“You haven’t heard?”
“Heard what?”
“He’s dead.”
Before Cahill could ask how, the smartphone in Ballentine’s hand buzzed. The kid immediately looked down at the display. “She’s ready and waiting.”
There was sorrow on Ballentine’s face, so Cahill decided not to pursue the subject of his older brother.
More than that, he wanted to offer the kid something in the way of kindness.
“See, you worried for nothing,” he said. “Now put the phone in your pocket and look at me.”
Ballentine did as instructed.
Cahill gave the kid his speech, how this was what he did for a living, and he wouldn’t get paid what he got paid if he wasn’t good at what he did.
The part about this being his living wasn’t true, but that didn’t matter.
The second half of his speech was true, and did matter.
He told the kid that he’d led men into danger before—younger men, men who were even more scared and distracted.
Men who were far from home, facing incursions into landscapes that were nothing shy of hell on earth.
He knew all about leading men, knew that his own confidence would instill the same—or at least some degree of it—in the kid.
Cahill could portray confidence, had always done so, even in the worst situations, and he was doing so now, despite his own lingering distraction and fear.
Despite the unbearable grief and remorse that burned still fresh in his mind.
The memory of the one death he couldn’t shake.
Hammerton announced that they were five minutes away.
Cahill offered Ballentine the weapon he had drawn but dropped on the stairway—a subcompact Beretta Storm, nine-mil.
Ballentine took it and checked the indicator located behind the ejector port to confirm that a round was still chambered, then removed the double-stack mag to determine that it was full.
He reinserted the mag and leaned forward, sliding the pistol into his small-of-the-back holster.
Cahill was comforted by the fact that the kid could at least perform a simple weapon check expertly.
A small comfort, yes, but at this point he’d take all that he could get.
“Just do what I tell you,” he told Ballentine. “We’ll get your people and get you out. All right? Everything’s going to be okay.”
Seven
The Baychester Motel was closed for renovations, though one look at the property told Cahill that any work that may have been begun had stalled, and had likely done so a while ago.
He watched through the windshield as the van approached the construction site, saw three two-story brick structures set in a U shape around a parking lot that was closed off by a cyclone fence, its gate not only standing open a few feet but also leaning inward at a forty-five-degree angle.
Each wing of the motel had twenty rooms—ten on the ground floor, ten on the floor above—and more than half of them had their windows and doors boarded over with weather-beaten sheets of plywood.
The parking lot’s pavement had long cracks through which tall, dead weeds had sprung.
Cahill’s first thought was to question how this place, in a desolate corner of the Bronx, could be considered a safe location for a woman and her teenage daughter to wait for evac.
If anything, the enclosed and deserted property struck him as the perfect scene for any number of crimes.
But as the van pulled up alongside the gate and Cahill saw farther into the empty parking lot, he recognized, in those rooms that had not been sealed up, a dozen positions that would offer someone both perfect cover and an unobstructed view of the gate.
Having many vantage points to choose from—and others to move to should one need to displace—was a significant advantage when choosing an Alamo.
Also, the fact that the property was seemingly abandoned meant there would likely be no one to witness the arrival and departure of two women.
What was more important to Cahill, however, was that this derelict place was different in every imaginable way from the New Haven motel where his beloved Erica had been shot and killed.
He was determined not to ever endure again—tonight or any other time—what he had barely survived two years ago.
Therefore, his mind clung to all the detectable differences between that motel and this one as if his very sanity depended on them.
But while Cahill opted to keep his impressions of this location to himself, Hammerton did not. “What the fuck is this? You sent them here?”
Ballentine moved forward and leaned over the back of the empty front seat, looking out the passenger window. “Raveis told me that this was my extraction point. I told Ula about it, in case I needed her to meet me here.”
Cahill wasn’t surprised by this, knew that Raveis had a network of safe houses throughout the Greater New York area.
The locations were on a need-to-know basis, and Cahill had been apprised of only a few—the storage unit in Brooklyn and the “old tavern” in Connecticut among them.
But in the vastness of the five boroughs, not to mention the far reaches of the tristate area, the options for such places were countless.
Cahill stood and, bent at the waist, moved forward as the other two men studied the motel.
“So where is she?” Hammerton said.
“Looking at us,” Ballentine answered.
“From where?”
Ballentine moved between the two front seats and sat by the passenger door. He pointed to the northern wing. “Up there—the room in the dead center of the wing facing us. Room 205. And my guess is right now she has you in her sights.”
Cahill leaned between the two seats for a clearer view. Room 205 was one of the rooms without its windows boarded over, and the only room with its shade almost fully drawn. “Is she coming out?”
“No. I’m supposed to come in and get her.”
Cahill understood the reason for that, nodded, and said to Hammerton, “We’ll be right back.”
Leaning across Ballentine, he opened the passenger door.
