He caught movement out of the corner of his eye – a pair of security guards to his right. The brief flare of a match, two clouds of smoke.
Abreeq stepped back into the shadows and edged along the wall to a stairway that led to the equipment areas. His contact at the facility, a janitor committed to the cause, had told him that the main security equipment room was in the basement area, with a door identifying it as such. Abreeq would have liked blueprints for the stadium, which were scheduled to arrive the following day, but didn’t want to leave all his preparations for the last minute.
The rubber soles of his cheap running shoes made no sound in the stairwell as he descended to the lower level. He paused at each landing, listening for any signs of life, but heard nothing. As he’d hoped, with tonight’s event a routine match between two football clubs, most of the security emphasis would be on crowd control, not crowd protection – Manchester was infamous for its rowdy fans, who would periodically riot if the match didn’t go in their favor.
When he reached the basement, there was nobody in evidence. Pumps whirred and hummed behind closed doors, steam hissed in pipes overhead, but there was no staff about. He edged along the wide corridor to the security room door, and after scanning the hall a final time, knelt before the lock and extracted a set of picks.
The deadbolt was hard, the lever easy, and after two minutes both had surrendered to Abreeq’s machinations. He rose, stepped into the room, and closed the door behind him, taking care to lock it. His eyes adjusted to the near complete darkness, the only illumination coming from small LEDs blinking from a panel at the far end of the space. Locating the light switch on the wall beside him, he reached for it, cocked his head as he listened again, and then flicked it on.
The room flooded with light. Against the far wall was all the expected gear for fire prevention, as well as the equipment for the security cameras, which would only be operating once the stadium was open, per his informant. Next to it was a large rack with electronic modules. His eyes roamed over the devices until they fixed on a double-height one with a logo on the front that featured atoms and the international symbol for radiation.
He crouched down and took a photo of the instrument, and then inched around to the back of the rack and repeated the process. He paused and followed the cables that led from the rear connector panel to a junction box mounted to the wall – one of several.
Abreeq opened the panel and studied the neatly labeled wires, smiling at the organized manner with which some thoughtful installer had painstakingly identified the connections. He reached into his pocket and felt for his Swiss Army knife, and in a few moments had the screws removed and was carefully pulling the panel forward.
Most of the cables fed into a large conduit tube – but two didn’t. They looked like network cables, which made sense – the radiation detection system wouldn’t operate in a vacuum and would be connected to a LAN.
Five minutes later, Abreeq had traced the cables to another junction, this one appearing to be the hub for the stadium computer system that ran all the automation. The cables from the radiation detector terminated into the hub, and Abreeq took another photo so he could tailor a solution.
He closed the panel back up and went back to the first one, repeating the procedure. After peering at the screws and verifying that they didn’t look like they’d been tampered with, he turned off the lights, confident that any trace of his intrusion was now hidden. Abreeq pressed his ear to the door and, when he was sure the corridor was empty, pulled it open and slipped through.
Relocking the deadbolt required longer than he’d hoped, but his luck held and the area remained deserted. When the bolt seated into the closed position with a heavy thunk, he grinned to himself. Security was laughable. He’d feared something like what he’d had to contend with at airports. This? This was child’s play. If his luck held, he would be able to contrive some way of disabling the radiation detector, and the sheep would never know what hit them.
He made his way back to the stairwell and was preparing to open the door when a voice called out from behind him.
“Hey! What are you doing here?”
“Oh, sorry, mate, I was looking for a loo,” Abreeq said, holding up his staff pass.
A man in blue overalls approached, his complexion ruddy, a network of gin blossoms painted across his nose and cheeks. “No bathrooms here, governor. Try up one level. Although most of ’em are probably locked at this hour.”
“Will do. I didn’t realize my mistake until I tried a couple of the doors.”
“No worries. Like I said, go to the main floor.”
“Thanks.”
Abreeq turned and strode into the stairwell, unhurried and calm, a worker who didn’t know his way around. Killing the man in any of a half-dozen silent ways had occurred to him as they’d had their brief discussion, but Abreeq had rejected the idea – he might be noticed, and there was the problem of how to dispose of the body. If the big match had been today, he wouldn’t have hesitated, but there was too much time for something to go wrong if one of the maintenance staff disappeared while on duty.
But the man had seen him.
Of course, he likely wouldn’t remember anything about it, but it was still an unwelcome wrinkle. And Abreeq didn’t like surprises, no matter how innocent.
Then again, by the time questions were asked, it would be far too late for anyone to do anything but bury the dead, and he’d be a thousand miles away – gone to ground, likely for at least a year or more.
Once back on the main level, he passed a colorful banner advertising the Eurocup championship in only a few days and smiled as he pulled his coat tight around him against the wet chill.
It would be a game nobody would soon forget.
He’d see to that.
