Chapter 87

Koenig and Draper double-timed to the kitchen area. They peered out of the window. Carlyle was right. There were men with guns outside. They had them under their coats. Koenig caught a glimpse when a blast from a street vent lifted one guy's coat like it was Marilyn Monroe's white dress. Submachine guns. Perfect weapons for an urban assault. They were on the sidewalk opposite Hobbs's apartment. A black van pulled up beside them. The panel door slid open. Three men climbed out and joined their colleagues on the sidewalk. That made seven. They made no move to enter the apartment. They were standing around, like office workers after a fire alarm.

‘They must have been on the apartment,' Koenig said. ‘They were watching it, just like we were watching.'

‘Why didn't we see them?' Draper asked. Annoyed.

‘We were improvising; they had time to do it right.'

One of the men reached into the van and hauled out a briefcase-sized box. It was black. Looked like the president's nuclear football. Koenig recognised it immediately. It was a military-grade jammer. Expensive, best part of a hundred thousand bucks.

Draper pulled out her cell phone. ‘I still have a signal,' she said. ‘I wonder why they didn't arrive with it powered up.'

‘That thing will knock out every phone in a ten-block radius,' Koenig said. ‘And no matter which route they took to get here, they'd have had to pass an NYPD precinct. And if a precinct's comms goes down without warning, they don't mess around. They assume it's terrorism. Everyone with a badge gets out on the street. Last thing these guys want.'

Draper stared at her cell like a teenager checking their Instagram likes. ‘Losing my signal will be their starter pistol then,' she said. ‘I'm too far away to see what model they're using, but military jammers don't take long to warm up. Five minutes, tops.'

‘If that.'

Her cell phone chirped a song Koenig neither knew nor liked. Draper answered it.

‘Yes? . . . Where the hell is that? . . . OK, tell her she can have anything she needs . . . I'm about to lose my signal, but I'll reestablish comms as soon as I can.'

She ended the call.

‘Jakob Tas's phone went dead in Maine,' she told Koenig. ‘A fishing village called New Silloth.'

‘That mean anything to you, Bess?' Koenig asked.

Carlyle shook her head. ‘I don't know anyone there.'

‘As luck would have it,' Draper said, ‘a woman on my payroll has a hunting cabin less than an hour away. She's already on her way. Rachel's ex-FBI, so if there's anything to find, she'll find it.'

‘First bit of luck we've had,' Koenig grunted.

‘Feels that way, doesn't it? Anyway, assaulting a building is your area of expertise, not mine. How do you want to do this?'

‘We have the stairs; they have the numbers,' Koenig said. He watched two of the group outside split off and head to the alley. ‘Must be relegated to covering the fire escape. That leaves five for me to deal with.' His SIG was tucked uncomfortably into his waistband. He reached for it and ejected the magazine. Pulled back the slide and held it to the rear. Checked the working parts weren't clogged with threads of denim. He'd seen it happen. It was clean. He released the slide and pressed home the magazine. ‘We can't let them reach the apartment. How about I go downstairs while they're all standing together?'

‘No,' Draper said firmly. ‘We won't get away with that again. They aren't like the goofballs at the airstrip. There are more of them. They aren't wearing stupid armour. They have the right weapons. And if they know what went down in Scotland, they'll be expecting you to come straight at them.'

‘We call nine-one-one then. Wait for the NYPD, then hit them from both ends.'

‘Even if we were prepared to sacrifice a bunch of cops, which I'm not, best-case scenario is we all get arrested. And if you're right about Tas entering the end game, we don't have time to wait for Smerconish to bail us out.'

‘Assuming it wasn't Smerconish who sent these assholes.'

Hobbs turned on his stool. ‘I can help,' he said. He seemed frightened. Which, for a man about to be rescued, seemed counterintuitive. He should have been looking relieved.

‘How?' Draper said.

‘Give me a gun. Even the odds.'

‘What a marvellous idea,' she said. ‘You want me , the person who's just tortured your daughter, to give you , a professional killer, a gun? Not even Koenig is stupid enough to fall for that bullshit.'

‘You don't know these guys!' Hobbs said, frantic now. ‘I do. They're butchers, not surgeons. Mr Koenig was right – you can't sit back and let them reach our apartment. They aren't interested in letting anyone live. They'll blow the door off its hinges, then lob in grenades until they've turned us into ground beef. Our only way out of this, the only way Harper gets out of this, is if we engage them on the stairs.'

‘I'm not giving you a fucking gun.'

‘Your cell still has a signal?' Koenig asked Draper.

She nodded. ‘It does.'

‘They can't stay there forever, though; they're standing out like pepper in salt.' He turned to Carlyle. ‘Bess, when this starts, can you cover the fire escape? Make sure they don't come at us from the rear. I doubt they'd be so stupid, but we can't ignore the possibility.'

‘I will.'

‘I can tell you what the plan is,' Hobbs said quietly.

‘I know what the plan is,' Koenig said. ‘They'll do exactly what you said – they'll blow the door off and throw in grenades. Stun or fragmentation. Maybe white phosphorus.'

Margaret stepped away from the window. It looked like she was pressing ahead with her tea. Brits, Koenig thought. Think there's nothing that can't be fixed with a cuppa. When he'd trained in the UK, he'd been told that during the Falklands War, Royal Marines Commandos took cover and stopped fighting the Argentineans so they could brew up.

‘Don't get too close to Hobbs, Margaret,' he warned.

‘I won't, dear.'

‘I don't mean their plan now,' Hobbs said. ‘I mean Jakob Tas's plan.'

It was a good ten seconds before anyone spoke.

‘You know what Jakob Tas is planning?' Draper said.

‘Some of it.'

‘And you're only remembering now? How convenient.'

Hobbs sighed in frustration. ‘You might not like what we do, but we are good at it,' he said. ‘And that means even when we get a referral from a trusted source, we don't go into the meeting blind. When Jakob Tas arrived at the Holiday Inn in North Dakota, a venue he'd chosen, he assumed it was neutral.'

‘But it wasn't.'

‘No. I arrived late, and that allowed Harper to subdue one of the servers. She took their uniform and bused Tas's table. She did this to make sure I wasn't walking into an ambush.'

‘And she overheard them discussing their master plan?' Draper said sceptically.

‘No, Tas is no James Bond villain,' Hobbs said. ‘But she did hear a phrase, a phrase I think might be important. It wasn't something Tas said, it was the Russian guy who travels everywhere with him. A monosyllabic brute called Konstantin. He said it and Tas shushed him.'

‘Bullshit,' Draper said. ‘We asked Harper the same questions we asked you, remember? She didn't mention overhearing anything.'

‘That's because she didn't understand the significance of what Konstantin said. I did. She thought it was a throwaway comment, a bit of nonsense, but I spent time in Russia when I was a young man and—'

‘I don't think you should be bothering everyone with this twaddle, dear,' Margaret said. She then took the Roman hairpin from her bun and pressed it into Hobbs's ear, all the way in like she was skewering a baked potato.

Hobbs slumped over as much as the duct tape allowed. Margaret checked his carotid pulse and smiled at everyone.

‘Whoopsie,' she said.