Flynn didn’t follow. He stepped forward, his handgun raised.
Fear flooded her body, turning her skin slick and cold. Darby didn’t see her life flash before her eyes and all that bullshit; she did what she’d been trained to do.
She jerked her head to the side as Flynn fired. The shot hit the wall. Her hands came up lightning quick. One hand clutched his wrist, the other wrapped itself around the Glock’s muzzle and twisted it back so that it pointed at his stomach.
She yanked him towards her. Flynn stumbled, caught by surprise. He couldn’t gain his footing.
Darby pulled the nine from his grasp. She turned it around in her hands and shot him in the thigh.
Flynn fell to the floor, screaming. She spun the nine to the hostage standing on the stairwell landing. The woman was holding a sub-compact Beretta pistol with a laser sight.
Darby fired twice, hitting the woman in the stomach. The woman stumbled back against the wall and Darby fired two more shots.
Flynn was scrambling across the floor. Darby threw him down on his stomach, dug her knee into his spine and yanked his arms behind his back. She grabbed a pair of Flexicuffs from her tactical belt as the lights came back on.
Darby flipped up her night-vision goggles, blinking sweat away from her eyes.
‘God
The man playing Chris Flynn groaned. ‘Quit your bitching, Tina. I’ve been killed three times over the past two days.’ He rolled on to his back. ‘Christ, McCormick, I think you bruised my spine.’
A fireplug of a man with a brown crew cut and a worn sun-blasted face stepped into the hall – John Haug, the SWAT instructor for the Boston Police Department. He snapped his fingers and pointed to the doorway.
‘McCormick, with me.’
2
Darby trailed a few inches behind Haug, as the adrenalin rush of the training exercise – the first part of her final SWAT exam – started to evaporate and give way to a bone-crushing exhaustion. For the past three days she had grabbed fistfuls of sleep while conducting round-the-clock surveillance on the warehouse.
The first week of her SWAT training, she had started each morning with a ten-mile run under a blistering August sun on Moon Island. There were eight other recruits. All men. For the rest of the morning she carried out close-quarter combat exercises and firearms training. Late afternoons were spent crawling through old sewer tunnels wearing blacked-out goggles to test the limits of her claustrophobia. She completed night-time diving exercises in Boston Harbor and abseiled from a Black Hawk helicopter. One recruit broke his foot. Two other men suffered physical injuries and dropped out. The five remaining members graduated to ‘The Yellow Brick Road’, a punishing gauntlet designed to crush the human body.
Dressed in a military flak jacket and combat boots, wearing a backpack loaded with thirty pounds of sand and with an assault rifle strapped across her chest or held above her head, she ran in the sweltering heat until her legs buckled. She picked herself up and ran some more. She crawled through mud. Climbed ropes and nets and scaffolding. She trod water dressed in her SWAT clothing and tactical gear. When she removed herself from the stream, the sand-filled backpack now twice as heavy from the water, she ran until she collapsed. When the fun ended, she was treated to a boxed lunch – two bottles of water, bread and an apple – and ate it along the way to the firing range, where she shot at targets until the muscles in her forearms cramped. The training ended at 10 p.m. After a quick shower, she slumped into her cot at the all-male bunker and woke at 4 a.m. to start the process all over again.
The second phase of training, Darby knew, was also designed to break one’s mental spirit. Without proper sleep, the body couldn’t heal. The physical toll tore down the mind’s protective walls and lead to frustration, anger and, in some cases, dementia. Two more men dropped out. They couldn’t hack it. The final three made it to the live training exercise.
Haug walked quickly down the final set of stairs. Her SWAT partner lay on his back smoking a cigar, his chest and one shoulder covered with blood-red paint. He saw her and waved. The members of Haug’s SWAT team who had been brought in to play the roles of Chris Flynn’s bodyguards smoked cigarettes and cigars and talked among the crates and shelves. They didn’t look at Haug; they were looking at her. She felt their glares drilling into her skin.
Haug stepped into the car park. Sweat had soaked through his grey T-shirt. He fitted a thick wad of chewing tobacco in the pocket of his cheek. As usual, it was impossible to read his face. The man lived behind an emotionless mask carefully crafted from his years as a marine.
He walked briskly around the side of the warehouse, his tactical boots crunching against the gravel. The hot air throbbed with crickets.
‘The woman you killed,’ he said after a long moment. He looked straight ahead into the darkness surrounding the woods. ‘What made you think she wasn’t an actual hostage? What tipped you off?’
Darby had anticipated the question. ‘I wondered what a well-dressed woman would be doing working at the warehouse at such a late hour.’
‘You didn’t think she was the owner? During the planning sessions, I told you the owner’s wife saw to the day-to-day operations of the warehouse and often worked late hours.’
‘You also said that Ortiz was a frugal son of a bitch.’
‘Your point?’
‘That woman was wearing a Cartier love bracelet.’
Haug’s head whipped around, eyes wide and brow furrowed. ‘You recognized her goddamn
‘And her Christian Louboutin pumps,’ Darby said. ‘Those shoes cost about eight hundred bucks. The bracelet, around three grand. I don’t know about the suit she was wearing but it looked expensive. What is it? Gucci? Armani?’
‘I strike you as a guy who knows shit about clothes?’
‘The way you dress? No, sir.’
Haug jogged up the road leading to the restricted site for bomb disposal.
‘The intel you gave on the cartel didn’t state whether the ringleader was a man or a woman,’ Darby said. ‘After Flynn released her, she didn’t run into another room. She didn’t scream for help. She ran up the stairs leading to the roof – same destination as Flynn. I thought that was odd, so, after I shot Flynn, I turned to the stairs and there she was holding a Beretta. I take it she was the head of the cartel.’
‘She was.’
‘So the plan was for her to play the hostage role and, once Flynn released her, if he hadn’t killed me then she would when I went to cuff Flynn.’
‘That was the plan.’
‘How many of the recruits got shot?’
‘You’re the only one who pulled it off.’
‘That’s what happens when you send in a woman to do a man’s job.’
Haug spat a dark blob of tobacco juice and turned left on to a new road.
In the distance Darby saw the small ranch building where she had lived for the past two weeks. She could see the glowing lights coming from the locker room and bunker.
‘Why are we heading there?’
‘Some guy is here to escort you back to the city on the orders of the police commissioner,’ Haug said. ‘Don’t ask; I don’t know the details.’
Darby had an idea. She was the head of Boston Police Commissioner Chadzynski’s Crime Scene Unit, a specialized group comprised of the department’s top investigators and forensic specialists. CSU was assigned to
