Kamikaze (23 page)

On one of the screens, a car was taking shape in the fog.

DeClercq flicked on the speakers.

“I’m picking up a fare,” reported one of the feet. “Southbound on Jervis. He’s inching along.”

“That’s taxi talk,” the sergeant explained. “You’ll hear a lot of that. Back in the early days of Special O, all frequencies were open. There were no ciphered channels. Because what they said could be monitored by crooks with receivers, the watchers communicated with cryptic talk that mimicked cabbies working the streets.”

“Tricky,” said Yamada.

“You’ll hear, ‘I’m occupied.’ Or, ‘He’s in my pocket.’ That means they’ve found the target. ‘I’m dropping off my fare’ tells us the target is exiting from his car. ‘I’m out of pocket’ or ‘I’m vacant’ means a watcher has lost his target. ‘VCB’—or visual contact broken—is what’s used if the target is temporarily out of sight. The sort of loss that happens if a truck cuts in. ‘VCB vacant’ is the worst of all. That means the target is lost and the speaker has no idea where it is.”

“The crooks have escaped?” said Yamada.

“And the operation has failed.”

The same car that had appeared on the initial screen was slowly materializing on a second.

“I’ve got the wheels,” a new voice reported through the command van’s speakers.

“That’s one of the younger guys,” Winter said, “so no taxi talk. At the moment, Special O is going through a shakeup. The oldsters who go back to day one are nearing retirement. In thirty years on the force, some never left the section. They see themselves as shadows, plain and simple. Taxi talk is their signature, though it’s no longer needed, and they don’t get involved in takedowns.”

“Pros,” said Yamada, with respect.

“The new blood is full of piss and vinegar,” Winter said. “Like so many people these days, they have short attention spans. Special O is no longer seen as a career assignment. The youngsters transition the section to get good at surveillance, before heading out to mix it up as regular Mounties. And if an O operation results in a takedown, they’re champing at the bit to get their hands dirty.”

“Amateurs,” said Yamada.

“But good for the section. Sure, there’s friction, but the dynamic is healthy. The newer guys are giving the older guys a shot of Viagra.”

“Team leader?” A different voice.

“I’m listening,” replied DeClercq.

“Since I got pitched, I’ve been walking a dog down Jervis. Aren’t there supposed to be
two
targets?”

“Yes,” said the chief.

“One behind the other?”

“Affirmative.”

“All I can see is
one
car blocking the road, and all the feet seem to have the eye on it.”

The fog and the counter-surveillance car.

Two wild cards.

And reacting to both had broken up Oscar’s five-car plan.

The five feet too. The two wild cards had broken up their plan as well.

Normally, pitching the feet worked like this: Each car had both a driver and a rider known as “the foot.” The vehicles tailed the target by cycling through their five-car ballet until the target got ready to “lay down the wheels.” The moment the bad guys began to park their car, each driver had to surreptitiously pitch his foot so the foot trackers could pick up the tail. At that point, the drivers “buried” their cars, blending into the background while finding parking spots. The others continued the ballet on foot.

The first foot was control.

The second was his backdoor.

The third was double back.

And the last two flanked the backdoor as parallels.

Pitching the feet, like surveillance, was an art. You had to stay far enough back not to be noticed but close enough to switch to shoe leather. And you had to perform both in a way
that appeared natural, in case
you
were being watched by a counter-surveillance team.

It was like “Spy vs. Spy” in
Mad
magazine.

The wild cards, however, had undermined that, forcing Special O to pitch the feet from parallel streets, and when none of the watchers had the eye, T1 had slipped away in the fog while T2 fell back to run interference.

It was decision time.

Lives hung in the balance.

With T1 gone, there could be no error with T2 or DeClercq would have the Hetts’ blood on his hands.

“Who’s
not
VCB vacant on T1?” he asked.

Dead air.

“Is T2 moving?”

“Negative, Chief.”

“What’s going on inside?”

“Hard to tell. Tinted windows and all. I can see the lit-up screen of a navigation system.”

“That’s what we’re up against. A digital map. T2 can navigate this city on the fly.”

“If we lose them, game over,” warned one of the feet.

“Okay,” DeClercq decided. “Here’s what we do.”

The plan he laid out was overheard by every ear wired to the ciphered channel.

That’s why they paid him the big bucks.

“Take them,” ordered the chief.

Fixed Bayonets

The members of the Emergency Response Team—ERT, to the Mounties—drove Chevrolet Suburbans big enough to muscle other cars off the road. When it came to vehicular takedowns, the goal was to wrest control, and they didn’t want the bad guys elbowing their bulk on through. Instead, they tried to hit them hard, cut them off, and pinch them in, jamming them from both sides. Hitting them hard was taken very literally—the bigger the bang, the better—and during those precious few seconds when the bad guys were stunned, the Mounties would smash windows with hand-held battering rams and blow the occupants away the instant they drew guns.

Normally, that was just common sense.

Live and let die.

But today, DeClercq had said, “I want the car in one piece.”

An ERT package usually shadowed Oscar from way back, biding time until the command was given to move in. But this was going to be hand-to-hand with fixed bayonets, so the Mad Dog and Ghost Keeper parked their wheels at Robson and Jervis and began to sneak in on foot.

