seated on a couch, giving off a glowering anger instead of the insincere happiness from their first meeting. The security men simply pointed at the chairs opposite the couch.
Sitting down, Kamil said, “Thank you for seeing us again. I hope the profit we brought will help with the inconvenience.”
Draco ignored Kamil, addressing Adnan instead. “What do you know of Prague?”
Kamil saw Adnan look to him for guidance, but he didn’t know where this was going. He said, “Draco, Adnan is just my explosives expert. He—”
“Shut the fuck up and let him answer.” He returned to Adnan. “What do you know of Prague?”
“Uhh… I know nothing. I stayed in a hotel and moved when I was told. I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Who has your friend here met with?”
“No one besides you. We left the city after his first meeting, just like you told us to.”
Draco lied, “Suppose I told you I had planted a tracking device on your friend here, and I know where he went. What he did. And now suppose that if you lie to me again, I’m going to cut your throat. Will that change your answer?”
“No.”
Draco flicked his eyes at the security men, who descended on Adnan, one holding him in the chair while another brought out a knife. A third drew a pistol and aimed it at Kamil when he leapt up.
Kamil shouted, “Why are you doing this? What have we done?”
“My transit point in Prague was raided. After your visit. Given your reluctance with my product, I’m thinking you had something to do with it.”
“No! We had nothing to do with it!”
“We’ll know soon, I’m sure.”
He nodded at the security men. The one holding Adnan in place torqued his head to the side, exposing the carotid artery. The other placed the knife against his neck.
Draco said, “You have one chance, my friend. Who did Kamil talk to after he left my house?”
Adnan said, “You have the tracker. You know. Nobody.” He quit struggling and closed his eyes. “Do it.”
Draco took in Adnan’s willingness to die, then assessed Kamil. He waved off his men.
“Understand this: I don’t trust you or your group. I think you had something to do with my losses, either directly or indirectly. If I see you again after tonight, I will consider you an enemy. And make no mistake, if something else happens to my enterprise because of your visit, I’ll hunt you down wherever you are.”
Kamil simply nodded.
“Did you bring the money?”
Kamil said, “Yes. Your men took it.”
Draco waited until it was retrieved. When the case was opened, he smiled.
“Well, at least you didn’t lie about the cash.” He addressed one of the security men. “Bring in the box.”
Waiting on the team, I watched the sun sink below the horizon and thought about our chances. The house itself was smaller than the slave house, with about the same amount of manpower. But it was still daylight, and this house had a helluva lot more electronic security.
The mission was to stop the attack, and looking at it logically, the only way we were going to do that was to hit the meeting itself. If we waited until the Arabs left, we’d get them, but we might not get the explosives. Odds were they weren’t going to drive to the airport with them in their car, and we still had two terrorists unaccounted for. We couldn’t take a chance that they’d simply make arrangements to ship the explosives, forcing us to hit the house anyway.
Ordinarily, we’d just recock and keep on truckin’, running down the threads, but not with the knowledge of the EFPs and the intel on the impending attack. We needed to knock this out right now. Which, given our manpower, sucked beyond words.
Life was much easier when I used to just hammer the shit out of a target, slicing through and overpowering everything in my path with a squadron’s worth of killers. Now, once again, our entire assault was predicated on nobody knowing we were there. On silently clearing rooms and taking out targets before the next one knew there was a threat. That wasn’t a problem when we were hunting an individual man in a specific hotel room. It was a little bit different taking on an entire force spread out over a building. With a single team. Not impossible, but damn well harder.
I heard the van door close and turned away from the Blackjack screen.
“Well, here we go again. The targets just entered the house.”
Nobody said anything. The men looked grim, knowing exactly how hard this would be. Jennifer looked a little sick, reminding me of the opening scenes from
I used the Blackjack image on the laptop screen to brief. “We do a dismounted approach, sticking to the wood line here in the east. We enter the house from the door here on the eastern side, leaving Jennifer in the wood line for security.”
Retro said, “What about the cameras?”
“From their angles, I’m pretty sure they’re focused on the roadway in and the front of the house. I think we can bypass them by coming in through the wood line. They don’t have three-hundred-and-sixty-degree coverage.”
Decoy said, “And the alarms?”
“Well, no SCADA tricks here. From a scan, we’ve picked up a ton of RF coming from the house and isolated a couple of signals to the cameras outside. That leads me to believe the alarm system’s wireless. We’ll get to the door, isolate the signal there, and jam it.”
An alarm system, by its very nature, has a single point of failure; when a breach occurs, it sends a specific signal delivering that message. So, to work around that, you can either trick the system into thinking a breach hasn’t occurred or hijack the signal before it gets to whoever’s looking — either a human or a mechanical device designed to start squealing. We always opted for the latter. Much easier to stop the signal than to memorize eight thousand different types of sensor systems and how they alert — motion detectors, magnetic plates, acoustic triggers, you name it. At the end of the day, all would have to send a signal. With a wireless alarm, we could stop it from broadcasting by simply overpowering the radio transmission with a signal of our own, basically making the receiver deaf.
“Of course, it’s more than likely got a sensor fail-safe, so once we jam, we’ll probably get ten minutes max before the control panel misses a self-test handshake with the door sensor. From there it’s game on.”
“What if that sensor’s next on the handshake list?”
“We get about ten seconds.”
“Fucking great.”
Decoy asked, “Still going top to bottom?”
“No. We’re looking for the Arabs and the explosives, and I doubt they’re on the top floor. We don’t need to secure this place, just stop the transfer. Once that’s done, we haul ass the same way we came in, running the wood line back to the vans.”
Retro said, “Is the house designated hostile?”
I hesitated. I didn’t want to do it, but I just didn’t have the force to accomplish a surgical hit. After the Prague operation, these men would be on edge, expecting an assault and trigger-happy. Looking for a fight. We wouldn’t be catching anyone with their pants down like last time, and unlike the Prague hit, there were no known friendlies inside. I caught Jennifer’s eye.
“Yeah. It’s a hostile force. My call.”
She knew it meant everyone inside who had the misfortune to cross our path would be dead, no matter if they were a threat or not, but she nodded, accepting it.
She said, “What about me?”
“Same plan as before. You stay in the wood line and interdict anyone coming down the drive. I want you to discriminate, however. I don’t want to kill police or any other coincidence that might occur. If they aren’t hostile, just alert us by radio. If they come out to play, light ’em up.”
She nodded, her eyes wide, but showing more confidence than she had last time.
“Anything else?”
