The Operative

by Andrew Britton

  “That’s it,” Allison said, panting a little. “Sharp Street’s on the other side.”

  They raced by an outdoor parking lot toward the churchyard, Kealey gripping her hand. Then he stopped abruptly a step or two past the lot’s chain-link fence. In front of him was a curbless lane running off to the right.

  “What’s this road?” he asked.

  “That’s the back of the original center,” Allison told him. “Events aren’t held there anymore, so I’m guessing the road’s used for deliveries.”

  Kealey looked up the strip of pavement for another ten seconds or so. He noticed a car pulled parallel to the building at the end—a small black sedan. There was another vehicle in front of it, possibly another sedan. With the church partially obstructing his view, Kealey could barely see the rear bumpers or tell if either car was occupied.

  “Ryan, what’s wrong?”

  He didn’t answer. He wasn’t sure wrong was the word. He could not even explain what it was about those cars that had snagged his interest, other than that he couldn’t think of a reason for them to be there. They certainly weren’t delivery vehicles, and they seemed a little too sharp, too clean to belong to staffers or folks who had come over to look for work on their day off. Anyway, why would just two cars have parked here?

  “It’s nothing,” he said, nodding up the block. “Come on—we’d better hustle.”

  They went on past the front churchyard, then jogged around the corner past the west gate. The smoke was thicker here, the noxious odor easily penetrating their improvised face masks. The moment they turned the corner, Kealey saw the roadway curve slightly to the left, to the mouth of what looked like a narrow ramp behind the original convention center. The second-story walkway between the old building and its extension was no more than 15 yards ahead, along with the doors Allison had told him about.

  He quickened his pace, his hand firmly around Allison’s. Ten yards to go now. There were flashing red, yellow, and blue lights ahead on Pratt Street, commands from loudspeakers—indecipherable here, but probably shouting instructions to survivors. The police and firefighters themselves would be using their radios.

  If not for being focused on his goal, Kealey might have instantly seen the cars shoot toward him from his right. As it was, his reaction was quick enough to avoid getting run over. He sprang out of the way as the first one barreled down the ramp in the back of the center, pulling Allison along so forcefully that she almost tripped.

  He steadied her against him. As the vehicles had come shooting onto Sharp Street, he’d noted that they were compact sedans similar to the cars he’d seen behind the building from Conroy. He’d also glimpsed the first vehicle’s driver through his windshield and registered his clenched, fixated expression.

  “Ryan?”

  Kealey was quiet. That obsessive look on the driver’s face. He’d seen similar ones before, and they had never signified anything good.

  “Ryan?”

  He shot her a glance. “I should have checked those sons of bitches out,” he said.

  “Who?”

  He jerked his head back the way they’d come. “Those sedans. What the hell were they doing behind the building?”

  She stared at him, frightened and confused.

  “The cars, the driver, the lack of any stickers on the windows or license plates—they smelled of Feds,” he said. “So why were they leaving?”

  Allison’s phone pinged.

  “It’s Colin,” she said. “The dust is starting to settle. He says he’s near the men’s room just outside the food area.”

  Kealey stood there a heartbeat longer, his eyes disgusted and angry. Then, mindful of the nearby police sirens, he reached under his jacket for his Sig, thumbed its decock lever, and held the weapon down at the low ready.

  “What is it?” Allison asked.

  She took a step back, probably unaware that she had done so, Kealey thought. It was anxiety, her nerve gone, her mind unable to make sense of anything.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But whatever it is, I want to be ready.”

  Grabbing hold of her hand again, he started toward the ramp.

  The entrances faced each other beneath the walkway. The letters above the automatic sliding doors to the left read OTTERBEIN LOBBY. Those above the opposite doors said SHARP STREET LOBBY—EXECUTIVE OFFICES.

  Kealey turned to his right. The extension on his left was where the blasts had occurred, where Colin and Julie might be trapped, if they hadn’t already escaped or been evaced. But he had to resist the temptation to head inside. The cars gunning out of the back ramp as if all hell was at their tails had convinced him there might be more trouble on the way—and that he might still have a chance to head it off.

