Bio-Strike

NINE

He had checked into the hotel five days ago and would need to stay perhaps another two before the diamonds-for-weapons deal was concluded. In this part of the world, haggling was a recreational activity, and ordinarily simple arrangements took on needless and infinite complications. But there was a wealth of precious stones to be derived, and he always fulfilled an assignment to which he’d committed.

And he could not claim that he hadn’t known what to expect.

Antoine Obeng was a thug, a rebel warlord who had secured an official government post through guileful manipulation after the fractures of civil war were weakly repaired. Now he was chief of police in the nation’s capital, a title that validated his ego and legitimized the power he relished above all else. But he continued his behind-the-scenes leadership of the outlaw militias that roamed the city at will and held the inestimably productive mines in the countryside by force of arms.

Much could be said for his endurance in a nation where political control changed hands often and violently, and death by assassination was the fate of most competing warlords.

Nonetheless, it was only the convenient location of the top-end hotel and its exceptional services catering to diplomatic and business travelers from abroad that had curbed the visitor’s annoyance over the inexhaustible convolutions of the bargaining.

A man of rigorous discipline, he preferred sticking to a tight routine. Every morning since his arrival he had taken a swim in the indoor pool at six o’clock, a time when few others were outside their rooms and he stood the best chance of having it to himself. It was also the one time each day he felt at ease moving about without his personal guard, wanting an interval of solitude.

After taking the elevator up from his room to the twelfth-floor recreational area, he would put on his bathing trunks in the locker room between the gym and solarium, rinse off in the shower, then walk through the short connecting corridor to the glass-enclosed pool and do his laps for precisely an hour.

On the first day, a garrulous Dutch banker had intruded on his privacy and asked whether he cared to have breakfast in the hotel restaurant after finishing his “dip.” Shunning interaction with strangers, he had tersely declined and ignored the man until he’d backed off.

In the three days since, he had found the pool empty and gone about his laps without disturbance.

Then, today, he had reached the locker room and again encountered undesired company.

Habitually alert, he whisked his eyes over the men inside. Both were fit and in their midthirties. One had blond hair, the other brown. They were wearing workout clothes and speaking American English to each other with the easy familiarity of close friends or associates. The blond-haired man had a somewhat tousled appearance and a light growth of beard. He was neatly hanging his street apparel in a locker. His companion sat removing items from his gym bag. A folded towel and sports bottle were on the bench next to him.

Superficially, they seemed of a type. Professionals on an overseas junket. Of no particular interest to him besides being trespassers upon what he had come to regard as his proprietary domain.

But he trusted the unconscious perception of environmental cues we call instinct. And something in the air told him to be careful.

As he stood inside the entryway, the men gave him mannerly nods. He noted them without response and went to the nearest free locker to the door, an ear attuned to their conversation.

“The taxis around here, Jesus, that ride from the airport gave me bruises where I sit. Plus he must have just missed getting us crunched at least twice,” said the man with the twenty-four-hour stubble. He yawned. “Thought I’d never make it to the conference.”

The one on the bench looked amused. “You should’ve listened to my advice, taken a metered cab. Their drivers have to be licensed. And they carry identity cards.”

“Like that’s going to do you any good. Or you really think the insurance companies pay off around here? Assuming they have insurance companies.”

“Maybe not, but you’d know who to curse out for putting you in a body cast.”

The bristle-cheeked man grinned and reached inside the locker to adjust his trousers on the hook. The other’s hand was returning to his bag.

Without letting another instant pass, the morning swimmer abruptly abandoned his locker and strode back out the door.

The pair in the room exchanged glances.

His hand coming out of the gym bag with a.22 N.A.A. Black Widow, the man on the bench sprang to his feet and slipped the five-shot minirevolver into the belly band under his sweatshirt.

The stubbled man simultaneously turned from his open locker, leaving its door flung wide. From his trouser pocket he’d removed a holstered Beretta 950 BS semiautomatic, his own choice of a peekaboo gun. He stuffed the deep-concealment holster into the pocket of his loosely fitting workout pants.

Both trotted to the doorway, then slowed as they went into the hall and looked up and down its length.

Neither saw any sign of the swimmer.

They split off in opposite directions, each using restraint to keep from moving too quickly. If the swimmer had about-faced for a reason unconnected to their presence — as they hoped was the case — it would do no good to raise his suspicions now.

Reaching the bank of three elevators, the brown-haired man glanced at the floor indicators above their doors. The numbers over the first and last cars were dark. The second elevator in line was descending, the number eleven and Down arrow lit up. He pressed the call button to be certain that the stationary cars weren’t sitting on his floor, the swimmer perhaps having ducked inside to wait out his pursuers, trick them into thinking he’d taken the other car. Send them chasing it via the stairwell while he stayed put.

No such luck.

Both cars began to rise from the ground-floor entrance lobby, obviously unoccupied.

