A face appeared in the door window. A pale, unfamiliar face that appeared for about a second. Just long enough to see them.
And long enough for Scott to fire at it.
“THEY’RE INSIDE the building,” Mike said through Tali’s earpiece. “I’ve lost contact.”
“That was to be expected,” Tali said from the doorway of a building across the street from the van. “All is quiet in front of the building. No signs of activity yet.”
“I’ve got eyes on you from the satellite,” he said. “I’ll be able to watch for another thirty minutes, maximum, before I have to hack another. And I still don’t understand why you’re not in the van.”
“Street cops have a wise saying,” she told him. “The car is a coffin. When the shooting starts, the first thing they do is get out of the vehicle. Same logic applies here.”
“It’s armored,” he reminded her.
“It limits my range of motion,” she said, “and the only spot I could find was past the building. I would’ve had to check my mirrors all the time. This way, I can see what’s going on before it happens.”
She remained perfectly still when she saw the front door of the building open, then close again.
She was careful not to move, looking down at her handheld like any other young woman checking her phone. The .45 was on her right hip if she needed it.
“Did the door just open?” Rivas said in her ear.
“Yes,” she said, looking down at her blank screen. “Something is wrong.”
THE GLASS in the door window webbed, but didn’t shatter. Scott racked another round and fired again, this time shattering the glass inward.
So much for the element of surprise.
“On my left, now!” Scott said as he bolted for the wall.
The three men hit the wall also. Hicks knew this would cut down on the firing angle from the shattered window. A gunman would have to stick his weapon all the way outside to hit them, rendering a steel door useless.
Scott shot at both hinges, denting them but not obliterating them.
“Patel, Primasheet. On me.”
Hicks brought up his M4 to cover the two men as they raced toward the door. Scott pulled a grenade from inside his jacket and dunked it through the shattered window in the door. Two seconds later, a blast sent a shudder through the building. The door rattled but held.
Patel placed a long, thin strip that looked like contact paper just above the doorknob. But Hicks knew it wasn’t contact paper. It was a breaching explosive as powerful as C4. A thin wire ran from the bottom of it, trailing behind them as he and Scott quickly backed away along the wall.
“Down, down, down,” Scott said.
Hicks and Roger looked away, just as a powerful blast ripped through the loft from the door.
Scott moved through the smoke and kicked the buckled door further open. Patel moved right behind him. Hicks and Roger followed.
Scott moved past the dead man at the bottom of the top landing. Patel paused to check the man as Hicks and Roger continued downward.
Scott stopped at the second landing where there was another steel door like the one they’d just destroyed.
Hicks covered the stairs leading up from the lower floors. “Hope you brought a lot of Primasheet.”
“Not necessary,” Patel said as he came down the stairs. “Our friend up there had a key card.”
He took up position next to the card reader at the left of the door. He looked at Scott. “You ready?”
Scott pulled another grenade from his vest. “Go.”
Patel tapped the card. The door opened. And Scott threw the grenade inside.
Hicks heard yelling in the two seconds before the grenade exploded.
Scott shouldered the door all the way open and moved inside. Patel moved in behind him and went left, rifle ready. Hicks moved in and cut right. Roger backed in, covering the stairway.
Hicks saw this floor, too, was a loft. Quick glance: folding tables, chairs, laptops. No walls, no office.
Scott’s grenade had landed in the middle of the room, where three people were on their stomachs. Two women and a man, bloodied from the blast.
The women didn’t move, but the man started crawling away. His hands were empty. Hicks fired a low burst and took out the man’s legs.
Hicks scrambled toward the man, keeping an eye out for other targets. Scott was ranging ahead of him, sweeping the room with the Mossberg.
Hicks reached the wounded man and quickly ran a hand over his torso. No weapon, but an empty holster under his left arm. Hicks saw what the man had been crawling toward, a nine millimeter five feet away that had been blown free in the explosion. Hicks kicked the gun as hard as he could, sending it skidding yards away.
He pressed the M4’s muzzle into the wounded man’s neck. “Who else is here?” he said in German.
“Nobody!” screamed the man. “Just us. We’re only accountants!”
In his earpiece, Hicks heard Roger say, “We’ve got company!”
And then the gunfire started.
TALI AND the rest of the people on the street flinched when they heard the muffled explosion from within the building.
“Even I heard that,” Mike said in her ear.
“Breaching explosive.” Tali moved calmly but quickly toward the van. Rivas was right, it was armor-plated and would offer her the best cover if people came out of the building. She slid open the panel door and removed the AK-47 from the bay floor. An old weapon, but reliable. One she had grown up using.
She reached into her shirt and pulled out a fake Berlin police badge on a chain around her neck. Pedestrians backed away as she slid the door closed. “Polizei!” she yelled in German. “Move away, now.”
She took up a position at the back of the van. She saw the front door of the building open and two men scramble into the street.
She raised her weapon and opened fire, strafing both men in the chest. They hit the wall, then slumped to the sidewalk. No blood. Kevlar. Fuck.
