by Dana Haynes
The nearer soldier made a fist and swung horizontally to backhand the insolent woman.
Fiero leaned back, dodging the blow from the seated man, which threw him off-balance.
As his fist windmilled past her face, she made a spear of two knuckles and lunged forward, driving them into his windpipe.
Fiero rose out of her seat, rocked by the strength of her legs, and drove the point of her elbow into the second guard’s nose. His head snapped back into one of the iron tie-down rings.
She followed with her left elbow into the ear of the first guy, then used the rebound to drive her left fist into the second man’s neck, just under his ear.
Fiero fell back into her seat.
The whole attack took a shade under two seconds.
The first guy’s eyes rolled up into his head and he flopped over to his right and slid to the floor by the ice chests. The second guy’s eyes rolled up and he followed his friend to the floor.
The Iraqi youth gaped.
Fiero unwound the hijab. “Ever jump from a moving truck before?”
“I … how … what? No!”
Fiero smiled. “Want to try?”
As soon as Fiero spotted the suicide vests, she understood what the soldiers planned: Kill the judge and leave behind fall guys. Muslim fall guys. Europeans would be quick to blame Islamist extremists for the attack.
She stepped to the back of the panel truck and gingerly opened the door enough to see where they were: on one of the local access roads between the flying saucer house and the urban center of The Hague. She remembered that the route featured right-angle intersections with stop signs, not the usual roundabouts. They’d reach the A44 within a few minutes, where their speed would pick up considerably.
She beckoned the youth to the rear of the cargo hold. “We’re going to reach a series of stop signs. At the first one, hop out.”
“And then?”
Fiero said, “Hide in the ditch at the side of the road until the truck is out of sight.”
The truck braked. The kid looked perilously close to a heart attack, but he swung his legs over the tailgate and hopped to the pavement.
Fiero didn’t follow. The truck started moving again, and the kid watched with pathetic eyes as she accelerated away.
The thing about suicide vests is: suicide is not their primary mission. Wearing one is suicide. But that’s a by-product. They should be called homicide vests.
That’s because, if they are configured correctly, the vests direct the energy of their explosion outward. Away from the wearer. With a well-packed vest, an estimated 80 percent of the energy is directed outward.
It’s the other 20 percent that kills the wearer.
Fiero glanced at the tie-down rings all along the inside walls of the panel truck.
Removing the hijab, she knelt and lifted off a Styrofoam lid. She gingerly pulled one of the vests out of its ice chest, studying it. It appeared to be well made. She opened one pouch, smelled the explosive, and used her thumbnail to make a crescent moon indentation in the material—to make sure it was what she assumed it was, and not some newer, high-tech explosive with which she had no experience. The rig featured shoulder straps and a canvas belt to be secured around the waist of the martyr, like a hiker’s backpack, but designed to be worn in the front, over one’s chest.
She moved forward and attached one half of the belt to one of the tie-down rings, to the left of the cab window. She attached the other half of the belt to a ring on the right side of the window.
The vest hung against the forward wall of the cargo space, splayed like an animal pelt.
She searched the two dead guards and took both of their sidearms and also a mobile phone. Then she moved to the back of the truck and waited for the next stop sign.
As soon as it came, she bunched up the long skirt and deftly hopped out the back. She planted her boots shoulder width apart, aimed a stolen Glock back toward the interior of the truck, left hand bracing her right wrist, and waited.
The driver pulled through the intersection.
Fiero let it get ten meters—about far enough that they’d spot her in the rearview mirror—and fired.
Her slug sailed through the cargo space and slammed into the vest.
The driver braked hard, the tires squealing.
She fired a second shot.
A third.
The third bullet did the trick. The vest exploded.
The blast kicked her like a mule, and she stumbled back but stayed upright. She’d hung the vest with the inside of it facing her. It was that 20 percent of energy that staggered her.
