She nodded. “Yeah. We’re good. Let’s hit it.”
Down the stairs and out to the van, and Karyn felt Anna’s eyes like a laser beam drilling a hole between her shoulder blades. That felt more wrong than the thing with Tommy. Up to this point, there should have been jokes and late-night bullshit sessions about how they were going to spend the money, and that should have gone double for this much money. They could make some long-term plans for a change. But that had all pretty much gone to shit since the argument. Karyn didn’t sleep much now, and Anna didn’t sleep at home, and when they spoke it was about precise tactical details of the job at hand and nothing else.
I’ll patch it up after the job. One night of work, and we can make this all better. Money, after all, fixed a lot of things. A shitload of money should fix everything, shouldn’t it?
Karyn got into her customary seat in the van, right up front where she could see everything. The trip gave her little time to do anything but fidget, and in any case there were no items left to attend to. Nail had planned the assault, as it were, in painstaking detail. Genevieve and Tommy had scoured the surveillance photos and done some scouting besides, and they’d put together a plan to breach the perimeter without triggering any magical defenses or alarms. Tommy had also prepared a box for the bone that ought to keep anything from leaking out or working the kind of mischief that these things sometimes did. Anna and Karyn had little to worry about at this point, other than just making the grab.
They left the close confines of apartment buildings and headed up toward Topanga Canyon. Tenements turned into houses turned into miles of low scrub and dry grass. This was as close to the middle of nowhere as Karyn had been in ages—a very good thing, since they were about to make a whole lot of noise, and the last thing they needed was a premature visit from the neighbors. Or the cops.
Nail parked the van on a side road a short walk from Mendelsohn’s estate. The night sky was dark, absent the moon, and Karyn could barely make out the curve of the estate wall a few hundred yards away.
“Ready?” she asked. A chorus of “yeah”s answered her. Anna met her eyes and gave a single authoritative nod.
The five of them poured out of the van. Nail pulled a heavy green canvas duffel bag from the back, and the others came in around him and grabbed small packs containing their equipment.
Tommy grinned. Smoke wafted up from his blackened eye sockets, and blood burbled from his mouth. “This is crazy. It’s gonna be awesome.”
Karyn shouldered her backpack and started walking.
* * *
“Are your men ready, Mr. Pullman?” Enoch Sobell stood inside Nathan Mendelsohn’s rambling estate, just the other side of one low hill from the house itself. He was surrounded by a half dozen figures clad thoroughly in black. Balaclavas covered their heads, night-vision goggles masked their eyes, and they sported enough hardware to outfit a Central American army. Sobell wasn’t sure what all that stuff was, but it certainly looked impressive, and if this whole thing went pear-shaped and it became a question of armament rather than stealth, he felt fairly secure in the outcome.
He felt for a moment, perhaps, a trifle out of place. He’d doffed his jacket for the occasion—and the necktie, sadly—and even rolled up the sleeves of his Burberry London dress shirt, but amid all this gun-toting machismo it was difficult not to feel at something of a manliness disadvantage. He reflected on the fact that he could torch the whole lot of them with a few words and gestures, incinerate them so thoroughly that it would be like they’d never been there, and that cheered him up somewhat.
Of course, that’s what got me into this mess in the first place, he thought, and the cheer dissipated.
“Yes, sir.”
“Very well, then. Just wait for the screaming to start.”
* * *
Tommy stopped twenty yards back from the wall. He recited a few words, pricked his thumb with a needle, and pointed his finger. The camera located near the top of the wall, neatly hidden beneath a phony downspout, turned a few degrees to the left.
Nail moved forward quickly, and the others followed in his footsteps as closely as possible.
It’s on, Karyn thought. Any moment now, the cry could go up. Maybe nobody’d notice that one camera among dozens had shifted its viewpoint a tiny bit, but maybe somebody would. The clock was officially ticking.
Nail stopped just short of the wall, and Genevieve drew up next to him. She produced a square scrap of paper, presumably the same one she’d spent all afternoon drawing an intricate web of patterns on. She tossed it into the air ahead of her. It caught fire, flared up, and disappeared.
