Page 136 of Agency

Not Management. A body guard. So therewassecurity.

I held my breath, tried not to move.

He reached forward to work something that I quickly realized was hand-soap, and then the sink faucet. Glancing up, he looked towards Ambyr and me, to where we crouched in the darkness just beyond the window. Clearly not seeing us, he lathered his hands like he wasn’t playing bodyguard for one of the most dangerous men in the world.

Two people inside, at least. Maybe the person he was talking to was Management, maybe they weren’t. If they weren’t Management, that meant we’d have two hostiles, plus the target.

As he continued to wash his hands, I realized I could just raise my weapon and fire. Two rounds. Double tap. Right through the glass. Right then. Snuff him out. Drop the number of the opposing force by one.

Of course, whomever else was on the property would hear the shots. A suppressor didn’t muffle a 5.56 that well. If there was even one more combatant inside, they’d be alerted to our presence. They’d know someone was going for Management, and that would change the calculus.

The dark haired man glanced over to my left, as if someone had just said something from that direction, and then he was grinning and saying something in reply as he turned off the water. Nodding to the unseen conversational partner, he grabbed a dish towel, just like any other normal person, and not some hired goon, and returned back from whence he’d came.

Fuck. Fuck, I’d been ready to kill him. But, now? Now, I was thinking about how he probably had a mom somewhere he called on a set day and time of the week, maybe an ex-wife he made sure got an alimony and child support check each month. This was a human being. Not some faceless combatant trying to kill me in a firefight.

I felt my held breath releasing, and my shoulders deflating like a sagging balloon. The whole moment seemed to have taken hours, but had probably only lasted fifteen seconds.

Ambyr was touching my shoulder, then, and pointing.

I moved to where she indicated, a spot just beneath the window through which I’d almost killed that man. I went, my knees pumping and screaming the whole way, the front of my brain reminding the rest of the gray matter what we were there for: find Management, subdue resistance, mitigate harm to the core team.

I covered Ambyr as she slid in in front of me, and, low and slow, made her way forward, well beneath the cabin windows. Up to the corner she went, keeping her body clear of the cabin’s sides as she moved with a killer’s fluid grace.

She hadn’t taken the shot through the kitchen window back there, I realized. Of all the people I’d known, I’d have figured her to be the one who would take it.

But Ambyr hadn’t.

She really was trying to do this “the right way.”

I followed after my unit lead, rounding the corner and taking a covering position as she shooter-walked to the front door. She crossed over the front of the door and stepped back a foot or so, maintaining her field of fire for when the door came open.

I lowered my primary weapon on its sling and drew my dry-husked breaching shotgun from the scabbard on my back. Short-barrelled and with a pistol grip, breaching shells, packed with wax and metal powder and designed to blow out door hinges and locks but not travel through the door to the other side, filled the tube magazine. The chamber was clear, and the safety was off.

A breaching explosive would have been faster, louder, and more disorienting, but also less dangerous for Ambyr and me. Management himself might very well be on the other side of this front door, though, and we wanted to kill as a little as possible.

This was supposed to be justice. Not murder.

Ambyr looked to me, those cold blue eyes looking like the waters of the Lake of the Woods must look on some beautiful summer’s day. So gorgeous, so inviting, so timeless as they gazed at me from the depths of her nighttime camo.

She nodded.

I pumped a round into the shotgun’s chamber as I stepped up just beside the door. On muscle memory, I put the muzzle at the latch bolt and angled the rest of the shotgun at forty-five and forty-five, the grip out and away and up at an angle, so that door and lock fragments would launch into the floor instead.

I looked to Ambyr, and she nodded again.

Go time.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Andrew

The keypad was nestled into the wall containing the window through which I’d entered, right where indicated by the diagram in the file. Below a digital readout was a pad with three keys across and four down. The “*”, “0”, and “#” keys were included on the bottom row.

Pretty standard.

I pulled out my notebook page with the code scrawled across the surface and keyed in the numbers, each button producing a tonally indistinguishablebeep.Star first, then nine digits, followed by pound–or hashtag or whatever. An audible click sounded from down near my feet, and, with a hydraulic hiss, one end of a large section of previously flush panels began to rise. The section stopped at six inches, and I bent down to lift and throw back the diagonally raised panel. With the barn’s wooden floor panels came the top half of a metal hatch that was heavy and solid enough to withstand the blast of a shaped charge, and I had to really engage my gluts and lug the thing back and over to reveal a concrete-walled stairwell leading below.

Readying my weapon, I checked the stairs.