Free Home Invasion by William W. Johnstone Page A

a second. The laptop’s screen flickered a couple of times, but otherwise remained dark. “Damn!”
    “What happened?”
    “Power surge.” Ford pulled the AC cord loose and flipped the laptop over. His finger pushed the battery release, popping it loose. He held the battery in his hand as seconds dragged by. “Sometimes this works.”
    The two men waited grimly for about a minute. Then Ford reinserted the battery, hooked up the power cord, and tried to turn the computer on. The lights indicating that it had power going to it came on, but that was all.
    “Damn it,” Ford said again. “I’d be willing to bet that it’s totally fried in there.”
    “Maybe the data retrieval guys can take it in the clean room and reconstruct what was on the hard drive.”
    “Maybe, but it’ll take a while, and meantime we’re still in the dark, with no clue where to start looking for our target.”
    “Yeah …”
    Parker wheeled around and ran to the door, throwing it open and hurrying out into the motel parking lot. Ford ran after him. He didn’t know what had occurred to his partner, but he trusted Parker’s instincts.
    Parker looked at the power lines leading into the hotel, then followed them with his eyes down the street to a pole with a transformer on it.
    “Look,” he said.
    An electric company truck was parked beside the pole. The lift on the back of the truck had just descended, and a man in coveralls was climbing out of it.
    “Come on,” Parker said. He took off at a run toward the truck, reaching to the small of his back for his gun as he did so.
    The coverall-clad man saw him coming, reached into one of the garment’s baggy pockets, and brought out a gun of his own. Parker darted to the side as the weapon blasted.
    He sent a return shot toward the man at the truck, then had to duck behind a parked pickup as the man fired shot after shot while backing toward the truck’s cab. He yanked the door open, dived in, and the truck lurched into motion. Another man must have been inside at the wheel, keeping the engine running.
    The agents’ SUV screeched to a stop beside Parker. “Hop in!” Ford called. He had gone back to get the vehicle rather than following Ford, a hunch telling him that they might have to give chase.
    Ford floored the accelerator even before Parker had closed the door on the passenger side. Momentum swung it shut.
    “How’d you know?” Ford asked as he took a corner at high speed. The power company truck was a block ahead. It wasn’t built for speed. The SUV, with its high-powered and specially-modified engine, was.
    “I figured somebody might have seen us leaving the hotel with that laptop. Did you bring it with you, by the way?”
    “Yeah, I ducked back in the room and got it. Might still be something salvageable on it.”
    Parker nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. Anyway, if they saw us with the laptop, they’d have to figure we’d try to find out what’s on it. They followed us out of Corpus to the motel.”
    “They didn’t have any way of knowing that we plugged it into the wall.”
    “No, not for sure, but it’s a reasonable assumption.”
    Ford frowned. “They can put their hands on an electric company truck and cause a power surge to the motel just on the assumption that we might have the computer plugged in?”
    “They didn’t have anything to lose if they were wrong,” Parker pointed out.
    “Maybe not, but being able to mount an operation like that on almost zero notice means they’ve got a lot of pull, whoever they are. That sounds almost like something—”
    Ford stopped short as he realized where his thoughts were going.
    “Yeah,” Parker agreed, his face and voice grim. “It sounds almost like something we could do if we had to.”
    Ford still had the SUV moving at a high rate of speed, weaving in and out of traffic, blasting through red lights, cutting into their quarry’s lead. The power company truck caromed off several parked vehicles as it took a