Red Frost

CHAPTER SIX

London East End,

2:20 p.m. GMT

David McCarter and Rafael Encizo hustled down the rain-slick East End street, a treeless, winding canyon of two-story, nineteenth-century brick. In the middle of the gray afternoon, it was deserted but for a few mothers pushing prams on the opposite sidewalk. McCarter noted the huge For Sale signs in upper-story windows. This neighborhood of tenement slums was gradually being gentrified. Where immigrants from Eastern Europe had once lived ten to a room without running water, frantically upscale yuppies from the city’s financial district cooked on their Jenn-Air ranges under expansive skylights.

The white panel van following behind McCarter and Encizo turned hard right, then angled down an alley that ran parallel to the street they were on.

Phoenix Force was closing in fast.

McCarter and Encizo walked on with their heads slightly lowered, their stocking caps pulled down over the tops of their ears. They looked like a couple of workmen, painters or plasterers in white-spattered coats, pants and shoes, hurrying to get back to a remodel job after an ale break.

They stopped in front of a take-out curry shop. The shopfront was made up of small, wooden-framed windows and a wooden-framed door that was mostly glass. A Closed sign hung in the window.

Through the glass McCarter could see a guy with his back to the entrance, working at a table on the far side of the service counter. He was small, brown, wiry, and he was wearing an orange-stained white apron. Loud, rhythmic music blared from a boom box on a shelf above him. Manic Punjabi rock.

While McCarter shielded Encizo from street view with his big body, the little Cuban deftly popped the lock with a credit card and put his shoulder to the door. Encizo had cased the front door lock the night before.

The glass shuddered in the door as it swung open and a little bell tinkled, announcing the arrival of new customers.

McCarter and Encizo had already pulled down their ski masks when the little guy behind the counter began to turn around, a big chopping cleaver in his hand. He said, “Damn, I thought I…”

The aroma of concentrated spices—cumin, coriander, garlic, bay leaf, cinnamon and onion—permeated the very walls of the cramped little shop.

The curry guy looked from their masks to their white hands and jumped to the obvious conclusion. “You’re in the wrong neighborhood for this game, you bloody skinhead wankers!” he shouted over the music, waving the cleaver in the air. “Do you know who the fuck you’re robbin’?”

McCarter reached under his paint-spattered jacket. The curry guy’s angry black eyes stared down the muzzle of the dehorned blue-steel pistol that was suddenly pointed at his head. The gun sort of looked like a Luger, but wasn’t. IDing the weapon’s make and model was the furthest thing from curry guy’s mind; he was mesmerized by the size of the bore, which was immense.

He dropped the knife on the counter and held up his hands in surrender.

McCarter fired practically point-blank. The .50-caliber pistol didn’t jump in his fist; it didn’t boom deafeningly, either. It whacked, as if someone had dropped a metal pan on the scarred linoleum floor.

Like magic, the red plastic tail of a hypodermic dart appeared in the front of curry guy’s throat. The impact of the projectile and simultaneous explosive injection of bolus of viscous fluid sent him staggering backward into the edge of his worktable. The one-inch-long, hollow needle was unbarbed. The dart immediately fell out of his neck, but the dose of sedative had already been delivered. A madly pounding heart sped the drug through his system. Grimacing in pain, the curry man clutched his throat with both hands, then his mouth began to sag, his face went slack and his eyes rolled up in his head. His knees gave way and he crumpled down behind the counter.

McCarter took another loaded hypo dart from his jacket pocket, opened the breech of the Benjamin-Sheridan Model 179B CO2 pistol and chambered it. Then he cocked the single-shot mechanism. The stock Model 179B pellet pistol had been customized, rebarreled and rechambered into a smooth-bore tranquillizer gun intended for close-range injection of large animals, penned livestock. With the right sedative concoction, it worked just as well on people. Cowboy Kissinger had ground off the ridiculous leaf rear and ramp front target sights so they wouldn’t hang up on their clothing.

Encizo kicked a metal wedge between the door and its floorplate, then kicked another along the jamb near the knob so the door couldn’t be opened from the outside. While he was doing that, McCarter moved beside the bead curtain that separated the storefront from a narrow, windowless hall that led back to the shop’s storage room. With the muzzle of his trank gun, he spread the strands of beads. The corridor was lit by a single bare light bulb in the ceiling. At the far end of the hall, the unpainted hollow-core door was closed. On the other side of that door was their target, Dr. Freddy Hassan, a wealthy Jordanian national. Codenamed “Penguin” by U.S. intelligence services, Dr. Freddy was a suspected international terrorist financier, widely known in London’s tight-knit Islamic community as a philanthropist and benefactor. He always traveled with a private four-man security team.

