Changing of the Guard

chance. They’d know his car.

His main regret at losing the house were the guitars in the basement. They were beyond price, some of them, but even so, it was not worth spending the rest of his life on death row to stop and pack them. He had to go, now! Somehow, he would either send for them, or make it back here some day, but now was not the time.

Maybe he could take just one, the Friedrich…?

No. A man on foot carrying a guitar case was memorable.

He paused only long enough to collect his good revolver and some spare ammunition. He tucked the holstered gun under his sport coat.

It was not possible that they could have found him, and yet they had. Why else would somebody who claimed to be from Net Force be asking the air freight delivery man about him? He had to assume the worst — they knew who he was and they would be coming to get him.

It didn’t make any sense. He was sure he had not left anything behind in his operations of late, neither with Gridley nor the Russian, nothing that could tie him to them, much less to this house!

And yet they had questioned Esteban, and they knew about his hobby, and they knew where he lived. It was clear that they had only wanted to confirm it.

There was no way they could have gotten that information, no connection to him.

Well, yes. There was one way.

He dismissed the thought angrily, instantly ashamed that such a disloyal idea had crossed his mind.

And yet — who else could possibly know?

Another worry, but no time to distress about it now. To stay here was to be trapped.

He looked through the sliding glass door into his fenced backyard. Nobody there he could see. It had only been an hour or so since Esteban had talked to the agent, he’d said. Maybe they hadn’t had time to get the proper clearances and roll. There were laws in this country that governed such things. You couldn’t just kick in a door and arrest somebody without a judge permitting it.

But maybe they had a tame judge, and were on the way and closing fast.

Of course, they might be sitting in a helicopter a mile away watching through a telescope, or footprinting him with a satellite, or just on the other side of the tall wooden fence, guns drawn, ready to cook him on sight.

No, they’d want him alive. To find out who he was working for, and what else he knew of value. If they were out there.

He took a deep breath, and stepped out into the yard, his hand on his revolver’s butt under his jacket. He was not going to prison, no matter what else happened. And with any luck, he could take a couple of them with him.

But nobody yelled or leaped out waving guns. There were no helicopters in sight, and if they had a spysat watching him, there was no way to tell.

He made it to the fence, jumped up and caught the top, and pulled himself up to peer into his neighbor’s yard.

Nobody there.

He tugged himself up and over the seven-foot-tall fence and dropped to the soft, sweet-smelling and neatly mowed grass. He hurried across the yard to the gate. A few more blocks, he would steal a car, get farther away, change vehicles, and get farther still. He would avoid public transportation, use back roads when he could, and get out of the District. Into a neighboring state, maybe one past that.

If he got that far, then he’d figure out what to do from there.

27

Washington, D.C.

Kent wanted this to go by the numbers, and he was being very careful not to do anything to screw it up. It was, after all, his first field op for Net Force.

At the moment, he was in that RV that Lieutenant Fernandez — who was about to become a Captain as General Howard’s parting gift, though he didn’t know it yet — had scored. It was a comfortable way to sit surveillance, that was for sure.

John Howard sat on the couch, looking through the one-way polarized glass at the subject’s house. The man who lived there was one Eduard Natadze, a Georgian native. They didn’t know much else about him, except for the guitar material, but that didn’t matter — they knew what he looked like, they had his house in sight, and they knew if he showed up, they were going to grab him, which should be enough info to do the job.

Jay Gridley perched on one of the captain’s chairs, also staring out at the surveillance scene. He didn’t need to be here, but Kent understood why he wanted to be. He wouldn’t get in the way.

It was Kent himself who was the problem. He simply wasn’t as comfortable as he’d like to be. He knew he didn’t have any problems at all when it came to a battlefield, but this kind of operation was not his forte. Sure, he had done enough intel gathering over the years to know you sometimes had to sneak instead of stomp, but this was the first time he’d ever mounted an operation on U.S. soil, other than in training or VR exercises, and he wanted a win.

So far, everything had gone like a Swiss watch.

They were parked within two hundred meters of the subject’s residence. Fernandez had an eight-trooper team scattered around the place either disguised or in hiding. There was a “repairman” working on a street light, a “gardener” clipping bushes, and others hidden inside nondescript cars and trucks, ringing the house. When the guy came home, they’d have him.

His car was there, but he wasn’t in the house, they knew that, not unless he could make himself invisible to their FLIR and sound sensors, which could pick up a man’s body heat and the sound of his respiration. Unless he was hiding in a freezer and breathing real slow…

But as the day wore into night, and eventually into day again, there was no sign of the subject. Maybe he was out of town.

As Gridley crawled out of the overhead bed just after dawn, he said, “I just had a thought. Commander Thorn talked to the guy who delivers this guy’s guitars, right?”

Kent said, “That’s what he said.”

“Let me check something.”

Gridley sat on the couch, opened his flatscreen, and began tapping the keys. After a moment, he said, “Well, that’s that.”

“What?”

“I tapped into the carrier’s delivery logs for this address.”

“And…?”

“There are four of them in the last six months. All of them at exactly the same time: 1:30 p.m.”

General Howard came out of the head in the back of the coach, rubbing his face. “And this means what?”

“It seems unlikely that the driver would make four deliveries to the same address at exactly the same moment.”

“Yes,” Kent said, “it does. But I fail to see the significance. Why would the driver put down something that wasn’t so?”

Howard said, “These guitars are valuable, right? So if you were a guy paying for them, you probably wouldn’t want them sitting out on the front porch until you got home. Bad weather, a sticky-fingered passerby, that would be bad.”

Jay nodded. “So maybe the delivery guy has a key? So he can leave them inside?”

“If you had a house full of expensive guitars, would you give a delivery guy a key?”

“I wouldn’t,” Kent said.

“So maybe Natadze has some other arrangement with the guy,” Howard said. “Maybe the guy only comes