winks of brightness into the room.
Nimec’s eyes slid up and down the wall. Gesturing with his hand, he silently directed Barnhart to shift the flash to the left, signaled him to bring it down a little, then sliced his palm through the air in a halting gesture.
“You see that?” he said in an excited whisper. “Hold it steady. Right there.”
Barnhart nodded again. With the beam hitting the panel straight on, he could see a tiny area, no more than a half inch in diameter, in which its surface seemed to be transparent, as if there were a chipped or bald patch on the reflective layer behind it. Then he realized the spot was a perfect circle — much too perfect to be any kind of defect.
Nimec was practically standing flat against the mirror now, pressing down on it with the heel of his hand.
At the same moment that Barnhart realized he was looking at a two-way mirror, the panel opened out into the room, almost like the door of a medicine cabinet.
“My, my,” he said, training his light into the cubby behind it. “What have we here?”
Nimec knew there was no need for him to answer. What they very obviously had was a covert video- recording system — a surveillance camera and portable duplicating unit for creating automatic backup tapes. The blank round eye of the camera was lined up with the transparent part of the wall mirror and pointed directly into the room. Roma might not keep written records of his various dealings, Nimec thought, but that clearly did not mean he was without any records at all.
He stood there looking into the hollow space. On a shelf below the electronic components were three or four scattered videotapes and a sheet of color-coded adhesive labels. The cassettes themselves were unlabeled.
“Looks like he hasn’t gotten around to cataloging his latest epics yet,” Nori whispered. She came up behind Nimec, her laser-dazzler against her leg. “Wonder what’s on them.”
“I think that’s something we need to find out,” Barnhart said.
Nimec hastily snatched the tapes off the shelf, put them into his duffel, then ejected the tape that was in the camera and dropped it in with them.
“Come on.” He snapped the panel shut and turned toward the others. “We’d better get out of—”
The sound of an approaching vehicle clipped off the end of the sentence. The three of them exchanged quick, anxious looks. They could hear the sound of tires crunching on fresh snowpack. It was close, very close, maybe right outside the building. Then the engine shivered into silence, doors slammed, and there were voices. Coarse male voices out in the street.
Nimec crossed the room, stood to one side of the window, and peered cautiously around the frame. There were two men downstairs near the club’s main entrance, the dark outlines of at least two more in the car’s front seat. One of the men on the sidewalk wore a brown military-surplus bomber jacket with a fleece collar. The other had on a long tweed overcoat. Both were huge. He recognized them instantly, just as he did the vehicle in which they’d arrived. They were Roma’s thugs, the bunch who had been flanking him when he left the building half an hour earlier.
As Nimec stood watching them, the pair that had gotten out of the car turned toward the entrance, then strode under the awning and were blocked from sight.
Nimec snapped his head around to Barnhart and Nori.
“We’ve got a problem,” he said.
“Hey, come here,” the man in the Air Force bomber jacket said.
“What is it, Vasily?”
“Just come over here and take a fucking look, will you?”
The man in the gray overcoat stamped snow off his shoes and then trudged heavily up beside him.
Vasily had paused inside the entrance and was facing the wall, scrutinizing the status window on the security system’s master control box. The alarm was set on a thirty-second entry delay, so that anyone with the deactivation code would have enough time to punch it into the keypad — and turn off the system — after passing through the door. He’d been about to do exactly that when he noticed the reading on the LCD.
The second man looked at the backlit display. Its pale blue digital characters said:
CODE29: SYSTEM FAILURE
Vasily glanced at him. “I don’t get it.” “Could be it’s the storm. Wind might’ve knocked out the power awhile. Or the phone lines.”
“I dunno, Pavel.” Vasily was shaking his head. “You want to check out the back door?”
Pavel was still for a second, his broad brow crunched in thought, balancing the minor hassle of having to walk out back against what his boss would do if it turned out that something really was wrong, and he and Vasily didn’t go investigate.
“Yeah,” he said, drawing a pistol from under his coat. “Better we don’t take chances.”
In Roma’s office, Nimec, Barnhart, and Nori heard the two bodyguards speak agitatedly to each other as they discovered the unlocked back door. Instants later they heard them racing up the stairs, saw lights blink on in the outer corridor, heard more rapid footsteps.
They were hustling toward the office.
The footsteps stopped outside the door.
Then extended silence.
The silence pressed.
The doorknob rattled, turned.
Nimec touched Nori’s arm above the elbow and he saw her glide into position, a dark silhouette against the deeper darkness of the room.
The door flung open, both thugs framed inside it, Uzi carbines held out in front of them.
Nori fingered a button on the control box of her laser and a blinding beam of high-intensity light streaked from the M203’s muzzle, hitting Vasily full in the face. He released a high-pitched, whooping scream, the subgun seeming to leap from his grip, hands clawing at his eyes. Nori held the weapon on him another second, its laser beam pulsing in the air like a bright white strip of the sun. He went jigging back into the hallway, slammed into Pavel’s shoulder, then went reeling into the corridor, his contortions throwing a delirious crop of shadows across the walls.
Ignoring him, Pavel threw himself back against the door wall, reached around the jamb with the Uzi, squeezed out a burst. Rounds crackled from the snubby barrel. Nori sprang out of the way as the deadly stream of 9mm bullets came rippling into the office, shattering the window, blasting chunks out of the walls, punching holes into the side of Roma’s desk, knocking over his chair amid flying wads of its chewed-up cushions. Spent casings swirled around the Uzi in a glittery blizzard.
Launching himself out of the darkness, Barnhart swung the Benelli toward the door, a flash-bang round already jacked into its chamber, and fired. There was a loud
“Now!” Nimec shouted.
The three of them plunged out of the office, Nori’s gun spewing a torrent of non-lethal rounds. When they reached the corridor, she pivoted to the right, spotted Pavel crouching near the door with the Uzi in both hands, and aimed for his chest. He flopped back in a graceless heap, his finger spasmodically squeezing the trigger of his carbine, the weapon discharging rounds in a crazy upturned fountain.
Gobs of plaster rained from the ceiling. Ricochets whined through the corridor in wild trajectories.
“Ah,
She jerked her head around, saw him clutching his side, his face a twist of pain, blood slicking his fingers. A dark wet stain was already spreading over his coveralls. He started to wobble forward, his legs folding beneath him,
