Nemesis

Suddenly, they heard a man yell, and the gunfire stopped. They waited, and Cal came up to his knees. Kelly’s comm came on: “Larry here. Two men, both down. We got them trying to run out the front. Repeat, they’re down, all is clear.”

Sherlock looked at the digital clock beside the bed. No more than three minutes had passed.

Kelly said into her comm, “Anyone hurt?”

“No, all of us are good.”

“Okay, we’re coming out.”

Kelly turned on the bedroom light. The room was a shambles, drywall all over the floor mixed with shards of glass from the broken windowpanes, the dresser chipped by flying debris and bullet fragments. “Probably sixty rounds sent in here,” Cal said. “Let’s go see what our guys have outside.”

He turned to see Sherlock standing quietly in the bedroom doorway. She wasn’t moving an inch. She turned and placed her finger over her mouth. “Stay here,” she whispered. “I heard something. I’m going to check it out.”

Cal’s blood turned to ice. He whispered, “No, Sherlock, don’t move, I’ll do it,” but she’d already disappeared into the hallway. He heard Kelly rack her Glock. “Let’s go,” she said low, and she and Cal followed Sherlock into the dark hallway. They didn’t hear anything, only Sherlock’s footsteps.

Then there was an ear-shattering blast that shook the house. “Sherlock!” Cal raced down the hall, Kelly on his heels. They ran into the kitchen in time to see a small figure leaping out the window. The kitchen was fast filling with smoke and flames, licking toward the cabinets. Sherlock was scrabbling up on the counter to go out of the kitchen window. The heat was suddenly incredible. Cal yelled, “Sherlock, we’re going out the front. Stay on the kitchen side! Be careful!”

Sherlock dropped to the ground outside the kitchen window and into a yew bush, pushed herself behind it. She yelled, “Larry, it’s Sherlock!” She felt the heat of a bullet pass by her cheek, and flattened herself to the ground, tasting dirt. She yelled again, “Larry, there’s another one, he firebombed the kitchen! I’m pinned down!”

Sherlock elbow-walked around the yew bush, looked carefully past it. She saw a slight figure moving fast to hide behind a skinny oak tree on the far side of the yard, maybe thirty feet away.

She yelled, “Drop your gun and get your hands up. We won’t shoot you. Do it! We have you surrounded, there’s no way out. Your two friends are already shot! Don’t make us shoot you, too!”

The figure’s arm jerked up and fired toward the sound of Sherlock’s voice. The bullet struck the house a few feet above her head. She heard the pounding of FBI feet coming closer, came up on her elbows, fired. There was a yell, and the gun went flying as Larry and four more FBI agents came racing around the side of the house, crouched over, fanning out into the backyard.

“He’s down!”

She saw them approach the moaning figure, guns trained center mass, going to their knees to restrain the terrorist, who was crying and cradling his wrist.

The terrorist stopped crying and looked back toward the madly burning house, casting the inferno’s glow on all of them. Orange flames gushed out toward them, and black smoke ate the oxygen out of the air, making it hard to breathe. The backyard looked like high noon.

“Hey, it’s not a man, it’s a girl!”

Sherlock ran to the fallen girl, who was clutching her hand. She was dressed in black, even her face blackened. She was trying not to cry now, doubtless it was humiliating, but still, tears seeped from beneath her lashes and trailed through the black paint on her face, cutting knifelike tracks. Sherlock knelt down beside her, saw another agent had applied a pressure bandage to the wrist. “You’re going to be all right, lie still. An ambulance is on the way.”

The girl raised dark pain-filled eyes to her face. “It was a trap.”

“Yes, it was a trap,” Sherlock said. She felt Cal’s hand on her shoulder, heard Kelly speaking to the agents. Cal said, “You were sent in to set the bomb, right? Because you’re so small? How’d you get into the kitchen?”

The girl turned her face away and didn’t say anything.

Cal continued: “She didn’t break the kitchen window, we’d have heard her. That window is too small for either of the men to get in, so she was elected. She cut a hole in the kitchen window and wriggled in, set the bomb, right?”

The girl looked up at him, said nothing.

“Her job was to set off the bomb between the kitchen and the living room, say, and then run as fast as she could and climb back out. If the bomb or the fire didn’t kill us, we’d be forced out of the house and her two friends outside would be ready to mow us down.”