Power and Empire

Chavez pushed away from the table and held up the flat of his hand, signaling for Adara to hang back while he took the first eyeball on Chen. She nodded and crossed the street directly while he took a more diagonal route to intercept Chen’s trail immediately. She’d follow at a respectable distance and the two would leapfrog, so as to give a fresh face to the follow. Chavez slowed a half-step when Chen and the other man hung a right at the end of the block, still following the cemetery wall. Chavez continued across the street and then turned right himself so as not to round the corner where Chen had gone without checking it out first from a different vantage point. The two Asians were still moving steadily, not quite trotting, halfway down the block now.

“Got your right,” Adara said, letting Chavez know she’d seen the turn.

Ryan and Midas were still giving a play-by-play of their individual pursuits. Chavez waited for them to pause, then claimed the airspace.

“Listen up,” he said. “We got a lot going on. Keep the bullshit to a minimum. Necessary traffic only. Speed, direction, and any threats. Got it?”

Ryan responded with “North on Callao.”

“North… Rodríguez Peña… behind the shooter,” Midas said, still running.

“I’m right behind you, Ding,” Adara said, for Midas and Jack’s benefit.

Chavez started to give his location when the two men ahead of him broke into a run, taking another right at the end of the block.

Adara picked up her pace. “They see you?”

“I don’t think so,” Chavez said.

He called out the location, following his own orders so Jack and Midas could keep up with the common operating picture. He trotted now, again swinging wide around the corner to avoid an ambush. He made it around in time to see the second Asian scale a construction fence behind Chen. Both men scrambled up some scaffolding to the top of a construction trailer, and then bounded over the cemetery wall and out of sight.

Adara ran up behind Chavez, turning to check behind herself as she came to a stop. It was long past the time to try to stay covert if anyone was trailing them down the dark street.

“You sure they didn’t see you?” Adara said again. Both she and Chavez cupped their hands over their chests, blocking the neck mics so they didn’t clutter the radio net.

Chavez said, “They never looked behind them.”

“Cemetery gates are locked up for the night,” Adara said. “We’ll have to go in the same way they did.”

Chavez rubbed his face and studied the construction trailer, his mind racing. He’d been in leadership positions in the past two decades. Hell, he’d led a team of some of the most elite operators with Rainbow. But life was so much easier when he’d been an impetuous troop and could let the bosses worry about the magnet in his ass that pulled him, without thinking, toward danger. He’d never been very good about aborting a pursuit, but he reminded himself that he had the entire team to consider. Like a good leader, he made the decision look as though it was second nature.

“First rule of following someone blind into a dark alley?”

“Is not to follow someone blind into a dark alley,” Adara finished his mantra. It was one of many, and she knew it well. “You gotta admit, the cemetery is a heck of a good SDR. It’s a maze in there. They’d know for sure if we followed them in.”

“The problem with an alley,” Ding said, toying with the beginnings of a plan, “is that you’re walking into a fatal funnel — that is, the way you’re expected to walk in. We just need to find a different way than the one they used.”

• • •

Hellooo, Midas,” Jack hailed his fellow operator, once he’d learned Chen had gone over the cemetery wall. “What’s your position?”

“Rodríguez Peñ—” he said, cutting out, still breathless.

“You’re moving parallel to us,” Ryan said.

The brunette moved more quickly now, still walking, but much faster than the rest of the crowd. She touched her ear as she jigged around a bus-stop shelter, in comms with somebody. Looking right at the next intersection, she paused for a split second, then ran across the street to her left.

“She’s coming toward you, Ding,” Jack said.

With his eyes on the brunette, he didn’t see the oncoming Japanese woman until it was too late, and the two ran headlong into each other. The woman bounced away, falling sideways, spitting like an angry cat. Ryan was stunned from the impact but able to remain standing. He reached down to offer the woman a hand, but she slapped it away, springing to her feet, ready to run again. Midas had caught up by now and grabbed a handful of her collar, giving it a yank, lifting the sputtering woman off her feet. She’d been holding a cell phone when they collided and it now lay on the ground with a badly damaged screen.

People on the street were still stampeding away from the bomb blast around the corner, and ran by without interfering.

“Let. Me. Go.” The woman said it through a clenched jaw. Her English was accented English but very good. “She is… escaping.”