Hellbent

Beyond the concrete rise, vehicles whipped by on the freeway, oblivious people leading ordinary lives, some charmed, some not. On this side of the wall, there was only Evan and a sixteen-year-old girl, trying their best to say good-bye.

Joey lifted the forgotten Snickers bar from her side and tossed it to him. She took a deep breath.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s bring the thunder.”

72 Thin the Herd

The freelancers came in first, and they came by foot. The five men wound their way toward the valley in a tightening spiral, a snake coiling.

Former Secret Service agents, they brought the tools of the trade designed to protect the most important human on earth. Electronic noses for hazardous chemicals and biologicals, bomb-detection devices, thermal-imaging handhelds. Though it wasn’t yet dusk, they had infrared goggles around their necks, ready for nightfall. After safing the surrounding blocks, they meticulously combed through every square foot of the valley, communicating with radio earpieces, ensuring that anything within view of the construction site below was clear.

Each man wore a Raytheon Boomerang Warrior on his shoulder, an electronic sniper-detection system. Developed for Iraq, it could pinpoint the position of any enemy shooter within sight lines up to three thousand feet away.

Two of the freelancers rolled out, hiking back up the slope, giving a final check, and disappearing from view.

Ten minutes passed.

And then two Chevy Tahoes with tinted windows, steel-plate-reinforced doors, and laminated bullet-resistant glass coasted down the slope. They parked at the base of the construction building in front of the porta-potties.

Van Sciver got out, swollen with body armor, and stood behind the shield of the door. Candy and Thornhill strayed a bit farther, the freelancers holding a loose perimeter around them, facing outward. The operators now held FN SCAR 17S spec-ops rifles, scopes riding the hard-chromed bores. Menacing guns, they looked like they had an appetite of their own.

Van Sciver cast his gaze around. “Well,” he said. “We’re here.”

Thornhill scanned the rim of the valley. “Think he’ll show?”

Van Sciver’s damaged right eye watered in the faint breeze. He wristed a tear off the edge of his lid. “He called the meet.”

“Then where is he?” one of the freelancers asked.

“The GPS signal from the microchips is long gone,” Thornhill said. “It’s up to our own selves.”

The faint noise of a car engine rose above the muted hum of freeway traffic behind the concrete wall. The freelancers oriented to the street above.

The noise of the motor grew louder.

The men raised their weapons.

A white Lincoln Town Car plowed over the brim of the valley, plummeting down the slope at them. Already the men were firing, riddling the windshield and hood with bullets.

The Town Car bumped over the irregular terrain, slowing but still pulled by gravity. The men shot out the tires, aerated the engine block.

The car slowed, slowed, glancing off a backhoe and nodding to a stop twenty yards away.

Two of the freelancers raced forward, lasering rounds through the shattered maw of the windshield.

The first checked the car’s interior cautiously over the top of his weapon. “Clear. No bodies.”

The other wanded down the vehicle. “No explosives either. It’s a test.”

Twenty yards back, still protected by their respective armor-plated doors, Van Sciver and Candy had already spun around to assess less predictable angles of attack that the diversion had been designed to open up.

Van Sciver’s gaze snagged on the side of the under-construction building, the platform lift waiting by the top floor. “He’s there,” he said.

“We would’ve picked up thermal, sir,” the freelancer said.

Van Sciver pointed at the mounted platform’s lift control. Thornhill jogged over to the base of the building, keeping his eyes above, and clicked to lower the lift.

Nothing happened.

The bottom control mechanism had been sabotaged.

All five freelancers raised their SCARs in concert, covering the building’s fifth floor.

Van Sciver said, “Get me sat imagery.”

Keeping his rifle pointed up, one of the freelancers shuffled over and passed a handheld to Van Sciver, who remained wedged behind the armored door of the Tahoe. Van Sciver zoomed in on the bird’s-eye footage of the building, waiting for the clarity to resolve.

Stiff, canvaslike fabric was heaped a few feet from the open edge of the fifth floor.

“He’s hiding beneath a Faraday-cage cloak,” Van Sciver said. “The metallized fabric blocked your thermal imaging. It’s not distinct enough to red-flag on the satellite footage unless you know to look for it.”

“He’s holding high ground,” Candy observed. “And we’ve got no good vantage point.”