The rest of the energy shredded the front wall of the cargo space, ripping through the cab, peeling off the roof like the lid of a can of dog food, pulping the torsos of the two soldiers, shattering the windshield and ripping the bonnet off its hinges, throwing it forward like a giant’s discus and exposing the engine.
Fiero unsnapped the skirt and let it fall to the tarmac, rolling down the legs of her jeans past her calves.
She heard an engine and turned. Behind her, a subcompact car slowly edged forward, the driver doubtless thinking there’d been some sort of collision ahead of him.
Fiero waved to the driver and removed the oversize sweater, letting it fall to the pavement in a heap. She tapped Finnigan’s number into the stolen mobile.
The car was a cheaply made, top-heavy Fiat Panda. The driver wore a plaid jacket and a pencil mustache, and he rolled down his window to ask if she was all right.
The phone connection clicked. Finnigan said, “Hello?”
“It’s me. Hold on.” She showed one of the stolen guns to the Panda driver. “Get out of your car please, sir.”
The driver said, “What’s going on? I don’t—”
“Now, sir.” She tapped the gun barrel against the door fame. The man scrambled to climb out of the subcompact.
Finnigan bellowed over the line. “Where the hell are you?”
Smoke unfurled from the ruined panel truck. The Panda driver hurried away from his car, eyes flicking from the wreckage to the madwoman with the gun. Fiero climbed into his car, throwing it into gear, and performed a quick K-turn to head back.
She put the stolen mobile phone on speaker and set it on her lap. “Michael? We were just at the Aleksić house! Three refugees and me. In a panel truck.”
“I’m parked just outside the grounds,” Finnigan said. “I saw your truck enter and leave.”
Fiero drove the clunky, underpowered Panda, glancing in the rearview mirror to see the roiling column of smoke rising from the remains of the panel truck. She shouted over the noise from the open window. “One refugee was with me! Two in the house! Michael, they have suicide vests!”
“Shit!”
She stomped on the gas. Stomping on the gas in a Panda doesn’t have any particular impact on the speed of the car, she discovered.
Finnigan said, “So they kill the judge, leave dead Muslims on the scene in suicide vests. Change the narrative from Judge halts trafficking of Muslim refugees to Islamists assassinate judge.”
“We have to get into that house.”
He said, “Got it covered. You coming?”
“Fast as I can.”
The Panda all but hyperventilated.
“Hey,” he said. “Glad you’re alive. How’d you get out of the freaking truck?”
“Let this be the lesson of the day,” Fiero said. “Never put a bitch like me in a truck full of explosives.”
When she was within a kilometer of the stone wall surrounding the seaside home, Finnigan stepped out of a small cluster of cypress trees and flagged her down. He ran ahead, down an unpaved access lane, until she spotted the most unlikely of vehicles—a massive cement-mixer truck, its enormous cauldron slowly rotating.
Fiero pulled in next to it. The cement mixe
r dwarfed the Panda.
Finnigan eyed the subcompact and grinned. “Wow. You stole this?”
“Shut up. It was the first car on the scene.”
“No, no. I like it. Really. Outstanding gas mileage. And, you know … cupholders.”
She threw her arms around him. “Fuck you, Michael.”
He squeezed her. “You, too.”
They pulled apart. “Soldiers have been leaving the house in small groups for the last hour. Not in caravan, but separately, so they don’t draw attention. The hit’s going down.” He stepped onto the running board of the cement truck and threw open the driver’s door.
Fiero circled the big engine—the grille was as tall as she. She climbed in on the shotgun side. “The judge is safe?”
“Yeah.”
She noted his beloved Halligan bar resting against the gearshift.
“The Kosovars will wait until the Iraqi refugees and the suicide vests arrive before attacking her office. And, since the refugees aren’t coming …”
“You bought us a little time,” Finnigan finished her thought. “Most of the bad guys are clustered at the court complex. It’s now or never.”