He returned his eyes to the indicator panel above the middle car.

The eight had flashed on.

Seven, six, five…

The elevator stopped at the fourth floor and its indicator light blinked off.

He frowned, looked down the hall at his partner, shook his head.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself.

The Wildcat had retreated to his den.

“I can’t figure where we slipped up,” the blond man was explaining over his handheld radio. “One minute he’s walking through the door, heading toward a locker, then he just takes off. In and out…”

“Never mind,” Tom Ricci said into his communications headset. He’d heard the locker room banter through installed surveillance mikes and thought the slipup was evident. You went incognito, you stuck with what you knew, kept your act simple. Instead, they’d gotten too clever for their own good.

There was an impermeable tunnel of silence over the radio. Then, “How do you want us to proceed?”

Ricci took a breath. Along with a couple of snoop techs named Gallagher and Thompson, he was across the street from the hotel, in an office hastily rented through a cutout and used as a spy post for the past several days.

“Stay at the hotel,” he said. “You’ll hear from me.”

More silence. The blond man at the other end of the trunked connection understood what Ricci’s order meant. He and his buddy were finished. Removed from the action, and soon to be cut loose from the fledgling RDT. Good night, take care, see you again sometime.

“Okay,” he said, his regret and disappointment evident despite the digital scrambling process that robbed so much tonality from the human voice.

Ricci aborted contact and passed Thompson’s headset back to him. He wasn’t unsympathetic to the snatch team but neither were their hurt feelings of paramount concern to him. The bungled opportunity at the hotel meant things were about to get a lot more difficult for him and the rest of his task force.

They had maintained a constant watch on Le Chaut Sauvage—the Wildcat — almost from the moment the terrorist arrived in the country, acting on reliable word from a plant among Antoine Obeng’s inner circle. In essence, their operational model was the Mossad’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from his safe haven in Argentina a half century ago: success achieved through simplicity of planning and execution. A small team watches the target’s patterns of movement, subdues him when a clean opening is presented, rustles him out of the country.

No witnesses, no fuss, no muss.

There were, however, some major differences between the past and present scenarios. The Israeli agents had shadowed their target for months without interference from Argentinian officials, who had a decent political relationship with their government, were aware of their activities in the country, and had lent them a sort of passive endorsement. By contrast, Ricci’s team had no such temperate climate in which to carry out a mission that had necessarily been planned on short notice. They were undermanned and underresourced. They were in a nation that was on the shakiest diplomatic terms with America and just recently had been taken off the State Department’s list of designated terrorist sponsors. The capital’s top cop was a crooked, venal son of a bitch who exercised his power in shameless cahoots with bands of khat-chewing thieves and looters. And, most significantly, the Wildcat was in the city at his direct invitation, enjoying the protective graces of the police and criminal militias that Obeng commanded with equal impunity.

It was a difficult and potentially ugly situation for Ricci and his men. If they got into a pinch, there would be no U.S. liaison — no one at all — to provide a bailout. They were entirely on their own string.

You asked for it, he thought, you got it.

Thompson had turned to him from the multiplex transmitter.

“What’s next?” he said.

Ricci leaned back in his chair. The answer to that question depended on his assessment of what the Wildcat had or had not come to suspect and, moreover, what his degree of suspicion might be — which meant Ricci needed to slip into the skin of a mercenary killer and international fugitive. The scary part was that it came easily to him. So easily it had made him close to dysfunctional when he was working undercover with the Boston P.D. So easily he’d eventually requested a transfer out of the Special Investigations Unit on psychological grounds.

And here he was again. Back where he didn’t want to be. He could know his enemy, see the world through his eyes, walk in his shoes. Sure he could. It was a natural inclination that he distrusted for the lines it blurred, an effortless reach into the darkness within him.

If he were the Wildcat, what would he do?

Had the topic of conversation in the locker room been the weather or hotel food, had the two men inside been exchanging war stories about fatherhood, home repairs, deadlines, simple stuff, chances were that the Wildcat would have hardly paid attention to them, and they’d have been able to make their intended move on him as he got ready for his swim. But instead, they chose to gripe about the local taxi service, and that had seemed unconvincing even to Ricci. An American traveling to this country for a business conference, staying at an expensive, first-class hotel, was no small potato with whatever firm he represented. It was far more likely than not that a courtesy car would be waiting for him at the airline terminal. And that the driver engaged by his corporate hosts would treat him like royalty.

Okay, then. The two men’s small talk had struck a false note, and their quarry had been sensitive to it. But not all hosts were equally hospitable. It wasn’t inconceivable that they’d have taken cabs from the airport, and it wasn’t as if they’d done anything that was a tangible and conclusive tip-off — revealing their firearms too soon, for instance. Would their clumsiness have been enough to make the Wildcat drop out of sight, abandon an immensely profitable deal that was well on the way toward finalization? Or would he instead opt to take extra precautions and accelerate the pace of his talks, clinch things before leaving the country?