Genevieve stepped to one side and, grinning, made an after you bow. Anna came forward, and Nail boosted her up. She stood on his shoulders and leaned against the outside of the wall without actually climbing atop it. She got out some tools, fiddled with something at the top—disabling the pressure sensor, according to the plan—and cut through the razor wire. It coiled up like an angry serpent, and she jerked her head back. Then she hauled herself up.
A quick look around, and she made a come on gesture to Nail. He hefted the big duffel bag up to her, and she dragged it to the top. The scrape of canvas against the rough stucco of the wall seemed louder than aircraft taking off, but then the bag was up, and Anna dropped it down the other side. She then dropped a short rope ladder, secured with hooks to the top of the wall.
Nail went up first, then Genevieve, then Tommy. Karyn came last, pausing at the top. She couldn’t see the house from here, but a line of parked cars filled the road around the low hill ahead and extended nearly to the front gate. Looked like the party was every bit as big as Drew had said.
She pulled up the ladder, dropped it down the inside of the wall, and climbed down.
From there, if the maps and Google Earth were to be believed, it was a half-mile run to the copse of carefully cultivated palm trees that would provide cover while they regrouped for the main event. This would be the worst part. Nail was pretty sure that, given all the people here tonight, perimeter security would get the most attention, and internal motion sensors and whatnot would likely be down. Genevieve agreed, but there was really no way to be sure. If they got spotted now, the clock would run down a whole lot faster than planned.
Before Karyn could get her thoughts in order, Nail took off. If the sixty pounds of hardware in the duffel bag slowed him down any, it sure didn’t show. The others lit out after him, and Karyn ran behind.
Her heart pounded in her ears, and her breath came loud and fast. She saw nothing threatening ahead, real or otherwise, but every hair on her body trembled in anticipation of a shout or a shot, and the faint crunch of footfalls on the trimmed golf course grass seemed a Klaxon blaring for Security’s attention.
The crew strung out in a long line. Fifty yards ahead, Nail dropped into a crouch and slipped into the shadows beneath the trees. A low murmur built in Karyn’s ears—the rushing sound of blood, she thought, until it took voice. That’s more than sixty, she thought.
Ahead, Genevieve and Tommy ducked in next to Nail. Karyn joined them moments later as the chorus of voices rose in some perverted variant of “Hallelujah!”
In the time that it had taken Karyn to catch up, Nail had already assembled two mortars and had moved on to the M60, a ridiculously large, tripod-mounted machine gun that he’d acquired from who knew what dubious sources. She knew she must be imagining it, but Nail seemed to be humming with joy as he set up the weapon.
Ahead of her, a truly surreal scene had been assembled. Mendelsohn’s house, a sprawling multilevel mess of twenty thousand square feet enclosed by glass panes and the occasional stone wall, choked the space between two shoulderlike hills. The hills narrowed, forming a sort of natural cul-de-sac a couple of hundred yards back in which stood a little guest house. It was surrounded by a wide patio: flagged in stone, encircled by a six-foot retaining wal
l, and large enough to play soccer on. At one end was an auxiliary swimming pool—evidently, the one nearer the house was wholly inadequate for Mr. Mendelsohn’s guests. All the pool furniture—and, if Karyn wasn’t mistaken, a large gas grill—had been pushed to one side, clearing most of the patio space. The lights from both the guest house and the main house had been shut off, as well as most of the patio lights, except for the few that cast blue rays up through the swimming pool. Instead of regular illumination, torches lined the retaining wall at intervals of maybe twenty feet.
Over a hundred robed figures crowded around the center of the patio. There were more torches here, enough that Karyn could see what was going on in the middle of the chanting throng.
Goddammit, she thought. They are gonna kill someone.
Mendelsohn had spared no expense on the altar. It looked to be a seven-foot-long slab of marble, inlaid with all kinds of vaguely threatening, darkly glittering symbols. A person—a man, Karyn thought, though it was hard to be sure—had been swaddled in white bandages and secured to the slab by chains hooked through eyebolts.
