Ricci grabbed for the door handle. “Come on, I think we’ve got ourselves a destination,” he said.
“Lucio,” Quiros said.
“Enrique,” Salazar said.
They shook hands.
It was a few minutes shy of eleven o’clock, and they were standing in the darkened parking lot behind the Spanish Village. Salazar’s Caddy on one side of them, Quiros’s Fiat Coupe and Lincoln on the opposite side, their bodyguards grouped loosely near the cars from which they’d emerged.
“So,” Salazar said. “What now?”
Quiros looked at him in silence a moment, the cool night breeze riffling his lightweight sport jacket around his body. “Now we talk,” he said. “See if we can find a way to straighten out our problems.”
Salazar tilted his head toward their guards. “We need to give ourselves some room,” he said. “Take a walk, air things in privacy.”
Quiros nodded. “I propose we each bring one man to follow behind as a precaution,” he said. “Leave the rest here with the cars.”
Salazar had to grin. “Sure, a precaution,” he said. “Got to make sure we don’t kill each other on the garden path.”
Enrique looked at him. “I’m glad you’re smiling, Lucio,” he said.
The balance that Sword’s foot surveillance teams generally had to strike was the same balance struck by cops doing undercover work in every major population center in America or for that matter the developed world. On the one hand, there was an appreciable chance that someone would see them — regardless of their skills at camouflage, concealment, and clandestine movement, and also regardless of how derelict, deserted, or remote their area of operation might be. On the other hand, they understood that being seen and being noticed were two very different things, and that being exposed was yet a third thing altogether.
Here and now in Balboa Park, this meant they faced specific limitations in their use of apparel, weapons, and accessories. They could not, for example, wear form-hugging stealth suits, equipment vests, night-vision goggles, and ballistic helmets in environments where there was even the scant likelihood of a late-night stroller mistaking them for terrorist invaders out to lay siege to his home and neighborhood or, worse, of their targets nailing them for the covert personnel they happened to be.
With regard to arms, they were a bit less hamstrung. Full-sized VVRS rifles with their twenty-inch barrels were of course virtually unconcealable and consequently out. The diminutive upgrades most recently trialed by Ricci’s rapid deployment team were in, but because they were still designated as prototypical, they had been issued only to the complement of A-Team Sword ops who accompanied Ricci from San Jose that afternoon. Nevertheless, a fair range of offensive and defensive gear was available to the entire task force, from incapacitant sprays and grenades and less-than-lethal stingball guns to very lethal revolvers, automatic pistols, and compact submachine guns.
Their tactical guidelines were basically low profile: Street clothes were to be donned over mandatory Zylon bullet-resistant vests, weapons had to be easily stowable, and deadly fire restricted to an option of absolute last resort.
The civvies worn by the three-person foot team in the shadows outside the botanical building were sufficiently camouflaging to make the odds of their drawing a first glance quite slim, and sufficiently inconspicuous to make a second glance even less probable, should anyone’s eye chance upon them. One of the men had on a black rugby shirt, navy chinos, and black canvas loafers. The second wore a slate-gray sweatshirt, baggy crew pants, and black running sneakers. The female member of the team was dressed in a dark green rigger ensemble and matching jogging shoes. Their Sword identification patches were concealed beneath pull-down velcro flaps.
All three had been plainclothes law enforcement agents prior to hiring up with Sword, and were thoroughly versed in the ins and outs of surveillance.
As they passed under lushly crowned trees and wound through flourishing gardens, they strode casually side by side, one sipping bottled spring water, one unwrapping a stick of chewing gum, another pausing briefly to tie a shoelace. While attempting to remain quiet and keep out of direct light, they avoided letting it become an elaborate production. They did not walk on their tiptoes, dart between lampposts, peek around corners, or freeze in place like window mannequins whenever a head turned in their direction. The idea was to do their damnedest to stay out of view but act as natural as possible if they were sighted.
On tonight’s job, their experience yielded valuable dividends. The four Quiros soldiers they had been hastily assigned to follow had exited the breakaway Lincoln behind the Marston House at the far western end of El Prado, advanced across the gardens and meadows to the thoroughfare’s north, and then finally taken positions of hiding on either side of a thickly hedged walkway without displaying the slightest awareness that they were being tailed.
Although they couldn’t have known they were watching a trap being set for Lucio Salazar, the Sword ops did realize they had stumbled onto something important and quickly radioed Ricci and Glenn with word of their observations and position.
What would soon throw their situation into confusion, however, was the fact that they weren’t the only ones doing the watching.
In the Town and Country, the small man at the monitoring station saw Quiros’s men slip into the hedges through his optical relay with the shooter on the museum’s rooftop, who had noticed their movement while surveying the area through his long-range scope… a stroke of good fortune for Lucio Salazar.
Had it not been for that observation, he might well be walking to his death.
Little was said between Quiros and Salazar as they left the parking area, walking south past the Spanish Village toward the green dominated by the Moreton Bay fig tree, their bodyguards following like unspeaking golems, near enough for their presence to be felt, far enough away for it to be unobtrusive. The few words they did exchange were inconsequential:
Timing.
At the eastern border of the green, Quiros paused a beat, glanced around as if to gain his bearings, then started briskly onto a path that would take them past the side of the Natural History Museum and into the Plaza de Balboa at the east end of El Prado.
Salazar touched his shoulder, noting his quickened pace.
“Lawn’s shorter,” he said and waved a hand to indicate the area behind the museum between the big Aussie tree and the village. “If it’s okay with you, I’d like to cut across it instead.”
Quiros appraised him quietly. He’d heard the mistrust in his tone, seen his reluctance to take the path. “Why not?” he said, inserting a note of hesitancy into his own voice as he moved off the path. “I picked the spot, you pick the route.”
Salazar gave him a thin smile. “I hadn’t looked at it that way, but it sounds good to me,” he said and turned right toward the green.
That was exactly where Quiros had meant to steer him all along, knowing his men were in position at its western side, hidden there in the shrubs that bordered on the walkway leading toward the reflecting pond, lying in wait, ready to spring their ambush.
The squawks came almost back to back, one from the surveillance team that had stayed on Quiros and his walking pal since they’d appeared from behind the Spanish Village, a second from the spotters who’d watched Quiros’s soldiers move into hiding in the garden near the reflecting pond. Ricci and Glenn were jogging briskly toward the latter from the park entrance over by the Marston House at Balboa’s western extremity, not far from where Quiros’s breakaway car had been left.
