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He checks his watch.
Time.
He calls behind him, “Tommy, do your work!”
“Roger that,” comes a male voice from the rear, the cargo space back there hidden by a taut black curtain.
A handful of seconds passes.
“Done,” Tommy says. “No phone service going in and out of that building, electronic door locks disabled, as well as their surveillance equipment.”
Liam says, “It’s a go, Boyd.”
“Roger that,” he says, starting up the van’s engine, shifting it into Drive, and then speeds a hundred yards or so to the front parking lot of the GRU installation. Boyd parks the van as close as he can to the front door. He gets out, and so does Liam.
Working calmly yet efficiently, they go to the rear of the van, which Boyd unlocks. He takes out a two-wheeled dolly, and withLiam’s help, loads up three black, hard plastic containers, ignoring what else is in the rear of the van. Boyd pushes the loaded dolly up the narrow concrete path and Liam joins him, holding a clipboard with some shipping documents fastened to it.
He and Boyd are both wearing, among other items, black trousers and short jackets with black hems and orange shoulders, marking the work uniforms of TNT Express, the largest domestic shipper in Russia. Black baseball caps with the orange-and-white TNT logo are on their heads, the van also painted with the same TNT logo.
Underneath the jackets are ballistic vests, not a typical part of the TNT dress code.
Boyd stops and Liam goes up, clipboard in hand, and rings the doorbell, ignoring the signs in Cyrillic lettering sayingNO ADMITTANCE, KEEP OUT, andPROPERTY UNDER SURVEILLANCE.
Once more.
And once more.
Boyd says, “I bet they’re distracted in there.”
“I bet you’re right,” Liam says, pounding the metal door with his fist, calling out in Russian,“Hey, anybody in there?”
He turns the doorknob.
It freely moves.
He looks to Boyd, raises an eyebrow, and then the door abruptly opens, with a young man, wearing jeans and a black turtleneck shirt, with shoulder holster, pistol, and one pissed-off look on his face.
In Russian he says,“You clowns, you’ve got the wrong address.”
“Sorry, sir,”Liam replies.“We’re here to make a delivery of twenty keyboards to Popov Associates.”
A curse from the GRU man, who says,“Morons, that building is over there.”
He breaks his concentration for a moment, pointing over Liam’s shoulders to another squat building in the distance, and Liam takes out a 9mm Beretta pistol from a concealed waist holster and shoots him in the forehead.
CHAPTER 15
ONCE LIAM DRAGS the body of the dead GRU man aside, Boyd pushes the dolly in, and the rear of the van reopens. Four other men—also wearing TNT Express gear—run up the entranceway, unlimbering their weapons. Each has been assigned a quadrant of the building, and thanks to a host of three-letter agencies that are part of the American intelligence apparatus, they have a perfect layout of the building’s interior.
The four highly experienced operators race by Boyd and Liam as the two of them get to work, opening the hard plastic storage containers on the tiled floor. From the building’s interior they hear muffled shots, a few shouts and cries, and within two minutes, one operator—Ferris Walton—comes out into the lobby and says, “All targets down and accounted for. You two are good to go.”
From each plastic container, Liam and Boyd pick up a black satchel with a carrying strap, make their way down a narrow corridor. Open doors reveal desks and computer terminals and dead GRU men. Liam doesn’t spare them a glance.
He’s got a job to do, with little time to get it done.
Another operator—Mike Cooper—waves them through the heavy metal door he’s holding open. “All clear in here, guys.”
He and Boyd enter a dark, cool, air-conditioned room. In banked rows on metal shelves, computer equipment blinks with red-and-blue indicator lights. The rows go on as far as the eye can see. In a desk chair before a computer terminal, an older GRU man with a closely trimmed black beard sits calmly, eyes open, a bloody, round hole in his forehead.
