Bravo

by Greg Rucka

  Without waiting for a response, the Architect turns, heading south. Bell matches his pace.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “You’re going to let Jordan Webber-Hayden go free,” the Architect says. “Before you do, you’re going to give her your phone number. She is going to send two text messages to your phone from numbers that I will recognize. The first message will be proof that she is free and under way. After that message, I will give you a piece of intelligence to demonstrate good faith. The second message, from a different number, will provide proof that she is safely out of your reach. At that point, I will give you everything you need to stop the attack before it begins.”

  “You’re talking time,” Bell says. “We release her right now, how long does it take for her to reach wherever she’s going and send that second message?”

  “You’re worried the attack will occur before she verifies her freedom.”

  “Correct.”

  “The attack will commence at eighteen hundred hours in zone.”

  “Which zone?”

  “Not yet,” the Architect says. “It’s almost four now. Do the math yourself.”

  Bell answers without pause. “Fourteen to seventeen hours.”

  “Yes, but I’d advise viewing it as somewhat less than that. You’ll need to get your people in position, after all.”

  “Or we could just grab you.”

  “You could do that,” the Architect says, agreeing. “You could black-hood me and pack me off to Gitmo or anywhere else. You could take my laptop and attempt to breach its security. You could pull out my fingernails and waterboard me. And you might well get what you want, and you might even get it with time to spare. But if you don’t, I guarantee you, hundreds of American lives will be lost today. Conservatively. This isn’t hyperbole.”

  Bell is silent for a moment, and the Architect suspects he’s listening to traffic in his ear. “I believe you.”

  “Then let her go. Do it now.”

  There’s another silence, and then Bell says, “She’s being released and your instructions are being relayed. Can we give her a lift somewhere?”

  The Architect laughs. “That’s very generous of you, Master Sergeant. But she’s a big girl, and she knows what to do.”

  “She’s a messed-up girl.”

  “Well, I’m a messed-up boy, so what can you do?” The Architect stops, looks out at the lake again, and Bell, likewise, halts. “It’s a big, messed-up world.”

  “You’re not helping unmess it.”

  “I am, actually. But you wouldn’t understand. You’re part of the problem.”

  He turns away from the water.

  “We’ve got a lot of time to kill,” the Architect says. “Let’s see if we can’t find someplace where we can kill it.”

  They find a café on the corner of South Winooski Avenue and Cherry Street, loiter outside for twenty minutes before it opens at a quarter of seven. The sun has been up long enough for the Architect to take a good look at Bell, and his first impression is of incredible fatigue. The man’s eyes are faintly bloodshot, the bags beneath them a haze of bruised purple. There is stubble, at least two days’ worth, and a faint if unmistakable scent of sour sweat and overworn clothes. There is a tattered bandage around his right palm; the cloth tape that holds the gauze in place is dirty and peeling, and when they walk, the Architect sees hints of a further injury to his left leg or perhaps his ankle. The Architect himself is feeling tired, but Jad Bell looks like he’s running, literally, on fumes.

  “You should get some sleep.”

  “Tell me what I need to know and I’ll be able to.”

  They get a table, each of them ordering coffee.

  “You’re paying,” Bell says.

  “More than you can imagine. You should get your phone out.”

  Bell takes his phone off his hip, and the Architect can see the pistol riding there. He expected nothing less. The coffee comes, and Bell lays the phone beside his mug. The Architect looks at the menu, orders the gingerbread pancakes. Bell orders eggs over easy and wheat toast.

  His phone chimes, and Bell looks down at it, then shows it to the Architect. “That the number?”

  The Architect lowers his mug and looks at the screen. The number matches.

  In transit, dorogoy.

  “So far so good,” the Architect says.

  “Your turn.”

  “You have more time than you think. The target is in the western United States.”

  “You have something against Californians?”

  “I did not say it was California.”

  Bell pushes back from the table, taking his phone with him. “I’m going to make a call.”

