Shadow Unit 15 (14 page)

And what are the odds Beale knows that already?
Hafidha thought. Since everyone else was thinking it, too, she kept quiet.

Esther Falkner put her hands on the wall she leaned against and pushed herself upright. "Get your things," she said to her team. "We're going to Illinois. Todd—"

"Todd is coming," Todd said, rising to his feet with the agility of a man twenty years younger. "I'm licensed as a private citizen to carry a firearm, Esther. And you need me."

She frowned at him for a moment while Hafidha's heart accelerated. Then Falkner sighed through her nose. "All right. Hafidha, you're with us."

Reyes stood. Falkner glowered at him. "Stephen, you have a little girl."

"I'm retired," he replied. He glanced at Todd and smiled. "And I'm no Solomon Todd."

Falkner let it slide."Tan... I'm sorry, but you get to mind the ranch this time."

"I warm benches better than anybody," he said. "Never fear."

Hafidha expected Falkner to raise an eyebrow and point out that anchor was a key role, and hardly benchwarming. But Falkner just shook her head, once, and headed for the door.

*

It was as quiet a flight as Falkner had ever endured. Her team huddled near the front of the Gulfstream, drinking coffee, pretending to read, and occasionally making desultory conversation. She was the commanding officer: she should do something to ease the tension.

But for the first time in her career, she couldn't think what.

At least it wasn't as bad as going after Hafidha had been. But that was cold comfort, and not something she could say out loud.

Finally, Hafidha looked up from her hands-free session of Angry Birds and barked laughter. When everyone turned to look at her, she shook her head and said, "You know the worst thing? The Bug was right. Somebody is out to get us, and has been all along."

Chaz stopped gnawing his thumbnail long enough to reply. "Even a stopped clock is right twice a day."

"Not if it's digital," Hafidha replied.

*

"Good flight, special agent.," said Esther, the first one down.

Bear kept his face straight. He was, to be sure, technically still a special agent; but even now, in the post-Hoover years, he couldn't get away with that beard, that hair, or with his bike leathers anywhere that involved contact with the public. Or even other agents, with the WTF being the notable exception. He used to do his best to look the part, before a .38 slug did things to his hip that he still couldn't think about. He was grateful for the employment, and more grateful that he could still walk; and calling him "special agent" had always been Esther's private joke.

Behind her, Villette said, "Tell me the truth: you've been gradually dropping the ceiling on this thing, haven't you? Just to see when we'd notice?"

"Don't piss off the bear," said Lau. "The Gulfstream is his weapon. He's liable to pick it up and throw it at you."

"Rar," agreed Bear. Then, "Go get the bad guys," he told Falkner.

"I always do," she said. "Take care of my glider."

"
My
glider," he said automatically as the others followed her down.

As his payload walked across the tarmac, he frowned.
Do they look more nervous than usual?
he wondered. He shrugged and returned to his post-flight checklist.

"Spooky," said Daniel Brady, since no one else had said it and everyone was thinking it.

The house was on top of a gently sloping piece of what had been Illinois farm country. The sensible white paint was peeling and gray; the porch rail sagged and showed missing bits like a mouthful of bad teeth; the rooflines dipped like the backs of old horses. The big shady trees from the photo were gone, replaced by a windbreak row of poplars dying of neglect and age. The old lilacs and mock oranges and viburnum that had ornamented the foundation had gone feral and enclosed the place like a jungle.

The barn was still there, fallen into itself like a decayed rib cage, and the cockeyed shed they now crouched behind. But the rest of the farm was gone. Bulldozers were at work down the road on an office park. The scrub fields and softwood thickets that had been cultivated land ten years ago would go the same way soon.

It was a heavy-handed metaphor for something, but Brady didn't have time to argue with the set designer.

"Judging by appearances," said Lau, who never judged by appearances, "the biggest danger is having the damned thing collapse around our ears."

"I'm leading," said Falkner. "Then Brady, Gates, Todd. Villette, bring up the rear."

Brady, who had always been tail-end Charlie, didn't argue, couldn't argue, didn't have to like it.

"Assume he'll have eyes on us as soon as we step into the open," said Todd.

"He's no sniper," said Brady.

"And he'll want us in the house, where he has control," said Villette.

"How do we enter?" asked Lau.

Todd huddled over, did something Brady couldn't see on the ground, then announced, "Front door."

"The front door is exactly as safe, and unsafe, as any other," said Falkner. "Why?"

"My secret weapon," he said, holding up a twenty-sided die. "I numbered each door and window."

"Randomizer," said Villette. "He's playing with probabilities, so we play right back."

"Darn," said Hafidha. "I was hoping for
Call of Cthulu
."

Brady refrained from commenting on the fact that Todd had been carrying around a twenty-sided die.

Falkner looked like she wanted to say all sorts of things, but settled for, "Floor plan?"

"Got it," said Hafidha. "Locked in."

"What would you think," said Brady, "of calling in an airstrike?" He didn't even get a courtesy laugh. He glanced over his shoulder: police cars, ambulances. Lined up by the roadside and waiting.

