“So who are the civilians?”
“Cracker’s wife and kids. Volkov kidnapped them. He’s using them as leverage to make sure Cracker does as he’s told. I worry any large-scale operation — by one of Jones’s teams, by the police, by the army, by anyone, no matter how well trained they are — will not end well for them. If Volkov is in charge, his men won’t be the type to surrender easily. And they won’t show any mercy to their captives. We have to hit them quickly and quietly and incapacitate them before they even know they’ve been hit.”
He shared his thought that the thugs inside would soon split up, and his belief that that would be their best opportunity.
“We just need to get inside the building without being spotted,” Storm finished.
“The problem is there’s so much open land surrounding the factory on all sides. If they have a lookout, we’ll be spotted. If the lookout is quick with a rifle, we’ll get shot.”
The car went quiet for a minute or so. Then Strike said, “We could play it like we did in Sarajevo.”
“No good,” Storm replied, thinking back on that mission. “There’s not enough of a crosswind. And, besides, where are we going to get all the fertilizer we’d need on such short notice? This isn’t exactly farm country.”
“Good point,” she said. They lapsed into silence again. It was interrupted by Strike saying, “I’ve got flashbangs and gas masks in the van with me. There are enough windows in that place. We launch flashbangs through the windows and then move in.”
Storm was shaking his head halfway through. “Too much smoke. Too much confusion. Too much of a chance one of those kids catches a stray bullet.”
“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”
“Do you have night vision goggles?” he asked.
“Sorry,” she said. “That’s not part of my standard party kit.”
Another pause for contemplation. “What we need is some kind of a distraction so we can get inside the building,” Storm said. “From there we can pick them off one at a time.”
“How about an explosion? I’ve got some C-4 with me.”
“Yeah, but what are we going to blow up?”
A wicked grin spread across Strike’s face. “Well, that depends. How attached are you to Becky here?” she said, patting the dashboard.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I would. Come on.”
They didn’t need more words than that. In this world, there were two places — and, sadly, only two places — where Storm and Strike were always in perfect sync. One was the bedroom. The other was on a covert operation.
Twenty minutes later, they had wired Becky for detonation and pushed her to a run-down auto repair shop that bordered the factory to the north.
If a lookout saw them, they would just look like a husband and wife pushing their derelict car to a place where it could get fixed. They retreated north, going back to Clara Strike’s van.
There, they equipped themselves for the coming confrontation: bulletproof vests; KA-BARs, the combat knives preferred by the Marines; and some extra firepower. Strike went with a .40-caliber Colt and a 9mm Sig Sauer. Storm chose an ankle-holstered Compact Glock G38 with a silencer. It made for a nice complement to his Dirty Harry gun. Plus, he was able to grab several extra magazines. Having a few more bullets suddenly seemed to be a good idea.
“Kevin just sent a schematic to my phone based on the infrared,” Strike said, holding out a 3-D image displayed there. “This is their position a half hour ago.” She touched the phone and a new image appeared. “And this is their position five minutes ago. Obviously, this is subject to change if Volkov and some of his thugs roll out — as you suspect they will — but at least it tells us a little bit.”
Storm studied the second image, went back to the first, then returned to the second. The way Agent Bryan had colored the image, the building itself had been made largely translucent, the walls and floors appearing only as gauzy, blue outlines. Human beings appeared as blazing chunks of orange and red.
The lookouts were in different places in each image, suggesting roving patrols rather than guards at fixed stations. The hostages were on the fourth floor, in a room toward the middle of the building, and they had remained stationary. Two guards were in the room with them in each photo.
There were stairs at either end of the building, but not the middle. Whatever manufacturing the building had been constructed to accommodate had relied on a long stretch of uninterrupted assembly line. Stairs in the middle of the building had been deemed superfluous by some ancient architect. In the building’s subsequent uses, before its abandonment, those open floors had been cut up into more discrete spaces. There was now a long, straight hallway bisecting each floor, with rooms of various sizes on either side.
“Obviously we’re going to be approaching from below them,” Storm said, when he was done analyzing the floor plan. “It probably makes sense for you to take one stairwell and I’ll take the other. We’ll meet in the middle.”
“Sure. You want the north stairwell or the south?”
“North. That’s the side the explosion will be on. They’ll likely all flock to that side. I’d rather have them coming at me.”
“Always the gentleman,” Strike said, giving him a coquettish smile and a curtsy.
They departed the van, jogging as they went two streets up, eight blocks south, then two streets back over, allowing them to approach the factory on foot from the opposite side of where Becky was now waiting for her explosive final act.
Without a word, they crossed into the lot immediately to the south of the factory, finding shelter behind a concrete wall — all that was left of what had once been a building.
From there, they each peeked out what had once been a window, taking a brief glance at the approach to the factory — a hundred-yard obstacle course of urban flotsam.
“There?” Storm whispered, nodding at a spot where the bottom of the fence had been pried back, creating a semicircular opening perhaps two feet high, enough for any reasonably flexible person to clamber under.
“Then there,” Strike replied in the same hushed tone, using her eyes to point toward a tall pile of asphalt chunks that some paving contractor had dumped there to avoid the tipping fees at the local landfill.
“I’ll take the lead,” Storm said, gathering his legs underneath him to make the run. “If anyone here is going to get shot, it’s going to be me.”
“Storm, wait.”
“Wait?” he said, because the only noun that wasn’t in their shared dictionary was patience.
“Storm, I just…,” she started, and he saw she was having difficulty coming up with the words. “In the bar, we didn’t really… I didn’t really get the chance to say some things that have been on my mind, and…”
“Is now really the right time for this?” Storm asked, keeping his tone muted. He cast a wary eye toward the building.
“They’re not going anywhere for a little while yet. Besides, there’s never a right time with us. Our last meeting started with you pointing a gun at me.”
“Fair point,” he said, relaxing his legs, leaning against the wall, keeping one eye on the building and the other on Strike. “Okay. So what’s on your mind?”
“I guess I just… Look, I died once and didn’t tell you. You died once and didn’t tell me. I know I’m still the bad guy, because I’m the one who hit first. But I guess I was hoping we could, I don’t know, call it even. You forgive me. I forgive you. Maybe try to start fresh?”
A fresh start. With Clara Strike. Was there really such thing? Or was she the forever spider, with him as the fly?
“Clara, I don’t know, I… We have all this history, and sometimes it’s the best thing about us. Other times it’s like this lode-stone around our necks. So it’s easy to say forget it all and begin again. But, one, I’m not sure I want to forget it all — because if you make yourself forget the bad stuff, you risk forgetting the good stuff. And two…”