Fiero was about to check the magazines in the guns she’d stolen when she glanced behind the driver’s seat and saw her gym bag, filled with her own guns. “You shouldn’t have!”
“What do you give the girl who kills everything?”
She began her prefight check of the familiar guns.
“Hey, Shan’s alive.”
Her eyes popped wide. “Oh my God! You’re sure?”
“He was as of yesterday. This just became a rescue mission.”
Fiero drew her SIG Sauer P226 pistols out of the bag, checked their magazines. She said, “Among other things, yes.”
The cement truck left the access lane and Finnigan turned it toward the Aleksić estate.
“Panda. Good choice.”
She grinned and flashed him two raised fingers, knuckles first.
C73
Driton Basha had set up his command post in the Aleksićs’ kitchen. Why not? It was spacious and well lit, and the butcher-block island was large enough to lay out a city map and the police- and military-band radios they’d brought. Plus: coffee. Always important.
He and a sergeant were able to monitor all first-responders in The Hague, as well as military bands. They also had purchased access on the black market to normally encrypted radio frequencies favored by the security unit in the International Criminal Court.
Basha’s chess pieces were aligned:
His lieutenant in the Fireplace Room would start the ball rolling.
His captain would lead the assault forces.
Two of the refugees, with their vests and guns, should be arriving at any minute.
The Fireplace Room. Sobbing, half-mad with pain, Shan Greyson had told them this was the least-secure spot in the court complex, with no cameras. He’d insisted upon it.
Something about that nagged at Basha. Something about the Fireplace Room. If only—
He heard a roaring boom from outside and, for a second, wondered if the extra suicide vests had exploded in the garage. Alarms began blaring.
Basha shouted, “Where’s the breach?”
The soldier looked at the panel of blinking red lights. “Um … everywhere!”
Basha grabbed his firearm and raced out of the kitchen, down the short hall and into the living room.
A wall exploded. Timber and glass and insulation flew horizontally, as if a tornado had touched down.
The grille of a Kenworth truck appeared through the dust, right before Basha’s eyes. Inside the house!
The maelstrom of material reached him, and he ducked, arms over his head, crouching low. Bits of wood smacked him in the shoulders and across his back.
He tasted blood, and it clicked.
Fireplace.
St. Nicholas.
Major Driton Basha had led his troops into a trap. Not one set by those damned bounty hunters. No, this trap had been set by the hopeless and helpless, broken and bleeding Englishman tied up in the cellar.
The state-of-the-art alarm system was designed to identify any specific type of intrusion—one alarm if anyone climbed over the stone wall, another if motion sensors aimed at the lawn were tripped, another if the front door lock was jimmied.
Slam a cement truck through the gate, gouge up the lawn with its oversize tires, and drive the front into the house like a cannonball, and the state-of-the-art alarm system became as useful as a yapping Chihuahua.
The east side of the flying saucer house began to collapse in on itself, the massive cement truck having destroyed one of the load-bearing walls. Part of the second floor and the curved stairway fell against the front left fender of the Kenworth. Water sprayed from cracked pipes.
Fiero rolled out of the passenger side and saw a big guy with a shaved skull and a gym rat’s physique struggling through the smashed furniture to get to her. He looked like he weighed three hundred pounds of pure muscle and meanness. He dragged an H&K MP5 submachine gun in his wake. Fiero spotted the guy’s ballistic vest, so she shot him in the hip.
The biggest, brawniest badass on the planet can’t advance on you with a shattered pelvis. The guy collapsed to his knees, firing the MP5 downward, the bullets smashing into the hardwood floor.
Fiero stepped closer and shot him through the top of his skull, driving the bullet straight down through his brain and spine and throat, and into his chest cavity. He was dead before Fiero’s shell bounced off the floor.
To escape the truck, Finnigan had to shoulder open his door; the frame had bent upon impact with the house. He saw a man with close-cropped hair and a bull’s neck rise from a crouch, turn, and sprint toward the almost-ruined stairs. He recognized the guy from the reconnaissance photos Bridget Sumner had provided before the assault in Kosovo: Major Driton Basha.
