In the Courts of the Sun (79 page)

“High Man A,” the CO said.
“In place,” High Man A’s voice said.
Six other spotters, or high men, checked in after him. Each one had a different perch on a rooftop or a telephone pole. Normally, some of them would be snipers, but today they were unarmed. In fact, the Goat Operation differed from most raids in that there were no guns anywhere near the assault zone. It wasn’t just because there was no real chance of return fire—who cared about that when we were all screwed anyway?—but because “delivering the suspect alive and coherent over[rode] officer survival.” Last of all, the marked vehicles came into view. Two ambulances pulled into Marguerite and stopped a block short of the house. An ordinary fire engine stationed itself on Emerald. About twenty regular police cars materialized out of nowhere and formed a four-block-wide perimeter centered on 820.
“Any issues?” the CO’s voice asked. “Right. We’re at T minus seventy seconds. I want to check prep on Eight twenty.”
“All target preps are in,” a British-sounding voice said. He meant that they were ready to turn off the main electricity just as the assault teams breached the doors so that there wouldn’t be any lights flaring in anyone’s night vision, that the Czerwicks’ door alarm had been turned off at the service provider, and that Mrs. Czerwick still had two cats but no dog. Ana’d said that six neighbor dogs who’d been judged overly vigilant had all been lightly sedated. It wasn’t quite clear how, but they hadn’t wanted to tip off anyone in any of the surrounding houses, so probably they’d sent in burglars with bacon-wrapped diazepam. Target prep also included what they called a wire delay. That is, at about two A.M. they’d moved the whole house sixty seconds back in time. They’d reset the link to the atomic clock on Madison’s computers, they’d put a sixty-second delay on the Internet and on the cell phone readouts, and they were even sending new, delayed signals to the TV satellite dish on the roof and to old-fashioned radios that anyone might turn on. Of course, any watches or unattached clocks or watches would be off, but who looks at those things anymore? So if some blabbermouth noticed any of what was going on—and to me it seemed like enough of a buildup to invade a whole country—and started talking about it on the Net or TV, they’d catch it.
“All right,” the CO said. “Brown team, I want—”
The audio cut out. There was silence.
There was a sense of everyone—that is, everyone in our conference room—stirring uncomfortably. It was the aural equivalent of watching a black marker redact a line of text on some CIA document.
“I bet he’s checking the FAEs,” Ana’s voice said.
She meant fuel-air explosives. And she was referring to a bit of information that we, and probably the folks in the VIP trailer, and probably even Lindsay Warren himself—who was undoubtedly watching the same array of windows in his pathogen-proofed safe room in the Hyperbowl—weren’t supposed to have.
Early in the Goat Op discussions, more than one person had mentioned the possibility of eliminating the entire town. Apparently, these days that sort of thing got done with a ring of fuel-air explosives that were positioned to incinerate any living particle in the area. Ana’d said that the U.S. had done it twice in Afghanistan, and each time, no biohazards had gotten out of the targeted factories. Anyway, as far as the Goat Op went, this option had gotten rejected pretty quickly, not out of any moral qualms, but because, despite a psychological profile that said it was doubtful, it was still possible that Madison was working with others, or that others knew about him, or that he knew about others, or that he’d mailed some of his research work to others, or that others had sent stuff to him, or, most nightmarishly of all, that he’d already started the dispersal. It wasn’t quite clear how he planned to handle it, but it could be as easy as sending small packages to addresses around the world.
Two days ago Ana’d told us she was guessing that there were still FAEs fused and positioned outside the city and that somebody in Victoria would detonate them if they determined that there was an uncontrollable release in progress. She said part of the giveaway was that the real big shots from D.C. and Ottawa—the directors of the CSIS and FBI, for instance—hadn’t wanted to be on the scene. If the biowarfare experts said there was a noncontainable release in progress, we should expect the whole place to disappear, and then we should all just hope that the heat had got most of the bugs. During the conference call, Michael had asked her why she was still there, in the blast zone, but Ana blew off the question. I guess she was just too butch to think about girly issues like personal survival.
The CO’s voice came on again.
“. . . nus twenty seconds,” it said. “All ready?”
Our conference room was silent. On Ana’s speaker the room she was in was silent. On the video windows 820 Marguerite looked like peace on earth itself. Someone had opened an audio channel to one of the parabolic mikes on Marguerite, and you could hear mourning doves and a little rush of breeze in the bare branches but nothing else.
