Larson had no craving to run headlong into a firefight, but he accepted it as a necessary evil as he chugged uphill with a pronounced limp.
He reached a gridlock of confusion as a stable of black vehicles battled for position. One car backed up onto the grass and shot off in twin rooster tails of mud. Another followed. Both came within a matter of feet of Larson, nearly running him over, yet no one bothered with him. Perhaps no one saw him. Perhaps he wasn’t there. Maybe he’d died beneath the double-wide and was now living out a final fantasy that was nowhere but in his head.
Rotem had orchestrated quite the show. To look at it, to hear it, one would think a hundred agents had stormed the compound, when Larson knew it had to be many, many fewer. Lacking any organized defense, shots were returned sporadically, with many of the estate’s guards already apparently AWOL.
Amid this hellfire, Larson made directly for the mansion’s front door. Once inside, he left behind what looked, smelled, and sounded like a small war and entered a world of opulence and grandeur. In their seclusion within this estate, the Romeros and others had spared little expense.
He glimpsed himself in the entranceway’s oversize, gilded mirror, wondering at the walking horror there, and turning away from it. He didn’t recognize himself. His sleeves and pant legs shredded, blood darkening even the black windbreaker he wore, Larson entered the grand staircase and climbed, his legs dragging, barely willing to cooperate, unmoved by the desperation that drove him.
He marched toward the third floor, another man’s gun in hand.
The lack of electricity was no doubt Rotem’s doing. Close to the manor house now, several percussive stun grenades exploded, rattling windows and shaking the foundation. Designed to throw shock waves meant to rupture sinuses and puncture eardrums inside enclosed spaces, the use of the grenades outside, where they were less effective but impressive as pyrotechnics, smacked of Hampton and Stubblefield and his squad’s methods of overwhelming a fugitive prior to a final strike.
The harsh white light from those flares burned through windows and lit the upstairs hallways. He climbed beneath the ostentation of a dozen portraits of jowly old men looking proudly officious with their golf clubs.
In the distance now, the first whine of approaching sirens. Backup. A stupid tactic, given Hope’s captivity. The sirens would panic Hope’s captors and shorten her life considerably. If she wasn’t dead already.