The glasses revealed the deserted nighttime street in all its seediness, down to the piece of newspaper blowing along the sidewalk with a tiny scritch… scritch… scritch of crumpled newsprint on concrete. They said Oakland had boomed since the nineties, but you couldn’t tell that from this neighborhood; the only other car in sight was resting on flat rims and probably hadn’t moved in years. A couple of failed attempts at renovation punctuated the decay of the buildings. Even the air seemed to have a stale smell, far from the living stinks of the bay.
“All right,” Tom said quietly, racking a round of double-aught into his shotgun; he’d have preferred a machine pistol or an automatic carbine, but they couldn’t go to the armory and draw as needed in this operation. “Everyone receiving clearly?”
The other’s murmurs came through the button microphone in his left ear. “We go in, collar the perps and then wait until Ms. Rolfe and/or minions arrive, at the time I gave her.” A grin. “I do hope your information was good, Sarah.”
She shrugged. “The Russians are bringing their Viet contacts to meet their source, so they can all kiss and make up,” she said. “Or at least that’s what our source said. Knowing what we know, that means at least two people from… ah… you-know-where.” Perkins had been avoiding the phrase “alternate universe.” “We grab everyone, call in the good guys, and break the news on an unsuspecting world…. Let’s go.”
They did, walking across the street with their weapons down by their sides, unnoticeable to a casual passerby in case one came through this rundown part of West Oakland. A few of the buildings were sealed, windows shuttered and marked with FOR RENT signs; not far away traffic hummed along the Nelson Mandela Parkway, and nearer the water to their south a diesel locomotive blatted mournfully as it drew a load of containers up from the docks. Tom checked the street number twice, because the building looked as shuttered and deserted as anything here. He was surprised at how nervous he felt, until he realized it was mostly a peculiar form of institutional loneliness.
I’ve been a team player too long, he thought. First in the army, then with Fish and Game.
It wasn’t just a matter of having backup in the physical sense; operating on his own was nothing new. But he was used to being on the side of the angels, or at least on the side of the duly authorized, licensed and officially approved. If things went messily wrong here he’d be filed under rogue cop, and so would his friends. The sensation made him a little queasy, and it was unfamiliar. Somehow the thought of being killed wasn’t nearly as nerve-racking as the thought of being classified with the villains afterward.
I may be nervous, he thought, suppressing the sensation with an effort of will. But I’ll be goddamned if I’ll be scared.
He drew his foot back for a boot-heel entry—the door was sheet metal around the lock, and didn’t look especially strong.
“Let me,” Perkins said, touching him on the sleeve.
She pulled out what looked like a blank Yale with a miniature doorknob on the handle. It hummed a little as she inserted the key end, then went through a series of barely audible clicks before turning inert.
“Sensors on the key,” she said softly, twisting the knob. “Adjusts it automatically… there! Standard-issue these days.”
“Fart, Barf and Itch get all the cool toys,” Tully said, his jaws working on a wad of gum.
The front doors led into a long two-story hall, part of an old converted warehouse that someone had hoped would become a nest of boutiques, upscale shops and eateries. Spiral staircases on either side led up to two galleries, giving access to shops and offices mostly vacant, like the ones on the ground floor. Most of those that were occupied had signs in various Asian scripts.
Tom brought the shotgun up, eyes flickering back and forth. “Go,” he whispered, hearing his voice in an eerie echo from the ear mike, ready to suppress anyone who shot at them. Hopefully the villains wouldn’t know they were coming, but nobody ever got killed by being too ready for trouble.
Unfortunately, very few operations have ever failed for using too many troops, either.
Tully and Perkins went up the left-hand staircase in a rush, their soft boot soles making quiet rutching noises on the perforated-steel treads. Roy dropped prone, covering the long gallery while Perkins ran halfway down it. Tom kept his stance until she was ready, down on one knee and weapon in firing position; then he went up the stairs himself, no louder than the others despite his greater size, moving like a great dark cat. It was a pleasure to work with people who knew what they were doing, and that was a fact.
He felt the same thing, in a distant abstract way, when an amplified voice bellowed: “Freeze! You’re covered!”
Both his companions did what he did: froze, with their eyes active. Jumping up and shooting at nothing would be highly unprofessional, also fatal.
Then the voice went on in a more conversational tone: “Look at the pretty red dots, motherfuckers.”
He did roll his eyes down. The glasses showed the laser aim point clearly, right on the upper part of his breastbone, right in the “sniper’s triangle.” And whoever was doing the talking had an accent like Adrienne’s, only stronger.
Urk, he thought.
“Throw down!”
“Do it,” Tom said, bending and slowly setting down his shotgun and pulling his Glock out to join it with two fingers.
If they wanted us dead, we’d be dead, he thought.
That was slightly reassuring; criminals rarely killed police officers except in the heat of the moment. Cop killers were unlucky—they tended to be shot while resisting arrest or while attempting to escape, or to commit suicide by throwing themselves downstairs in stir. The mystery men from the other dimension might not think like that, but most of the people here were good, honest terrestrial scumbags.
Men came out of the door that had been their destination, with pistols in their hands. They didn’t make any attempt to cover their faces; that wasn’t reassuring, even slightly, because it meant all three of them could make the perpetrators. Which meant they didn’t care…
A gun tapped him on the back of the head, then withdrew—reminding him it was there, then withdrawing out of range of a sweep if he tried to turn.
“Forward march, asshole,” the voice with the not-quite-Southern accent said. “Hands on your head.”
Their captors were arguing, out in the waiting room beyond this office; all except for one Vietnamese gunsel who was standing with a machine pistol trained on them.
“Just kill them,” someone said; someone with a thick Slavic tinge to his vowels. “Not to get fancy, not to fall on ass.”
“We need to ask them questions,” the voice with the accent like Adrienne’s said. “Then we can kill them.”
“Our money!” said a third party to the dispute. “You give us our money!”
Oh, that is all soooo not good, Tom thought.
The hood and night-sight glasses were gone; he was sitting in a metal-frame chair, with his hands tied behind his back and behind the backrest; his feet were lashed to the legs. Tully and Perkins were to his left and right, along one wall of an industrial-décor office, bare brick and metal strut ceiling, and a discouraged-looking potted plant in one corner. They all exchanged glances.