Hellbent

72 Thin the Herd

The freelancers came in first, and they came by foot. The five men wound their way toward the valley in a tightening spiral, a snake coiling.

Former Secret Service agents, they brought the tools of the trade designed to protect the most important human on earth. Electronic noses for hazardous chemicals and biologicals, bomb-detection devices, thermal-imaging handhelds. Though it wasn’t yet dusk, they had infrared goggles around their necks, ready for nightfall. After safing the surrounding blocks, they meticulously combed through every square foot of the valley, communicating with radio earpieces, ensuring that anything within view of the construction site below was clear.

Each man wore a Raytheon Boomerang Warrior on his shoulder, an electronic sniper-detection system. Developed for Iraq, it could pinpoint the position of any enemy shooter within sight lines up to three thousand feet away.

Two of the freelancers rolled out, hiking back up the slope, giving a final check, and disappearing from view.

Ten minutes passed.

And then two Chevy Tahoes with tinted windows, steel-plate-reinforced doors, and laminated bullet-resistant glass coasted down the slope. They parked at the base of the construction building in front of the porta-potties.

Van Sciver got out, swollen with body armor, and stood behind the shield of the door. Candy and Thornhill strayed a bit farther, the freelancers holding a loose perimeter around them, facing outward. The operators now held FN SCAR 17S spec-ops rifles, scopes riding the hard-chromed bores. Menacing guns, they looked like they had an appetite of their own.

Van Sciver cast his gaze around. “Well,” he said. “We’re here.”

Thornhill scanned the rim of the valley. “Think he’ll show?”

Van Sciver’s damaged right eye watered in the faint breeze. He wristed a tear off the edge of his lid. “He called the meet.”

“Then where is he?” one of the freelancers asked.

“The GPS signal from the microchips is long gone,” Thornhill said. “It’s up to our own selves.”

The faint noise of a car engine rose above the muted hum of freeway traffic behind the concrete wall. The freelancers oriented to the street above.

The noise of the motor grew louder.

The men raised their weapons.

A white Lincoln Town Car plowed over the brim of the valley, plummeting down the slope at them. Already the men were firing, riddling the windshield and hood with bullets.

The Town Car bumped over the irregular terrain, slowing but still pulled by gravity. The men shot out the tires, aerated the engine block.

The car slowed, slowed, glancing off a backhoe and nodding to a stop twenty yards away.

Two of the freelancers raced forward, lasering rounds through the shattered maw of the windshield.

The first checked the car’s interior cautiously over the top of his weapon. “Clear. No bodies.”

The other wanded down the vehicle. “No explosives either. It’s a test.”

Twenty yards back, still protected by their respective armor-plated doors, Van Sciver and Candy had already spun around to assess less predictable angles of attack that the diversion had been designed to open up.

Van Sciver’s gaze snagged on the side of the under-construction building, the platform lift waiting by the top floor. “He’s there,” he said.

“We would’ve picked up thermal, sir,” the freelancer said.

Van Sciver pointed at the mounted platform’s lift control. Thornhill jogged over to the base of the building, keeping his eyes above, and clicked to lower the lift.

Nothing happened.

The bottom control mechanism had been sabotaged.

All five freelancers raised their SCARs in concert, covering the building’s fifth floor.

Van Sciver said, “Get me sat imagery.”

Keeping his rifle pointed up, one of the freelancers shuffled over and passed a handheld to Van Sciver, who remained wedged behind the armored door of the Tahoe. Van Sciver zoomed in on the bird’s-eye footage of the building, waiting for the clarity to resolve.

Stiff, canvaslike fabric was heaped a few feet from the open edge of the fifth floor.

“He’s hiding beneath a Faraday-cage cloak,” Van Sciver said. “The metallized fabric blocked your thermal imaging. It’s not distinct enough to red-flag on the satellite footage unless you know to look for it.”

“He’s holding high ground,” Candy observed. “And we’ve got no good vantage point.”

