The Enemy Inside Page 3

  He’d taped a small metal folding stepladder to his suitcase, on the side concealed by his body. He cut the tape with his folding knife and set the ladder up against the wall. Something brushed by the leg of his jeans. Probably a rat. Storey didn’t move a muscle. Then he began to unzip the suitcase. Very quietly, an inch at a time. He stopped when he heard something on the other side of the wall. It sounded like a door closing.

  Storey strained to hear, but there was too much background noise in the neighborhood to make it out.

  Then, clearly, a key going into a lock. The door in the wall came open with a creaking of hinges. A man stepped out cautiously, a plastic bag in his left hand and his right inside a jacket, despite the heat.

  Storey could accept only two possibilities. Either there was a surveillance camera, and it had picked him up. Or this was a lookout doing a routine check of the alley in the guise of taking out the trash. Since it was only one man, it had to be the second option.

  Storey’s silencer-equipped mini Glock pistol was in the shoulder holster under his shirt. A hell of a place for it, because right now he couldn’t get it out without attention-attracting movement.

  The man took a few steps toward Storey’s hiding place. An Arab, not Latin or Indian. Now Storey didn’t even dare lift one eye above the garbage cans.

  No garbage in the bag, Storey thought, as if to will it to be so. The bag is just camouflage. Go back through the door.

  No. Feet moving closer. Storey could feel the adrenaline surge, his heart beginning to race. He held his breath, afraid it would be heard. Crouched behind the garbage can, Storey knew that as long as he couldn’t see the Arab he couldn’t be seen himself.

  The footsteps were right there. A shadow fell from a security light farther down the alley. Then the top of a head.

  Storey drove himself up off the ground, and the web of his open outstretched hand into the Arab’s throat. That shut off every noise but a strangling sound. The blow caused the Arab to instinctively throw his hands up to his throat, giving Storey enough time to dart around the trash can. A fast kick to the groin bent the Arab over and brought the hands down from the throat.

  Storey stepped forward, swinging his arm around the Arab’s neck and tucking the head into his armpit. He put all his weight down on the back of the head, driving his opponent’s chin down onto his chest. Except under the chin was Storey’s forearm, as a fulcrum, grasped by the other hand, violently lifting up. There was a loud snap, like a piece of green wood broken in two, and an electric shiver ran through the Arab’s body. The broken neck flopped nauseatingly in Storey’s arms, and he eased the body down onto the dirty alley. The dirty alley and the unclean feeling after fighting hand to hand.

  He swept out the pistol and trained it on the open doorway. There was no time to lose now, he had to initiate the attack before they missed the garbage man. Heedless of the noise now, he ripped the suitcase open and keyed his radio four times.

  At the sound of the fourth click, Troy turned to the driver and said, “Go!” He jammed the other earplug into his ear—it was going to be really loud.

  They were only at the end of the street, just out of sight of the house. The driver, a young sergeant all fired up to be on his first real combat operation, floored it. Troy almost yelled at him to slow down but held his tongue, afraid the sergeant would stop instead.

  Troy did keep a close eye on their location. When people got excited strange things happened, like stopping in front of the wrong house.

  The sergeant in fact didn’t slow down in front of the house. He stood on the brakes, sending everyone in the back flying. Troy almost went out the open side door.

  Giving vent to a “Goddammit!” he picked himself up off the floor and picked up the RPG-7 rocket launcher. Nothing more than a 37.43-inch-long piece of steel pipe sheathed in brown wood, with two handgrips, a bell-shaped flare at the end, and an 85mm antitank rocket sticking out of the front.

  Troy scrambled up on the roof of the van so he could see, and shoot, over the top of the wall. He balanced the launcher on his shoulder, aiming for the second-floor window where Storey had noticed the lookout. A spin of the thumb to cock the hammer on the back of the handgrip, an intake of breath to steady the aim, and a squeeze of the trigger.

  A thunderclap of a roar; a brief tongue of flame and longer belch of rolling dark smoke from the rear. But for Troy no sensation of recoil, just a flare of light out in front when the rocket sustainer motor fired downrange. The rocket hit the window and detonated with a bright flash and an even louder roar.

  But by that time Troy had been handed another rocket from inside the van. He slid the slim tail down into the launcher tube, careful to line up the prominent screw on the rocket with the indent on the launcher.

  There was a downstairs room with lights on behind the curtains, and another next to it that was dark. Troy fired his second rocket into the darkened room, per Storey’s instructions.

  The other technicians were covering both ends of the street with AK-47s, careful to stay out of the RPG back-blast area.

  Troy put his third rocket through the lighted window. That ought to do it, he thought.

  After his radio call Storey had rushed to finish assembling the Minimi Para light machine gun. The same gun was used by the United States as the squad automatic weapon, but this one had Belgian markings. With the chopped barrel and collapsing tubular stock, it was only thirty inches long. Storey snapped on the Gemtech Halo sound suppressor, one of the few that could be used on a machine gun without melting into a puddle of molten metal. The plastic box holding the 200-round belt clipped under the receiver. The last step was to cock the bolt and position the first round on the feed tray.

  The now open door to the backyard meant he didn’t have to use the stepladder to aim the machine gun over the wall.

  When the first rocket hit, pulling everyone’s attention to the other side of the house, Storey slipped through the doorway, pulling it closed behind him and throwing himself down onto the grass. He extended the machine gun’s bipod legs to give himself a stable firing platform.

  When the second rocket hit a few seconds later Storey pushed the button safety to “fire.”

