One. He breathed deeply, tasting the river in his throat.
Two.
Three. The dog clawed at the chain-link fence, pushing back against it and barking.
Four. He drew the slide back then eased it forward, chambering the bullet. He let out the breath he had been holding.
Frost didn’t make it as far as five.
The night watchman’s voice carried to him easily. “You’re getting old, stupid bloody dog. There’s nothing out here but the ghosts of dead shipwrights. Come here.” Frost risked the briefest of glances around the edge of the pillar. The man was on his knees and had the Doberman by the scruff of the neck. He appeared to be playing with the animal. It always surprised him the way men bonded with the animals they used, ascribing all of these human qualities like understanding and aging minds to dumb animals. He watched the pair for a few more seconds, then the man clipped the leash back in place and dragged the huge dog toward the front gates.
Frost released the Browning’s slide and holstered the gun at the small of his back.
He waited for them to disappear from sight then spoke in a hushed whisper, “Good job, Jude.”
“Thought it’d make your day, boss,” Lethe said in his ear.
“I’m always happier chasing the money than I am worrying about some holy bloody relic. Fanatics give me the creeps, but money I understand. Greed I understand. These things make sense to me. So we can link Devere to every city that’s been threatened, and back to Caspi. I think we’ve found our man in the middle, so someone needs to pay our Mister Devere a visit.”
“One step ahead of you, boss. Devere chartered a private jet to Winningen airport, Koblenz, yesterday. He cleared customs eighteen hours ago.”
“Germany,” Frost mused, thinking about it for a minute. “Konstantin’s still in Berlin, right? Get him to take a detour. See if he can’t lean Devere. Find out what he knows.”
“I’m on it. What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to find out what the hell’s going on on the other side of this fence. If I don’t check in within the hour, send in reinforcements.”
“Erm, boss, you do know we don’t have any reinforcements, right?” Lethe said.
“I know that, kiddo. It’s an expression, that’s all. It basically means if you don’t hear from me, start to worry.”
“Well that I can do,” Jude Lethe said with a nervous little laugh.
Frost killed the connection. He needed to concentrate, and Lethe babbling in his ear wasn’t exactly conducive to focus. He walked over to the chain-link fence. A coil of barbed wire topped it. These guys were pretty serious about keeping people out, which made Frost all the more eager to find a way inside.
He took off his leather bike jacket and threw it up, still holding onto the cuff of one sleeve, so that it fell over the wire. He took off his silver-gray suit jacket and lay it on the ground. Frost was no fool; there was nothing to identify him in either set of pockets. If he needed to run, the most they’d learn about their intruder was that he had impeccable taste and wasn’t afraid to spend money to look good.
Stepping back, he rocked on his heels, then took a short run up of four steps and launched himself at the fence. He grasped the top, the leather jacket saving his hands from being shredded by the teeth of the barbed wire, and boosted himself up over the fence. It wobbled violently beneath him as his weight shifted. He dropped down on the other side and crouched, listening. Mercifully, the dog didn’t bark.
Frost pushed himself up from the ground and started to run, hard, and kept low. He kept his eyes straight ahead, focusing on the warehouse. His stride ate up the ground. His feet scuffed across the hardstand. There was nothing he could do about the noise. Inside fifty feet he was breathing hard. The windows all along the ground floor were either boarded up or barred. He couldn’t see any doors. He forced himself to run faster, barely slowing before he hit the wall. He turned so that his back was pressed up against it and began to edge around the building, looking for a way in.
The moon was a silver slice above the rooftops of the city on the far side of the river. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. Somewhere in the distance a tin horn sounded its lonesome mating call. Frost jogged around the side of the warehouse. The skeletal limbs of scrub bushes swayed gently in the breeze. The first entrance he found was large enough for two trucks to drive in side-by-side. It was covered by roll-down doors. Like the main gate, it was secured by a thick padlock. He rattled the doors but the padlock didn’t budge, so he carried on around the side, looking for a more conventional door.
As he neared the far corner a flicker of movement caught his eye.
Frost dropped into a tight crouch, instinctively reaching around for the Browning.
It wasn’t that kind of movement, he realized a moment later. Something had flickered in his peripheral vision. He studied the boarded-up window just above him and found an inch-wide crack in the wooden planks. The faintest of lights danced erratically through the small crack. It took him another moment to realize that the reason the light was so erratic was because of the draft. There was no glass in the window. The candle burning on the other side of the boards was down to little more than a stub. In a couple of minutes it would be dead and the room dark. Frost pressed his eye up against the crack.
There were a dozen mattresses in the small room. Frightened people lay huddled up on each one. Most of them were sleeping. He had found the leverage. Whoever was behind the suicide burnings had taken these women and children as insurance to make sure the “suicides” went off according to plan. Frost felt sick to his stomach. This kind of trade in human life was vile, but he was beginning to understand the kind of people they were up against, or more importantly, the limits of the people they were up against.
