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  Ahmed returned wearing a fresh set of clothes. His hair was still disheveled. At least he finally understood the urgency of the situation. They all filed out the front door, Ahmed locking it behind them.

  Reese told Ahmed they were parked further up the street and instructed him to meet them at the fallback location. Cyrus and Reese crossed the yard and started up the street, while Ahmed headed for his truck.

  When Cyrus reached the spot at the curb with the three extinguished cigarette butts, he stopped cold. He turned around and watched Ahmed step up to the side of his truck. The man tapped the button on his key fob and the car alarm chirped as it disarmed.

  “Whoa!” Cyrus bellowed and started running toward Alfie Ahmed. “Alfie! Don’t touch the truck!”

  Though Ahmed looked up at Cyrus with a slack-jawed expression, at least he stopped short of grabbing the door handle. As Cyrus came around the truck, Ahmed seemed to realize something was wrong. He stepped away from the vehicle with a confused expression on his face.

  Reese rounded the truck as Cyrus started making a circuit of the vehicle, looking carefully through each of the windows. “What do you see?” she asked.

  “Nothing yet. It’s just a bad feeling.” He had completed a trip around the truck but found nothing out of the ordinary. Ahmed was standing about ten feet away, watching the exercise with an expression one might have after finding a dead bug in their salad.

  Cyrus slid out of his jacket and pulled his gun, holster and all, from the back of his waistband. He wrapped the gun in the jacket and handed it to Reese. At the sight of the gun, Ahmed’s expression became more extreme. Cyrus ignored him. He didn’t have time to coddle the kid. Alfie did seem a rather dramatic lilting flower. Thank God, Reese has more fortitude. She was holding up remarkably well, given the strain of the circumstances.

  Dropping to the ground and rolling onto his back, Cyrus slid under the front of the Toyota. It was dark. He pulled out his phone and launched the flashlight app. It wasn’t as good as a real flashlight, but it brought the vehicle’s undercarriage into crisp detail. Moving slowly around the underbody, he found the leads snaking up to the battery. While the underbody was filthy with dirt and grime, two clean wires were spliced into the truck’s electrical system. It was not a good sign.

  He followed the new wires back toward the passenger compartment, where he found what he feared. A rather sizable wad of plastic explosive was jammed up between the firewall and the engine block. The wires led right to the bomb’s ignition cap.

  Shit.

  This meant Reese wasn’t the only target. The rest of the team was in danger as well.

  Cyrus reached up and carefully removed the pencil-like, short, metal stub that was stuck into the plastic explosive. That was the detonator. He took care not to touch the metal with his fingers. Not because it could cause detonation, but because there was a chance of pulling fingerprints from it. Once the detonator was out, he jerked the wires free of the splice that linked them to the electrical system. The bomb now disarmed, he reached up and pulled the wad of explosive free from the frame of the vehicle and crawled out from under the truck.

  Cyrus held up the explosive in one hand and the wire and detonator in the other. Reese’s eyes went wide. The little bit of pink to her normally pale complexion drained away. Ahmed faired less gracefully. He looked like he was going to be sick. It took only seconds for his face to transition to a horrible gray pallor. His eyes were wide, and he’d lost the ability to blink. He dropped to his knees and wretched into the grass.

  Reese finally found her voice. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Cyrus only nodded. He was holding the wad of plastic explosive up in the sunshine. It was a malformed wad. Once in the shape of a block, someone had squished it into a misshapen mound to better stick to the truck’s undercarriage. And, as he’d hoped, there were fingerprints evident in the surface of the pliable clay material. It was odd that they were dealing with someone with the skills to set a bomb but not intelligent enough to avoid leaving trace evidence behind. It wasn’t very professional. That was the part that confused him most. Maybe it would make more sense once the fingerprints were run.

  But first things first. They needed to meet with the rest of the team and get everyone into protective custody. Cyrus looked at Ahmed who was still horking in the grass. The guy was on his hands and knees, trembling.

