“Professionals?”
Bellow shrugged. “Might as well be. They know what I’m going to try, and if they know it ahead of time, then they know how to maneuver clear.”
“No way to mitigate their behavior?” Clark asked, wanting it clear.
“I can try, but probably not. The ideological ones, the ones who have a clear idea of what they want-well, they’re hard to reason with. They have no ethical base to play with, no morality in the usual sense, nothing I can use against them. No conscience.”
“Yeah, we saw that, I guess. Okay.” John stood up straight and turned to look at his two team leaders. “You got two hours to plan it, and one more to set it up. We go at twenty-two hundred hours.”
“We need to know more about what’s happening inside,” Covington told Clark. “Noonan, what can you do?”
The FBI agent looked down at the blueprints, then over at the TV monitors. “I need to change,” he said, heading over to his equipment case and pulling out the green-on-green night gear. The best news he’d seen so far was that the castle windows made for two blind spots. Better yet, they could control the lights that bled energy into both of them. He walked over to the park engineer next. “Can you switch off these lights along here?”
“Sure. When?”
“When the guy on the roof is looking the other way. And I need somebody to back me up,” Noonan added.
“I can do that,” First Sergeant Vega said, stepping forward.
The children were whining. It had started two hours earlier and only gotten worse. They wanted food – something adults would probably not have asked for, since adults would be far too frightened to eat, but children were different somehow. They also needed to use the restroom quite a bit, and fortunately there were two bathrooms adjacent to the control room, and Rene’s people didn’t stop them from going – the restrooms had no windows or phones or anything to make escape or communication possible, and it wasn’t worth the aggravation to have the children soiling their pants. The children didn’t talk directly to any of his people, but the whining was real and growing. Well-behaved kids, else it would be worse, Rene told himself, with an ironic smile. He looked at the wall clock.
“Three, this is One.”
“Yes, One,” came the reply.
“What do you see?”
“Eight policemen, four pairs, watching us, but doing nothing but watching.”
“Good.” And he set the radio down.
“Log that,” Noonan said. He’d checked the wall clock. It was about fifteen minutes since the last radio conversation. He was in his night costume now, the two-shade greens they’d used in Vienna. His Beretta .45 automatic. with suppressor, was in a special, large shoulder holster over his body armor, and he had a backpack slung over one shoulder. “Vega, ready to take a little walk?”
“You betcha,” Oso replied, glad at last to be doing something on a deployment. As much as he liked being responsible for the team’s heavy machine gun, he’d never gotten to use it, and, he thought, probably never would. The biggest man on the team, his hobby was pumping iron, and he had a chest about the dimensions of a half keg of beer. Vega followed Noonan out the door, then outside.
“Ladder?” the first sergeant asked.
“Tool and paint shop fifty yards from where we’re going. I asked. They have what we need.”
“Fair ’nuff,” Oso replied.
It was a fast walk, dodging through a few open areas visible to the fixed cameras, and the shop they headed for had no sign on it at all. Noonan slipped the ground-bolted door and walked in. None of the doors, remarkably enough, were locked. Vega pulled a thirty-foot extension ladder off its wall brackets. “This ought to do.”
“Yeah.” They went outside. Movement would now be trickier. “Noonan to command.”
“Six here.”
“Start doing the cameras, John.”
In the command center, Clark pointed to the park engineer. There was danger here, but not much, they hoped. The castle command center, like this one, had only eight TV monitors, which were hard-wired into over forty cameras. You could have the computer simply flip through them in an automatic sequence, or select cameras for special use. With a mouse-click, one camera was disabled. If the terrorists were using the automatic sequence, as seemed likely, they probably would not notice that one camera’s take was missing during the flip-through. They had to get through the visual coverage of two of them, and the park engineer was ready to flip them off’ and on as needed. The moment a hand appeared in camera twenty-three’s field of view, the engineer flipped it off.
“Okay, twenty-three is off, Noonan.”
“We’re moving,” Noonan said. The first walk took them twenty meters, and they stopped behind a concession stand. “Okay, we’re at the popcorn building.”
The engineer flipped twenty-three back on, and then turned off twenty-one.
“Twenty-one is off,” Clark reported next. “Rifle Two-One, where’s the guy on the root?”
“West side, just lit up a smoke, not looking down over the edge anymore. Staying still at the moment,” Sergeant Johnston reported.
“Noonan, you are clear to move.”
“Moving now,” the FBI agent replied. He and Vega double-timed it across the stone slabs, their rubber-soled boots keeping their steps quiet. At the side of the castle was a dirt strip about two meters wide, and some large boxwoods. Carefully, Noonan and Vega angled the ladder up, setting it behind a bush. Vega pulled the rope to extend the top portion, stopping it just under the window. Then he got between the ladder and the building, grabbed the treads and held them tight, pulling the ladder against the rough stone blocks.
“Watch your ass, Tim,” Oso whispered.
“Always.” Noonan went up quickly for the first ten feet, then slowed to a vertical crawl. Patience, Tim told himself. Plenty of time to do this. It was the sort of lie that men tell themselves.
“Okay,” Clark heard. “He’s going up the ladder now. The roof guy is still on the opposite side, fat, dumb, and happy.”
“Bear, this is Six, over,” John said, getting another idea.
“Bear copies, Six.”
“Play around a little on the west side, just to draw some attention, over.”
“Roger that.”
Malloy stopped his endless circling, leveled out, and then eased toward the castle. The Night Hawk was a relatively quiet aircraft for a helicopter, but the guy on the root turned to watch closely, the colonel saw through his night vision goggles. He stopped his approach at about two hundred meters. He wanted to get their attention, not to spook them. The roof sentry’s cigarette blazed brightly in the goggles. It moved to his lips, then away, then back, staying there.
“Say hello, sweetie,” Malloy said over the intercom. “Jesus, if I was in a Night Stalker, I could spray your ass into the next time zone.”
“You fly the Stalker? What’s it like?”
“If she could cook, I’d fucking marry her. Sweetest chopper ever made,” Malloy said, holding hover. “Six, Bear, I have the bastard’s attention.”
“Noonan, Six, we’ve frozen the roof sentry for you. He’s on the opposite side from you.” Good, Noonan didn’t say. He took off his Kevlar helmet and edged his face to the window. It was made of irregular segments held in place by lead strips, just like in the castles of old. The glass wasn’t as good as float-plate, but it was transparent. Okay. He reached into his backpack and pulled a fiber-optic cable with the same cobra head arrangement he’d used in Bern.
“Noonan to Command, you getting this?”
“That’s affirmative.” It was the voice of David Peled. The picture he saw was distorted, but you quickly got used to that. It showed four adults, but more important, it showed a crowd of children sitting on the floor in the corner, close to two doors with labels-the toilets, Peled realized. That worked. That worked pretty well. “Looks good, Timothy. Looks very good.”
“Okay.” Noonan glued the tiny instrument in place and headed down the ladder. His heart was racing faster than it ever did on the morning three-mile run. At the bottom, he and Vega both hugged the wall.
The cigarette flew off the roof, and the sentry got tired of looking at the chopper, Johnston saw. “Our friend’s moving east on the castle roof. Noonan, he’s coming your way.”
Malloy thought of maneuvering to draw the attention back, but that was too dangerous a play. He turned the helicopter sideways and continued his circling, but closer in, his eyes locked on the castle roof. There wasn’t much else he could do except to draw his service pistol and fire, but at this range it would be hard enough to hit the castle. And killing people wasn’t his job, unfortunately, Malloy told himself. There were times when he found the idea rather appealing.