that day, and there was no guarantee that day would come at all. For now he would deal with what was in front of him and keep looking for the light at the end of the tunnel. At this thought, Fisher smiled.
Overhead spread a rumble of thunder, followed moments later by a flash of lightning to the south. A soft rain began to fall, pattering on the leaves around him. He pulled up his hood and kept watching.
Shortly before 1:00 A.M., Doucet’s rust-on-white, hubcapless Citroen Relay van pulled into the driveway alongside the warehouse and followed it to the circular turnaround behind the loading dock. With a soft squealing of brakes, the Relay pulled to a stop twenty feet from where Fisher crouched. From inside, there came laughter and shouting. No female voices, as far as Fisher could tell. The Relay’s side door slid open, and the Doucet gang came tumbling out, each of them barely negotiating the step down to the tarmac. This, Fisher thought, was going to be disappointingly easy. In his weeklong surveillance of the gang, he’d seen no guns but plenty of knives and truncheons. The two acts of violence he’d witnessed — group beatings administered to passersby for some slight, real or imagined — had confirmed what Fisher had already guessed: Doucet and his gang were bullies, but they were also good street fighters. No matter. Tonight good wasn’t going to be good enough, and he had no intention of letting it descend into a fight — at least not a fair one. No such thing in this business.
Doucet emerged from the van. Despite the chilling rain, he wore red nylon Nike track pants and a tight white T-shirt that accentuated his muscles.
“Hey, Andre, get the damned door open, huh!” he yelled.
Andre hurried up the loading-dock steps to the door. He looked up, noted the dimmed light fixture Fisher had disabled earlier, and gave it a tap with his finger. The light stayed dark. Another tap. Still dark.
“Andre!” Doucet drunkenly stumbled toward the steps. “Forget that!”
Andre got the door opened, and Doucet stepped through, followed by the rest.
Fisher gave them ten minutes to settle in, grab a fresh round of beers, and start whatever kung fu movie was on the night’s playbill; then he shed his rucksack and retrieved the pair of two-by-fours he’d stashed under a pile of leaves earlier that day. He walked down the driveway to the front of the building and braced the first two-by-four under the front door’s knob, then returned to the rear and did the same to the loading-dock door. He returned to the trees and retrieved his rucksack.
At the top of the loading ramp, he boosted himself onto the railing, then, with one hand braced on the wall, leaned forward until he could reach the defunct, car-sized air-conditioning unit affixed to the warehouse’s back wall. Once he had a good grip on the unit, he stepped off the rail with his left foot and placed it on a flange jutting from the AC unit. He followed with his other hand and foot, then boosted himself atop the unit. From there it was a short climb up the utility ladder to the roof. Walking catfooted, he crossed the corrugated sheet metal until he reached the skylight; this, too, he’d already surveyed. He’d found it unlocked, but the hinges were squeaky, so he’d fixed them with a few squirts of silicone grease from a flip-top travel bottle. He lowered himself flat, pressed his ear to the sheet metal, and listened: laughter and, in the background, melodramatic martial-arts shouting and tinny movie music. Fisher lifted the skylight hatch until it rested against the roof, then slipped his legs through, feeling around until his right foot found a ladder rung. He climbed down a few feet, reached up, and closed the skylight, then climbed down to the floor. He was in a closet adjoining the bathroom. The previous owner had turned the warehouse’s raised office area, which occupied the rear third of the space, into an open apartment that now overlooked the Doucet gang’s social club — a collection of tattered recliners and couches clustered around a fifty- inch LCD TV.
Fisher pressed his ear to the door. He heard no one in the bathroom. He opened the door, took a moment to grease the hinges, then stepped past the toilet and sink on the right and eased open the exterior door; this one made no noise.
Directly ahead of him, spanning the width of the loft apartment and ending at a set of steps along the opposite wall, was a waist-high steel railing. To his right were a small kitchen, a breakfast nook, and a laundry area, each separated by a hanging mustard yellow bedsheet. The loft’s width was divided every ten feet by load- bearing stanchions.
As he watched, one of Doucet’s men — Pierre, it looked like — appeared, moving from right to left. He trotted down the stairs and out of sight. Fisher eased forward along the short wall until he could see over the railing. The gang was all there, still drunk and clearly entranced by the movie, occasionally shouting curses at characters and standing up to mimic a particularly pleasing kick or punch.
Fisher returned to the closet, retrieved what he needed from his rucksack, then shut the door, leaving it cracked open. Now he would let nature do its work.
The wait was short. Ten minutes later he heard the clunk of feet coming up the steps. Ten seconds later the bathroom door swung open. Through the gap between the closet door and the jamb, Fisher saw the one known as Louis walk in. Fisher let the man position himself before the toilet, then swung open the door, stepped out, and tapped him hard behind the ear with a lead-and-leather sap. Louis dropped straight down. Fisher caught him by the collar and lowered him noiselessly to the floor. He quickly secured Louis’s feet and hands with plastic flex-cuffs, then flushed the toilet, ran the faucet for a few seconds, and moved into the kitchen.
He opened the door under the sink, knelt down, stuck his head in the cabinet, and then called in guttural French, “Hey, Pierre!”
No response.
“Hey, Pierre!”
“What?”
“Gimme a hand here. Something’s wrong with the sink!”
Footsteps thumped up the stairs, then across the floor into the kitchen. Head still inside the cabinet, Fisher stuck his hand out and waved Pierre forward. He knelt down to join him, and as his head slid inside, Fisher brought his seven-inch Gerber Guardian dagger up and laid the edge under Pierre’s jawline.
“Not a word,” Fisher whispered, “or I’ll open your throat for you. Nod if you understand.”
Pierre nodded.
“No matter what happens, your friends won’t be quick enough to save you. Understand?”
Another nod.
“We’re going to stand up and move to the bathroom. Nice and quiet now…”
Fisher got Pierre on his feet and herded him into the bathroom. When Pierre saw Louis’s prostate form, he stiffened and started to turn around, but Fisher was ready with his sap. With a groan, Pierre dropped in a heap atop his friend. He bound them together, flex-cuffed hands and ankles interlocked.
Had this been a Third Echelon-sanctioned mission, his standard operating procedure would have been anonymity above all: no muss, no fuss, no footprints. In this case, however, disruption was everything. Romain Doucet was about to experience, in a dramatic way, the law of cause and effect.
Fisher made no attempt to hide himself coming down the stairs. Even so, he’d nearly reached the bottom before Doucet noticed him. “Who the hell are you?”
“Meter reader.”
“What?”
“Census taker.”
Now Doucet and the other three — Georges, Avent, and Andre—were on their feet.
“How did you get in here?” This from Avent. The top of his right ear was missing; the crescent shape suggested he’d been Mike Tysoned.
Fisher circled the group, keeping them on his right with a couch between them. He kept his eyes fixed on Doucet. No one would move without a sign from him.
“I said, how did you get in here?”
“Pierre and Louis let me in,” Fisher said. “You can ask them yourselves when they wake up.”
Four pairs of eyes darted up to the loft, then back at Fisher. The fact that Doucet was still talking rather than