  “Maybe you better ride with us, Alfie,” Cyrus suggested. “Come on. We’ll get you something to drink on the way. Maybe some breath mints, too.” After the words came out, he realized they were his first to the kid since they met. Until now Reese had done the talking. He decided that the words could be construed as insensitive. It was not what he’d intended. “It’s okay, Alfie. The first time someone tries to blow you up is the hardest.” He waited a beat. “It gets easier.”

  Alfie stopped where he was, on his hands and knees in the grass. He sat back on his haunches and looked at Cyrus. His expression read as if he were trying to decide whether Cyrus was from another planet or not. Then, after several long beats, Alfie’s face turned into a small smile for the first time. The small smile spread into a broad grin, as the absurdity of the situation and Cyrus’s comment sank in. “Maybe some gum would be good,” was all he managed to say. But he climbed wearily to his feet and followed Cyrus and Reese back to their car.

  Chapter 13

  Payton Street, Santa Barbara, California

  Wednesday, 8:08 am (9:08 am Colorado Time)

  One of the operatives walked across the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. He looked at Dargo and raised the pot, in question. Dargo simply shook his head and glanced down at his half-empty styrofoam cup. Surveillance locations changed, it was the shitty coffee that remained constant. It didn’t matter what continent or what country, the coffee was always terrible. He wondered how many cups of the swill he’d swallowed over the decades. As the younger operative walked back across the room and sat down at the surveillance station, Dargo wondered how many similar young soldiers he’d worked with in that same time. It was not lost on him that there were few he encountered on follow-up missions. This was not a profession that allowed many to grow to old age.

  At the age of fifty-eight, in this game, Dargo was considered an old man. These days he felt it, too. Though, to be fair, it wasn’t the years so much as the mileage. But for his part, Dargo had suffered the mileage far better the most. He was still strong and healthy. He still towered over many of the younger men he commanded. Six foot six, he still tipped the scales at two-twenty. And while youth was a valued resource when recruiting foot soldiers, his services had only come into greater demand as of late. Soldiers were in ready supply. Experienced operators—men who knew the right and wrong times to pull the trigger—were in increasingly short supply.

  All the same, Dargo sensed his time in the game was running short. His enthusiasm for the profession was not what it had once been. But, if he were honest with himself, that was only part of his malaise. Sure, these thoughts had been on his mind for some time. But last night’s revelation that Cyrus Cooper was part of his current mission had put things into a new perspective. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the kid’s involvement. He still couldn’t decide whether he wanted to crush the kid’s windpipe or warn him of the impending danger. Complex feelings had never been a part of the job, and Dargo felt equally compelled toward both options.

  “Sir,” a voice called in Russian from across the room. “I have something. A black Volkswagen Jetta initially made a slow pass of the target. It has since circled back and parked forty meters west of our location.”

  Dargo tapped a series of keys on his laptop and brought up one of the external cameras mounted on their house’s exterior. His team had secured a home across the street and two homes east of Alfie Ahmed. Ahmed was the only remaining member of the Meridian team. The rest had fallen off the face of the planet. Surely they had gone to ground. But why not Ahmed?

  Dargo’s technical team had wired up
the exterior of their house with a number of hidden high-resolution cameras. They had an unimpeded view of the front of Ahmed’s home as well as the street and sidewalks leading to it from both directions.

  Last night, the team surveilling Reese Knoland’s apartment had contacted Dargo to report an abrupt outbreak of gunfire on the same floor as her apartment. Soon after, the team had piped over a live video feed displaying the events as they unfolded. Cameras hidden in the hallway and stairwell outside the apartment had told much of the story. But Dargo had opted not to place surveillance gear inside the apartment, due to the increased risk of discovery. He had watched in fascination as two Hispanic men tried to abduct Miss Knoland from her home. It came as no surprise when Cyrus gave chase and shot both of the fleeing men dead before recovering Miss Knoland. What had surprised him was the follow-up report from his team. It turned out that prior to recovering Miss Knoland, Cyrus had apparently been attacked by two more men with automatic rifles. Somehow the young man had managed to throw one of the men from the tenth floor balcony and shoot the other in the head.