Finnigan ducked back into the cab as part of the ceiling fell—right where he’d been standing. He grabbed the long-handled Halligan bar, climbed out again and looked around at the devastation.
The house wasn’t going to stay standing long.
He circled the front of the truck. He and Fiero spotted each other.
Finnigan pointed. “Basha! Heading upstairs!”
A wooden beam crashed down from the ceiling, and part of the outer wall of the house began to sag.
Two missions then: get Basha; get Shan Greyson.
Finnigan did the math.
Rescue and retribution.
Cop and spook.
He knew what separating from Fiero meant at this moment. He knew how she’d react.
“I got Shan! You get Basha!”
She blinked in surprise. “You’re—”
“Go!”
Fiero nodded, understanding the full depth and breadth of Finnigan’s decision.
She headed for the stairs.
It’s a cliché to hold a prisoner in the basement or subbasement. But in his time as a cop and a US Marshal, Finnigan had found it almost always worked out that way. Nobody holds a prisoner in a room with a lovely view.
The door to the basement was locked, the door fairly modern and the lock substantial. Finnigan shoved the arched, adze-like fork of the Halligan between the door and the doorframe, gripped the other end of the bar, and yanked. The wooden door cracked, wood splintering. The deadbolt had been jarred halfway out of the wall. He stepped back and kicked the door, right under the knob, and it bounced open.
He affixed the Halligan bar to a loop on his belt. He drew his handgun and took the stairs slowly. The postmodern house groaned and, even down in the bedrock basement, Finnigan could hear and feel the destruction upstairs. He found a rec room and the remnants of a military bivouac, with boxes of supplies, including ammunition, and that gym–locker room funk of to
o many men cooped up for too long.
No sign of a hostage.
He winced as timbers fell to the floor above his head. Time was running short.
Finnigan figured a guy like Director Miloš Aleksić would have a fancy wine cellar in his fancy UFO house. He went looking for it.
He found it, along with a soldier. Finnigan turned a corner, and the guy was almost nose to nose with him. The soldier drew his sidearm and Finnigan grabbed his wrist, pinning it down.
Gunfights are a difficult proposition when opponents are close enough to grapple. The soldier struggled to aim his gun, but Finnigan stepped in tight and used his gun as a club, swiping it across the guy’s cheek and slicing skin to the bone.
The soldier had had the wherewithal to wear a bulletproof vest. Finnigan thought, Good for you, pal, and kneed him in the balls.
The soldier dropped like an anvil.
Finnigan threw the soldier’s gun the length of the rec room. He stepped over the guy, toward a wooden door rounded at the top and slotted into a stone doorway. This lock was even older and heavier than the one in the kitchen, and it wasn’t a modern, hollow-core wooden door. The Halligan could get it open, but not quickly.
He drew his gun and aimed it like they taught him: forty-five degrees up, forty-five degrees in. He fired, and the bullet smashed both the door’s lock and the faceplate of the doorframe. From that angle, the bullet lodged in the wall, rather than traveling through the door to hit who-knows-what beyond.
He turned his back to the door and kicked it open with his heel, spinning in, gun raised.
Shan Greyson moaned and squinted into the light that poured into the wine cellar.
Finnigan made the sign of the cross, almost bursting into tears of joy. He ignored the stench, knelt and drew a knife from his hip pocket, cutting the tape off Shan’s ankles and wrists. The tape came away with bloody strips of necrotic skin. Shan’s face was swollen, sweaty, and red; one eye was swollen shut, and teeth were missing. Finnigan wouldn’t have recognized him if he hadn’t been searching for him.
“M-Michael …”
Finnigan helped him to his feet, but his body was like a bag full of broken glass. Finnigan lifted him up and threw one of Shan’s arms over his shoulder. Shan’s ankles and feet were broken.