Chapter 15
Dhaka, Bangladesh
The afternoon heat hit its peak by two o’clock, and Maya was soaked in sweat. She’d circled the block as many times as she dared over the last hour, and had spotted two men lounging on either side of the building, obviously guarding it. The address belonged to a modest two-story home ringed by a perimeter wall, and her heart had sunk on her second pass – there was no way to carry out a frontal assault that wouldn’t be a suicide run. On the south side was a tenement, its windows overlooking the home like gaping eyes, and on the north some sort of shabby offices.
The best bet she could see was the property that backed against the home, but when she’d circled the block, two large dogs had sent up a barked alarm. A man had come out to shush them and eyed Maya suspiciously, and she decided that wasn’t an option – for all she knew, the imam had confederates in the dwellings adjacent to the safe house.
She paused at the corner, unwilling to expose herself any further. The guards looked lazy and sloppy, but even so, they’d notice the same woman going by three times. She was reaching into her robe for the cell phone to call Uri when she froze, eyeing the tenement.
One of the third-floor windows was closed. All the rest were open for ventilation. But the one that was closed…the glass looked filthy, which hinted that it wasn’t occupied.
Thunder exploded overhead and she checked the sky. A line of dark clouds was moving in, which explained the unbearable swelter – the approaching rainstorm had pushed any cool air out to sea as it moved south, leaving only muggy stifle in its wake.
Another loud boom and the heavens opened. Heavy drops of rain pelted down, causing any pedestrians to dart for cover. The guards pulled back into the doorways where they’d been lounging, the structure above providing meager shelter from the downpour.
Maya saw her opportunity in an instant. As sheets of rain washed down the street, cutting visibility drastically, she could use the weather to mask her approach and be on top of the nearest guard before he knew what hit him – and the far watcher might not see anything if the intensity of the storm continued.
But she didn’t have much time. Rainstorms in the r
egion could blow past within minutes, and if she waited, she might find herself exposed during a lull in the cloudburst.
Maya struggled internally with the decision, and then unzipped the duffle and removed the submachine gun. She looked around at the now-empty street as she screwed the suppressor in place, and then set the gun down and repeated the process with her SIG Sauer. The pistol would make less noise, she thought.
And then she had an even better idea.
Two minutes later she was trotting down the street toward the first guard’s position, holding the duffle over her head as if to shield herself from the deluge. She spotted the man in the shadows of the doorway as she neared, and saw the cell phone in his hand and the look of shock on his face as she dodged toward him, a glint of steel in her hand.
Blood sprayed the door as the razor-sharp blade of the combat knife slashed through the guard’s esophagus and carotid artery, and she was already moving past him as the phone clattered by his side and he slumped into a pile at her feet. From here she was fully committed, and the success of her attack on the second watcher would depend almost entirely on Mother Nature masking her approach as long as possible.
She was only a few yards from the second guard when there was a lull in the rain, but she was too far to use the knife again. She saw the man reaching beneath his shirt as she slowed, and then the SIG Sauer barked twice from within the folds of her robe, the silenced shots muffled by the fabric, although as loud as cannon fire to her.
Twin crimson blossoms appeared in the guard’s chest and he slammed backward, the expression on his face shocked as momentum carried him down. He was fighting to raise the gun that had appeared in his right hand, but she kicked it away and pivoted as she swung the sack at his head.
The bag cracked against the guard’s skull, and his body shuddered. Maya crouched next to him to confirm he was dead, and waited as more thunder roared overhead, hoping her shots would be mistaken for the storm’s fury. She unzipped the bag and extracted the H&K. Once she’d tucked the spare magazines into her waistband beneath the robe’s folds, she debated leaving the sack but discarded the option – if discovered it would point to a clandestine operation, and she didn’t want to leave any clues for the police to follow.
She wasted no time on the house’s front gate and hurried past it to the tenement next door and raced up the dark stairs to the third floor. Music filled the hall as she turned a corner, and the jabber of a television soap opera drifted from the door next to the one she estimated housed the vacant apartment.
The lock provided slim resistance to her picking skills and she was inside shortly. She looked around, the accumulation of dust in the empty room confirming her guess that it was unoccupied, and moved to the window.
The roof of the house was a story below, eight feet separating the buildings – an easy jump had it not been pouring rain and had she not been wearing the burka. She took in the inside of the compound – the front and back yards were both empty, not surprising given the downpour – and there was an access door next to the black plastic water tank on the roof. That would be her way in.
Maya stripped off the robe and stuffed it into the bag to shield it from damage. With a final glance at the house, she tossed the duffel onto the roof. She winced at the thump it made, and then followed it out the opening and threw herself into space.
Rain pelted her as she flew through the air, and then she was tumbling on the roof, rolling once before leaping to her feet and scooping up the bag. She had the submachine gun out by the time she reached the access door, and took a long breath before twisting the handle.
Locked.
Bolted from inside, and no lock to pick.
The submachine gun barked and rounds tore through the flimsy wood. Maya kicked the barrier aside and burst into a pitch-black room, pushing cobwebs from her face as she made for the light seeping beneath a door on the far end.
Voices yelled from below, and she tossed aside any subtlety and threw the door open. Gunshots rang out from downstairs, pounding into the cinderblock wall, and she waited until the volley had stopped before spraying the downstairs with the contents of the first magazine, firing indiscriminately over the balcony of the second-story landing.
