“Did you notice where the lookouts are?” she asked.
“Yes, at that blind alley with a loading dock at the back end.”
“Right.” Angela let out a deep breath. “Well, this is it.”
He shot her a sidelong glance. “This had damn well better work,” he muttered. “From here a nuke would take out the government.”
She nodded absently, thinking instead about the enormity of what was about to happen, the magnitude of everything resting on her shoulders. It seemed insane, but at the same time she knew she was right that this was the only sane course of action that could stop it from happening.
As they went around the building again, a DC police car drove slowly past, both black cops looking everything over for any sign of trouble. They had no idea that the Stilton Building they were passing was filled with trouble. The cop car drove on down the street and eventually turned a corner in the distance.
Just before they came around the corner again, before the street that would take them past that blind alley with the loading bay, Angela gestured to the side. “Okay, park back here. Back before the corner. I don’t want them to see us drive by again or it will alert them.”
“Are those two men standing beside the alley men you recognize from Cassiel’s memory?” he asked as he pulled to the curb and leaned forward to try to look out past her.
“Yes,” she said as she pushed him back in his seat before she popped open her door. “Silvino and Ronaldo. Back up a little so they can’t see your car.” When he did, she said, “Okay, wait here.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” Jack asked.
“I need to take out the lookouts. When I come back out of that loading alley, I’ll signal, so be looking for me, then you can come in the back entrance with me. Do you have all your magazines on you?”
“Yes. What do you mean you’re going to take out the lookouts?”
Angela didn’t answer as she got out and shut the car door.
All four of her pockets were loaded with five or six magazines each. That was far more than she expected to need, but as her grandfather always told her, you can never have too much ammo. At times it felt like he was with her, reminding her of a hundred little details.
Leaving the car waiting back around the corner, she strutted down the street to where the two men were leaning against a wall beside what at first glance looked like an alley. Rather than an alley, though, it was a short dead end, deep enough for a large truck to park and unload at an elevated dock at the rear. The dock had wooden stairs to the left.
She recognized the two men standing watch beside the alley—Silvino and Ronaldo—because Cassiel had spent a good deal of time with Rafael and all his men. She recognized them the same as he would have. None of the men really liked Cassiel—he was an outsider.
For his part, Cassiel didn’t respect or care about any of them, either. He had only been with them until a time came when he could make an escape and again be on his own.
Once the bomb went off and the entire team was dead, their minders back in Iran would think he had died along with them. Having escaped death twice, he would then be free to hunt again. But the third time had been the charm. He died hunting Angela.
When she walked past the pair, they grinned, then pursed their lips to make kissing sounds as they grabbed their crotches. Angela stopped and smiled at them.
“You called?”
“Maybe,” Silvino said.
“Well, do you want something or not? I ain’t got all day, ya know.”
“Maybe you could suck my cock?” Silvino asked with a grin.
She stepped close and ran a finger along his collar.
“Maybe.”
“How much?”
“Ten. With a condom. Twenty without.”
“Is good for me. Twenty dollars.” He pointed a thumb back over his shoulder. “We go back there.”
Ronaldo leered down at her legs, his gaze coming to a stop on her crotch. “How much for fuck?”
“Forty. But I’m running a special today. Two for sixty.”
Silvino whispered something to his buddy.
Ronaldo looked somewhat annoyed. “This is my last chance for coño,” he answered back. “If you don’t want, you can wait here.”
“No, I will have coño too,” Silvino said, finally giving in. “We both will have this American puta.”
Angela smiled and sauntered into the blind canyon of brick. The wall at the back was whitewashed halfway up. Windows to the side were boarded over from the inside. The short, blind alley was filled with garbage and trash of every sort. She saw the desiccated carcasses of rats among the rubble. A truck tire without a rim sat to the side.
The men pointed at the dock.
“Disgusting,” she said. “I’m not going to lay down in this trash. You got someplace a little nicer and more private for a lady?”
“Yes,” Ronaldo said, nodding eagerly as he started up the wooden stairs at the side of the dock. He pointed at the metal door. “In there.”
Angela let them both usher her up the steps onto the dock and then through a dented metal door. Inside was an empty space with iron posts. Scraps of stained, ripply cardboard lay scattered about among bits of junk. She looked around in the dim light of a few high windows to make sure there weren’t men inside. She saw a stairwell far back in the right corner.
Satisfied that they were alone, she turned around. Both men were staring at her legs as they were unbuckling their belts. One of them had laid down a bed of cardboard scraps for her to lie on.
Angela pulled out her gun as they were staring at her legs.
“Up here, boys.”
When they looked up, she shot both men between the eyes—two quick pops. The bullets ricocheted around inside their skulls, scrambling their brains in a lethal instant. With no motor function, they dropped straight down. With everything from their motor cortex to the brain stem scrambled, their eyes remained open in death. They hadn’t even had time to close them.
Gun in one hand, Angela used her other hand to pick up the scraps of cardboard to cover the bodies in case anyone came down to check on them. She went back out the door and out the alcove to peek around the edge of the building. She saw Jack taking a stealthy look around the corner. Angela waved for him. He came at a trot.
