“What makes them special?”
“That’s something we can discuss later.”
“Which means you don’t know,” said Ari, laying a finger beside his nose and nodding sagely. “You’re working for someone and they haven’t told you all of it. Or… maybe they don’t know all of it yet. No, don’t look so surprised. You’re not the first person to come to me looking for something all tangled up in history and myth. Kind of a thing in the antiquities trade, my friend. So, tell me… how much of it do you need?”
Valen finished his glass of whiskey and held it out for a refill. “All of it.”
CHAPTER NINE
The back door opened with a creak and swung all the way in, spilling gray light and rain onto the dusty floor. There was a beat when the doorway stood empty, and then two figures came in fast, breaking right and left, pistols up and out. Then the front door burst inward, the lock torn roughly from the splintered frame by a breaching tool swung by a brute of an agent. He stepped aside, dropping the heavy tool, and drew his gun as two other agents ran quickly past him.
They moved through the downstairs with professional competence and speed, clearing each room, pointing guns into closets. There were four men and one woman. All were grim-faced, unsmiling, and efficient. The two who had entered through the rear went down into the vast, unlighted cellar, which was a warren of small storage and service rooms left over from when the mansion had been occupied. The other three moved quickly to the stairs and went up, making sure to check their corners and watch each other’s backs. It was all done in a smooth and ghastly silence.
But they did not see the dark shape that waited for them beneath the stairs. It was not the natural place for them to look first. It wasn’t where their flashlight beams fell as they came down to the concrete basement floor. The two agents did everything right.
It wasn’t enough.
Upstairs, the three agents from the black SUV moved along the hallway in a three-point cover formation. One checked the hall behind and in front, moving in quick but smooth 180-degree turns. The second offered cover to the third, who pushed open doors to check and clear the rooms. For the larger rooms, they went in as a team, breaking to either side of the door while the first man watched their backs to prevent ambushers from coming from unchecked rooms.
They cleared four bedrooms and an old empty library and found nothing.
The second held up a fist to signal them to stop, then he pointed to the floor. There, in the dust, was a line of animal tracks. Heading toward the stairs to the third floor.
“He has a dog, doesn’t he?” asked the first very quietly.
“Yes,” said the third. “Big white combat dog.”
The second agent touched a smudge near the baseboard. They all studied it; they all nodded. It was the kind of smudge someone made if they were walking on the edges of their shoes in an attempt to avoid leaving footprints. But there was too much dust in the old place. The agents looked down the hall, following the lines of animal and human tracks around the corner toward the stairs.
They smiled. There were three other rooms to check, but the tracks were an arrow pointing to their quarry. The first two agents began to move; the third agent hesitated for a moment, knowing that they were doing it wrong. They were tracking an expert, a senior covert operator. The others were almost to the foot of the stairs.
“Wait…,” he called.
One second too late.
The door to the second-to-last bedroom stood slightly ajar. They had less than one full second to register the fact that something was moving through the air toward them. Small. About the size of a soda can.
The agent behind them tried to yell, “Grenade!” But the flash-bang flashed and banged. Real damn bright, too damn loud.
The agents in the cellar heard the blast and turned toward it. Toward the stairs.
Toward the big man with the dark goggles and sound-suppressing headphones.
They never even glimpsed the stun grenade that blew them backward against the wall, burned their vision from white to blackness, and dropped them into huddled masses so shocked that they could not even hear their own screams.
Top Sims kicked their guns away from them and had both agents — male and female — belly down and cuffed in seconds. Only then did he remove his sound suppressors and nearly opaque dark glasses. He was grinning. It was not a nice grin.
He cocked his head and listened to the cries and groans from upstairs. And then the harsh, angry, triumphant barks of a very big dog.
It made his smile very bright in the dusty darkness.
CHAPTER TEN
Five little agents all in a row.
They sat in the dust against a wall in the basement. Zip cuffs on wrists and ankles, pockets turned out, personal expectations and feelings of self-worth shattered. The effects of the flash-bangs had mostly worn off, though I think all five of them might need to see an ear, nose, and throat guy sometime soon. Maybe put Miracle-Ear on their birthday wish lists.
Top and I stood on either side of Ghost. All of their weapons and equipment were laid out on the floor. Top was examining their IDs and handing them off to me. The last person in the line was Agent Virginia Harrald, who was a snub-nosed woman with hate in her gray eyes and a stern slash of a thin-lipped mouth.
“You have no idea how much shit you just stepped in,” she muttered. She spoke too loud, the way people do who can’t hear all that well.
Top gave her a warm and fatherly smile. “Trouble? That’s adorable. Isn’t she being adorable, Cap’n? Making threats like a grown-up.”
“Adorable,” I agreed.
“Sitting there all tied up and shit.”
“Yeah.”
“Hair mussed up. Cuffed and scuffed and still full of stuff. Bet her parents would be so proud of her.”
Harrald stared pure unfiltered death at him. “Fuck you.”
“Such language. I’m shocked,” said Top, looking aghast. “Shocked, I do declare.”
Ghost made a sound that I swear to God was a doggy laugh.
I looked at Harrald’s ID, then stuffed it in a pocket. The other agents were Kurt Krieg, Thomas Hurley, Christopher Jablonski, and John Smallwood. I pocketed all of their IDs. No need to call it in, because the American flag pin I wore on my lapel was a high-res video camera that was feeding everything to MindReader in real time. Calpurnia had run facial recognition on each of them and one of Bug’s team was happily tearing through their entire lives via deep and unfiltered Net searches.
“Okay, kids,” I said to the unsmiling faces glaring at us, “I know it’s tough losing the big game, but we can take it as a learning experience. If you try real hard, make every practice, one day maybe — maybe — you’ll be able to play with the big kids.”
“Fuck you,” repeated Harrald.
“Okay, that’s a valid argument,” I conceded. “Or… how about you five are already fucked. Deeply and comprehensively fucked. None of you are carrying warrants. No warrants have, in fact, been issued for me. I checked.”
That put some doubt in the faces of the four men. They tried not to cut looks at Harrald, but mostly failed. Which confirmed that she was the foreman of this little crew.
“You guys know what happened to the three bozos who came at me at the cemetery this morning?”