And then, without warning, it was like the world caught fire.
BEING THAT LIGHT TRAVELS FASTER than sound, Storm first became aware that illumination was suddenly pouring out of every orifice of the house, including some floodlights attached to the roof that he hadn’t seen before.
Nanoseconds later, the noise hit: a wailing, shrieking, ear-splitting alarm.
Storm reacted instinctively. He grabbed the Tin Man and tossed him across the door’s threshold. Then he rocketed himself through the maze of junk to his right and over the side of the porch railing. He flattened himself against some half-broken latticework that kept animals from crawling under the porch, keeping Dirty Harry tight against his chest.
As the siren continued pulsing at a volume that could have shaken a pharaoh from a four-thousand-year slumber, Storm stayed hidden in the shadow of the porch. He waited for the cavalry to emerge — dozens of future jihadists, swarming to protect their liege’s castle.
No one came. After a minute or so, the alarm stopped. The lights stayed on. Storm heard cursing and the sound of someone tossing the Tin Man aside. Storm dared to turn and peek through the bottom slat of the porch railing.
What he saw, backlit against the bright glow of the house, was one of the men he had shot earlier in the day. It was Ahmed, the leader of what Storm had thought was just a motley gang of desert bandits. When Storm had heard Raynes say the name Ahmed, it hadn’t triggered any bells. Ahmed was a common name in this part of the world. Had Storm known who the man really was, he would have taken care of all of this in the desert.
Yet another example of hindsight being fifty-fifty.
Ahmed took one step out on the porch, but no more. His head was bare, without its usual turban. His long, salt-and-pepper hair was greasy and unkempt. He was dressed in an ankle-length nightgown. He wore nothing on his feet. His right arm was tucked in a sling. His left arm carried a sawed-off shotgun.
He was letting the shotgun lead the way. He swung the muzzle from left to right, back to the middle, again to the right, and then to the left. Storm stayed absolutely still, knowing he was effectively invisible in the shadow of the porch, with all that junk to serve as cover.
Ahmed walked to the edge of the porch, swiveled the gun some more. He was mostly looking in the direction of the guard shack, where there was no activity.
“Wake up, you lazy dog,” he yelled in Arabic, but of course got no response.
“You’re fired,” he added, to no greater impact.
Storm had a perfect shot at that moment. He could have dropped Ahmed easily. But if he killed Ahmed, he would have no more intelligence about the Medina Society’s structure or organization, and certainly no idea of how to stop its current plot.
As a result, Storm maintained his hiding spot. Ahmed muttered a few choice Arabic words that ventured some unkind descriptions of the guard’s mother. Then Ahmed turned and walked back in the house.
It was finally dawning on Storm that there was no one else here. There was no cavalry, no bloodthirsty true believers coming to the leader’s aid. It was just the guard — who wasn’t going to be an issue — and Ahmed.
Well, them and the Tin Man. But Storm didn’t think the Tin Man would put up much of a fight. No heart.
Mostly, Storm couldn’t believe his luck: a Medina Society leader, ripe for the taking.
All he needed was some patience.
He leaned back down against the latticework and watched as, one by one, the lights in the house went out. Then the floodlights followed suit. He removed the AK-47 from his back. He would not need to lay down a heavy blanket of fire against just one man.
Storm’s eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness again and he began formulating his plan. Eventually, the leader — convinced that the Tin Man had been the cause of the false alarm — would fall back asleep. Storm just needed to be able to get into the house without tripping off all that sound and fury.
What kind of system was it? Knowing was the key to defeating it. Back in his days as a private eye — when he was barely scraping out enough business to cover the rent on his tiny strip-mall office — one of the services he offered his clients was consulting on alarm systems. Another one was defeating alarm systems so he could snoop in his target subjects’ homes, not that he advertised that particular offering in his literature.
He was not the world’s foremost expert on the subject. But he knew enough to get by. In his mind, he replayed the scene of himself opening the door. It had happened so fast the first time. But by concentrating on it, he began to slow it down. Each replaying got just a little longer. Details that he had missed the first time began to pop out, almost like a form of self-hypnosis.
Once he got the picture moving slowly enough, Storm caught what he was looking for: there were two pressure sensors in the doorframe, one just above eye level, the other down around his shins. He knew well enough how they worked. They were nothing more than small semicircles of plastic attached to springs. As long as they remained depressed, the alarm system believed the door was still closed. When the springs extended, the system knew the door had opened.
He just needed to keep them down. Back in his private eye days, he used chewing gum, tape, Silly Putty — whatever he had available. He just didn’t happen to have any of those things on him at the moment.
Then he remembered the eucalyptus tree that the cargo truck was parked under. Still moving cautiously, Storm crept around the other side of the porch. Then he made the sprint to the tree, running until he was on the opposite side of the trunk from the house.
He searched for old cuts and scratches in the tree, found several, and began pulling off the gum that had hardened there. He stuffed it in his mouth, where he began working it so it wasn’t quite so stiff. It tasted terrible — Wrigley’s had nothing to fear from untreated eucalyptus gum — but the consistency was right. He waited until he had a decent-sized mouthful of the goo, then moved back toward the house.
All was again quiet. The only thing that had changed about the house from the first time was that the Tin Man was now lying forlornly on his side. Storm crept up the steps, across the porch. He opened the screen door, then turned the handle on the main door.
But this time, he didn’t shove. He slowly nudged it partway open, then held it there with one hand. He bit off a hunk of eucalyptus gum and with his other hand, wedged a lump of it over the top sensor. It held nicely.
He repeated the maneuver with the lower sensor. Gingerly, he opened the door just a little further, so that now the entire doorjamb was exposed. He used the remaining gum in his mouth to completely cover both sensors, packing them tightly so there would be no chance their springs would extend as the gum dried.
He opened the door the entire way. The alarm did not go off. Storm exhaled. He took one step into the house and closed the door behind him.
His eyes were already well accustomed to the dark, but they had not yet focused on the dim recesses of the foyer when he heard one of the more unmistakable noises in the modern world. It resonated straight from its source to some deep, reptilian part of Storm’s brain. It was an authoritative chuck followed by an even more convincing chick.
It was the sound of a shotgun slide being racked from about fifteen feet away.
THE SAWED-OFF SHOTGUN is the most effective short-range antipersonnel weapon ever devised by man. In addition to the massive force of fire, its multitude of projectiles spread upon exiting the muzzle, meaning it only needs to be aimed in a very general sense. There is no such thing as surviving a shotgun blast from point-blank range without significant — and, most likely, terminal — injuries.
The only thing that saved Derrick Storm’s life was that pumping a shotgun requires two fully functioning arms. And Ahmed, with only one, had to brace the shotgun stock against the floor in order to rack the slide before bringing the muzzle back up.