  Allison was pointing to the left. “Ryan, wait! We have to go—”

  “That way, I know,” he said. “But we need to get there through the back door. I’m not sure this is finished.”

  She did not protest any further but came along with a rag-doll limpness. Kealey knew the feeling. She had shut down, her mind and body overwhelmed.

  Entering, he heard the earsplitting racket of the convention center’s internal fire alarms. He spotted a pair of uniformed guards inside the entrance, about six feet apart, their backs toward him. The rent-a-cops were no surprise: he’d assumed that there were security guards on premises, and that it would be standard operating procedure for them to remain at their posts until the police arrived to seal the exit. The real question for Kealey was how to get past them.

  “Come on!” he said, walking forward cautiously, unclasping his hand from Allison’s to reach into his pocket for his card holder.

  One of the guards noticed him, shouted to the other, and they both turned, their eyes on his weapon as they drew their own sidearms from hip holsters.

  “Halt!” one of them shouted from behind his Glock 9-millimeter semiautomatic. “Don’t take another step!”

  “CIA!” Kealey said, stopping and flashing his outdated credential. “We need to get through.”

  “We were told no one gets in—”

  “We have people at the Harper event,” Kealey said. “We need to get to them.”

  The rent-a-cops stood with the pistols extended in two-handed shooter’s grips, their muzzles aimed straight at Kealey and Allison.

  “Toss the ID over.”

  Kealey kept his gun lowered. He was trying to decide what to do next when he saw Allison bend and slide her own ID across the floor. Without lowering his gun or taking his eyes off Kealey, the guard squatted and picked it up.

  “Drop the kerchief and come over here,” he said, rising.

  Kealey and Allison did as he asked. As they approached, he compared the photo to the woman standing before him. He seemed satisfied, and Kealey folded away his own ID. The guard didn’t ask to examine it.

  “Go ahead,” the man told him.

  “Thanks. You have any intel, Officer Goldstein?” Kealey asked, reading his name tag.

  “Not much,” the beefy man replied. “Three explosions—ballroom, food court, and hotel lobby. Emergency personnel having a tough time getting through traffic.”

  “Some son of a bitch did their homework,” Kealey remarked.

  The two moved on, leaving the scarves hanging around their necks.

  “Nice move,” Kealey said.

  Allison didn’t answer.

  “Do you know how to get where we’re going from here?” he asked.

  “Upstairs. Then double back,” she said.

  Kealey grasped her hand again, saw a sign that said FIRE EXIT, and led her through the door. They hurried up the stairs, pausing behind the closed fire door. Kealey looked through its wired glass panel before he pushed into a wide public corridor. A misty film hung in the air, thicker at the bottom than at the top.

  “Better put your mask back on,” he said.

  Glancing back and forth, he saw separate signs for the administrative offices and the walkway to the center’s n
ewer wing, the latter pointing around a bend in the corridor to his right. They moved in that direction at a full-tilt run.

  No sooner had they rounded the corner than they saw the dead man. He was sprawled on the floor, faceup, wearing the same uniform as the guards downstairs in the lobby.

  Allison stopped short an instant before she would have barreled over the corpse’s legs, horror dawning over her features, her eyes jumping from his grotesquely mutilated face to the overturned electric scooter beside him. It was splashed all over with blood.

  “My God,” she said, gasping.

  Even as Kealey moved between her and the dead man, his eyes snapped to where a second guard lay several feet to the right, also dead, his shirtfront soaked with blood. He’d fallen with his head propped against the wall, one knee upraised, the other leg extended, his arms spread loosely to either side. A long dripping red skid mark ran down on the wall where he must have fallen back against it before sliding to the floor.

  Kealey studied the body near the scooter. The head was tilted sideways to the left, a large puddle of blood under the cheek and blown-out skull; the eye on that side rolled lazily up in its socket so only its white was visible. The right eye socket was a swamp of red.