Ricci stared at the ceiling and thought in silence a while longer. He imagined the tactile sensation of holding the illicit diamonds in hand, their weight and smoothness, his fingers clenched tightly around the forbidden gems.

Then he sat forward, looked at Thompson and Gallagher.

“We’re shifting to our fallback options,” he said. “Let’s have the intercept teams keep close tabs on the airport and other departure routes just in case. But five gets you ten our guy isn’t going anywhere before he pays Obeng another visit.”

Ricci’s bet was on the money.

It was late afternoon when Le Chaut Sauvage appeared. Two of his bodyguards had preceded him out of the hotel, looking up and down the street, scouting for any indication of a threat. Then one of them made a discreet all-clear gesture with his hand, and the Wildcat emerged onto the sidewalk, another couple of guards trailing a few steps behind.

Minutes earlier, a line of five police vehicles had arrived at the entrance, two standard patrol cars followed by a diesel-fueled South African Lion 1, reinforced from frame to engine block with ballistic-and-blast-resistant carbon fiber monocoque. After pulling the big, armored four-by-four up to the curb, several of its uniformed occupants had exited and leaned against its heavy flank with their arms folded imposingly across their chests.

The group from the hotel moved straight toward the Lion 1. One of the uniforms standing beside it opened the rear door, and the Wildcat climbed in back between the original pair of bodyguards to have left the hotel. The second two hovered beside the vehicle until his door shut and then went to the lead police car and got into it.

Behind drawn shades in the office across the street, Ricci and his techs watched on an LCD panel as the motorcade pulled into the two-way avenue bisecting the downtown area and then rolled eastward, the pictures feeding from 180-degree trackable spy eyes suctioned to the windowpane.

Ricci glanced at the city map on the wall above the monitoring station. East was toward police headquarters, Obeng’s official seat of corruption, its location circled on the map with a red highlighter. His unofficial cradle lay west of the downtown area. Ricci had penned the words “Gang Central Station” above the blue circle that marked its coordinates.

A vertical crease etched itself in the middle of his forehead. Something wasn’t kosher about what he’d just observed. A few somethings. If the Wildcat believed he might be under surveillance, why stroll out the front of the hotel, head so openly to the cop station, make the trip there surrounded by a goddamned cortege?

“Alert the strike team at Gang Central that company’s on its way,” he abruptly said to Thompson.

Thompson spun around in his chair and looked at him. “Will do,” he said, sounding confused. His eyes went to the wall map. “But—”

“I can read that as well as you,” Ricci said. “The whole scene in front of the hotel was a dupe. Like a game of three-card monte. Soon as Wildcat reaches police HQ, he’s out the back door and into a different vehicle.” He paused, his mind racing. “We’ll keep one of the tail cars on him. Let’s have the others sit outside the cop station, make themselves just conspicuous enough so our man feels comfortable he’s outsmarted us,” he said.

Comprehension dawned on Thompson’s face. He nodded briskly and turned to the multiplexer.

Ricci chewed the inside of his mouth, still thinking hard, making sure he’d covered all his bases. Then he rose from his chair and grabbed the shoulder-holstered FN Five-Seven pistol that was hung over the backrest.

“Have Simmons and Grillo bring around the tac van,” he said, and strapped on the holster. Basics first; he would finish gearing up en route. “I’m heading out to meet them.”

Since before the civil war, Antoine Obeng had presided over his rackets from a five-story commercial frame building set back from the street on a low hill in one of the city’s quieter outlying neighborhoods. A paved blacktop turnaround gave motor access to the main doors and led to the entrance and exit ramps of its sunken parking garage. Descending behind it were three or four yards of terraced slope and manicured shrubbery, below which the neat plants yielded to a snarl of wild, thorny growth that went down another thirty feet to the bottom of the hillside and then extended outward into a small, flat, muddy barrens.

On the ground floor were two businesses that Obeng owned and controlled through tamely obedient surrogates: the main offices of a shipping/mailing company and a travel agency. These afforded the warlord with useful fronts for laundering a portion of his criminal earnings, distributing forged documents, and orchestrating a multiplicity of smuggling operations, a partial index of which included the transport of stolen luxury cars and antiquities, bootlegged music and video recordings, illegal weapons and narcotics, and the meat, hides, horns, and hooves of exotic animals killed by poachers in wilderness preserves all across central and western Africa.

Like everyone else in the city, the thirty or so employees of Obeng’s front businesses were aware of his command of the militias and indeed could not have possibly failed to notice the regular comings and goings of his hoodlum lackeys. But only a few knowingly participated in his lawless undertakings or profited from them in any way. The majority of these men and women showed up each morning for an honest day’s work, went home to their families at quitting time, and brought home modest paychecks at the end of the week.

