State of Attack Read Free Page B

beige-coloured limestone facade, with green shutters. It was one of four connected terraced townhouses that made up the one hundred and nineteen-room complex.
    When she’d gotten safely inside, Tom and his team could relax. Their remit didn’t extend to guarding the exterior, let alone protecting her inside her suite. A fresh DS team would ensure the perimeter was secure for the dayshift, and the Russians looked after their own at close quarters.
    As Pouter walked up the steep steps with her bodyguards, sheltered from the light rain that had begun to fall by the dark green canopy, Tom was glad it was home time for him, too. But as she got just a couple of yards from the door, it was flung open abruptly. A suited man barged out, brandishing a handgun, and Tom willed the Russian bodyguards to fill the space between them and his charge, to fling her to the rear and pump ten rounds into the guy’s chest.
    He barked a series of short orders via the PTT and hit the emergency button under the dash. That sent an ultra-quick response requirement to the local PD, the Secret Service, the FBI and the DS. The SUV’s four heat-seeking cameras clicked into 360-degree vision for the various agencies that were now surveying the scene on video screens, just in case the hovering low-level drone got knocked out or malfunctioned. But by the time his team were halfway to the flight of steps, with their SIGs drawn, he could see that the Russian agents had holstered their own handguns.
    He held up a field scope and recognized the face of the ostensible attacker from his briefing photos. The man was in fact the Russian president’s fifteen-year-old nephew and the handgun was a squirt gun that he was now firing into the face of the hulk carrying the shopping bags.
    The kid had a mental age of nine, according to Tom’s security briefing notes, and that meant that all anyone would feel would be sympathy. Still, his team had reacted well, even Ed the rookie. Drills had their place in producing long-term muscle memory and instinctive positive action, but there was no substitute for a real test. He radioed his team to stand down and called it in before making a mental note to pat Ed on the back and say a quiet encouraging word.
    Suddenly, he felt overcome with exhaustion. He hadn’t had a day off in a month due to a minor epidemic of flu at the Washington office. His father, a recently promoted three-star general who worked at the Pentagon, was in Ankara, Turkey, at present, but he was due back in a week’s time, and Tom had arranged to take a short, well-deserved vacation to spend some downtime with him.
    “You okay, Tom?” Sam said, as he fired up the SUV.
    “Yeah, just a little tired. You know how it is.”
    “Yeah, goddamned adrenalin dump with nowhere to go,” Sam replied, referring to the anticlimax on the steps of Blair House.
    “Let’s get outta here, Sam.”
    As Tom rested his head against the SUV’s headrest, feeling jaded, he knew he’d worked long and hard to heal the relationship with his father. He no longer felt anger towards him for deserting his mother when he was eight. He still blamed him for her subsequent miserable existence and his own sense of betrayal in his formative years, but he didn’t hate him any more.
    Once Sam had dropped him off at the departmental lot and he’d typed out his report on his laptop, it would be less than a week before he could drive out of DC and over one of the four-lane road bridges that crossed the Potomac to his one indulgence in life: his retreat.
    But he had a nagging feeling about the prospects of getting some quality downtime. In the last few months, every time he’d thought life would experience a little peace, he’d gotten the mental equivalent to a jab in the ribs with a cattle prod. All his senses were telling him that it wouldn’t be any different, but he couldn’t think of one reason why.

Chapter 5
    In Syria, the white sun had mellowed into a tangerine-coloured half