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“And you told Anderson.”

“Figured it might play. Could be his boy, you know? Watching for a house to hit.”

“Did Anderson bite?”

“You know the drill. Paid me light until he checked it out. More on the back side if it proves good.” He eyed Boldt.

“Did it prove out?” Had Anderson run smack into the Pied Piper scouting his kidnaps?

“He was gonna check it out. Get back to me.”

“Sure he was.”

“Damn right. And now you telling me he’s tits up! Fucking guy has a fifty belongs to me. This be bullshit.”

“Address of the vacant house?” Boldt asked. It was quintessential Raymond, just weird enough to ring of truth.

A huge grin overcame the man’s face, reminding Boldt of the grille of a ’47 Chrysler New Yorker. “I’m smelling that fifty,” Raymond chortled.

If the drug lab existed and they busted it, they would have probable cause to turn the house upside down and shake. If something fell out pertinent to the Pied Piper then it would later be admissible in court. The Shotzes’ baby sitter had mentioned an exterminator, as had Sherry Daech. The connection was enough to get a judge behind a warrant.

It was the first place Boldt started.

Busting a drug lab was second in risk only to defusing a known bomb. The “cookers” were typically heavily armed and sitting on a powder keg of volatile chemicals. The raid had to be sanctioned by Narcotics for warrants. Boldt processed it accordingly and got lucky: Narcotics had been after the roving lab for weeks. With the word of a reliable snitch behind it, authorization came down quickly. Behind it was the full force of Special Operations, and its elite Emergency Response Team-with an abundance of firepower and expertise.

By 11:45 P.M. all necessary warrants had been walked through the system and the first of three neighboring families was quietly evacuated from its home adjacent to the suspected lab. Under instruction by telephone, the parents and their child simply drove out of their garage and were met downtown by a woman from City Services who housed them in the Westin. At 12:20 A.M., as the second of three surveillance units was established and the second home evacuated, a special listening device was sequestered onto one of four basement windows (all of which had been painted black from the inside), and it was established that the structure was empty. Working on a combination of collected information, the third surveillance unit was in place by 12:50, believed to be ahead of the arrival of the cookers.

Combat units followed.

The street cleaner that had broken down across from the target structure was receiving mechanical assistance from three undercover Narco detectives.

The commercial Dumpster left on the street in front of the evacuated neighbor’s house contained two ERT sharpshooters. With slits cut by acetylene torch, the Dumpster was one of SPD’s cheapest and most easily disguised fortresses and had been dubbed the Trojan Horse.

One street to the south of the target residence was parked a tractor trailer-an Allied moving van-containing eight Special Ops officers, a six-foot battering ram and enough armament to start and finish a small war.

In the evacuated homes to either side, four ERT officers, all medal-winning sharpshooters, sat behind darkened windows at the ready, communications devices hissing in their ears.

Mulwright, his field dispatcher and a lieutenant of Narcotics manned the department’s Mobile Command Vehicle, a confiscated steam-cleaning van, parked with a view of the vacant house.

Boldt technically was not involved, even though he had helped plan the operation. He waited impatiently in his car along with SID’s Bernie Lofgrin, a handheld radio listening in on a Special Ops frequency.

There was no idle chatter.

Amet Amali Ustad, squad leader of Mulwright’s Special Ops unit, waited inside the Allied moving van along with seven ERT officers. Egyptian and Indian by heritage, his parents had moved as children to the Northwest following World War II and had met in Seattle in the Eisenhower era. A fierce fighter tagged the Warrior by his fellow officers, Ustad was darkly handsome with unexpected green eyes. He wore a tight-fitting charcoal gray uniform that distinguished itself from ERT’s all-black. Across the back of every Special Ops field agent the word POLICE was printed in bold yellow letters. Amet Ustad looked over his men, worried only for Devon Long, whose personal problems with an invalid mother made him more of a burden than an asset to the team. Ustad made it his business to hear about any problems with his officers; he had consulted Lou Boldt’s Intelligence unit more than once about rumors concerning members of his elite team.

The radio traffic delivered no surprises. Three separate surveillance teams tracked any and all movement surrounding the target while six unmarked patrol cars worked the surrounding blocks alert for the arrival of the meth lab cookers.

“Stay loose,” Ustad said, addressing Devon Long, worried about him. More than any other, his squad-“the ramrods”-worked with precision timing, striking a target with a fierce intensity and heavy firepower. There was no room for a straggler, no room for error.

The regular radio reporting of the various units rolled through predictably. There were good raids and bad raids, and Ustad expected the current one to fall in the latter category because it had been conceived hastily by a group of desk jockeys in desperate need of “warm ink”-favorable publicity to feed the media monster. He knew all the warning signs, multiple command being at the top. A woman captain and an admitted drunk were running this one. Ustad needed little more than this to fuel his concern. “Stay alert, people,” he told his troops. “I think we’ve got a live fish.” He pressed the earpiece farther into his ear and listened.

In proper order, each unit responded, Ustad taking his turn. His elite unit looked up at him as he spoke into the small microphone positioned by a flexible boom in front of his lips.

Besides the various shooters in the Trojan Horse and adjacent buildings, ERT had a six-man unit in a black panel van two blocks away, ready to strike within one minute of a summons. Ustad knew the ERT leader unit well and respected him. Together, their squads would constitute the advance strike. Ustad to the rear, the ERT boys at the front door. If all went well, a swarm of Narcotics officers would follow and actually lead the hit behind the protection of the two squads. The choreography and timing were rehearsed regularly in a police-confiscated warehouse on the south end of Boeing Field, inside of which stage sets of house and apartment interiors had been constructed. Amet Ustad was a believer in such mock exercises, and his team was so well trained that they were the advance unit of Washington State’s elite Quick Response Police Squad. QueRPS, consisting of various units from a variety of state and city law enforcement agencies, traveled to crisis scenes-terrorism, hostage or armored drug raids-and put out the fire.

SURVEILLANCE 2: We’ve got Joy.

SURVEILLANCE 3: Tally-ho. I count four going in through the back door.

SURVEILLANCE 2: Roger that count.

OPERATIONS: We’ve got four birds, people. Vehicle’s tag number does not check as the owner of the house. We’ve got a green light from the top.

SURVEILLANCE 3: Door is shut. They’re inside.

OPERATIONS: This is it, people. Let’s look alive and end up that way. Okay? Allied, it’s your lead.