  “Of course you are.” He watches as Bell steps outside. The café is filling up rapidly, even given the early hour. The Architect finishes his coffee, finds that he’s feeling remarkably calm. Of course, he realizes, this is the easy part. Bell and those he works for will play him along until they have what they need.

  He thinks about Zoya, wonders which of the caches she’s cleared, what route she is taking. It doesn’t matter much, only that she gets clear of the country. The first number, the message that just arrived, he recognized. The second that comes he won’t, but Bell has no way of knowing that, just as Bell has no way of knowing that Zoya’s run, now, is simply that. When she feels she is safe, she’ll let him know.

  That she will be safe isn’t a question. The calculus of the scenario is absolute. In the grand scheme of things, Zoya means nothing to Bell and his owners, only to the Architect. In the grand scheme of things, they are trading her for him, and he is the prize of greater value.

  The Architect watches as Bell speaks on the phone, then he directs his gaze around the café as his mug is refilled. From Brock’s files, he makes at least one of the men present as another of Bell’s team, the one called Chaindragger. He ignores him, and his pancakes come, and the Architect attacks them with vigor.

  Bell returns to find his plate waiting for him. They eat in silence.

  Finished, the Architect lays a twenty on the table.

  “My treat,” he says.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  BELL DOESN’T KNOW what to think.

  At first he thought the walking around was Echo’s way of flushing coverage, of identifying and counting the surveillance, but the man genuinely doesn’t seem to care how much of how many are watching them. They’ve had breakfast, walked much of downtown Burlington, and ended up on a pedestrian mall that has too many people and no vehicle access, and Bell thinks that if Echo wanted to run, this would be a pretty good place to start the race.

  But Echo gives no sign of fleeing. He gives no sign of anything, just maintains the complacent calm of a man who knows how to wait. What little he’s said seems to both mock and defer, as if he holds Bell in contempt but somehow feels sorry for doing so.

  Now it’s eight minutes to ten in the morning, and Echo wants another cup of coffee. Bell is happy to oblige, mostly because he can’t feel the caffeine anymore. They get their drinks at a shop on Church Street, and Echo himself suggests they take a table outside.

  “Easier on the surveillance teams, I should think,” he tells Bell.

  “Jesus fuck,” Heath says in his ear. “This guy is ice.”

  “Brickyard,” says Ruiz. “Status.”

  “I’ve got eyes on.” Cardboard now. “Still at Church Street, sharing a table.”

  “Blackfriars,” Nessuno says. “Coming up from the south.”

  Bell looks past the Architect, sitting opposite him, sees Nessuno, wearing a baseball cap and carrying her jacket over her arm, coming up the pedestrian mall toward them. She stops, window-shopping, and Bell focuses on the Architect, finds the man staring at him again. Every time he looks at him, Bell feels like he’s being weighed, measured, and itemized.

  “Radio chatter?” the Architect asks.

  “You know it.”

  “It’s interesting. I had thought about approaching y
ou before.”

  “For?”

  “I lost a good man in Tohir. I need to replace him.”

  “You wanted to recruit me?”

  “I considered it. You have exceptional skills. You’re smart, or at least smart enough. You’re dogged. You don’t posture. You’re loyal, as evidenced by the trouble you went to in an attempt to preserve your marriage. Amy seems a remarkable woman, by the way.”

  “You’re well informed.”

  “I had help.”

  “Brock.”

  “Obviously. I considered it, as I said. And rejected it. It’s clear you would have refused.”

  “How would you know if you never asked?”

  “Because you’re a good soldier, Jonathan. Even if the people you soldier for aren’t.”

  “You’re telling me you’re the good guy?”

  The Architect waves a hand as if shooing a lazy fly. “I’m long past measuring things in terms of good and bad or, worse, good and evil. Frankly, I’d have thought you were, too. But I’ve never understood patriotism. It requires a willful blindness I find difficult to stomach.”

  “Zoya said she’s Russian,” Bell says. “She says she doesn’t know where you’re from.”

