Shockwave (29 page)

“No, parking’s only out front. Behind is just empty space. There’s no lighting, and no paving, either. Nothing but a few old girders still in place from the demolition, but new construction won’t start for at least a few months. They’re putting up a whole—”

“Okay. Now, listen: I walk in, you see me. I turn around, walk back out the same door I came in … like I’d made a mistake. Then I slide around to the back. You give me a minute, then get out there yourself—you and the other three.”

“There’s a back door.”

“That’s up to you. But you use the back door, you better make sure nobody else does. Not until
all
our business is finished.”

“Done.” He signed off. I hadn’t missed his “I’m still in charge” tone, but I guessed that wasn’t for me; it was for himself.

W
e picked him up where he wanted—a pool of darkness just behind the high school.

Dusk hadn’t even settled in yet, but if we hadn’t been watching, we wouldn’t have seen him. Must have been a place he’d used before. No sign of a vehicle, but he had to have gotten there somehow. The one thing I was sure of was that a friend hadn’t dropped him off.

I got out of the backseat and said, “Put it all in here,” pointing to the trunk Mack had popped open from the driver’s seat. I could see Conrad didn’t want to let go of his lifelines, but he relaxed a little when he noticed we had padded the whole compartment with those foamy acoustical tiles they use in recording studios.

I pointed at the front seat. He climbed in. When Mack pushed the button, it wasn’t the sound of all the doors locking that froze Conrad in place—I was sitting behind Mack, so every time our video man turned to his left, he’d see me.

Probably all unnecessary. The video ninja wasn’t going to run, not with all his equipment in our possession. And not with us knowing where to find him. But my training was that there’s no such thing as taking too many precautions.

The meeting was for 1:00 a.m. I wasn’t lying when I assured our video expert that we had plenty of time—we’d be in place well before midnight.

No rain. Around the coast, that’d be counted as a lucky break, but where we were going, none was expected. Weather wouldn’t have changed anything, but at least I could keep my
window down—my character smoked, and I wanted to keep reinforcing that in the video man’s mind.

He’d seen my face only when he was terrified, before. Now he was more relaxed—not
much
more, but enough to do the work we needed doing. He never spoke, just looked straight ahead or out his window. Probably couldn’t have picked me out of a lineup. Even if he wanted to.

And there was no “probably” about this: he’d never want to.

S
omething was nagging at me, but I couldn’t isolate it.

I closed my eyes, blocked out even the sensation of the car moving.

Why did I see the man seated next to Mack as “Conrad”? His name, I mean, the spelling. Why “Conrad,” not “Konrad”? How had I known this before I’d ever seen the ID Mack had copied?

Was that because the only “Konrad” I’d ever known was in the same unit I was—I should say, had the same paymaster? He was older than me, but way too young to have fought in World War II. Yet there had been something about him that triggered an embedded memory—Luc’s memory, now mine.

We were in the midst of a firefight. At the first crack of a rifle shot, our unit immediately split—taking cover as separated as possible, every man for himself. For reasons I’d never examined, that triggered memory had caused a trigger pull.

When we reassembled, the enemy had disappeared. Some dead, some just gone. No need to count our dead: if you didn’t make it back to the preset coordinates by pull-out time, you were
counted
as dead. This wasn’t La Légion—we weren’t expected to return carrying dead comrades. Or waste time burying them.

Nobody would ever know my bullet had taken Konrad’s life.

It had come to me as naturally as breathing. Not something you think about. So why was I thinking about it now?

“T
his is
perfect
,” the video ninja whispered.

I could see why he was so excited: the skeleton of the demolished building still had some girders standing, with a few crossbeams lying haphazardly across. I could smell the exposed iron, already rusting.

His comfort level rose when he saw it was extra-dark back there—even shadows had blacker centers.

“I can use the tripods,” he said, like that was an enhancement he hadn’t expected.

