Дэвид Балдаччи - King and Maxwell

A jagged strip of lightning struck a tree in the distance, severing it in half and setting it on fire. A deafening boom of thunder followed. The split tree toppled to the ground, where the flames were quickly doused by the heavy rains.

Sean watched the smoldering tree for a few moments and then looked at Wingo.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. Thank you, Mother Nature.”

Michelle was being escorted to the White House in a black SUV with four Secret Service agents, two of whom she knew.

“What’s the deal?” she asked one of them as they drove along.

The man shrugged. “Not my place.”

The other added, “You’ll know soon enough. The Man will tell you himself.”

The Man was President John Cole. And from the grim expressions of the four agents, Michelle did not think the Man was in a particularly good mood.

They had made her turn off her phone. No communications. No pictures. No recordings of any kind. She hoped Sean didn’t call while she was out of the loop.

They pulled into 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and Michelle was taken to the Oval Office. She was told to wait; the president would join her shortly.

“Tell him to take his time,” Michelle said to herself as the door closed, leaving her alone. She looked down at her phone. She was itching to turn it back on but she knew there were eyes on her in here. This was a White House under assault, with leaks coming from somewhere, and it was making them all paranoid. If she tried to get her communications lines back up, they might just make her disappear. Well, maybe not that drastic, but she didn’t want to add fuel to what looked like a bonfire in the making. She sighed, sat back, and waited for the most powerful man in the world to walk in and further ruin her day.

Edgar Roy’s fingers were hammering the keyboards with – even for him – unusual ferociousness. But things were not going well. Edgar had almost never been beaten when hunting down something electronically. People tried to hide things from him but they never could. He could stare at a wall of screens with information coming in digital packages from the four corners of the earth, and make sense of it while just sitting there. His mind was uniquely designed to function at a high level in complete chaos. He could bring order, reason, and results to situations that seemed impervious to any of those things.

He had been able to track Grant’s Mercedes – that was relatively easy. It was right now parked in a very rural spot more than sixty miles farther west from the address of the cabin that he had given Sean earlier. He had emailed Sean with the information and then turned to his next task. The satellite.

And yet he couldn’t find the eye in the sky that Alan Grant had presumably leased. He might have used an alias of course, or more likely a shell company. Edgar had looked at purely commercial satellites and then government platforms and now he decided to look at the category in between – commercial satellites leased to the government. Sean had told him that Grant was mad at the government. So maybe he was trying to get back at it.

As he was clicking away something caught his eye. He hit other keys, his gaze flitting across two screens. To the casual observer this would be quite a feat, but for Edgar it was actually a break. He was used to staring at fifty screens at the same time. He thought about the request that Sean had made – to track Alan Grant’s Mercedes using GPS. He had done that. Police did that all the time. The GPS chip in a car’s computer brain made such a task relatively simple. The onboard computer systems in cars these days were extraordinarily complex. Yet since they were tied to other systems, they were vulnerable to hacking, just like Edgar had done.

But as the data kept flying over the screen, Edgar Roy got a very concerned look on his face.

This couldn’t be possible, could it?

“DO YOU SMELL SMOKE?” THE man said.

The pair sat in the front room of the cabin. Each sported shoulder holsters. One had been reading a magazine. The other had been playing a video game on his phone.

The other man looked up and inhaled. “Yeah, I do.”

They each glanced to the window. “Lightning struck that tree a little bit ago. Could be that.”

The other man shook his head. “Too far away. And with all the rain coming down the fire went right out. Not much smoke.”

They both rose and looked around.

“There!” the first man exclaimed. Smoke was coming through a crack in the wallboard. They both rushed over and examined the area.

“I’d try to put it out but I think it’s in the walls. Piece-of-crap place. Maybe the storm caused an electrical short.” He looked anxiously at his companion.

“We better move to the backup place. I’ll get them.”

He raced into the other room and came out a few moments later with a gagged, blindfolded, and bound Tyler and Kathy. Kathy had a bandage wrapped around her arm where Alan Grant had shot her. He had done so in a way that the wound was only a crease in her arm. The slug hadn’t gone in. But it had burned her skin, bled a lot, and hurt badly.

“Let’s go,” said the man as he pulled them along. “Move it!”

His partner was already at the front door. He said, “I’ll check in on the way, let him know what we’re doing.”

They stepped outside onto the porch and prepared to get very wet running to the car. They would not have to worry about that, because they were never going to make it to the car.

A fist crushed the first man’s jaw. He toppled as if he’d been clubbed by a grizzly. The second man yelled, let go of the kids, and reached for his gun. When he saw three guns pointed at his head from inches away, he wisely decided to put his hands up instead.

Sam Wingo stood over the man he had just knocked out, rubbing his fist.

He looked at Sean. “That felt really good.”

“Dad!” Tyler had managed to spit out his gag when he heard the voice.

Wingo ran to his son and untied him.

Sean did the same for Kathy. She was teary and holding her arm.

While Wingo hugged his son, Sean held Kathy. “It’s okay, Kathy. Everything’s going to be okay now.”

She whimpered and said, “He shot me.”

Sean looked down at her bandaged arm and then held her tighter. “And he’s going to pay for that. He’s going to pay for a lot.”

They loaded the kids into the car.

Sean doused the small fire he had built using rags, papers, and a bit of gasoline that he’d found in a can behind an old lean-to on the cabin property. Wingo came up to him.

“Brilliant tactic,” he said.

Sean stamped the last of the fire out and poured some water on it to make sure. Although the rain had left everything wet, he didn’t want to take any chances with the cabin really catching on fire.

“Any tactic is brilliant so long as it works.”

Wingo gripped his shoulder. “Thank you, Sean. I…”

Sean put a hand on Wingo’s shoulder. “I know, Sam. I know.”

McKinney and Littlefield had the two men cuffed and in their SUV. Sean poked his head in.

In a low voice he said, “I just checked my email. Got a lead on our guy using the GPS in his car. It was parked at an old AM radio station in the middle of nowhere.”

Littlefield nodded and pulled out his phone. “Give me the address and I’ll have an HRT team check there ASAP.”

Sean did so and then added, looking at the two prisoners, “Spilled their guts yet?”

“They want to lawyer up,” Littlefield replied. “And I don’t blame them. Kidnapping. Attempted murder. Conspiracy to commit a terrorist act.” He said all this in a loud voice so the two prisoners would be sure to hear. He turned to McKinney. “Hey, if we classify them as terrorists or even enemy combatants do they even have the right to a lawyer?”