Shannon had made it halfway through the crowd before stalling out. Even her gift couldn’t find a way through the mob. The faceless held the mouth of the alley shoulder to shoulder, with Chinatown’s furious residents layered twenty deep against them. Cooper grabbed a man in front of him and yanked, tangling the guy’s foot as he went. The man staggered back into the crowd, and Cooper slid in behind Shannon.
“We need to go,” he shouted over the roar of the crowd. Right now the primary team would be searching Lee’s gambling den and the apartment above. They’d have thermal scans and dogs, and it wouldn’t take them long to realize that he and Shannon weren’t there. “They’ll search the crowd for us.”
“They’re not here for us,” Shannon said. Her cheeks had paled.
“What are you—” He followed her eyes to a prisoner transport van the size of a delivery truck parked halfway down, the back doors winged open. Riot-geared troopers guarded the rear of the truck, weapons at the ready. Another group was shoving two shackled figures down the alley, a balding man and a woman with chic hair, both of them yelling and fighting.
Lee and Lisa.
Cooper’s stomach seized. As he watched, a commando buried the butt of his gun in Lee’s belly. Lisa screamed, tried to get to her husband. Another grabbed her from behind, stuffed a black hood over her head, and pushed her into the waiting wagon. Seconds later Lee was forced in beside her. Something in Cooper’s chest raged and shrieked, railed against the cage of his ribs. He pushed forward, surging against the crowd, feeling more than hearing his yells. He gained six inches, lost them. It was like being caught in a thundering wave; he was rolled and tossed but made little progress. Shannon made even less, her gift useless here. Overhead there was the rotor of a chopper, and sirens from somewhere far away. Glass shattered, a window or a bottle. That triggered a reaction; the faceless locked shields and braced themselves. From behind them, tossed over their head in a lazy arc, came a smoking canister. The tear gas hit someone in the crowd, bounced downward; billows of white streamed up. A second and third canister followed. People began to gag and retch, the motion of the crowd reversing, sweeping Cooper and Shannon along with it.
The last he saw of the alley, before the gas and the panic consumed everything, was a soldier pulling a black hood over the head of eight-year-old Alice Chen.
Silence. It had been an hour, and the silence was still loud, and in it he could hear the echoes of the mob.
He’d gotten a pretty good huff of gas as the crowd split and surged. The frantic coughing had left his throat raw, and his eyes still stung and watered. He kept having to fight the speed of the Jaguar, his foot wanting to go heavy on the accelerator. Instead, he moved with the steady flow of traffic and saw the scene again and again. He’d been too far to make out details, but his imagination was happy to supply them: the wide-eyed trembling of the little girl, the pure panic she would have felt as men in black pulled her parents away from her. Her mother’s scream as her father was beaten. The stranger’s smooth insect mask reflecting her face as he bent over her.
And then the darkness, close and heavy, as the hood slid over her head.
He had seen it, had heard the crowd and felt the gas, and yet he still barely believed it. How could that mission have been authorized? Why take Lee and Lisa and Alice? Why take them that way?
“It had to be us.” His voice thin and hollow against the weight of an hour’s accumulated silence. “They were there for us.”
Shannon didn’t respond. She sat at the edge of the passenger seat, shoulders turned away, as if trying to get as far from him as possible.
“I can’t believe it,” he said.
“Why not?” She spoke to the side window. “This is what it looks like.”
“Not normally. Somehow they knew we’d been there. They wouldn’t come in like that otherwise.”
She turned to look at him then, pure scorn on her face. “Are you serious?”
He searched for a response, but none of the words that came to mind were right. Everything he believed made a lie by the image of a hood going down over a child’s face.
“This is how it works, Cooper. Don’t you know that? Of course you do. You’ve ordered that before.”