She saw movement from the doorway and ducked back behind the van just as bullets began to pepper the vehicle. “Call Jason,” she told Rivas. “The shit has hit the fan.”
ROGER HIT the wall to the left of the door as he paused to reload.
Patel moved around him, firing blind into the stairwell.
“Fire in the hole!” Scott yelled as he tossed a grenade through the doorway.
Roger and Patel dropped back just before the explosion ripped through the stairwell.
Hicks brought the butt of his rifle down on the back of the wounded man’s head. “Yeah. Just the three of you.”
He ran toward the door as Scott fired two more blasts into the stairway. “Hicks, you lead.”
Hicks burst through the doorway and went down the stairs. Roger had slapped in a new magazine and fell in behind him. Patel followed. Scott fed more shells into the Mossberg and brought up the rear.
Hicks found what was left of the four men in the stairwell. He had to step on them in order to make it down the stairs. He swung his rifle to the left.
Ground floor. No stairs to a basement. Another steel door ajar.
Hicks took up position to the right of the door. Gunfire erupted, but not aimed at him. Someone was shooting outside from the front door.
Someone was shooting at Tali.
Hicks didn’t check the room. He didn’t wait for cover. He put a shoulder into the door and burst through.
TALI WAITED for the doorway gunman to reload before she dropped to the sidewalk, rifle butt to her shoulder, landing in a perfect firing position. Just as she’d been trained. The gunman had been aiming high. She’d be shooting low.
One of the men on the street had begun moving back toward the safety of the building. He fired blindly in her direction. Another nine millimeter. The bullets sailed wide over the van.
Tali fired once. The round pierced the man’s temple. This time there was blood. No Kevlar there.
Tali smiled. One down. Two left.
Another burst of automatic fire erupted from the doorway. Again, the gunman fired high, hitting the van well above the wheel well.
Tali fired from the sidewalk, striking the door and doorframe. The glass scarred, but didn’t break. Bulletproof glass. But it was enough to send the gunman back inside.
Then she heard shouting. Another blast from the gunman, this time firing at something inside the building. James.
She thought about moving for a fraction of a second, but no longer. She had a good field of fire. The second man she wounded was still on the street in front of the building, somewhere behind a parked car. Wounded, hurt, but still very much alive and probably armed.
James could take care of himself. He always had.
More shouts and more shots fired within the building.
Then nothing.
Just the sounds of people on the sidewalk, scrambling away from the scene; a few intrepid souls had stayed to film it all on their cell phones. She didn’t worry about them. OMNI would scrub the images from the internet later.
She kept her aim on the building.
And in her ear, she heard a familiar voice.
“First floor clear,” Hicks said. They could communicate now that he was near the open door. “Tali, what about the street?”
“One down, one wounded. Target is off to your left by maybe twenty feet. Kevlar. Probably armed.”
“You got eyes on him?”
“Negative. Car’s blocking my view.”
“Move around to see if you can get eyes on him.”
Tali hadn’t been expecting that. She thought he’d try to handle it himself, given her condition. Maybe there was more to the man she loved after all?
She got to her feet and moved back along the sidewalk to the front of the van then made her way across the street, AK aimed at the spot where she believed the man had fallen.
She popped out between two parked cars. A tough shot for a wounded man with a handgun to make at this distance, but not for her Kalashnikov.
But the sidewalk was empty. The man had gotten away.
She lowered her rifle. “Target’s gone. James. He must’ve crawled away during the battle.”
Hicks didn’t miss a beat. “Rivas, you got him on camera?”
It took a few seconds for him to respond. “Got him. White male, approximately six feet tall in a black suit, limping due east from your location. About a block away.”
“Let me go,” Tali said as she moved toward the building. “I know what he looks like.”
“And he knows what you look like. No way. Mike, send the feed to Patel’s phone. He’ll track him down on foot. Tali, get in here. We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
Patel ran past her as she stepped inside, smoothing down his hair and zipping up his jacket as he ran. He looked like any other of the city’s young men dashing for a bus or to make his U-Bahn train. If she hadn’t seen him exit the building, she never would have guessed he’d just been in a firefight.
But then again, that was what made him good at what he did.
Tali stepped inside and Hicks pulled the door closed behind her.
Washington, D.C.
DEMEREST HAD just gotten an alert from the Agency’s Germany desk when his phone began to buzz. He recognized the number. It was Hicks.
He toggled to his computer’s tracking program on the phone he’d given Hicks. “Talk to me, son.”
“We hit a Vanguard building here on Mohrenstrasse,” Hicks said. “Things got public. I’m going to need someone to keep people away until we have a chance to see what we’ve got here. Trace my location, but don’t come to this address. I’m calling you from the garage behind the building we hit. They’ve got some kind of jamming frequency in the building, so I had to step outside to call you.”
Shit. “Any civilians killed?”
“No, but one target got away. One of my men is after him on foot.”
“Okay,” Demerest said. “Okay, that’s good. That’s very good. That makes it clean.”
“Thanks. I’m glad you approve.”
Demerest didn’t appreciate the sarcasm. “It makes it easier to keep it quiet, goddamn it. I’ve already alerted my contacts at the Federal Intelligence Service that something was going down. They’ll keep a lid on things and the cops at bay. One second.”