Van Sciver stared at the concrete wall framing the 10 Freeway. Posting up on the fifth floor was a smart move on X’s part. The open top level was in full view of the freeway and the buildings across from it. They couldn’t come at him with force or numbers without inviting four hundred eyewitnesses every second to the party.

“What’s he waiting for?” one of the freelancers asked through clenched teeth.

“For me to step clear of the armored vehicle and give him an angle,” Van Sciver said. “But I’m not gonna do that.”

With a gloved hand, the freelancer swiped sweat from his brow. “So what are we gonna do? We can’t get up there.”

Van Sciver’s lopsided stare locked on Thornhill. An understanding passed between them. Thornhill’s smile lit up his face.

Van Sciver said, “Fetch.”

Thornhill snugged his radio earpiece firmly into place. Then he sprinted forward, leaping from a wheelbarrow onto the roof of a porta-potty. Then he hurtled through the air, clamping onto the exposed ledge of the second floor. The freelancers watched in awe as he scurried up the face of the building, frog-leaping from an exposed window frame to a four-by-four to a concrete ledge. He used a stubbed-out piece of rebar on the third floor as a gymnast high bar, rotating to fly onto a vertical I-beam holding up the fourth story.

Mere feet from the edge of the fifth floor, he paused on his new perch, shoulder muscles bunched, legs bent, braced for a lunge. He turned to take in the others below, giving them a moment to drink in the glory of what he’d just done.

Then he refocused. His body pulsed as he slide-jumped up the I-beam’s length. He gripped the cap plate with both hands and readied for the final leap that would bring him across the lip to the top of the building.

But the cap plate moved with him.

It jerked free of the I-beam and hammered back against his chest, striking the muscle with a thud.

One of the high-strength carriage bolts designed to secure the cap plate to the I-beam’s flange sailed past his cheek.

The other three bolts rattled in their boreholes, unsecured.

He clasped the cap plate to his chest, a weightless instant.

His eyes were level with the poured slab of the fifth floor, and he saw the puddle of the Faraday cloak there almost within reach.

The cloak’s edge was lipped up, a face peering out from the makeshift burrow.

Not X’s.

But the girl’s.

She raised a hand, wiggled the fingers in a little wave.

“It’s the girl,” Thornhill said. His voice, hushed with disbelief, carried through his radio earpiece.

He floated there an instant, clutching the cap plate.

And then he fell with it.

Five stories whipped by, a whirligig view of construction gear, Matchbox cars drifting through fourteen lanes of traffic beyond the concrete wall, his compatriots staring up with horrified expressions.

He went through the roof of the porta-potty. As he vanished, one sturdy fiberglass wall sheared off his left leg at the hip, painting the dirt with arterial spray.

A moment of stunned silence.

Van Sciver tried to swallow, but his throat clutched up. One of his finest tools, a weaponized extension of himself as the director of the Orphan Program, had just been splattered all over an outdoor shitter.

Candy moved first, diving into the Tahoe. Van Sciver’s muscle memory snapped him back into focus. Raising his FNX-45, he set his elbows in the fork of the armored door and aimed upslope. He said, “It’s another decoy.”

The freelancers spread out, aiming in various directions — up the partially constructed building, across the valley, at the freeway wall.

The lead man squeezed off a few shots, nicking the edge of the fifth floor to hold Joey at bay.

The wind reached a howl in the bare beams of the structure.

“Fuck,” Van Sciver said. “Where is…?”

Twenty yards away the trunk of the white Lincoln Town Car popped open and Evan burst up in a kneeling stance, a Faraday cloak sloughing off his shoulders.

He shot two freelancers through the heads before they could orient to the movement. The third managed to and took a round through the mouth.

The remaining pair of freelancers wheeled on Evan, their rifles biting coaster-size chunks of metal from the Town Car’s grille. Evan spilled onto the dirt behind the Town Car and flattened to the ground. The big-block engine of the old Lincoln protected him, at least as well as it had on the car’s descent into the valley, but time was not on his side.

