, added a pair of shades.

In the bathroom, she took a Band-Aid and put that across her nose, under the sunglasses’ nosepiece. If anybody looked at her face, what they would notice would be the bandage—that’s what they’d remember. Skinny kid with a bandage on his nose. Or her nose.

She looked at herself in the mirror. Took another deep breath and let it out. Grabbed her coat and shrugged it on.

When Carruth had first come to D.C., way back when, he had, like millions of tourists before him, gone to the monuments and museums that lined the lawn. He’d scoped out the old Smith, the Air and Space Museum, crossed over a couple streets to the Navy Memorial. He’d hiked down to the war memorials, seen the thousands of names on the Wall and the Korean Monument, walked along the Reflecting Pool, all that. It had been a while since he’d spent any real time there, but he knew his way around enough to get to the lawn between Madison and Jefferson.

He parked his run-for-it car in a lot—didn’t want it towed—and walked a few blocks. It was cold, but there were still tourists around even so.

He wasn’t sure about Lewis anymore. Could be she’d set him up, but it could be the Net Force geek had made the connections she’d said. She had warned him about how good the guy was. He should have gotten rid of the gun after the cops, and if that was what had nailed him, it was his own damn fault. Couldn’t blame anybody for that.

And if Lewis had some cash, he could use it. He only had a couple thousand, and that wasn’t going to go far. There was a cabin he’d rented a couple times in Montana. They knew him there from before, and nobody would bother him if he could get there. Way out in the boonies, lotta survivalists out there didn’t have much use for newspapers, TV, certainly not the government. They minded their own business, expected you to mind yours.