“Baby, whatever you do, stay downstairs in the vault!” Sam knew she was yelling into the phone, but she couldn’t stop herself. She felt she had done a good enough job just keeping the hysteria out of her voice.
Brock calmly explained that the police officer had already rung their doorbell several times, and didn’t appear to be on the verge of leaving.
She filled him in on the last few minutes of her life, high-speed chase included, hoping Brock would be less inclined to give in to the insistent doorbell. “It might be a real cop, or it might not, and even if it is a cop, he may or may not be planning to screw us over. Please, just sit tight in the panic room.”
Brock reluctantly agreed. She knew it went against his Type-A, fuck-with-the-bull-and-you’ll-get-the-horns personality. He was a career fighter pilot, after all, a subspecies convinced of its own invincibility, high mortality rate notwithstanding. She avoided telling Brock that she would take care of the situation; she knew that would only encourage him to defend his masculinity by doing something stupid.
That settled for the moment, Sam then dialed her boss. “Special Agent In Charge Ekman,” he answered after only a couple of rings.
“Lighten up, Francis,” she said. His name really was Francis. “It’s midnight on a Saturday. Do we really need all the pomp and circumstance?”
“Hello Sam. Would a little respect for authority kill you?”
“You’d be surprised.” She filled him in on how a little respect for police authority almost killed her a few minutes earlier.
“Shit.”
“That’s your professional assessment?”
“Cool it, Sam. Give me a minute to think this through.”
“OK, but while you do, it is my duty to inform you that I am on my way to defend my home from a potential invasion,” Sam said, putting the Porsche in gear.
“I can have the response team out the door in two minutes,” Ekman offered.
“I was afraid you were going to say something like that.”
“You really should have a bit more trust in your coworkers,” Ekman chastised.
“You really should hire better coworkers.”
Ekman ignored the barb. “I don’t have many options here, Sam. Procedures are pretty clear in situations like this. Your wildly arrogant objection is duly noted, but I’m sending the team, and I’ll make a few phone calls. In the meantime, stay away from your house.”
“Thanks, Francis. Remind me why I bothered calling you?”
“It’s your job.”
“Says you.”
“Sam, seriously, take a drive, and let the team handle the guy at your house. We’ve got you covered.”
“Sure, Francis.” She hung up before her boss could challenge her lie, and headed toward the home she and Brock had shared for the past couple of years. She subconsciously patted her Kimber .45 auto in the pancake holster under her jacket, eager for a little reassurance.
Shit. Police lights in her rear view mirror. Though she had every intention of breaking the speed limit, she had just turned the corner and hadn’t yet accelerated to speed when the cop appeared.
The fucking telephone gave me away. She rolled down the window and threw it out of the car, then stomped on the gas. Her car leapt forward, and the police car gave chase.
Wait a minute. A thought struck. She pulled the portable police light out of her glove compartment, rolled down her window, and slapped the light onto the roof. She fumbled for the electrical cord, which she plugged into the lighter receptacle.
She could tell the light was working, because the cop car behind her immediately slowed down. Interesting. The cop thought he was running down a perp, she realized, and the sudden appearance of her police light had caused what the bureaucrats referred to as a paradigm shift.
So the cops in her corner of the world at the moment were behaving as the good guys normally do, which was an important piece of information. They probably weren’t rogue police officers moonlighting for someone else, and they probably weren’t impostors, either.
She didn’t slow down. She was driving at breakneck pace through the surprisingly heavy midnight DC traffic, her analytical mind working as hard as her driving instincts. If the cruiser behind her, which had retreated to a far less aggressive distance behind her car, was indeed driven by a straight-laced cop on the job, it meant one of two things. Either there was a misunderstanding somewhere at the cop shop, or someone higher up at Metro was crooked, and looking to do her harm.
That seemed to contrast sharply with her experience during her last high-speed chase, in which the guy in the Metro cruiser apparently wasn’t talking to the dispatcher. She didn’t quite know what to make of things, but she thought another 911 call might be useful. If not, it would at least be informative.
She suddenly wished she hadn’t thrown her work phone out the window. She reluctantly pulled her personal cell phone from her jacket pocket and dialed 911.
Different operator this time, which wasn’t unexpected, but it was inconvenient. She spent a couple of minutes telling the dispatcher about her evening. After a few entirely predictable but time-consuming questions, the operator was finally up to speed enough to put the call out to the units in Sam’s vicinity.
Déjà vu all over again, Sam thought as she waited impatiently for the answer. She was getting close to home, which was now a real problem. She didn’t want to drag the cop behind her into the mess at her house without knowing what the hell was going on.
“Ma’am, I’m in contact with an Officer Davis, who says he’s following your car. He’s going to move in closer for a look at your license plate to confirm.”
Sure enough, the cruiser was closing the gap, and was soon nearly on her bumper.
“What’s your license plate number, ma’am?” The dispatcher’s question wasn’t unreasonable, but Sam hadn’t stayed alive this long in the counterespionage world without avoiding hundreds of stupid-person traps.
“Let’s do it this way,” Sam said. “I’d like you to read the number to me, and I’ll let you know if you’re close.”
Silence. Sam began to get the sinking feeling she always got when situations turned sour, and she was about to stand on the accelerator to try to lose the cop behind her when the dispatcher’s voice crackled over her Bluetooth. “Niner seven x-ray bravo six tango niner,” the operator said.
“I’m very glad to hear you say that,” Sam said. “I thought I was going to have to add you to the list of people whose ass I plan to kick. Please have your guy follow me. I’m on the way home to head off an intruder.”
