A white Lincoln Town Car plowed over the brim of the valley, plummeting down the slope at them. Already the men were firing, riddling the windshield and hood with bullets.
The Town Car bumped over the irregular terrain, slowing but still pulled by gravity. The men shot out the tires, aerated the engine block.
The car slowed, slowed, glancing off a backhoe and nodding to a stop twenty yards away.
Two of the freelancers raced forward, lasering rounds through the shattered maw of the windshield.
The first checked the car’s interior cautiously over the top of his weapon. “Clear. No bodies.”
The other wanded down the vehicle. “No explosives either. It’s a test.”
Twenty yards back, still protected by their respective armor-plated doors, Van Sciver and Candy had already spun around to assess less predictable angles of attack that the diversion had been designed to open up.
Van Sciver’s gaze snagged on the side of the under-construction building, the platform lift waiting by the top floor. “He’s there,” he said.
“We would’ve picked up thermal, sir,” the freelancer said.
Van Sciver pointed at the mounted platform’s lift control. Thornhill jogged over to the base of the building, keeping his eyes above, and clicked to lower the lift.
Nothing happened.
The bottom control mechanism had been sabotaged.
All five freelancers raised their SCARs in concert, covering the building’s fifth floor.
Van Sciver said, “Get me sat imagery.”
Keeping his rifle pointed up, one of the freelancers shuffled over and passed a handheld to Van Sciver, who remained wedged behind the armored door of the Tahoe. Van Sciver zoomed in on the bird’s-eye footage of the building, waiting for the clarity to resolve.
Stiff, canvaslike fabric was heaped a few feet from the open edge of the fifth floor.
“He’s hiding beneath a Faraday-cage cloak,” Van Sciver said. “The metallized fabric blocked your thermal imaging. It’s not distinct enough to red-flag on the satellite footage unless you know to look for it.”
“He’s holding high ground,” Candy observed. “And we’ve got no good vantage point.”
Van Sciver stared at the concrete wall framing the 10 Freeway. Posting up on the fifth floor was a smart move on X’s part. The open top level was in full view of the freeway and the buildings across from it. They couldn’t come at him with force or numbers without inviting four hundred eyewitnesses every second to the party.
“What’s he waiting for?” one of the freelancers asked through clenched teeth.
“For me to step clear of the armored vehicle and give him an angle,” Van Sciver said. “But I’m not gonna do that.”
With a gloved hand, the freelancer swiped sweat from his brow. “So what are we gonna do? We can’t get up there.”
Van Sciver’s lopsided stare locked on Thornhill. An understanding passed between them. Thornhill’s smile lit up his face.
Van Sciver said, “Fetch.”
Thornhill snugged his radio earpiece firmly into place. Then he sprinted forward, leaping from a wheelbarrow onto the roof of a porta-potty. Then he hurtled through the air, clamping onto the exposed ledge of the second floor. The freelancers watched in awe as he scurried up the face of the building, frog-leaping from an exposed window frame to a four-by-four to a concrete ledge. He used a stubbed-out piece of rebar on the third floor as a gymnast high bar, rotating to fly onto a vertical I-beam holding up the fourth story.
Mere feet from the edge of the fifth floor, he paused on his new perch, shoulder muscles bunched, legs bent, braced for a lunge. He turned to take in the others below, giving them a moment to drink in the glory of what he’d just done.
Then he refocused. His body pulsed as he slide-jumped up the I-beam’s length. He gripped the cap plate with both hands and readied for the final leap that would bring him across the lip to the top of the building.
But the cap plate moved with him.
It jerked free of the I-beam and hammered back against his chest, striking the muscle with a thud.
One of the high-strength carriage bolts designed to secure the cap plate to the I-beam’s flange sailed past his cheek.
The other three bolts rattled in their boreholes, unsecured.
He clasped the cap plate to his chest, a weightless instant.
His eyes were level with the poured slab of the fifth floor, and he saw the puddle of the Faraday cloak there almost within reach.
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.