“Bear, this is Rainbow Six, reading you five by five, over.”
“Bear’s in the air, sir, be there in seven minutes.”
“Roger, please orbit the area until we tell you otherwise.”
“Roger that, sir. I’ll notify when we commence the orbit. Out.” There was no particular hurry. Malloy dipped the nose and headed into the gathering darkness. The sun was almost down now, and the park lights in the distance were all coming on.
“Who is this?” Chavez asked.
“Francisco de la Cruz,” the man replied. His leg was bandaged, and he looked to be in pain.
“Ah, yes, we saw you on the videotape,” Covington said. He saw the sword and shield in the corner and turned to nod his respect at the seated man. Peter lifted the spatha and hefted it briefly. At close range it would be formidable as hell, not the equal of his MP-10, but probably a very satisfying weapon for all that.
“A child? They kill a child?” de la Cruz asked.
Dr. Weiler was at his file cabinet. “Anna root, age ten and a half,” he said, reading over the documents that had preceded the little one. “Metastatic osteosarcoma, terminally ill …. Six weeks left, her doctor says here. Osteo, that is a bad one.” Against the wall, the two Spanish cops lifted the body from the chair and laid it tenderly on the examining table, then covered it with a sheet. One looked close to tears, blocked only by the cold rage that made his hands tremble.
“John must feel pretty shitty about now,” Chavez said.
“He had to do it, Ding. It wasn’t the right time to take action-”
“I know that, Peter! But how the fuck do we tell her that?” A pause. “Doc, you have any coffee around here?”
“There.” Weiler pointed.
Chavez walked to the urn and poured some into a foam cup. “Up and down, sandwich ’em?”
Covington nodded. “Yes, I think so.”
Chavez emptied the cup and tossed it into a wastebasket. “Okay, let’s get set up.” They left the office without another word and made their way in the shadows back to the underground, thence to the alternate command center.
“Rifle Two-One, anything happening?” Clark was asking when they walked in.
“Negative, Six, nothing except shadows on the windows. They haven’t put a guy on the roof yet. That’s a little strange.”
“They’re pretty confident in their TV coverage,” Noonan thought. He had the blueprints of the castle in front of him. “Okay, we are assuming that our friends are all in here . . . but there’s a dozen other rooms on three levels.”
“This is Bear,” a voice said over the speaker Noonan had set up. “I am orbiting now. What do I need to know. over?
“Bear, this is Six,” Clark replied. “The subjects are all in the castle. There’s a command-and-control center on the second floor. Best guess, everybody’s there right now. Also, be advised the subjects have killed a hostage – a little girl,” John added.
In the helicopter, Malloy’s head didn’t move at the news. “Roger, okay, Six, we will orbit and observe. Be advised we have all our deployment gear aboard, over.”
“Roger that. Out.” Clark took his hand off the transmit button.
The men were quiet, but their looks were intense. Chavez saw. Too professional for an avert display-nobody was playing with a personal weapon, or anything as Hollywood as that-yet their faces were like stone, only their eyes moving back and forth over the diagrams or dickering back and forth to the TV monitors. It must have been very hard on Homer Johnston, Ding thought. He’d been on the fucker when he shot the kid. Homer had kids. and he could have transported the subject into the next dimension as easily as blinking his eyes …. But no, that would not have been smart, and they were paid to be smart. The men hadn’t been ready for even an improvised assault, and anything that smacked of improvisation would only get more children killed. And that wasn’t the mission, either. Then a phone rang. Bellow got it, hitting the speaker button.
“Yes?” the doctor said.
“We regret the incident with the child, but she was soon to die anyway. Now, when will our friends be released?”
“Paris hasn’t gotten back to us yet,” Bellow replied.
“Then, I regret to say, there will be another incident shortly.”
“Look, Mr. One, I cannot force Paris to do anything. We are talking, negotiating with government officials, and they take time to reach decisions. Governments never move fast, do they?”