  “Where do you think I’m from?”

  “I don’t know.” Bell considers everything he’s seen of the man, everything he’s heard him say, tries to collate the information into something that resembles an informed opinion. “Your English is excellent, accent sounds native. It’s a little stiff, fluctuates between almost colloquial and formal. You’ve got some European manners. You’ve clearly traveled extensively, you’re clearly educated. First World child.”

  “Would it surprise you to learn I’m American?”

  “Are you?”

  The Architect smiles at his coffee. “I’m going to need a bathroom. Can I go alone? Or do you want one of your men to follow me?”

  Bell holds up his cell phone. “I think you’ll come back.”

  “Yes, I certainly will.”

  The man rises, disappears into the building. Bell stretches, arching his back. The sunlight is too bright, hurts his fatigued eyes. He thinks he’s slept all of four hours in the last forty-eight.

  “Status?” he asks.

  “You are prepped and fueled,” Ruiz says. “Soon as we have the intel, you are go.”

  “Capture team?”

  “Waiting on the word.”

  Cardboard, in his ear, cuts in. “What?”

  “This is open for discussion?” asks Nessuno. “This is a debate?”

  “Priority is his intel,” Ruiz says. “We are waiting on the word to bag him.”

  There’s something in the way he says it that makes Bell think there are others on the net, other people listening in aside from Heath and Ruiz and Nessuno and the rest of his team. Brock had a list, he remembers, and it wasn’t one the colonel had been willing to share. Bell thinks again about the authorization required to go after Brock, about how high up the chain of command this must now reach. If everything they’re doing now isn’t feeding straight back to the White House Situation Room, he’d be surprised.

  The Architect returns.

  “Message?”

  Bell shakes his head.

  “You didn’t do something stupid, did you?” the Architect asks.

  “Stupid like what?”

  “Put a tail on her. Try to track her. Bug her.”

  “We did not.”

  As if in answer, his phone chimes. He doesn’t recognize the number.

  Safe.

  The Architect is leaning forward, he’s responded to the noise, and Bell hands him the phone, watches the man’s reaction. When Echo smiles, his face moves just a little wrong, and Bell can see the effects of cosmetic surgery, but only just. Whoever did it was very good and therefore very expensive. Bell would put the man in his forties, close to his own age, if he felt he could trust what was before his eyes.

  “Happy?” Bell asks.

  “Pleased, rather.” The Architect hands him back the phone.

  “Let’s hear it.”

  “Before I do—”

  “No,” Bell says. “Now. That’s our deal.”

  The Architect nods once, reaches into his coat, and comes out with a fountain pen that he uncaps. There’s a paper napkin on the table, and he writes on it, the ink leaching through the fibers, spindly fingers crawling out from letters and numbers. He hands the napkin to Bell, screws the cap back on his pen.

  “That is the address of a house in Las Vegas, Nevada. That is the staging house. Inside are six men. Those men are armed with fully automatic weapons, small arms, and twenty-four hand grenades. At eighteen hundred local, they will depart from the house in three vehicles, three teams of two, and proceed to the Strip. At eighteen forty, they will launch an attack from entry points to the north, east, and south of the major casinos on the Strip’s west side, one team entering at the Bellagio, another at Caesars Palace, and the third at the Mirage. They will first attack the casino floors, where the sight lines are almost entirely unobstructed, for maximum chaos, then they will move into the casino’s shopping areas to group up and take defensive positions. Their targets are anyone who moves.”

  Bell puts a hand to his ear. “Got all that?”

  “Confirmed,” Ruiz says. “Second Team is rolling.”

  The Architect starts to rise, and Bell reaches out, takes his wrist, pins it to the table. “Hold on.”

  “I’m leaving,” the Architect says.

  “No, you’re not.”

  The Architect sits heavily, sighs. “You’ve not thought this through. Hopefully others have.”

  “You’re not walking away.”

