Less than three minutes later, they were in the lobby.
“Not a soul, boss,” Buddha said at the door. “Should we—?”
“Leave him in the trunk for now. The plastic wrap went out when we dumped that body Tiger dropped in before. We’ll leave this one under that viaduct we saw coming in. He’ll be coming around soon. Should be safe enough—easy to see he isn’t carrying anything worth stealing. Keep that uniform on, brother; we’ll take care of it when we get back home.”
“THAT’S THEM!” Tiger said excitedly. “The same ones I saw in that—”
“Rhino?”
“Give me a minute,” the giant said, turning the strangely shaped disks so he could examine one from all directions.
The minute stretched into a half-hour before Rhino spoke again. “I had to risk opening one up, to be sure. But Tiger’s instincts were true—these are nothing but key cards. When you pull them apart, they turn into rows of connector plugs. There’s no data on them at all. What they’re for is to open that access port.”
“Why would he have more than one?” Cross asked. “Are they just backups?”
“I don’t think so. There’s no way to tell for sure, but my best guess is that each one is for a different channel. That would fit—no one key could actually get into wherever the material is kept, only a tiny slice of it. Storm-proof clouded, for sure.”
“Just like he told us,” Buddha said, as if to defend killing the Lao before he could tell them anything more.
“It’s almost four in the morning,” Cross said. None of the crew questioned how a man who never wore a wristwatch was always right about the time. “Might as well finish this part of it.”
“Boss, can So Long stay—”
“I can speak for myself, husband. And I do not wish to stay,” she said, with a quick glance at her Amazon companion.
“Nobody would even think about coming back here,” Buddha assured her. “And with Princess and Rhino…”
“I must see it for myself,” his wife said.
“LOOKS EMPTY,” Cross said, speaking from the backseat. “But if there’s a basement, they might have it fixed up like an apartment.”
“You want me to take a—?”
“No,” Cross told Tiger. “Next time we come around the block, we finish this. If the maggots running this darknet operation are in that room, they’re not coming out. And if they’re not, they’re never coming back.”
“How can you be so—?”
“Not now,” he said to silence Tiger. To Buddha he said, “Stop right across from that back door. We know it’s steel, but it’s not built for what we got. Once it’s drilled, a smooth, slow roll to the corner, turn right, and keep moving—breaking glass isn’t a big trick.”
The Shark Car glided to a stop just past the side door. The back window zipped down. Cross jumped out, dropped to one knee, shouldered a long tube of black metal, and squeezed off a single round. The rocket-launched explosive vaporized the steel door.
So Long watched, without interest.
Cross threw the tube into the backseat and followed right behind. By the time Buddha had taken the corner, the explosion was already reverberating, shattering glass in nearby storefronts. Cross jumped out, another launcher in each hand. He landed lightly, put two more rockets through the now aptly named No-Chance, and caught the Shark Car on foot within fifty yards.
Buddha picked up speed almost imperceptibly and began to float through alleys.
Sirens shrieked, tearing the fabric of the night, sending 911 operators into instant overload. Chicago PD’s Command Central ignored the incessant stream of orders from Homeland Security to stand down.
Would-be reporters were running cell-phone videos straight to CNN. Some as-yet-unidentified individual on a small motorcycle with a tiny video cam strapped securely to his helmet was shot so many times by so many weapons that his DNA splattered the sides of buildings up to the third floor. Chicago PD could ignore Homeland Security’s stand-down orders, but keeping them away was impossible. As would be questioning the motorcyclist.
Bloggers dueled for bandwidth; cables were torn from beneath the concrete by a blanket of cover fire laid down to protect the SWAT teams trying to enter what was left of the structure as the Fire Department’s full range—chemical foam to high-pressure hoses—worked on containment.
Somewhere in a basement at Quantico, FBI profilers were screaming, “More data!” as if summoning a genie from a lamp.
Bullhorns competed with human screams, neither winning.
INSIDE WHAT looked like a derelict gas station in the Badlands, Buddha pulled a tab, releasing torrents of air under the skin of the Shark Car.
Cross and Tiger each took a side and pulled off the city-camo, revealing a midnight-blue body that now resembled a limousine. Buddha stripped off the doorman’s uniform and dropped it into an empty hazmat container before he re-donned his own clothes.
“Go!” Cross told Buddha, pointing both index fingers straight ahead.
Turning to Tiger, he said, “Come on.”
“How am I supposed to walk in—?”
“It isn’t far.”
“What does—?” Tiger started to say, just as Condor dropped from his perch.
“Anything?” Cross asked.
“Nothing,” the young man answered, meaning no vehicle had attempted to enter the area after the Shark Car. “But a panel truck came a while back. They dropped off this motorcycle. I mean, one of them did—the other one never got out.”
“Can you get the bike back here?”
“Sure. But we’d have to ride it.”
“How else…?”
“The guy who dropped it off, he carried it!”
“You’ve seen him before.”
“Sure. But that thing has to weigh—”
“It doesn’t matter. Just bring it down the road, we’ll grab it there.”
Condor stepped off into the darkness, already speaking into the old Army-issue field phone he carried on a sling.