“That was quick,” he said.
She gave him a look. “Did you expect me to fuck them first before I shot them?”
Angela hadn’t meant to snap at him, but she was already sinking down into a familiar, merciless mood she knew all too well. He seemed to recognize it, so he let it pass.
She pressed the lever at the bottom of the trigger surround to release the magazine. She’d already used three bullets. She put in a fresh magazine and put the partially empty one in her back right pocket where she wouldn’t use it unless needed. She wanted a full ten rounds when it started.
Jack followed her into the blind alley. “Tell me about the building, and where the men will likely be located.”
SIXTY-SIX
Angela and Jack stood quietly inside near the cardboard-covered corpses of Silvino and Ronaldo. There were bales of scrap paper piled nearby, along with stacks of beat-up cardboard boxes.
In the dead silence she spoke in a low voice, briefing Jack on what she knew from Cassiel’s memory about the interior layout and where Cassiel had last seen the men.
“Keep in mind that what I know could miss a lot of important stuff and the men could easily not be in the same places as before. From this point on, they could be anywhere. Cassiel wasn’t at all interested in dying for Allah. He wanted to be out of here before the bomb went off. He was only watching for a chance to slip away so he could come and kill me. I was on his Constantine kill list. That’s what he was thinking about.”
“I understand,” Jack said. “Whatever information you have from his memory is better than nothing, but we shouldn’t rely on it.”
“Right. Once it starts,” she said, “it’s
going to take on a life of its own.”
“If I didn’t know better, I’d say you’ve done this before.”
In a way, she had. “We both know what we need to do, so we just have to go in and do it.”
Jack nodded as he looked around, watching for any sign of trouble. “Agreed.”
“I’m going to go first,” she told him.
“I don’t think—”
“If they see you, they’ll shoot first and ask questions later. If they see me, they’ll ask questions first.”
Jack made a face as he glanced around again. “I hate to admit it, but you’ve got a point. Do you know how many of them are armed?’
“All of them carry AK-47s. They trained with them and know how to use them, but shooting was never part of their plan. They rarely spent time target practicing or in firearms training. Their training was focused on physics and machining skills. These are sophisticated bomb makers, not soldiers.
“They consider other terrorists who use guns little more than unskilled amateurs. These men think they’re smarter than that, deadlier than that. And they’re right. They have guns more for the testosterone factor than anything else.”
With Angela in the lead they both moved up the broad, concrete stairs as quietly as possible. The sliding metal door at the top stood half open. They both slipped through, guns at the ready.
The room they emerged into was filled with a forest of rusting iron posts holding up iron beams. The ceiling was a mass of pipes covered in disintegrating asbestos. A few sections of pipe lay on the floor along with crumbled masonry and other unrecognizable detritus that had drifted into ankle-deep piles here and there. The place had an echo, so they walked slowly and carefully near the wall and used hand signals.
They both tiptoed on the larger chunks of broken concrete to make as little noise as possible. It reminded her of crossing the stream on Grandfather Mountain by dancing from one dry rock to another.
Angela heard a sound, like water running. She held an arm out to stop Jack. He froze in place.
The far side of the room had a row of short concrete block walls jutting out from the rear wall to make a series of cubicles. A man turned from the corner of one of those cubicles, zipping up his pants after having urinated. He had an AK slung over his shoulder.
His hand on his zipper froze as he looked up. His eyes were opened wide.
Angela put a bullet between them.
He collapsed, his head banging the floor hard. It made an echoing thud. The ejected shell from her gun pinged with a metallic ring as it bounced against a pipe lying on the floor.
They both stood still for a moment to see if anyone had heard either the man’s dead weight landing in the rubble or the soft pop of the suppressed shot.
When Angela started heading for the back corner to her left, Jack pointed at a stairwell to the right, letting her know they should go that way.
Angela shook her head. She pointed to a dark corridor in the distance to the left side. When he came close to question why, she leaned in and whispered in his ear.
“This leads to a back stairwell. They don’t realize it’s here.”
“How the hell do you know that?”
“The main stairs had lookouts. Cassiel found this back way out and used it to sneak away without being seen.”
Jack didn’t look convinced. “It could be a dead end,” he warned. “We could get trapped in a tight place like that and be sitting ducks. Are you sure?”
She started toward the narrow passage in wordless answer. She knew that surprise was invaluable. The main stairs had lookouts. They were the only stairs the men knew about, so they had them covered. Jack followed without further complaint.
The spooky-looking passage had a small window at the far end, so at least it wasn’t completely dark, but the bright light coming into the dark space made for high-contrast shadows that were difficult to see into. It smelled musty. Deeper in, she could see that it appeared to be a utility service passageway of some sort.
Big pipes running along the ceiling with faded white paint had peeled for years, leaving chips and crumbles of plaster all over the floor to crunch underfoot. She pointed for Jack to big footprints in those curled paint chips.
“Cassiel,” she whispered.
