“Easy as pie, man. Just get me on site a little early and I’ll park my baby where I can keep an eye on you. This little puppy is dead silent, I could be ten feet over your head and you’d never know I was there.”
Noah looked up at him. “What about speed? I’m assuming our destination will be somewhere within the area, but we may be doing interstate speeds.”
“No sweat. She can do better than a hundred miles an hour, ain’t no car going to get away from her. I can follow you until you get in a vehicle, and then keep that vehicle in sight until it stops. All we’ve got to do is cruise along behind her, not even close enough for anyone to see us.”
Hayes looked at Noah and shrugged. “Jimbo got tapped for drone training a couple months ago. He’s been dying to give it a try.”
“Sounds like he just got the chance.” Noah was scanning through the saved items in the 3-D printer’s database of designs. He selected a pair of clip-on holsters, one that would fit the .45, and another the right size for Sarah’s Beretta, which was still in his pocket, and told the printer to make them. They would be thick and heavy, but he didn’t expect Andropov’s men to take them from him once they relieved him of his guns. “Now, here’s the other part. These things have a detonator inside them, and they’re far more powerful than any explosive you’ve seen before. I can program them to go off at a certain time, but I have no way of knowing when would be the best time to use them. They can also be detonated by remote control and I’m going to give that to you. You have to be within a mile of them for it to work, so when you see that I’ve gotten where I’m going, you wait fifteen minutes and then set them off. I’ll find a way to put them somewhere in the room or the area before then. Then, as soon as they go boom, I need you guys to come in as fast as you possibly can. I’ll be unarmed when I go in, of course, but I’m hoping to be able to relieve one of Andropov’s men of a weapon after the explosion.”
Hayes nodded. “Fifteen minutes,” he said. “Just be sure you get those off by then.” He looked at Noah’s wrist. “No watch? How are you going to know when to duck?”
“One of the weird little habits I picked up over the years,” Noah said, “is that I’m always counting seconds in the back of my head. It gives me kind of a built-in alarm clock—I always wake up exactly when I want to, that sort of thing. In this case, I can sort of ‘set’ myself an internal timer for fifteen minutes. I’ll do that a few seconds before I step inside, so I should be ready to hit the ground just before you push that red button.”
TWENTY-THREE
Noah drove up to the park ten minutes early, and parked on the north side of Gibbon Street, the southern boundary of the park. He got out of the car and unlocked it, then began walking across the grass to get to the paved octagon with a single tree growing in the center of it. He reached it in about three minutes and stood on the pavement while he waited for a sign of his escort. He had left his Glock with Hayes, but the weight of the two guns and holsters on his belt was at least somewhat reassuring.
A couple of minutes passed and he began looking around to see if he could spot anyone. The only people in sight seemed to be teenagers, but then he saw two men approaching from the opposite end of the park. He watched them carefully and became certain that they were the ones he was looking for.
The two of them walked up to him and one of them asked, “Are you Mr. Wolf?”
“I am. Let’s get on with this.”
The man looked at one another and then motioned for him to follow them. They led him through the playground and across a concrete bridge over a stream, and stopped when they reached a large Mercedes cargo van. One of them opened the back door and motioned for Noah to get in, and the other one followed him inside. The doors closed and a light suddenly came on.
“I gotta pat you down,” the man said. Noah grinned and opened his jacket to show a holstered Colt forty-five on his right side and a Beretta on his left. The man reached slowly to take both guns from him, then slipped them into the pockets of his own heavier jacket before frisking Noah the way a policeman might do.
The sides of the van were lined with seats and the man pointed at them. Noah didn’t need any further invitation; he sat down and waited for the truck to begin moving. He didn’t have to wait long before he felt the big van pull away from the curb and head down the street.
“So where are we going?” Noah asked.
The man grinned and shrugged. “I don’t have any idea,” he said. “The guy up front, he’s the driver. He knows where we’re going, but I don’t.”
Noah grunted and leaned back. He closed his eyes and tried to visualize the distance and turns.