recipient of a generous grant. Many of the houses were still boarded up, though, at the very least, most of the trash had been removed. This was the section of New Orleans that was hardest hit when the levees failed and had been a virtual lake in the days following Katrina. Nearby were vacant lots with only crumbling concrete pads to mark the grave sites of families’ homes.
Linc dropped MacD and Cabrillo at a coffee shop not too far from their intended target. In this area, two white men and a black man in the same car would look suspiciously like cops no matter who was behind the wheel. He returned thirty minutes later, and helped himself to the chicory coffee from the pot Juan had ordered.
“Well?” Cabrillo asked after Linc had stopped making a sour face at the bitter taste of the coffee.
“Nasty,” he pronounced. “Okay, the satellite pics we have are a little out of date. The two houses behind the one we’re interested in have been demolished, and the lots are practically jungles. The ones on either side are still there and completely shuttered. There are families living across the street. I saw kids’ bikes chained in their yards, and toys and stuff on the lawn, so we need to be careful there.”
“What about the kidnappers?” MacD asked, his anxiety level spiking.
“Never showed themselves. The shades are drawn in all the windows, but I believe there are tiny gaps at the edges that they can see out of and only a professional Peeping Tom could see in. And Juan, you were right about the lawn. It looks like a goat’s buffet. Those guys are holed up tight and probably go out only at night, to get food from a store miles from here.”
“So was that an attached garage we saw on the pictures?”
“Yes.”
“Did you get a chance to run a thermal scan?”
“No. It would look too suspicious, and it’s still too warm outside. Not enough of a temperature difference to register properly.”
Cabrillo had suspected as much but felt he should ask anyway. “Okay. We lay low and then go in at one and assault at three.” Three a.m. is when the human body is at its lowest ebb. Even a guard on night duty succumbs to the body’s natural circadian rhythms and would be far from alert. “MacD, you cool?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Ah won’t let my emotions interfere with the op.”
Even in such a tumbledown neighborhood, the men couldn’t go skulking around in full combat gear and armed to the teeth. As one o’clock approached, Linc parked the car several streets over from the target house and popped open the hood. Any passing police patrol would see that it was a disabled vehicle and that the driver had left it for the night. A curious cop might run the plates, see that it was a rental, and assume it was a relative displaced by Katrina to Houston, as so many were, back home for a visit.
They all wore dark jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts, and their equipment was stuffed in duffel bags. The air was markedly cooler, though the humidity remained high. They walked normally along the cracked sidewalk as if they didn’t have a care in the world. There was no traffic, and the only sound came from a barking dog several blocks over.
When they reached the jungled lot behind the target house, the men faded into it as if they’d never existed. From here on out, they were invisible. Bags whispered open, and equipment was triple-checked. They oozed their way through the foliage. If any of them noticed that most of the plants were studded with wicked sharp thorns, no one gave any indication. After five minutes of silently crawling through the underbrush, they came into the clear. A wooden fence, missing slats like a mouth missing teeth, encircled the backyard and blocked most of the view. Unperturbed, Cabrillo hefted the thermal imager from a bag strapped to his side and climbed atop a chunk of concrete left over from when this parcel had been a home.
The scanner worked by comparing heat signatures, and had uncanny sensitivity. It basically allowed him to see through walls as though he had X-ray vision. They were so effective that many civil liberties groups were fighting their use by law enforcement agencies because of right-to-privacy issues. The military had high hopes for the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, but oftentimes the mud huts’ walls were too thick to get accurate readings. But here, with a house so old it lacked even basic insulation, the scanner was in its element.
Cabrillo could see four distinct heat signatures, which glowed white in his vision, and a squat rectangle of absolute black, which would be the cold water stored in the only bathroom’s toilet cistern. There were three other spots showing heat. One was cylindrical and would be the hot-water tank. Another was much smaller and was the warm compressor motor for the refrigerator. There was no glowing pilot light, so the stove was electric. In this way not only did Juan see the occupants, he could decipher the house’s layout. Three of the people were in repose, their bodies seeming to float a few feet above the floor because the scanner couldn’t see the beds they were lying on. The fourth figure was sitting upright as if in a chair, a lightbulb glowing cheerily over him.
He concentrated on the seated person for fifteen minutes, and in all that time the figure didn’t move once. If Juan had to venture a guess, he’d say the guy was sound asleep.
Next he moved off to the right about twenty yards, through the grass, until he came up against the trunk of a tree. He was close enough now to peer over the fence. He scoped the house a second time. Because he’d shifted position he saw the same objects from a different angle and could confirm that his mental picture of its layout was accurate.
He rejoined his team, and they retreated back into the woods.
Cabrillo’s voice was barely above a whisper. “There are three Tangos, one at the front of the house asleep in a chair. A second one is alone in a back bedroom. The third is in the bedroom next to it with MacD’s daughter.” He felt Lawless stiffen next to him. “Before you ask, they’re in separate beds.” He’d been able to distinguish her from the others because of her small stature.
They’d earlier determined that the house, though small by American standards, was too big to use the knockout-gas trick they’d employed to “rescue” Setiawan Bahar. They would have to go in silently and without a hint of hesitation. The heat signatures were too clear for any of the kidnappers to be wearing a bulky suicide vest, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have them close by.
For the next two hours they took turns watching the house through the thermal imager. At one point, the guard in the front room roused himself to use the bathroom and when he returned the scanner showed him lying down—on a couch, presumably—and most likely going to sleep again.
As the minute hand of Juan’s watch swept to three a.m., they moved out, advancing in a crouch and then vaulting over the fence like ghosts. They were so silent that the few nearby crickets didn’t stop chirping. There was a single door that led to the backyard from the kitchen. Juan and MacD donned night vision goggles and turned them on. Working only by touch, Linc picked the lock in under fifty seconds. Despite the massive size of his hands, he had the dexterity of a surgeon but had taken longer than normal in order to stay as quiet as possible.
While Linc was working, Cabrillo drizzled oil from a small can over the hinges and worked it into the gaps with his fingers. The door unlatched, but Linc kept it closed, as a slight breeze had come up from behind them and would have blown into the house had he opened it.
The men’s weapons were mere .22 calibers, and the silencers attached to their barrels were the size of soda cans, making them unbalanced and unwieldy. Such pistols had only one purpose. These were the tools of assassins. The ammo was mercury tipped but carried less powder than normal. It was a trade-off of power versus stealth. But when the silencer was placed against a target’s head, the extra gunpowder would have been superfluous anyway.
The breeze died down, and Cabrillo nodded. Like a black panther, Linc inched open the door and slid his big body through, followed immediately by Cabrillo and Lawless.
There was enough light spilling from the front living room to make it seem like noon in the filthy and reeking kitchen. A barrel-sized trash can was overflowing with rotting food and used paper plates. Skillets and pans were mounded in the sink, covered in congealed grease and doubtlessly home to a sizable roach colony. An unadorned archway led to the living room while another exit gave way to a hallway where the bedrooms and bathroom were located.
Moving so that his feet barely left the unmopped linoleum floor, Cabrillo glided through this second doorway with MacD on his heels. The bedroom doors were both closed. From one there was silence. From the other came deep, sonorous snoring. The snorer was with Pauline Lawless, yet one more torture for the poor girl.
As agreed, they struck thirty seconds after parting in the kitchen to give each other enough time to get into position. Juan counted down those last few seconds in his head as accurately as a Swiss chronograph. At the precise last second, he heard two muted coughs from the front of the house. Linc’s man was dead. Juan opened the cheap pressboard door and saw his target sprawled on a plain metal bed. Next to him was a stand with a pistol and