Ballentine climbed out, and Cahill followed. They crossed the sidewalk to the broken gate, moved through it, and faced the open parking lot.
Half a football field wide.
Cahill’s training told him to make use of available cover by walking along the wing to his right, but he knew the woman watching them would prefer that he remain in her direct line of sight as much as possible, so he had no choice but to lead Ballentine into what would be the perfect kill box.
A wing straight ahead, one to their left and another to their right, and no easy escape behind them.
Too many windows to keep track of as they moved.
Despite this exposure, Cahill maintained an easy pace, keeping his arms hanging at his sides, his hands open.
It took a minute for them to cross the distance and climb the single flight of cement stairs to the second-floor landing.
Here the occupant of 205 could no longer see them and no doubt had abandoned her position at the window for one deeper inside the room.
Cahill and Ballentine reached the door, but neither stood in front of it. Cahill crossed to the left of it, Ballentine remained to the right. Ballentine knocked lightly once, then twice, then three times.
From inside a woman said, “Enter.”
Just one word was enough for Cahill to detect an accent, one he believed to be Middle Eastern.
Ballentine opened the door and moved inside, doing so with his hands held out and up slightly.
Cahill took a last scan of what was behind him—the empty lot and the two wings that flanked it, the cyclone fence, and the van waiting just beyond it.
He didn’t like the idea of having to move through that again as they departed, but there was nothing he could do about that now.
Finally, his hands held out and open, he, too, entered the darkened motel room.
Eight
He could not see at first.
Such a transition would offer a significant advantage to those waiting inside.
The first thing Cahill determined was that the room was unfurnished—he sensed openness, and the few footsteps he took had echoed more than he would have expected.
The room wasn’t completely void, however.
To his left, in front of the only window, was a pile of what appeared to be sandbags stacked to form a barrier.
Cahill recognized a fixed and reinforced position behind which a shooter could find cover and take careful aim.
As his eyes adjusted, he realized that the contents of the stack weren’t sandbags but rather sixty-pound bags of cement mix laid end to end, three stacks long and four tall.
Ballentine had stepped to the center of the room and was facing the back wall. Cahill turned his attention there and saw a woman standing in front of the closed bathroom door as if guarding it.
He made quick work of sizing her up.
She was in her late thirties at the most. Her thick, dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she was dressed in tactical boots, dark jeans, a black field jacket, and a scarf.
In her gloved hands was a Kel-Tec Sub-16 carbine, its folding stock extended and shouldered, its suppressed muzzle aimed at Cahill’s center mass.
The weapon was attached by a short bungee sling to a harness she wore under her open jacket.
Cahill froze, didn’t even breathe. His only movement was in his eyes, which shifted from the suppressor to the woman’s right hand.
Her fully extended index finger was resting outside the trigger guard, so he knew she was well trained.
From there he looked at her face and saw something that alarmed him.
There was a wildness in her eyes.
Dark-gray eyes, he noted.
They weren’t, he believed, wild from fear or panic, but rather from something else, something . . . deeper.
Cahill scanned the room for a second occupant—a teenage girl—but he and Ballentine and the woman ready to fire were all he could see. The girl was probably hiding in the bathroom.
He realized then that the wildness in the woman’s eyes was the look of a mother determined to protect her child at all costs.
Ballentine put himself between the woman and Cahill. A simple adjustment of her aim put Cahill back into her sights.
“It’s okay, Ula,” Ballentine said. “He’s with me.”
But she didn’t budge, nor did her demeanor alter. She said in a deep voice, “The word, please. Say the word.”
Cahill understood the protocol in play here.
Should Ballentine ever arrive here with another person, he was to speak one of two preselected words, and the woman’s actions—shoot the stranger beside him or not—depended on which word he spoke.
But Ballentine was obviously drawing a blank. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Tell her the word.” Cahill kept his voice as calm and even as he could.
Ballentine glanced over his shoulder. “Give me a second,” he snapped. “I’m not used to all these guns being pointed at me—”
“Say the fucking word,” Cahill urged.
Ballentine’s mouth opened as he searched for the word, but nothing came out. He shook his head once, then again, and finally blurted out, “Darayya.” He let out a breath and repeated, “Darayya. It’s Darayya.”
Cahill recognized that as the name of a suburb of Damascus, Syria.
The woman named Ula lowered her carbine, though she kept the stock pressed against her shoulder. Her eyes remained fixed on Cahill. “Who is he?”
Cahill spoke before Ballentine could answer. “It doesn’t matter. I’m here to get you out; that’s all you need to know.”
Ula ignored him. “What happened, Dante?”
Again, Cahill cut Ballentine off. “You two can catch up later. Right now I need you and your daughter to come with us.”
Ballentine took a less forceful approach. “Tell Valena it’s okay to come out,” he said softly. “They’ll take us somewhere safe.”
