Brothers In Arms (2 page)

Small groups of onlookers had formed across the street as well. One of them was a tall blond man with a heavily lined face, dressed casually in a denim work shirt with the tails out over faded Levis. He stood with a coffee cup in his hand and watched the crowd grow around the art store. Something about him drew Dale’s eye. Maybe it was how the man had positioned himself to see the bodyguards; he watched them the way a coach might watch his players. Dale’s vigilance was rewarded a moment later, when the man shifted his stance and the material of his shirt bunched unnaturally a few inches behind his hip.

The man was armed with a pistol concealed beneath his shirt—just as Dale was.

Dale set his coffee cup down, pushed it to the center of the table, then eased his chair back a few inches. His view of the man across the street was obscured momentarily by passersby, then he saw him again. There was tension about the man, but it seemed more like close attention to the events unfolding in front of the art store than a preparation for violence. Dale had long experience in looking for those cues. This man didn’t look like an off-duty cop, either.

So who was he and what was he doing here?

There was a Unitarian church just up the block from the art store, at the top of the hill where Forty-fourth Street and Upton Avenue
intersected. A van with the logo of
AAA PLUMBING SERVICE
on its side, eased slowly into a short-term parking space in front of the church. From that position one could easily see all the activity in front of the art store, as well as down the length of the block. That was why the driver had waited till the spot was free. In the back of the van, sophisticated electronic surveillance equipment crammed the tight quarters, forcing the two men there to sit thigh to thigh beside each other. They faced a small bank of video screens ringing one larger one where the circus in front of the art store played out.

“This is a mess,” the first man said. He was in his early thirties, heavily muscled beneath the coveralls with the logo of
AAA PLUMBING
on the back.

The other man was older, with short cropped gray hair and the lean build of a distance runner. “Good lesson here. These guys should have deployed low profile . . . look at the commotion they’ve caused.”

“Truth,” said the first man. His name was Robert Sanders, and he and his partner Marcus Williams were surveillance specialists for a clandestine government operation called
DOMINANCE RAIN
. “They’d have been better off in one car.”

“Heavy threat, though,” Williams said.

“Harder to spot and follow.”

“There’s that,” Williams conceded. “These guys aren’t bad at working the man. They’ve got good moves.”

“Good moves don’t count if you create a circus everywhere you go.”

Williams shrugged his thin shoulders. “Maybe they didn’t have a choice. The man likes having all his bully boys around.”

“You see the legs on the moped beauties?”

The older man grinned slyly. “I don’t pay attention to things like that when I’m working. What girls on a moped are you referring to?”

“Like you’d miss that,” Sanders said. “Let me refresh your ancient brain.”

Sanders turned a control knob while working a toggle stick with
the other hand and zoomed the telescopic lens hidden in the ventilator hood onto the two girls. They were still perched on their moped, watching the door of the art store with the rest of the curious.

“Some lookers, huh?” Sanders said.

“Not bad. Probably kill a young guy like you, though. They need the proven stamina of an older man.”

Sanders snorted and wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand. He pulled the focus back to expand the point of view to include the whole crowd again.

“People will be talking about this for a week,” he said.

Williams nodded. “You got any possibles in the crowd?”

“No . . . you?”

“That one guy, with the work shirt untucked? Over there, same side of the street as the little blondies.”

“I make him. What about him?”

“Everybody else is either coming forward or staying where they started . . . he came just far enough to get a good look.”

“You make him for a shooter?”

“Zoom his face, we’ll run him through the database. Just to be sure. He’s got the look.”

“Roger that.” The younger man zoomed in on the lined face of the man in the work shirt and touched a button. The picture froze for a moment, then continued with the live feed. “Want me to run it now?”

“No, stay on the crowd. Put the image over on my screen, I’ll run it myself.”

Sanders pushed buttons and the face of the man appeared on a small screen directly in front of Williams. Williams used a touch pad to move the cursor to a pull-down menu on the screen, then watched a progress bar beneath the man’s picture tick off percentages. The computer program he ran matched the face of anyone they imaged against a huge database of known terrorists, criminals, and other people of interest to the US intelligence community. If they were in the database, the program would match the face to a file and bring up the pertinent data. After a few seconds, the percentage bar disappeared and a message box saying
POSSIBLE MATCH
came up.

“Well, well, what do we have here?” Williams said. He clicked on his touch pad and a small window opened beneath the man’s picture, with another full-face photo, an official-looking one, and a text file that he began to scroll through.

“We’ve got one Charles Payne, former staffer in CIA’s Special Operations Division, operator with the Special Activities Staff . . . a shooter. It’s a small world. What the hell is he doing here?”

“Is he operational?” Sanders said.

“Nope,” Williams said. “Says here he resigned, no contact with the outfit since then. Working as a contract photographer for the local PD.”

