Karr parked the bike and leaped up on a Dumpster at the back of a low-slung concrete-block building, climbing up on the roof and then mounting the ladder of a water tower to look at the warehouse where the goons had stopped. He reached into his pocket and took out a small pair of folding opera glasses, along with a wire to hook the feed into his handheld and ship it back to the Art Room. The optical portion of the glasses was capable of 20X magnification; the unit could also use an infrared, or IR, sensor roughly twice as powerful as Generation 3 military units. Karr selected infrared to try to look through the thin wall of the warehouse; he saw two figures near a window at the front but wasn’t positioned well enough to see farther into the facility. Neither of the figures had guns.
“We’re running down the owners of the warehouse,” Chafetz told him. “But I doubt that’s significant. Can you get close enough to get visuals on the people as they come out?”
Karr craned his neck toward the building. He could hop from one roof to the other.
“Doable,” he told her. Then he hopped from the ladder, took a short windup, and jumped to the next roof. A taller building sat next to it; he could just barely reach high enough to pull up and get over. This one had a good view of the warehouse and the alley in the back.
He moved his glasses around, scanning the warehouse. Most of the interior was empty, but a small part of the front comer of the building had interior walls and thick insulation, probably so it could be air-conditioned efficiently. This made seeing through it problematic, though the Art Room was able to find and enhance five shadows, IDing four as people and the fifth as a cat.
A Toyota was parked in the back. Karr reached to the back of his belt and took out one of his flies, a small eavesdropping device that could fit on a fingernail. From his left pocket he removed a device that looked like an old- fashioned Pez dispenser. Instead of candy, however, the device dispensed a sticky plastic that Karr rolled into a ball. He placed the fly at the top, then tossed the wad gently on the roof of the car. It splatted, looking like an odd bird dropping. He keyed his handheld to wake up the bug, got a beep indicating it was working, then went back to scanning the warehouse.
“Duck,” said Chafetz suddenly.
The kids who had followed them and stolen his wallet came out the front, scootering away. Two other men got into the Toyota and backed quickly out of the alley.
“You want the Toyota,” said Chafetz.
“Great. Keep tabs on it for me while I go get my wallet,” said Karr.
“Uh…”
“Uh what?”
“They threw it in a barrel and lit it on fire. I’d guess it’s pretty crispy by now.”
19
Malachi Reese grooved on the Blink 182 cut, bouncing at the edge of his seat as he guided the tiny spaceship toward its destination. Called a “vessel,” the craft looked like a foot-long section of copper pipe, the sort you’d find in a home water system. It had steering fins that were “ignited”—in layman’s terms “extended”—by a small canister of hydrogen, allowing Malachi to steer it with the aid of the keyboards in front of him. In some ways, the vessel was nothing more than a ridiculously expensive space-launched dump truck; in about thirty seconds Malachi would hit a red button on his console and shower his target with motion and sound sensors about the size and shape of a flattened penny. Once deposited, the sensors would transmit their data back to the Art Room for the next four hours.
“How are we doing?” asked Telach.
“We’re just about on target.”
“I have a man in there and he’s been knocked out,” said the Art Room supervisor, her voice strained. “I need to know what the hell is going on.”
“Hey, like, I’m doing six times the speed of sound, you know what I’m saying?”
That was an exaggeration — the vessel was actually moving at about Mach 4.
Malachi was a ReVeeOp-a remote vehicle operator or, more bureaucratically, “flight control specialist class three,” the highest designation below supervisor status — controlling the spacecraft from a bunker a short distance from the Art Room. He made a slight course correction, then got ready to pickle his sensors.
“I’m sorry,” apologized Telach.
“Not a prob, Mom.”
He checked his course again, jacked the volume on the Mp3, and watched his screen for the cue.
“Baby,” he said as the timer nailed down to one. His fingers danced quickly on the board.
“Got a good spread,” he told the Art Room through the headset sitting over the buds for his stereo player. The vessel had dumped its load of sensors on and around the castle where Dean was being held.
“What’s that in the background?” asked Telach. She reminded him of his third-grade teacher.
“Christmas carols,” said Malachi.
“You’re a bit ahead of the season, don’t you think?”
“Never too early to celebrate.”
He tickled the buttons, monitoring the vessel’s flight on the pseudo-3-D terrain map at his right. He wanted to crash the now useless pipe into a wooded hill about two miles from the target, which was a large castle on a hill in northern Austria. The course had been preset, and as soon as the computer beeped to confirm they were on beam, he went back to the keyboard at the extreme left of his work area, punching the two preset keys at the right. The screen above the board changed, putting up green dots and squares to show whether the sensors were good.
He had a full board. Kick butt.
Had to be the music. Blink ruled. From now on, Christmas songs every flight.
In July. They’d love that.
“Malachi?” asked Telach.
“You’re up and good,” he said, punching the bar at the very bottom of the board, giving control of the feed over to the Art Room.
20
As the Toyota drove out of the city, oblivious to the bug on its roof, Karr decided the time had come to gear up. He headed for an equipment cache stored in the basement of a store that sold Buddhist shrines and related paraphernalia. After he purchased two small envelopes of incense from the rail-thin girl who worked at the register, an old man with a long white mustache appeared in the doorway.
“I’m Sam’s friend,” Karr said, adding a line in Mandarin Chinese, not Thai, that told the man he had come to worship his ancestors.
The old man bowed, then smiled, showing that he was missing several teeth at the front, and led the way into a back room, pulling a rug off the floor to reveal a trap door. The wooden steps bent severely with his steps, the rickety stairway creaking and swaying as he made his way down. The man stopped and lit a match, then picked up a torch from a bucket nearby. Flames shot upward when he ignited it, scorching the rafters; Karr followed as the old man brushed aside spiderwebs, walking past a collection of wooden boxes toward an area lined with shelves.
“How many bodies you got buried down here?” Karr joked.
Chafetz had claimed he didn’t understand English, but a moment later the proprietor stopped and held the torch over a skeleton in the comer.
Karr laughed, then stooped down and gently pushed the skeleton to the side, pulling out a large footlocker next to it. The locker held a variety of light weapons and equipment available for Deep Black ops and had to be opened in a certain way or the plastiques it was largely made of would explode. With his right hand still on the red
