the plank before shoving it effortlessly back across. The Teflon-coated edges of both rooftops had been tested and retested a hundred times. The only difficulty encountered had come when Princess demanded a turn. Rhino protested, Buddha encouraged him. Cross settled it: “If it’ll hold his weight, it’ll hold mine, right?”
The new building’s roof housed an electrical shack. Cross stepped inside. He moved down a flight of stairs to a hallway, where he rang for an elevator marked “Freight.”
The elevator car came up, driven by a short, squat Hispanic with a Zapata mustache. Cross got on. The car descended all the way to the basement. Both men got out. The Hispanic looked through a periscope device for a long minute.
“Clear,” he told Cross.
Cross stepped around the other man, exchanged a fist-pound for the other’s
“Viva la Raza!”
; the man’s cynical expression as he pocketed the tightly rolled bills clearly demonstrated that the political-solidarity verbiage had been pure sarcasm.
Neither man was as unseen as either of them believed. Inside what looked like an oversized van sat the blond man and another individual, the latter wearing a white lab coat and trifocal glasses.
The blond man was seated in a captain’s chair in the rear, watching the other one peer at a console.
“You got him?” the blond asked.
“Locked on. No place he can go now. He can change his clothes, but he can’t change his thermal image. Look.…” One of the round monitors flickered. On the screen, the image was the fluid outline of a man, with different areas of his body marked in different colors.
“Is this what …
they
… use?” the blond asked.
“Far as we can tell, yes. They’ve got some form of heat-seeker, that’s for sure. But it can differentiate better than anything we’ve ever seen. The technology was so superior that we don’t have anything to compare it to. Are you following me?”
“I believe.…”
“Just in case you’re not, I’ll spell it out: they can see us, but we can’t see … whatever they are. Which is about as bad as it gets. But we’ve just added something to
our
bagof tricks. With these new instruments, we can pick up
when
they’re watching.”
“Watching us, you mean?”
“No,” the white-coated man said. “We’re nowhere near that stage. We can pick up a signal that says their system is activated, but that’s
all
we can do. We don’t know
who
it’s locked on to, just
when
it’s gone operational. And then only when it’s within our sweep area.”
Tiger moved just enough to announce her presence. She nodded in a gesture the blond man understood all too well: unlike Percy, Tiger relied on more than just her eyesight. But her basic premise was the same—if she could sense it, she could kill it.
AS THE team reassembled in the War Room, they continued to track Cross making his way through the underground network of the city: from abandoned tunnels to subbase-ments of office buildings and finally to an apparently empty shack standing at the end of a shipping pier. The pier itself hadn’t been used in years—Cross carefully picked his way across the rotting timbers.
“You know what I can’t understand?” the blond man said to Wanda, forcing her to look up from a thick sheaf of computer printouts she had in her lap.
“What is it
this
time?” Wanda responded, her voice tinted with the waspish superiority she could not always restrain.
The blond ignored her attitude—human emotions were of no great interest to him.
“We’ve got locates on them all over the world. Whatever the hell they are, they don’t give a damn about climate.”
“So?”
“So look at this pattern. We have a series of kills near the Arctic Circle. Polar-bear hunters. Poachers, as it turns out. Same in Kenya.”
“Polar bears in Kenya?” Tiger asked, just short of giggling. “
That’s
your pattern?”
“
Poachers
, you stupid slut. In Kenya, they were after rhino
The new building’s roof housed an electrical shack. Cross stepped inside. He moved down a flight of stairs to a hallway, where he rang for an elevator marked “Freight.”
The elevator car came up, driven by a short, squat Hispanic with a Zapata mustache. Cross got on. The car descended all the way to the basement. Both men got out. The Hispanic looked through a periscope device for a long minute.
“Clear,” he told Cross.
Cross stepped around the other man, exchanged a fist-pound for the other’s
“Viva la Raza!”
; the man’s cynical expression as he pocketed the tightly rolled bills clearly demonstrated that the political-solidarity verbiage had been pure sarcasm.
Neither man was as unseen as either of them believed. Inside what looked like an oversized van sat the blond man and another individual, the latter wearing a white lab coat and trifocal glasses.
The blond man was seated in a captain’s chair in the rear, watching the other one peer at a console.
“You got him?” the blond asked.
“Locked on. No place he can go now. He can change his clothes, but he can’t change his thermal image. Look.…” One of the round monitors flickered. On the screen, the image was the fluid outline of a man, with different areas of his body marked in different colors.
“Is this what …
they
… use?” the blond asked.
“Far as we can tell, yes. They’ve got some form of heat-seeker, that’s for sure. But it can differentiate better than anything we’ve ever seen. The technology was so superior that we don’t have anything to compare it to. Are you following me?”
“I believe.…”
“Just in case you’re not, I’ll spell it out: they can see us, but we can’t see … whatever they are. Which is about as bad as it gets. But we’ve just added something to
our
bagof tricks. With these new instruments, we can pick up
when
they’re watching.”
“Watching us, you mean?”
“No,” the white-coated man said. “We’re nowhere near that stage. We can pick up a signal that says their system is activated, but that’s
all
we can do. We don’t know
who
it’s locked on to, just
when
it’s gone operational. And then only when it’s within our sweep area.”
Tiger moved just enough to announce her presence. She nodded in a gesture the blond man understood all too well: unlike Percy, Tiger relied on more than just her eyesight. But her basic premise was the same—if she could sense it, she could kill it.
AS THE team reassembled in the War Room, they continued to track Cross making his way through the underground network of the city: from abandoned tunnels to subbase-ments of office buildings and finally to an apparently empty shack standing at the end of a shipping pier. The pier itself hadn’t been used in years—Cross carefully picked his way across the rotting timbers.
“You know what I can’t understand?” the blond man said to Wanda, forcing her to look up from a thick sheaf of computer printouts she had in her lap.
“What is it
this
time?” Wanda responded, her voice tinted with the waspish superiority she could not always restrain.
The blond ignored her attitude—human emotions were of no great interest to him.
“We’ve got locates on them all over the world. Whatever the hell they are, they don’t give a damn about climate.”
“So?”
“So look at this pattern. We have a series of kills near the Arctic Circle. Polar-bear hunters. Poachers, as it turns out. Same in Kenya.”
“Polar bears in Kenya?” Tiger asked, just short of giggling. “
That’s
your pattern?”
“
Poachers
, you stupid slut. In Kenya, they were after rhino
Similar Books