Ula glanced at Ballentine’s shoulder. Blood had seeped through his dressing. “You’re injured.”
“Don’t worry about it.” He nodded toward the bathroom door behind her. “Tell Valena to come out. We need to get going, now.”
She took a breath, held it for a few seconds, then let it out and announced, “Clear.”
Cahill and Ballentine watched the bathroom door, expecting it to open, but it didn’t.
Then Cahill sensed motion to his left, someone suddenly standing there.
He turned and saw the girl.
She’d been hiding beside the stacked bags of cement, wedged in between the stack’s far edge and the cinder-block wall, and had risen to her feet without Cahill detecting her.
She was holding in a two-handed grip a pistol he immediately identified as a Czech-made CZ-75 nine-mil.
The girl, like her mother, held the weapon expertly.
And like her mother, she had dark hair that she wore pulled back into a ponytail and was dressed for urban combat.
Unlike her mother, however, the wildness in her dark-gray eyes was fear.
Cahill would have been surprised to see anything less than that.
He said to Ula, “Have you seen any activity since you got here? Vehicles up and down the street a few times? Unusual pedestrians walking by? Anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Are you sure?”
It was obvious that the follow-up question irked her. “Yes.”
Cahill ignored her reaction. “You and your daughter follow me. Ballentine here will be right behind you. Are we clear?”
Ula waved for her daughter to join her.
The girl did, handing the pistol to her mother, who slid it into her carbon-fiber belt holster without taking her eyes off Cahill. She then folded the carbine’s shoulder stock, effectively cutting the length of the weapon by more than a third, which would allow her to conceal it, more or less, inside her field jacket.
As Ula did this, her daughter reached behind her and removed something from the small of her mother’s back—a six-inch-long tactical flashlight.
The girl had done this without missing a beat. It struck Cahill that they worked together as a well-drilled team.
“Actually,” Ula said, “it will be better if you two follow us. Only a fool or someone with a death wish would walk through that kill box out there.”
She stepped back and, still facing Cahill, opened the bathroom door.
The small room was lit, though dimly. Cahill saw something he did not expect.
A hole had been cut into the tile floor, and sticking out of it were the top few rungs of an aluminum ladder.
Someone had taken the time necessary not only to fortify this room with bags of cement mix but also to create a second means of entrance and egress, and then had cleaned up afterward.
A quick look at Ballentine told Cahill that the kid was just as surprised by this revelation.
“My daughter and I are going out the way we came in,” Ula said. “I’d suggest you follow us.”
She led the girl through the bathroom door. Taking the flashlight back, she switched it on. The flashlight in her left and the carbine’s grip in her right, Ula aimed both items down through the opening.
She made a visual search of the room below, shifting her position around the edge of the makeshift escape hatch till she had covered a full 360 degrees.
Handing the light back to her daughter, who kept it aimed down the hole, Ula said to the men, “I’m going to need you two to keep up.”
She swung her carbine to her left side and let it hang there from its sling,
then began to climb down the ladder.
Nine
Cahill was the last one down, and the moment he stepped off the ladder, he dropped to one knee and drew his Kimber from its ankle holster.
Rising, he followed Ballentine, who was behind the pair of women.
Standing close together, Valena aiming the light and Ula holding the carbine, they headed toward an opening in the wall separating this room from the one next to it.
A half dozen or so cinder blocks had been knocked out, likely by jackhammer, leaving an opening that was large enough for a person to move through.
It was necessary to duck, and to be mindful of debris littering the floor, but that barely slowed the women as they moved into the next room, then through a similar gap into the room next to that.
They passed through four walls before reaching the final room of that wing.
Here there was no evidence of any further demolition, and to Cahill’s eye, no way out other than the door.
Ula strode to it and stood to the right of it, opening it slightly.
This room’s window wasn’t boarded over, so Cahill hurried to it and stood to its left, leaning forward enough to peer out.
Nothing had changed from the last time he had looked.
He saw the same empty parking lot and fence, and the van was still twenty feet beyond the broken gate.
The distance they needed to cross to reach the waiting vehicle, however, seemed somehow greater than it had been when he’d first assessed it just moments ago.
Maybe his judgment was tinged by the fact that retreat generally took longer than forward motion, and unlike his and Ballentine’s two-man advance, it was a group of four that would be retreating now.
Ula barely paused at the door. She announced, “We’re moving,” then swung the door open.
After one more visual sweep, she led her daughter outside.
Ballentine followed, his Beretta drawn.
Cahill would have preferred a longer pause, but there was nothing he could do about that. Ula had taken point, and the race for their transport out had begun.
Stepping to the door, he made his own quick survey before proceeding into the open.
Ula led them along the front of the western wing, using the shadow of the second-floor landing directly overhead as cover.
The Rogue Agent (The Agent Series) Page 5
