“Yeah.” The FBI agent nodded resignedly. “I have to figure a way to spike it, then.” Just then the phone rang.
“Yes, this is Paul,” Bellow said instantly.
“Hello, Paul, this is One. The lights remain out. I told you to restore power. It has not been done. I tell you again, do it immediately.”
“Working on that, but the police here are fumbling around some.”
“And there is no one from the park there to assist you? I am not a fool, Paul. I say it one last time, turn the electricity back on immediately.”
“Mr. One, we’re working on it. Please be a little patient with us, okay?” Bellow’s face was sweating now. It started quite suddenly, and though he knew why, he hoped that he was wrong.
“Andre,” René said, doing so mistakenly before he killed the phone line.
The former park security guard walked over to the corner. “Hello, Anna. I think it is time for you to go back to your mother.”
“Oh?” the child asked. She had china-blue eyes and light brown hair, nearly blond in fact, though her skin had the pale, delicate look of parchment. It was very sad. Andre walked behind the chair, taking the handles in his hands and wheeling her to the door. “Let’s go outside, mon petit chou,” he said as they went through the door.
The elevator outside had a default setting. Even without electricity it could go down on battery power. Andre pushed the chair inside, flipped off the red emergency-stop switch, and pressed the 1 button. The doors closed slowly, and the elevator went down. A minute later, the doors opened again. The castle had a wide walk-through corridor that allowed people to transit from one part of Worldpark to another, and a mosaic that covered the arching walls. There was also a pleasant westerly breeze, and the Frenchman wheeled Anna right into it.
“What’s this?” Noonan asked, looking at one of the video monitors. “John, we got somebody coming out.”
“Command, this is Rifle Two-One, I see a guy pushing a wheelchair with a kid in it, coming out the west side of the castle.” Johnston set his binoculars down and got on his rifle, centering the crosshairs on the man’s temple, his finger lightly trouching the set-trigger. “Rifle Two-One is on target, on the guy, on target now.”
“Weapons tight” was the reply from Clark. “I repeat, weapons are tight. Acknowledge.”
“Roger, Six, weapons tight.” Sergeant Johnston took his finger out of the trigger guard. What was happening here?
“Bugger,” Covington said. They were only forty meters away. He and Chavez had an easy direct line of sight. The little girl looked ill in addition to being scared; she was slumped to her left in the chair, trying to look up and back at the man pushing her. He was about forty, they both thought, a mustache but no beard, average-normal in height, weight, and build, with dark eyes that displayed nothing. The park was so quiet now, so empty of people, that they could hear the scrape of the rubber tires on the stone courtyard.
“Where is Momma?” Anna asked in English she’d learned in school.
“You will see her in a moment,” Nine promised. He wheeled her around the curving entrance to the castle. It circled around a statue, took a gentle upward and clockwise turn, then led down to the courtyard. He stopped the chair in the middle of the path. It was about five meters wide, and evenly paved.
Andre looked around. There had to be policemen out here, but he saw nothing moving at all, except for the cars on the Dive Bomber, which he didn’t have to look at to see. The familiar noise was enough. It really was too bad. Nine reached into his belt, took out his pistol, and—
“—Gun, he’s got a pistol out!” Homer Johnston reported urgently. “Oh, fuck, he’s gonna—”
—The gun fired into Anna’s back, driving straight through her heart. A gout of blood appeared on the flat child chest, and her head dropped forward. The man pushed the wheelchair just then, and it rolled down the curving path, caroming off the stone wall and making it all the way into the flat courtyard, where it finally stopped.
Covington drew his Beretta and started to bring it up. It would not have been an easy shot, but he had nine rounds in his pistol, and that was enough, but—
“Weapons tight!” the radio earpiece thundered. “Weapons tight! Do not fire,” Clark ordered them.
“Fuck!” Chavez rasped next to Peter Covington.