The reports were deafening.

He clicked his bone phone on. “Joey, jump now and get gone.”

She’d played bait one last time. Her only job now was to vanish.

Evan had set her up with the camouflage backpack he kept hidden in the planter on his balcony. The pack was stuffed with a base-jumping parachute. A running leap off the backside of the fifth-floor platform would allow her to steer across the immense freeway, land in the confusion of alleys and buildings across from it, and disappear.

Evan risked a peek around the rear fender. He spotted Candy rolling out of the Tahoe’s backseat with a shotgun an instant before one of Van Sciver’s bullets shattered out the brake light inches from his face. He whipped back, felt the Town Car shuddering, absorbing round after round as the freelancers advanced.

He spoke again into the bone phone. “Tommy, you’re up.”

Flattening against the car, he rested the back of his head to the metal, pinned down to a space the width of a rear bumper.

Tommy emerged from the umbra beside Benito Orellana’s chimney and bellied to the edge of the roof where his two Hardigg cases waited, lids raised. The first held optical-sighting technology, and a half-dozen eightball cameras nestled in the foam lining.

He had no direct sight line onto the valley or the construction site below.

He plucked free the first eightball and hurled it across the street. It bounced once, disappearing over the lip and rolling downslope, its 360-degree panorama replicated on the laptop screen. The round camera landed behind a backhoe, providing him a view of the dirt slope beyond, the clear blue sky, and nothing else.

He threw the second and third eightball cameras in rapid succession. The second landed in a ditch, but the third stopped three-fourths of the way down the slope, providing a lovely perspective on the mayhem unfolding at the construction site below. Two freelancers stood in the open, but Van Sciver and Candy were wisely tucked away, using the armored SUVs for cover.

That was okay. Tommy could still thin the herd for Evan.

In front of the second Hardigg case, an assembled Barrett M107 awaited him. He’d chosen the self-loader for rapidity — once this shit went down, the boys below would be scrambling every which way, all asses and elbows.

Firming the .50-cal into position, he lay at the roof’s edge. He would have preferred a spotter, but given the sensitive nature of the mission and Evan’s wishes, no one else could be in the loop. It would be a helluva challenge to crank off two shots in rapid succession, especially since he had to steer the first one in. Microelectronics distorted the shape of the round after it left the barrel, changing its line of flight. As good as Tommy was and as state-of-the-art the technology, there was only so much guidance you could lay on a projo hurtling along at 2,850 feet a second. He checked the optics screen, using the eightball’s feed to index locations for landmarks.

Then he set his eye to the scope and prepared to bend a bullet in midair.

Evan read the freelancers’ shadows. That was all he could do. Braced against the rear bumper of the Town Car, he watched them stretch alongside him, upraised rifles clearly silhouetted. If he rolled to either side, he presented himself not just to them but to Van Sciver and Candy, who were posted up in the SUVs twenty yards beyond.

“We got you pinned behind the car and the little girl stuck up on the roof!” Van Sciver shouted. “Even if she has a rifle, she can’t cover you, not from there. I’ve seen her shoot.”

Tommy still hadn’t announced himself. The technology was fledgling; Evan had always known that any help would be a literal and figurative long shot.

Cast forward, the shadows on the earth inched past his position crammed behind the Town Car. They advanced in unison. Any second now Evan would have to make the choice to move one way or the other.

He decided to expose his right side. He could shoot with either hand but was stronger with his left, so if an arm went down, better the right one.

If he was lucky enough to merely take a round to the limb.

He sucked in a breath, tensed his legs, counted down.

Three… two…

The whine of a projectile was followed by a snap on the wind. The shadow to Evan’s right crumpled, a body falling just out of sight by the side of the Town Car. A bright spill oozed into view by Evan’s boots, staining the dirt.

Twenty-four down.

One left.

