right-bam! Three down, all head shots.
He heard a car coming fast from his right. He moved between two parked cars and confirmed it was the white van he'd seen parked at the end of the street when he came in. He waited until it was forty feet away, then stepped out into the road, brought up the HK, and put a round through the windshield into the driver's face. The van swerved wildly and slammed into a parked car ten feet from Larison's position on the other side of the street. Larison crossed over, moved past the van, and approached it from behind on the passenger side, the HK up at chin level. A dazed-looking operator covered in his partner's blood and brain matter was struggling with the door, which must have been jammed. He saw Larison and tried to bring up a gun, but the angle was all wrong and the timing useless. Larison shot him in the head.
He walked quickly across the street, mounted the Kawasaki, fired it up, pulled on the helmet, and raced down the street toward where he knew the other sentries would be. Even if the first set hadn't contacted them already, they would have heard the gunshots, would have known something had gone badly wrong. They'd be trying to raise their comrades on cellphones right now. He noted another van, a green one, on his right as he rode, but it was in the wrong position to have been of any use operationally and he judged it just a civilian coincidence.
There it was, at the end of the street, another white van, parked on the right, facing away from him. He scanned the other parked cars and potential hot spots to ensure he wasn't missing anything. He wasn't. The van was the target.
He gunned the engine so they would hear him coming, then swerved between two parked cars, jumped the curb, and raced up the sidewalk to the passenger side of the van. He saw the passenger's reflection in the sideview. The man had heard the whine of the Kawasaki's engine and naturally assumed Larison was coming up the street, not the sidewalk. So, sadly for him, he was now facing the wrong way.
Larison pulled up to the window. The guy's ears must have had just enough time to send an urgent corrective message to his brain-threat on right, not on left-because his head started to turn in the instant before Larison put an armor-piercing round into the back of it.
The driver was amazingly quick. In the moment during which Larison was focused on his partner, he managed to open the door and jump out onto the street. Larison stepped back, judged the angle, and fired twice through the van. He heard a cry from the other side and circled carefully around the front. The guy was splayed out on his back in a growing pool of blood, a gun on the ground beside him, his legs kicking feebly as though to propel him from the scene of his own destruction. Larison checked his flanks-clear-stepped out from behind the cover of the van's engine block, and approached him, the HK up.
'Please,' the guy whispered. 'Please.'
Larison smiled and shot him in the face.
He went back to the bike, reloaded, and roared off.
Seven down, he thought. Five to go.
He wished there were more.
28
Shaken Up The whole thing happened so fast that Ben didn't have time to figure out what to do. In the space of a half minute, he watched Larison appear, drop five men, and disappear again. Ben could have gotten out of the van after the first three and engaged Larison from behind, but his orders were strictly to observe, and besides, the point, if anything, was to snatch Larison, not to kill him. Still, it was appalling to have to be a spectator to so much killing, to be helpless to do anything about it.
Paula was stunned by the mayhem. She watched it all with one hand over her mouth, the other around the butt of the Glock in her lap, muttering, 'Oh, my God. Oh, my God.'
When Larison mounted up and roared off toward the other end of the street, Ben knew the two men waiting there were already dead. A moment later, the same.45 caliber gunshots he'd already heard confirmed it.
Ben started to pull out his phone to call Hort. And then he realized.
Larison wasn't done. He was heading toward Nico's office. Hoping to find more prey.
Someone had to warn those guys. He could call Hort Who would have to call the national security adviser, who would have to call the CIA, who would have to call the field director, who would have to call the snatch team in front of Nico's office, whose bodies, by then, would already be cooling.
Fuck it.
He opened the back door. 'Drive to Nico's office,' he said. 'Right now. I'll get there faster on foot.'
'What the hell-'
'He's going to take out the second team. I've got to warn them.'
He sprinted down the street, the Glock out, his eyes scanning the hot spots. He passed another van, a bloody body splayed out in the street beside it. People were looking out windows and coming to doorsteps. He pulled the baseball cap lower and ran.
He cut across corners and between parked cars and it took him less than two minutes to cover the distance to Nico's office cul-de-sac. Fifty yards out, he heard two more.45 caliber shots.
He burst onto the street just in time to see Larison pumping another white van full of bullets. Larison was standing on the passenger side, just behind the door, the angle obviously calculated to make shooting maximally difficult for the people inside. Two shots, a third. Then he calmly walked to the back of the van and emptied a half dozen more rounds into it in a pattern that no one hiding inside could have avoided.
Ben sprinted down behind a parked car. He hoped it would provide cover. He had a feeling Larison was using AP rounds.
Larison looked left and right. He took a fresh magazine from a fanny pack or belly band and swapped it into his gun. Ben had the shot. All his instincts, all his experience, told him to take it.
He ground his teeth together and fought warring impulses. He could end this thing right now. Right here. But wouldn't that mean the tapes, set to a dead-man trigger, would be released? Wasn't that exactly what he was supposed to prevent?
Larison picked up his bike and mounted it. He rode past Ben. And looked directly at him.
Somehow, even through the visor obscuring Larison's face, Ben thought he felt a kind of… recognition pass between them. He still had the shot. Larison must have known it. But he didn't react. He just looked at Ben, and then rode away.
A second later, Paula came barreling down the street, going right past Larison. She must have missed Ben crouching between the cars because she went by him. Shit. He ran out after her.
She turned around in the cul-de-sac. Her window was down. 'Here,' Ben called. She nodded and stopped. Ben went around the back of the van and saw her pushing the passenger door open as he came up the side. He would have preferred to drive, but if they encountered opposition, for the moment it would be better for Paula to drive and for Ben to shoot.
There was a squeal of tires from the opening of the street. Ben gripped the side of the door and watched a brown sedan rapidly approaching. Cops? he thought. It would have been a pretty fast arrival. And that kind of bad luck twice in a row, first Manila, now here… he didn't believe it.
'Keep your head down,' he said. He could see a passenger and a driver, both Caucasian, both wearing shades. No one in back.
The car stopped ten feet in front of them. The driver and passenger, both in poplin suits, stepped out. Their hands were empty. Ben scanned the area. He saw faces in gated windows and people coming to their doors. But no other immediate threats.
'Paula Lanier?' the passenger asked, moving toward the driver side of the van.
Paula looked at him. 'Who are you?'
Ben didn't like the whole thing from the beginning, and he was liking it less by the second. The way the car was blocking them. The fact that whoever these guys were, they wanted to have a conversation of some sort at the scene of a recent multiple homicide. The way the passenger had called out Paula's name, which felt like an attempt to lull her by establishing false familiarity. And now they were engaging in a flanking maneuver. Five more feet, and the passenger would disappear from Ben's view. Meanwhile, the driver was continuing to advance on