“It’s about a hundred yards,” Cross told Tiger. “Keep your damn shoes on; I can carry you that far.”
“Wow! You must be so strong!”
Cross dropped to the same firing position he had used earlier, scooped Tiger over one shoulder, and began to slog forward in a fireman’s carry.
“You say something?” she demanded.
“Just a prayer.”
“Are you trying to say—?”
“Can you try shutting up for a minute?” he said, smacking her rump with his left hand.
“Oh! That hurt!”
“Sure,” Cross said, sourly, his palm still tingling. “What I was praying for was that Princess didn’t drop off his damn scooter.”
CROSS WOULD be hard-pressed to distinguish one motorcycle from another, but he relaxed as soon as he saw it wasn’t the Pepto-pink Harley.
Red 71 could be reached through the Badlands, but only if you knew how to navigate past a series of sensors before deliberately passing through a final strobing light to deactivate an open-on-contact twenty-foot drop to a pile of hacked-up I-beams.
Cross piloted the bike carefully, but Tiger held on as if they were about to go airborne any second. When they reached the back perimeter, Cross pulled in the clutch and cut the motor, letting the bike drift until it came to a natural stop. Few knew Red 71 could be accessed from that direction at all—those who did knew that no car could possibly traverse the torn iron maze. And that any first step would open a screen inside, with infrared cameras tracking movement of anything larger than a small dog.
“We’ll leave it here,” Cross said. “Nobody’s gonna steal it.”
“It’s got to be another quarter-mile,” Tiger answered. “And I know you’re not planning to carry—”
“Not me. But somebody will be out here soon enough. Probably Princess and that dog. And you know he’d carry you up Sears Tower if you asked him.”
“Oh, that’s all right.” She flashed a grin. “I may not h
ave been Girl Scout material, but I’m always prepared.”
Cross stood silently as the Amazon reached into a side pouch on her jumpsuit and pulled out a pair of thin-soled slippers. “The soles are some kind of plastic Rhino made—they flex, but you couldn’t drive a nail through them.”
Cross had taken some serious risks in his life, but he wasn’t about to ask the Amazon why she hadn’t bothered to mention those substitute shoes earlier.
“THEY PROBABLY got the coordinates wrong,” Percy said to Ace. “Wouldn’t be the first time for those desk warriors.”
“Meaning, Blondie and that girl, they’re somewhere around here, just not in the place they pointed you to?”
“Yeah.”
“Got a car?”
“No. I don’t know my way around here—it’d just weigh me down.”
“You took the damn CTA dressed like that?”
“Night drop,” Percy explained. “Black parachute. Not my first. Just picked a flat roof, and…”
“Yeah, I got it. But we can’t do no house-to-house here. Sooner or later, some little gangstah will crank off a few just to be doing it.”
“I thought you wouldn’t have no problems.” The war-machine’s version of sarcasm.
“Man, it ain’t me that looks all RoboCop. You out of some seriously dumb movie, son.”
“You want me to, what, wait here? That’s not what I—”
“Yeah, I know. You all kinds of bad. But unless you got some magic net to drop over that whole spot, they’ll be gone before we get close.”
“I’m not—”
“Rest easy,” Ace said. “I just gotta make a call.”
Percy watched as the slim black man shook a sleeve of his long leather duster, deftly caught the cell phone as it slid across his open palm, popped it open with his thumb, and tapped a single key with a long, slim finger, all in the same motion.
“I need a posse car,” Ace spoke into the mic. “Four doors, two men in front, backseat empty. How long till you get it over to…?”
A CANDY-ORANGE Cadillac Escalade with ridiculously oversized wheels slid to the curb.
Percy hit the backseat first, Ace close behind. As the car pulled away, the war machine looked over at his for-now partner.
“This your idea of camouflage?”
“You ever been on the West Side? This one looks the way it’s supposed to look. And nobody be looking at it twice.”
Before Percy could reply, Ace said, “Good call,” to the driver. Turning to Percy, he said, “Run it down. I don’t know what they look like, except what I got off tape. You was locked up with the two of them for—what?—weeks?”
“White male, blond and blue, just under six feet, scrawny, small birthmark on his left hand, right near the web. Asian female, cream-in-coffee, dark eyes. Maybe five two, max. Smells like cocoa butter; gets her nails done every day, it looks like. She’ll have to be near someplace where she can plug her computer into the Internet.”
The front-seat passenger looked over his left shoulder. One quick glance was enough to convince him he didn’t want another one.
“You working with partners, now, Ace?”
“I ask you any questions, boy?”
“I was just—”
“Shut up, fool,” the driver said, trying to derail a conversation he knew had no possibility of ending well. But he’d reacted too late.
“I don’t know you,” Ace said, very softly. “I wanted to call you by your name, how could I do that?”
“I was just saying—”
“Don’t be ‘just saying’ things. I couldn’t call your name ’cause I don’t know your name. You can’t add that up? The man who sent you, you and the man behind the wheel—you know, the one who knows how to act—that man who sent you, he knows me. What you know is you gonna get paid for doing what I tell you. That’s true?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s getting paid for doing, not for saying, we clear?”
“Yeah.”
