There were four simultaneous flashes from four different points above the green, four rifle cracks that merged into one loud, echoing sound that split the night like a thunderclap. Salazar jerked with surprise and confusion as Quiros’s head snapped sideways, blood misting up around it and spurting from a hole in his chest, and then his mouth dropped open and blood was pouring from it, too, streaming over his lips and chin. Quiros went down, folded almost neatly, and lay still there in front of him on the grass.
Salazar spun around and saw that Quiros’s guard was also on the ground, his own man standing over the sprawled body.
He looked up at the roof of the museum, at the great fig tree, at the tops of the Spanish Village cottages and saw no sign of the snipers, nothing at all except shadows and pale silver moonlight.
His eyes widened with confusion. He hadn’t given the order. What the hell had happened here? He hadn’t given the goddamned order.
Ricci and Glenn were within fifteen yards of the hedges when they heard the discharge of the sniper guns smack the air up ahead.
Both had slowed to a trot to keep from scaring Quiros’s men out of the bushes. Now they came to a frozen standstill and looked at each other.
“Those were rifle shots.” Ricci removed his radio’s earpiece so he could hear more clearly. “Plural, I’m pretty sure.”
Glenn nodded. “I’ve heard synchronous fire before. You don’t forget the sound.”
Ricci reached under his sport jacket and pulled his Five-Seven out of its holster. Glenn drew his own piece, a Beretta 9mm.
“Where you think the shooting came from?” Ricci said.
Glenn started to answer, then abruptly tapped his radio earpiece to indicate he’d been squawked, and listened.
His features were stunned as he ten-foured into the unit’s neck mike.
“Let’s have it,” Ricci said.
Glenn looked at him.
“Quiros is down,” he said. He pointed eastward beyond the walkway and hedges. “The green, back of the museum.”
“Fuck.” Ricci’s breath escaped him in a sick rush. “What about Salazar and his bodyguard?”
“They’re on the go.”
“Tell our people to stay on his tail, but I don’t want anybody trying to take him, not under any circumstances. Those shooters that tapped Quiros have the overhead positions and are going to cover his retreat.”
Glenn nodded and conveyed the message.
Ricci was forcing himself to think. “We have to get over to Quir—”
There was a loud stirring of vegetation to his right.
They might have started out of the bushes a second or two earlier, Ricci wasn’t positive. In his momentary crushing distraction, his effort to pull his wits together, he could have missed hearing them right off. But he’d heard them now.
He wheeled toward the sound of tossing branches, spotted Quiros’s men spotting Glenn and him, remembered a couple of them from the Golden Triangle office. One was the bulky door-opener, Jorge.
Just doing his job, Ricci thought.
And all within a heartbeat he saw the recognition in Jorge’s eyes, saw Jorge notice the Five-Seven in his hand…
And then Ricci saw Jorge start to point his own gun at him.
Glenn reacted to the disturbance in the shrubbery in near unison with Ricci, pivoting on his heel, whipping his Beretta toward the hitters as they appeared from cover.
“Team One, move in!” he called into his throat mike.
They were already moving.
By the time he saw the gun coming up in front of him, Ricci was on automatic pilot: his position, movement, and firing seamlessly integrated, the large figure outlined against the bushes objectified to his trained eye, a target with specific aiming points.
The Five-Seven in a firm, two-handed grip, his arms extended, feet apart, he dropped into the slight crouch of a police shooter’s stance and fired three rounds into the darkness, catching Jorge dead on with every one of them.
Clouted off his feet, Jorge collapsed backward, a yawning hole briefly visible in his chest before he crashed heavily down into a clump of shrubbery.
Ricci didn’t pause to think. You didn’t pause at these moments, didn’t think; at these moments you were the tip of an arrow.
Leading with his Five-Seven, he swiveled to the right, where another slugger had advanced from the bushes, his pistol a blur as he brought it up toward Glenn. Ricci took a quick breath, sighted, pulled the trigger on his exhalation. Glenn’s Beretta spurted flame at the same instant. The slugger did a grotesque shimmy on his feet, then pitched over sideways.
Ricci sought more movement, listened for more rattling in the hedges. There, over to the left, a third man raised his gun. A fourth beside him.
And then from farther back in the darkness, a female voice called out, “Don’t try it! Toss your weapons, hands up in the air. Now!”
Ricci focused on the spot from which the command had been shouted and saw a woman in a rigger’s outfit with a semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. The luminescent Sword ID on her breast identified her as one of his own.
A moment ticked by.
Two more figures had rushed out of the night to either side of the woman and formed up in a semicircle around the hedges. Men in dark civvies, firearms held out, glow-in-the-dark Sword insignias seeming to float over their chests.
Ricci kept his Five-Seven on the sluggers, saw Glenn doing the same with his Beretta from the corner of his eye.
Both men waited to see if the sluggers would pick smart or dead, their choice here, no lifelines, no polling the audience.
They dropped their pieces, raised their hands.
Smart.
Ricci sprang out of his crouch toward Glenn, leaving the frisk-and-cuff to their foot team.
“The green,” he said. His hand on Glenn’s arm. “Take me over there.”
Ricci had known Quiros was down but had hoped to a God he’d never been sure existed that Quiros wasn’t out. What he found on the lawn would not make a religious man out of him.
One brief glance at the body on the grass was all it took to establish there wasn’t a spark of life remaining in it. Whatever part of the head hadn’t gotten scattered aross the lawn was a gaping, bloody mess. Ricci guessed it should have seemed odd to him that Quiros’s glasses had stayed on his face, that they weren’t even askew, but he’d been around violent death enough to know it often had a sardonic touch.
He knelt over the body, searched through its pockets, and found nothing of use. Then he just knelt there feeling numb.
Far across the lawn, he could see Glenn looking up at the tops of the buildings around them, standing with his gun loosely at rest against his leg. The roofs looked empty. The monster tree looked empty. Not much risk to being here, the snipers were probably gone by now. If they were still in place, they weren’t a threat. Their work showed they’d been top-tier pros, and the job they’d been hired to perform was finished.
Glenn raised a hand to catch Ricci’s eye and signaled that he wanted to do a walkaround, pointing toward the front of the museum. Ricci waved for him to go ahead and watched him turn the building’s corner, leaving him alone with the body.
Ricci knelt over it, looked down at it, the night feeling very deep around him, its chill penetrating his clothes.
“You got away from me,” he said to Quiros’s un-hearing ears, his voice flat and husky. “Got away, you son of a bitch. And I don’t know what to do.”
He never heard anyone slipping up on him. Never heard a sound. Despite his natural alertness, his finely keyed senses, not a sound until the voice spoke out of the darkness mere inches behind his back.
“Shazam,” it said.