Personally, McCarter would have preferred to use 9 mm FMJs and silencers on the lot of them, but dead men don’t talk.

And talk was what this mission was all about.

After Encizo joined McCarter at the curtain, the Briton slipped through the dangling beads and took the lead down the hall with weapon raised.

IN MIRROR SUNGLASSES and hooded black sweatshirt, Gary Manning drove the van down the cobblestone alley. Calvin James rode in the passenger seat, likewise in shades and hood. The third man, T. J. Hawkins, was back in the van’s cargo compartment, sitting on a crated junk-yard four-cylinder engine block. The alley was narrow and dotted with puddles of standing water. Empty clotheslines were strung overhead, from the back of one building, across the alley, to the back of the building opposite.

The curry take-out’s rear entrance was on the left, and coming up fast. There was enough room for a delivery truck to pull in, but the space was taken up by two parked cars, both black, top-of-the-line Mercedes sedans with dark-tinted windows all around.

Dr. Freddy’s rides.

Manning stopped the van in the middle of the alley, cranked down his window and stuck his head out.

There was a tall, olive-complected guy standing just inside the rear entrance. He was leaning against the closed metal-sheathed door. His arms were folded across his chest.

“I got a delivery to make inside,” Manning told him. “How about moving one of those cars out of the way so I can pull in the van?”

“Come back later,” said the man in the doorway, who looked like a bodybuilder. His loose-fitting Hilfiger gangsta-wear was open to the navel to show off his pecs and six pack. He had high-top Nike running shoes; all that was missing was the poser, sideways white billcap.

“Can’t do that,” Manning said, leaving the van running and setting the emergency brake. “Got a schedule to keep.”

“Are you deaf, or just stupid? I told you to sod off!” The sentry stepped out of the doorway. With a practiced snap of his wrist, he telescoped a black baton to full length—seventeen inches of spring steel with a weighted steel knob on the business end.

Manning ignored him. He turned on his emergency lights, then got out of the van and headed for the rear doors.

“Hey!” the sentry called at his back.

James and Hawkins exited the far side of the truck. Hawkins, the only one carrying a conventional weapon, covered the shop entrance from the front bumper with a suppressor-equipped machine pistol.

As the sentry rounded the back of the van, Manning raised his trank gun to greet him. The range was three feet and closing.

Manning put the dart between the sentry’s lapels, into a bulging right pec.

The hypo hit the guy hard enough to stop him in his tracks. The color and the anger drained from his face, replaced by shock as he stared at the trank gun and the report echoed down the alley.

It took four seconds for the guy to realize he hadn’t just been shot in the heart. Then he ripped the dart out of his chest in fury and threw it on the ground between them. He brandished the baton. “What you think you’re playing, you fucking bender? Is this some kind of fucking joke?”

In two more seconds, the 250-pound guard was trembling and staggering like a near comatose drunk. Two seconds after that, he went down for the count.

As he fell, he reached out to grab Manning for support. The big Canadian sidestepped out of the way, letting the man topple forward. The sentry banged his head hard on the rear bumper as he went down. He never felt the impact; he was unconscious before he hit the ground.

Manning quickly reloaded the trank gun while James hauled the limp sentry toward the metal door by the back of his jacket collar. A unlocked padlock hung from the door’s hasp.

James and Manning burst through the entrance side by side, with Hawkins right behind them.

A fraction of an instant later, Encizo and McCarter kicked the storeroom door off its hinges.

The brick walls were lined with tiers of cardboard boxes and five-gallon plastic tubs. Four guys sat around a card table in their shirtsleeves, drinking mint tea and smoking tobacco from ornate hookahs. Two of the men carried autopistols in shoulder leather.

Before they could reach for them, the trank guns popped out four darts. On impact, the explosive charges in the hypos made faint flashes in the dim light. The flashes were followed by shrill cries of pain. Two of the bodyguards managed to get to their feet before falling on the floor. The other two never made it off their chairs; they slumped facedown on the card table.

“We’re clear,” McCarter said. He took in the unconscious bodies. “Which one’s our guy?”

“This one,” James said as he raised a stout, black-turbaned man from the table and held him propped in his chair.

Dr. Freddy Hassan was sixty-one years old, long bearded, grizzled, with spectacular bushy eyebrows. He had large pores and a peppering of brown moles on his cheeks, his bloated nose and his forehead.

“Let’s roll,” McCarter said.

