front door. Two men came out and walked off down the sidewalk. A moment later a taxi pulled up behind the laundry truck, and a woman and a young girl wearing an eye patch got out and went into the building. Seconds passed and the taxi drove off. Then there was only the parked laundry truck with its emergency lights flashing as they had been from the beginning.
“Don’t like it, Colonel.”
“Neither do I,” White said.
“Control, 6-4. I’m giving Moses two minutes more. Nothing happens, we go in. Copy.”
“6-2, you copy?”
11:48 A.M.
The two groups were gathered in a hallway just off the reception area. Anne, Ryder, Birns, and Mario Gama, now in the white smock of an ambulance driver, were in the first. The other was made up of Marten, with the Glock automatic in his belt, wearing the earpiece and microphone from Moses’s team radio unit that would enable him to monitor White’s communications; the Joe Ryder look-alike, Agent Grant; and the impersonators of Anne, Birns, and the just-apprehended laundry truck driver, Moses. A female bookkeeper wore Anne’s bucket hat pulled down over her ears; an anesthesiologist who more or less resembled Birns wore his tan sport coat; and Santos Gama, Mario’s brother, who was a real-life ambulance driver and to some degree resembled Moses physically, had on the laundryman’s jacket. Moments earlier he had put on a deep-bronzing makeup, courtesy of a male nurse, that darkened his facial complexion enough so that, from a distance at least, his skin color took on something of the Algerian’s. It was he who would drive the truck.
“Everyone ready?” Marten asked. There was a murmur and unanimous nod. Then he looked at Anne.
“Good luck,” she said.
“You, too.”
“Good luck to us all,” Ryder added and looked to the people around him. “And a very indebted and heartfelt thank-you to Mario, to his brother Santos, and to his friends for helping us in what we all realize is a particularly dangerous situation.” He looked at Marten and nodded.
“Let’s go,” Marten said, and they parted: Anne, Ryder, Birns, and Gama down the corridor to the left and the ambulance bay; Marten and his people to the right, toward the front door. As they went Marten saw a fire alarm box on the wall. Quickly he turned back. “Mario,” he called, “is there an alarm box near the ambulance bay?”
“In the corridor just inside it, why?”
“Just a thought, it’s nothing, sorry.” He glanced at Anne, their eyes met, and he turned back to his group. “Out the door fast and into the truck!”
11:49 A.M.
113
The two minutes were up.
Conor White had come too far, been thwarted too often through no design of his own, not to complete the mission now. Not with the objective right there, yards from his grasp. He hit the KEY TO TALK button and lifted the microphone in his jacket sleeve to his hand.
“6-4, this is Control. We’re going in. Lockdown rules, full balaclavas.”
“6-2, you copy?” White reached for the balaclava on the seat beside him.
“They’re coming out,” Irish Jack said sharply.
“What?” White looked up.
They saw five people quickly exiting the hospital’s front entrance and heading for the parked laundry truck. Moses led them. Marten was next. Then Joe Ryder carrying some kind of backpack, Anne, and lastly one of the RSO agents. Patrice lifted the binoculars.
“6-4, abort action,” White snapped into his microphone. “Our relatives are in view!”
“That’s not Moses!” Patrice had the binoculars tight against his face, watching Marten’s group as they climbed into the truck. “It’s not Anne, either!”
“Christ!” White lifted the MP5. “Gun it, Jack, gun it!”
Irish Jack turned the ignition key. The Mercedes’s 510 horsepower V12 roared to life. A split second later he fishtailed it out of the parking spot after the laundry truck that was accelerating away.
“6-4, 6-2,” White said into the microphone at his sleeve. “Marten’s using the truck as a decoy. Anne and Ryder will be coming out in some other vehicle. Watch for it. We’re in pursuit of Marten! Copy.”
Marten rode in the shotgun seat watching the truck’s outside mirror. “Here they come. Black Mercedes.” He clicked on the power to the team radio unit he had taken from Moses and pressed the earpiece into his left ear.
Agent Grant was right behind him. He looked to the bookkeeper playing Anne and the anesthesiologist who had the part of Agent Birns. “Get down, flat on the floor!” he ordered, then opened his backpack and slid the MP5K submachine gun from it.
“Santos.” Marten looked to Mario’s brother at the wheel. “Take us into the Baixa, the shortest route you know.”
Twenty yards ahead, Rua Serpa Pinto ended at the bottom of the hill. Santos touched the brakes, then leaned on the horn and took a sharp left, the top-heavy truck leaning dangerously to one side as it went. Marten could see the Mercedes slide through the same turn seconds behind them. His hand went to the Glock in his belt. He looked at Santos.
“They’re coming hard. What can you do?”
To his great surprise, Santos grinned, almost as if he were enjoying it. “I have been an ambulance driver for twenty-two years. This is no ambulance, but-” Abruptly he swung the wheel right and turned the laundry truck down a narrow cobblestone alley that was almost impossible to see from the street. Marten saw the Mercedes fly past, then slide to a stop, back up in a cloud of burning rubber, and come down the alley after them. Then Santos was taking another right, then a sharp left. The Mercedes disappeared from view.
“How far is the Baixa?” Marten pressed.
“Three minutes.”
“Get me on a street where I can drive to it myself. Then pull over and stop. I want you people out of here.”
Santos grinned again. “Out of here? This is fun!”
“Fun, hell, those guys will kill all of us!”
