Page 56 of Play the Game

TJ crossed his arms over his chest. “We’re T minus two. The other tac and log crews are in place.” He was referring to the additional HEAT agents we’d borrowed for the night. “The entire three-block radius is sealed off.” He looked at Tam. “We can delay an hour and pull in another agent or two to learn the plans and breach the building with you.”

Tam shook her head. “I don’t want to be responsible for taking more agents into a potential shitshow.” She looked at Kessler and Li. “How about you?”

“I’m with Sparks,” Kessler said.

“Same,” Li added.

At least they were finally on the same page, which made us all feel the slightest bit better. I exchanged another glance with Tam, conveying all my feelings, everything I wasn’t allowed to say, into that look.

“Get your weapons,” TJ told them. “It’s go time.”

I climbed into the van so I wouldn’t have to watch her walk away. When I sat down beside Alder, she turned away from her screen and glared at me.

“What?”

“I know what you’re doing.”

My heart pounded against my ribcage. This was no time for her to read me the riot act for my relationship with Tam. “I’m not sure you do,” I said, hoping to deflect her.

“Stepping back on the mission, turning over lead responsibilities, deferring to me. You’re trying to move me into your job. I don’t want your fucking job, Jensen, so don’t even try it.”

When I didn’t answer her, she turned her attention back to her monitor. I sank deeper into my chair and watched my own screen, occasionally stealing sideways glances at her. She didn’t spare me a single look. I hated this. Alder and I almost never argued. This was another bad omen in a night full of them.

* * *

Tamela

The thingabout breaching a building quietly, with a small, lethal strike team, is you rarely do it through the front door. Thus, Kessler, Li, and I maneuvered through the sewer tunnels, relying on headlamps and my unfailing sense of direction, to spring a surprise attack on the Carbonados. At least I’d had city maps and had memorized every twist and turn and curve of these tunnels. Li, as our sharpshooter, led the way, but I guided her with quickly whispered instructions. We slowed down when we were directly under the building. I spotted the small vent we needed, and we scaled the wall. We climbed into a narrow, forgotten shaft.

This was where it would get dicey. While I’d mapped as much of the building as I could, using Alder’s tracking program to follow the cell phone signals as their owners moved about, large parts of it would still be blind spots for us. As we inched through the shaft, I tapped out codes for Hart and Penn to decipher, grateful for Jason’s and Alder’s diligence in making sure we had a clear signal to reach them from the depths of several dozen feet. My information would allow my team to build a 3-D map of this building, as we had the Ann Arbor warehouse. If anyone needed to come after us for an extraction, they would need the best picture we could draw for them.

We emerged into a dank, brick-walled space sooner than I’d thought we would have.

“Basement,” Kessler said.

“No,” I corrected. “It’s a sub-basement.” I walked the perimeter to get the dimensions. “Something isn’t right about this.” We had an operation plan, and we had to stick to it, for Pasco’s sake. Maybe after we’d swept the building, I could come back down here and figure out what was so wrong with these dimensions. “Moving on,” I said for the sake of the off-site team.

I noted the position of the metal-runged ladder attached to the wall for Hart and Penn. Li climbed up the ladder first and turned in a circle to make sure it was clear. I followed next and emerged in the basement proper. I solved the puzzle of the sub-basement immediately. This space was broken up into multiple rooms, all of which were empty, dusty, and damp. And up here, there was a 6-foot by 8-foot room in an area to the south, where no such space had existed in the sub-basement.

I noted the stairs were on the north wall, then crept up them carefully, with Li once again leading. We knew from our signal tracking that someone made regular sweeps of the ground-level floor, although the timing was haphazard. Alder would alert us if she saw any electronic activity on the floor, but there was always the possibility that someone would come down without their phone or that there were additional guards here that we weren’t expecting.

We entered the first floor without incident and breathed a sigh of relief that it was empty. We hadn’t walked into an ambush. Yet. I reminded myself to drop the negativity and focus. So far, we were on course and on schedule and hadn’t had to engage in a firefight. There were two stairways on this floor, one leading up from each side of the main room. I drew my gun and crept through the other two rooms, one on each side, which were also empty. It was important to add them to our map because they would make the perfect hiding place for snipers if our team needed to come through here to find us.

The three of us reconvened in the center of the main room and each pulled out miniature computers. The floor above was the one that had shown the most activity, and we needed every bit of help we could get to surprise the Carbonados, and not be surprised ourselves. I tapped my comms unit twice, the signal that we were ready for Alder to send us the real-time feed of the phone signals, which would give us the best idea of where Pasco’s guards were. At least three of the tracked people were in one room. Kessler used her hands to convey that we should expect to find Pasco there. The fourth tracked person was on the same floor but in a far corner. The rumble of old pipes followed by rushing water suggested that the person had been in the bathroom.

The signal didn’t join the others in the main room. Kessler pointed to the dot on the screen and indicated her tranq gun. That one would be her target. Li pointed to two dots in the main room. She was a fast and accurate enough shot to take out both of them. The final one would be mine. Kessler took the staircase to the left, while I followed Li up the one on the right. Somewhere above us, a door slammed. Our targets didn’t move. Or, at least, their phones didn’t. If they’d figured out we were tracking them that way, this could all be a setup.

But we had a mission to execute and a civilian to save. We stuck to the plan and emerged on the second floor. It might have been luck or even divine intervention, but the thugs were exactly where we’d expected them to be. Li and I took out our assigned targets in seconds, and the thud coming from another room was a good indicator that Kessler had taken down hers, as well. I rushed to the main room, where Pasco should be. That’s when we discovered there were, in fact, more thugs.

“Cover!” Kessler yelled.

I ducked behind an old brown sofa while Li and Kessler kept them at bay. One of them managed to avoid Li’s tranq dart, and she lunged for him. She executed a perfect series of jujitsu moves and laid him out on the floor.

“Clear on this floor,” Kessler called. “We’ll clear the rest of the building. Sparks, get Pasco.”

I ran past a space with a sink and a refrigerator. A small, makeshift kitchen. The fridge was plugged in, so hopefully they’d been feeding Pasco. I entered what appeared to be a dining room, where Pasco was gagged and bound to a chair. There was a computer on the table in front of him and an unconscious thug on the floor beside him. Judging from the position, it appeared the guy had been working on the computer when Kessler had taken him out.

“We’re here to rescue you,” I told Pasco as I untied his gag. One of his eyes was swollen and there was a cut on his mouth, so the hospitality hadn’t been great.

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