  “Shot at close range,” he said, noticing that the dead guard’s hand was wrapped around the butt of his half-drawn sidearm. “Executed.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was beaten to the draw,” Kealey said. “It doesn’t look like they ordered him to surrender.”

  “They were probably making sure the offices were evacuated.”

  Kealey nodded. “And then someone came up the stairs, the same as we did.” He shook his head, looked up toward the juncture of the wall and the ceiling. A camera was mounted there, but the red light was dark. It hadn’t been shot out by the killers, because someone on their team was using it. Whoever it was, they were watching him now.

  The long black box reminded him of a vulture on a tree branch, patiently waiting for him to die.

  Allison was breathing rapidly. “Ryan, what kind of madness is this?”

  “I don’t know,” Kealey told her. “Let’s go.”

  Raising the barrel of his Sig, he grabbed her right hand with his left and continued toward the walkway.

  The gunfire erupted as they reached its entrance—a staccato burst from the far end of the span, then another overlapping volley.

  Kealey dropped to his belly, simultaneously pulling Allison down and gathering her against him with his left arm. He used his body to cushion her fall. The bullets rapped into the glass panels to their right and left, sending an explosion of jagged shards over their backs.

  He pushed her head closer to the floor, growled through the mask, “Stay low!”

  Kealey felt her stiffen against his side, heard her shallow, frightened breaths. The walkway represented the only access to the extension. It could also be a perfect place of ambush, closing them in, offering no cover from fire.

  Keeping his hand protectively on her head, Kealey raised his eyes to look across the walkway. He saw two gunmen through the thin, hovering veil of smoke. They were just beyond the entry, one on each side, using the outer walls for partial cover. Kealey noticed that they were clad entirely in black, wearing black bandannas over their mouths and grasping semiautomatic weapons. The firearms looked like sound-suppressed MP5K variants. Whoever they were, they didn’t want the authorities to hear them. Presumably, the dead bodies would be attributed to the bombers or accomplices.

  Whatever this part of the operation was—and whoever was running it—the plan had been orchestrated according to classic guerrilla techniques. The main objective reached, a raid force had been inserted, a trap laid for whoever might try to follow them.

  Kealey realized that he and Allison couldn’t just stay out in the open. Even if they didn’t reach Colin right away, they had to get out of here.

  “Listen to me,” he said, pressing his lips to Allison’s ear. “Stay flat, and move to your left. We need to get closer to the wall.”

  She made a small sound of acknowledgment and wriggled toward the wall on her stomach. Kealey moved along with her, his gun fully extended in his right hand. Their movement prompted another barrage of fire from the other side of the walkway. More glass popped and sprayed around them. They slid a little farther and stopped, Allison having gone as far as she could, pressed between his body and the passage’s wall.

  Better, Kealey thought. Propping himself up slightly on his elbows, he pulled his left hand away from her, shifted it to his pistol grip so both hands were folded around the weapon. He was breathing heavily, and the smoke was pungent enough to sting his nostrils. But the haze itself wasn’t too bad. He could see the shooters if they moved.

  He stared over his sight, waiting. Then he glimpsed the snub-nosed barrel of an assault weapon poking from behind the wall to his right, fingers in cutoff gloves wrapped around its forestock. A poor target, but his goal was not necessarily to score a hit with his first shots.

  Taking a steadying breath and exhaling quickly, Kealey squeezed off a round. He missed the gunman, as expected, but the killer went for the bait. He leaned around to return fire and this time exposed himself enough for Kealey to get a clear shot. He pulled the trigger, and the pistol discharged with two sharp cracks, his arm jolting with recoil. The masked man fell back silently, clutching his throat, the MP5K dropping from his grasp.

  Kealey quickly rolled onto his left side, saw the second gunman lean through the entrance from the right, his weapon spurting. Bullets splattered where Kealey had been just moments before, pecking into the low walls and fallen glass to the left of Allison. Kealey took aim over the nub of his sight and fired three rounds in rapid succession. His shirt puffing at his chest, the shooter jerked violently and then sagged forward onto the floor of the walkway.

