On the ocean end of the first floor, where the open office space was, Selma called out, “Remi! What’s wrong?”
“Men are here! They chased me and tried to ambush me on the path in the woods.”
Selma ran to Remi, then stopped and stared at Zoltan in horror. Remi looked too and saw that his muzzle was dripping blood. He turned to stare at the door and crouched, his teeth bared.
As they looked, the whole house went black. There was the sound of men running up the steps and then a loud boom as they swung something that sounded like a battering ram against the steel door. The impact set off the battery-operated alarm system, so there was a loud, pulsing tone that kept on as the ram hit again with another boom.
The house’s emergency generator was running now, and a few low-watt lights came on, so they could see.
Then Sam was in the room with them. He went to the metal control box built into the wall, opened it, turned on the monitor for the cameras over the door, and looked for just a second. “Selma, call the police.”
He used the intercom to speak to the men outside. “You, on the porch. Get the battering ram out of here or you’ll regret it.”
Sam reached for a covered switch in the control box and flipped it on. In the monitor, Sam and Remi could see the men on the porch react to a hissing sound. When they looked up, they dropped the battering ram, covered their eyes and faces with their hands, and blindly staggered off the porch.
“What’s that?” Remi asked.
“Pepper spray. It’s one of the things I added to the security system.”
“That kind of paid for itself, didn’t it?” she said as she watched men from the woods hurry onto the lawn to pull the injured back to the cover of the pines.
Selma called out, “The phones are dead.”
“Use your cell.”
“They seem to be jamming 850 megahertz.” Selma took another phone out of her desk and they recognized it as one of the ones they’d used in Europe. “Some kind of device. 1900 megahertz too. 2100 and 2500.”
“Then send someone you know an e-mail to call the cops for us.”
“The Wi-Fi is jammed too. I can’t get online. I can’t use the phone line because it’s dead.”
“All right. Of course,” Sam said. He manipulated a toggle on his control board to alter the aim of the surveillance cameras. “Wow. We’re in trouble,” he said. “Look at all the men out there.”
“Are Pete and Wendy home?” asked Remi.
“I’ll go tell them what’s up,” said Selma.
Sam said, “Tell them to open the gun safe and bring us—”
“I’ll do that,” said Remi, already running for the stairs. She took them two and three at a time, but Zoltan seemed to have no trouble staying ahead of her. She reached the second floor and met Pete and Wendy on the way to the third. “Hold it!” she said. “I need you upstairs for a minute.”
Pete and Wendy followed Remi upstairs to the fourth floor. There was the big bedroom suite straight ahead from the staircase and to the left were the two big closets. Between the two was a plain panel on the wall that would have escaped notice unless you knew it was there. Remi pushed a spot on it and it opened like a door. Inside was a narrow corridor that held two gun safes and a third safe that looked as though it had come from a small bank. Remi quickly worked the combinations of the gun safes.
Remi said, “Wendy, get five Glock 19 pistols—one for everybody—and two extra magazines each. Then take as much nine-millimeter ammo as you can carry and go to the first floor. You can leave the two for Pete and me.”
“What’s going on?” asked Wendy.
“Not sure yet. I think it’s the people we thought we left in Europe. Pete, get some long guns and ammo—a couple of short-barreled shotguns and the two semiauto .308s. Lots of ammo.”
Pete and Wendy hurried from the fourth floor to the narrow stairway down to the third floor, their arms piled with weapons and boxes of ammunition. Remi closed the two safes without relocking them and then closed the panel that hid them. She went into the bedroom, not looking at Zoltan but feeling him coming in with her. She said, “
She picked up the Glock that Wendy had left her, released the magazine to be sure it was loaded, then put the two spares into the waistband of her shorts and ran down the stairs to the third floor, whirled to go down the next flight to the second floor, and got halfway down when she saw something through a window that made her freeze.
There was a ladder leaning against the side of the house, the end of it just above the top of a second-floor window. A man in a black turtleneck and black jeans scrambled up the ladder in plain sight. He reached the floor, pulled out a hammer, and smashed a large pane of glass, then prepared to step from the ladder onto the empty frame. Remi ran to the nearest window, raised her arms above her head and lifted the long wooden curtain rod off its hooks, dipped it once on each side to let the curtains slide off the ends and ran to the broken window. The man saw her coming and reached for the rifle sling across his chest to bring his automatic weapon to his hand, but Remi was faster. As she ran toward him she aimed her pole out the window into the man’s chest. He tried to brush it away, but that caused him to take his hand off the ladder and forget his weapon. Remi pushed him backward off the ladder, then used the pole to push the ladder over after him.
She looked down out the window and saw that a man had run to the aid of the fallen climber and another was picking up the aluminum ladder. When they saw Remi, they fired several shots in her direction. She ran to the opposite side of the second floor, holding on to the curtain rod, and hurried around the stairway.
It was as she had feared. Another man was on a ladder outside the window on that side. He used a tool that looked like a hatchet to break the glass. Remi was already moving, so this time it was easier to catch him before he was ready. She jabbed the long wooden pole through the broken window, still running. But this man still had the hatchet in his hand and he flung it through the window at her. She ducked to the side and it spun past her head and hit something behind her, but she managed to plant the pole in the man’s chest and kept running until he went over backward, clinging to his ladder.
Remi saw the control panel for the second floor’s systems. She dropped her curtain rod, ran to it, opened the cover, and turned on the switch for the second floor’s steel shutters. The lights dimmed, the motor gave a sickly groan, and the shutters came down only about a foot and then stopped.
Downstairs she could hear the booming of the battering ram again. She ran to the head of the stairs and looked down. Sam, Pete, Selma, and Wendy had pushed a lot of heavy furniture against the front door. A pair of desks were on their sides with some steel filing cabinets lying horizontally behind them. The four defenders stood in a twenty-foot circle, watching the door. Pete was on the left, aiming a shotgun, with Wendy on the right pressing the other shotgun to her shoulder, and Selma was at Wendy’s shoulder, aiming a pistol with both hands. Sam was in the center with one of Remi’s Les Baer Semi-Auto Match rifles. The sturdy steel front door had buckled a little from the constant pounding, and Remi could tell they were almost ready to bend backward enough to let the bolt slip.
As she watched and listened, the battering stopped. Then, from outside, came the sound of a car engine. It grew louder as it came closer, then louder still. It roared for a couple of seconds and then—
Sam had fired a couple of shots as soon as the door had flown open and there were holes on the driver’s side of the windshield, but there was no driver. Clearly the pedal had been jammed down with a weight or a stick and the truck aimed at the door.
Men in black clothes appeared a few yards back from the door, hidden by the high bed of the truck, and fired bursts into the house with automatic weapons.
Sam called out, “Get upstairs!”
