The Archimedes Effect

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.

35

Washington, D.C.

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?”