On the ground floor were two businesses that Obeng owned and controlled through tamely obedient surrogates: the main offices of a shipping/mailing company and a travel agency. These afforded the warlord with useful fronts for laundering a portion of his criminal earnings, distributing forged documents, and orchestrating a multiplicity of smuggling operations, a partial index of which included the transport of stolen luxury cars and antiquities, bootlegged music and video recordings, illegal weapons and narcotics, and the meat, hides, horns, and hooves of exotic animals killed by poachers in wilderness preserves all across central and western Africa.
Like everyone else in the city, the thirty or so employees of Obeng’s front businesses were aware of his command of the militias and indeed could not have possibly failed to notice the regular comings and goings of his hoodlum lackeys. But only a few knowingly participated in his lawless undertakings or profited from them in any way. The majority of these men and women showed up each morning for an honest day’s work, went home to their families at quitting time, and brought home modest paychecks at the end of the week.
They were what Tom Ricci had called “solid citizens” back when he’d carried a detective’s tin.
They were also convenient human shields for Obeng.
From Ricci’s standpoint, this was not good.
As he sloshed through a foul-smelling drainage culvert in a near squat, his boots awash in brown sludge, his arms, legs, and ballistic helmet soiled with wet clots of grime that had peeled like fresh scabs off the curved, close-pressing top and sides of the channel, Ricci knew the worst things that could go wrong with his maneuver would be having innocent civilians taken hostage, injured, or, even more unthinkable to him, killed during its execution.
Morally wrong, operationally wrong, politically wrong. Rollie Thibodeau had correctly pointed out aboard the Pomona that the mere presence of his RDT on foreign soil shredded several chapters of international law. Without question, the course of action on which they were now embarked would trash the rest of the rule book.
But Ricci had come a long way to collar the Wildcat, stalked him with all the resources at his disposal, and he was not going to succeed by knocking on Obeng’s front door and politely asking that his guest step into the waiting arms of justice.
Neither would he do so by shrinking from a calculated risk.
Given the best opportunity for a nab that was liable to present itself, Ricci damn well intended to exploit it. If he screwed up, he was ready to take the heat. And his darling admirer Megan Breen could flash her razzle-dazzle smile as she watched him swing in the wind like a gallows bird.
Ricci dismissed that unpleasant image from his mind.
He’d been twice on the money today, after all.
As expected, the Wildcat’s ride to the police station had been a classic casino shuffle. Soon after arriving there, he left in different clothes than he’d worn out of the hotel — taking a side exit rather than the back door, the only detail not to meet Ricci’s prediction to the letter — and was then chauffeured off in the passenger seat of an unmarked sedan that pulled into the crosstown avenue’s westbound lanes and clanked along seemingly on two cylinders, an authentic touch that allowed it to blend nicely with the crumpled matchboxes driven by the average motorist in this land of plenty.
Thirty minutes later, that car swung into the parking garage at Gang Central.
Ricci and his strike team had been ready and waiting in the swampy, weed-clogged field out back.
Now he crawled toward the building by way of the subterranean overflow channel beneath the hill, his helmet-mounted torch beam lancing sharply into the dimness. Like the men slogging along at his rear, he was clad in a mottled woodland camouflage stealth suit with protective knee and elbow pads and an ultrathin Zylon bullet-resistant lining. Besides the Five-Seven in his side holster, he was toting a compact version of UpLink’s variable velocity rifle system — or VVRS — submachine gun, a second-generation variant that was half the size and weight of the original, that was manufactured with an integrated silencer, and that fired subsonic ammunition. The rotating hand guard, which manually adjusted the earlier model’s barrel pressure from lethal to less-than-lethal, had been replaced by MEMS circuitry that did the job at the fast and easy touch of a button.
A snap-on attachment under the barrel resembled and was technologically related to a laser targeter, though it served a very different function. While Ricci disliked the way the device threw off his weapon’s balance, its use by the entire team was crucial to their objective.
They had brought other equipment from the tac van as well, some of it defensive in nature.
Because he had taken point, Ricci held in his left hand a portable vapor detector that looked oddly similar to the super-eight movie cameras he remembered from distant childhood, and was presently scanning for environmental hazards that ranged from the toxic methane, nitrogen, and sulfurous gases of decaying sewage to chemical and biological weapons agents to the minutest airborne traces of the explosive ingredients of booby traps. In the event its beeper alarm sounded, a backlit LCD readout would specifically identify the threat, with the beep tones increasing in rapidity as the instrument was brought closer to it. Should that threat prove to be chem/bio or the products of organic decomposition, each member of the strike team was ready to convert the carry bag strapped over his shoulder into an air-powered, filtered-breathing system at the pull of a zipper, worn as if it were a masked and hooded vest. Should a bomb be detected, they would hopefully steer clear of its triggering mechanism.
And there was still more equipment, some of it suppressive, referred to as public order weapons by law enforcement personnel with a penchant for cooking up new euphemisms every fifteen seconds.
Call them what you wished, their fundamental purpose was to incapacitate their targets without causing serious injury.
Ricci’s absolute intent, second only to bagging the Wildcat, was that no harm come to the innocent civilian workers in the building. This was foremost out of bounds. But he was also determined to avoid using deadly force on any of Obeng’s rotten cops, and for that matter against Obeng himself, all of whom held nominal claim to being upstanding members of the population. Even the militiamen would not be permanently damaged, if possible, though Ricci was giving his ops some leeway in dealing with them, as it was unlikely their country’s heads of state, eager to improve relations with America, would raise a commotion over the loss of a few known malcontents whose looting and violent behavior threatened their own government’s stability, and who they were consequently better off living without.
Cramped from kneeling, Ricci led the way through the narrow drainage duct for another ten minutes. Then his torch disclosed its circular mouth a few yards up ahead. He moved forward and saw that it opened out some three or four feet above the bottom of a cementwalled tunnel with room enough for him and the others to stand upright.
He raised a clenched fist to signal a pause, then glanced over his shoulder at Grillo.
“Drop’s maybe a yard,” Ricci told him in a hushed voice. “Everybody be careful. Looks to me like the tunnel’s ankle deep in water. Not much of a flow, but it’s bound to be slippery.”
Grillo nodded and passed the word to Lou Rosander, the man behind him, who in turn relayed it to the next in line.
Ricci inched over to the opening and sprang down.
He landed with a splash. A layer of slime coated the floor under the stagnant water, but he had a good sense of balance and was aided by the corrugated rubber soles of his boots.