“Deal,” Jonathan said. He turned to Boxers. “You ready?”
“Oh, my, yes,” he said.
Because of their relative sizes, it always made sense for Jonathan to lead on any entry. He pushed the door open, took two steps inside, and dropped to a deep crouch, his M4 trained on the hallway ahead. The last thing he wanted at this point was a gun battle-that would almost surely cause the Nasbes to be killed. Two seconds later, Boxers was in and the door was pushed closed again.
This was where it got tough. Absent any useful intel, Jonathan and Boxers had become little more than well- armed burglars. They would have to feel their way into this new environment, using the ancient floor plans as a template, but anticipating that everything about them was wrong. They didn’t know where the bad guys were, and, even more critically, they didn’t know where the good guys were-assuming that they were here at all.
Their advantage had been whittled to nothing more than superior marksmanship.
For the better part of a minute, they stayed frozen in the hallway, listening and watching. With buds in both ears-the right one for the radio traffic and the left to monitor any audio feeds they might get-it could be difficult sometimes to pick up distant conversations. You had to adjust to the ambient noise, and then react as much to background anomalies as to actual sounds themselves.
In this case, he heard the people arriving in the front of the house, but their conversations were an indiscernible rumble.
“Can we at least get some cover?” Boxers whispered over the radio. In superquiet environments like this, the radio was the most efficient way to communicate. The mikes they used could pick up the faintest whispers, yet still be decipherable in the middle of a firefight.
“I think we need to split up,” Jonathan whispered.
“And I think one of us just had an aneurism,” Boxers replied, “because I could have sworn that I just heard my boss suggest that we split up. That ain’t happening.”
“We’ve got to. We’ve got to search the house, and we need to find out what’s going on at this meeting. Together we make too big a footprint. Separately, we can stay out of sight easier.”
Boxers made the growling noise that usually meant surrender. “Promise no shooting without me,” he said.
“Not if I can avoid it. You stay on this level with the guests. I’m searching for the basement.”
Boxers didn’t like it, but he didn’t argue. “Shout if you need me, hear?” he said.
Jonathan crossed his heart. “Got it. And no killing people just because you’re bored.”
The second door on the left led to the basement. Boxers was with him step-for-step until that moment, and then, after they parted with a knuckle knock for luck, Jonathan was on his own.
The stairs were finished with lush carpets, and the walls on either side were decorated with artwork that Jonathan could not have cared less about. He noted with interest what appeared to be drops of blood on the walls. When he touched one, it smeared, and he became even more convinced that he was in the right place.
He descended along the side of the risers for the same reason every teenager who ever returned home after curfew did: the farther you stay from the center of any board, the less likely it is for it to squeak. He chose the left side so that his right hand-his preferred shooting hand-could remain on the grip of his M4.
He moved slowly, taking one step at a time, pausing between each to listen for any noise that might indicate trouble.
Patience was a great asset to soldiers and burglars alike, and perhaps the single most distinguishing trait that separated professionals from amateurs. The slowness was agonizing; the temptation to just get it over with overwhelming.
It took every bit of five minutes for Jonathan to reach the carpeted floor. Now he knew that the floor plans were a waste of paper and electrons. The place was fully furnished down here, complete with a pool table, a bar, and a big-screen television. A man cave. And it was entirely unoccupied.
It also took up only about a quarter of the total footprint of the house, maybe less. That meant that there was more to the place than what he could see.
A vertical seam of light on the far side of the room solved the riddle. As he closed to within a few feet, he clearly saw the outline of a double door in the wall. Lowering himself to his knees, he once again used fiber optics to peer into his future.
The image on his PDA showed a brightly lit area of utilitarian construction. An unremarkable off-white hallway rose from an unremarkable tile floor. Distances were difficult to judge, but every ten feet or so, the walls gave way to closed doors. He’d seen this sort of unimaginative decor in countless office spaces throughout the world.
The good news was that he didn’t see any people in the camera’s field of view. But someone had left the lights on.
Hoping to find the means to open the door, he used the flat of his palms and rubbed the door from knee to shoulder height. Sooner or later he’d find a knob. When he couldn’t find it after a minute or so, he flipped his NVGs out of the way and opted to use the muzzle light from his M4. Within seconds, the bright white disk of light revealed not a knob but a D-ring that had been recessed into the wall. If there was an alarm system, he couldn’t see it.
Didn’t mean it wasn’t there, though. He winced in anticipation as he turned the ring. While Venice could easily disable even a sophisticated system from sounding the alarm at the off-site headquarters, she was powerless to silence local alarms that were tied directly to the sensors.
Holding his breath, he pressed the door open, and…
Nothing. The mission gremlins remained on his side. He slipped inside and closed the door behind him. He pressed his transmit button and whispered, “Radio check.” He would have been inaudible to someone standing two feet away.
Venice answered, “A little crinkly, but I’ve got you.”
“I’m in the basement.”
“Copy. Take care of yourself.”
The first order of business was to establish a forward operating base for himself here in the bowels of enemy headquarters. If the conversations they’d monitored were still operative, he had more than an hour to kill before anything interesting happened, and standing in the middle of the hallway for that amount of time was a nonstarter.
He decided to start in one of the offices. First, though, he owed his team some intel. “Mother Hen, Scorpion,” he said.
“Right here.”
“I’ve got a total of eight rooms on either side of the first hall, directly inside the doorway. They’re pretty heavy construction, and they’ve got some heavy locks.” In Jonathan’s experience, people used big locks to secure against big fears-the kind of fears that posed big threats to people like him. In his mind, he could see Venice back in Fisherman’s Cove typing like crazy to document what he was telling her.
“More in a minute,” he said.
Neither of the first rooms on the right or the left bore padlocks, so he targeted those first. The one on the left was locked at the knob; the one on the right was not, so he chose the locked one. There was no way in the world he was going to hang out in an unlocked room, and if the room on the right was supposed to remain unlocked, so be it.
Using his picks, he gained entry in seconds. He was in somebody’s office. The computer and the file cabinets were a dead giveaway. He locked the door behind him and keyed his mike. “Radio check.”
“Not as strong as before,” Venice said, “but I’ve got you.”
“Continuing, then,” Jonathan said. “The hallway on my side terminates in a right-angle turn to the north. I can’t see around the corners, but it looks to me as if this area is designed either as secure office space or secure storage. I’m about to step out to surveil the area now.”
He didn’t wait for a response. Stepping back into the hallway, he turned left and eased quietly down the hall. He moved at a crouch, his M4 up to his shoulder and ready.
The bright light was his greatest immediate hazard. At least they were overhead fluorescents. The shadows thrown by fluorescents were far less prominent than their incandescent cousins.
Jonathan heard voices as he approached the turn, and stopped. If they were approaching him, he was screwed; the mission would come to a violent end right now. As it was, the voices seemed stationary, neither getting closer nor farther away.
With his M4 dangling parallel to his body via its sling, Jonathan moved at an excruciatingly slow pace to the end