Gone Too Far (49 page)

“Really,” he said. “I wanted to be a SEAL more than anything in the world—right up until the moment I walked into Mrs. Fucci’s English class and started listening to you arguing with her about the importance of rap music in the American cultural experience.”

She laughed, her face lighting up. “You remember that?”

“Yeah. You and Calvin Graham got up and did that rap version of that scene from
Romeo and Juliet
that was, um—”

“It was pretty awful.”

“No,” he said. “I went home and read the play that night, and I got to the part where Romeo sees Juliet for the first time, and I’m sitting there thinking,
Damn.
I’ve got the same affliction Romeo’s got. And what am I going to do about this Calvin guy?”

“He was so gay.”

“I didn’t know that then.” It had been Noah’s first day in a new school—his first day in years that Ringo hadn’t been by his side. He’d spent a lot of time those first few weeks worrying about Ringo alone back in Texas, without Noah, without Dot and Walt.

Please God, don’t let Ringo get blindsided by the loss of his family. Don’t let him let Lyle Morgan piss him off. Don’t let him kill Lyle and spend the rest of his life in jail. . . .

Noah should have had more faith. Just the fact that Ringo had opted to remain behind with his mother was proof he was capable of thinking things through and not always reaching for the easiest, most instantly gratifying solution.

He hadn’t realized just how difficult a sacrifice it had been for Ringo to stay in Texas until the summer he came down to visit.

Ringo had hitchhiked the entire way because his father not only wouldn’t give him the money for a bus ticket, but he also wouldn’t let him touch the money Ringo himself had earned, loading trucks after school. That money was for college, or so Roger Senior had insisted.

So Ringo had packed a duffel and walked to the truck stop off Route 20, with only seven dollars in his pocket.

Every year after, Walt sent him the money for a bus ticket. Ringo pretended he took the bus, but Noah knew he still hitched. He used the money to buy presents for them, because he hated showing up empty-handed.

That summer had been wonderful. It was Ringo who had walked up to Claire and said, “My cousin Noah, here, thinks you’re incredibly hot. He’s too much of a fuckhead to tell you that himself. Want to help me drive him crazy and go to a movie with me?”

Noah was standing there, embarrassed as hell, ready to drag Ringo off and beat the crap out of him—right after he cleared up a thing or two. “I didn’t say you were hot,” he told her.

Claire looked at him, her eyebrows raised, like,
no?

“I said you were beautiful and smart and funny,” he said, going into freefall just from looking into her eyes, part of himself completely unable to believe he was standing there and talking to her, let alone saying what he was saying, “. . .
and
hot.”

Claire didn’t look away from Noah as she’d answered Ringo’s question. “I think I’d rather drive him crazy in other ways.”

Instant hard-on. Of course, he’d been sixteen and it didn’t take much. Still, it was something of a miracle that he and Claire had kept their clothes on—at least most of them—for a full year.

By the end of that first summer Noah was so wrapped up in Claire, he almost didn’t notice when Ringo left.

Except for the fact that Ringo got really quiet those last few days of his visit.

And when Walt and Noah took him to the bus station, he broke down and cried.

All three of them did. People gave them a wide berth—three guys all well over six feet tall, weeping like babies.

“Do you think Ringo and Mary Lou will get back together after this?” Claire asked. “That happens sometimes. People go through a traumatic experience and they try again.”

Noah glanced at her. “You know, I might be tempted to agree, but . . . I didn’t tell you this before, but this woman—an FBI agent—a sister—she showed up after you left Janine’s house. Alyssa Locke. Ringo introduced her to me as a friend. I almost told her, ‘My cousin thinks you’re hot.’ ”

Claire laughed. “ ‘But he’s too much of a fuckhead to tell you that himself’?”

“Yeah. You should have seen the way he looked at her,” Noah said, pulling up to a stop sign at the end of the road. “And she was looking back at him, too. Do I go right or left here?”

Claire studied the map. “Left. If we’re where I think we are.” She looked up. “Either way, I don’t think it’s too much farther.”

She did. “Still nothing.

“What’s the status of those choppers? What’s Max’s ETA? What’s
our
ETA?”

“I’m working on reaching Max,” she reported, juggling the phone and the map. “We’ve got another ten minutes as far as I can tell.”

“Shit-fuck! Noah! Use my cell and call him,” Sam ordered her. “Now, Alyssa,
please!
” The way he was driving, it was good he was keeping both hands on the wheel. “Tell him not to approach the gate. Jesus,
Jesus . . .”

She took his cell phone from between his legs and hit Redial. Come on, Noah. “Sam, he’s not picking up.” She looked at the phone. “Oh, shit . . .”

“No,” Sam said. “Don’t say that.”

Alyssa tried her own phone. It, too, was giving her an out-of-range signal.

Sam glanced at her, and she shook her head. “We’ve lost our cell phones.”

“Wrong answer.” Max didn’t have time for this. He had more than twenty agents—himself included—driving like bats out of hell for the address Alyssa had given them, and another twenty heading toward MacDill Air Force Base, up in Tampa, ETA two minutes, where there were three Navy Seahawks waiting to take them the forty miles they needed to go in about fifteen minutes.

