and a third man in the back.
Shit! They were already in place!
Tad came back into the kitchen. “What’s up?”
“Company,” he said. “Look.”
Tad looked at the screen. “So? Some guys in a car. Don’t mean nothing.”
“Yeah, except that my father just called and told me to call my lawyer.”
“Your father? Oh, shit.”
“Exactly.” Drayne took a deep breath. He said to Adam, “Go see if anybody is hanging around out back.”
Adam returned in thirty seconds. “Nope. Couple of girls with their tops off lying facedown on beach towels next door, that’s it.”
“Okay, they haven’t covered the rear of the house yet. Tad, Adam, we’re going for a walk. The rest of you stay here. If anybody comes to call in the next five minutes, don’t let them in. After that, it doesn’t matter. You don’t know anything. Not who I am, not where I’ve gone. You got that?”
There was a murmur from the guards. They pulled their pistols out.
To Adam, Drayne said, “You have an extra one of those?” He pointed at the gun in Adam’s holster.
“Sure.”
“Give it to me.”
Adam did so. The gun was kind of squarish, black, and made out of some sort of polymer. Drayne said, “What do I do?”
“It’s a Glock.40,” Adam said. “Point it like you would your finger and pull the trigger. It’s ready to go. You have eleven shots.”
Drayne hefted the black plastic gun, then tucked it into his pants in the back, under the tails of the Hawaiian shirt.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Here comes the cavalry,” Howard said.
Three unmarked late-model sedans cruised slowly up the highway from the south. The cars turned into their parking lot and pulled to a halt.
“More behind us,” Jay said.
Howard looked around and saw three more cars and a van convoy into the lot.
A tall man in a gray sweatsuit got out of the lead vehicle and walked to the passenger side of their car. “Commander Michaels? I’m Special Agent in Charge Delorme.”
Michaels waved at Howard and Gridley. “SAC. General John Howard and Jay Gridley.”
“No offense, sir, but isn’t Net Force supposed to be a computer-based operation?”
“It is.”
“With all due respect, sir, once you located the suspects, you should have called the proper agency in right away, not come out here on your own.”
Gridley leaned forward and said, “Yeah, well, last time we found a suspect, the proper agency rolled in like gang-busters and shot him dead. We were kinda hoping to avoid that this time.”
Howard grinned a little. He was a mouthy kid, but he did put his finger right on the problem from time to time.
“Thank you, Jay,” Michaels said. To Delorme, he said, “Don’t worry. We’ll sit right here out of your way while you do your job.”
“Sir,” Delorme said. He stood and waved his hand in a circle, index finger pointing up at the sky. Three of the cars pulled out of the lot and across the highway, skidding to stops on either side of the target house. Doors opened, and agents in body armor with FBI lettered in big Day-Glo yellow on their backs, armed with assault rifles and wearing goggles and LOSIR headsets, boiled out of the cars. Delorme pulled a headset on, caught a vest somebody tossed at him, and moved toward the highway.
Other agents alighted from the cars still in the lot and ran across the road.
Two cars rolled toward places where the beach was accessible from the road, and more agents leaped out and hut-hut-hutted toward the ocean, to circle around behind the house.
“Not bad deployment,” Howard said, after watching them move into position outside the gate. “A little slow, kind of sloppy, but not bad for civilians.” All the high-tech gear in the world, and when it came right down to it, it was still going be the ground troops who had to gain the territory.
“Might as well sit back and enjoy the show,” Michaels said. Then he said, “Shit!”
“What?” Howard and Jay said together.
Michaels pointed. A big Dodge rolled out of the sandwich shop parking lot and roared away, heading north.
“Sir?” Howard said.
“The zombie is driving that car!”
Howard didn’t hesitate. He started the rental car’s engine and pulled out onto the highway.
Jay said, “Why don’t you get closer, General? We might lose them!”
Howard said, “If they see us behind them, we’ll sure as hell lose them. We’re going up a hill here. This gutless piece of crap rental can’t begin to keep up with that hot rod they are in. So far, they are obeying the speed limit, but if they see us and decide to run, we can’t keep up with them.”
Michaels was on his virgil, trying to call the SAC running the bust.
The man wasn’t answering.
“Come on, come on!”
“He’ll have his com shut off, tactical channels on LOSIR only,” Howard said. “You don’t want to have to answer the phone in middle of a firefight.”
The boss swore.
“Try FBI HQ,” Jay offered.
Michaels shook his head. “Probably half their guys are on this raid already, and it’s gonna take anybody else as long to get here as it did to get to the beach. Maybe longer.”
“What about the local police?” Howard said.
“Who are the local police? Where are we? Who has jurisdiction?”
“Call CHP,” Howard said. “Probably they can get here fastest. Put up a roadblock. Better than nothing.”
Michaels nodded. He tapped a button on the virgil, waited a few seconds, then started talking. The woman’s voice coming from the virgil was calm enough, but her news was bad:
“Sorry, sir, but we have a major traffic accident on the Ventura, ten cars and a semi full of hazardous chemical that’s on fire, all available officers are there or on the way there. I can put you through to the county sheriff’s patrol.”
“Damnit!” Michaels said. He shut the virgil off.
“We’re okay,” Howard said. “We stay with them, they’ll stop sooner or later. When they do, we’ll get whatever police agency that covers the area to roll.”
“If we don’t lose them,” Michaels said.
“If we don’t lose them,” Howard agreed.
“Close,” Adam said. “FBI assault team, looked like. What did you guys do?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Bobby said from the backseat. “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. They didn’t follow us, right, Tad?”
Tad looked into the rearview mirror, but anything more than a few feet back was a blur. He hadn’t gotten his stack just right; he was having a little trouble focusing his vision. But nobody was within a block of them, and if the feds were there, they’d have already zoomed up and tried to run them off the road by now, right? Out here on a road over the hill with nobody around, that was the way to do it. There was a curve maybe a quarter mile back, and if he squinted hard, Tad could see that the road was empty at least that far.
Tad said, “No. Nobody followed us.”
Adam, in the front, turned around and looked. “Looks clear.” He rolled the window down and stuck his head
