Suddenly the call cut out. Archer frowned.
‘Sir? Hello? Sir?’
The call was dead. Beside him, the same thing had just happened to Foster, on the line with Dalton. Archer tried calling back but he couldn’t get through. He checked the display and saw all four bars had disappeared, no service provider.
‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Perfect. No signal.’
Foster frowned. ‘They must have disabled the cell phones.’
‘How the hell could they do that?’ Barlow asked. ‘They’re street punks.’
Foster walked over to the main phone and grabbed it off the receiver. There was no dial tone. He glanced over at the group, who were looking at him, a hint of unease creeping into the room.
‘Main line’s dead too.’
Downstairs, the man from the basement reappeared without the axe, nodding towards the man who Braeten had already identified to be the leader of the response team.
‘Outside line is cut. They’re not gonna be talking to anyone any time soon.’
‘Any other ways in down there?’
‘No, sir.’
The leader walked over towards Braeten. The two men were around the same size but with his balaclava, the response team leader was anonymous and therefore more intimidating. Braeten didn’t know if these were the guys who’d hired him or a secondary team sent in to finish the job, but he hid his unease. He wasn’t comfortable meeting his clients in person and made it a rule never to do so. It kept things professional. He also didn’t like them knowing exactly what he looked like; he was just as expendable as the guys he was hired to kill.
He looked at the man’s eyes through the eyeholes of the black balaclava, which stared straight back at him impassively. He was solidly built, broader and more thickset than Braeten and his guys. The way he was staring was pissing Braeten off.
‘Take a photo,’ Braeten said. ‘It’ll last longer.’
The man frowned. ‘What?’
Braeten instantly recognised his voice. He was the man from the original call, the man who’d hired him. The client.
‘We did our best.’
‘Is that right? Did your best include lighting up half of the Upper West Side?’
‘We almost got her.’
‘Instead you attracted the attention of every cop in Manhattan.’
‘We tagged one of their people.’
‘Is he the one I want dead?’
Braeten didn’t answer. The man kept staring at him.
‘You knew where they were. You had an entire afternoon to get to them. But you decided to start a gunfight in the street and then get involved in a car chase across town.’
The anonymous leader shook his head.
‘I’m trying to think of a way you could have screwed this up even more. I’m struggling.’
Braeten didn’t respond. He knew the man was right, but he didn’t apologise. They maintained eye contact, like two fighters squaring off before the bell. The lobby had gone silent. Every man in the room listened to the exchange, their hands wrapped around pistol grips, fingers on triggers. The tension was palpable. If someone made the wrong move, the Marshal wouldn’t be the only gunshot man in the building.
‘The information we gave you was golden,’ the leader continued. ‘You knew where she’d be and what their movements would be. You think that sort of information is easy to come by?’
Braeten didn’t reply.
‘What more did you want? Her head on a chopping block and an axe in your hand?’
‘I’m sorry,’ Braeten said. ‘And that’s the last time I’m saying it.’
The two men stood eye to eye for a long moment.
Then the leader turned away and the room relaxed slightly. Braeten glanced at the entrance and saw one of the response team had pulled the desk back slightly and drawn a series of translucent tripwires across the front of the door. Behind the wires were five rectangular Claymore mines, anti-personnel weapons that fired hundreds of metal ball bearings. He’d placed them this side of the desk, so anyone coming in wouldn’t see them before it was too late. Braeten had seen the mines before in some Russell Crowe movie; they were activated either by tripwire or clacker and made one thing certain.
Whoever was on the wrong side when they went off would have enough holes punched through them to grate cheese.
‘So what now?’ Braeten asked the leader, making the point that he wasn’t intimidated.
The man looked at him. ‘We find her. We kill her. We leave.’
‘We?’
‘My team. You can stay here and figure it out with the NYPD. This is your mess. We’re just passing through.’
Before Braeten could reply, the leader turned to two of his men.
‘Find her.’
The pair nodded and made their way to the south stairwell.
They started moving up the steps, looking through the sights of their M4A1s as they disappeared out of sight.
SIXTEEN
Upstairs, three of the group were still trying the phones, Archer and Foster with their cells, Vargas with the land line, frustrated and confused in equal measure. Barlow had made a good point; the gunmen who’d ambushed them had to be street thugs. How the hell would they be able to kill all cell phone signal?
Realising it was futile, Archer tucked his phone back into his pocket then looked out of the window again. He checked the sky but the chopper was gone, the sound of the rotors having disappeared into the night. Shepherd had been trying to warn him of something when he was cut off mid-sentence.
But what?
Turning, he walked across the room and opened the sitting room door, making sure the barricade was still in place and that he couldn’t hear any sound of movement in the corridor outside. He glanced over at Foster, who was standing beside Carson.
‘Did you get a look at the chopper?’ he asked.
Foster shook his head.
‘Must be our guys though,’ Barlow said. ‘They’ll be here any second.’
‘So why would the phone lines go down?’
‘Could be ESU?’ Barlow suggested. ‘They did it to stop the gunmen communicating?’
‘Did Dalton say it was one of yours?’
‘Didn’t have a chance,’ Foster said. ‘He’d only just called before the line went dead.’
Cursing quietly, he tried redialling Dalton. No reception.
Something about this wasn’t right.
He put the phone back in his pocket, then turned his attention to the group, who were looking at him.
‘Listen. Right now we-’
There was a sudden, tiny smash of glass.
Foster was thumped back as a bullet hit him in the forehead, blood sprayed all over the wall behind him.
As Jennifer screamed, everyone in the room recoiled in shock. Foster dropped to the floor, dead before he got there.
‘Get down!’ Archer shouted, the group throwing themselves to the floor, Vargas covering Jennifer as they all stared in shock at Foster’s body.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Vargas said. ‘Where the hell did that come from?’
Eighty yards away in the office building downtown, the man in the t-shirt and jeans watched through the scope of his rifle, snuggled in close to the stock. He’d taken out the grey-haired Marshal and could see the back of his head blown across the wall. The others had hit the deck and were out of sight. He was sitting at a desk, tucked in behind a VSS Vintorez, a gas-operated silenced Russian weapon which had a ten round magazine and was the shooter the Spetsnaz, Russian Special Forces, used on their operations. The weapon consisted of three main parts and could be transported easily in the special briefcase, making it easy to conceal and carry. His prints were all over both the weapon and the case, but he would be taking them with him and would take the necessary disposal precautions later. He’d fired through an open window and with both sub-sonic ammunition and a fat black suppressor on the rifle no-one on the street would have heard the shot.
The window of the apartment he’d fired into was still intact, just a small bullet hole in the pane. Keeping the scope on the tenement block window, the sniper pushed a pressel switch laid on the desk beside his left hand. It was connected to an earpiece tucked in place over his left ear and a small Velcro tactical microphone around his neck.