“Ben, I’m just behind the white truck near the dock,” said Valentina. “There are a few cars parked across the street, but they look empty. I can see a Range Rover and a couple of others. You’re clear to go.”
“Roger that. Hold positions. Here we come.”
Hansen and Ames darted along the building directly east of the warehouse, the sheet-metal walls already growing damp with dew. On three they sprinted across the parking lot, bounded up the stairs to the loading dock, ducked under the blue police tape, and reached the front door.
Hansen covered Ames, who was about to pick the lock when he simply tried the handle: open.
“Nice police work here,” Ames said softly. “They didn’t even lock up on their way out.”
“Works for me,” Hansen replied.
Drawing their pistols, they eased into the warehouse and switched on their penlights, illuminating the open spaces in dim shades of red. Off to their right was a living room of sorts, with torn-up couches and recliners positioned around a big flat-screen TV, fifty inches or larger. Nearby sat a DVD player with literally hundreds of movies stacked beside it. Most of the titles were either kung fu flicks or porn. A trash can near one sofa was overflowing with garbage, and a rat scurried off as Hansen caught it with his light.
Directly ahead stood a flight of metal stairs leading up to a loft along which ran a metal railing. “I’m going up. Find me something down here.”
“I’m sure I will,” said Ames. “Fisher’s getting sloppy. I’m telling you… ”
Hansen sighed and quickly mounted the staircase. At the top, he moved along the railing, then crossed into the kitchen. Farther back were a breakfast nook and laundry area partially obscured by a makeshift bedsheet divider.
Oddly, the door to the base cabinet under the kitchen sink hung wide-open. Hansen thought about that as his light played over the floor, looking for any signs of blood. Nothing. He moved out of the kitchen and found a bathroom with a simple toilet and sink. Again, his light swept along the floor, where he spotted a tiny sliver of black plastic. He reached down, picked it up, turned it over.
Plastic from what?
Hansen lifted the toilet seat, saw that someone had urinated but not flushed. Urine stains were on the seat and the floor. He thought about that. Then he turned to a door, swung it open, and found that he was in a closet with wall-mounted ladder leading up to a skylight. The warehouse had obviously been a conversion project; thus the closet had been constructed to preserve that roof access, probably for maintenance purposes or even escape in case of a fire.
“Ames, anything?” Hansen called into his SVT.
“Not yet.”
“Get up here.”
“You got something?”
“Maybe. Move it.”
Ames’s footfalls came soft but swiftly, and within a few seconds he stood beside Hansen.
“How much you want to bet that skylight was opened from the outside?”
“Nothing, because it was.” Ames mounted the ladder and climbed up twelve feet to the top. He pushed open the skylight, which folded soundlessly out of the way.
Soundlessly.
Hansen followed, and they both emerged onto the roof. Hansen leaned over and ran his finger along one of the skylight’s hinges. His finger came up slick. “Fisher sprayed the hinges with silicone so they wouldn’t squeak. This is definitely his entrance point.”
“How’d he get up here?” Ames crossed the roof and spotted the air-conditioning unit. “Oh, here we go. I think he climbed up on the AC; then he could reach the ladder there.” Ames climbed down the ladder and jumped onto the AC unit affixed to the wall. Again, Hansen followed, and in a few moments they both stood on the ground, staring up at the building.
“So if he came in from up top… ” Hansen began aloud. “Wait a minute.” He jogged around the front of the warehouse to the door, his gaze probing… and then he saw it — a long two-by-four lying near the wall about twenty feet away. He went over, picked up the wood, and inspected the ends. As he suspected, the wood was indented on one side. He brought the piece up to the door handle, and the indentation matched.
“If we go back to the loading dock, we’ll find another two-by-four over there.”
“He locked them in,” Ames concluded.
“Then he came in from up top. They didn’t stand a chance.”
Ames snorted. “Yeah, well, they were fools. Fisher’s playing with us now. Old man Fisher’s going to cry like my sister when I get down with him.”
Hansen made a face. “Pride cometh before the fall.”
“You quoting Shakespeare?”
Hansen smirked. “No, Oprah. Let’s go.”
They crossed to the loading dock, where Hansen did, indeed, spot the second two-by-four, the indentation once again matching the door handle.
They went back inside the warehouse and Hansen crossed to the oak coffee table, where at each leg he found a black plastic ring: flex-cuffs. He was painfully familiar with them and felt his wrists ache from that night in Korfovka. Sure enough, the plastic matched the sliver he’d found upstairs in the bathroom.
So there it was: Fisher had probably lured them one by one upstairs, where he’d neutralized and cuffed them. But he’d saved the questioning of Doucet for the main arena. He imagined Doucet bound to the table and Fisher conducting the interrogation in his deadpan voice:
Hansen flinched and shuttered as he noticed, on the floor, the scratch marks where Doucet had tried to free himself. All of it jibed with the police report.
Hansen and Ames spent another fifteen minutes searching for anything else of interest. Hansen discovered that the clothing dryer had been pulled back from the wall, and the floor was clear of dust in an area about the size of a briefcase. Something had, no doubt, been stashed there and removed.
Outside, they slipped back to their cars and took off, with Hansen, Ames, Noboru in one car, the women in the other. They would take separate routes back to the hotel, yet another tradecraft detail Hansen employed this time around.
He and the others were about five minutes away from the warehouse when Moreau called: “Ben? Maya and Kim are okay, but it looks like you boys have picked up a tail.”
After swearing under his breath, he answered, “Talk to me.”
“Black Range Rover. Two occupants. Driver’s got the lights out. Can’t see their faces. The driver’s a pretty big guy, though. They’re keeping pretty far back. What’re you going to do, cowboy?”
“You testing me?”
“Life’s a test, young man. Every day. Every hour. Every minute.”
Hansen sighed and looked over at Ames, who was at the wheel. “Just keep driving.”
Ames frowned. “You kidding me? I can lose these bastards, but you’ll need to hang on.”
“No. If they followed us out here, then they saw us leave the hotel. They know where we’re going. Let’s just head back and see what they do.”
“I agree with that plan,” said Noboru. “We don’t know who they are, and if we react, we will lose the element of surprise.”
Noboru had forced the emotion out of his voice — and that wasn’t easy. Two men were following them, one larger. This wasn’t his paranoia rearing its ugly head. Horatio and Gothwhiler were back there in that Range Rover. They had tracked Noboru to France. They were coming to finally, inevitably, settle the score.
But how had they found him? Had someone within Third Echelon tipped them off? As far as Noboru knew, only Grim was aware of his past. But perhaps that wasn’t true. Perhaps there were others, those who worked for Kovac… those who would like nothing more than to expose another conspiracy within the organization: that one of Third Echelon’s Splinter Cells had once been employed by Gothos, a corporation currently identified as an enemy of