A scream echoed through the house from the first floor as she switched the spent magazine for a full one, and then she was in motion, rolling onto the landing as more shots followed her. She caught a blur from near a doorway downstairs and fired two short bursts. The sound of a body falling thudded against the stone floor, and then the area was still. She waited, but heard nothing more.
Maya pushed herself to her feet and moved stealthily to the stairs. She peered over the railing and saw a body near the base and a pair of sandal-clad feet protruding from the doorway. She swept the room with the silenced muzzle of the submachine gun, but saw nothing move.
She edged to the room next to her and pulled the door wide, shielding herself from any gunfire with the wall. After a quick look into the room to confirm it was empty, she proceeded to the final doorway on the second floor and repeated the move.
She was alone.
Maya inched back to the stairs and descended to the main floor, weapon at the ready. Aside from the dead man by the stairs, sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, and his companion halfway into the kitchen, there was nobody in the house. She took cautious steps into the kitchen, skirting the second man lying in a widening pool of blood, and spotted another door.
Of course.
The cellar.
That’s where she would keep a prisoner.
And without a doubt, assuming they hadn’t moved him, that’s where Gil was.
The problem being that going down a stairway into a basement that could have any number of gunmen waiting in it was about as bad an idea as any she could imagine.
Maya glanced around and moved toward the garage. There was only one way she could see of making it through this ordeal alive.
Cut the power.
She found the breaker panel where she figured it would be and flipped off the two master switches, and then returned to the kitchen and rooted around until she found what she was looking for.
Maya pushed the basement door open and stood clear of the doorway. Even though there was precious little light in the kitchen due to the rainstorm, it was still enough to silhouette her for any shooters. The impulse of an untrained gunman would be to fire when the door opened. She was surprised when there was no barrage from below.
After five seconds of waiting, she flipped on the flashlight, and holding it with her left hand while gripping the H&K with the other, she moved across the threshold and rushed the stairs.
Gunfire exploded in the small space and a round caught Maya square in the chest, knocking her back as she lost her footing and slipped down the remaining steps, the flashlight tumbling from her grip along with the submachine gun as she landed hard.
Chapter 16
Maya sensed rather than saw the shooter approach her, and emptied the SIG Sauer from the folds of her robe into the area of the muzzle flashes. Her chest felt like someone had slammed her breastbone with a hammer, but the Kevlar vest had spared her anything worse than a bad bruise. Not so her spine and legs, which were aching from the tumble down the stairs even as the slide on the SIG Sauer locked open after the last round, the pistol empty.
She reached for the full magazine in her pocket as she ejected the spent one, rolling as she did, and heard a burbling from nearby. Shocked by the fall, she nevertheless forced herself to one knee, the pistol in her right hand as she reached for the flashlight. When her fingers found it, she slowly scanned the room with the beam, stopping when it settled on the form of a young man bleeding from three bullet wounds. She rose shakily, ignoring the pain flaring through her body, and squinted at the dying man. He looked…familiar.
“You,” she whispered.
It was the motorcycle courier. He’d somehow made it back to Dhaka – they’d underestimate
d his powers of persuasion or his determination, obviously. She shone the light on him and saw another bullet wound, this one on his upper arm, the blood dried. At least she’d been right about hitting him.
He coughed twice, and then his eyes went wide and stayed open even as his final breath rasped from his chest. She stared at him for several beats, and then spun when a scrape from the far end of the room startled her.
Maya’s flashlight beam stopped at the huddled shape of Gil suspended by a chain that bound his wrists, hanging from an iron hook mounted to the wall. His shirt was torn, his skin blistered and lacerated, his face brutalized to the point she barely recognized him. A pool of blood collected around his feet, which were tied with rope. Nearby a blowtorch lay on the floor, hastily abandoned, as well as a truncheon and pair of gore-crusted pruning shears.
“Oh, God. Gil,” she whispered.
He didn’t register her other than to moan, a sound so hopeless and agonized it made her skin crawl. She moved to him and wrapped her arms around his torso, freeing his wrists of the weight of his body, and slipped the chain free of the hook before dragging him to the middle of the room and laying him down.
Maya did a quick examination of his wounds and understood that he was bad – they’d cut his fingers off and his toes – the blood loss alone would have been enough to kill him had they not then seared the wounds closed with the torch. She frowned as she inspected his ruined appendages, hyperaware of time passing, each second increasing the odds of either the police, or the imam’s men, arriving.
Gil’s remaining eye cracked open and he gave her an unfocused stare.
“Gil, it’s me. Maya. You’re going to make it,” she whispered.
He tried to shake his head, but the effort caused him to writhe in pain. He gasped and shut his eye, and then croaked a few words so softly she could barely hear him.
“Disk…corner…the computer…”
She understood immediately. The courier had made it back with the disk, and she’d interrupted the torture…and something else. Copying it? Decoding it? Sending it to someone after downloading it?
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