“Then I will help them. Tell Paris that unless the aircraft bringing our friends is ready for us to board it in one hour, we will kill a hostage, and then another every hour until our demands are met,” the voice said, entirely without emotional emphasis.
“That is unreasonable. Listen to me: even if they brought all of them out of their prisons now, it would take at least two hours to get them here. Your wishes cannot make an airplane fly faster, can they?”
That generated a thoughtful pause. “Yes, that is true. Very well, we will commence the shooting of hostages in three hours from now . . . no, I will start the countdown on the hour. That gives you an additional twelve minutes. I will be generous. Do you understand?”
“Yes, you say that you will kill another child at twenty-two hundred hours, and another one every hour after that.”
“Correct. Make sure that Paris understands.” And the line went dead.
“Well?” Clark asked.
“John, you don’t need me here for this. It’s pretty damned clear that they’ll do it. They killed the first one to show us who’s the boss. They plan to succeed, and they don’t care what it takes for them to do so. The concession he just made may be the last one we’re going to get.”
“What is that?” Esteban asked. He walked to the window to see. “Helicopter!”
“Oh?” Rene went there also. The windows were so small that he had to move the Basque aside. “Yes, I see the police have them. Large one,” he added with a shrug. “This is not a surprise.” But “Jose, get up to the roof with a radio, and keep us informed.”
One of the other Basques nodded and headed for the fire stairwell. The elevator would have worked fine, but he didn’t want to be inconvenienced by another power shutoff.
“Command, Rifle Two-One,” Johnston called a minute later.
“Rifle Two-One, this is Six.”
“I got a guy on the castle roof, one man, armed with what looks like a Uzi, and he’s got a brick, too. Just one, nobody else is joining up at this time.”
“Roger that, Rifle Two-One.”
“This isn’t the guy who whacked the kid,” the sergeant added.
“Okay, good, thank you.”
“Rifle Three has him, too . . . just walked aver to my side. He’s circulating around . . . yeah, looking over the edge, looking down.”
“John?” It was Major Covington.
“Yes, Peter?”
“We’re not showing them enough.”
“What do you mean?”
“Give them something to look at. Policemen, an inner perimeter. If they don’t see something, they’re going to wonder what’s going on that they cannot see.”
“Good idea,” Noonan said.
Clark liked it. “Colonel?”
“Yes,” Nuncio replied. He leaned over the table. “I propose two men, here, two more here . . . here . . . here.”
“Yes, sir, please make that happen right away.”
“Rene,” Andre called from in front of a TV screen. He pointed. “Look.”
There were two Guardia cops moving slowly and trying to be covert as they approached up Strada Espana to a place fifty meters from the castle. Rene nodded and picked up his radio. “Three!”
“Yes, One.”
“Police approaching the castle. Keep an eye on them.”
“I will do that, One,” Esteban promised.
“Okay, they’re using radios,” Noonan said, checking his scanner. “Citizen-band walkie-talkies, regular commercial ones, set on channel sixteen. Pure vanilla.”
“No names, just numbers?” Chavez asked.
“So far. Our point of contact calls himself One, and this guy is Three. Okay, does that tell us anything?”
“Radio games,” Dr. Bellow said. “Right out of the playbook. They’re trying to keep their identities secret from us, but that’s also in the playbook.” The two photo ID pictures had long since been sent to France for identification, but both the police and intelligence agencies had come up dry.
“Okay, will the French deal?”
A shake of the head. “I don’t think so. The Minister, when I told him about the Dutch girl, he just grunted and said Carlos stays in the jug no matter what – and he expects us to resolve the situation successfully, and if we can’t, his country has a team of his own to send down.”
“So, we’ve gotta have a plan in place and ready to goby twenty-two hundred.”
“Unless you want to see them kill another hostage, yes,” Bellow said. “They’re denying me my ability to guide their behavior. They know how the game is played.”