They were what Tom Ricci had called “solid citizens” back when he’d carried a detective’s tin.

They were also convenient human shields for Obeng.

From Ricci’s standpoint, this was not good.

As he sloshed through a foul-smelling drainage culvert in a near squat, his boots awash in brown sludge, his arms, legs, and ballistic helmet soiled with wet clots of grime that had peeled like fresh scabs off the curved, close-pressing top and sides of the channel, Ricci knew the worst things that could go wrong with his maneuver would be having innocent civilians taken hostage, injured, or, even more unthinkable to him, killed during its execution.

Morally wrong, operationally wrong, politically wrong. Rollie Thibodeau had correctly pointed out aboard the Pomona that the mere presence of his RDT on foreign soil shredded several chapters of international law. Without question, the course of action on which they were now embarked would trash the rest of the rule book.

But Ricci had come a long way to collar the Wildcat, stalked him with all the resources at his disposal, and he was not going to succeed by knocking on Obeng’s front door and politely asking that his guest step into the waiting arms of justice.

Neither would he do so by shrinking from a calculated risk.

Given the best opportunity for a nab that was liable to present itself, Ricci damn well intended to exploit it. If he screwed up, he was ready to take the heat. And his darling admirer Megan Breen could flash her razzle-dazzle smile as she watched him swing in the wind like a gallows bird.

Ricci dismissed that unpleasant image from his mind.

He’d been twice on the money today, after all.

As expected, the Wildcat’s ride to the police station had been a classic casino shuffle. Soon after arriving there, he left in different clothes than he’d worn out of the hotel — taking a side exit rather than the back door, the only detail not to meet Ricci’s prediction to the letter — and was then chauffeured off in the passenger seat of an unmarked sedan that pulled into the crosstown avenue’s westbound lanes and clanked along seemingly on two cylinders, an authentic touch that allowed it to blend nicely with the crumpled matchboxes driven by the average motorist in this land of plenty.

Thirty minutes later, that car swung into the parking garage at Gang Central.

Ricci and his strike team had been ready and waiting in the swampy, weed-clogged field out back.

Now he crawled toward the building by way of the subterranean overflow channel beneath the hill, his helmet-mounted torch beam lancing sharply into the dimness. Like the men slogging along at his rear, he was clad in a mottled woodland camouflage stealth suit with protective knee and elbow pads and an ultrathin Zylon bullet-resistant lining. Besides the Five-Seven in his side holster, he was toting a compact version of UpLink’s variable velocity rifle system — or VVRS — submachine gun, a second-generation variant that was half the size and weight of the original, that was manufactured with an integrated silencer, and that fired subsonic ammunition. The rotating hand guard, which manually adjusted the earlier model’s barrel pressure from lethal to less-than-lethal, had been replaced by MEMS circuitry that did the job at the fast and easy touch of a button.

A snap-on attachment under the barrel resembled and was technologically related to a laser targeter, though it served a very different function. While Ricci disliked the way the device threw off his weapon’s balance, its use by the entire team was crucial to their objective.

They had brought other equipment from the tac van as well, some of it defensive in nature.

Because he had taken point, Ricci held in his left hand a portable vapor detector that looked oddly similar to the super-eight movie cameras he remembered from distant childhood, and was presently scanning for environmental hazards that ranged from the toxic methane, nitrogen, and sulfurous gases of decaying sewage to chemical and biological weapons agents to the minutest airborne traces of the explosive ingredients of booby traps. In the event its beeper alarm sounded, a backlit LCD readout would specifically identify the threat, with the beep tones increasing in rapidity as the instrument was brought closer to it. Should that threat prove to be chem/bio or the products of organic decomposition, each member of the strike team was ready to convert the carry bag strapped over his shoulder into an air-powered, filtered-breathing system at the pull of a zipper, worn as if it were a masked and hooded vest. Should a bomb be detected, they would hopefully steer clear of its triggering mechanism.

And there was still more equipment, some of it suppressive, referred to as public order weapons by law enforcement personnel with a penchant for cooking up new euphemisms every fifteen seconds.

Call them what you wished, their fundamental purpose was to incapacitate their targets without causing serious injury.

Ricci’s absolute intent, second only to bagging the Wildcat, was that no harm come to the innocent civilian workers in the building. This was foremost out of bounds. But he was also determined to avoid using deadly force on any of Obeng’s rotten cops, and for that matter against Obeng himself, all of whom held nominal claim to being upstanding members of the population. Even the militiamen would not be permanently damaged, if possible, though Ricci was giving his ops some leeway in dealing with them, as it was unlikely their country’s heads of state, eager to improve relations with America, would raise a commotion over the loss of a few known malcontents whose looting and violent behavior threatened their own government’s stability, and who they were consequently better off living without.