Hmm. About that intruder. Sam had another thought: “Did anyone dispatch a black and white to 935 Fox Hill Lane about ten minutes ago?”
It took a couple of minutes for the dispatcher to access the digital logs, which apparently required a supervisor’s password, and Sam was rounding the corner onto her street when the operator finally came back on the line: “No ma’am. We have no record of a dispatch to that address.”
“Thought that might be the case. Stay on the line with me? Who knows what I’ll find when I get home. And tell the officer behind me that we’ll use a standard pincer to box in the intruder’s vehicle, my car in front.”
“No problem ma’am.”
Sam opted for a full frontal assault, hoping to seize initiative from whoever was lurking outside her front door. She stood on the horn and left her police light flashing as she rounded the lazy curve leading to her larger-than-average brownstone. She pulled her gun from its holster, and was prepared to box the police cruiser in to prevent his escape.
But the street in front of her house was completely empty. No cop car, and no cop, except for the one she brought with her.
She noticed that her call waiting was beeping at her. Brock. He must have been worried when he couldn’t get ahold of her on her work phone. “Hi, baby,” she answered. “I see that you scared our guest off.”
“He left a minute ago,” Brock said. “I watched him on the video feed.” He was referring to the state-of-the-art Israeli-built video surveillance system that Sam had installed throughout their home, which featured hidden cameras covering almost every square foot of the house and yard. The cameras fed a surveillance control system in the panic room, and every second of footage was compressed and stored on a ridiculously large hard drive.
The system had the added benefit, for which Sam had paid a hefty premium, of not containing the NSA-friendly trapdoors that all surveillance systems sold in the US contained. She had worked for Big Brother long enough to know that she couldn’t trust Big Brother.
“Sadness. I was looking forward to whooping some ass.”
“I wouldn’t mess with you, but I’m glad he slinked off nonetheless,” Brock said with a laugh. “Can I come out yet?” Brock was a big, muscular guy and a minor legend in his own world, but he knew his limits. He wasn’t a trained spook, or a trained spook catcher, and Sam was grateful that he was content to leave that kind of business to the pros. Like her. She was also grateful that he was well-hung, which, she believed, made dating a bona fide badass such as herself slightly less emasculating.
“Not yet. I’m not entirely sure that’s a real cop behind me.”
“I’ll bring the shotgun.” He hung up. She knew he meant it.
She wasn’t wrong. The front door opened about the same time the police officer came up to speak with Sam. Her attention was divided between Brock, stark naked and brandishing a shotgun, and Officer Davis of the DC Metro Police Department.
The badge and cop trimmings all looked real, but she called Davis’ badge number in to the DHS duty desk for verification. “I sleep with the naked guy holding the 12-gauge,” she reassured Davis while she waited for the DHS duty officer to look up the badge number in the system. The officer nodded, but kept his eye on Brock.
“Thanks,” Sam said when the duty officer finally vouched for the patrolman. “Now my boyfriend can get dressed and put his gun away. Or put his gun away by getting dressed. Whatever.”
The DHS response team pulled up in their black Suburban, which looked a little ridiculous with its antennae sticking out everywhere. Sam asked them to secure the perimeter, which was polite spook-speak for “stay the hell out of the way.” They cooperated by milling about unproductively at the corners of her lot.
She invited Officer Davis in for coffee, and he appeared happy to accept. She quizzed him on the evening’s events, hoping he’d heard some snippet of radio chatter or observed something unusual that would help shed some light on the confusing situation.
But Officer Davis hadn’t heard or seen anything, and based on his slow uptake, Sam figured that he wasn’t a strong candidate for detective any time soon, so the time was largely wasted. Still, a girl had to try.
After Davis drove off, Sam and Brock returned to the panic room to review the video footage for any clues it might hold. They were largely disappointed. The “officer” who parked at their curb and rang their doorbell a hundred times had worn a policeman’s wheel cap, which shielded his facial features from the camera’s view. The camera angle also prevented them from seeing a license plate number or other markings that might identify the police cruiser, if in fact it was a police cruiser.
But there was something peculiar. As the man approached the walkway leading up to the front door, his arm appeared to make a tossing motion. The camera didn’t pick up anything leaving his hand, but Sam felt it was worth investigating.
She and Brock looked through the bushes with a flashlight, fruitlessly, then remembered her multi-spectral camera. She took a few photos of the front of her house, then forwarded them to her deputy to analyze along with the earlier pictures she had taken at John Abrams’ place.
There wasn’t much else to do. The Stooges, as Sam called them, were guarding the house, which she reckoned meant the house was probably less safe than if nobody were guarding it. So Sam and Brock retreated back to the panic room, cuddled up in the cozy bed in the corner, and dozed off while awaiting the multi-spec photo results.
They hadn’t yet reached REM sleep when Dan Gable’s call woke them up. It seemed the object the “officer” had tossed into the bushes had shown up terrifically well in the ultraviolet spectrum, because it was a beacon. “For what?” Sam asked.
“Dunno. Satellite maybe, or a handheld transponder. It’s tough to say,” Gable said. “But we’re dealing with someone fairly sophisticated. I’d advise you to evacuate your house for the night, just as a precaution.”
“I figured you were going to say that.”
“Discretion is the better part of valor,” Dan said. “Even for you, Wonder Woman.”
Sam started to make a smart-assed response, but an explosion rocked the house on its foundation and rudely cut her off.