Julian arrived at the condominium in Big Bear as a snowstorm was beginning. The flakes were big, and stuck to the windshield of his rental car, so he needed to use his wipers and headlights to find his way.
The condo had already been booked online, and the keys were waiting for him at the rental office. When the rental agent looked up from his desk and saw him, Julian saw the man’s face lose its look of expectancy and go flat and expressionless. Julian ignored the man’s involuntary reaction, signed the agreement, and took the keys. As Julian had driven into town he noticed that nearly all the faces were white.
Julian went to the condominium, unpacked, and prepared. He was aware that this moment was the peak of his career. This was his chance to become a success and an insider. But his mission was a mistake.
The old man was not what they said he was. He had seen covert aid money being diverted—and taken it back. He was not a traitor.
About twenty minutes after Julian arrived, the soldiers drove into town from Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona in a pair of black SUVs and an oversized pickup truck. They wore civilian clothes, but all of the clothes looked new, and the men were too well matched to be anything but some kind of team. The first man to the door was Staff Sergeant Axel Wright. He looked like a retired quarterback, tall and blond, with long arms and a thin, permanently sunburned face. When Julian came to the door, Wright introduced himself and said, “Mr. Carson, sir. Do we have your permission to bring in our equipment?”
“Of course. Come in.”
Julian sat in the condominium’s kitchen and watched the members of the squad spread around the living room, the stairway, and the dining room. They took their weapons out of their padded transport cases, assembled them, and loaded rounds into the detached magazines. Julian hadn’t seen anything quite like this since Afghanistan.
They were a ten-man squad that included a medic, and Staff Sergeant Wright as team leader. One of the eight riflemen was a radio operator-maintainer. For this mission he was equipped with other devices besides a radiotelephone. He spent a few minutes plugging in a couple of olive drab army-issue laptops, hacking into the Wi-Fi network, changing the password, and adding his phone and some other equipment to the network. Then he went to work.
The radio operator began studying the screen of his laptop and relaying weather information to Staff Sergeant Wright while Wright looked out the window at the falling snow. The snow was steady, with big white flakes floating down past the window and already building a layer of white on the ground. The flood lamp mounted on the eaves of the building threw enough light to make the flakes fifty or sixty feet away glow against the dark sky, obscuring the view.
To Julian, Wright’s confidence was a bad sign. The sergeant wasn’t paying attention to what his men did, and that meant they had worked together for a while and Wright knew he didn’t even have to look anymore. The old man up the mountain in the cabin might be clever, but in a confrontation he would have no hope against men like these.
After about five minutes Wright turned away from the window, and his men looked in his direction in silence. He said, “The snow is going to get heavier and the air colder, and it won’t stop coming down until morning, guys. Pelham and Slavin, go get the pickup configured to plow. Kelly and Oldham, take one of the SUVs and find something heavy to weigh down the truck bed for traction—bags of gravel or sand, or whatever you find.”
The four men put on their winter gear and went outside. Sergeant Wright went into the kitchen to the sink and drew a glass of water, and then sat at the table across from Julian. “Mr. Carson. You’re sure you’ll recognize him when you see him, right?”
“I’ve seen him three times,” said Julian. “The first time he seemed to be a creaky old guy walking his dogs. The next time he suddenly turned up in the dark to show me he had his gun in my face, and the third time he was disguised to look like a crazy old homeless guy living on the street. He’s well trained, and he hasn’t forgotten any tricks.”
“I understand that you want to take him alive. Is that right?”
Julian nodded. “Yes. And there are two of them. He has the woman, Zoe McDonald, with him. We’d like to take her alive too.”
“Of course, if we can,” said Wright. “Alive or dead, though, he’s the priority. And he’s a killer. You know what an armed assault on a building can be like.”
“Yeah,” said Julian. “I do. I’m wondering if this operation has changed since I was briefed. I wasn’t expecting to conduct a heavily armed frontal assault.”
“When I was briefed they said he had killed some foreign agents who had tried to take him quietly a couple of times in different cities. So military intel cranked up the heat.”
“If we get the two of them alive, what do your orders say happens next?” said Julian.
“Then we get to go back to Yuma, where it’s warm, and you go on to your next assignment,” said Wright.