Cramped from kneeling, Ricci led the way through the narrow drainage duct for another ten minutes. Then his torch disclosed its circular mouth a few yards up ahead. He moved forward and saw that it opened out some three or four feet above the bottom of a cementwalled tunnel with room enough for him and the others to stand upright.

He raised a clenched fist to signal a pause, then glanced over his shoulder at Grillo.

“Drop’s maybe a yard,” Ricci told him in a hushed voice. “Everybody be careful. Looks to me like the tunnel’s ankle deep in water. Not much of a flow, but it’s bound to be slippery.”

Grillo nodded and passed the word to Lou Rosander, the man behind him, who in turn relayed it to the next in line.

Ricci inched over to the opening and sprang down.

He landed with a splash. A layer of slime coated the floor under the stagnant water, but he had a good sense of balance and was aided by the corrugated rubber soles of his boots.

The rest of the team hopped from the pipe one at a time, all of them joining him in short order. They immediately formed up in single file.

Ricci looked around. The passage was almost chamberlike measured against the constricted tube from which he’d jumped. Other tunnels of nearly equal width and height branched off from it in various directions.

They had reached a major juncture of the system.

Ricci did not need to consult his underground street plan to know which of the diverging passages to take. He had committed the system layout to memory before proceeding with his mission, just as he’d memorized the location of the drainage pipe’s outflow opening from the high-res GIS data provided by Sword’s satellite mapping unit.

With another crisp hand signal, Ricci turned toward the dark hole of the tunnel entrance to his immediate left and stepped into it, his feet squishing in the muck.

His men followed without hesitation.

“Okay,” Rosander whispered. “I see a single attendant. I don’t think he’s one of Obeng’s goons. Or that he’s gonna be a problem.”

“He in a booth?” Ricci asked.

Rosander kept peering through a thin fiber-optic periscope that he’d coiled upward through the metal drain cover above him. With maybe four feet of clearance between the floor of the sunken garage and the bottom of the sluice in which they were hunched, a six-year-old would have had difficulty standing erect, let alone the ten grown men of Ricci’s team.

“No,” he said. “The guy’s nodding off in a chair against the wall.”

Ricci nodded.

“There anybody else around we have to worry about?” he said.

“Give me a sec.”

Rosander rotated the fiberscope between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand, his other hand making adjustments to the eyepiece barrel to focus its color video image.

“Not a soul,” he said.

“Number of vehicles?”

“I’d say about a dozen, including the rattletrap that brought the Wildcat.”

Ricci nodded again.

He reached into a gear pouch for a breaching charge, peeled the plastic strip from its adhesive backing, and pressed the thin patch of C2 explosive — a compound as powerful as C4, but more stable — against the ceiling surface until it was firmly secured. Then he took the “lipstick” detonator caps out of a separate pouch and inserted them. Before blowing their mouse hole into the sunken garage, his team would back through the runoff duct to keep a safe distance from the blast and falling masonry.

After a moment, Ricci turned to Simmons and handed him the vapor detector.

“I’ll go in first, take down the attendant,” he whispered. “Stay close, and don’t forget the regs.”

“Right.”

Ricci got his radio out of its case on his belt.

While the explosion he was setting off would be small and contained, any explosion was by definition noisy, and therefore would be heard by those in the building unless masked.

Ricci had arranged for something even noisier to do just that.

A few blocks east on the crosstown avenue, two men in the white uniforms of emergency medical responders had been waiting patiently in the cab of a double-parked ambulance.

After receiving Ricci’s cue, the driver cut the radio and turned to his partner.

“We’re on,” he said.

They raced into traffic toward Gang Central, the ambulance’s light bars flashing, its siren cranked to peak volume and howling like a thousand tortured wolves.

Seated across a desk from Obeng in the warlord’s second-floor office, Le Chaut Sauvage heard the ululant wail of the rapidly approaching medical vehicle and tilted his head toward the window.

“Is that one of yours?” he asked, his voice raised over the deafening clamor.

Obeng shook his head no.

“An ambulance,” he said.

The Wildcat gave him a questioning look.

“You’re certain?”

“Yes,” Obeng assured him. He was almost shouting to be heard. “Even here people get sick.”

As he leaped up through the small crater in the garage floor, Ricci didn’t know whether it was the detonating C2 or the eardrum-piercing shrillness of the ambulance siren that shocked the attendant from his dozy position on the chair.

Not that it made a jot of difference to him.

The attendant shot to his feet now, his chair crashing onto its back, his features agape at the sight of men in visored helmets and tactical camo outfits pouring out of a rubbled, dust- and smoke-spewing hole that hadn’t existed a split second before.

Ricci swiftly bound over to him and pressed the squirter of the dimethyl sulfoxide cannister clenched in his gloved fist.