  If Dargo’s information was to be believed, Cyrus had been out of the game for a number of years. The young man had walked away from the Coalition following Dargo’s last encounter with him. That resignation was a crucial deciding factor for Dargo. The resignation was proof that Cyrus found the collateral damage of that mission unacceptable, and it was the only reason Dargo had chosen not to hunt Cyrus down and kill him for all that had happened.

  But if Cyrus Cooper was back in the game, it meant one of two things. Either Dargo had been fooled by his supposed resignation, or Cyrus was sincere in his disillusionment and had somehow been forced back into the fold. And if Cyrus was sincere, it meant there was something more going on than Dargo had been led to believe.

  Putting his personal concerns aside, Dargo knew he faced a still greater paradox. The live video feed his men had sent of Cyrus’s fight with the Hispanic gunman had followed his own sighting of Cyrus in Meade’s office building by only minutes. That Cyrus had managed to exit the office unobserved was troubling. But that he’d managed to cross the city in a matter of minutes was simply unexplainable.

  “Sir, I have confirmation,” the technical operative reported, pulling Dargo from his dilemma. “Cyrus Cooper and Reese Knoland have just arrived on scene.”

  Dargo tapped a series of commands into his computer and adjusted the camera view while he watched Cyrus and Reese approach the front of Alfie Ahmed’s home. Dargo had considered further surveillance on Ahmed to be his last chance to leverage a situation that was slipping from his grasp. The rest of Professor Meade’s research team had suddenly gone to ground, following the attack on Reese Knoland. Impressively, there had been no hint of an alarm being raised. Ahmed was the only member of the team who failed to go into hiding. So Dargo had gone to the surveillance post to monitor the situation personally.

  The circumstances had escalated even before he arrived on site. Dargo had still been in transit when the head of the field team contacted him reporting that a pair of Hispanic men had arrived and conducted a sloppy recon of the street. Shortly after, one of the men had crawled under the Toyota pickup truck parked in Ahmed’s driveway and secured some sort of device to the undercarriage. They then departed minutes later.

  When Dargo arrived on station, he took a look under the Toyota. It was a gamble, but a calculated one. He risked exposing his operation by approaching the pickup truck, but he needed to understand what the Hispanic men were doing. Had they attached surveillance gear to the truck? If so, why weren’t Dargo’s techs able to piggy-back the signal coming from the device? It turned out not to be a tracking device but a plug of plastic explosive that was left behind. All in all, a rather sloppy job, at that.

  All said, Dargo had been observing the research team for several weeks. In that time he had come to the conclusion that Ahmed was not a key member of the team. As such, he decided to leave the explosives in play and see how events transpired. First, the attempted abduction of Miss Knoland, and then a car bomb targeting Alfie Ahmed? Something could be learned no matter how things unfolded.

  And now Cyrus was here.

  By way of the concealed surveillance cameras, Dargo and his tech watched as Cyrus and Reese entered the home of Alfie Ahmed. As soon as they passed through the door, the tech switched to a laser microphone that, when pointed at a window, would pick up the vibrations of the glass surface and convert them into sound. It made for the perfect long-range wireless bug.

  Dargo listened to the conversation inside the house, across the street, in such crystal clear fidelity that he might have been sitting in the room with the participants. He listened as Miss Knoland chastised Ahmed for not responding to the scramble code she had sent. That explained why everyone had disappeared so abruptly. Professor Meade had prepared for such a situation. The old man was craftier than Dargo had been led to believe. Radioing the rest of surveillance team, Dargo made sure they were ready to deploy. He had put them on standby prior to his arrival the night before. If Ahmed left, he wanted the man followed. He initially hoped the young lab tech would lead him to the rest of the Meridian team. That was, until Dargo discovered the bomb rigged under the truck. It would’ve negated his ability to track Ahmed, but he had still hoped to come up with a lead. Waiting to see who arrived to investigate the explosion would prove useful. It might still lead him to the research team. All the same, now he was fortunate enough to have a full compliment of surveillance personnel and vehicles standing by. If Cyrus was on site, Dargo knew his team could track him. Cyrus would personally lead him to the rest of the team.