On the far side of the room he saw a woman holding two young children close to her chest. He couldn’t tell if she was asleep, but he guessed not. Her body was tense; he could see it in the muscles of her arms as they draped protectively over the kids. Another young girl, this one no more than 9 or 10, was looking up at him. He had no idea if she could see him in the dim light. He whispered, “It’s all right, I’m here to help you.” His voice rippled through the sleepers, causing them to stir. A third girl, this one closer to 16, sat up on her mattress. She rubbed at her eyes and seemed to have trouble focusing.
“Who’s there?” she called out. Her voice spiraled on the last syllable, becoming dangerously loud. The young girl pointed toward the window. She had seen him.
“Shhh,” Frost cautioned with his finger to his lips, worried someone would hear her. It was a stupid gesture given that she could only see part of his cheek and his right eye. Others started to look toward the boarded-up window. “I’m going to get you out of here.”
It was as though he’d said the magic word. The older woman stood, coming toward the window with her two children clinging to her legs. “Oh, thank God. Are you with the police?”
“No,” he said, softly. “And not the Army, either,” he cut her off before she could ask too many questions. “But I am here to help you. I need you to do something for me. I need you to tell me how many people are in there with you. How many hostages and how many people are holding you. Can you do that?”
The woman nodded hesitantly. “I don’t know if there are any others-they don’t let us out of this room-but there are sixteen of us in here, four adults, three teenagers. The rest are under ten.”
“All girls?”
The woman swallowed and nodded. “There were boys, but they took them. We heard the gunshots. I think… I think… they executed my son.” She broke down then and started to cry. He gave her a few seconds to gather herself, but he couldn’t wait for her to cry herself out.
“I need you to hold it together, just a little while longer. What’s your name?”
“Annie.”
“All right, Annie, my name’s Ronan. Right now I am your new best friend, and as your new best friend I’m going to make you a p
romise. I am going to get all of you out of there. And I am going to make you a second promise now, just between the two of us, I am going to make them suffer for what they did to your boy. Okay?”
She nodded.
He looked at her through the narrow crack in the wooden boards. “Do you trust me, Annie?”
There was another short hesitation, then she nodded again.
“Good. I trust you as well. Now, try to remember if you can, how many guards have you seen?”
She thought about it for a moment, biting on her lower lip. “Six. Eight. I am not sure.” She wrapped her arms around herself. She was shivering. Frost wished he could reach through the window and hold her. There was nothing more reassuring than human contact, especially in a situation li this. Noah was good at the human stuff, he wasn’t. He had to make do with his voice.
“That’s great, Annie. Good girl. Now I want you to get everyone ready so when I come through that door you’ll all be ready to move. Can you do that for me?”
She nodded again.
“Are you going to kill them?” she asked.
This time it was Frost’s turn to nod.
“Good,” Annie said, emphatically. She looked down. When she looked up again he saw the shock in her eyes. Her need to be strong for her two girls was swimming up against a need to just collapse and mourn her son. She had already decided they were all dead and had been curled up in the corner with her girls, waiting for their killers to open the cell door again and take another one of her children out into the darkness. And then he had arrived, and suddenly she dared to hope. But now she was starting to come apart because of it. When there was nothing, it was easier for her to be strong. Those last hours, however many or few they might have been, were all about staying strong for her girls. Now there was hope and hope meant a life beyond their cell. If she started to believe they might escape, that they might have a life left together, losing it would hurt all the more. She had to trust her life to this stranger on the other side of the wall, and it was all she could do not to crumble. Frost had seen it before. He just prayed she could hold it together long enough for him to get them out.
As far as what happened next, six or eight didn’t matter. Even with the element of surprise the odds were stacked against him. As Orla was wont to say, that only made it more interesting. He double-checked the Browning for a chambered round.
“You’re going to be all right,” he promised her. He needed her to believe that. He needed hope to galvanize her, not paralyze her. “In a few minutes it will all be over.” He pushed away from the window before she could answer him, glanced over his shoulder to be sure the night watchman hadn’t doubled back, and then set off around the corner.
There was another wide, green steel overhead door and beyond that a small door. He crept up to it. He saw a small weather-worn fire exit sign and beneath it, the warning that the door was alarmed. He doubted the alarm was still functional, but given the fact they had a night watchman and a Doberman prowling the grounds, he wasn’t about to take any chances.
He looked around for another way in.
Then he looked up.
An old rusty fire escape stair dangled just out of reach.
He smiled. People were a lot laxer about security on the third, fourth and fifth stories than they were on the ground and first floor. He backed up a couple of steps, then took a running jump. Reaching up, Frost snagged the last rung of the ladder and hauled himself up hand over hand until he got his first foot up on the fire escape. The rusty metal made a god-awful racket as it groaned under his weight. He didn’t have time to worry about it.
He ran up the first set of stairs then along the wire-mesh platform to the second set of steps. He didn’t try the first, second or even third fire door. He went straight for the fifth-floor, not looking down as he ran across the wire platform. The door was locked, but the wood around the lock was so rotten it didn’t take a lot of persuading to open. He bumped his shoulder up against the door, once, twice, straining the woodworm-riddled frame, and on the third bump the frame splintered and the door swung open. It wasn’t quiet. All he could do was pray that it was quiet enough.
