I watched them file in. Marianne’s little club…what was left of it. Then all of Varga’s hoods, at least twenty of them. Finally Quigg and the zombies carrying the bodies of Marianne and her boyfriend. In they went. The door closed.
“Any of ‘em come out of there,” I hissed, “and you die, understand?”
He shook his head carefully. “They won’t. Not until I come for ‘em.”
“You sure?” I said, pushing that cutter against his pipes.
“Yeah, I’m sure, tough guy.”
I dragged him up the drive and over to the wall.
Maybe my timing was a little off, because we’d barely made the wall when the fireworks began. There was a huge, rending explosion that pitched us to the grass. And the Tudor came apart like a house built of Popsicle sticks. Great sections of it vaporized as gouts of fire and rolling clouds of flame blasted through the windows and engulfed the roof. The air was raining charred wood and missiles of glass and burning fragments. They showered down all around us.
Varga sat up and just stared at his house, slowly shaking his head. “You sonofabitch,” he said, sounding like he needed to cry. “You dirty sonofabitch.”
I started laughing and couldn’t stop. “It’s all over, asshole. All of it.”
But then I wasn’t so sure. A huge figure stumbled out of the burning wreckage, lit up like Roman candle. He made it a few feet and fell into a blazing heap. You could’ve roasted wieners off him.
I figured it was Big Tony.
A few minutes later the fire department arrived along with dozens of nosy neighbors. There wasn’t much to do but watch it burn to ashes. They asked me and Varga questions, but we had no answers.
Finally, Tommy arrived. “Jesus H. Christ, Vince,” he said. “What in hell’s name did you do this time?”
He dragged me away to his car after warning the mob boss not to move. He gave me a belt of bourbon from his pocket flask, stuck a cigarette in my mouth, and waited. Just waited. It was going to be good and he knew it.
“Well?” he said. “You wanna tell me about it?”
“Depends,” I said, blowing smoke.
“On what?”
“On whether you like horror stories or not.” I took another drag. “Because if you do, Tommy, boy, have I got a beaut for you.”
MORTUARY
Weston said his people were ready to kick ass and take names and Silva knew the moment had come. A lot was riding on what he did in the new few minutes. The decisions he made now-or didn’t make-could haunt him for years.
“We’re going to do this right, understand?” he said to Weston. “This operation is not going to become another Waco or Ruby Ridge. I’m not about to become the subject of a Senate investigation.”
And now that it was time to break the standoff between the FBI and the religious crazies down in the compound, Silva was wondering for the first time in his career if he was the right man for the job.
Using a nightscope, he was looking across that open stretch of field, thinking the complex looked like something from an old prison movie. A sprawling, flat-roofed collection of rectangular buildings quarried from a dirty gray stone. The windows were tall and narrow, set with iron bars. The grounds were barren, the perimeter wrapped up in a high chain-link fence topped with coiled barbwire. A very utilitarian sort of place. About as cozy as a Victorian madhouse.
A helicopter buzzed overhead, a mounted searchlight scanning over the darkened, interconnected buildings.
Silva didn’t like it. Didn’t like the feeling twisting in his belly.
And he liked even less what was going to happen within the next ten minutes or so.
Things went well and nobody got hurt…well, careers were going to be made here tonight. But, if on the other hand, the whole thing went south…somebody’s ass was going to get hung out to dry. And Silva pretty much figured whose ass it would be.
Silva was an FBI Assistant Director for the Critical Incident Response Team, the CIRT. He was in direct charge of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team. The HRT was a Tactical Support Branch of the CIRT, a highly-trained paramilitary force used in every delicate situation from hostage rescue and high-risk arrests to mobile assaults and the search for WMDs.
One of their specialties were raids against barricaded subjects.
Something they were going to be practicing real soon now.
Down in the compound were members of the Divine Church of the Resurrection, a shadowy cult led by a psychotic messiah name of Paul Henry Dade. Dade’s specialty was kidnapping new recruits, brainwashing them and putting them to work in his domestic terror network which he funded with everything from narcotics trafficking to the sale of illegal arms.
This guy was so fucked-up, Charles Manson had openly called him a fanatic in a taped interview two months before.
And for once, old Charlie was right.
Night had fallen now and the immediate area around the police blockade was a hive of bustling activity. Hostage negotiators on loudspeakers were trying to get Dade’s people to give themselves up. Floodlights were sweeping the compound. Armored trucks and support units were pulled up at the ready, ambulances and fire engines behind them. And to the immediate rear, the county sheriff and his people keeping the press and the curious at bay.
Jesus, it was like a circus, Silva thought.
He got on his walkie-talkie: “All right, Weston,” he said, his voice oddly shrill, “tell your teams to prepare to stage.”
A balding agent named Runyon came running up, leaping from the back of a tactical support van. He wore a midnight blue windbreaker like Silva with the letters FBI stenciled on the back in day-glo yellow.
“Sir,” he said, “thermal imaging still isn’t picking up a goddamn thing down there.”
“Dammit,” Silva said. “I knew we should have kicked the door in two days ago.”
But it wasn’t his decision. The timing of the raid was his, but the actual decision came down from the Attorney General. The standoff had been going on for nearly a week now and the administration was in no hurry to get anymore bureaucratic egg on their faces. So they’d held back. Until tonight. And that was just plain bullshit because thermal imaging had told them the worst possible thing since early that morning: no infrared signatures.
Meaning, if there was anything alive in the complex, it must have been hiding pretty damn deep.
Silva thumbed his walkie-talkie. “Weston. Deploy your teams. Repeat: It’s a go. Take it down…”
*
There were three HRT tactical teams: Red Team, Blue Team, and Green Team. Each had four operatives. Blue Team came in from the rear, cutting its way through the chain link fence and blowing the backdoor with a shaped charge of C-4. Green Team was helicoptered to the roof, put on standby. Red Team blew their way through the front entrance.
And waltzed right into the mouth of hell itself.
*
TAC unit Red Team was led by Weston himself, an ex-Delta Force commando. When the door was blown in, he charged through, LeClere, Becker, and Hookley right behind him. All the HRT TAC teams were dressed in black coveralls and Kevlar vests. They wore ballistic helmets with headsets and NV goggles, carried Colt M4 tactical carbines, assault shotguns, and H amp; K MP5 machine pistols.
They were loaded for bear.
The compound was blacker than the inside of a body bag, a labyrinth of corridors and rooms and staircases leading up and down. Dead-ends and cul-de-sacs and storage closets. The place had originally been a U.S. Army military complex in World Wars I and II, then a government warehouse, and now?
Now it was a trap waiting to be sprung.
No electricity, no water. No nothing. Just the unknown waiting in the damp darkness.
“Keep your eyes open,” Weston told them over his headset, studying the corridor ahead through the green field of his NV goggles. “Not seeing any movement…not a damn thing…”
Becker said, “Not picking up shit on infrared.”