Page 59 of The Wolves Come at Night
The audacity of the dead, to make the living continue on.
The men let her go. They watched with dark eyes as she stumbled to her feet, wiped a hand under her nose, knuckled the tears from her cheeks. Watched her spine straighten. Watched the animal caught in the toothy, rusted trap gnaw off her own leg to escape.
And looked toward each other for comfort when she snarled, “It is time we had a conversation.”
Twenty-Nine
Chantilly, Virginia
There was a light on in the small office in the back of the warehouse, a golden shadow in the gloom. Angelie needed only to cross the space from door to office, the length and width of a football pitch. Easy, but for one small issue. Stationed every fifteen meters was a man with a gun. Six men. One Angelie. She didn’t love the odds, but they weren’t impossible.
There was no other way to reach Marcello Staley face to face. He lived in this warehouse, he worked from this warehouse, and he never, ever left. A hermit crab with a monstrous shell on his back. His server farm was always attended, the rows upon rows of cell phones in racks and the poor women he shipped in from Vietnam and Thailand practically strapped to their chairs click-click-clicking on the stalker programs went twenty-four seven. Running bots was a full-time gig; there were governments to topple and societies to ruin, after all.
Her finger tapped the scope of her rifle as she thought. The easiest thing to do was blast her way in, catch them by surprise, take out every guard, and put a knife to Marcello’s doughy throat to get what she needed. Maybe let the women go free. But that sort of attack would draw notice from people she’d prefer to keep ignorant of her presence in the country.
In another life, Angelie Delacroix would not be sitting on the side of a hill in the mud debating her best course of action. She would have already taken the warehouse and gotten the information she needed from Marcello. Subtlety wasn’t always necessary, and she’d never been concerned with it before. Once, the more people knew—and feared—her actions, the better. Now, she wanted to stay as far off the radar as possible. She was getting soft, worrying about the footprint she would leave behind.
There was another way in, and she was going to try it first. Since all of Marcello’s physical security was inside, he relied on cameras only for the exterior. She could drive up, walk up, or otherwise present herself on the main grounds, and no matter what angle, what path, she would be seen.
But the tunnel was another matter. She knew Marcello well enough to know that there was no way in hell he didn’t have a bolthole. And an underground egress was exactly the thing a snake like him would build.
If she could thread the needle between the cameras that were surely placed in a position to see the entrance, she could slip inside his lair.
She simply needed to find the entrance and disable the cameras. The map she brought had four possible places of ingress, unnatural mounds that stood out against the terrain on the detailed satellite views.
She packed up and started moving. The weather was about to turn, the air redolent of moss and ozone, and she didn’t feel like getting any muddier.
She traversed the perimeter carefully, stalking the entrance. The first anomaly was a large rock, and the second was also natural. But the third, approximately 800 meters from the warehouse, had loose stones and what looked to be fresh sod. She knew there must be cameras and searched the trees but found nothing.
Too easy. But she was out of time.
She pulled a jammer from her pocket, a small device that would create a thirty-second series of blips on the monitoring screen, enough time for her to break cover and open the door.
Which was easily found if you knew what you were looking for. She pressed the button on the jammer and yanked open the door, waiting a heartbeat for alarms and shouts. Nothing.
Marcello was either getting sloppy or was so confident no one would think to come in through his rabbit hole that he’d left it unguarded.
She slung her rifle across her back, palmed her pistol, and headed into the darkness.
It all went to smash.
Of course it did.
Her intel was bad. They were waiting for her. The guards had been trebled because clearly someone knew she was in town. Three were waiting deep in the tunnel, all of whom she dispatched with six cadenced shots from the suppressed pistol—head and heart, head and heart, head and heart—and the rest were crawling all over the interior of the warehouse, on alert.
She didn’t want to kill them all, but she had no choice. She did her job, and she did it well. Those who didn’t go down in the first barrage of bullets she got in the subsequent firefight, sniping individuals from the tops of the multitude of containers. The very few who evaded the secondary assault, she took on by hand. It was noisy, and it was carnage. Exactly what she wanted to avoid.
Thirty minutes later, bloodied to the elbows, everyone dead except for Marcello, who was on his way out with a stab wound to the kidney, she kneeled on his wet, meaty chest and snarled in his face, “Tell me, now. Where is Game?”
Marcello had the audacity to grin, his teeth rimmed in blood.
“Tell me,” she shouted, but he shook his head, blew out a frothy red breath, and died.
“Fuck!” She screamed the word in English, then French, then dismounted the fat man and went to his precious computer. It was in a state of alarm, files erasing—he’d hit a self-destruct when she’d started the firefight—but she took a steadying breath and sat down, typing as quickly as she could to stop the chaos and reset the machine.
She was no hacker, but she had a few tricks up her sleeve for just this situation.
Marcello Staley was an information broker. He was the one dirty people went to for information on their enemies. He could hold entire governments hostage should he choose, and this information—invaluable information, years of intel, some of it provided by Angelie herself—was quickly deleting itself. Surely he had some backups for leverage and protection, and maybe she’d find them, but she had more pressing matters at the moment.