“You know where we left the car. When we”—pointing at Mack, to make sure he got it—“leave, you won’t see anything until I come back. I’ll be joined by four men. Things will happen. You won’t see Jenkins”—I whispered, then clamped down on the last word like I’d said too much, quickly covering with it with “Mr. Boston”—“until it’s over, but you
keep
recording until he tells you to stop. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

I checked my no-frills Luminox. Not just another prop to enhance the “special agent” routine for the video man—it worked so good that I’d had to rubber-cap it to make sure nobody but me picked up its electro-glow hands. Still shy of midnight. I had no way of knowing if the targets were already inside. I hadn’t seen the red Corvette in the parking lot out front on our first pass-by, but that didn’t mean anything.

“One more time, Conrad. Run it down for me. By the numbers.”

“You’re not ever to be in the frame.…”

I nodded, making vague sounds of approval so he’d relax a little more.

“I get a wide shot of all four of them. Then I come in close, face by face, and snap stills. Once I’ve got each one face-captured, I dial back a little so I can cover everything that happens.”

“Perfect. Now, listen.
One
of them is going to end up standing next to me, so be very precise. Shoot it like you’re my eyes, Conrad. We need the coverage only of what I
see
, not of me myself. Understand?”

“I’m your eyes,” he echoed. Not just repeating words, saying it as if he wanted to
be
me, seeing with
my
eyes.

“And my ears,” I reminded him.

But he was ahead of me, already fitting equipment in place—becoming more a part of this with every move. Going from voyeur to government agent had done wonders for his … I don’t know what, exactly. Not confidence, more like maybe he wasn’t
just
some sick little man, not anymore. Our certification of him as a team member, an expert with special qualifications, that was the key to a door he hadn’t even known was there. Unlocking that door had given him a true
raison d’être
, probably for the first time in his life.

I could feel that in him, even stronger now than the first time it had come.

I threw a complicated series of hand gestures in the direction where Conrad thought Mack was standing. But Mack was actually on the opposite side, holding the full-blued Benelli 12-gauge in one hand. “Remember,” I’d reminded him, “start from one side and
sweep
. It holds five, but don’t try to count—the blasting will block your ears. Keep pulling until it’s empty. Then just drop it on the ground—you’ve never touched it without gloves—and run for the car.

“If I can, I’ll be at the car before you. If I’m not, you get out of here. Don’t worry about Conrad. Just
drive
! Don’t stop. Don’t make calls. Get the car back to where we took it from, put it inside the gates, leave the keys in the ignition … and walk away.

“Get a couple of miles under you
before
you call Dolly.… Just tell her where to pick you up; she’ll know what to do.”

I could see he didn’t like it. But he’d been out of choices the moment we grabbed Conrad. If he knew I was going to make sure Conrad didn’t talk—not to anybody, not ever again—he also knew there was nothing he could do about it.

I left Mack, and walked all the way back to where our video man had set up. “I know you’re good at waiting, Conrad. Less than an hour to game time. Roger?”

“Roger!” he answered. A little steel in his voice, fear fading as he again became one with the only element that had ever opened its arms to embrace him.

T
he red Corvette rolled up at midnight plus twenty and slid into the space farthest to the right.

He strutted in like he owned the place. Maybe he did—the name would be his idea of a joke, and he’d said we could do anything we wanted inside, too.

I waited. Other cars pulled in, other men got out. No way to tell if
his
tools had already been inside, waiting for him.

It didn’t matter. When the time came, I slipped on the transparent latex gloves, pulled them tight, rolled my shoulders to make sure my thigh-length field jacket was correctly adjusted, and stepped into the bar.

H
e was where he’d said he’d be, sitting all the way to the right on one side of a booth, a glossy white nylon jacket unzipped to show a bright-red pullover underneath.

I couldn’t see who was across from him, or next to him. Or even if anyone else was there at all. I made a “Damn!” gesture
with my right hand, like I’d walked into the wrong place. Then I turned around and walked back the way I’d come in.