Frost stepped inside. The vaulted ceiling of the old warehouse was cathedral-like, panes of frosted glass with iron girders holding the whole thing together. The moonlight streamed in through the glass, casting shadows that stretched to every corner of the wide-open warehouse floor. The crane gib and winches were all still in place, though the mechanisms had almost certainly seized up with two decades of disuse. He wasn’t about to risk swinging down on the dangling chain like some sort of comic book hero.
He took a moment to scout out his immediate surroundings. He was on a gantry that ran all around the top floor of the warehouse. There were maybe half a dozen doors on each side of the building which, he surmised, led to the old offices. All of the windows along the gantry were dark. Down in the center of the concrete floor five stories beneath him, he could see two men sitting on packing crates. They appeared to be sharing a smoke.
The Browning was accurate enough over this kind of distance that they were a comfortable shot, but he had no intention of taking it. The next few minutes were all about silence. He ghosted along the gantry, looking for the stairs down to the next level. He found the stairwell in the far corner, meaning he had to cover the entire length of the warehouse floor. He kept looking down over the side. Neither man looked up.
Frost took the stairs, keeping his shoulder pressed against the wall as he half-ran down the ninety-degree turns of the stairwell. He didn’t go all the way to the bottom. He wanted to know as much about what he was up against as possible, so he crept out onto the second-floor gantry. Like the one much higher up, the gantry ran around the re circumference of the warehouse. He could see down through the floor all the way to the ground. Conversely, that meant anyone who happened to look up would be able to see him. As trades went, it was one he was happy to make. The pair he’d watched from the fifth floor told him all he needed to know about these guys and their operation. They’d been watching their hostages for over a week now without incident. They were complacent.
He moved out along the metal gantry. Two more men came out to join the others at the packing crates. They were big guys. One had a Heckler amp; Koch MP5 slung casually over his shoulder. Frost watched the way the man moved. There was an easy confidence about his posture as he sank down beside the others. He took a packet of cigarettes from his shirt pocket and lit up. Frost waited and watched. He tried to think through the numbers. If Annie had seen eight guards, the odds were they were running two shifts, four and four. He didn’t recognize any of them as the night watchman, which meant there was at least one more out there whose whereabouts was unaccounted for.
There was no way he could take them all at once. He was going to have to pick them off one at a time like the ten green bottles accidently falling. Not so accidentally, he amended silently. These would have bullet holes in the back of their heads. That made falling the only natural thing to do.
The MP5 guy stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette under his boot.
It would be easy to move along the gantry and squeeze off two quick shots, taking out a couple of the guards, then make his way down to the ground. They wouldn’t know what had hit them, and in the panic that followed he’d have time to clear up the loose ends. What he didn’t know was when they changed watches, when the relief would arrive, how many of them there actually were in the old warehouse, and if the sound of the gunshots would carry to the watchman outside. These were variables he couldn’t control. Adding more guns to the mix meant more room for things to go wrong. The situation became harder to control. All he needed was for one of the kidnappers to go through to the room they were using as a cell and start shooting.
His instinct was to dictate the scenario.
That meant striking hard, fast and, if possible, remaining unseen.
He crept along the gantry, conscious that the slightest movement could catch a
kidnapper’s eye at any time. He kept as close to the wall as possible. It took him a full minute to get into position. Frost crouched down. He had a perfect view of the killing ground beneath him. The Browning felt heavy in his hand, hungry. He’d carried the gun for what felt like all of his adult life. He had a parasitical relationship with the thing. It had kept him alive more than once, but sometimes it felt as though it thirsted for blood. This was one of those times. He breathed deeply, forcing the rise and fall of his lungs to stay steady.
Frost raised the Browning, drawing a bead on the man with the MP5. The kidnapper turned away from him, as though challenging him to put the bullet in the back of his head. Frost didn’t care about cowardice or seeing the whites of his victim’s eyes. That was Hollywood bullshit. A dead goon was a dead goon. It didn’t matter how he got there. He wouldn’t score points in goon heaven for taking the bullet face first. Honor was for the Samurai. It had no place in saving the lives of these women and children.
He kept the gun steady, breathing in, breathing out. He wanted to time the shots with the exhale for accuracy.
Beneath him, the kidnapper threw up his arms and spun on his heel. The MP5 banged off his hip. He looked up, and seemed for a heartbeat to be looking straight at Frost. Frost squeezed down on the trigger, slowly increasing the pressure until it was a hair from firing.
And stopped himself.
At the last moment the gunman looked away, barking something at his compatriots. Frost expected an explosion of gunfire. It never came. Their voices carried, loud in the huge space of the empty warehouse. It took Frost a few seconds to realize what had them so agitated-they were waiting for instructions. They were arguing about whether they should go in there and kill the hostages. Their contact hadn’t called in and they were getting fractious. The joker with the MP5 seemed to be the one with the itchiest trigger finger.
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