Peacemaker. Gordon Kent
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had been somebody’s pride once, a sign of some kind of wealth in this pitiful place. The house stood back among some scruffy trees that were only big enough to make a chopper landing there impossible; it had a low wall around it, the remains of gate pillars, all visible on the aerial photography. Gagliano’s team were already spread along the cover of the wall, the two shooters out where they could get at the armored car if it came.
He turned into the drive. No lights showed in the house. They still had surprise. They had wanted to cut off the house’s communications, but it had a spindly radio tower on the roof and there was no getting at it easily. They were just going to go in, and the hell with it. Somebody up there had plastique, if they needed it.
As Alan got close, he saw the crouching figures, weapons ready, and two more, only shapes to him, near the house, moving nearer. Several had already put up their night-vision goggles. The two closest to the house would be the sergeant and his partner, he thought. They were to try the door, place the plastique if they had to. If they could go in, they would, stun grenades ready; four more men behind them. The hope was to invade the house before any defense could be laid on. That was the hope.
Alan flopped into the snow facing the door. The Beretta was in his hand. When had he done that? He held his breath. What were they doing up there? The sergeant and his partner had disappeared into a little portico, like something on a cuckoo clock, with a little peaked roof. Alan could see nothing, then made out one of them bent over or kneeling. What the hell was he doing, looking through the keyhole?
The man stood up. “Aperto,” he whispered. Open. Jesus, the front door was open. Just like a small town anywhere.
The four men got up, ready to go, and there was movement in the portico and suddenly it looked different, blacker, the door open, and the silent figures rushed forward. He wanted to go in. He looked at his watch, couldn’t find it because of the heavy glove. The hell with it. It couldn’t have been more than a couple of minutes. Surely not. Yet—
A shot boomed from the house. Everybody on the snow tensed; you could hear nylon rustle, a piece of ice crumble. Then hell broke loose, brief hell, loud hell: shots in quick succession, too many to count, and the thud of a stun grenade, the flash in an upstairs window as well as the doorway. A voice. Then somebody screaming, the words not Italian, not one of his. Then he was up and running for the door, and somebody was reaching back for him, hand on his arm, “Tenente, subito, subito—” Quick, quick.
“Lights!” he bellowed in Italian. Speed was more important now than invisibility. A flashlight bounced off painted walls, some godawful blue; then a light came on in a corridor beyond, and he was being waved in. Overhead, feet pounded and doors banged, and automatic fire started somewhere outside, maybe the outbuilding in back, somebody hosing. The screamer dropped to a lower key and gurgled, and the Kenyan medics were already inside and headed up a stairway to Alan’s left. He shoved ahead, was aware of more shots outside, prayed it wasn’t the armored car already but the other building, the torture place. Ahead were bare rooms, what had been some sort of dining room, now an office. He saw two wooden desks, several chairs; a bare overhead bulb threw a sickly light, hardly more than a wash of yellow-gray.
“Get the computer!” he shouted. One of the Italians started to wrestle with the monitor, and Alan pushed the man’s hands away, tore out the cords and gave him the computer itself. He didn’t know the words for keyboard or monitor. “Only this!” he shouted. The man passed it to somebody else. Alan raced around the room, opening drawers, dumping files. There was a fax machine. Could they take it? Would there be anything worth saving on it? No, he decided, too bulky, must have been the first one ever made, huge. He shoved papers into a pile with his feet, and somebody began to stuff them into a pack. He added notebooks, a weird kind of rolodex, a card file. Then he stood in the middle of the room, for just an instant paralyzed, unable to think. Too much stuff, no way to sort it out. Couldn’t read it, didn’t know the language—what the hell—
“Tenente?”
The sergeant was framed by an archway, dark wood with things like spools sticking down all the way around. He had a civilian, hands held behind (plastic cuffs; they’d begged them from the MPs). The man was in pajamas, barefoot. Alan made a savage gesture. “Take him!”
“All of them?”
“How many?”
“Three. Sleeping upstairs. One is—” He made a gesture.
“Take them, take them—they can help carry this shit. What’s upstairs?”
“Bedrooms. Nothing.”
Alan grabbed a flashlight and sprinted up. The stairs went like a square corkscrew, up-turn, up-turn, up-turn. There were heavy doors everywhere, all open. The grenade had left burn marks and the place stank, and smoke drifted in the flashlight beam with dust. He went along, shining the light into each room, the Beretta ready but feeling awkward and too big, sliding the light around the door and then looking. The sergeant had been right; there seemed to be nothing. Graffiti, old magazines, a girl’s photo, clothes. Not military, these people. He had done five of the rooms when he flashed the light in one and something pinged and he swept the light back, not knowing what it had been, a shape or a sign, what? And the light showed another anonymous room, this one seeming unused, even austere. But something—
An ashtray. He went in and shone the light down into it. Big, plastic, empty. Wiped clean. Around the edge, “Chicago Bears Football.”
Small world. That’s what had caught him, something out of place that had put little hooks into his consciousness, like burrs catching a sweater. Chicago Bears Football. Here?
He picked it up with the hand that held the Beretta and with the other swept the light over the walls. Nothing. Yes, something. A color photograph, held to the old wallpaper with transparent tape. He went close and looked at it. Was it anything? A man in camos with an assault rifle raised above his head, standing over what Alan was pretty sure was a corpse. Something written on the too-blue sky with a felt pen, Cyrillic and unreadable. Alan peeled it from the wall and started to stuff it into his jacket, and he saw color on the back as well, another photo, female and nude and—
He saw the movement before he heard the man, and he ducked and swung the light and glimpsed a broad, dark face, contorted by the flinch that meant he was in the act of firing. Alan had time to think that the man was half-dressed and therefore cold, somebody who had been in the house and had managed to hide, and he kept the light moving, meaning to blind the man but in fact giving him something to shoot at. Better for the man if he had been an inexperienced shooter, but he wasn’t; he knew enough to aim, and habit makes you aim at what you can see. He had a nine-millimeter CZ that sounded louder than the grenade and made a flash that blinded them both. Alan shot on instinct, on terror, not sure he hadn’t yelped. He was slow because of the strange pistol, wrong size, too heavy goddamit take forever to point! But the man was only five feet away. Tap-tap, tap-tap. Four sounds running into two like more grenades, flashes of fire, blood and bone on the wall, the smell of copper and gunfire. Alan reacted away, stepping to the side, moving the light away so he wouldn’t be a target; he knew the other man was down, and his ears were dead to sound from the shots, his eyes dazzled, but he knew he had heard something, seen something else out there—a second man?
His heart was thudding. He raised the Beretta again, and suddenly the corridor was bathed in light, astonishingly bright and white to his dark-accustomed eyes. One of the helos had put on its searchlight. Why now? he had time to think, realizing that the light must be moving over the house but registering at the same time a shadow on the corridor wall, then knowing that the light was coming through a window of the room beyond and catching another figure, because what Alan saw was like a hand clutching at the back of his neck. The shadow not human, distorted by the angle, but there was something wrong with it, anyway; impressions cascaded down his consciousness: kid’s game, the shadows you make with your fingers on the wall, a rabbit, an owl, but this one something bad; then witch, Halloween mask and he couldn’t figure it out, something primitive whispered evil and then the shadow was moving and the light was swinging away, getting watery and fading, and Alan moved to reach the doorway at the