by Tom Clancy
“Looks like he hasn’t gotten around to cataloging his latest epics yet,” Nori whispered. She came up behind Nimec, her laser-dazzler against her leg. “Wonder what’s on them.”
“I think that’s something we need to find out,” Barnhart said.
Nimec hastily snatched the tapes off the shelf, put them into his duffel, then ejected the tape that was in the camera and dropped it in with them.
“Come on.” He snapped the panel shut and turned toward the others. “We’d better get out of—”
The sound of an approaching vehicle clipped off the end of the sentence. The three of them exchanged quick, anxious looks. They could hear the sound of tires crunching on fresh snowpack. It was close, very close, maybe right outside the building. Then the engine shivered into silence, doors slammed, and there were voices. Coarse male voices out in the street.
Nimec crossed the room, stood to one side of the window, and peered cautiously around the frame. There were two men downstairs near the club’s main entrance, the dark outlines of at least two more in the car’s front seat. One of the men on the sidewalk wore a brown military-surplus bomber jacket with a fleece collar. The other had on a long tweed overcoat. Both were huge. He recognized them instantly, just as he did the vehicle in which they’d arrived. They were Roma’s thugs, the bunch who had been flanking him when he left the building half an hour earlier.
As Nimec stood watching them, the pair that had gotten out of the car turned toward the entrance, then strode under the awning and were blocked from sight.
Nimec snapped his head around to Barnhart and Nori.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“Hey, come here,” the man in the Air Force bomber jacket said.
“What is it, Vasily?”
“Just come over here and take a fucking look, will you?”
The man in the gray overcoat stamped snow off his shoes and then trudged heavily up beside him.
Vasily had paused inside the entrance and was facing the wall, scrutinizing the status window on the security system’s master control box. The alarm was set on a thirty-second entry delay, so that anyone with the deactivation code would have enough time to punch it into the keypad—and turn off the system—after passing through the door. He’d been about to do exactly that when he noticed the reading on the LCD.
The second man looked at the backlit display. Its pale blue digital characters said:
CODE29: SYSTEM FAILURE
Vasily glanced at him. “I don’t get it.” “Could be it’s the storm. Wind might’ve knocked out the power awhile. Or the phone lines.”
“I dunno, Pavel.” Vasily was shaking his head. “You want to check out the back door?”
Pavel was still for a second, his broad brow crunched in thought, balancing the minor hassle of having to walk out back against what his boss would do if it turned out that something really was wrong, and he and Vasily didn’t go investigate.
“Yeah,” he said, drawing a pistol from under his coat. “Better we don’t take chances.”
In Roma’s office, Nimec, Barnhart, and Nori heard the two bodyguards speak agitatedly to each other as they discovered the unlocked back door. Instants later they heard them racing up the stairs, saw lights blink on in the outer corridor, heard more rapid footsteps.
They were hustling toward the office.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Then extended silence.
The silence pressed.
The doorknob rattled, turned.
Nimec touched Nori’s arm above the elbow and he saw her glide into position, a dark silhouette against the deeper darkness of the room.
The door flung open, both thugs framed inside it, Uzi carbines held out in front of them.
Nori fingered a button on the control box of her laser and a blinding beam of high-intensity light streaked from the M203’s muzzle, hitting Vasily full in the face. He released a high-pitched, whooping scream, the subgun seeming to leap from his grip, hands clawing at his eyes. Nori held the weapon on him another second, its laser beam pulsing in the air like a bright white strip of the sun. He went jigging back into the hallway, slammed into Pavel’s shoulder, then went reeling into the corridor, his contortions throwing a delirious crop of shadows across the walls.
“My eyes!” he shrieked, sinking to his knees. His hands stayed over his face. “God, God, my fucking eyes!”
Ignoring him, Pavel threw himself back against the door wall, reached around the jamb with the Uzi, squeezed out a burst. Rounds crackled from the snubby barrel. Nori sprang out of the way as the deadly stream of 9mm bullets came rippling into the office, shattering the window, blasting chunks out of the walls, punching holes into the side of Roma’s desk, knocking over his chair amid flying wads of its chewed-up cushions. Spent casings swirled around the Uzi in a glittery blizzard.