Demerest lowered the phone and looked at Williamson. “Call Ernst. Tell him I need that favor over on Mohrenstrasse.” He showed him the map on his desktop, which had the exact address. “He’ll know what to do. Tell him I’ll be in touch as soon as I can with more details.”
Williamson went back to his desk and Demerest got back on the phone. “It’s being taken care of as we speak. Are your people okay? Did you find the evidence we need?”
“Everyone made it through. They’re checking the place now. Looks like we’ve got some satellite office here. Lots of computer equipment upstairs. We came in the back way, so I think we stopped them before they could crash the hard drives, but I’m not sure. There’s some kind of device rigged to the front door. Looks like it runs upstairs. Might be some kind of crash alarm if the front door was breached.”
“Then I’m glad you boys went in the back way,” Demerest said. He had dozens of questions about what they had found, what they were seeing, and who had been inside the place. He’d been a field man too long to not be excited about finding a cache of enemy information. But he kept his enthusiasm in check. “Any of them left alive other than the runner?”
“One, I think. I’m on my way up there now to check. We’ll take a look at the hard drives, too, and let you know what we find.”
“How long will you need the place for?”
“Three hours,” Hicks said. “Maybe less. I’ll call back when I know more.”
“Good. That’s doable. Won’t raise too much suspicion with the locals. Get as much as you can and fry the rest. I want to know what we’re looking at before our German colleagues do. Safer all around that way.”
“You read my mind.”
“I can help your man with the runner,” Demerest said. “Give me his position and—”
“No way,” Hicks said. “My man can handle it. If we need you, we’ll be in touch. I’ll keep you posted.”
Demerest couldn’t blame him for being cautious. He’d been the same way in the field. In many ways, he still was. “Still don’t trust me, do you, son?”
“No more than you really trust me. I’ll be in touch. Hicks out.”
The connection died, leaving Demerest staring at his phone. He couldn’t remember the last time someone had hung up on him. No one had ever dared.
He looked up when Williamson reappeared in his doorway. “Sir, I’ve got the chief of staff’s office on line one for you. I think this might be the call we’ve been waiting for.”
Demerest smiled. His assistant had a creative grasp of the word we. “Put him through. And tell Ernst I might be a little longer than expected.”
Berlin
PATEL IGNORED the questions people asked him at the corner as he ran past them. They’d all seen him come out of the building. He didn’t blame them for being curious. Gunfire. Explosions. A brown-skinned man emerging from the chaos at a run. Was he a terrorist? Was this more Islamic trouble?
As curious as they may have been, no one tried to stop him. And when he was a block away, no one even noticed him. He blended back into the bustling human traffic moving to and fro along the busy streets of Berlin.
He checked his handheld constantly for the runner’s location on his map. Mike spoke into his ear. “Hicks and the others are back inside, so their comms are blocked until they leave. It’s just you and me now.”
“How comforting,” Patel said as he reached the corner and moved left, following the trail of the wounded man. “How accurate is this map?”
“As accurate as the cameras I can hack,” Mike responded. “He’s half a block away from you now. Standing still in front of a stationery store on your side of the stre
et. Looks like he’s cradling his ribs, maybe trying to get his wind back.”
“Duly noted.” He was less than half a block away from the man’s position on the map. He looked for him through the crowds of people, but no joy. He spotted a sign jutting out above the crowd. Paper-La-Papp. “He still alone?”
“Yes, but he’s got something in his hand. No one around him is reacting, so I don’t think it’s a gun.” A few more clicks in his earpiece, then, “I zoomed in. It’s definitely not a gun. It’s a phone. If you get close enough with your handheld, OMNI can back-trace the call.”
If he got close enough, Patel intended to do more than that.
Rivas seemed to read his mind. “Just don’t kill him. I know Hicks will want Roger to question him.”
“That’s up to him, now, isn’t it?”
Patel cut to the right side of the sidewalk and spotted his mark. He was just inside the doorway of the stationery store. It was a cool spring day, but his bald head was thick was sweat. The back of his black suit was even darker than the rest of it. He was on the phone and hunched over slightly, probably more from damaged ribs than out of a sense of privacy on a busy street.
Patel walked past him as if he was on his way elsewhere. All it took was a glance for him to verify the man was on the phone, but not armed. And only a trained eye such as his would have spotted the bulge under his left arm. At least it was holstered.
The target didn’t spot Patel as he passed, too caught up in his conversation to pay any mind to a passerby. He was speaking in German, quickly at that, far too quickly for Patel’s minimal knowledge of the language to grasp.
He doubled back and tried to get the man’s attention. “Excuse me, boss,” he said in English. “Excuse me. Do you speak English?”
The man looked at him and tried to move away, but Patel blocked his path. “May I borrow your phone?” He even showed him his handheld. “Mine’s just died and I need to make a call. I’ll pay you. Hello? Speak English?”
The man flipped him off and tried again to go around him, but stopped when Patel pressed the muzzle of his Glock into his groin.
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