Cancer took off running, though not into the woods.
Instead he paralleled the road away from Keyamo’s house, a course designed to draw the officers’ focus away from the real target that night. He couldn’t maintain the ruse for long, however; despite turning himself into a moving target, he was still a target, and after a few meters Cancer cut into the trees and fought the whipping branches scraping across his face and body.
He heard the officers giving chase on foot—maybe he’d succeeded in disabling the vehicle after all—one cop speaking what must have been a radio call a moment before the other shouted at him.
“Stop! Stop, you fucker!”
Another gunshot rang out, and while Cancer didn’t hear the impact, he had no intentions of pushing his luck with Nigerian police marksmanship. Satisfied that he’d succeeded in diverting the officers away from his teammates’ operation-in-progress, he continued threading his way eastward to break their visual contact. The wooded swath lining the southern edge of the neighborhood would soon thin out to his front, and before that occurred he’d have to complete a buttonhook and change course. That effort would be aided by the night vision device in his pocket, which he’d utilize to go full stealth and easily bypass the flashlight beams that appeared behind him now.
In the meantime, it was all he could do to outpace the determined cops behind him. Extrajudicial killings were more or less a routine occurrence for the Nigeria Police, and Cancer considered that the biggest difference between himself and anyone else they’d shot at previously was the fact that he wasn’t currently in handcuffs.
And if he intended to keep it that way, he’d have to complete the race of his life all the way to his eventual fence crossing point.
Keying his mic on the run, he said, “Moving to alternate exfil.”
No response—the interdiction element probably had their hands full with Keyamo, or at least he hoped so.
Sliding to a partial halt beside a tree, Cancer grasped it with one hand and swung a 90-degree turn to change course to the south. Then he began running again, weaving his way through the brush in a desperate attempt to get the hell out of this neighborhood while he still could.
Reilly heard Keyamo’s footsteps halt abruptly at the first popping gunshots in the neighborhood, the banker seemingly frozen with fear on the walkway between his Bentley and the entrance to his house.
But the inaction didn’t last long, and when the footsteps resumed, they did so at a run. He was making a panicked break for his front door, and if Reilly didn’t act fast, the man would pass him by. So he pushed himself upright between the manicured bushes on either side, preparing to take a darting leap into the footpath to clothesline Keyamo with one massive arm swing.
As the team’s largest member and—judging by physique—the only amateur bodybuilder, all tasks of Herculean strength fell upon him and him alone. After all, the next closest team member was Ian, an intelligence operative who was in no danger of prevailing in a chance barfight, much less a critical hand-to-hand engagement like the one that approached at a run now.
That wasn’t to say Reilly didn’t relish his assignments, particularly the task at hand. After all the hard, laborious hours at the gym, there was a certain sense of both justification and catharsis in using his physical attributes to accomplish a key task for the benefit of both his team and the overall mission. Short of a medical casualty, this was the singular task to which he and he alone was suited.
But as Reilly rose above the bushes and stepped into the path, he saw that he wouldn’t be able to clothesline Keyamo after all. The terrified banker was moving far too fast for that, was already too close, and Reilly barely had time to use his body as a physical obstacle blocking the walkway.
Then he got his very first up-close, in-person view of Olapido Keyamo, now fumbling with his keys in preparation to unlock the front door. The man was tall and birdlike, the only fat on his entire six-foot-four frame a spare tire around his midsection, which was all Reilly could see in the split second before he ran headlong into the target.
They collided with enough force to fall to the ground like bowling pins.
Hitting the ground on his back, the medic saw Keyamo impact the walkway with a grunt as the air was knocked out of him. A briefcase Reilly hadn’t noticed until now tumbled from his grasp as the strap of a leather satchel, previously hoisted over one shoulder, now pulled at the prone man’s neck. Before Reilly could scramble forward to straddle the man’s back and administer a chokehold, Keyamo was crying out in some Nigerian dialect—since English was the country’s official language, that indicated the banker had made some key assumptions about who was robbing him and what they would understand or otherwise empathize with, and that was a very good thing for the team.
But a moment before Reilly pounced upon the man, he managed to roll to his side, appraising Reilly’s masked face with terror as he emitted a gasp of surprise and abruptly switched to English.
“Please—do not hurt my family!”
Ian stepped out from the bushes, watching Reilly mount Keyamo’s backside and wrap an arm around his throat.
A sense of near-panic racked the intelligence operative upon hearing Keyamo’s sudden shift in language—he’d no doubt seen white skin at the periphery of Reilly’s mask. Ian responded instinctively in the only way he could.
Whipping a kick across Keyamo’s face, he hissed the first Russian phrase to come to mind.
“Zatkni past!”
Then he descended upon Keyamo’s restrained body, reaching around his teammate to strip the essentials with gloved hands: phone, briefcase, and laptop satchel for intelligence purposes, gold wristwatch and wallet to disguise the effort as an act of robbery. Ian hastily deposited each item into a sack carried for the purpose, hearing a final, more distant gunshot as Cancer’s diversion drew the cops away.
Ian proceeded to pat down Keyamo for any additional material, hearing the man sobbing against Reilly’s chokehold as he recovered a silver cigarette lighter and the Bentley keys. Palming the key fob in his hand, Ian unlocked the vehicle and carried his sack to the driver’s side as footsteps approached behind him.
He paid the approaching man no mind—Ian knew full well that David was rushing in from his vantage point to gag and flex cuff the restrained banker before they made a hasty getaway.
Cancer spoke over the net then, his words breathless.
“Moving to alternate exfil.”