“Wait, hold up,” the CO’s voice said. “We’re holding the count.”
There was a pause. It was uncomfortable at the beginning, and then it got more uncomfortable, and then unbearable. People shifted around me. I could smell sweat in the room. There was an odd little sound next to me and I realized it was A
₂
’s teeth chattering. Put an arm around her? No, don’t. If anything touches her she’ll probably have a stroke.
“Window six,” Ana’s voice said. “It’s nothing, it’s a neighbor.” Her cursor pointed at someone with big puffy red hair in a gray bathrobe. It was a lady from 818, the house next door. She toddled out to her car, which was in the driveway as always, slowly and deliberately opened the door, rummaged in the front seat for something, didn’t find it, and minced around to the driver’s side. I thought I was going to tear off my own scalp. Twelve seconds away from the earth’s most critical moment since the Chicxulub meteorite and we’re waiting for Endora to find her Dulcolax. The lady opened the driver’s-side door, found whatever it was she wanted, closed it, and, shuffling in her puffy slippers, made her way back toward her house. By now I was sure one of us was going to vomit, or lose control of his or her bowels, or at least faint. Nobody did, though. I guess we were all just rock-hard. Or sufficiently medicated.
The door of 818 eased itself shut.
“All right,” the CO’s voice said. Even he sounded a little wobbly. “Everyone still in place? Right. Resetting to T minus twenty seconds.”
A drop of something fell on my cheek and I realized it was sweat from my forehead. I wiped my face on the sleeve of my jacket—it was that same gray Varvatos thing I’d had in that Jeep ride with Marena and Max about seventy million years ago—peeled off my hat, ran my hand through my hair that still wasn’t there, and put the hat back on. Whew.
De todos modos.
“Seven, six,” the CO’s voice said. “Ready. Three, two, go.”
On window number five the ten members of Elements A and B crossed the lawn like the shadows of crows flying over the roof. They seemed to have working keys for both doors, the doors opened without any sound that we could hear, and the elements were already inside. It took all of four seconds for them to pour through the hall, spread into the living room and dining room, and dash up the acrylic-carpeted stairs. On one of the helmet cameras there was a glimpse of gilt-plastic-framed photos on the wall, old graduations and older weddings and Madison accepting a trophy at a grade-school science fair. Ordinarily, SWAT teams make as much noise as possible when they go in, but this raid had been designed to assume that Madison might have a finger on a detonator. So there was just the creaking of the floorboards and the wheeze of the old refrigerator in the kitchen, and the darting shadows, as though the house were an aviary and the crows were all flying into their own little nests. Assaulters burst simultaneously into each of the three bedrooms. Oh, Christ. A face. It was a horrible fanged predatory face, lunging at us on helmet cam #6. There were gasps around me and Lisuarte, for one, visibly recoiled. It was one of the Czerwicks’ attack cats. It vanished from the frame. By the time we got over that, we could see on two other Element A helmet cams that Mom and Pop were being gently held down in their bed. There was one good, steady shot of a Kevlar-gloved hand covering Mrs. Czerwick’s mouth. On helmet cam #9 you could just see that they’d gotten a restraining hood on Madison’s little brother—who was twenty-eight—and that he was kicking and wriggling but not getting anywhere. And on #6, the one that had dealt with the cat, which was now in Madison’s room, on that one—
Hmm. Madison wasn’t in his bedroom.
“Oh,
coño,
” Tony Sic said.
“It’s number sixteen,” Larry Boyle said. His voice was unnaturally high. “Number sixteen.”
We all looked at window #16. It was the helmet cam of one of the assaulters in Element C. There was a glimpse of what might be basement stairs, then a glowy bunch of shapes in the center of a dark field, and then, for a few frames, less than a half a second, there was a sofa. There was a pudgy naked torso on the sofa. There was a face on top of the torso. There was a big gawking mouth in the middle of the face. It was Madison’s face. There was a sound like a big old woofer popping its voice coil and the element’s windows grayed out.
“That was an NFDD,” Ana’s voice said over some kind of squealing or whimpering in the background.
“Which is what?” Michael Weiner asked. The video processors of the helmet cams had started readjusting and a few inchoate images drifted back into the windows.