  As Dargo watched, Cyrus, Reese, and Ahmed left the house. Dargo was concerned to see Cyrus head for his own car up the street while Ahmed made his way to the Toyota in the driveway. Now Dargo wished he’d removed the explosive. Ahmed’s death would only complicate matters.

  But at the last moment, Dargo watched as Cyrus stopped and turned back to the truck. He called out to Ahmed before sprinting toward the man. Cyrus suspected something was wrong with the truck! But why? What had he seen? Dargo watched in fascination, as Cyrus circled the vehicle before finally crawling underneath. Moments later he emerged holding the disassembled explosive device.

  Dargo was speechless. He had no idea how Cyrus had concluded that the truck was rigged, but he watched in amusement as Ahmed spilled the contents of his stomach in the grass. The realization that someone wanted you dead could be jarring. Finally the three targets made their way up the street to Cyrus’s car. Dargo radioed the first follow car to ensure it was in position. It was overkill, but he had nearly a dozen backup vehicles ready to swap in and pick up the trail. He would have to move them around more aggressively now. Cyrus would most certainly be on alert after finding the explosives.

  Chapter 14

  Santa Barbara, California

  Wednesday, 8:33 am (9:33 am Colorado Time)

  The rendezvous with the research team was delayed.

  Shortly after leaving Alfie Ahmed’s home, Cyrus noticed a white Toyota Corolla in the rearview mirror. The car had done nothing suspicious other than follow them through several random turns. Then, as quickly as it appeared, the Toyota was gone. To an untrained eye, it would’ve meant nothing. Such was the nature of the nondescript car and its brief time in pursuit. But Cyrus knew differently. Shortly after it disappeared, he picked up a black Caprice. The Caprice followed them for several miles and a number of inconspicuous but indiscriminate turns. Identifying a tail was the goal of Cyrus’s haphazard course. The trick was to drive normal while plotting an unpredictable course; at the worst, he driving pattern would indicate he was a bit lost. If a vehicle stood out in the rear view, it meant there was a tail.

  In tradecraft, this was known as a surveillance detection route (SDR). A good tail was hard to spot. The tail he’d picked up was proving to be exceptional. He knew they were there, because as soon as he’d picked out a follow car, it quickly fell away and was replaced by an alt
ernate vehicle. New and constantly changing follow cars were very difficult to identify. The efficiency and dexterity of the constant rotation provided him a number of key pieces of information. First, he wasn’t being tracked by an individual—he was being stalked by a team. Second, the team was extremely professional. The follow cars had drivers proficient at blending in. Lastly, it meant that the team had resources. Normal follow teams would drive a considerable distance before trading one tail for the next because the number of vehicles was finite. This team had a rich roster of experienced drivers. The cars kept changing, and they were always unique.

  But the team conducting surveillance was also at a disadvantage. Every change of the follow car required the carefully orchestrated handoff of the target. It was crucial to prevent drawing undo attention during the handoff, but it was also essential not to lose it in the process. With all of this in mind, handoffs were never conducted more frequently than absolutely required.

  The tail on Cyrus was passing him off like a hot potato. They were aware of his skills in counter surveillance. The observation raised more questions and provided no answers. Logic dictated that Cyrus had picked up the tail upon leaving Ahmed’s house. Even though he had detected no surveillance of the house, it was entirely possible that something had gone unnoticed. Especially if these guys were as skilled as they now appeared. But why have all of these resources tied up watching Ahmed’s home after they had already planted a bomb in his truck? Fine, leave one observer behind to ensure that the bomb went off, but the tail that he had now indicated that an entire team had been lying in wait. He could’ve picked up the tail prior to his arrival at Ahmed’s home, but he felt certain it would’ve caught his eye earlier in the morning. He was confident in ruling that out. All of this led to a growing suspicion that two parties were interested in Alfie Ahmed—one that planted the bomb and a second that was content to sit back and surveil the events as they transpired. But as much as the evidence pointed toward this new conclusion, why would someone go through the trouble of surveilling Ahmed while still doing nothing to prevent his murder? The contingent of follow cars might be a clue. Either the surveillance team was there to watch Ahmed, or they were there to track whoever showed up to visit the man.