On the slab near the man’s head was a grinning crescent shape: the bone.
Eight guards stood at various points around the edges of the ceremony, small submachine guns in full view. They faced inward, not out, and Karyn realized that they were there not to keep intruders from crashing the party, but in case one of the faithful had a sudden change of heart.
At one end of the altar, a hooded figure raised a wavy-bladed knife to the sky. The chanting picked up in speed, the rising pitch lifting the hairs on the back of Karyn’s neck. The figure chained to the altar squirmed.
“Hurry up,” she whispered.
“We’re go!” Nail whispered back. “Get ready!”
Each of them took a moment to put on a respirator and thermal vision goggles, and readied their weapons. Karyn caught a glimpse of Anna’s face, cocked in her direction, and gave her a reassuring nod.
“Go!” Nail said.
Anna and Genevieve cut right as Karyn followed Tommy toward the house to the left. Seconds later, Nail fired the first grenade launcher. A loud, heavy whump split the air, and a canister of tear gas arced out above the assembled cult members and detonated. Two more followed, then a smoke grenade. White fog choked torches and cultists alike, and the air filled with the sounds of coughing and retching. Ahead of her, Tommy tossed a couple of stun grenades into the fog. The resulting bang nearly deafened Karyn—and, unlike the people below, she’d known it was coming.
Shock and awe, she thought with disgust. And then Nail opened up with the M60. If the night had been loud and frightening before, it must have seemed like Armageddon to the robed figures down there now. Hell, it seemed like the end of the world to Karyn, like she’d been dropped into Baghdad or Darfur with no warning, and even though she knew Nail was firing over their heads, the rounds doing nothing but churning dirt on the opposite hillside, terror squeezed her heart.
She and Tommy reached the spot where the wall tapered down to the patio. He hopped down, and she followed a second later. They stood between the crowd and the main house, where hopefully they’d be able to cut off anybody trying to escape with the bone. Karyn felt irritating drops of tear gas on her exposed skin, but the cloud was invisible through the goggles, the people exposed and clear as if it were midday. A figure emerged from the mob in front of her, and she almost fired, but she held off as she realized it was just a terrified cult member running for safety. The man ran past her and clambered up the wall. Two more followed. Then she saw a fourth figure, a man moving steadily toward her rather than fleeing, and before she even confirmed the presence of his weapon, she pulled the trigger.
The Taser hit him high in the shoulder, and he collapsed not ten feet in front of her. She kicked his gun away as she ran past and tugged at the Taser line. It didn’t budge, so she dropped the Taser rather than screw around trying to pull the darts loose and reel them back in.
Another flashbang detonated ahead and the remaining worshippers who weren’t stunned into immobility finally gave up and ran. A group of six came out of the tear-gas fog, scrambling over each other in their haste to escape. Karyn sidestepped them and stumbled into a rolling bank of noxious cloud. She gasped. The respirator did its job, mostly, but the air coming through had a noxious tang to it, and her eyes teared up as trace amounts slipped in around the seal of her goggles.
A shape ahead of her moved, light gray against the dark gray of the seething mob behind it. From the bulky headgear, she assumed it was Tommy. Another figure moved past him, running toward the house, arms clutching something to its chest.
The figure was gone in a moment, and Tommy followed.
Karyn started forward after them, then stopped abruptly and fell forward as something snagged the cuff of her pants. Half a second later, searing pain ripped into her calf.
Knife! He’s got a knife!
The man she’d Tasered clung to her ankle with one hand and clumsily swung a short survival knife with the other. Her calf was bleeding, the guy was surely going to stab her again, maybe do some real damage, and all she felt was confused surprise coupled with indignation that this was actually happening to her.
What the fuck? I guess I really did take too much.
* * *
The men moved at the first explosion, like sprinters leaving the starting blocks. In moments, they had disappeared over the low rise that had masked them from the house. Sobell took a moment to work a small spell that would scramble his appearance on any electronic equipment and ambled after them.
