A vertical seam of light on the far side of the room solved the riddle. As he closed to within a few feet, he clearly saw the outline of a double door in the wall. Lowering himself to his knees, he once again used fiber optics to peer into his future.
The image on his PDA showed a brightly lit area of utilitarian construction. An unremarkable off-white hallway rose from an unremarkable tile floor. Distances were difficult to judge, but every ten feet or so, the walls gave way to closed doors. He’d seen this sort of unimaginative decor in countless office spaces throughout the world.
The good news was that he didn’t see any people in the camera’s field of view. But someone had left the lights on.
Hoping to find the means to open the door, he used the flat of his palms and rubbed the door from knee to shoulder height. Sooner or later he’d find a knob. When he couldn’t find it after a minute or so, he flipped his NVGs out of the way and opted to use the muzzle light from his M4. Within seconds, the bright white disk of light revealed not a knob but a D-ring that had been recessed into the wall. If there was an alarm system, he couldn’t see it.
Didn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. He winced in anticipation as he turned the ring. While Venice could easily disable even a sophisticated system from sounding the alarm at the off-site headquarters, she was powerless to silence local alarms that were tied directly to the sensors.
Holding his breath, he pressed the door open, and…
Nothing. The mission gremlins remained on his side. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He pressed his transmit button and whispered, “Radio check.” He would have been inaudible to someone standing two feet away.
Venice answered, “A little crinkly, but I’ve got you.”
“I’m in the basement.”
“Copy. Take care of yourself.”
The first order of business was to establish a forward operating base for himself here in the bowels of enemy headquarters. If the conversations they’d monitored were still operative, he had more than an hour to kill before anything interesting happened, and standing in the middle of the hallway for that amount of time was a nonstarter.
He decided to start in one of the offices. First, though, he owed his team some intel. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said.
“Right here.”
“I’ve got a total of eight rooms on either side of the first hall, directly inside the doorway. They’re pretty heavy construction, and they’ve got some heavy locks.” In Jonathan’s experience, people used big locks to secure against big fears-the kind of fears that posed big threats to people like him. In his mind, he could see Venice back in Fisherman’s Cove typing like crazy to document what he was telling her.
“More in a minute,” he said.
Neither of the first rooms on the right or the left bore padlocks, so he targeted those first. The one on the left was locked at the knob; the one on the right was not, so he chose the locked one. There was no way in the world he was going to hang out in an unlocked room, and if the room on the right was supposed to remain unlocked, so be it.
Using his picks, he gained entry in seconds. He was in somebody’s office. The computer and the file cabinets were a dead giveaway. He locked the door behind him and keyed his mike. “Radio check.”
“Not as strong as before,” Venice said, “but I’ve got you.”
“Continuing, then,” Jonathan said. “The hallway on my side terminates in a right-angle turn to the north. I can’t see around the corners, but it looks to me as if this area is designed either as secure office space or secure storage. I’m about to step out to surveil the area now.”
He didn’t wait for a response. Stepping back into the hallway, he turned left and eased quietly down the hall. He moved at a crouch, his M4 up to his shoulder and ready.
The bright light was his greatest immediate hazard. At least they were overhead fluorescents. The shadows thrown by fluorescents were far less prominent than their incandescent cousins.
Jonathan heard voices as he approached the turn, and stopped. If they were approaching him, he was screwed; the mission would come to a violent end right now. As it was, the voices seemed stationary, neither getting closer nor farther away.
With his M4 dangling parallel to his body via its sling, Jonathan moved at an excruciatingly slow pace to the end of the hallway at the turn. He pulled a rubber-handled dental mirror from a pocket in his sleeve-the analog equivalent of fiber optics-and used it to take a look down the perpendicular hallway. He advanced it with the lens pointing toward the floor to guard against an unintentional flash of light, or an errant reflection fairy on the wall.
What he saw made his stomach flip. Two young people, late teens, early twenties-a boy and a girl-stood about halfway down the hall, flanking a heavy door. They both wore holstered sidearms and appeared heavily engaged in a whispered argument, the text of which he couldn’t hear. The girl was the one standing farthest from him, and she was turned so he could see her face.
When he realized that he recognized her, he nearly gasped. That was the shooter from the bridge.
In his ear, Boxers whispered, “Okay, we’re pegging the weird-o-meter up here. They’re changing into robes. Think Klansmen without the hoods.”
Jonathan withdrew his mirror, replaced it in his pocket, and quietly unslung his ruck and placed it on the floor. They needed to be able to watch what was happening in that hallway.
“This is a trial,” Boxers whispered. “But the defendants aren’t present, and there’s not a lot of doubt how it’s going to go.”
“You’re talking a lot,” Venice said. “Are you under enough cover?”
There was a pause. Then Boxers tapped his microphone to say yes.
Jonathan found the wireless camera and transmitter he was looking for in the left-side pocket. He splayed the flexible wire legs that served as a tripod, and he placed it on the floor, using the point of his finger to move it past the angle of the turn. About the size of his thumbnail and black, it would be visible to anyone who looked at it, but if you didn’t know what you were looking at, it could easily be written off as an insect. In fact, he’d had a few of these babies stomped on over the years.
“I’ve got your signal,” Venice said in his ear without him asking. “I see two people standing in a hallway. They’ve made no indication that they’ve seen you.”
Jonathan acknowledged with a tap to his transmit button. What he needed was a way to peek inside that room they were guarding. If the Nasbes were there, and they were together, he’d pull Boxers in, snatch them both, and make a running getaway. But he couldn’t do that with the guards there.
With nothing better to do, he headed back to his makeshift FOB to wait out the next event, whatever that might be.
While he did that, Venice polled them for situation reports. Boxers replied by breaking squelch, and Gail said that she was bored.
Boring was good, Jonathan thought. But he doubted that it would stay that way for long.
CHAPTER TWENTY – FIVE
The pain in Ryan’s arm had dulled to a low, constant throb, punctuated by occasional jolts of agony when he gave in to the urge to test if it still hurt to move his fingers or wrist. It was a stupid thing to do-it always hurt, and why wouldn’t it since the bones were broken?-but he couldn’t resist. It was like testing the wet-paint sign, only with high-voltage paint.
The splint and the sling definitely helped. He supposed that he should feel more grateful to Sister Colleen than he did. She showed him kindness that no one else showed, after all, and she liked his muscles. But even if she blew him, there’d be no getting around the fact that she was a flaming nut job.
He refused to believe that they were really going to kill him. That thing with Brother Stephen had been an accident, after all. Wasn’t a broken arm punishment enough? Besides, why go through all the effort to splint his arm if they were just going to murder him anyway?
He tried not to think about what might have happened to his mom through all of this. If they knew about Brother Stephen, then they had to have done something about her. He tried telling himself that it couldn’t be any worse than what Brother Stephen had been trying to do, but he knew that wasn’t true. He’d seen movies, and he’d read books. He knew all about how awful people could be to each other.