Page 116 of The Watchmaker's Hand

Team Two, led by Sharonne Brown, a woman she had workedwith for years. The ESU officer was built like Sachs, slim and tall, one difference being that Brown was in the gym at least an hour a day and could bench-press two hundred pounds without shedding a drop of sweat.

Sachs nodded and Brown’s team fell in behind hers, staggered, for better firing coverage—and to minimize cluster damage from a shooter inside.

Ten feet away.

“Three, we’re here. Signature?”

“He’s moved a few feet again, but still not near any windows.”

She had a passing thought: Gilligan had stolen and delivered to the Watchmaker the DSE documents, some of them maps of underground passages, of which most in the city were here and farther south. Did he possibly have an escape route planned through a tunnel?

Maybe, but they had the element of surprise.

Anyway, there were no tactical variations possible, given the layout and the urgency.

Sachs pointed to the windows, and Brown directed two of her officers to cover them. Hale wouldn’t try to escape that way, but they were perfect firing stations. He might even have mounted steel plates behind the blinds and would fire from a small porthole.

Three reported, “Moved a few inches, but not toward the windows. He doesn’t know you’re there.”

Or he’s holding a submachine gun pointed at the door, waiting for the first person in.

Then they were at the trailer.

This was no-knock. The breaching officer moved up fast and quickly mounted a C4 charge on the lock plate. Double wad.

They each carried gas masks and neoprene smocks, to protect against HF acid and gas. But she had decided they shouldn’t wear the gear during the assault. That would be dangerous, limitingfield of sight and movement of weapons. If he was inside, there wasn’t much risk of exposure to the stuff.

Even as she thought this, though, she pictured the construction worker lying in the tunnel at the first scene, his skin dissolving, blood bubbling. This image had replaced that of the gory rebar rods.

She scanned the team. They nodded. The breaching officer lifted the detonator pad, but refrained from a “Fire in the hole!” They didn’t want to give the Watchmaker the slightest indication of their presence.

Sachs nodded.

The packet exploded with a sharp crack, and she started forward.

53.

RON PULASKI UNFOLDEDthe document Lyle Spencer had produced.

Spencer said, “I called in a marker, and got that. It’s a draft. They’re still working on it.”

Ron looked down at the sheet in his hand.

Throughout the interview, it appeared that Subject Pulaski—

“Subject?” he whispered. “That’swhat they’re calling me?”

—had only a vague recollection of the accident, even though it just happened, and he admitted he’d been only lightly injured. He used the phrases “I don’t know” and “I don’t remember” frequently. He admitted he was not concentrating at the time of the collision …

On the goddamn phone call.That’swhat I wasn’t concentrating on.

At one point in the interview he was staring into space and did not even hear the interviewer’s question.

Because I was looking at the picture of Garner’s family and thinking about my dead daughter …

He admitted to using drugs and admitted that they made him sleepy.

What the hell? Half a joint twenty years ago?

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