“Think he’s packing?”

“Doubt it. Why would a contract photographer be carrying a gun?”

“Guy with history with SAS, why wouldn’t he be packing a gun?”

“Hmm,” Williams said. “Only if he had need, and he doesn’t have any need.”

“I’ll keep an eye on him.”

“That would be a good idea,” Williams said. “Let’s do just that.”

Charley Payne felt conspicuous. He reminded himself that he was just an onlooker like the rest. His professional curiosity had gotten the better of him when he saw the protection detail pull up, and he’d moved with the certainty of long experience to the best vantage spot to watch them. While he’d been through the Secret Service protection course and the CIA’s own intensive training course, close protection was one special operation he had limited experience in. It was interesting to watch how this team was working. They were certainly attracting a lot of attention.

As he was.

He saw the athletic man with big sunglasses hiding half his face in the shaded courtyard of the Sebastian Joe’s coffee shop across the street. That guy was tuned in to everything going on around him,
and while everyone else was watching the bodyguards, that guy was watching Charley. Another operator for the team? Planting a few plainclothes people in the crowd to monitor things would be one way of ensuring additional security. That didn’t seem likely, though. If they were going to do that, they could have run the whole operation in a more low-key fashion.

Charley smiled at how his imagination got away with him. The man across the street had the look, but he was probably an off-duty cop or some other kind of security professional. He felt as though he had to second-guess himself these days; his operational days were behind him. The only reason he maintained a civilian concealed carry permit was, well, he didn’t really know why except that he’d carried a gun for a living for most of his adult life and it just seemed natural to be armed. He touched his elbow to the butt of the pistol concealed beneath his baggy work shirt.

He admired the two leggy blondes on the moped. They were laughing and having a good time, urging on the curious gawkers, beeping the moped horn and trying to talk to the two bodyguards outside the art store.

“Who is in the store?” the one with the short hair said. “C’mon, give us a clue!”

“Hey handsome,” the ponytailed blonde said. “I’ll show you something pretty if you tell us.”

Grins flickered across the faces of the two men.

“Ooooh, he wants us to show him something pretty,” the shorthaired one said. “Hey, here they come now!”

The two outside guards straightened up as the door opened and a bodyguard came out, holding a framed and wrapped painting in both hands. He was followed closely by the pudgy principal and the other bodyguards, who attempted to herd the principal quickly across the sidewalk. The pudgy man hesitated, one hand to his wrinkled lapel, and looked at the people gathered to watch him.

“Who is that?” someone called out.

Charley watched as though in slow motion as the two blond women, their legs holding the moped firmly in place, dipped into
their matching courier bags and came up holding machine pistols. He recognized them as Czech Skorpions, with the suppressor attachment and the wire stock unfolded. The twin blondes tucked the thin stocks into their shoulders with the familiarity that only long practice can achieve and they rolled the triggers expertly, putting a short burst each into the two outside guards, tracing a three-round burst across the bridge of their target’s nose and directly into the brain, dropping the men cross-legged where they stood.

Then they smoothly tracked onto their next target, each woman taking her time and full advantage of the sudden shock that stopped everyone, even the bodyguards, for the brief seconds necessary for them to put the next two bodyguards down with neat bursts to the head, avoiding the body armor that bulked them up beneath their business suits.

Four down, two to go and then the drivers, who couldn’t hear any gunshots and had their view of the scenario blocked by the crowd, got out of the cars, aware only that something was going horribly wrong. The team leader was the toughest of all. He sprang and grabbed the principal while pulling out his own pistol and actually got off shots as the point man dropped the painting and went for his gun and died with a diagonal burst across his face at nearly point-blank range from the pixie-cut blonde, who blinked as blood splashed across her face. Her ponytailed partner didn’t flinch as bullets from the team leader’s High Power whipped by her face. She kept tracking and worked a burst first into the team leader’s pelvis, below his vest, dropping him down to be finally anchored with a burst to the head.

Then it was time for the drivers, who waved their pistols ineffectually, trying to aim through the panicked crowd, their leader’s gunshots a signal that all had gone wrong, and the two women had no compunction about shooting into the crowd, dropping a young woman in a Spandex top and shorts, suddenly bloody, and the two drivers were down. The pudgy man stood amid the bodies of his protectors, naked and alone and sadly resigned as he sought out the eyes of the two assassins.

One of them fired to his head, the other to his pelvis, and he dropped to the ground. They speed-loaded their machine pistols with fresh magazines and fired short bursts into his head until his brains and his teeth scattered across the sidewalk.

Then there was a sudden stillness, one of the lulls that come in combat, when the guns fall silent and everyone involved takes in how the picture has suddenly changed.

Charley dropped his cup of coffee, shattering the porcelain mug on the sidewalk, and drew his Glock .45 from beneath his shirt.