which we stood was big, dirty, and empty. And cold. Like the meatpacking plant had been, maybe thirty-five, forty degrees with damp air and black mold on the walls. The floor was old tile and had a big gutter down its middle, and to our left was a low stone wall beyond which were oversized showers. There was a row of heavy pegs on which were still hung a couple of old oilskin jackets. This was where the crab fishermen must have come in after offloading their catch, to shower the seawater and crab gook off their foul-weather gear before heading into the interior of the plant. There was a line of foul-smelling toilet stalls to our right and the wall in front of us was set with rows of lockers. A corridor broke left past the lockers. All of it was visible in the piss-yellow glow of flickering fluorescent lights.
I signaled Skip to watch the hall while the rest of us shucked our coats and helmets and stowed them out of sight in a shower stall.
Skip signaled us by breaking squelch and then hand-signed that someone was coming. We all faded back. Ollie and Skip went into toilet stalls and crouched on the seats; Top and Bunny hid in shower stalls and I crouched down behind the low concrete wall. I could only see around the edge of it and there were shadows behind me so I was pretty well hidden. I had my silenced Beretta ready in a two-hand grip as I strained to hear the footsteps through the jangling alarm.
Right around the time we heard the running footsteps the alarm stopped. The trooper continued to pound on the door and now he was shouting, too, sounding genuinely outraged that no one had come to check out the fire. Then a man stepped into view with an AK-47 in his hands. He looked nervous and sweaty, his eyes round and white as he stared at the door. He licked his lips and looked around the shower room, but didn’t see anything. We’d been careful not to scuff the floor.
After a moment’s indecision he backpedaled, opened one of the lockers and put the assault rifle inside, closed it and pulled a small walkie-talkie from his jacket pocket. As he clicked it on he moved into the spill of weak light from one of the few overhead fluorescents that still worked. He was Middle Eastern, with a receding hairline, short beard, and a beaky nose. “I’m at the back door,” he said into the walkie-talkie, speaking in Waziri, a dialect from southern Iran. I could just about understand him. “No the door is locked but I think the firemen want to get in. They are banging on the door.” He listened for a few moments, but the voice on the other end was too garbled for me to understand. “Okay,” he said, and clicked off the radio.
In very good English he yelled: “All right, all right, I’m coming!” He pushed the door open and the big state trooper filled the doorway with his bulk and shone his light right into the man’s face.
“Didn’t you hear me knocking, sir? Didn’t you hear the explosion? How can you not be aware that half the fire companies in the county are in your parking lot?” As ordered, the trooper went immediately into an outraged tirade, which provoked a defensive reaction in the other man, and within seconds the two of them were locked in a screaming match. It was clear the Iranian was regretting opening the door, but he was caught up in his role now, playing the part of a clueless and aggrieved worker who wants no part of something that happened on the docks. He made a lot of noise about being a supervisor for a crew mapping out renovations for a building that had already been sold. He shouted names and phone numbers for the police to call. He also told the cop to get the damn light out of his face; and he had to repeat that three times before the trooper did. Both the Iranian and the trooper could yell like fishwives. I checked my watch. The argument had lasted two minutes. Any second now another trooper would call the big guy away and they’d allow the “supervisor” to go about his business; and sure enough, I heard Gus Dietrich calling the cop away.
“The fire marshal is going to need you to sign a release form,” the trooper yelled.
“Sure, sure, fine. Don’t harass me. This is bullshit. Here is the card for the lawyer who is handling things. He will be happy to handle whatever needs to be done.”
The trooper snatched the card out of the Iranian’s fingers and stormed off. It was all very impressive, with exactly the right amount of indignation.
The Iranian pulled the door shut again and double-checked the lock. He keyed his walkie-talkie again and in rapid Waziri relayed what was happening. “Okay,” he said at length, “I’m coming back.” He pocketed the radio, cast one last look around, retrieved his AK-47 from the locker, and headed back along the hallway. I waited a full minute after the sound of his footfalls vanished before I stood up. The others crept out of hiding to join me.
“Skip, you watch the hall again,” I whispered. “You see so much as a cockroach you break squelch twice. Top, Bunny, I want you both to hold this position. Ollie, you’re with me. Code names here on out. Small arms only.”
They nodded and we began moving. Skip dropped down to a shooter’s kneel using one of the rows of lockers as cover. There was enough light to see, but only just; and if it went lights-out we had night vision as backup. Bunny positioned himself behind the low wall so that it would serve as a bunker if we got chased. Top faded to the other side of the big room and vanished into a bank of shadows.
Ollie looked down the shadowy corridor. “Clear,” he murmured. We set off into the belly of the beast.
Chapter Sixty-One
Crisfield, Maryland / Wednesday, July 1; 3:15 A.M.
THE BUILDING WAS quiet as a tomb and as cold as a meat locker. I hated that because of what it implied. All I could hear was the faintest hum from the refrigeration compressors on the far side of the warehouse. Our gum-rubber shoes made no sound as Ollie and I crept along, hugging the wall, looking for security cameras, moving from shadow to shadow.
I knew from the schematics that there was a central corridor that ran the length of the building; that much was in the original floor plans, but the hallway in front of us didn’t look long enough to go the whole way. We had no plans that showed renovations made since the plant went into receivership. The corridor ran straight for maybe three hundred feet and then vanished in shadows that looked solid enough to be a wall. There were heavy steel doors set about every ten yards and as we moved up to the first one we checked every inch of the floor, walls and ceiling for cameras and saw none.
The first door we came to was set with a simple keycard lock. Nothing that would slow us up for very long if we were in a hurry.
“Bug,” I said, and Ollie fished in his pocket and removed two tiny devices. The first was the size of a postage stamp and painted a neutral gray. He handed it to me and I pulled off a clear plastic cover to expose the photosensitive chemicals, and then pressed it to the side of the metal door for three seconds. When I finished counting Mississippis I pulled the strip off and saw that it was now the same color as the door. I turned it over and removed the tape from the other side, exposing a strong adhesive, and then pressed it to the door at about knee level, below where the eye would not naturally fall when opening a door. I examined the results and Ollie and I exchanged a raised-eyebrows look. Unless you knew exactly where to look the thing was invisible, blending in completely with the paint on the door. The little chameleon bugs were supposed to have incredible pickup and could relay info up to a quarter mile.
“Nice,” Ollie said as he handed me the second device, a silver disk the size of a nickel. I removed the adhesive backing and placed the device on the underside of the keycard box. The bug would do nothing until someone used a keycard to open the door and then it would record the magnetic code and transmit it immediately to the DMS where it would be processed through MindReader and the code signal would be sent back to us. We each carried master keycards that could be remote-programmed by the DMS techs. Within ninety seconds of someone using a keycard here we’d all have cards with the same code. Our master keycards could store up to six separate card codes. Church really had nice toys, but I hoped it worked as well as promised.
I tapped my earpiece. “First one’s in place.”
We moved down the hallway and repeated the process at each door. Counting both sides of the hall, there were eleven doors in all; then the hallway ended at a T-juncture, with shorter corridors branching at right angles.
“Split up?” Ollie suggested.
I nodded. “Break squelch once if you find anything, twice if you need me to come running.”
“Roger that,” he said and melted away.
This part of the building was badly lit, with fluorescent lights hanging from their wires like debris caught in some gigantic spider web. The ceiling was cracked, water dripped from a damaged pipe somewhere in the walls.