The attendant raised his hands over his face on reflex, but the stream of odorless, colorless DMSO…

A chemical with myriad properties that was originally an incidental by-product of the wood pulping process, used as a commercial solvent for fifty years, a medical organ and tissue preservative for about forty years, and a pain reliever and anti-inflammatory with limited FDA approval for slightly less than thirty years…

A chemical that in the past decade or so had attracted the close attention of nonlethal weapons researchers because of its instant penetration of human skin and its capacity to completely sedate a person on contact and without side effects if administered in sufficient concentration…

The DMSO running down over the attendant’s outthrust palms and fingers made him crumple like one of the foam training dummies Ricci sometimes used in hand-to-hand combat practice.

Ricci caught the attendant in his arms to ease his fall, lowering him gently onto the floor. Then he quickly rose and scanned the garage for ways to reach the building’s aboveground levels.

There was a single elevator about ten yards to the right. Not a chance his men were going to box themselves into that death trap.

His gaze found the door leading to the stairwell to his far left, on the opposite side of the garage.

He turned toward the rest of the men, now standing back-to-back in a loose circle, their individual weapons pointed outward, covering all points of the garage while they peripherally watched for his gestured command.

Ricci was about to wave them toward the stairs when he heard the distinct sound of the elevator kicking in. He glanced in its direction, his eyes fixing on the indicator lights over its door.

It was coming down the shaft from the ground floor.

Coming down fast.

Grillo had likewise turned to face the elevator, his eyes narrowed behind his helmet visor.

He watched its door slide open seconds after its hoisting motor activated, appraised its passengers at a glance.

Don’t forget the regs, he thought, needing no real incentive. The man and woman inside were a couple of honest Injuns if there’d ever been any, probably customers leaving one of the quasi-legit businesses right upstairs.

They took maybe a step out of the car and then froze at the scene that met their eyes, both simultaneously noticing the assault team, the unconscious garage attendant, and the debris-strewn hole in the floor.

Grillo didn’t give them a chance to recover from their initial confusion.

He whipped his hand down to his belt, unholstered his stingball pistol, and pulled the trigger twice.

The mini-flash bangs it discharged hit the floor directly in front of their feet, the fragile rounds shattering like eggshells against the hard cement to produce startlingly loud reports and blindingly bright bursts of light.

The couple staggered dazedly, the woman covering her eyes with both hands, the man tripping backward to sprawl with the upper part of his body inside the elevator and his legs stretched out. Its door tried to close, struck his hip with its foam rubber safety edging, automatically retracted, tried to close again, hit him again, the whole sequence repeating itself over and over as he writhed there on the floor of the garage.

Grillo put the stingball gun away, satisfied with how the weapon had delivered. Poor guy was going to have some bruises to show for his unexpected adventure, but what could you do?

He looked at Ricci.

Ricci completed his interrupted hand signal, waving at the stairwell door.

His team dashed across the garage in its direction.

The men climbed the stairs as one, as trained, a single composite organism armored in synthetic materials, their guns bristling like deadly spines.

A few steps below the first-floor landing they paused for Rosander to peer around the corner with his telescopic search mirror, a low-tech, reliable, simple tool. Ricci’s cardinal rule was in play here: Use the fiber-optic scope when you wanted maximum stealth, but when the actual insertion began, when speed was of the essence, you didn’t want to screw with finicky shit like flexible electronic coils and video apertures.

Nobody in sight, they hustled up onto the landing. Ricci motioned for two of them, Seybold and Beatty, to split off from the others and cover the first floor. This was an organism that could divide and reassemble itself as required.

Up the next flight of stairs, ten now having become eight; Ricci and Rosander were in the lead.

Midway to the second floor, on the next landing, Rosander again stuck the pole around the corner and saw the reflections of three men on the mirror’s convex surface.

He signaled quickly. Two fingers pointed at his eyes: Enemy in sight. Then three fingers in the air, revealing the number of opponents on the way down.

“Militia,” he mouthed soundlessly to Ricci, who was squatted beside him.

Ricci nodded.

His men readied themselves in the short moments available. This time they wouldn’t be facing a bleary-eyed garage worker or a couple petrified with astonishment, literally struck blind on the way back to their car after booking a trip to paradise at the ground-floor travel agency.

They held their guns at the ready.

The militiamen continued downstairs toward the landing.

Ricci’s hand was raised, motionless, slightly above shoulder height: Hold your fire.

It was his show. His and Rosander’s. They could not worry about taking accidental hits from their own teammates behind them.

The militiamen were carrying assault rifles, Russian AKs. One of them glimpsed the assault team below.

His gun muzzle came up as he grunted out a warning to his companions.

Ricci squeezed the trigger of his baby VVRS, its electronic touch control set for maximum blowback. Lethal as lethal could be. And quiet.

The militiaman fell to the landing, spots of crimson on his chest. Then a quick burst of gunfire from above, bullets swarming down the stairwell.

