Unhurriedly, he pulled out his phone and made a call. “I’m clear. You are go for roundup,” he said simply and then disconnected.
Skoblin stared blankly at the black square on his laptop. The live video feed from their drone had gone haywire only seconds ago — breaking apart into a chaotic, dizzying swirl of distorted images before it went completely dark. His hands clenched. “Raven Eye, what just happened?” he barked.
The drone operator’s voice was strained. “I don’t know, Viktor. Everything just suddenly dropped offline.”
“Oh, really? Well, nice work, Yvgeny. I’m so glad I’ve got an expert like you around to confirm that for me,” he ground out sarcastically. “Look, is there any chance you can get the signal back?”
“Negative,” the other man admitted after a moment. “I think the drone must have crashed.”
Skoblin felt cold. So now their sole remaining means of tracking their target had died, leaving them completely blind? He felt sure this was not just an unfortunate accident. It had to be hostile action.
A sharp rap on the back of the van startled him. Reflexively, he grabbed for the Walther P99 9mm pistol lying on the workbench next to his laptop. Holding it ready, he reached out and cautiously peeled back the sacking he’d used to block the rear windows. He peered out. Through the dusty, tinted glass, he saw a female police officer in a peaked cap standing next to the van. Thoroughly bundled up in a heavy uniform jacket against the cold, she looked hugely irritated.
“Now what?” Skoblin muttered. Quickly, he tucked the Walther back out of sight in a toolbox and closed the lid. Then he got up, unlocked the van’s rear doors, and stepped awkwardly outside. After the thick fug of mingled sweat and cigarette smoke he’d been breathing for hours, the crisp, icy air was like a tonic.
“Is this your vehicle?” the police officer demanded, looking him dubiously up and down. Her nose wrinkled slightly at the smell.
Skoblin nodded.
She folded her arms. “Look, we’ve been getting a lot of complaints about this van of yours being parked out here day and night. The residents say it’s an eyesore. And they don’t see why you can’t at least move it somewhere out of sight once you’ve finished work for the day.”
With an effort, he hid a scowl. This was all he needed after this shitstorm of an afternoon… complaints from the local busybodies. Donning a look of regret, he shrugged his shoulders. “I’m sorry about that, Officer. But this is a big job, you see. And our client wants it finished fast. So we’ve got crews working around the clock.”
She glanced up at the conspicuously deserted building beside them and then turned back at him with an eloquently raised eyebrow. “Around the clock?”
Skoblin forced a twisted smile. “They’re on break just now. Union rules, you know.”
“I see,” the policewoman said dryly. Her voice hardened. “Do you have a permit for this restoration work?”
“Of course,” he assured her. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “It’s in the glovebox.”
“Show me,” she ordered.
Officious bitch, Skoblin thought furiously. She was toying with him. But with an obsequious nod, he turned away to retrieve the genuine permit the Raven Syndicate had paid through the nose to acquire.
Abruptly, the world around him flared bright white as though a bomb had just gone off. Involuntarily, he stumbled forward and collided with one of the van’s open rear doors. Slack-jawed, unable to speak, the Raven Syndicate agent slowly slumped over and collapsed facedown on the ground — completely incapable of controlling his twitching arms and legs.
Laura Van Horn calmly holstered the Taser she’d just used to stun the phony electrician. Then she turned around and whistled sharply.
Another van, this one white with sliding side doors, came barreling around the corner. It braked sharply and stopped at an angle right behind them, preventing anyone on the street from getting a good look at what was going on. The moment it stopped moving, two of her men jumped out. Quickly and with practiced efficiency, they bound the tased man’s hands and ankles using plastic flexicuffs. Then they blindfolded and gagged him for good measure. Once he was secured, the two men unceremoniously bundled him into their own vehicle — sliding him between two rows of seats. A tarp hid his body from view.
While they were doing that, Van Horn busied herself inside the blue electrician’s van. Working swiftly, she collected their semiconscious prisoner’s laptop, toolbox, and every piece of radio gear in sight. She didn’t bother going through the glove box. Whoever these people eventually proved to be, she could already tell they were definitely professionals. They’d never be stupid enough to leave a paper trail for her to find.
Once she was finished, she scrambled into the front passenger seat of their own van and nodded sharply to her driver. He put the vehicle in gear, pulled back out onto the road, and drove away. Gleefully, she grinned over her shoulder at the rest of her team. From start to finish, their work had taken less than a minute… and not one of them had needed to utter a single word.
Nick Flynn closed the door to a maintenance room on the deserted lower level of a public parking garage outside the city center. “Our friend inside is still tied up tight,” he said quietly. “He won’t be going anywhere until we’re long gone.” Laura van Horn and the rest of the action team nodded in satisfaction. Like him, they all now wore clothes suitable for travel — jeans and khakis, button-down shirts and sweaters, and lightweight blazers or jackets.
One of them, a short, compact, and forceful man named Shannon Cooke, shoved Van Horn’s discarded police uniform into a trash bag for later disposal. Cooke was a veteran of the Joint Special Operations Command who’d been recruited into Four several years ago. Before joining the Army, he’d actually started law school, only to decide that if he was going to hurt people, he’d rather do it honestly using guns and knives instead of just bankrupting them with overpriced billing. While on active duty, he’d served in the Army’s ultra-secret Task Force Orange, otherwise known as the Mission Support Activity. Its highly trained and independent-minded operatives often deployed into hostile territory first to gather the vital intelligence needed for high-risk U.S. special forces missions. Now he did similar work for the Quartet Directorate.
Flynn checked the time. Except for Tadeusz Kossak and Cooke, who would also see to their weapons and other specialized equipment, they were all booked out on various flights from Vienna’s International Airport over the next several hours. He turned to another member of the team, Alain Ricard, and indicated the pair of CCTV cameras rigged to scan this floor of the parking structure. “Are we still good on those? Plus the camera covering the garage entrance?”
Ricard clapped him on the shoulder. “No sweat, Nick. You can relax.” The tall Frenchman, a former officer in his nation’s elite Marine Commandos, was proud of his grasp of American slang. “They will turn back on at staggered intervals, starting ten minutes from now.”
Flynn nodded. There’d been a slim chance that temporarily disabling those surveillance cameras would be noticed. But he’d judged it a risk worth taking to conceal their brief activity here. After all, there were dozens of public multistory garages dotted across Vienna’s metropolitan area. Which meant, in turn, that the municipal employees overseeing all those parking structures had to monitor hundreds of separate CCTV feeds at any given time. So no one would be especially surprised or worried if two or three cameras went offline for a few minutes here and there.