“Noise and flash diversionary device,” she said. One of the assaulters had tossed what they called a double whammy into the basement. The thing looked like a pair of yellow squash balls yoked together. One ball was a regular flash-bang grenade with an eight-million-candela flare and a 180-decibel report. The other was a sting grenade, which releases about two hundred tiny hard-rubber balls. It was more reliably debilitating, especially if the suspect had managed to close his eyes and cover his ears during the explosion.
“Righto,” Michael said.
“Shhh, we want to hear this,” Larry Boyle said.
We listened, but all we could hear was a hircine squeal. It faded into heavy panting, and then, suddenly, Madison seemed to have gotten his voice back.
“What’s the charge?” he asked. His high tenor was familiar from the wire-taps, but it felt creepy hearing it in real time, especially since it sounded oddly calm. On the helmet cams the assaulters had switched on their flashlights for the first time and we got another unflattering close-up of Madison’s jowls. I think he started say the word
officer
, but by the middle of the word there were Kevlar-gloved hands over his mouth. The assaulters weren’t supposed to let him say anything, just in case he might have a voice-activated switch somewhere. There were another two seconds of abstract scuffling shapes on the windows, and then helmet cam #13 resolved itself into a pair of hands holding open Madison’s mouth and a third hand grubbing around under his tongue, as though he were a SMERSH agent from the 1960s about to bite down on a cyanide pill. Finally they hustled him up the stairs. Back on window #5 the Czerwick lawn and Marguerite Avenue had, with a suddenness that made me remember the jungle gym scene in
The Birds
, filled up with a flock of black-uniformed officers. Someone had switched the audio back to an outdoor feed, and you could hear helicopters overhead, and sirens started up. In less than thirty seconds Madison had been strapped to a stretcher and loaded into his own ambulance van. The other ambulance was already pulling out with the rest of his family. We all focused on helmet cam #13, whose owner was going along in the ambulance and, it seemed, was about to give us another rare view of Madison, but suddenly, his feed grayed out.
“Do we not have a camera in there?” Michael asked.
“No, that’s another one they won’t give us,” Ana’s voice said. “Sorry.” Once again, our information was being redacted.
Don’t take it personally, I thought. The folks in the VIP trailer, and the directors in the capitals, and, one guessed, even Lindsay, probably needed to preserve their deniability if there was any torture during the interrogation. Maybe we’d get some video later on, but there’d be some stuff nobody outside the spook shop would ever see.
Don’t worry about it now, anyway, I thought. Ask Marena when she gets back. She has a knack for teasing bits of dirt out of people. I looked back at the long view, Window #5. Big black SUVs moved in behind and in front of Madison’s ambulance. Motorcycle police maneuvered into positions on the flanks of the vehicles. Slowly, the caravan drove off east on Marguerite Street. They turned south on Young Road, toward Route 1.
Was that it? we wondered. We looked around at each other. Back in the basement they’d already positioned five remote cameras, giving us a whole row of new windows. Tech people stepped gingerly in and out of the windows, sweeping the place for booby traps. The TV was still playing the Lucifer scene in
Janine Loves Jenna
, to which Madison had evidently been masturbating. Nobody touched any of the mice, keyboards, cell phones, PDAs, remotes, or anything.
“Heads up, two primary suspects, section Delta,” the CO’s voice said.
“What’s that about?” somebody asked.
“He means those two freezers,” Ana’s voice said. “In the garage. Check out window thirty-four.”
The view showed a pair of workers in chrome responder’s suits standing on the bed of the Czerwicks’ pickup truck and waving long spray wands at a pair of waist-height freezers, which, according to neighbor informants, Madison’s father had used for venison in the fall. “They’re hosing them down,” Ana’s voice said. She meant they were spraying them with liquid nitrogen from the gas tankers. Even if any Goat was seeping out of its packaging, it wouldn’t get through the ice.
“That’s great,” Larry Boyle said. “Good efforting, everybody.”
Shut UP,
I and probably everyone else thought. Go hie thee to Kobol. A crew from Hazmat Unit B was up on the Czerwicks’ roof, unrolling big sheets of blue vinyl. Other teams were twisting steel poles into the ground at the corners of the lawn. The idea was to seal the whole place and then set up a bigger enclosure, like a circus tent, over the wrapped-up house and garage. Then they’d set up a double system of hoses and fill the area between the house and the tent with CO