Fifteen minutes later Chung-Cha joined her team near the target location. They were all dressed in costumes.
Jing-Sang came up to her. “Ready, Comrade?”
“Of course.”
“And Min?”
“She is back at the cottage. She drank her milk…and went to sleep.”
Jing-Sang smiled. “Then let us do this great deed. To the glory, Chung-Cha.”
“To the glory,” repeated Chung-Cha.
Out on the main street the elements of the parade were assembling. There were motorized vehicles with floats built on them, a high school band, dozens of costumed zombies, and a plethora of other colorfully clad Halloweeners.
There was also a long Chinese dragon that had emerged from an alley. Underneath its cover one could just make out a number of sneakered feet marching along.
“We ready to move to the town hall, Sam?” Eleanor Cassion was looking at her protection detail leader.
He spoke into his walkie-talkie and then gave her a thumbs-up. “We’re ready to roll, ma’am. Side entrance over there. Two-minute walk to the left and up the front steps.”
He and another of his men stood on either side of the Cassions as they filed toward the door.
Sam gave Robie and Reel a high sign. They nodded and fell into step behind the Cassions.
Claire was dressed in a poofed-out long blonde wig with a headband and skinny jeans. She turned and looked at Robie, who wasn’t in costume. “Can you guess who I am?”
He shook his head while Reel, who had also decided against dressing up as Maleficent, looked on, a curious expression on her face.
“Stevie Nicks. She was a singer with some band way back.”
“Uh, that some band would be Fleetwood Mac,” said Reel.
“Yeah, them. They were apparently really popular at some point.”
“I thought you were going as some TV character from way back in the early 2000s,” said Robie.
“I was, but I couldn’t think of any. My mom told me about this Stevie person and she had a blonde wig.”
“Yay for Mom,” said Reel.
The local police and the Secret Service detail surrounded the Cassions as they walked down the street toward the town hall. The sun was setting and the sky looked nearly molten. The wind was picking up and there was the threat of rain later that evening, something the parade organizers were desperately hoping would not happen.
Chapter
74
THEY WERE NEARLY AT THE town hall when Robie spotted it. The Chinese dragon marched into place near the front doors of the building. He observed the great many feet under the dragon’s skin.
He looked at Reel, whose gaze was also on the dragon.
“Better to be safe than sorry,” he said, and Reel nodded in agreement.
He spoke into his walkie-talkie, and a minute later the Cassions were being hustled into the town hall. Several deputies raced over to the Chinese dragon and started pulling up the dragon’s “skin.”
Robie saw astonished faces revealed when they did so.
They were teenagers. American teenagers.
Robie smiled at Reel. “Okay, I’m officially paranoid.”
“You think?” she replied.
They entered the town hall and Robie said to Sam, “Dragon was a false alarm. Sorry, kind of like the car backfire.”
“No harm, no foul,” replied Sam, though he looked a bit put off.
Eleanor came over to them. “What is going on?”
“False alarm, ma’am,” said Sam. “We can proceed on schedule and—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish as a round hit him in the head, spraying everyone with blood.
Robie grabbed Eleanor and jerked her downward as Reel turned and fired shots in the direction from which the round had come.
Making her stay low, Robie pushed Eleanor toward the others. He yelled to one Secret Service agent who was shielding the two children, “Get them through that door. Now!”
Another agent came up to help, and together they pushed the kids ahead of them.
Claire started crying as she saw Sam dead on the floor. Tommy looked too afraid to make a sound.
Eleanor called out to her children even as one of the agents with them was hit in the back of the head and went down, falling over a stack of chairs.
A body came tumbling down from the second-floor balcony and hit the floor hard. It was one of the deputies from the local police. He’d been shot in the forehead.
“They’ve got the high ground,” yelled out Reel as she kept backing away, acting as the rear guard and firing widely angled shots at the balcony to provide cover.
“Move, move!” Robie urged Eleanor as more shots rang out.
The other agent with Claire and Tommy went down with a bullet in his spine.
“Reel!” yelled Robie.
Reel catapulted across the room and hit the man who had just appeared in the doorway. Her kick crushed his face and sent him flying backward, his weapon sailing away. Before he could try to get up, Reel had fired a bullet into his head.
The next instant she was falling backward as another man struck her low, driving his shoulder into her gut. She hit the floor and spun away on the smooth wood. She still had her gun and was preparing to fire when a shot rang out. The man who had hit Reel stood there stiffly for a second and then toppled forward, his face largely gone from the round Robie had fired into it.
Claire and Eleanor screamed as another man raced into the room brandishing an MP5 submachine gun. But before he could fire, Robie forced him to take cover when he emptied his clip at the man. Robie pulled Eleanor along and through a doorway as Reel sprinted across the room, hurdled a table, grabbed both kids, and propelled them into the same interior room, kicking the door shut behind her.
Back in the main room another Secret Service agent and a deputy raced in. The deputy was shot in the chest and went down before even firing his gun. The agent fired three shots at the second floor and a yell indicated that he had struck someone. Then he went down in a hail of fire from the man toting the MP5. But he still managed to empty his clip and killed the man who had just ended his life.
Inside the other room Robie and Reel pulled the first family away from the doorway and flattened them to the floor just in time. MP5 rounds ripped through it, spraying metal and wood in all directions.
As soon as the shooting stopped, Robie and Reel led Eleanor and her kids through another interior doorway. Robie locked the door and then surveyed the room. It was small, windowless, and there was a set of stairs leading down.
Reel had already eyed it. “Probably the cellar,” she said. “Curved staircase.”
“Constrained fields of fire,” he replied, understanding immediately. “Gives us an edge.”
“Not much choice. Let’s do it.”
They propelled the first family down the steps. The cellar was even smaller than the room above and had no exit.
They were trapped.