He understood at once why Garner had taken note of the six gunmen and their relaxed postures. They were plenty prepared to raise their silenced Berettas if any of their four captives made a move—but the sudden arrival of armed Secret Service agents was a very different matter.
The effect on the six men—not to mention Finn—was immediate. Their heads turned toward the sounds of the various doors breaking in. From where they stood—the six of them in their long arc—they couldn’t see directly down the entry hall. Travis and the other three could: the living-room wall they stood against was an extension of one side of the hall.
But Finn’s gunmen knew exactly who was coming. The part of their brains that would’ve told them to drop a hot potato had figured it out in about a hundredth of a second. The result, Travis saw, was a kind of neural tug-of-war between all possible reactions: killing the captives, finding cover, getting the hell out of this place. Not the kind of decision they could make in the almost comically small amount of time they had to work with.
At least one of the six opted for the first choice. The man nearest to Travis. The guy’s Beretta began to come up toward the four of them, even as the Secret Service men in the hallway advanced at a sprint. They’d reach the living room soon, but not soon enough.
Travis threw himself forward at the man bringing up his gun. The two of them were lined up in a perfect face-off. Travis crossed the five-foot reach of space between them in the time it took the gun to come up to chest level. He got his left hand around the silencer, yanked the weapon down and away from pointing at the others, and punched the guy in the throat with all the force his weight and momentum could provide. Which turned out to be enough. The guy’s hand came off the gun with a reflexive jerk. And then Travis was twisting, holding the pistol, going right past the guy and beyond the arc of the others. Not trying to check his speed. Not even trying to stay on his feet.
He took one more step before his balance outran him, and then he was falling, completing his spin as he dropped. Still holding the Beretta in his left hand by its silencer. He brought his right hand up and took the weapon by the grip. Raised it to sight in on one of the still-armed gunmen. His angle of fire, as he fell, was tilted radically upward. If he missed, the bullet would hit only the ceiling—there was no more of the building above this floor.
He fired. He didn’t miss. The shot hit the man at the base of his skull and blew it open.
Then Travis’s ass hit the floor painfully and his gun arm dropped beyond his control.
By then, everyone was moving. Things were happening too quickly for him to keep track of. He saw Paige and Bethany ducking and running toward him, getting out of the kill zone that was about to open up between the gunmen and the oncoming agents in the hall. He could hear the agents’ footsteps, as well as those of the other teams, still out of sight somewhere behind him. He could see the gunmen scattering, ducking—no doubt they could see the agents now. One man slammed into the leather chair that held the two cylinders. The chair pitched forward, spilling the cylinders onto the carpet. They rolled in different directions—neither one toward Travis.
Travis raised the Beretta again, looking for a target, when it occurred to him what he was doing. He was holding a pistol, in a room containing a former president, into which Secret Service agents were about to flood.
Not a good way to stay alive.
He cocked his wrist and threw the gun sideways, saw it hit the carpet and spin into the gap beneath the couch. At the same time he saw Paige and Bethany diving toward him, and even as they hit the ground the shooting started.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Travis saw within seconds that it wasn’t going to shake out in their favor. Finn and his men had fallen back to defensive positions in adjoining rooms, leaving Garner alone where he stood. The Secret Service agents were already converging on him, unloading suppressing fire at the doorways through which the others had retreated.
But not engaging them.
Not attacking.
That wasn’t their job.
Their job was to get Garner out of harm’s way, and they would do it in probably fifteen seconds. Twenty at the most. They would surround him and hustle him out, down the entry hall and out into the larger corridor. Probably right out of the building after that. They would maintain fire to cover the retreat from the residence, but that would be it. Not even Garner could order them to do otherwise. In the heat of it all, they wouldn’t even be listening to him.
Well under half a minute from right now, Travis knew, the three of them would be left alone with Finn’s remaining people—nearly all of them still alive.
Travis was lying facedown on the floor now, hands outstretched and empty. Paige and Bethany, right beside him, were in the same position.
Travis turned his head and saw two agents pass by on the inside wall of the living room. They were firing three-shot bursts.