The still body of the guy he’d hit pressing against his shins, weighty against his shins, Ricci stayed put and swung his weapon toward the remaining two. The mirror in one hand, Rosander had lifted his gun with the other and was already spraying them with ammunition. A second man collapsed, rolled downward, olive fatigues stained red. The third kept standing, got off some more counterfire, and Ricci heard a grunt from Rosander as the pole of his inspection mirror flew from his fingers and went clattering against the metal risers below.

Edging back against the handrail, out of the shooter’s direct line of fire, Ricci triggered his gun again, aiming for the legs, and when he saw the legs give out, finished the militiaman with a sustained burst to the chest.

Silence. A pale gray haze of smoke.

Ricci looked around at Rosander.

The visor of his helmet was splashed red. Dripping red where he’d been hit. Ricci could not see his face through it.

He glanced at the others behind him, shook his head. They couldn’t linger here in the enclosed stairwell. They had to keep moving. The exchange of gunfire had been brief and probably wouldn’t have been heard too far beyond the concrete walls of the fire stairs. But it might have drawn the attention of someone nearby.

Keeping his eye on the mission, Ricci ordered his unit to resume its hurried advance.

As they passed over the bodies lying across the stairs, Grillo snatched the search mirror from where it had dropped.

They would need it later on.

The strike team pushed through the door to the second-floor hallway, each of its members familiar with the floor plan, knowing the exact location of Obeng’s office at the rear of the building.

The thing none of them knew was what sort of obstacles to expect along the way.

The corridor was empty as far as they could see. Closed office doors on either side. Then, perhaps ten yards up, an elbow bend. They would need to turn it, head down another short, straight length of hallway, round another corner. And then they’d be there.

Easily said.

They ran forward, guns at hip level, eyes sweeping the sides of the hall.

Ricci saw a door open a little. Third ahead on the right. He signaled a halt, pointed to it. His men fanned out, sticking close to the walls for cover.

Watching.

Waiting with their guns angled toward the door.

The crack widened, widened, and then a muzzle poked through.

The wait extended. An eternity of seconds. More of the weapon appeared. A semiautomatic pistol. Its barrel slipped tentatively outward into the hall.

That kind of firearm, that kind of cautiousness, Ricci was betting they were dealing with a cop here.

He looked into the eye peering out at him through the crack.

“Toss it!” he said.

The hand ceased to move but held onto the pistol.

Ricci kept looking into that eye. The man behind the door could see how his team was equipped, the serious ordnance they were carrying. Maybe he’d have the brainpower to realize he was outclassed.

“We’re not interested in you. Or any other officers with you,” Ricci said. “Lose that gun, come out with your hands up, you’ll be fine.”

There was another hanging pause.

Ricci couldn’t afford to delay any longer with this small fry.

“Last chance,” he said. “Give it up.”

The opening between the door and its frame widened.

Ricci lifted his weapon, prepared to fire.

The pistol dropped from the man’s hand onto the corridor floor. Then he stepped out of the office, arms raised above his head.

A uniform, sure enough.

Ricci moved forward, kicked the relinquished gun aside, then grabbed the cop by his shoulder and pushed him face against the wall for a frisk.

He patted him down hurriedly, found a revolver in an ankle holster, and handed it back to one of his men, a young recruit named Newton. The cop wasn’t packing anything else.

Ricci hauled his captive away from the wall and stayed behind him, his gun pressed into the base of his spine, his free arm locked around his throat. Using him for cover in case anyone in the office decided to do something stupid.

At his nod, Grillo and Simmons moved to either side of the half-open door, flanking it, their weapons steady in their hands.

Ricci slammed it the rest of the way open with his booted foot.

The office was nearly bare. A couple of chairs, a metal desk with a push-button telephone on it, a trash can beside the desk.

Two more uniforms were inside, both with their hands high in the air.

Ricci glanced at Newton.

“Dump whatever weapons they’ve got in there,” he said, indicating the trash can with a jerk of his chin. “The phone, too. Then pull the can out into the hallway.”

Newton did as he was ordered.

Ricci thought a moment, then shifted his eyes back to the now-empty phone socket on the wall. He still had the first cop in a choke hold.

“You already ring your boss to tell him we’re here?” he said into his ear.

The cop didn’t respond.

“I can hit the redial button, see who answers, find out what I need to know myself,” Ricci said. “Be better for everybody if you save me the time.”

The cop still didn’t answer.

Ricci pushed the snout of his gun deeper into his back.

“I mean it,” he said.

The cop hesitated another second, then finally nodded his head.

Thirty seconds later, Ricci and Newton had backed into the corridor, leaving the disarmed cops in the office.

“Stay put for half an hour, then you’re free to leave,” he said from the doorway. “You get the urge to do something different, you might want to keep in mind we don’t mean your boss any harm. And that no outsider’s worth getting killed over.”

He pushed the door shut, turned to his men.

