When no one shot at him or jumped out at him, he allowed himself to rise to a crouch, and then to a standing position. He keyed his mike. “I’m in,” he said. “I’m going to sweep the building.”
“Roger,” Boxers said. “I’ve got eyes on the PC.”
Some might argue that it was overkill to search the entire house for other people-they only needed shelter for a few minutes, after all-but a hidden bad guy had the power to ruin Jonathan’s day in enough ways that it was worth the time it took to make sure there was no one else in the building.
It took him all of three minutes. Once he got past the two front rooms on the first floor, the rest of the house had virtually no furniture, and therefore no place for bad guys to hide. He checked every closet, and saved the basement for last. He chuckled in spite of himself. He wondered if anyone entirely escaped their childhood fear of basements. Still, despite the creepiness, the cellar harbored no terrors.
As he climbed the steps back to the first floor, he radioed, “The house is clear.”
“The sidewalk isn’t,” Boxers replied. “I found our sentries. There are at least two, and it looks like they kill time crashed in the front seat of the vehicles. Lazy bastards.”
That news was bad, but it wasn’t devastating. It wasn’t even unexpected. Jonathan asked, “Are they an immediate problem?”
“Negative,” Boxers said. “So long as we’re quiet.”
Back on the first floor now, Jonathan walked casually back to the window where he’d made his entrance and announced to Tristan, “No bad guys.”
“I figured that from the absence of shooting,” the kid replied. “Am I supposed to join you in there?”
That had been Jonathan’s original plan, but now it didn’t make a lot of sense. “No, just stay put,” he said. “I’ll do this and we’ll get going.”
Jonathan moved away from the window, back toward the house’s tattered kitchen, and nestled himself behind some cabinets and a bar to fire up his PDA and open the attachment Venice had sent him.
He keyed his mike. “Okay, Mother Hen,” he said. “You have the controls. Give me a tour.”
Squinting to see the tiny screen, Jonathan opened the encrypted link and watched the satellite image move to Venice’s commentary.
“Here’s where you are,” she said. The image zoomed from a few hundred feet up to maybe thirty feet above the ground. On the screen, he saw himself and his team squatted at the corner. It was creepy to watch yourself in the past.
Then the image lifted to a hundred feet and tracked due north, passing over rooftops and abandoned streets. After three blocks, the image tracked eastward and then stopped on a building that Jonathan recognized as the target house. “As the crow flies, this distance is about a quarter mile,” Venice said. “A little less.”
Jonathan squinted harder. He couldn’t see any people, but he knew that Venice would get to it. She had her own pace for these things, and she was not to be hurried.
“You’ll note that there aren’t any people,” Venice said. “Now watch when I put in the infrared filter.”
The picture blinked, and there they were: a dozen or more human-shaped heat sources crouched behind vehicles and corners of nearby structures. While their weapons did not show up well, the ghosts of rifles were visible, and the postures of the forms holding them sold it.
“I count fourteen people,” Venice said, “but there could be more. Actually, there are more. Seventeen, counting the soldiers Big Guy spotted.” Clearly, she’d been monitoring the radio traffic.
They’d set up a textbook ambush-not that it was a particularly difficult one to engineer. “They’ve got the front pretty well covered,” Jonathan said. “Show me the black side.”
The image moved again, and when it settled down, he saw an aerial view of a standard alleyway that could have been in any city in America: tiny backyards that appeared to be enclosed by stockade fences, backing up to other backyards with stockade fences. The space in between was barely big enough to accommodate a sedan, let alone the trash trucks that no doubt cruised the space once or twice a week.
The infrared imagery revealed two more people hunkered down back there. “There are numbers eighteen and nineteen,” Jonathan said. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
“Are they ever?” Boxers asked over the radio.
When the odds were this badly stacked, their only chance for success lay in speed and overwhelming violence, and the configuration of the OPFOR confounded both of those factors. Taking out the guys in the alley would be a simple matter of expending about three dollars’ worth of ammunition, but doing so would alert the troops out front, and ignite the kind of firefight that was especially difficult to win. Throw in the fact that these guys were real soldiers-as opposed to the thugs and posers that Jonathan so often encountered in his job-and the odds diminished even more.
There had to be a way, though, because there was always a way.
“Can you pull up engineering drawings for the house?” he asked. He had no idea what he was looking for, but if you didn’t look, you couldn’t find anything.
“Stand by,” Venice said.
“Holy shit,” Jonathan said off the air. He was in Mexico, for God’s sake. How could she possibly-
“Hey, Scorpion, I’ve got good news. I just got a call from Wolverine. The house has a tunnel.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Veronica Costanza left the way she had come, through the panel in the bathroom, and from there to wherever the tunnel led. A sewer. How appropriate. If Maria had a brain in her head, she’d have used the escape route herself by now. This waiting was killing her. It had been hours, and the phone Veronica had left behind hadn’t rung.
Was it possible that this was an elaborate setup? Had Maria’s safety been traded by the FBI for some larger prize? She’d heard of such things happening before. The Americans were famous for turning their backs on one friend in favor of a newer, more important friend. Just ask the citizens of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan about that. Americans’ priorities changed with the wind. Perhaps Maria’s usefulness had been expended, and now they needed to give her over to Felix to gain some larger prize.
Maria told herself that these were foolish thoughts-the paranoia of the moment-yet they continued to nag at her. Was it so different from what Veronica promised would be her fate if she failed to wait for the Americans whose lives were so important? Yet wait she did, even as soldiers surrounded her house.
She never looked out a window-in fact, she made a point of staying away from the windows lest she present too enticing a target, bullet-proof glass notwithstanding-but she knew they were out there, and she knew that they were planning to hurt her.
But she would not go quietly. Or peaceably. Her six-shot revolver would see to that. Weighing over a kilogram once it was loaded, her Taurus.44 Magnum was designed to kill attacking bears. She imagined it would stop Felix and his men. It would stop five of them, anyway. The sixth bullet would be for herself.
She knew the horrors that awaited her if Felix ever got his hands on her. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction.
So she continued to wait in the dark, both literally and figuratively. She’d turned off the lights so as not to throw shadows across the windows, and at the same time to be able to better see shadows that were thrown from outside. She sat in a fat padded chair in the only windowless corner in her house. The front door stood to her left, the kitchen and its back door to her right. Through the kitchen and into the bedroom lay the route to her survival-perhaps the route to the soldiers’ invasion.