Silence

way.

During her first evening shift, she used the nightscope sparingly. The bright green glow gave her a headache after a few minutes, and she knew she didn’t need it. A car pulling up in front of the building to let out passengers would be hard to miss.

Her rest periods were worse than the watch periods. Paul had sunk into his quiet mode, which made him no company at all, and she was afraid that watching television would light up the room and make Paul visible. Her eyes were tired anyway. At ten Paul lengthened the shifts to three hours, so she could sleep.

The bed was mostly taken up by the uniforms they had laid out, so Sylvie pulled back the covers and made a small space on the far edge. In the darkness and silence of the room, she went to sleep immediately. At one Paul gave her a small shake, and she managed to bring herself out of sleep and open her eyes. “I sure hope this is a one-day job,” she said.

“Just do your best. Wake me up at four, unless something happens first. If you find you can’t keep your eyes open, get me up.”

“All right. I think I’m awake now. Where are the two men?” She put her feet on the floor and stretched.

“I don’t know. I think they must be in the building or in a parked car somewhere. I haven’t seen them since around midnight.”

Sylvie kept herself awake by searching for the men for a time, and then by trying to use the nightscope to see into the cars that passed. The only pedestrians on the street were a couple of homeless men with shopping carts. It occurred to Sylvie that they could easily be cops, too, taking the night shift. She used the scope to study them, but could not reach a conclusion about them. Their clothes consisted of several layers to keep off the night chill, so it was impossible to tell if they were hiding weapons. She saw nobody else who interested her, and at four she woke Paul and went back to sleep.

When Sylvie awoke again, the light in the room was still dim. She looked in the direction of the window. Paul had it open, and she realized that the sound of his opening it was what had awakened her. He lifted the rifle to his shoulder.

“What is it?” she said.

“A car. Get up.”

Sylvie threw off the covers and rushed to join him at the window, snatching up the other rifle. While she had been asleep, he had removed the nightscope and put on the other sixteen-power Weaver. Sylvie brought the rifle up, opened both eyes wide to rid herself of the filmy blur left over from sleep, then stared into the rifle sight.

A black SUV had pulled to the red curb in front of the building. Two doors on the far side swung open. Sylvie cycled the bolt of the rifle and aimed at a spot just past the rear door, where somebody was going to step out in a second.

“Hold your fire.”

Something was wrong—she could hear it in Paul’s voice. She looked wide of her scope, saw running figures approaching the SUV, and placed her crosshairs on one of them. “It’s the man from yesterday. The one on the bus bench!”

Sylvie watched the man reach into his coat as he ran. His hand came out, holding a gun. There was a burst of fire from inside the car, but it was another volley of shots from somewhere else that caught him from behind and swept him forward onto his face on the pavement, where he lay with his arms out in a big embrace, blood pooling on the cement by his head.

There was another barrage of shots. Sylvie swung her rifle to her left to see, but Paul held her arm. “Put it down. We’ve got to go!”

She set the rifle on the table, her eyes still on the scene below. The second man she had seen yesterday was lying on the sidewalk, too. Three plain vans—white, blue, black—pulled up quickly and men and women in black nylon jackets began to pile out. Some of them knelt by the fallen men, while others spoke into radios. A couple of uniformed cops appeared a hundred feet down the street and tossed flares on the pavement to begin diverting traffic away from the scene.

“Did you see the girl?”

“I don’t think she’s even there.” Paul wasn’t even looking now. He was folding the legs of the spotter scope and putting it in a carry-bag. “It was an ambush, a decoy thing. It was set up for us. Help me collect our gear.”

“But who were those two men they killed?”

“I think they were there to kill Wendy Harper, too. I think somebody has decided to hedge his bets by hiring another team.”

“Without even telling us?”

She could see that Paul was concentrating hard, and that he was trying to keep his voice sounding calm. “I guess we never should have called Densmore and tried to back out.”

“Are you saying this is my fault?”

“I’m not saying it’s anybody’s fault. I’m trying to tell you why we’ve got to get out of here. If the cops picked out those two, they must have been smart enough to check out the windows that overlook the entrance. Let’s go.”

“How?”

“We use the original plan.”

He changed into the police uniform as quickly as he could, so she imitated him. As soon as she had her uniform on and the utility belt buckled, she stuffed their clothes into the black canvas bag, then the Peter and Sarah Harkin clothes and wigs. When she had finished, she pulled the covers tight on the bed again, and took a last look around the room to be sure they’d left nothing behind. They hurried out into the hallway, pulling their wheeled suitcases, and managed to get to the stairwell without seeing anyone. They took everything down two flights and left the empty suitcases on the landing. Now Sylvie had the black carryall bag slung over her shoulder, and she and Paul each carried a sniper rifle. Paul led the way down the stairs, prepared to fend off questions or open fire if they met police on their way up.

They made it to the ground floor of the building in a short time. They were near the back of the building, so Paul led them along a corridor of meeting rooms to a fire exit. He pushed open the door and stepped onto the blacktop just as a pair of police cruisers came up the side street and pulled to a stop. The whole area was full of uniformed police now, setting up to block off streets on all sides of the crime scene. The neighborhood seemed to be empty of people, except for police.

As the two police cars maneuvered nose-to-nose to block the street, Paul and Sylvie stepped past them, carrying the sniper rifles. A cop who was driving one of the cars looked at them curiously for a second, but Sylvie pointed at the parking structure where she had once parked when she was called for jury duty. She called, “We’re setting up on the parking structure. Good view of Temple.”

The cop nodded, and they trotted to the parking structure. When they had gotten into the car they had left the day before and Paul was driving down the ramp to the street, Sylvie said, “You know whose fault this is, don’t you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I do.”

31

YOUR IDEA brought us some surprises, Jack,” Poliakoff said. “In fact, the plan worked too well. It went down around four this morning.”

Jack Till held the cell phone to his mouth and spoke quietly because he didn’t want Wendy in the next room to overhear. “What happened?”

“During the night, we deployed SWAT officers in buildings along the south side of Temple Street near the DA’s office, just as you suggested. We had two black SUVs like the ones they use to deliver prisoners to court. When the two SUVs pulled up at the curb and opened their doors, two men came out of parked cars on both sides, apparently trying to get a shot at a female officer in the second vehicle. The SWAT guys had spotted them, so they each got about as far as pulling out a weapon.”

“Is everybody all right?”