The Chaos Kind (John Rain #11)(18)

There was an opening for a stairway a few feet to their right. The wingman glanced toward it, then went back to watching the team on the left. He said, “Don’t like the stairs. Don’t know what’s down there. They could be funneling us.”

The talker turned and glanced at the team coming from the wingman’s side. “Agreed. And I don’t fancy giving up the high ground, anyway.” He went back to watching the team on his side.

Manus thought the wingman was right about the stairs. And the talker was right, too, about not ceding the high ground. And either or both theories could also explain the slow, deliberate approach.

The problem was, if another group flanked them from below, they’d be penned in on three sides without any escape route. If Manus had been carrying, he would have preferred a frontal assault against one of the pincer groups. Attack the ambush, fight your way through it. But he had left the Force Pro, his customary carry, back in Maryland. He’d gotten lazy. Lazy and stupid. Acting like a civilian, even after they’d made him go operational again.

The good news was, he had visited the park several times already, and had studied it closely. He’d gotten stupid, yes, but he still reflexively examined terrain for routes of ingress and egress, still ran constant when/then scenarios.

It was too bad about the Force Pro. But there was a lot he could do with the Espada.





chapter

twelve





DOX


Dox was castigating himself over his earlier hubris—had he really assured himself he’d yet to meet the operator he couldn’t make, right before that damn jogger turned out to be anything but?—when Manus pulled himself up onto the concrete wall behind them, flattened out on top of it, and rolled over the other side.

“He’s gone,” Larison said. “Can’t blame him. Sucks to have nothing but a knife at a gunfight.”

Despite himself, Dox was surprised by the quiet suddenness of Manus’s exit. But there were more important matters to consider. For example, the two teams still approaching, now about thirty yards away.

“Which way do you want to play it?” Dox said. “I don’t like how slowly they’re moving. I think they’re waiting for something, and I don’t want to be here when it happens.”

“I think they’re not sure of their orders,” Larison said. “Look. They stopped.”

Dox watched the woman jogger pull out a cellphone and speak into it.

“Could be that,” Dox said. “Could be she’s calling for reinforcements. I say it’s time to blast our way through one end of the pincer or the other.”

“Agreed. Which side?”

“It’s all the same to me. You have a preference?”

“No.”

“Well shit, what are we going to do? Eeny, meeny, miny, moe?”

The woman put away the phone. All six pulled out pistols and started moving again.

“Looks like their orders have been clarified,” Dox said.

“Okay, let’s take the three approaching from your side.”

“Why aren’t they shooting yet?”

“Could be from that far out they’re afraid they’d miss and we’d go down the stairs.”

“Or like you said, they could want us to go down the stairs.”

“What difference does it make?”

Dox couldn’t argue with that. His heart started beating harder.

“You ready?” he said. “One. Two—”





chapter

thirteen





MANUS


Manus hopped from one giant vertical concrete block to another, scanning the area for another team or for anything else suspicious. Other than two elderly Asian women doing tai chi despite the rain, the area was clear.

When he knew he was well past the righthand team’s position, he jumped down and made his way to the stairwell at the park’s south end. He raced up the steps three at a time, crouched at the top, and darted his head around the corner.

He saw the three-man team, their backs to him fifty feet away, still moving methodically forward to close the pincer. Their hands were in front of their bodies now. From the way they were moving, he could tell they were all righthanded, and all holding pistols at high compressed ready. Obviously, they were trained.

If he approached from behind and to the right, the biomechanics would be awkward for them. The distance was farther than ideal, but manageable. The problem was, the other team would see him coming. If they got off a warning, it could be bad.

But he saw no other options. He didn’t even consider leaving. He didn’t want the talker and the wingman to be killed. He wanted to know what they knew. Who was behind this whole thing. Why they had set him up.

Most of all, whether Evie and Dash were in danger.

The thought terrified him. He judged his current odds of success at about sixty-forty. And while he could accept those odds for himself, if he died, who would protect Evie and Dash?

His heart pounding uncharacteristically hard, he opened the Espada, manually depressing the folding mechanism to mute the click he knew the blade would otherwise make. He couldn’t be sure how loud the sound would be, or how far it would carry.

He felt the blade lock into place. He took a deep breath, stood, and charged from behind the corner.