Ordinarily, black was the color of an ERT cop’s garb. Pull-down balaclava cap to cover the face. Turtleneck beneath a combat jacket over cargo pants. Tactical vest with movable Velcro pouches stuffed with tear gas, pepper spray, ammo clips, and stun grenades. Nine mil on the hip and a submachine gun in the hands. Still, this was the Great White North, so the team also had winter camouflage. In the white wear the Cree and the Mad Dog pulled on, they looked like ghosts in the fog.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Let’s do it,” Ghost Keeper said.

They called themselves the Assassins, the triad inside T2. All were lean, mean, and hungry, and on their way up in the yakuza. Back in Tokyo, they had jumped at the chance to make their bones for the legendary
kumicho,
Genjo Tokuda. So now here they idled, blocking the street in case any cops were on their tail, while the Claw made a getaway with the old American who was marked for death.

“Anything behind us?”

“Not that I can see.”

The Assassin in back was squinting out the rear window.

“The man with the dog?”

“Nothing. He vanished into the fog.”

“We’ll wait a minute more. Then we’ll vanish too.”

“I’m north on Jervis, nearing Barclay,” Craven said into his mike.

“I’m east on Barclay, nearing Jervis,” said a gruff voice in the plug in his ear.

“Hang on.”

“You too.”

Bang!

They collided.

The impact of the collision spun both Oscar cars around a quarter turn, effectively blocking the hazy intersection just a few car lengths in front of the target vehicle.

“You stupid asshole!” Craven shouted as he staggered out into the mist, holding a hand to his temple.

“Fuck you!” the other driver shouted back, waving a clenched fist as he emerged from his door.

“I had the right of way, dick wad!”

“You were speeding.”

“Yeah, sure. In this weather.”

“Come here and I’ll knock your block off!”

“You and whose army?”

“Just me, you dumb cocksucker!”

And that was it. The street fighters might as well have been rolling up their sleeves as they closed on each other in between their banged-up cars.

Push ...

Shove ...

Push ...

Shove ...

Craven threw a punch with his good hand.

“Back up,” ordered the Assassin in the passenger’s seat. “This fight will attract the cops.”

Honnnk!

A car appeared in the fog behind them, blocking their retreat down the narrow street.

“Who’s driving?”

“Some Chinese bitch I can barely see over the steering wheel,” the thug in back answered.

Honnnk!

Honnnk!

Honnnk!

The back-seat thug was trying to wave off the tailgater through the rear window.

Honnnk!

Honnnk!

“Deal with her,” ordered the Assassin in front. “The crash scene is drawing a crowd.”

The man walking his German shepherd reappeared on the far side of the street. Either he’d circled the block on his regular walk or he’d been lured by the commotion.

Coming up behind the Assassins’ car on this side of the street, and passing the bitch who—

Honnnk!

Honnnk!

—wouldn’t let up on the horn, were a pair of beefy guys nuzzling each other in what would have been broad daylight were it not for the murk seeping through the
swirling haze. Not only did the two have their arms draped across each other’s shoulders, but the homos wore identical white jackets, as if to announce to the world that they were on the same team.

That’s what happens, the back-seat Assassin thought as he began to open his door, when a degenerate country like this allows butt-fuckers to marry.

Honnnk!

Honnnk!

Honnnk!

Okay, bitch. Either you back up the fucking car, he said to himself as one foot hit the ground and his hand crossed to the shoulder holster just inside his gaping jacket, or I’ll back it up with you dead on the floor.

Constable Cynthia Oh of Special O hit the horn again. Her left palm was on the steering wheel, and her right hand gripped the Smith & Wesson in her lap. As the least likely looking cop in the five-car plan—she was, in fact, the fifth wheel—she was chosen to pinch in T2 from behind.

“If they think something’s up,” DeClercq had warned, “they’ll call T1 or Tokuda on their cellphones, and it’ll be game over for Corporal Hett and us.”

“Yes sir,” Oh had said.

“We need that car in one piece, so an ERT Suburban can’t ram it. With all this fog, an intersection collision won’t be suspicious. But once a car pulls up behind, T2’s survival instinct will kick in, and you’ll be on your own.”

“Yes sir,” Oh had said.

“You’re far from the stereotype, Constable. You’re the best hope we have. I’m depending on you to dispel their suspicions and then open up their car.”

“Yes sir.”

“Can you do it?”

“Yes sir,” she had said.

So here she was—

Honnnk!

Honnnk!

—playing picador, and about to find out if she would get gored.

“It’s going down,” Craven muttered to the cop he was pushing around.

“Want more?” he shouted to keep up the ruse.

“Tell me when,” mumbled the cop who had his back to T2.

Both itched to go for their guns.

The foot across the street was a dog master in the Mounted. A Mountie and his dog, they fit the stereotype. Except that this stubble-faced old fart on the verge of retirement didn’t look like Sergeant Preston. He could be—and was—a granddad.

Crouching down, the foot fed the dog a biscuit.

Then he unhooked the leash.

With a simple command, the dog would be off for the kill.

The Assassin in the passenger’s seat was protected by bulletproof glass. Just beneath the bottom rim of the passenger’s window, his index finger curled around the trigger of a Steyr pistol. These three killers were into firearms, and they knew quality.