was no getting to the C-side of the target, the back side, except to cross it. If the buildings on this dirty lot were the six pips on a die, the target building was the lower right pip and C-team was just rounding the lower left. Running right past the two were the twin tracks of the Chuo-Sobu Line, where the
Mariko’s team tucked themselves into a corner to catch their breath. They waited for the train for the same reason they’d been so careful in strapping their gear down tight: speed and surprise were their only sure defense against automatic fire. The helmet and vest were half armor, half security blanket; every cop knew there was no protection against a lucky shot. Submachine guns could spit out a
Mariko heard a little
The train was upon them before she knew it, and then they were running again. Off to Mariko’s left, A- team’s big black van roared through the parking lot and B-team was almost to the B-side windows. As Mariko’s element reached the C-side door, the SWAT guy with the ram—a heavy goddamn thing by the look of it; Mariko could hardly believe he’d kept pace with the rest of the team—charged the door and laid into it.
The ram bounced back.
He hammered the door again, but the ram bounced off like it was made of rubber. “Shit,” Mariko said. So much for owning the building in the first five seconds.
Now that the train had gone, she could hear shouting, shattering windows, the explosion of flash-bangs. Now two SWAT guys were on the ram, beating the holy hell out of the door. They were supposed to have made their breach by now. A-team would already have punched right through the front door, and if Mariko’s team couldn’t punch their door, their suspects would only have A-team to shoot at.
Mariko didn’t like the thought of volunteering to draw some of that fire, but the whole point of converging on the target at once was to overwhelm and confuse the opposition. Besides, the longer her suspects had to think, the more time they had to find weapons or flush product down the toilet.
She pulled a flash-bang grenade from her belt and set it on the windowsill behind her. “Get down,” she said, and she tried to hide her whole body under her helmet.
White light consumed the world. The concussion was enough to buckle her knees. It sounded like Armageddon, but it sure blew the hell out of the window. Mariko hopped through the gap, Han following like her own shadow.
For Mariko the world narrowed to whatever her pistol could see. She put her front sight on the empty doorway, then this corner, then that one, not checking the other two because that was Han’s area and she knew he’d do it right. The furniture didn’t even register to her except as cover.
With the room cleared she and Han made for the hall, looking for the bathroom. When they raided residences, that was where perps disposed of product, and there was no reason a commercial storefront’s toilets couldn’t be used for the same purpose. Mariko reached the hallway just in time to see the C-side door exploding inward, finally succumbing to the ram. Two of her SWAT guys breached and held. The other two followed Mariko and Han.
Footsteps thundered on a flight of stairs somewhere nearby. So many voices were shouting through Mariko’s earpiece that she couldn’t keep them straight. She rounded a corner and saw a balding man in a maroon track suit closing a door behind him. She only got a glimpse of the room on the other side of the door, but she thought she saw some kind of heavy machinery back there.
In an instant Han had a pistol on the suspect too, shouting at him to get down, and both SWAT guys had him in the wavering glow of the flashlights undermounted on the barrels of their M4s. The man in the track suit gave all four cops a cocky smile, held his hands up near his head, and let something small and shiny fall from his right hand.
Keys.
That arrogant smile told Mariko all she needed to know. Her suspect didn’t care about being arrested. All he had to do was stand there getting handcuffed long enough for some machine on the other side of that door to destroy all of her precious evidence.
She rushed the perp. Still wearing that cocksure smile, he stood with his hands in front of him, as if to offer his wrists. It was the sort of pose she’d only seen in people who had been handcuffed before. Mariko took the tiniest bit of delight in seeing his eyes widen a bit as she drew near. Apparently he assumed she’d slow down before she reached him. But body armor wasn’t just for stopping bullets.
She hit him like a wrecking ball. They crashed through the locked door, which, unlike the reinforced door that had repelled the battering ram, was just an interior door like the ones she’d expect to find in the average apartment. She let her shoulder pad sink into her suspect’s solar plexus, rolling right over it and up to her feet. Han would be on the guy; Mariko didn’t need to look back and check. She didn’t recognize any of the weird machines standing in front of her—and there were a lot of them—but she didn’t need to. She just hit the STOP button on the one that was mixing a bunch of white powder.
She learned afterward that the machine was for making those biodegradable packing peanuts, and that doing so involved turning cornstarch into tiny little pellets, which were then subjected to extremely high heat to expand them to their peanutty volume. She also learned that mixing highly combustible amphetamines into the cornstarch wasn’t exactly a foolproof method to make a whole lot of speed disappear, but if you let the laced cornstarch hit the pellet processor, it was a great way to flood the building with noxious gases and make the whole neighborhood smell like ammonia for a week. In the moment, though, Mariko stood with her hands on her hips, panting a bit and smiling down at the guy she’d just blasted through the door.
Frowning at the splintered doorframe, Han said, “You know, Mariko, I thought we worked pretty well as a team, but I have to tell you I didn’t see that one coming.”
Mariko grinned at him, enjoying her adrenaline high. “Opened the door, didn’t it?”
“Yeah. But you know, these do that too.” He jingled the perp’s keys at her. “And these don’t give the SWAT guys heart attacks and make them hope they can clear the big roomful of weird-ass machines before someone puts a bullet in the chick they’re supposed to protect.”
SWAT had indeed cleared the rest of the factory floor, and judging by the chatter coming over the wire, the operation was over. It seemed impossible. “Han, how long did this thing take?”
“What, the op?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “Starting from when we first hit the back door? I don’t know. A minute, maybe? No, less than that, I think.”
“Me too. Call it forty-five seconds.”
“Okay. So what?”
“So,” Mariko said, “was that the best forty-five seconds or what? Damn, I love this job.”
2
Mariko sat on the edge of the desk in the shipping company’s sales office and waited for her verbal beating.
It was inevitable. She’d violated standard operating procedure, and cops who violated SOP suffered a thorough pummeling by a commanding officer. Han knew it too, and he sat beside her on the broad desktop, arms folded across the peeling TMPD patch on his chest, equally resigned to the same fate. “Hey, check that out,” he said, as if making small talk could distract them from their impending fate. “You think we can get these guys on weapons possession?”
Mariko had been looking at the same thing: a weather-beaten