Waiting was all they would do, unless the team called for them. This was no job for the Regulars. But Brady thought longingly of screwed-up law enforcement sieges of the past, in which the forces of order opened fire through the windows, or threw in canisters of tear gas that set the building on fire. The job, done right, demanded that you didn't shoot first, and you took the bad guy alive if you could. Besides, tear gas cannisters and a hail of bullets might get awkward around a guy who fiddled with probability.

But damn, if there'd ever been a time for a Waco or a Chris Dorner in the cabin in Big Bear, this was it. He checked the straps on his ballistic vest, and made sure his backup weapon wouldn't hang up on the bottom edge or slide down and pinch.

"Tan?" Falkner asked.

"Loud and clear," Tan said in Brady's earpiece, and everyone else's. "There's no unusual activity on the monitoring sites Agent Gates set up. The recorder's on."

"Okay, move out," said Falkner.

Weapons out and down, they crossed the fifty feet to the front porch and stopped. The door had once had a window, but the glass was gone. Through the empty square Brady could make out a dark front hall. Flashlights came out without anyone saying a word.
Deep breath time
, thought Brady. Shouldn't the door have been boarded up? He narrowed his eyes to study the rotting frame, and saw— "That's a Post-It note."

Falkner crouched at the foot of the steps, sighting across their warped surfaces. She did the same to the floorboards of the porch before she stepped on them and bent to read the note. The face she wore when she looked back at them over her shoulder had no expression at all. "It says, 'Welcome in.'"

Brady felt his pulse speed up. "Show-off," he said.

"Tan, this is Falkner. We're going in. Mark the time, please."

"Wait." Todd's voice had the sharp crack to it that always went straight to Brady's spine.

Falkner turned back. "What is it?"

Todd moved forward, staring at the door handle and the keyhole, then poking his head through the broken window. He took out a pair of pliers and some latex gloves. "Tell you what," he said. "How about if I lead?"

*

If Todd had thought about it, he would have considered it an odd kind of comfort. No one else, except maybe The Cowboy, would think of it as comfort: creeping along at about ten yards a minute, flashlight in one hand, service weapon in the other, eyes straining, looking for what the next death-trap might be, knowing there was one. But it
was
a comfort, because this, moving in on the target, team at his back, was what Solomon Todd was made for.

Right behind him, Falkner would be wondering if Beale had planted that first trap, the electrical charge on the doorknob, deliberately to warn them: "Traps ahead! See if you can find them all!" Maybe so, but that wasn't Todd's concern: his interest was in finding the next one, and nothing else. Hafidha and Chaz had memorized the layout of the house, and Falkner, Lau, and Brady were watching for Beale, which left Todd free to watch for—

There. He held up a hand and focused his light on a gap in the wainscotting. There was a matching gap opposite. Photoelectric, no doubt, rigged to a pipe bomb right...there, in the ceiling. "Duck," he said.

"There's another note," said Falkner. "End of the hall, too far away to read."

Did that mean Beale expected them to get past this one? Or was he trying to distract them?

"Disable it?" said Villette from his tail-end Charlie position.

"I would, but I'd be more likely to set it off trying."

Two of them back to back would be clever
, thought Todd, and looked carefully at the next several feet of hallway. He found what might have been a pressure plate under a loose board, and guided them past it.

The note, in the hasty script of someone who wrote his first drafts longhand, read,
Nice save, Agent Todd.

He shivered; he couldn't help it. He checked around and under the note carefully. Then he flicked it off the wall and handed it to Falkner. She frowned and stuffed it in her trouser pocket.

They inched up to a pair of doors, just before the hallway would open up into what Hafidha said was the living room. Todd spent a lot of time on each. The one on the right was rigged to go off when the door moved. "I don't see any way past that one," he said. "So we'll assume he isn't here."

"It's a bathroom," said Hafidha. "I doubt he'd wait there by choice."

Across from it was what had once been a sun parlor, but now was empty even of furniture. The windows were boarded up, and there were no traps.

"I'm glad he doesn't have an infinite supply," said Lau.

Todd grunted and led them back out of the room. A left turn.
Farther up and further in. Or do I have that backward again?

"About due for another," he said. He was starting to get a sense of Beale's psychology. People had patterns. Gammas, even more so. And trap -makers, Todd had found, usually had an orderly sort of mind.

He shone the beam ahead and saw nothing, nothing—a shadow on the wall, just a wavering ghost, thin as a hair.

"Aren't you glad you brought me along?" he said, crouching down to show them the matte-black trip wire. It pleased Todd to be doing something useful with Uncle Sam's poisonous legacy. "I do my best work in the dark."

He glanced up, thinking,
I bet I'm pissing Rupert off something fierce right about now.
His flashlight picked up a glint of metal just before he saw the muzzle flash; the report, horribly loud in the confined space, seemed to come a long time later.

*

Arthur Tan had heard "to do is to be" at least as often as anyone else who'd either been to college or knew someone who had, but he'd never before considered the negative.