“Yes,” the Englishman agreed. “Quite.” He holstered his pistol, watching the man turn and walk back into the shelter of the stone castle.
“I’m on target, Rifle Two-One is on target!” Johnston’s voice told them all.
“Do not fire. This is Six, weapons are tight, goddamnit!”
“Fuck!” Clark snarled in the command center. He slammed his fist on the table. “Fuck!” Then the phone rang.
“Yes?” Bellow said, sitting next to the Rainbow commander.
“You had your warning. Turn the electricity back on, or we will kill another,” One said.
CHAPTER 15
WHITE HATS
“There was nothing we could have done, John. Not a thing,” Bellow said, giving voice to words that the others didn’t have the courage to say.
“Now what?” Clark asked.
“Now I guess we turn the electricity back on.”
As they watched the TV monitors, three men raced to the child. Two wore the tricornio of the Guardia Civil. The third was Dr. Hector Weiler.
Chavez and Covington watched the same thing from a closer perspective. Weiler wore a white lab coat, the global uniform for physicians, and his race to reach the child ended abruptly as he touched the warm but still body. The slump of his shoulders told the tale, even from fifty meters away. The bullet had gone straight through her heart. The doctor said something to the cops, and one of them wheeled the chair down and out of the courtyard, turning to go past the two Rainbow members.
“Hold it, doc,” Chavez called, walking over to look. In this moment Ding remembered that his own wife held a new life in her belly, even now probably moving and kicking while Patsy was sitting in their living room, watching TV or reading a book. The little girl’s face was at peace now, as though asleep, and he could not hold his hand back from touching her soft hair. “What’s the story, doc?”
“She was quite ill, probably terminal. I will have a file on her back at my office. When these children come here, I get a summary of their condition should an emergency arise.” The physician bit his lip and looked up. “She was probably dying, but not yet dead, not yet completely without hope.” Weiler was the son of a Spanish mother and a German father who’d emigrated to Spain after the Second World War. He’d studied hard to become a physician and surgeon, and this act, this murder of a child, was the negation of all that. Someone had decided to make all his training and study worthless. He’d never known rage, quiet and sad though it was, but now he did. “Will you kill them?”
Chavez looked up. There were no tears in his eyes. Perhaps they’d come later, Domingo Chavez thought, his hand still on the child’s head. Her hair wasn’t very long, and he didn’t know that it had grown back after her last chemotherapy protocol. He did know that she was supposed to be alive, and that in watching her death, he had failed to do that which he’d dedicated his life to doing. “Sí,” he told the doctor. “We will kill them. Peter?” He waved at his colleague, and together they accompanied the others to the doctor’s office. They walked over slowly. There was no reason to go fast now.
“That’ll do,” Malloy thought, surveying the still-wet paint on the side of the Night Hawk. POLICIA, the lettering said. “Ready, Harrison?”
“Yes, sir. Sergeant Nance, time to move.”
“Yessir.” The crew chief hopped in, buckled his safety belt, and watched the pilot go through the startup sequence. “All clear aft,” he said over the intercom, after leaning out to check. “Tail rotor is clear, Colonel.”
“Then I guess it’s time to fly.” Malloy applied power and lifted the Night Hawk into the sky. Then he keyed his tactical radio. “Rainbow, this
is the Bear, over.”
“Bear, this is Rainbow Six, reading you five by five, over.”
“Bear’s in the air, sir, be there in seven minutes.”
“Roger, please orbit the area until we tell you otherwise.”
“Roger that, sir. I’ll notify when we commence the orbit. Out.” There was no particular hurry. Malloy dipped the nose and headed into the gathering darkness. The sun was almost down now, and the park lights in the distance were all coming on.
“Who is this?” Chavez asked.
“Francisco de la Cruz,” the man replied. His leg was bandaged, and he looked to be in pain.