There were vertical pipes as well as exposed wiring. In one spot a beam crossed at chest height. They ducked under it and kept moving.
A brick wall they came to on the left had partially collapsed, spilling bricks out across the floor of the narrow corridor. Since there was no going around it, they had to step carefully over it to get past. Angela pointed out Cassiel’s footprints again on the dusty floor. Jack nodded that he knew what they were, finally conceding that she was right.
Broken stubs of pipes sticking out low on the right threatened to catch their ankles. To the left was a room left exposed by the collapsed brick wall. Rusty tanks stood against a wall. They looked like they might be some sort of old, industrial water heaters. Everything was covered with a heavy layer of greasy dust. Ductwork and pipes coming out of the water heaters went in all directions back into the darkness, while some came out of the room to run overhead along the ceiling of the corridor.
Jack grabbed her sleeve between a finger and thumb to urgently stop her. He pointed ahead to a place in the floor that was hard to see in the flare of light coming in from the window directly ahead.
“There’s a hole in the floor,” he whispered. “Be careful.”
Angela nodded and moved on, hugging the wall to shuffle past the rectangular hole. It was probably a utility pass-through. She looked down as she went by. It would have been a long fall two stories into a dark basement.
When they reached the window, the passage turned to the right and terminated at a flight of open, iron-tread stairs. The wall studs were exposed. Dusty insulation and thick veils of filthy cobwebs hung down in places. Fallen plaster lay on some of the iron treads. They started up, both pointing their guns up at any threat that might be above them. Plaster crunched softly underfoot.
On the next floor, Angela gently pushed open a door. It squeaked. A man standing guard at the main stairwell not too far away immediately turned and saw them. He turned back to shout an alarm up the stairs. That denied her the preferred target of the triangle between his eyes at the tip of his nose. She admonished herself for not taking the shot immediately. She knew better.
Before he had a chance to make a sound, Angela put a round through his windpipe, immediately followed by a second one through the center of his left ear. By the way he dropped, the round through his ear had penetrated his skull just fine.
The guards at each flight of stairs were the reason Cassiel had avoided the main stairwell and instead snuck away down the utility stairs at the back. Now that they knew where the guards were posted, Angela took them out at each level on their way up. She didn’t want men left down below rushing up the stairs behind them once the fight started.
After they had made their way up the lower floors, which looked to be more for manufacturing type of work, they reached the smaller upper floors. The stairs there had proper railings that looked more ornamental. She also saw iron radiators and more windows. Some floors had dust-covered desks and chairs.
At each level she took out the guard.
Before going through the final doorway at the top floor, she stopped and put in a full magazine.
She held her weapon in both hands, pointed up, adjusting her grip, taking a couple of deep breaths, preparing to go through the final door.
This was where the bomb was. She could see it in her mind, in the memories from Cassiel. This was where Rafael and the rest of his team were gathered for their final religious act.
She could feel her heart pounding. She repeated the mantra to herself: Speed and violence of action.
Angela remembered her grandfather snapping his fingers as fast as he could, teaching her to pull off shots that fast as she fired at the target.
Angela looked back at J
ack. “It’s been nice knowing you.”
SIXTY-SEVEN
“Remember, we have to stop them from detonating that bomb,” Jack whispered with earnest concern. “Nothing else matters. We need to stop the guy sitting on that dead man’s switch from getting up. If he gets up from that chair, it’s over.”
Angela nodded. “I know what he looks like. I’ll find him.” She gave him a long, last look. “I’ve got this, Jack. Stay behind me and take care of anyone who tries to sneak up on me from behind.”
Jack answered with a single nod.
Angela took a last deep breath and then shoved the utility door open with her shoulder.
She burst into a semidark room. In the span of a heartbeat she took in the entire room, matching it to the memory in her head. Iron posts held up a network of overhead trusses. The ceiling above naked girders was broken open in places, letting insulation and corrugated tin panels hang down. The windows ringing the room were covered with cardboard. Two big skylights let in light.
The place was a tangle of dusty, broken, water-stained desks and chairs. Junk lay scattered across the floor among the desks. Nails, screws, iron fittings, torn metal scraps, soggy cardboard boxes, and lengths of pipe of every size lay toppled over one another, some with one end resting on desks.
She made note of it all, but mostly she took note of the men. She knew she would have to be careful not to trip over things as she focused on the men.
It felt like she was watching herself move in slow motion.
Broken glass lay scattered everywhere, reflecting flashes of light as she charged into the room. A counter to her left with a tile front looked like a truck had fallen on it and splintered it apart. Boards leaned against filthy walls to the right. Metal doors of gutted utility boxes stood open with wires hanging out.
Angela spotted the spherical bomb sitting on a square stack of cement blocks. Wires attached to brass studs stuck out from the metal casing here and there around the bomb. A narrow metal cabinet of some sort stood close to the bomb. Clusters of wires, reminding her of umbilical cords, sagged between the metal gray cabinet and the bomb. Rows of amber lights on the front of the cabinet flickered on and off.