Words came through the crackle of static; most of them Tan recognized—barely—as Todd's voice. "Clear," he would say, then there'd be a pause. Then, "Stop, got one." Then, "Stay to this side," or, "Stay low," or, "I can get this one." Those phrases and words, in Todd's voice, going from crisp, no-nonsense urgency to what Tan couldn't help but think of as a Northern Drawl.

Sweat was running down the back of Tan's shirt.
Christ, they're calmer than I am,
. Then,
Of course they are. If I were there, I'd be calmer.

He tried to fill in the empty time by doing—making sure the logs were up to date, that the recording gear was working. It didn't help. The trouble with being on the bench wasn't the bench, it was the being.

The sound was like a burst of white noise, of infinite volume and precious little duration. It took him almost a second to identify it.

*

Falkner saw everything.
That's what agents do,
said a detached part of the detached part of her mind.
We see things, and we remember what we see, and then we report it.

The gun was a big one, a .50 cal Desert Eagle 1911 GR, magazine holds eight rounds plus one in the pipe. The hands gripping it had stubby fingers and poorly manicured nails, and the cuff of the shirt in the unwavering flashlight beam—that had to be from Lau—seemed purple.

She kept seeing. She kept seeing everything. She brought her own weapon up at so close to the same time Todd did that for an instant there was the illusion that her arm was raising both weapons.

The muzzle flash was brighter than the flashlight, and faster than the raising arms, because Beale had been waiting, and because her speed, and Todd's were only human, after all.

Hafidha's was not. Falkner, who saw everything, didn't see Hafidha move, just saw her appear, between the gun and Todd.

The muzzle flashed only once, then gun, hands, and shirt cuff were all gone, and Hafidha was knocked backward into Sol, who caught her with his flashlight arm as he kept his service weapon raised. Someone cried out, "Hafs!" and it took Falkner a while to realize it was her.

Nikki Lau's flashlight beam, now joined by Brady's, never wavered.

Falkner stepped up next to Sol, noticing that her light was also steady. There was an impossible tension, watching, moving only what was absolutely necessary, and the echo of the shot died out; it had seemed to have lasted for a long time. And then there came the smell of cordite, harsh and sick-making and meaning so many different things in so many different times and places.

"Hafs!" said Chaz. "What—"

"Literalizing the metaphor," she said, and coughed.

"Hafs!"

"It'll take more than one little old bullet to kill a big tough gamma," said Hafidha.

Too fast and too slow
, thought Falkner.
That's how it always happens. No time to act, but plenty of time to watch it all happen, every detail
. She wanted to know how seriously Hafidha was hurt, wanted to know so badly it made her teeth ache, but she didn't dare look away. She had a job to do. Two jobs—make sure Beale didn't get another shot at them, and watch everything, so she could remember it, and report, because that's what FBI agents did.

"Tan," she said. "Agent down."

*

Todd got all of half a step past Hafidha before Falkner's voice, with a crisp, flat, "No one moves," stopped him as effectively as a stone wall would have. Beale was up there, and had just shot Hafidha. Beale had aimed at him, but she—

"There are still traps," said Falkner, her voice level.

Todd risked a glance back. Lau was holding her flashlight, her service weapon in the other hand, both hands together; perfect form, just like she'd been trained. Her face was as expressionless as it always was when she needed to do the impossible. Brady and Chaz were on their knees with Hafidha, Brady keeping pressure on a wound in her armpit, over the edge of her vest. Where so damned many cops and soldiers got it. Blood ran black over Brady's hands.

Bloody luck. No, not luck; probabilities. He made a grunting sound and turned toward the darkness where Beale had disappeared.

"Todd!" said Falkner.

He nodded and turned back, next to Falkner, watching, waiting, holding.
Do your job, you stupid nit. Trust your team, and do your job. Anything else will make things worse
.

On the doorframe through which the gun had appeared, he saw a sticky note.
RIP Solomon Todd.

That chicken hasn't hatched yet.
He felt a dull, savage satisfaction over it.

*

Chaz's knees ached. His teeth hurt from clenching. He was frozen in place, locked, feeling panic rise up as he hadn't since—since Texas.
I can't do this. I can't do this again.

A touch on his sleeve. Todd, gentle. Chaz shook him off, still not looking away from Hafidha. Her eyes closed, she breathed through gritted teeth.

"Hurts," she said.

"No shit," said Todd. "Chaz, stand up. Cover us."

"I wish Daphne were here."

Had he said that? Said that out loud? What a stupid thing to say out loud.

"Me too," Hafs said.

"Hafs, don't talk—" Behind him, Chaz could hear Nikki's voice. Calm, level. Talking to Tan, telling him to get EMS to the door they'd come in by. Not to let them enter the building.
Too close
, Chaz thought, but he didn't say it.

Todd touched his shoulder again. Chaz gave Hafidha's hand one last squeeze, passed it to Todd. Stood. Brady was breathing hard with the force he was putting on the wound. Chaz heard cloth ripping on the blade of a knife; Todd making a pressure bandage out of his nylon jacket.