The last freelancer pulled back. “Holy shit. How the fuck…?”

Evan popped up to drop him, but Candy was waiting by the other Tahoe. She unleashed the shotgun, and Evan dropped an instant before the scattershot hit the trunk. The trunk slammed down, nearly sawing off his chin, and banged back up. The edge clipped his shooting hand, the ARES flying out of reach, landing ten yards in the open.

Slumped low at the rear fender, he panted in the dirt.

The bullet holes in the raised trunk cut circles of light in the shadow thrown on the ground behind Evan. He rose to reach for a backup pistol in the trunk, but Candy fired again, the slugs tearing through the metal, whistling past his torso. The trunk slammed down, banging his forearm. Evan hit the ground again, dust puffing into his mouth.

The freelancer was crawling away; Evan could see him for an instant beneath the carriage of the Town Car. Another of Tommy’s rounds whined in and bit a divot from the dirt four inches from the freelancer’s pinkie finger.

The man bellowed and rolled away, grabbing at the screen of the Boomerang Warrior unit mounted on his shoulder. A third round clipped the butt of the man’s slung rifle, kicking it into a hula-hoop spin around his shoulder.

He dove behind a heap of gravel next to the tower crane, shouting, “How the hell does he see me? I’m showing nothing in our line of sight!”

Van Sciver’s calm, deep voice rode the breeze. “Check for cameras.”

A moment later, “The Boomerang Warrior’s picking up a remote-surveillance unit in the valley with an angle on us.”

Evan debated going again for the backup ARES in the ravaged trunk of the Town Car, but there were enough holes now that the raised metal no longer offered protection; it would be like standing behind a screen door. He got off a glance around the punctured rear tire, catching Van Sciver’s thick arm reaching past the Tahoe’s door to haul in a fallen FN SCAR 17S.

Even without an earpiece, Evan heard Van Sciver say, “Send me the coordinates.”

The simple directive landed on Evan like something physical, the weight of impending defeat.

Twenty seconds passed, an eternity in a battle.

Then the rifle cracked, and Evan saw metal shards jump up from the earth upslope, glinting in the dying sunlight.

Van Sciver’s voice carried, ghostly across the dusty expanse. “We are clear. Candy, haul ass up there and find who’s behind that camera.”

At the Town Car’s rear bumper, Evan heard Tommy’s voice come through the bone phone. “I’m blind.”

“Fall back to the rally point,” Evan said quietly. “Immediately. Do not engage any further.”

Tommy was a world-class sniper, but past his prime. If he went head-to-head with Candy, an Orphan at the top of her game, she would kill him.

Evan heard one of the Tahoes screech away. It barreled upslope, giving Evan’s position wide berth. He caught a glimpse of Candy’s hair in a side mirror as the SUV bounced across the razed lot.

Through the radio Tommy’s voice sounded scratchier than usual. “What about you?”

Evan stared at his ARES 1911 where it had landed in the dirt ten yards away. His backup was out of reach in the trunk behind him. Tommy neutralized. Van Sciver beaded up on the Town Car with his rifle.

“I got you covered,” Van Sciver called to his freelancer. “Make the move.”

A crunch of footsteps signaled the man’s emergence from behind the gravel pile.

Evan realized what Van Sciver’s countermove was, the genius of it turning his insides ice-water cold.

He heard the clang of footsteps on metal rungs. Then the door to the elevated operator’s cabin of the crane hinged open and slammed shut.

Evan was finished.

He still owed Tommy an answer. He set a finger on the bone phone, said, “I’ll be fine.”

“You’re clear?” Tommy asked.

Evan swallowed. “I’m clear.”

“Falling back,” Tommy said. “Call me for extraction?”

The Tahoe creaked as Van Sciver posted up and slotted a fresh twenty-round mag into the big rifle.

“Sure thing,” Evan said. His mouth was dry. “And, Tommy?”

“What, pal?”

“Thanks for everything.”