Launching himself out of the darkness, Barnhart swung the Benelli toward the door, a flash-bang round already jacked into its chamber, and fired. There was a loud whump in the corridor, a sudden flare of brilliance, a swirling bubble of smoke. Pavel’s gun stopped chattering and withdrew from the entry. Almost simultaneously Nori took her finger off the laser control, hooked it around the trigger of the modified M16, and unleashed a sustained burst of VVRS sabots, laying a band of covering fire for her teammates.
“Now!” Nimec shouted.
The three of them plunged out of the office, Nori’s gun spewing a torrent of non-lethal rounds. When they reached the corridor, she pivoted to the right, spotted Pavel crouching near the door with the Uzi in both hands, and aimed for his chest. He flopped back in a graceless heap, his finger spasmodically squeezing the trigger of his carbine, the weapon discharging rounds in a crazy upturned fountain.
Gobs of plaster rained from the ceiling. Ricochets whined through the corridor in wild trajectories.
“Ah, shit!” Barnhart said through gritted teeth behind Nori.
She jerked her head around, saw him clutching his side, his face a twist of pain, blood slicking his fingers. A dark wet stain was already spreading over his coveralls. He started to wobble forward, his legs folding beneath him, but Nimec rushed over and got an arm around him an instant before he would have fallen to the floor.
The thug’s gun, meanwhile, continued to jolt and rattle. Nori whipped her head back around, leveled her rifle downward, and hit him dead-center in the chest with another gust of fire. A scream ripped from his throat and he thrashed on the floor as though suffused with voltage. After a moment he passed out, the Uzi dropping from his fingers with a metallic clatter.
“How bad is it?” Nimec said, helping Barnhart to his feet. He nodded his chin at the blood-saturated middle of his coveralls.
“Don’t know exactly.” Barnhart winced. “Hurts like all hell, though.”
Nimec regarded him steadily, his lips clamped together.
“We’ll try and get out of here the way we came in,” he said after a moment. “With any luck the rest of those guys will still be out front.”
Barnhart shook his head vehemently. “I’m not sure I can make the stairs. Head on down without me ... I can hold my own if any more come up here ... I’ll use that mope’s Uzi—”
“Do us a favor, Tony, okay?”
Barnhart looked at him.
“Shut up and cooperate,” Nimec said.
Barnhart shook his head again, but this time didn’t voice any protest.
Noriko hustled over to Barnhart’s left side, lifted his arm, and slung it around her shoulders. At the same time, Nimec continued bracing him on the right. He had drawn his Beretta from its holster with his left hand.
He swapped glances with Noriko, then nodded.
Half-carrying Barnhart between them, they started toward the entrance to the stairwell.
They had no sooner reached the steps than a third thug appeared on the landing below. He had a Glock nine in both hands and was raising it in a shooter’s stance.
His eyes slitted with
concentration, Nimec got off two shots with his own pistol before the bodyguard managed to fire a single round. The first caught him in the right kneecap, the second in the left. He crumpled to the base of the stairs and rolled around there in spastic agony, howling at the top of his lungs.
“Shut him up,” Barnhart rasped. He unclipped a DMSO canister from his utility harness, passed it to Noriko. She noticed that its tubular surface was slick with blood, but said nothing.
Slipping out from under Barnhart’s arm, she sprinted down the stairs, held the canister over the screaming man’s pain-knotted face, and depressed the nozzle. A fine, nearly invisible mist hissed out of it. The thug raised his hands in front of his face in a warding-off gesture, his eyes wide, white, and bulging. Then his arms dropped like deflated balloons and his features went slack and he fell off into sedated unconsciousness.
Nori turned back toward her companions. They had almost reached the bottom landing, Nimec gripping the rail with one hand, supporting Barnhart with the other. Barnhart’s face was blanched of color and she could see a greasy patina of sweat on his cheeks. He was biting his lower lip, gasping a little with each descending step.
