The hike through the woods was entirely uneventful. They walked cautiously, trying to make as little noise as possible in the dried leaves and underbrush, but daytime stealth was different from nighttime stealth. The trick was to look as natural as possible while still trying to remain undetected.
They spread out, too, keeping fifty yards between them both laterally and longitudinally. Boxers led, with Jonathan bringing up the rear. They kept in contact with each other and with Venice-“Mother Hen”-via encrypted radio.
“Hey, Scorpion,” Venice said through Jonathan’s left earbud. “I’ve got more good news for you. The house has got security cameras, and they beam their signals to a security company via the Internet.”
Jonathan pressed the transmit button in the center of his chest. “How is that good news?”
He could hear the pride when she said, “Because I own the Internet. I’m working right now to record empty fields of view. If you can give me a half hour, I’ll be able to loop the recordings and route the fake images to the transmitters.”
Amazing, Jonathan thought. “What are their fields of view?”
“Assuming that they use only one company to monitor, it appears that only the house itself-the perimeter and the interior-are monitored.”
“The fence line?”
“Absolutely.”
“Mother Hen, you’re my hero,” Jonathan said. He knew that Venice would take it as the high praise that he had intended.
Ten minutes later, Jonathan, Boxers, and Gail all arrived at the fence that surrounded Michael Copley’s sprawling home. The fence was nothing special-chain link, but of a gauge more suitable to a secure military facility than, say, a swimming pool. A Y-shaped bed of barbed wire capped the fence. If the links proved too tough to cut-and Jonathan guessed that they would-those same links would be that much easier to climb, and provide that much more stable a platform to take out the barbed wire with a pair of snips.
“Sure is a lot of sunshine out here,” Boxers grumped as they hunkered together in some bushes at the base of a very significant oak tree.
Jonathan looked at his watch. It was almost four o’clock. “Not for long. Give it another hour.”
“Bullshit,” Boxers said. “I’ll give Mother Hen the thirty minutes she needs to cover my ass, and then I’m going to work.”
Watching Jonathan and Boxers interact with each other-the lighthearted banter in the face of impending danger-Gail realized that she didn’t belong here. She would never be a full-fledged member of the team. These two men shared so much history-so much past pleasure and pain-that she couldn’t hope to become a part of it.
Everything about this operation felt alien to her. In her ordered world, formerly defined by the rule of law, planning meant everything. You didn’t make a move without a piece of paper telling you it was approved, and you didn’t fire a shot unless you were one-hundred-twenty-percent sure that it was defensible in court.
Even the sole focus on the rescue of the precious cargo was unique to her experience. During her days with the FBI Hostage Rescue Team, the primary goal hadn’t truly been the liberation of the hostages. Rather, it had been to lawfully ensure that the bad guys did not get away, and that the legal case you built against them would withstand the scrutiny of the bad guys’ legal defense team. They worked very, very hard to make sure that the hostages remained unharmed, but at the end of the day, it was a better career move to convict a kidnapper for murdering a hostage than it was to reunite a hostage with his family and then have his assailant walk on a technicality.
Gail was surprised by how rapidly her heart was hammering in her chest. She didn’t dare contribute to her colleagues’ banter for fear that her voice would tremble in the process.
She told herself to settle down. This wasn’t the first time that she’d strayed outside the law while in Jonathan’s employ. That trend had started on the mountaintop in Pennsylvania, and then continued into the wilds of Alaska some months later. She’d approved illegal wiretaps and photographs that never should have been taken, but those were mere violations of civil rights. She’d killed, but that had always been in self-defense. Jonathan was right to question her ability to kill prophylactically. That skill-to kill in order to eliminate an enemy before he could kill you-was perhaps the single most important factor that separated what police did from what soldiers did.
Studies had been written about it, in fact. Several decades ago, during America’s War on Drugs, the Drug Enforcement Administration had enlisted the aid of Navy SEALs for the interdiction of seaborne drug trafficking. The planners had envisioned the SEALs as a legal force multiplier that would chase down bad guys, place them under arrest, and recover countless millions of dollars in drugs.
In practice, the plan had proven disastrous. The SEALs chased down the boats easily enough, and they recovered the millions of dollars in drugs, but more often than not, there were no people left to arrest. If a bad guy had a gun, he was killed, consistent with the SEALs’ long-standing training.
It made sense when Gail thought about it. What was the point in having a conversation with a guy who wants to kill you?
If only prosecutors were that sensible.
The lesson learned from SEAL exercise was that training trumped intentions. When you invest millions of dollars in creating a warrior, that’s what you get. You don’t get a cop.
Now, Gail worried that the opposite was true. Could she be the warrior she needed to be when the time came to pull the trigger? And if not, then who would take her place?
Finally, an easy answer: No one would take her place. If she froze, the mission would come unzipped; and if that happened, everyone might die.
She could do this, she told herself. All it took was a total commitment to “We’ve got a guard coming,” Boxers’ voice said in her ear.
Gail shot her gaze first to the Big Guy, and then followed his eyeline into the woods, where a black-clad sentry was wandering into view.
“No guns,” Jonathan whispered. As he spoke, he drew his KA-BAR knife from its scabbard on his left shoulder. The finely honed edge flashed white against the flat black finish of the blade. Gail shifted her eyes and saw Boxers mimic the move.
Her own knife remained in its sheath on her belt. Another training deficit. She reached out to Jonathan and touched his arm.
He glanced at her briefly, then shook his head and pursed his lips in a silent shh.
“Let him go unless he poses a threat.” Jonathan’s whisper was barely audible over the radio.
Gail settled more deeply behind the bush that provided her concealment, her heart hammering Verdi’s “Anvil Chorus.” To her right, Jonathan and Boxers both looked like coiled snakes, every muscle tensed, their knives ready to separate the guard’s soul from his body.
The foliage confounded any clear view of the man as he approached, but to Gail’s eye he could have been the very sentry they’d seen in Rollins’s satellite photo. Tall and lean, he appeared to be young. He wore his M16 casually, dangling by a sling from his shoulder. He was nowhere near ready to confront an intruder. He had the complacent, bored look of a man who’d been walking the same route for far too long while seeing far too little action. Gail thought ruefully that she could probably jump out at him and yell, “Boo!” and he’d be half a mile away before he ever got his hand to his weapon.
This was all good news.
As the sentry approached within a few yards of their hiding place, Gail looked at Jonathan, whose eyes never left his prey. He remained perfectly still, nothing moving but his eyes as the young man passed the tree that shielded them, and then continued to wander down the line and around the corner. The danger had come and passed in a little over a minute. When the guard was out of sight, Jonathan’s shoulders finally relaxed.