“Obeng and his guest of honor know about us,” he said. “But we’re between them and the elevators and stairs, the only routes out of the building unless they want to start jumping out windows, and it’s a long drop down the hill from Obeng’s office. So they either go through us or they’re stuck where they are.”

He looked from one man to the other. Their eyes were upon him.

“Cornered animals fight hard,” he said. “Capice?”

Nods all around.

Ricci inhaled.

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s move.”

They continued up the hall toward Obeng’s roost.

At the final bend in the corridor, Grillo held out the search mirror’s curved pole, glanced into it for barely a second, pulled it back, and turned to the others behind him.

“Four of Obeng’s goons, headed straight toward us with AKs,” he whispered to Ricci. “Not a dozen feet away in the middle of the corridor.”

“Take them out,” Ricci said. “I want it done yesterday.”

The strike team launched around the corner in a controlled rush, firing short, accurate bursts with their guns.

Two of the militiamen dropped before they could return fire, their weapons flying out of their hands like hurled batons. The remaining pair split up, one breaking to the left, the other to the right.

Ricci heard the whiffle of subsonic ammo from a baby VVRS, saw the man on the left fall to the floor, arms and legs wishboned.

One to go.

The militiaman who’d run to the opposite side of the corridor was bent low against a closed door, practically flattened against it, seeking a modicum of cover in the shallow recess as he poured wild volleys into the hallway.

Ricci hugged the wall, aimed, fired his weapon, unable to get a clean shot at his target. His sabot rounds whanged against the door frame, missing the gunnie, but causing him to duck back and momentarily lay off the trigger.

Ricci knelt against the wall. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Grillo and the others take advantage of the distraction and dash up the hall toward Obeng’s office.

He held his weapon absolutely still. Let the gunnie lean out of that space one inch. Just a single goddamned inch…

Up ahead, Simmons was sweeping the entrance to Obeng’s office with the ionic vapor detector, checking for explosives that might be rigged to a tripwire or similar gimmick. Good. The rest were in their entry-preparation positions. Grillo and the newbie Harpswell on one side of the door. On the opposite side, another green recruit named Nichols held the rammer, while the more experienced hands, Barnes and Newton, stood behind him.

Suddenly, movement from where the militiaman was huddled. His back still pressed to the door, he lifted his hands. The tip of his AK tilting outward. His knees unfolding slightly.

Ricci inhaled through gritted teeth.

This was going to be it.

As the gunnie scuttled into the hall, his weapon spitting bullets, Ricci caught him with a single shot to the center of the chest. He went down hard, his green fatigue shirt turning brilliant red.

Ricci pushed from the wall, racing around the fallen bodies in the corridor to join his team. He could see Simmons complete his scan, move himself out of the doorway—

His eyes widened. Nichols had suddenly moved toward the door with the rammer, was swinging it back for momentum, about to drive it against the jamb, unaware of Barnes reaching out to stop him.

“Hold it!” Ricci shouted. “Fucking hold it!”

He could see Nichols try to check himself, but the warning registered an instant too late. His entire upper body was already into the forward swing.

The rammer hit the door and it flew inward with a crash, and that was when the attack dogs came lunging out. Pit bulls, five of them, silent and vicious, their voice boxes surgically removed. Called hush puppies by the SWAT personnel Ricci had known in his police years, too often encountered in crack-house raids, they were usually maddened from drugs, torture, and starvation, reduced to a core of frenzied, bestial aggression by their keepers.

Their muscles humped and rippling under their pelts, jaws snapping, lips peeled away from their carnivorous white fangs, they sprang into the corridor and were on his men in a heartbeat—

“Stop!” A voice from Obeng’s office. “Sit!”

The pit bulls stopped in their tracks and got onto their haunches, immediately heeding the firm command.

“That’s it, that’s it, nice doggies,” the voice said. This time coming from just inside the doorway.

A hand reached from the entrance, rows of shiny gold and silver bracelets clattering around the wrist. Then an arm in a colorful, hand-beaded shirtsleeve.

The man who stepped into the corridor a moment later had performed his role to the hilt, even dressing the part of a warlord.

He bent over the dog nearest the door, scratched behind its ear, then reached into his trouser pocket for some biscuits and began passing them out to the obedient animals.

They crunched them happily, tails wagging, crumbs flying from their jowls.

“Hate to be the one to say this,” he told Ricci, looking up at him. “But—”

The Sword op who’d been the Wildcat for the week-long training exercise strode from the office to finish the sentence for him.

“But your guys just got their balls chewed off,” he said. “And probably some other chunks of their anatomy, too.”

Expelling a long breath, Ricci turned from the office door in disgust. Down the hall, the militiaman he’d nailed with his practice round rose from the floor and pulled his dye-soaked shirt away from his chest.

“Shit’s sticky,” he muttered. “And cold.”

Ricci glared over at Nichols.

In that kid’s case, getting his balls chewed off was exactly what he could look forward to.

No playacting.