The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

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.
    The rest of the action was going on where Travis couldn’t see it. He couldn’t tell if Finn’s people were shooting. Their silenced fire would’ve been impossible to make out against the other shots.
    Paige turned to him, her eyes intense. She understood the trouble they were in as well as he did. Then she looked past him. He turned to follow her gaze, and saw one of the cylinders.
    It was ten feet away, under the coffee table.
    He looked for the other one. Couldn’t see it anywhere. Given the direction it’d rolled, it had to be closer to Finn’s position now. It wasn’t even worth thinking about.
    Travis looked at the nearer one. If he could get to it and get the iris open, no special care would be needed to position it. The ruin of this building had thick steel gridwork for subflooring instead of concrete and rebar. The grids were completely rusted, but because they were such a heavy gauge—inch-thick steel rods crisscrossing at three-inch intervals—they were still very strong. No matter where he opened the iris, there would be a solid surface to crawl onto on the other side.
    It would take him two seconds to reach the cylinder, starting from his prone position.
    Paige saw what he was thinking. “You can’t!” Her voice was just audible under the shooting. “The agents will think you’re going for a weapon!”
    He craned his neck around to look at them. They’d reached Garner. They’d boxed him in. Two or three of them, with their free hands, had grabbed hold of the man’s arms. They were dragging him toward the hall. Garner was shouting something at them, as Travis had imagined. It was about as effective as he’d imagined, too. Ten more seconds and they’d be gone. They were still shooting at the doorways through which Finn and his people had ducked. Sporadic fire, meant only for deterrence.
    One of the agents had his eyes fixed on Travis and Paige and Bethany, even as his MP5 stayed trained on the doorways. He could swing the weapon toward the three of them, where they lay, about as quickly as he could decide they were a threat.
    Travis wouldn’t get halfway to the cylinder if he went for it.
    He judged the agents’ progress toward the mouth of the entry hall, beyond which they wouldn’t be able to see him anymore. Five seconds now, at most.
    He looked at the doorways. Finn and the others were somewhere beyond them. Travis had no doubt that Finn, at least, was running the same calculation he was: gauging the straight-razor margin of time between the agents’ departure from the suite and the earliest moment that Travis could reach the cylinder and trigger the iris.
    It would take some number of seconds, and some number of seconds would be available. One of those numbers would turn out to be larger than the other. In the end it would be that