I
will say this for La Légion: if you survived all their tests, they stopped the lying and treated you like the soldier you had become.

So, before you went into the field for the first time, they made it all clear. No matter how expertly you had been trained, no matter how correctly you might be armed, no matter how perfectly strategic the position you held, there would always be the waiting. And, within that waiting, what you did with your mind could change what was to come.

You were never to think about your preparations. Once in place, you were done with the past.
All
your past, right up to that very second.
“Aucun homme n’a le pouvoir de changer son passé. Mais un homme bien entraîné peut changer son futur.”
Your full range of reactions is loaded in your mind, each as carefully as you had loaded your weapons.

There were options, always. But they always lived inside the inescapable dungeon of commitment. To the death. The enemy’s, if you performed correctly. If not, your own.

And, then, the final truth.
“Peu importe qui distribue les cartes, la dernière carte à jouer sera toujours celle du Destin.”

I
’d done everything I could.

The FBI man knew exactly what he had to do: execute the maneuver so smoothly that he would be standing with me before the others realized what was happening.

I could not be more prepared than I was.

But I knew this, too: I couldn’t be sure of him—there was no way for me to know what Conrad would be seeing with
my
eyes.

I
was in position.

Committed, but with options inside that commitment. Whoever came out the door would be backlit, so the matte black pistol dangling in my right hand would be invisible to them. If the FBI man was planning to cross me, that glossy white jacket would be my first target.

The back door opened and four men walked toward me. The man in the white jacket was wider than any of the others, but the one standing just slightly behind him to his left was taller.

They came toward me, not in a hurry. Moving slowly enough to show they had no fear … but all I saw in their movement was that they didn’t want me to think they were going to rush me.

When they got close enough to see my face, I could see theirs. Not kids, but younger than Mack—I guessed somewhere between late twenties and early thirties.

I was going to say something soothing to freeze them for the split second I’d need, but the FBI man was already in motion. He spun around to my right side so the config became the two of us facing the hit squad, just as we’d rehearsed. The man in the middle of those three responded by stepping slightly forward. Had to be Gomes, I thought.

“He’s with me,” the FBI man said to them. Whether they thought I was another agent or just hired backup, his flat statement was enough to settle them down. “I’ve got something you all need to hear,” he said. “A new target. Hard to believe, but easy to take. Very easy.”

All three of them simultaneously clasped their hands together at the waist, in a listening stance.

“You already know Jordan was a rat,” the FBI man said. “And it shouldn’t have taken
me
to clue you—he was cut loose way short of his full sentence, and there’s always a reason for that.”

“We didn’t even know he was out until—”

“Then the organization is still too weak for the Final Move,” the FBI man said, cutting off the speaker, a slender man with a hawkish face standing to the left of Gomes. “Nobody is
ever
locked down where you can’t get some girl to write him like she was going to wait for him no matter how long it took. At the worst, they can’t stop a lawyer from getting inside. Who cares if they’d be listening in? All we’d need to do is verify he was still there.”

“That’s not right,” Gomes said, his voice pulsating with resentment, playing along with what he must have thought
was
a play. “We were on him quick enough; that wasn’t the problem. The problem was, he
knew
we were coming. And even with that, he never got far, considering.”

“Considering what? He’d already been out months before you
started
to close in. You know what a rat does when you let him run around loose? You have any idea how much he spilled before—?”

The guy with the hawkish profile wasn’t going to lose face, not in front of the other two: “He didn’t have anything
to
spill. Anything more, I mean. You think we didn’t know he was sprung? We had to lay back, like we didn’t know nothing. Thought he’d come right to us.”

“Guess he didn’t, huh? So who finally sent you after him?”

“The Leader. Same as always.”

“Jordan must have known by then. So how’d you get him to trust you?”

“
Trust us?
That’s a joke, right?”

“He got done with a rock hammer to the back of his head—”

“Yeah.
This
one,” the tallest man said, as he pulled a heavy, spike-ended tool from behind his back. “So?”