“Our two, they won’t be walking,” the assassin said to Percy. “Gotta hope they get to one of the Main Originals and pay rent before they get rolled on. Either one of them a shooter?”
“THEY NOT gonna be on the street,” Ace told the driver. “So we play it like they already found a spot. Got me?”
“Only ones who could let them—”
“Sure. So, first step, we find one of the shot-callers.”
“Alone? That’s not—”
“Hey! You a driver, not some private eye. They still got that spot in Englewood?”
“The Green Lantern?”
“That’s the one.”
“Sure. But it’s never empty.”
“Not supposed to be. That spotlight above the door, the green one? It sweeps, right? And they got a couple of their boys in front, either side of the door?”
“Yep. Same as always.”
“Okay, how it plays is like this: you pull up like you carrying a couple of men who gonna party.”
“Can’t park—”
“You not gonna park. You the driver, right? So you pull up, and the people in the back, they get out. That’s your job.”
“I got a job, too?” the front-seat passenger asked.
“Oh, you got a job, all right,” Ace assured him. “An acting job. Like this is a movie, okay? Far as those doorposts know, whoever’s in the back of this thing, they’re major players. We pull up, your window goes down, so they can see you. You’re the bodyguard—that’s why you wearing that nice suit your boss had made for you.
“All heavyweight players, they got drivers, bodyguards, fancy rides. So you get out, open the back door toward you, and stay where it takes you. That’s behind that door. Remember, you make sure you never take your eyes off the boys below that spotlight. That’ll keep their eyes on you.”
“Okay, so we drop you off, and…”
“And take off,” Ace told the driver. “You got that pager your boss gave you? Okay. You take off, but you don’t go far. You hear the beep, you get back quick. Soon as we load back in, you get us over the border. You stop; we jump off; you go back and pick up your money.”
The driver made a leisurely left turn and headed west.
“You got something that don’t make noise?” Ace asked Percy, his tone making it more of a statement than a question.
“Step two?” was the war machine’s only response.
“You take out the door guards. We walk in. It’s a small joint. Most of the people there, they just people, understand? Soon as they catch on, they’re booking for the exit. The ones we want, they’ll all be in this one spot on the far right, a couple of steps up from the floor. Got a brass rail all around it, little chain across the opening. Probably a man just standing there, holds up the chain if any of the Main Originals give him the word. You know, let some girl come up there and sit with them. Now, the second any of them see me, they gonna be plunging for steel—they know I don’t party. Thing is, we need one of them alive.”
“You move left,” Percy said, as he affixed a flash suppressor to the front of a heavy-barreled pistol, working by touch. “I’ll put down a spray to the right, then switch to three-beats. Inside, it’ll be panic. You herd them out the door. Then get over to that brass rail. Ask whoever’s alive whatever you want, but be fast—not gonna be quiet once I start sweeping.”
“That works,” Ace said, implicitly transferring authority to Percy. Cross had told him Percy could be expected to improvise as situations developed. He wouldn’t make ego-moves, but he’d see Ace as a means to the end of his mission, so getting in his way wouldn’t occur to him.
“You carrying anything besides that scattergun?”
“No,” Ace lied. “I never dial long-distance.”
“You want…?”
“I’m good with this, bro. You the one doin’ all the heavy lifting.”
THE ESCALADE stopped outside the club.
The driver’s-side window zipped down. As the two men standing on eit
her side of the green double doors swiveled their heads into a practiced stare-down, the front-seat passenger exited, then opened the back door ostentatiously, as if presenting a royal gift. That move shielded Percy long enough to get off two hardball rounds, each hitting a guard just above the bridge of the nose. Both were dead before they hit pavement.
The war machine shoulder-rolled and came up with a heavy pistol in his right hand. Ace was already at the door, stepping inside the club just ahead of Percy, his sawed-off wordlessly sending a “Don’t move!” message to the small crowd.
The first blast from Percy’s full-auto was enough to change that message to “Run!” Ace used his scattergun the way a teenager would use her forefinger to sweep through stacked-up messages on her iPhone, herding the terrified cattle into their escape chute. No role players reached for anything except better position in the herd—Ace’s black Zorro hat and matching leather duster were a message on their own.
The assassin whirled and quick-stepped to the right side of the club, which now resembled a Jackson Pollock canvas. Percy had already reloaded, but only two men were still alive, and no reinforcements had entered the slaughterhouse. Both of the living were sprawled on the green plush fabric of the horseshoe sofa, bleeding but breathing.
Ace put his face very close to one of them, said, “Where are they?”
“Huh? Who? Man, I—”
Ace used one barrel to interrupt by blowing the man’s face off. He whipped the weapon around to face the lone survivor. “You gonna pull that stutter act, too?”
“Upstairs,” the man gasped. “We didn’t know nothing. They paid for—”
Ace ended the man’s desperate plea with the second barrel, snapped open the weapon, and popped out the spent shells. He grasped two fresh loads between the fingers of one hand, re-chambered, and flicked the scattergun closed as he sprinted for the circular staircase.
Percy swept the entire room in one long burst, then followed right behind.
Three doors. Percy wrenched one open, Ace another. Both empty.
Drawing Dead Page 20