Provided they had the President’s permission to assist in this FBI operation.

“He’s in a meeting with the—”

“Do you know who I am?”

“I’m sorry, I’m new. This is my first day, sir. I’m trying—”

“Connect me to someone who is not new,
right now,
” Max said, “or this will be your last day.” On earth.

Someone else picked up. “Peterson.”

“This is Max Bhagat—”

“I’ll connect you to the President right away, sir.”

Two seconds, maybe even less, and Allen Bryant picked up. “Max. What’s going on?”

“Sir. I need three Seahawks at MacDill—”

His cell phone beeped and died.

No signal.

Perfect. He’d just hung up on the President of the United States.

Max reached for the radio even as he hit the brakes and skidded to a stop. “This is Max Bhagat. I need trucks with satellite towers moved into this area immediately, over!”

He put his car into reverse and drove backward as fast as he could, engine whining, while he watched his phone, waiting for the signal to return.

“Sir.” Laronda’s voice came over the radio. “We just got a call from Deb Peterson at the White House. Three Seahawk helicopters are standing by, at our disposal.”

Max hit the brakes again, and shifted back into drive. He’d worked hard to establish that kind of trust with the country’s commander in chief. It was gratifying to know all he had to say was “I need . . .” and President Bryant would deliver.

“We’re working on setting up a direct connection between you and the Army commander,” she continued. “Until we do, do you have any orders for me to relay? Come back.”

“Yeah, tell them to haul ass. And get communications up and working. Alyssa Locke is at least twenty minutes in front of all of us, but that won’t do us any good if she can’t talk to us, over.”

“She’s in a rental car, no radio,” Laronda came back. “We’ve ordered local police to set up roadblocks in the area, but otherwise to wait for us to arrive. I’ll get an unmarked car with a police radio into the vicinity, over.”

“Locke needs to be told to do surveillance, to report, and then to wait for backup. Repeat, tell her to wait for backup. Over.”

“Dream on, sir,” Laronda told him. “Over.”

Low battery.

No!

Okay, maybe there was enough to make one call . . .

Except Mary Lou couldn’t even tell if there was service available. She dialed anyway, but the screen went dark.

Low battery had become no battery.

Whitney’s car had a charger—the kind that could be plugged into the cigarette lighter. The kind that would let the phone be used even while it was charging.

Mary Lou ran back to her apartment, where that frigging phone had finally stopped ringing.

“I found it,” she announced. “I’m going down to the garage to see if—”

Boom!

An explosion rocked the entire house, pushing Mary Lou down onto her butt and breaking the glass in her kitchen windows.

She scrambled to her feet, ran for the bathroom.

Ihbraham was shielding Haley and Amanda with his body. The two little girls were wide-eyed.

“Whitney,” Mary Lou shouted. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine,” came a return shout. “What the hell was that?”

Out in the living room, the phone started ringing again.

All over the house, the fire alarms started shrieking.

“I know it’s not what you want to do,” he said. “But I’m begging you, Lys. This man is my brother. He has no training, no reason to believe he can’t just drive up to that gate. They are going to kill him—”

“How am I going to call him?” she asked. “If we can’t use our cell phones, he can’t use his, either.”

“Maybe there’s coverage down where he is.”

“We’re moving farther away from civilization,” Alyssa told him. “Just
drive
.”

Sure enough, thick smoke was already curling through the air.

Lord God, everything was so dry, it was going to go up like a tinderbox.

Whatever a tinderbox was.

“There’s one man out front with a sniper rifle,” Whitney said, “and two in the back, one with an AK-47, one with something else, I can’t tell what. Looks like they’re putting gasoline on the parts of the house that aren’t burning yet. These asswipes want us dead.”

As if a fire would need any kind of help at all in this dry heat.

Mary Lou picked up the phone.

“Here’s the deal,” the man she knew as Bob said before she could even say hello. “You and Rahman walk out the front door right now, and everyone else in the house—including Haley—stays alive.”

Oh, Lord.

“The FBI is on its way,” she said. “If you don’t want them to kill you, you better leave right now!”

“Thanks for the tip, honey,” he said. “I’ll put my men here at the gate on alert.”

No!

“They’re going to be here,” Mary Lou said, praying she was right. “Lots of them. Any minute.”

“Any minute,” he said. “That would be about how long it’s going to take for that house to become completely inescapable. If you and Rahman walk out now—”

Bile burned her throat. “So you can shoot us.”

“Better than burning. Better than watching your daughter burn.”

Mary Lou might’ve done it. If it were just her and Haley, she
would
have done it. But she would not let him kill Ihbraham. No, sir.

“Go to hell,” she told him, and hung up the phone.

“Perhaps we should move downstairs,” Ihbraham said. He was carrying both Haley and Amanda, and watching her from the door to the bathroom.

Whitney was watching her, too. Everyone was looking to her for what they should do next.

“Yeah,” Mary Lou said. The smoke was thick at the ceiling. “Let’s move downstairs.”