The group from the hotel moved straight toward the Lion 1. One of the uniforms standing beside it opened the rear door, and the Wildcat climbed in back between the original pair of bodyguards to have left the hotel. The second two hovered beside the vehicle until his door
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shut and then went to the lead police car and got into it.
: Behind drawn shades in the office across the street, Ricci and his techs watched on an LCD panel as the motorcade pulled into the two-way avenue bisecting the downtown area and then rolled eastward, the pictures feeding from 180-degree trackable spy eyes suctioned to õ{; the windowpane.
Ricci glanced at the city map on the wall above the |# monitoring station. East was toward police headquarters, I’Obeng’s official seat of corruption, its location circled on the map with a red highlighter. His unofficial cradle f lay west of the downtown area. Ricci had penned the words “Gang Central Station” above the blue circle that I- marked its coordinates.
A vertical crease etched itself in the middle of his forehead. Something wasn’t kosher about what he’d just observed. A few somethings. If the Wildcat believed he If might be under surveillance, why stroll out the front of |ihe hotel, head so openly to the cop station, make the “trip there surrounded by a goddamned cortege? the super-eight movie cameras he remembered from distant childhood, and was presently scanning for environmental hazards that ranged from the toxic methane,
initrogen, and sulfurous gases of decaying sewage to
^chemical and biological weapons agents to the minutest
airborne traces of the explosive ingredients of booby |?lraps. In the event its beeper alarm sounded, a backlit I LCD readout would specifically identify the threat, with
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the beep tones increasing in rapidity as the instrument was brought closer to it. Should that threat prove to be chem/bio or the products of organic decomposition, each member of the strike team was ready to convert the carry bag strapped over his shoulder into an air-powered, filtered-breathing system at the pull of a zipper, worn as if it were a masked and hooded vest. Should a bomb be detected, they would hopefully steer clear of its triggering mechanism.