“Ah, yes, we saw you on the videotape,” Covington said. He saw the sword and shield in the corner and turned to nod his respect at the seated man. Peter lifted the spatha and hefted it briefly. At close range it would be formidable as hell, not the equal of his MP-10, but probably a very satisfying weapon for all that.
“A child? They kill a child?” de la Cruz asked.
Dr. Weiler was at his file cabinet. “Anna Groot, age ten and a half,” he said, reading over the documents that had preceded the little one. “Metastatic osteosarcoma, terminally ill. . . . Six weeks left, her doctor says here. Osteo, that is a bad one.” Against the wall, the two Spanish cops lifted the body from the chair and laid it tenderly on the examining table, then covered it with a sheet. One looked close to tears, blocked only by the cold rage that made his hands tremble.
“John must feel pretty shitty about now,” Chavez said.
“He had to do it, Ding. It wasn’t the right time to take action—”
“I know that, Peter! But how the fuck do we tell her that?” A pause. “Doc, you have any coffee around here?”
“There.” Weiler pointed.
Chavez walked to the urn and poured some into a foam cup. “Up and down, sandwich ’em?”
Covington nodded. “Yes, I think so.”
Chavez emptied the cup and tossed it into a waste-basket. “Okay, let’s get set up.” They left the office without another word and made their way in the shadows back to the underground, thence to the alternate command center.
“Rifle Two-One, anything happening?” Clark was asking when they walked in.
“Negative, Six, nothing except shadows on the windows. They haven’t put a guy on the roof yet. That’s a little strange.”
“They’re pretty confident in their TV coverage,” Noonan thought. He had the blueprints of the castle in front of him. “Okay, we are assuming that our friends are all in here . . . but there’s a dozen other rooms on three levels.”
“This is Bear,” a voice said over the speaker Noonan had set up. “I am orbiting now. What do I need to know, over?”
“Bear, this is Six,” Clark replied. “The subjects are all in the castle. There’s a command-and-control center on the second floor. Best guess, everybody’s there right now. Also, be advised the subjects have killed a hostage—a little girl,” John added.
In the helicopter, Malloy’s head didn’t move at the news. “Roger, okay, Six, we will orbit and observe. Be advised we have all our deployment gear aboard, over.”
“Roger that. Out.” Clark took his hand off the transmit button.
The men were quiet, but their looks were intense, Chavez saw. Too professional for an overt display—nobody was playing with a personal weapon, or anything as Hollywood as that—yet their faces were like stone, only their eyes moving back and forth over the diagrams or flickering back and forth to the TV monitors. It must have been very hard on Homer Johnston, Ding thought. He’d been on the fucker when he shot the kid. Homer had kids, and he could have transported the subject into the next dimension as easily as blinking his eyes. . . . But no, that would not have been smart, and they were paid to be smart. The men hadn’t been ready for even an improvised assault, and anything that smacked of improvisation would only get more children killed. And that wasn’t the mission, either. Then a phone rang. Bellow got it, hitting the speaker button.
“Yes?” the doctor said.
“We regret the incident with the child, but she was soon to die anyway. Now, when will our friends be released?”
“Paris hasn’t gotten back to us yet,” Bellow replied.
“Then, I regret to say, there will be another incident shortly.”
“Look, Mr. One, I cannot force Paris to do anything. We are talking, negotiating with government officials, and they take time to reach decisions. Governments never move fast, do they?”
“Then I will help them. Tell Paris that unless the aircraft bringing our friends is ready for us to board it in one hour, we will kill a hostage, and then another every hour until our demands are met,” the voice said, entirely without emotional emphasis.
“That is unreasonable. Listen to me: even if they brought all of them out of their prisons now, it would take at least two hours to get them here. Your wishes cannot make an airplane fly faster, can they?”
That generated a thoughtful pause. “Yes, that is true. Very well, we will commence the shooting of hostages in three hours from now . . . no, I will start the countdown on the hour. That gives you an additional twelve minutes. I will be generous. Do you understand?”
