Sarah had been looking into his eyes as he spoke, and suddenly glanced down at the sandwich she was holding. She blinked once, then put the sandwich down on the plate.
“Something wrong, Sarah?” Neil asked her.
She looked up at him for a moment without speaking, then slowly shook her head. “It just hit me,” she said. “I’ve never actually seen anyone die, but after what that son of a bitch did to me in Moscow, I think I want to watch.”
“You want to watch? Hell, I want to help. By the way, Boss, did you give any thought to getting me that shotgun?”
Moose’s eyebrows tried to crawl over the top of his head. “Shotgun? Neil, as skinny as you are, a shotgun would blast you back to last week. That’s like holding a rocket up to your shoulder and setting it off. That’s the last thing you need.”
“Well, I want something! I can barely even handle a pistol, I always blink and yank it back when I pull the trigger. I can handle a rifle fairly well, but that isn’t much good for up close and personal. I need something that’s going to wipe out whoever I’m shooting at, you know? I asked the boss to get me a sawed-off.”
“Sawed-off shotgun? Well...” Moose seemed to be thinking it over. “Actually, a single-barrel 12-gauge might not be a bad idea. Even if it knocks you on your ass, you’ll probably blow away whoever you’re shooting at, assuming they’re within thirty feet or so. You want to use rat shot, not buckshot. Does a better job of perforating a human body.”
Sarah had been watching them as if at a tennis match. “God, the conversations we have while we’re eating. Do either of you ever wonder what it would be like to be normal?”
Moose and Neil looked at her for a moment, glanced at each other and then turned back to Sarah. “Nope,” they said in unison.
They finished eating and got back into the car for the final leg of the trip.
“I want to find a hotel,” Noah said, “and then recon the subdivision Molly lives in before we actually start watching her. I want to know just what kind of security holes we may have to watch out for.”
“Neil said security there was Blackstone,” Moose pointed out. “Those guys are pretty good, you won’t find any. They were trying to recruit me while I was still in SEAL school. Just about all of their people are ex-special forces, and then they get even more training after they sign on.”
Noah nodded his head. “You’re probably right, I just want to be sure. From what we know of Nicolaich Andropov, if there’s any gap in security, he’ll spot it. I don’t want to give him any opportunity to slip past us.”
“Well, if you do find any,” Neil said, “I think I can plug them. I’ve got a dozen dart cameras with me that we can put just about anywhere. We’ll need an air rifle, one of the twenty-two caliber ones; Moose can shoot them into walls and such, and they’ll transmit high-def video and audio for about a month. They use a multi-frequency setup, splitting up the signals and sending them over four different UHF channels that aren’t used anywhere else. If somebody were to pick up one of them, it’d just sound like static, and all we have to do is hide a little receiver that re-combines the signals and streams it to a server back at Neverland. We can watch it live on any computer.”
Noah turned and looked back at him. “That’s slick,” he said. “And I think it might be pretty useful. See if you can find out where to get one of those air rifles, would you? Make it a good one, we need something with both range and accuracy.”
“You got it,” Neil said as he picked up his computer from the floorboard. A moment later, he and Moose were looking at a web page showing numerous air rifles. “Okay, Boss, there’s a Benjamin twenty-two caliber that would be perfect, and we can pick one up at Walmart. In fact...” He tapped a few more keys. “There’s one in stock at a Walmart two exits up. We ought to stop and grab it, so that we don’t have to go looking for one around Alexandria.”
“Good point,” Noah said. “Sarah, let’s make a stop at Wallyville, shall we?”
Sarah grinned and moved into the right lane. They made the stop at Walmart and were back on the highway only thirty minutes later with the air rifle added to all the other gear in the trunk of the car.
They arrived in Alexandria at just before three. Molly’s house turned out to be in a private community known as Gatewood, which consisted of only forty-two homes and was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high brick wall. There were only two entrances, both of which were manned by a quartet of armed guards. Two of them bore only sidearms and would be the ones to approach any vehicle that attempted to enter; the other two carried assault rifles and stayed inside a brick-fenced portico on the guard shack. Moose and Noah spotted them instantly as they drove by.