  “I have given you exactly what I promised. As I said, you can stuff me in a van and cart me off and put me in irons and sweat me for months. You have that power, I recognize that. You will certainly shatter my network, you will certainly get more out of me than you have done already.”

  Past him, Bell can see Nessuno is moving up. He sees her mouth move, hears her saying, “Take him.”

  “But you will not get much more,” the Architect is saying. “And you will lose what I can provide you. You will lose the intelligence I can gather and would be willing to share. You will lose an asset.”

  “You’re an enemy of my country,” Bell says.

  “No. Your country was just the arena in which I was paid to operate.”

  “Hold,” Ruiz says. “Hold.”

  “I’m going to walk away, now, Jon.”

  “You’re not going anywhere.”

  Chaindragger’s voice, soft, “I have transport, exfil north side.”

  “Hold,” Ruiz repeats.

  “Take him down.” Nessuno’s voice, hissing. “Jesus Christ, take him down!”

  The Architect doesn’t move, doesn’t pull, just looks at Bell with surprising resignation.

  “They’re going to order you to let me go, Jon,” he says.

  “Cut him loose,” Ruiz says.

  Nessuno’s voice comes from behind the Architect as much as in Bell’s ear. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  “This is from the shiny on-high,” Ruiz says. “You are ordered to release target Echo and clear your AO; repeat, you will release target Echo and clear your area of operations. Proceed to ANG local for immediate loadout and transport. I require confirmation.”

  Nobody moves.

  “Warlock, I require confirmation.”

  Echo smiles sympathetically.

  “Warlock, confirm.”

  “Warlock,” Bell says. “Confirmed.”

  He lets go.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  THE GULFSTREAM G650 eats the sky at a top speed of 704 miles per hour, covers the distance from Burlington to Las Vegas in just under four hours, sets down at McCarran just after 1500 local. Bell, despite thinking he wouldn’t, manages almost three hours of sleep on the plane, then leads the team off and into the back of the waiting van. His team is light. There will
be running, there will be gunning, and this will be a speed strike, and that means Jorge—Bonebreaker—is once more out of the action on this deployment because of his injured ribs. The Second Team, once commanded by Tom O’Day and now being led by Sergeant Josiah Henry, is waiting for them at a staging area four blocks from the house, at the edge of the perimeter established by local law enforcement.

  Bell, Chaindragger, and Cardboard are all geared and ready to roll by the time the van comes to a stop. In the absence of Steelriver, and with Henry’s consent, Bell has command. He steps up to the command post—more precisely, another unmarked van—and Henry gives him the briefing book.

  “By-the-numbers parakeet op,” Henry says. “If it’s not a friendly and it moves, it dies.”

  Bell looks over the blueprints. He reviews the plan of attack. He reads over the list of operator call signs, the number of Indigos in each element. Eight men could do this job well. Doctrine says that twelve would be ideal. They have seven, and Bell took the house in Tashkent almost a week ago with only four.

  Seven will be more than enough.

  “We’re buttoned up on this?” Bell asks.

  “We’ve had command as of fourteen fifty local.” Henry understands what he’s asking without needing explanation. This is an Indigo op, he’s saying; we are secure.

  Bell takes the secure phone handset from its rig, keys the mike. “Indigo oh-one actual, we are in position and standing by.”

  “Brickyard, actual.” It’s Ruiz, not the duty officer, not some CWO or staff sergeant, in the TOC. “You are go.”

  The Second Team makes their breach at the front, hydrocharge on the door and following with their 9-bangs. Bell, Chaindragger, and Cardboard take the back; this was Bell’s call, made because he’s still missing Bonebreaker and because he expects lighter resistance at the rear of the house. He effects entry with a ram, knocks the back door clean off its fittings. He drops the ram and pivots, Board, then Chain, taking the entry as he swings up his own submachine gun to follow. There’s steady chatter on the radios, the dulled concussion of the grenades. Their weapons are suppressed, and Bell can hear no gunshots, but Henry comes through almost at once with a “Tango down,” and another on his team gives a “Clear.”