The cloak’s edge was lipped up, a face peering out from the makeshift burrow.
Not X’s.
But the girl’s.
She raised a hand, wiggled the fingers in a little wave.
“It’s the girl,” Thornhill said. His voice, hushed with disbelief, carried through his radio earpiece.
He floated there an instant, clutching the cap plate.
And then he fell with it.
Five stories whipped by, a whirligig view of construction gear, Matchbox cars drifting through fourteen lanes of traffic beyond the concrete wall, his compatriots staring up with horrified expressions.
He went through the roof of the porta-potty. As he vanished, one sturdy fiberglass wall sheared off his left leg at the hip, painting the dirt with arterial spray.
A moment of stunned silence.
Van Sciver tried to swallow, but his throat clutched up. One of his finest tools, a weaponized extension of himself as the director of the Orphan Program, had just been splattered all over an outdoor shitter.
Candy moved first, diving into the Tahoe. Van Sciver’s muscle memory snapped him back into focus. Raising his FNX-45, he set his elbows in the fork of the armored door and aimed upslope. He said, “It’s another decoy.”
The freelancers spread out, aiming in various directions — up the partially constructed building, across the valley, at the freeway wall.
The lead man squeezed off a few shots, nicking the edge of the fifth floor to hold Joey at bay.
The wind reached a howl in the bare beams of the structure.
“Fuck,” Van Sciver said. “Where is…?”
Twenty yards away the trunk of the white Lincoln Town Car popped open and Evan burst up in a kneeling stance, a Faraday cloak sloughing off his shoulders.
He shot two freelancers through the heads before they could orient to the movement. The third managed to and took a round through the mouth.
The remaining pair of freelancers wheeled on Evan, their rifles biting coaster-size chunks of metal from the Town Car’s grille. Evan spilled onto the dirt behind the Town Car and flattened to the ground. The big-block engine of the old Lincoln protected him, at least as well as it had on the car’s descent into the valley, but time was not on his side.
The reports were deafening.
He clicked his bone phone on. “Joey, jump now and get gone.”
She’d played bait one last time. Her only job now was to vanish.
Evan had set her up with the camouflage backpack he kept hidden in the planter on his balcony. The pack was stuffed with a base-jumping parachute. A running leap off the backside of the fifth-floor platform would allow her to steer across the immense freeway, land in the confusion of alleys and buildings across from it, and disappear.
Evan risked a peek around the rear fender. He spotted Candy rolling out of the Tahoe’s backseat with a shotgun an instant before one of Van Sciver’s bullets shattered out the brake light inches from his face. He whipped back, felt the Town Car shuddering, absorbing round after round as the freelancers advanced.
He spoke again into the bone phone. “Tommy, you’re up.”
Flattening against the car, he rested the back of his head to the metal, pinned down to a space the width of a rear bumper.
Tommy emerged from the umbra beside Benito Orellana’s chimney and bellied to the edge of the roof where his two Hardigg cases waited, lids raised. The first held optical-sighting technology, and a half-dozen eightball cameras nestled in the foam lining.
He had no direct sight line onto the valley or the construction site below.
He plucked free the first eightball and hurled it across the street. It bounced once, disappearing over the lip and rolling downslope, its 360-degree panorama replicated on the laptop screen. The round camera landed behind a backhoe, providing him a view of the dirt slope beyond, the clear blue sky, and nothing else.
He threw the second and third eightball cameras in rapid succession. The second landed in a ditch, but the third stopped three-fourths of the way down the slope, providing a lovely perspective on the mayhem unfolding at the construction site below. Two freelancers stood in the open, but Van Sciver and Candy were wisely tucked away, using the armored SUVs for cover.
That was okay. Tommy could still thin the herd for Evan.
In front of the second Hardigg case, an assembled Barrett M107 awaited him. He’d chosen the self-loader for rapidity — once this shit went down, the boys below would be scrambling every which way, all asses and elbows.
Firming the .50-cal into position, he lay at the roof’s edge. He would have preferred a spotter, but given the sensitive nature of the mission and Evan’s wishes, no one else could be in the loop. It would be a helluva challenge to crank off two shots in rapid succession, especially since he had to steer the first one in. Microelectronics distorted the shape of the round after it left the barrel, changing its line of flight. As good as Tommy was and as state-of-the-art the technology, there was only so much guidance you could lay on a projo hurtling along at 2,850 feet a second. He checked the optics screen, using the eightball’s feed to index locations for landmarks.
Then he set his eye to the scope and prepared to bend a bullet in midair.
Evan read the freelancers’ shadows. That was all he could do. Braced against the rear bumper of the Town Car, he watched them stretch alongside him, upraised rifles clearly silhouetted. If he rolled to either side, he presented himself not just to them but to Van Sciver and Candy, who were posted up in the SUVs twenty yards beyond.
“We got you pinned behind the car and the little girl stuck up on the roof!” Van Sciver shouted. “Even if she has a rifle, she can’t cover you, not from there. I’ve seen her shoot.”
Tommy still hadn’t announced himself. The technology was fledgling; Evan had always known that any help would be a literal and figurative long shot.
Cast forward, the shadows on the earth inched past his position crammed behind the Town Car. They advanced in unison. Any second now Evan would have to make the choice to move one way or the other.
He decided to expose his right side. He could shoot with either hand but was stronger with his left, so if an arm went down, better the right one.
If he was lucky enough to merely take a round to the limb.
He sucked in a breath, tensed his legs, counted down.
Three… two…
The whine of a projectile was followed by a snap on the wind. The shadow to Evan’s right crumpled, a body falling just out of sight by the side of the Town Car. A bright spill oozed into view by Evan’s boots, staining the dirt.
Twenty-four down.
One left.
The last freelancer pulled back. “Holy shit. How the fuck…?”
Evan popped up to drop him, but Candy was waiting by the other Tahoe. She unleashed the shotgun, and Evan dropped an instant before the scattershot hit the trunk. The trunk slammed down, nearly sawing off his chin, and banged back up. The edge clipped his shooting hand, the ARES flying out of reach, landing ten yards in the open.
Slumped low at the rear fender, he panted in the dirt.
The bullet holes in the raised trunk cut circles of light in the shadow thrown on the ground behind Evan. He rose to reach for a backup pistol in the trunk, but Candy fired again, the slugs tearing through the metal, whistling past his torso. The trunk slammed down, banging his forearm. Evan hit the ground again, dust puffing into his mouth.
The freelancer was crawling away; Evan could see him for an instant beneath the carriage of the Town Car. Another of Tommy’s rounds whined in and bit a divot from the dirt four inches from the freelancer’s pinkie finger.