“Yes, you say that you will kill another child at twenty-two hundred hours, and another one every hour after that.”
“Correct. Make sure that Paris understands.” And the line went dead.
“Well?” Clark asked.
“John, you don’t need me here for this. It’s pretty damned clear that they’ll do it. They killed the first one to show us who’s the boss. They plan to succeed, and they don’t care what it takes for them to do so. The concession he just made may be the last one we’re going to get.”
“What is that?” Esteban asked. He walked to the window to see. “Helicopter!”
“Oh?” René went there also. The windows were so small that he had to move the Basque aside. “Yes, I see the police have them. Large one,” he added with a shrug. “This is not a surprise.” But—“José, get up to the roof with a radio, and keep us informed.”
One of the other Basques nodded and headed for the fire stairwell. The elevator would have worked fine, but he didn’t want to be inconvenienced by another power shutoff.
“Command, Rifle Two-One,” Johnston called a minute later.
“Rifle Two-One, this is Six.”
“I got a guy on the castle roof, one man, armed with what looks like a Uzi, and he’s got a brick, too. Just one, nobody else is joining up at this time.”
“Roger that, Rifle Two-One.”
“This isn’t the guy who whacked the kid,” the sergeant added.
“Okay, good, thank you.”
“Rifle Three has him, too . . . just walked over to my side. He’s circulating around . . . yeah, looking over the edge, looking down.”
“John?” It was Major Covington.
“Yes, Peter?”
“We’re not showing them enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Give them something to look at. Policemen, an inner perimeter. If they don’t see something, they’re going to wonder what’s going on that they cannot see.”
“Good idea,” Noonan said.
Clark liked it. “Colonel?”
“Yes,” Nuncio replied. He leaned over the table. “I propose two men, here, two more here . . . here . . . here.”
“Yes, sir, please make that happen right away.”
“René,” Andre called from in front of a TV screen. He pointed. “Look.”
There were two Guardia cops moving slowly and trying to be covert as they approached up Strada España to a place fifty meters from the castle. René nodded and picked up his radio. “Three!”
“Yes, One.”
“Police approaching the castle. Keep an eye on them.”
“I will do that, One,” Esteban promised.
“Okay, they’re using radios,” Noonan said, checking his scanner. “Citizen-band walkie-talkies, regular co
mmercial ones, set on channel sixteen. Pure vanilla.”
“No names, just numbers?” Chavez asked.
“So far. Our point of contact calls himself One, and this guy is Three. Okay, does that tell us anything?”
“Radio games,” Dr. Bellow said. “Right out of the playbook. They’re trying to keep their identities secret from us, but that’s also in the playbook.” The two photo-ID pictures had long since been sent to France for identification, but both the police and intelligence agencies had come up dry.
“Okay, will the French deal?”
A shake of the head. “I don’t think so. The Minister, when I told him about the Dutch girl, he just grunted and said Carlos stays in the jug no matter what—and he expects us to resolve the situation successfully, and if we can’t, his country has a team of his own to send down.”
“So, we’ve gotta have a plan in place and ready to go—by twenty-two hundred.”
“Unless you want to see them kill another hostage, yes,” Bellow said. “They’re denying me my ability to guide their behavior. They know how the game is played.”
“Professionals?”
Bellow shrugged. “Might as well be. They know what I’m going to try, and if they know it ahead of time, then they know how to maneuver clear.”
“No way to mitigate their behavior?” Clark asked, wanting it clear.
“I can try, but probably not. The ideological ones, the ones who have a clear idea of what they want—well, they’re hard to reason with. They have no ethical base to play with, no morality in the usual sense, nothing I can use against them. No conscience.”
“Yeah, we saw that, I guess. Okay.” John stood up straight and turned to look at his two team leaders. “You got two hours to plan it, and one more to set it up. We go at twenty-two hundred hours.”
“We need to know more about what’s happening inside,” Covington told Clark.