Set up like an amphitheater with six stacked rows of workstations, the operations room was kept intentionally dim so the fifteen men and women working at their individual computers could clearly see the cinema-size screen mounted high on the front wall.
The big display was filled with a feed from a camera aimed from several hundred yards away at a small private jet parked on the tarmac of an unidentified airport.
On the top row of the amphitheater, a tall man in his forties with longish dark hair and a clipped salt-and-pepper goatee watched the screen intently, his arms crossed.
He adjusted the microphone on his headset. “Can we zoom in, Edith?”
To his right, Edith, a harried-looking brunette in her fifties, adjusted her eyeglasses before giving her keyboard a command.
The screen magnified, showing the Citation Jet and two men in dark sunglasses climbing down the gangway. Both carried machine pistols.
On the screen, a third, smaller, person loaded luggage into the hold from a cart. Finished, the handler shut the hold and, with a nod to the armed men at the bottom of the gangway, pushed the empty cart out of view.
“That was smoothly done, Mr. Vance,” the tall man remarked to the beefier man standing a few feet away from him.
“Flawless, Mr. Malcomb,” agreed Steven Vance, the CEO of Paladin Inc.
Ryan Malcomb, his tech-genius partner, was now tapping his fingers on the back of an unoccupied chair at one of the workstations.
A woman with a buzz cut on much of the left side of her head and the hair on the right dyed purple said, “They’ve got their flight plans cleared.”
“Excellent,” Ryan Malcomb said.
A younger man two rows down said, “Escalade’s at the gate.”
A few minutes later, a black Cadillac SUV rolled onto the scene and stopped near the gangway. Three more armed men climbed out.
One of them opened the right rear door and a woman exited. Dark pantsuit. Dark glasses. Jet-black hair. A stunning beauty.
Vance said, “Edith, make sure it’s not a body double.”
Edith adjusted her glasses and typed again, freezing the woman in a frame and setting it to one side of the big screen. A biometric model appeared and settled over the woman’s face.
“Twenty-four-point match,” Edith said. She had a British accent. “It’s her. Emmanuella.”
The cartel chief climbed after two of her bodyguards into the eight-person jet. Two more bodyguards followed her inside.
The door was pulled up. The Cadillac drove away. The jet began to taxi.
It got no more than thirty feet toward the runway when it exploded in a fireball.
The entire room stayed dead silent for several beats.
Malcomb broke the tension, saying, “Well done, little burglar.”
“Thank you, M,” Alison Purdy replied in his ear. “My great pleasure.”
“Mine too,” M said, and he began to clap.
Starting with Vance and then Edith, one by one every person in the room stood to clap as Malcomb called out, “Brilliantly done! All of you! The dream we shared is now manifest. The Alejandro cartel is no more. This battle against the darkness is over. The forces of Maestro have triumphed!”
As the others in the room cheered and hugged, Edith said, “Do you wish to notify Alex Cross, M?”
Malcomb’s expression tightened a little before he smiled and shook his head. “I’m sure Dr. Cross will find out soon enough, Edith.”