James and Hawkins stretched Dr. Freddy out on the floor, belly up. Then Hawkins stripped off the turban, revealing a coiled, bobby-pinned topknot of waist-long, coarse gray hair. He pulled heavy shears and a cordless electric trimmer from his jacket pocket.

The others left Hawkins to it.

Their mission was hit-and-git.

McCarter, Manning, James and Encizo moved quickly, using plastic cable ties on all the downed men, securing wrists behind their backs and tethering their ankles. They confiscated cell phones and ripped the landline out of the wall. After Encizo dragged the curry man into the storeroom with the others, they opened their SOG Auto-Clips and started cutting off the men’s clothes. They took their shoes and socks, too, leaving them naked on the floor.

It wasn’t strictly part of the job, but a little psy ops never hurt.

“Man, you are really messing him up,” James said as he leaned over Hawkins’s shoulder.

“What are you talking about? He looks great,” Hawkins insisted.

He had already hacked off Dr. Freddy’s beard and the long hair, and was going to town with the electric trimmer, crudely shaving his chin, his cheeks and his head. In a final flourish, Hawkins sheared off the dramatic eyebrows, too.

The unconscious financier bled from dozens of tiny cuts where Hawkins had nicked him with scissor points and trimmer blades.

“Looks like he fell into a weedwhacker,” Encizo remarked.

“Even his own mother won’t recognize him,” Manning said.

“DIA will,” McCarter said. “They’ve got his fingerprints.”

Phoenix Force had already accomplished two-thirds of its mission. They had live-captured a high-profile, politically sensitive figure, and changed his appearance so he could be spirited out of the country without raising alarm. All that remained was to arrange a pass off of the captive to an on-the-books U.S. intelligence service. Dr. Freddy was going to wake up in a nameless prison in Syria or Dakar with a twelve-volt battery connected to his balls.

They left the boom box booming in the shopfront to cover cries for help from the bound men after they came to. As James and Encizo carried Dr. Freddy to the back of the van, Manning locked the padlock on the rear entrance.

With McCarter behind the wheel, they were out of the alley and back on the main road in a hurry. He negotiated the crosstown traffic snarls and free-for-all roundabouts like the professional driver he was. As they closed on the drop-off location, McCarter took out a disposable cell phone and made the call to DIA’s London branch.

“I have a package for you,” he said to the man who picked up on the other end. “It’s something that’s been on your wish list for a long time. Highly perishable, though. You need to pick it up in fifteen minutes or less, and move it out of country within two hours.”

“Who the hell is this?” demanded the agent on the other end. “How did you get this number?”

“If you want Penguin, bucko,” McCarter said, “you’d better come and get him before he wakes up and walks away. He’s in the phone booth near the corner of Great Russell and Bloomsbury. An ambulance would do the job nicely.” Then he hung up, wiped the phone down and threw it out the window.

A long line of traffic inched toward the intersection just ahead.

When the van came up alongside a red phone booth, James and Hawkins slid back the side door and jumped out carrying Dr. Freddy between them by the armpits. They quickly muscled him into the booth and shut him inside. There were pedestrians moving in both directions on the sidewalk, but no one stopped. No one said anything. Up at the corner of Bloomsbury and Great Russell Street, the light turned green. James and Hawkins piled back into the van, and McCarter drove on.

A few blocks down he made a left turn and circled the little park in the middle of Bloomsbury Square. When he was sure they hadn’t been followed, he retraced his route on the other side of the street and pulled into a loading zone within sight of the phone booth.

“Now we’re going to see just how good these guys are,” Manning said as he checked his wristwatch for the elapsed time.

The drop-off was close to DIA’s London HQ and a major hospital, where they could commandeer an ambulance.

Despite what McCarter had told the agent, he had no intention of letting someone like Dr. Freddy “walk away.” That’s what the engine block in the back of the van was for. The fallback plan was to chain it to his waist and sink him in the Thames.

People walked right past the booth where Dr. Freddy sat slumped. Nobody paid any attention; in fact, they averted their eyes when they saw him. Given his rough appearance and the neighborhood’s decline, they thought he was an overdosed heroin addict. After about ten minutes, a siren sounded in the distance. A couple of minutes later, an ambulance stopped at the curb beside the phone booth with roof beacon flashing. Two uniformed attendants picked up the unconscious man, loaded him inside, and then the ambulance left the curb, siren blaring.

“Heathrow, here he comes,” James said.

“That’s where we’re heading, too,” McCarter informed the others. “The Gulfstream is fueled and ready to go. Looks like we might have another job on our plates.”

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