Mike Lawson - The Payback

For Tracy Howell

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Prologue

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Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Author’s Note

Praise

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

DeMarco looked down at the dead man lying at his feet.

He should have been the one lying there. He should never have made it this far.

He picked up the man’s weapon. An Uzi, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. He’d never fired a machine gun in his life.

Across the Potomac River he could see lights burning in the Pentagon. He was less than a mile from one of the most secure buildings in the world, a building filled with people who actually knew how to shoot the weapon he was now holding, but none of those people, as close as they were, would be of help to him or Emma now. This would all be over before anyone could help.

He fumbled for the safety on the Uzi, flipped the mechanism, then looked to see if Emma was still in the same position.

He could see her clearly in the lights of the marina parking lot. And he could see the Asian woman, the automatic in her hand, the gun pointed at Emma’s heart. The Asian was the most lethal person that DeMarco had ever known. If he didn’t do something in the next few minutes, Emma was going to die.

DeMarco began running through trees. He had to get closer; there was no way he could kill the woman from where he was.

And then the sound of a weapon firing, another machine gun. Who the hell had fired? Goddamnit, how many of them were there? How many were still alive?

After that, it all happened so fast, too fast: a man running down one of the piers, the green and black camouflage paint streaked on his face making him look like something that had escaped from hell; the Asian woman spinning toward the man and firing; the camouflaged man falling; Emma leaping at the Asian woman and wrestling her to the ground.

Emma was trying to get the gun away, but DeMarco could see that she was losing. The other woman was younger and stronger – and insane.

DeMarco burst through the trees. Only fifty more yards. Just hold her, Emma, just hold her. Just hold her five more seconds.

But then the camouflaged man rose up from the boards of the pier. Even beneath the face-paint DeMarco knew who he was – and he wasn’t surprised that the man hadn’t been killed. He wasn’t sure anything could kill this man.

DeMarco raised the Uzi in his hands and swung it toward the camouflaged man but he knew immediately that he was moving too slowly. He knew the man would beat him.

He knew the Asian woman would beat Emma.

And he was right.

From his office window Norton could see a Los Angeles class attack submarine moored at one of the piers. He was too far away to read the sub’s hull number but he thought it was the USS Asheville , SSN 758. He had worked on the Asheville last year, spent a lot of time drinking with some of the chiefs. He stared at the sub a minute longer, then realizing he was just stalling, turned the rod and closed the venetian blinds. It was unlikely that anyone would be able to see what he was doing through a fourth-floor window but he couldn’t take that chance.

Norton turned away from the window and peered over the partitions that enclosed his cubicle. It was lunchtime. There were four guys playing cribbage two cubicles over, and near the door, a secretary buffing her nails. There wasn’t anybody else in the office that he could see. He had sent Mulherin up to bullshit with the secretary. Mulherin was good at bullshit. If anyone started to come down the aisle in Norton’s direction, Mulherin would slow the person down and say something to warn him.

Having no further reason to delay, Norton pulled the chessboard out of his backpack. The board was thirteen inches square and an inch and a quarter thick, a little thicker than most chessboards. He pressed down on one side of the chessboard and a thin door popped open and a dozen chess pieces spilled out onto his desk. He then tipped the chessboard downward and a slim laptop computer slid out of the hollow space between the top and bottom of the chessboard.

The chessboard had been Carmody’s idea.

After he used the laptop, Norton would slide it back into the hidden compartment in the chessboard, put the chessboard on top of his file cabinet, and arrange some pieces on the board to make it look as if he was playing a game with Mulherin. What a joke that was: Mulherin playing chess.

Getting the laptop into the shipyard was the riskiest part of the whole operation. Norton only needed to use it a few minutes a day, and when he did, he’d do like he was doing now – use it at lunchtime with Mulherin standing guard. But he’d been worried about bringing it in. In fact he’d been sweating so hard he was surprised one of the jarheads at the gate hadn’t noticed.

Personal computers were prohibited inside the facility – only government-issue equipment was allowed – and if the marines guarding the gates had picked him that morning for one of their random security checks, and if by some chance they had discovered the laptop hidden in the chessboard, he’d have been screwed. Absolutely screwed.

But the likelihood of that happening had been small. If the terrorist threat level was high, the marines searched everything coming through the gates. Cars, knapsacks, purses, lunch boxes. Everything. But Norton had brought the laptop in when the threat level was normal and he had waited until there was a backup at the gate, a lot of people bitching that they needed to get to work, which tended to make the marines rush their searches. That had been Carmody’s idea too, going in when the line was long. Carmody was a smart bastard.

Norton realized at that moment that it wasn’t the marines that he’d been worried about. It was Carmody. Carmody scared the hell out of him.

DeMarco pulled his car into a parking space at the Goose Creek Golf Club in Leesburg, Virginia. He got out of the car, shut the door, and had walked twenty yards before he remembered that he hadn’t locked the car. He went back to the car, jammed down the knob to lock the door, then slammed the door harder than necessary. It bugged him, particularly this morning, that his Volvo was so damn old that it didn’t have one of those cool little beeper things to lock the doors.

On his way into work DeMarco had taken a detour to a used car dealership in Arlington. He’d passed by the place a couple of days ago and had seen a silver BMW Z3 sitting on the corner of the lot, posed like a work of art. The car had sixty-four thousand miles on the odometer, the leather seats were sun-faded, and DeMarco wasn’t sure he could afford it – but he wanted a convertible and he was sick to death of his Swedish box on wheels. He had just started to dicker with the salesman when Mahoney’s secretary called and told him that Mahoney wanted him down at Goose Creek before he teed off at nine.