Bio-Strike

“Like that’s going to do you any good. Or you really think the insurance companies pay off around here? Assuming they have insurance companies.”

“Maybe not, but you’d know who to curse out for putting you in a body cast.”

The bristle-cheeked man grinned and reached inside the locker to adjust his trousers on the hook. The other’s hand was returning to his bag.

Without letting another instant pass, the morning swimmer abruptly abandoned his locker and strode back out the door.

The pair in the room exchanged glances.

His hand coming out of the gym bag with a.22 N.A.A. Black Widow, the man on the bench sprang to his feet and slipped the five-shot minirevolver into the belly band under his sweatshirt.

The stubbled man simultaneously turned from his open locker, leaving its door flung wide. From his trouser pocket he’d removed a holstered Beretta 950 BS semiautomatic, his own choice of a peekaboo gun. He stuffed the deep-concealment holster into the pocket of his loosely fitting workout pants.

Both trotted to the doorway, then slowed as they went into the hall and looked up and down its length.

Neither saw any sign of the swimmer.

They split off in opposite directions, each using restraint to keep from moving too quickly. If the swimmer had about-faced for a reason unconnected to their presence — as they hoped was the case — it would do no good to raise his suspicions now.

Reaching the bank of three elevators, the brown-haired man glanced at the floor indicators above their doors. The numbers over the first and last cars were dark. The second elevator in line was descending, the number eleven and Down arrow lit up. He pressed the call button to be certain that the stationary cars weren’t sitting on his floor, the swimmer perhaps having ducked inside to wait out his pursuers, trick them into thinking he’d taken the other car. Send them chasing it via the stairwell while he stayed put.

No such luck.

Both cars began to rise from the ground-floor entrance lobby, obviously unoccupied.

He returned his eyes to the indicator panel above the middle car.

The eight had flashed on.

Seven, six, five…

The elevator stopped at the fourth floor and its indicator light blinked off.

He frowned, looked down the hall at his partner, shook his head.

“Shit,” he muttered to himself.

The Wildcat had retreated to his den.

* * *

“I can’t figure where we slipped up,” the blond man was explaining over his handheld radio. “One minute he’s walking through the door, heading toward a locker, then he just takes off. In and out…”

“Never mind,” Tom Ricci said into his communications headset. He’d heard the locker room banter through installed surveillance mikes and thought the slipup was evident. You went incognito, you stuck with what you knew, kept your act simple. Instead, they’d gotten too clever for their own good.

There was an impermeable tunnel of silence over the radio. Then, “How do you want us to proceed?”

Ricci took a breath. Along with a couple of snoop techs named Gallagher and Thompson, he was across the street from the hotel, in an office hastily rented through a cutout and used as a spy post for the past several days.

“Stay at the hotel,” he said. “You’ll hear from me.”

More silence. The blond man at the other end of the trunked connection understood what Ricci’s order meant. He and his buddy were finished. Removed from the action, and soon to be cut loose from the fledgling RDT. Good night, take care, see you again sometime.

“Okay,” he said, his regret and disappointment evident despite the digital scrambling process that robbed so much tonality from the human voice.

Ricci aborted contact and passed Thompson’s headset back to him. He wasn’t unsympathetic to the snatch team but neither were their hurt feelings of paramount concern to him. The bungled opportunity at the hotel meant things were about to get a lot more difficult for him and the rest of his task force.

They had maintained a constant watch on Le Chaut Sauvage—the Wildcat — almost from the moment the terrorist arrived in the country, acting on reliable word from a plant among Antoine Obeng’s inner circle. In essence, their operational model was the Mossad’s abduction of Adolf Eichmann from his safe haven in Argentina a half century ago: success achieved through simplicity of planning and execution. A small team watches the target’s patterns of movement, subdues him when a clean opening is presented, rustles him out of the country.

No witnesses, no fuss, no muss.

There were, however, some major differences between the past and present scenarios. The Israeli agents had shadowed their target for months without interference from Argentinian officials, who had a decent political relationship with their government, were aware of their activities in the country, and had lent them a sort of passive endorsement. By contrast, Ricci’s team had no such temperate climate in which to carry out a mission that had necessarily been planned on short notice. They were undermanned and underresourced. They were in a nation that was on the shakiest diplomatic terms with America and just recently had been taken off the State Department’s list of designated terrorist sponsors. The capital’s top cop was a crooked, venal son of a bitch who exercised his power in shameless cahoots with bands of khat-chewing thieves and looters. And, most significantly, the Wildcat was in the city at his direct invitation, enjoying the protective graces of the police and criminal militias that Obeng commanded with equal impunity.

It was a difficult and potentially ugly situation for Ricci and his men. If they got into a pinch, there would be no U.S. liaison — no one at all — to provide a bailout. They were entirely on their own string.

You asked for it, he thought, you got it.

Thompson had turned to him from the multiplex transmitter.

“What’s next?” he said.

Ricci leaned back in his chair. The answer to that question depended on his assessment of what the Wildcat had or had not come to suspect and, moreover, what his degree of suspicion might be — which meant Ricci needed to slip into the skin of a mercenary killer and international fugitive. The scary part was that it came easily to him. So easily it had made him close to dysfunctional when he was working undercover with the Boston P.D. So easily he’d eventually requested a transfer out of the Special Investigations Unit on psychological grounds.

And here he was again. Back where he didn’t want to be. He could know his enemy, see the world through his eyes, walk in his shoes. Sure he could. It was a natural inclination that he distrusted for the lines it blurred, an effortless reach into the darkness within him.

If he were the Wildcat, what would he do?

Had the topic of conversation in the locker room been the weather or hotel food, had the two men inside been exchanging war stories about fatherhood, home repairs, deadlines, simple stuff, chances were that the Wildcat would have hardly paid attention to them, and they’d have been able to make their intended move on him as he got ready for his swim. But instead, they chose to gripe about the local taxi service, and that had seemed unconvincing even to Ricci. An American traveling to this country for a business conference, staying at an expensive, first-class hotel, was no small potato with whatever firm he represented. It was far more likely than not that a courtesy car would be waiting for him at the airline terminal. And that the driver engaged by his corporate hosts would treat him like royalty.

Okay, then. The two men’s small talk had struck a false note, and their quarry had been sensitive to it. But not all hosts were equally hospitable. It wasn’t inconceivable that they’d have taken cabs from the airport, and it wasn’t as if they’d done anything that was a tangible and conclusive tip-off — revealing their firearms too soon, for instance. Would their clumsiness have been enough to make the Wildcat drop out of sight, abandon an immensely profitable deal that was well on the way toward finalization? Or would he instead opt to take extra precautions and accelerate the pace of his talks, clinch things before leaving the country?

Ricci stared at the ceiling and thought in silence a while longer. He imagined the tactile sensation of holding the illicit diamonds in hand, their weight and smoothness, his fingers clenched tightly around the forbidden gems.