“Where do we do it?”
“I’m on duty, so do me right here.” He backed up against the wall into the shadows and began to unzip his pants. Standing at arm’s length, she playfully stroked the flower along his groin and then up, up to just below his chin. She smiled, moved the flower near his nose and squeezed a button on the hard stem.
A blast of vapor sprayed into his face, and she quickly spun clear and stepped away from him. He looked confused, but it only took one second for the Kolokol-1 incapacitating agent to change his confused look to one of sheer terror. He took a step, wobbled, and then collapsed. Russian Spetsnaz troops had used something almost identical against Chechen terrorists—3-methylfentanyl dissolved in halothane—during the Moscow theater hostage debacle in 2002. Yulana knew the big man would be out for several hours, unless, that is, he died from the drug, as did many hostages during the 2002 theater raid. She didn’t want the man to die, but the truth was, it wouldn’t break her heart, either.
She placed an earbud into one ear and turned on the radio in her pocket. She clicked the TALK button three times, and after a few seconds, she heard Kit click the TALK button on his radio three times. So far so good.
Yulana moved to the rear corner of the building and chanced a scan of the parking lot. She didn’t see any guards, but half a dozen late-model sedans sat parked and she couldn’t tell if anyone was inside. If so, they’d see her as soon as she stepped into the open.
She pulled the radio from her pocket and whispered into it. “Kit, the parking lot.”
CHAPTER 50
Kit finished binding the two rooftop guards with duct tape. He put a final piece of tape across the thin man’s mouth, then answered Yulana’s radio traffic.
“What is it?”
“I think I see someone sitting in one of the cars,” she said.
“Wait one minute.” Kit slithered to the edge of the roof and used the binoculars. He squinted and blinked and finally made out the image of a guard sitting behind the wheel of an Audi sedan. And the man was wide awake.
With haste, Kit shouldered the futuristic-looking, suppressed P90 bullpup that he had in the rig under his jacket. The T-shaped reticle of the tritium night sight glowed red in the dim light as he tried to acquire a target picture. But even the soft red glow of the optics hurt his eyes, which were now supersensitive to light due to the migraine.
Suddenly, the guard opened the door to the Audi and got out. Something was wrong; he looked concerned and pulled a pistol from his shoulder holster.
Kit tried to sight on him, but he now had a flickering, partial alteration of his center field of vision. He rubbed his eyes, then looked into the sight again.
The guard slowly walked toward where Yulana stood pressed against the building.
Kit pressed the sight tighter against his eye. The flickering in his vision now spread out to the sides, like zigzagging black-and-white lines. It felt bizarre to be gazing into state-of-the-art optics with a migraine-related visual impairment, but then, life happens.
In a few more seconds the armed thug would reach Yulana and no longer be in Kit’s field of fire, so he relaxed, exhaled, sighted the weapon as best he could, then gently squeezed the trigger, because, death happens, too.
Yulana stood frozen with fear, her body pressed hard against the old building wall. She had chanced a second look into the parking lot after contacting Kit, and she feared the guard in the Audi might have seen her.
She heard a car door open and close, she heard footsteps approaching, and she wanted to run but couldn’t. She stood rooted in place, petrified with fear as she slowly reached for the pistol in her purse. She tried to will her hand to move faster, but it seemed to have a mind of its own. She could barely move; how in the world would she be able to aim and pull the trigger if the guard rounded the corner of the wall?
She bit down hard on her lip, using the pain as a stimulus to action. It worked, and she raised her pistol… just as she heard a different sound… like someone had fallen on the pavement.
She took a tentative step forward, then…
“Sorry, I should have checked that for you. You’re clear now,” said Kit, over the radio.
She exhaled with relief. As blood dripped down her chin from where she bit herself, she tugged on the backpack straps, then stumbled forward.
The commercial version of the device was called Sonic Assault and was sold as a gag item. Switch it on, and the high pressure acoustic generating device causes anyone within fifteen feet to get very sick to their stomach and begin vomiting. Unless the device was turned off, the only relief was to move away from the unit. The device Yulana placed on the window ledge of the first-floor security office was much more powerful than the commercial version.
She turned it on and quickly moved away.
Boris Krutov was bored, as usual. This kind of security duty wasn’t his cup of tea, because he never got to bust any heads. He much preferred working in strip joints or nightclubs. As he ran a hand through his thick black hair, he looked into the hackers’ room. They didn’t even notice him; all three of them wore earphones, listening to ugly music at ridiculously high sound levels. Overpaid spoiled brats, thought Boris, although he’d like to get his hands on the girl hacker for some horizontal recreation.
It wasn’t time to rotate posts yet, but screw it, no one really cared, and the bosses were either gone or asleep. So Boris crossed to the stairwell, opened the heavy steel fire door, and trudged up the stairs to the roof. He decided to play another trick on his friends at the rooftop post, so he opened the steel rooftop door very quietly and closed it softly. He took a few steps toward the cement tower, when he saw his friends, bound up with tape, lying on the roof.
Then Boris saw a man at the northeast corner of the roof hoisting a backpack. An intruder! Boris pulled his pistol and opened fire.
Vertigo, as part of the package of symptoms experienced by migraine sufferers like Kit, usually happened during the aura phase. For Kit, it always came at the end of that phase and just before the unbearable pain of the headache itself began. Kit always got objective vertigo, where the objects around him appeared to be in motion. As he bent down to open his backpack and remove a thermite grenade, he stumbled as his world went into a spin.
And then, gunfire! Kit felt heat rip into his back. He dove to the roof and rolled as more gunfire pierced the night. Wobbly, he stood up with his sound-suppressed pistol, an FN Five-seven that held twenty-one 5.7x28mm high-velocity cartridges that can defeat most body armor—the same rounds the P90 held.
He saw a man, one of Popov’s guards, but the man seemed to be moving so fast, circling Kit, that he actually saw many images of the same man. Kit understood intellectually that the vertigo was playing tricks on him, but he also knew that he made a good target just standing there. So he started firing his weapon at the images as he turned his body counterclockwise.
Kit was completely disoriented but just kept firing at the spinning images until his gun magazine was empty and the spinning form of the man was now lying prone as it continued to spin around him.
Kit knelt down and vomited again. Pain shot through his torso from the new gunshot wound. He took deep breaths, then took them quickly, oxygenating his brain. As quickly as the vertigo had come on, it faded.
Then the real pain in his head began. It was on the right side only—a unilateral migraine—and the torturous feeling began to ratchet up in intensity.