She hurried over to help him the rest of the way down, got his arm back around her neck. Together the three of them pressed through the rear door to the alley.
Cold air and snow blasted them the moment they got outside. Thunder was still skipping across the sky. They moved awkwardly toward the mouth of the alleyway, Barnhart stagger-stepping forward, a tortured grimace on his face, blood dripping from his midsection to the snow.
A fourth bodyguard appeared in the alley entrance, directly in front of them, sweeping an outthrust carbine back and forth like a divining rod. Slugs churned from the gun and whapped into the snowpack at their feet, kicking up powdery spurts of whiteness. Nimec hauled Barnhart sideways out of the line of fire, then jostled him against the diamond-mesh fence dividing the alley from the adjacent property. More rounds shivered from the bodyguard’s weapon, pecking at the brick outer wall of the building, striking a shower of sparks off a fire escape somewhere overhead.
Nimec extended his gun toward their attacker, triggered two rounds. But he was off balance, unable to take decent aim, and they went sheering ineffectually into the darkness.
The killer prepared to fire again. He seemed to have realized that one of his prey was wounded and swung his gun in their direction with a kind of slow, deliberate confidence, like someone about to take out a crippled fowl.
Nimec huddled against the fence, shielding Barnhart with his own body.
Nori fired her webgun a beat before Roma’s thug would have pulled the trigger. A hollow pop! issued from its barrel, and then the sticky webbing bloomed over him, ensnaring him from head to foot in a cocoon of microthin filaments. Stunned, he tried to tear free, but only became more tangled up in the cottony shroud, skidded on the snow, and took a pratfall that might have been comical under far different circumstances.
Nori dashed over to him as he lay there thrashing, and sprayed him full in the face with the DMSO. An instant later he ceased to move.
The webgun still in her hand, Nori ran past him to the alley mouth, peered up and down the sidewalk through blowing sheets of snow. Lights were flickering on in the apartment buildings along the street—obviously the sounds of the firefight had drawn some attention—but there was no one in sight.
She turned and padded back down the alley to her companions.
“You all right?” she asked Nimec.
“Yeah,” he said.
She looked at Barnhart. The perspiration was streaming down his face now, and the glazed, somewhat abstracted cast of his eyes gave her cause to fear he might be slipping into shock.
“Coast’s clear, as far as I can see,” she said, gripping Barnhart’s arm. “We have to get back to the wagon before somebody calls the cops, though. Think you can make it?”
He looked at her a moment and somehow managed a wan, grim smile.
“Race you,” he said.
THIRTY
NEW YORK CITY JANUARY 20, 2000
THE SEX WAS QUICK AND DIRTY. SO WAS THE CONVERSATION that preceded it—“dirty,” in this instance, meaning distorted and semiaudible on playback.
It wasn’t the fault of the recording equipment. Nick Roma had simply been speaking in a low voice when the woman in the black leather coat entered his office.
“Let’s see that part again,” Barnhart said.
“You mean when he’s behind her, or on top?”
“Don’t get smart.”
“I’ll cue it up from where it’s still rated PG, and just about to segue into triple-X,” the thin, long-haired man at the audio-video processor said with a mock frown. He pushed a button on his console, and Barnhart heard the faint whir of the hard disk spinning in the silence.
They were in a sound studio in the basement of the Sword headquarters in downtown Manhattan, Barnhart and the techie seated shoulder-to-shoulder at the workstation, Pete Nimec and Noriko Cousins standing behind them.
Barnhart leaned stiffly forward in his chair, feeling his stitches pull under the bandages around his midsection. His wound still gave him a lot of discomfort, but the bleeding had made it look more critical than it actually turned out to be. Though a long, shallow furrow had been plowed into his right side, the slug had been deflected from his internal organs by a ridge of hard muscle before exiting. According to the emergency room physician his superb physical condition was what saved him.
