The ladder creaked as the two men lowered themselves, weapons hanging over their shoulders. One man’s leg was bleeding from where a stray round had hit him, but he was still pushing himself even as crimson drops leached from the wound and fell to the sidewalk below. The lower man made a hand signal as he reached the broken window and then unstrapped his rifle, leading with it as he strained with his leg for the ledge. He winced with effort as he pulled himself into the darkened room, peering around warily.
His partner followed him in, and they exchanged a glance in the gloom, both men straining for the slightest sound in spite of their ears ringing from the gunfire. A ricochet had killed their companion in the stairwell so they were being especially cautious, their mission having been a disaster so far.
The lead man pointed to the doorway with two fingers. The other man nodded before stepping over the glass and inching cautiously towards it. Sirens keened in the far distance, and they knew that they were now on borrowed time. Even in Bangkok, the police would show up for a full-on gun battle.
Once through the door, there was almost no light, so they waited a few seconds for their eyes to adjust. A scraping came from further in the depths of the offices. The lead man pointed at the light switch. His partner shook his head. Light would make them sitting ducks. Right now they had the same darkness to contend with as their adversary.
They moved down the hall, pushing doors open with their gun barrels, ready for anything, and then the noise became clearer. Rhythmic. Like a machine of some sort.
From the next office down.
The lead man tapped his temple with his hand and pointed at the door. A bead of sweat rolled down his face and crept into his eye, causing him to blink the burn away. His partner stood by the side of the doorjamb and eased the knob to the right, then threw it open and rolled into the room.
An old copy machine was churning away, its internal scanning arm clattering each time it fulfilled its journey across the screen and hit the carriage-stop. The lead man followed his partner into the room, gun at the ready, but the machine was the only occupant.
The sirens grew louder. It wouldn’t be long.
Somehow their target had gotten away.
And now they were faced with an impossible choice. Keep searching the building and face certain arrest, or escape to fight another day but have to report back that they had failed in their mission.
The second gunman turned to look at his partner for guidance.
From downstairs, a door slammed, confirming their worst suspicions. They were now alone in the building, their quarry gone, leaving them to the police.
The lead man lifted a cell phone to his ear and murmured a few words into it, instructing the car to circle around and pick them up in the alley. Hopefully, they would be able to outrun the police. If not, they would have to fight it out. Capture was not an option.
They wound their way back to the fire escape and prepared to climb down the two stories to the street, shouldering their rifles, edging around the brittle glass shards on the linoleum floor.
The lead man’s eye disintegrated as the sharp crack of the.32 caliber round shattered the silence in the small room, and he dropped like a sack of wet mud, blood seeping down his face as he fell. His partner fumbled with his rifle and then gurgled as a stalk of bamboo plunged through his back, the sharp shaft exiting his chest. He looked down in puzzled surprise at the skewer that impaled him and managed a half turn of his head before his legs buckled and he sank to the floor.
Jet stood behind him, watching him shudder, and then reached down and lifted his rifle free. A Kalashnikov. She popped the magazine out and checked it — the weight told her it was half full. After slapping it back into the rifle, she pulled the strap onto her shoulder and looked out over the fire escape, where she had lain in wait after circling back around while the two men had been distracted by the Xerox machine.
Headlights illuminated the small alley as a car pulled to a stop a few feet past the fire escape. The driver’s gaze swept the dank service area in a panic — the police would be on top of them in only a few more moments. It would be a miracle if they were able to get out alive.
The roof collapsed on the driver, and the windshield shattered into a snowy starburst of safety glass as the lead man’s head struck it, seeming to stare sightlessly through one good eye at him before sliding off the roof and onto the hood. The driver screamed in shock, and then bullets tore the cabin apart, slugs ripping him to pieces as the deadly hail from above shredded the thin metal.
Jet watched as gas trickled from the car’s ruptured fuel tank before dropping to the ground next to it and jogging away from the clamor of the approaching police.
Two blocks from the scene of the gunfight, she slowed to a walk. The three squad cars that passed her didn’t give her a second glance. The officers were looking for armed hostiles, not a nice Thai woman walking home from a nearby nightspot.
She removed the battery from her cell phone and tossed the sim chip aside, having memorized the two numbers on it. However she had been tracked, she was now taking no chances. She had to assume the worst — that she was completely compromised. The question was how, and who had come after her.
A tuk tuk picked her up three minutes later. She dropped into the back with a sigh before giving the driver instructions to take her to the Nana mall. She would pick up some new clothes at the perennially open market stalls in the neighborhood, change in a bathroom, and then figure out whether her room was compromised. If so, she had a real problem. If not, she would be moving to a new hotel within minutes, and her whereabouts would become a mystery to everyone but her.
Chapter 18
A rainstorm whipped the treetops near the large boulevard that fronted the mall Arthur liked to use as his getaway from Langley when things became too stressful, or he had to make some private calls and didn’t want to have them go through the CIA switchboard. He sat in a red vinyl booth at a retro-Fifties coffee shop, the waitresses dressed in sock hop garb in keeping with the theme. The soda fountain was already doing a good business even at ten a.m., a tribute to the quality of the shakes as well as the lack of concern over calorific intake that its patrons shared.
Arthur took a sip of his rich brew and glanced around the diner to confirm he was alone. The waitresses were used to him so nobody stared at the horror that was his face. A small thing, but one he appreciated, and he always tipped generously by way of thanks. He reached into his jacket and extracted a cell phone with a scrambler module incorporated in it.
The voice on the other end answered within moments. “So what’s the word?”
“The operative’s in place, and we’re waiting to follow the contact.”
“That’s great. Hopefully this will be over soon, and we’ll have our diamonds back.”
“Well, there’s also a wrinkle. I got a call a few hours ago that someone attacked them.”
“What do you mean, someone attacked them? Who? What was the result?”
Arthur took another sip, what passed for his lips drooling fluid onto the saucer — an eventuality he was prepared for with plentiful napkins. No matter how hard he tried he couldn’t get used to drinking hot coffee through a straw. It was just another of life’s plentiful challenges. “Information is coming in, but the good news is that the operative wasn’t harmed, so other than some logistical hurdles, we’re still all systems go.”
“And who mounted the attack?”
“Unknown at this time. One disturbing piece of information I’m thinking you can look into, though. I don’t want to use any agency assets — it appears we have a leak. It seems that the operative was tracked. That points to what we’ve long suspected — someone inside who has access to the positioning feed. It would also explain why our last two forays were unsuccessful. If they had the tracking data…”