  Kealey didn’t waste an instant pushing to his feet. It bothered him for a moment that he might have just killed two Americans, possibly brothers in arms with the Company. For all he knew, the rent-a-cops had been part of an enemy plot and these guys were just cleaning up.

  In which case they should have identified themselves, he told himself.

  It was all that gray in a world that had once been black and white that had driven him to seek Allison’s counsel in the first place. Espionage was not a business for anyone who craved clarity.

  “Stay down until I call you,” he said to Allison when the gunfire failed to draw reinforcements.

  His pulse thudding in his ears, he ran across the walkway in a half crouch, stopping to check on the first man. He was completely motionless where he’d fallen, a fist-sized hole in his throat, blood pooling on the tile. Kealey whirled toward the second shooter, who was still alive and was struggling to get off his back by rolling onto his side. Seriously wounded, the front of his shirt soaked with blood, he had managed to hang on to his gun and was bringing it up into firing position.

  Kealey took a lunging stride toward him, kicked the weapon from his grasp, and smashed his foot into the vicinity of his chest wound, at the same time driving him back against the side of the walkway. The gunman produced a low, froggy croak and went limp, sagging against the wall.

  Moving swiftly to retrieve the shooter’s weapon, Kealey slung its strap over his arm, knelt over his motionless form, and pressed the muzzle of his Sig into the man’s temple. But he realized at once that additional force would not be necessary. The man was unconscious, a pinkish froth dripping from his wide-open mouth to his chin. If he’d coughed that up from his lungs—and Kealey had seen pulmonary bleeding often enough to recognize its signs—then it was a safe bet that he wouldn’t last much longer.

  Kealey lowered the Sig, pulled aside the bandanna, and studied his face. It had no distinctive characteristics. A light-skinned, brown-haired Caucasian, he could have come from anywhere on the planet. A Bluetooth headset on his right ear did, however, catch Kealey’s attention. He removed the headset and, checking it for any
obvious tracking signals, saw none and dropped it in his jacket pocket.

  Searching him quickly, Kealey found a cheap prepaid cell phone in his trousers and pocketed it alongside the headset. Besides the weapon and a six-magazine ammunition pack over each shoulder, that was it, all he was carrying. The man had no wallet, no documents, no identification of any type.

  Kealey slipped the 9mm packs over his shoulders and hurried back to the other shooter. He took the MP5K from his unresisting fingers, shucked the unfired round from its chamber, removed the partly spent magazine, and put it in a separate pocket from the headset and phone, tossing aside the gun. Then, curious, he pulled off the man’s mask, tugging a little to get the edge of the fabric out of the wound. It came free with a spray of blood that splattered Kealey’s shirt and jacket.

  The dead man had black hair, olive skin, and a long, narrow face. His features might have been Middle Eastern, but they also could have been Spanish, Greek, Indian, southern Italian, or something else altogether. If the gunmen had the same ethnicity, or seemed to, it might be a clue to their origins and motives. As it was, Kealey could glean nothing from his appearance.

  Tellingly, neither man carried hand or finger restraints of any kind. That proved his earlier assumption, when he saw the dead rent-a-cops: these guys were here to kill people, not take prisoners.

  The Bluetooth receiver was identical to the other man’s. Kealey stashed the headset with the other one, then turned and gestured at Allison. Already on her feet, she ran and joined him in the entry to the walkway. Her face pale and distraught, she was holding her phone in her hand.

  Kealey looked at her. ”What is it?”

  “They have hostages,” she said. “He’s with them.”

  “Does he know what they’re demanding?”

  Allison stared at him, her lips working in mute silence, as if they could not quite fit around the words she wanted to speak.

  Instead, she simply showed him the post.

  We r on 3 flr. Many wounded in exhbt hall. Men w/guns killing ppl no reason, don’t know when I can post agn, they say will kill all of us i f—