“You think you can get us to what he’s saying?” Nimec asked.
“If I hadn’t been reasonably certain the audio streams could be cleaned up to your exacting demands, I wouldn’t have bothered committing this blue romp into digital form,” the man at the workstation said. “After all, the moans of ecstasy were already loud and clear enough to get my motor running.”
Nimec and Noriko exchanged looks of pained commiseration. Jeff Grolin was one of the most skilled forensic A/V specialists in the country—Megan wouldn’t have snagged him for their organization if he wasn’t—but he was also a vexingly juvenile pain in the buttocks. Was social maladjustment something that people in his field acquired, a sort of professional hazard, Nimec wondered, or some intrinsic characteristic of those with a high degree of technical aptitude?
“Okay, guys and gal, hold onto your cookies,” Grolin said, fiddling with a dial. “It’s Nick Roma’s Big Adventure, alternately titled Badguy Lust. Scene one, take two.”
Their eyes turned toward the workstation’s twenty-one-inch monitor.
On the screen, a door opened into Roma’s office and the woman came in, then stepped toward the lens of the stationary surveillance camera. Her dark hair was pulled back, her lips were parted, and she moved with an apparent awareness of her body and the reaction it elicited from the man she was approaching.
The date/time stamp on the lower left-hand corner of the image read: “01.01.2000 1:00 A.M.”
Nimec studied the woman intently. Though the room’s fluorescents were dimmed, there was sufficient ambient light coming in from the windows to reveal her features without any sort of computer enhancements. In fact, a still image had already been extracted from the video footage and was being cross-indexed with Sword’s file of known and suspected international terrorists.
“You could have knocked,” Roma said through compact Audix speakers. At this point only the back of his head was visible.
“Yes. 1 could have.” Shutting the door.
“There’s a light switch on the wall ...”
“Bounce it to where it’s been giving us trouble,” Barnhart said, watching.
“Sure,” Jeff said. His finger stabbed a button with the double-arrow fast-forward symbol on it. “Though I personally get a charge out of the suggestive dialogue during the buildup—clichéd as it may be.”
The video zipped ahead.
Grolin hit Play again.
Now the woman was much closer to the desk, her coat partially unbut
toned, unmistakable desire in her expression.
“Why are you here?” Roma said, and then paused. His voice had become husky, dropping to a near whisper.
“Right. Like he’s really that clueless,” Grolin commented. “The guy’s choking on his own drool—”
“Shhh, this is it,” Noriko said.
“Yno... zrrywn’t ... hvyrrpstl... mrrow ... pssed ... syight.”
“It’s still nothing but gobbledygook,” Barnhart said.
“That’s because I haven’t worked my electronic wizardry yet.” Grolin froze the image, then shifted his hands to a smaller console which consisted of more dials and pitch slides, as well as a dozen or so keys the size of the Tab button on a standard computer keyboard.
As his fingers clicked over the keys, a tool bar appeared across the top of the screen and the video image shrank into a window, with graphical level meters and editing controls appearing to its right.
“Now, let’s try it again, giving it a little mid-range gain, eliminating some audio dither.”
Grolin hit Rewind, Pause, then Play.
“Why are you here?” Roma said from the speakers. Paused.
Grolin quickly tweaked a dial, and then another, his eyes narrow behind the intentionally nerdish horn-rimmed glasses.
Roma said, “You know ... zarry ... wnnt have your parrrrrsrdy until tomorrow—”
Grolin stopped the progress of the virtual image, ran it backward to the point just before Roma’s voice dropped off in volume, started it going forward again.
His fingers clattered over the buttons of his console. Graph lines and status bars rose and fell in the edit window.
“Why are you here?” Roma husked. “You know zakrry won’t have your papers rdy until tomorrow. And 1 don’t suppose you’ve just come to syngnnnight.”
“You hear that?” Barnhart jerked his head around toward Nimec, wincing in pain from the abrupt movement. “He’s talking about providing her with papers. Presumably travel documents.”
