This was the moment of truth. Get it wrong, and the glass would shatter into a thousand pieces. He jerked his hands and with a loud cracking noise the section of glass snapped cleanly out of the frame.
He was in.
CHAPTER SIXTY-ONE
On the roof of the building opposite the one he’d just seen Kirk climb up, Kyle Foster unpacked his M24 from his bag and began to assemble it. Just for fun, he did it with his eyes closed, like they’d been trained to back at Fort Benning in Georgia.
First slip the barrel assembly into the stock. Then insert and tighten the action screws, locking in the trigger guard assembly. Then clip on the scope by using the half-inch combination wrench to tighten the front and rear mounting ring nuts. Finally insert the bolt assembly. Magazine in. Safety off. Good to go.
Foster preferred the M24’s bolt action to the PSG-1 or the M21’s semiautomatic mechanisms that spat shell casings all over the place. It was light, too, featuring a HS Precision stock made of a Kevlar, graphite, and fiberglass composite bound together with epoxy resins. Empty, without a scope, it weighed just five and a half kilos and had an effective range of about eight hundred meters. More than enough for tonight’s job.
He’d swapped the normal Leupold M3A 10x42 day optic scope for a Litton Aquila x6 night vision device. And just to make sure, he’d also clipped on a Harris bipod and an under barrel laser pointer. Double bagging it, as his old staff sergeant used to say.
His only real complaint with the whole package — apart from the well-known limitations of the M118 round, which used to drive everyone in his unit nuts — was the long action, which had been known to cause feeding problems if the rounds were not pushed all the way to the rear of the magazine. But as he grasped its familiar shape, the butt nestling snugly against his shoulder, his eye pressed up to the scope, such minor considerations faded into insignificance. He was only going to need one shot anyway.
Instead the memories surged.
El Angel Negro.
The dark angel, that’s what the locals had taken to calling him in Colombia. Not that they ever knew who he was, or even if he was human. Some said he was a ghost, carrying their children and brothers and sisters and parents into the forest never to be seen alive again, their mutilated bodies only found months later, buried in a shallow grave or strung high above them in the dark branches of the forest canopy.
“Why?” their innocent eyes had asked as he leaned over them.
“Because I can,” he had whispered. “Because I’ve been told to.”
Just like he’d been told tonight. The usual phone call, the clipped voice rasping its instructions.
“Follow Kirk. Stay close. Take up a position opposite. And don’t miss.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-TWO
Tom placed the sheet of glass down a few feet away, loosened the suction pads and replaced them in his pack. Then he stood up and walked over to the chattering air-conditioning vent that sat just behind the skylight, a small pool of water at its base where the moisture extracted from the room below had condensed and dripped to the ground.
Kneeling down, Tom lifted a small remote-controlled Ramsey ATV winch out of his pack and secured it in place by looping a rope around the vent’s thick neck and then clipping it onto each side of the winch. Although designed to be powered by a car engine, Tom had adapted it for battery power. It wouldn’t last long, but it would be more than enough for what he had planned tonight. He flicked the winch on and fed out several feet of slack from its drum, the narrow steel cable glinting like barbed wire.
Standing at the edge of the skylight, he put his pack on back to front, so the main compartment sat on his chest, and clipped the cable onto the rappelling harness that he wore over his black overalls, the metal buckles, clips, and hoops wrapped in black tape to minimize noise and cut out reflective glare. Finally he slipped on a black ski mask, the material molding itself to his face with familiar intimacy. He was ready.
Crouching, he levered himself through the hole he had cut, until his legs were suspended in the room below, the winch taking his weight. He slid a small piece of hardened rubber under the wire to stop it rubbing against the frame. Pressing the remote control, he was silently lowered into the room.
The gallery floor lay about twenty feet below him, with the room itself measuring about thirty feet square. The only doorway into the gallery led out to a wide corridor with access to the other rooms and the main staircase down to the lower floors. There were also three cameras in the room — one static camera covering the doorway and two tracking cameras in opposing corners covering approximately half the room each. The white gallery walls glowed eerily in the moonlight, the semi-darkness broken regularly by the periodic flashing of the small red lights that indicated that the three cameras were all functioning properly.
The gallery had been daringly hung with a mix of artists from across the centuries. Rothko next to Rembrandt. Modigliani next to Monet. On the left-hand wall, he could just about make out the outline of the Dürer sketch that he had been planning to steal all those years before.
Through the open doorway, Tom could also make out a faint green glow. He knew from Archie’s schematics that this was the control panel for the grid of infrared trip wires that would trigger if anything touched the floor. But the floor was irrelevant; he had no intention of touching it. So, too, was the static camera trained on the doorway, since he wouldn’t be going near that. But the other two tracking cameras, their glass eyes sweeping rhythmically backwards and forwards across the room every ten seconds or so, they would have to be dealt with.
Both cameras had been deliberately angled down toward the lower parts of the surrounding walls and the floor, their relentless gaze directed, understandably, at the actual paintings and sculptures and display cabinets that they were protecting. This meant that they took in perhaps only ten feet of vertical height at the most. Suspended just below the skylight in the middle of the room, therefore, Tom was out of the cameras’ field of vision and would remain so as long as he stayed high and kept his legs up.
Tom reached into the backpack and took out a small speargun. Usually kept on life rafts, the great advantage of the JBL Mini Carbine was its compact size, being only twenty-seven inches from tip to butt. Underwater, it had an effective range of nine feet, but on land and with a few modifications, Tom had increased it to twenty. He judged the distance from him to the wall over the top of the left-hand camera to be about fifteen feet, well within range. He took aim carefully a few feet above the camera, knowing that if he missed, the spear would crash down to the floor and set the alarm off.
As he steadied himself, he felt the familiar taste of carbon on his tongue, dry and metallic. This was common to most art galleries, the carbon filters installed to remove fumes and odors, but most importantly the sulfur dioxide generated by the exhalation of gallery visitors that could severely damage the paintings if left unchecked.
Swallowing, Tom squeezed the trigger and the spear flashed across the room, spooling a thin nylon rope out behind it as it slammed into the wall, burying its nickel-plated steel tip about five inches deep. Without pausing, he reloaded the gun, turned, and fired another spear above the other camera in the opposite corner.
With both spears in place, he fed the two pieces of thin nylon ropes that were attached to the ends of both spears through a metal tightener. Winding the small handle on the side of the tightener drew the ropes together until they were taut. He checked his watch. Thirty-five minutes left.