By the time he reached the front door, the two guards that had been posted there were dead, their bodies stuffed into the front coat closet. The low-ranking member of the team had already mopped up the blood trail, and the whole group stood at attention.
“Lead on,” Sobell said.
They moved through a short hall and into a spacious living room. Sobell couldn’t keep the sneer off his face. Mendelsohn’s place was a tasteless hat tip to Frank Lloyd Wright designed by somebody who didn’t understand the aesthetic, other than that everything must be squared off and, preferably, feature some kind of ungainly cantilever. Square blocks of uncomfortable-looking furniture lined the room in tiresome rectilinear precision. The room was dark, but Sobell felt certain that all the furnishings were black.
Ought to do good taste a service and burn this place down before we depart, he thought.
Sobell’s team flicked on gun-mounted flashlights as they moved to the basement stairway and began the descent. Sobell cast one last glance at the living room, shook his head, and followed the bobbing lights down. If his intelligence was correct, this level of the basement was carved up into perhaps a dozen rooms housing no fewer than thirty of Mendelsohn’s most devoted followers. They would be outside now, awaiting their peculiar version of the Second Coming. And good riddance.
Pullman, the squad leader, had done a good job memorizing the plans. He took two lefts and the next right without hesitation, dropping low just as he turned the last corner. The guardroom ahead was still staffed despite the activity outside—six men playing cards and waiting, guns at the ready.
Pullman wasted no time. He fired, dropping two of the guards immediately before the others scattered. The shots were uncomfortably loud despite the suppressor mounted on the gun barrel, and Sobell covered his ears.
The squad followed Pullman, and Sobell stepped back around the corner to wait until it was finished. An awful lot of shooting got crammed into the next few moments, and chips of concrete flaked off near Sobell as stray shots pounded the wall.
Then everything was quiet.
“Status?” Sobell shouted.
“Enemy’s down,” Pullman said. “Edgars got hit, but the body armor stopped it. We’ll have to move, though, sir. Pretty sure they got off a call to the others.”
Sobell walked around the corn
er, brushing dust from his shirt. “The others should be fairly busy right now. But your point is well taken. Shall we?”
The hall passed through the guardroom and continued around another bend, bringing them up short in front of a curious door. Sobell pushed the barrel of one of the guns up and across, playing the light over the surface. Black cast iron, rough, reminding him of nothing so much as the surface of an old frying pan. Somebody had etched it with a collection of runes and sigils. Probably Genevieve, Sobell figured. It looked like her work.
There was no doorknob or handle of any kind, but that didn’t bother him. He touched the door in three spots, said a few words. A white-hot line flared up around the outer edge of the door, causing the soldiers to step back and cover their eyes. A moment later, the door swung open.
“Don’t touch that,” Sobell said. “It’s hot.” He pushed up one sleeve of his shirt where it had unrolled and slid down. “After you.”
The stairs turned out to be metal as well, though of a much more utilitarian flavor: rough treads, handrails made of galvanized pipe. The hall below was similarly Spartan. The walls were unadorned cinder block, and the ceiling was left open to the bare structural members and floor above. This level was dark and unguarded. That made sense, Sobell thought. There was, after all, only one way in.
Sobell followed the men. He noticed a faint, odd smell as they started walking—something dead, certainly, but also the foundry smell of scorched metal, something with the acrid chemical tang of paint thinner, and something that was, unless he’d lost his mind, lavender. It turned into a full-on stench within just a few dozen steps. He swallowed roughly once or twice. The men in front of him coughed and rubbed at their eyes.
After about a hundred feet, the corridor turned sharply left, but before they reached that spot, Sobell called a halt.
“Stay here. Don’t come around that corner unless you hear me scream bloody murder.” He considered. “Actually, don’t come then, either. I’ll be fucked in that case, and there won’t be anything you can do about it. Just stay here and cover my behind. I need some quiet time. No interruptions.”
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