  A few seconds later the back door to the house exploded open, sending a column of light onto the lawn. The stampede had begun. He wasn’t worried about being seen—they were coming from a lighted house into darkness.

  They were running hard, panicked, heading for the door into the alley. Storey counted them out. Four, five, six.

  The first one was getting close, but Storey waited patiently for more to leave the house. He could hear the panting; the lead man was almost on top of him. Storey held the trigger down.

  The metal clacking of the bolt cycling back and forth was louder than the hissing of the suppressor. One round in every five was a tracer, and the stabbing red lines cut across the lawn.

  The lead man dropped right in front of Storey, blocking his view, so Storey had to rise up on one knee to get a clear field of fire. He fired five-round bursts, finger bouncing on and off the trigger, just like the well-disciplined Ranger private he’d been seventeen years before, sweeping the gun back and forth across the width of the backyard. When the bullets hit the wall or ground and ricocheted, the normally orderly tracer lines skipped off wildly, some flying up into the night sky.

  The sheer focus on the technical shooting problem demanded that Storey shut his ears to the cries. He watched the bodies pile up in front of him and then quickly shifted his fire. They didn’t have a chance, which is the precise goal of any ambush. They couldn’t make it back to the house, and the walled backyard—intended to keep out enemies—instead trapped them in a killing ground. The ones in back charged him when they saw the front-runners go down. They had as much chance against a single man with a machine gun as the Ndebele tribesmen who’d been the first to try and charge a Maxim gun in 1893.

  When they were all down Storey rose up into a crouch and moved forward. Each body re
ceived a short burst as insurance against anyone playing possum.

  Then he paused and made a quick radio call, mainly so Troy wouldn’t come looking for him. “Clear.”

  Storey cautiously peered through the open doorway into the house, but did not go in. Anyone who wanted to stay alive didn’t go trying to clear houses by themselves.

  Someone had been carrying papers—they were scattered across the lawn. Anticipating this, Storey had a nylon mesh shopping bag tied to his belt and stuffed into his hip pocket. As fast as he could, he shoveled the papers inside. He stopped at each body and frisked it, using his own quick field expedient technique of pressing the fingertips of one hand into a middle page of a passport to preserve the prints for later recovery.

  Two of them had computers in their arms. Storey appreciated them not leaving the machines behind. They were added to his bag.

  Another radio call. “Make the move. ” And almost immediately the sound of a motorcycle roaring up the alley. Storey went to pull open the door to the alley. It had locked automatically. And at least one key was out in the alley. Now that was embarrassing. Darting back to get a running start, he leaped for the top of the wall. Weighed down by computers, papers, and machine gun, he only got it with his fingertips. Storey swung his hips, using the momentum to bring his legs up. He managed to hook one heel over the top of the wall, and kicked hard with the other leg to lever his body up on top. He rolled over the wall and dropped to the other side, angry with himself for wasting so much time.

  Covering the alley with the machine gun, Storey hopped onto the back of the waiting motorcycle.

  No sirens, no neighbors in sight other than curious faces in the windows. In the tropics people stayed up late to do as much living as possible in the cool of the evening. But everyone was staying out of this one. Sensible.

  They came out the other side of the alley, and the van was waiting for them two blocks away. Storey passed the Minimi and the shopping bag through the open door, and they all got moving again.

  The next stop was two miles down the road. Everyone removed their personal baggage from the van, and then hoisted the motorcycle inside. It would remain there, along with the Minimi, the RPG -7, and the AK- 47s. Before they locked the van, Troy gave a twist to the egg timers taped to the two plastic jugs full of gasoline and detergent, each topped with an electric blasting cap. It was always a good idea to light two of everything—one might turn out to be a dud. As the SEALs say: one is none, two is one. In about ten minutes all the incriminating evidence, along with any fingerprints and DNA they might have left behind, would be burned up along with the van.

  A short walk to another van—different make, different color—and once again they were off. Now to the Freedom Bridge, and Brazil. A one-way trip this time, because the town was about to get kind of hot.

  Their fake passports were tucked away, and they went back to being U.S. diplomats with diplomatic immunity. Even though the names on those documents weren’t genuine.

  Storey busied himself during the drive by emptying out the shopping bag, making neat piles of passports and identity cards, some of them badly bloodstained.

  “How many?” Troy asked.

  “Seven,” Storey replied. “Good shooting on the RPG.”

  “Made a real mess.”

  “If you’d just sniped through the windows with a rifle, they would have hit the floor, thought it over, and decided to stay and fight. But rockets hitting the house turned it into a stampede.”

  “Think we got ’em all?”

  “Don’t rightly know. If any stayed in the house, good luck to them. We’ll get intel later, check the police reports.”

  “Speaking of the cops, they weren’t in any hurry to show up, were they?”

  “You’re a city cop, and a call comes in someone’s shooting RPGs into a house. Would you want to be the first responder?”

  “Nope, don’t think so.”

  They all flew commercial to Rio de Janeiro, then split up, taking different airlines and different connections back to Washington so they’d be harder to trace.

  Chapter Two

  Once you get off the main drags in Studio City, California, you find quiet neighborhoods of neat, single-story homes. The grounds mostly immaculate and the house numbers, according to the local custom, painted on the curbs.

  A pickup truck equipped with commercial toolboxes and a ladder on the back cruised slowly down the street. The cable companies had all moved to independent contractors to do their service and repair work, to cut costs, so nowadays you saw more and more generic trucks and vans with vinyl magnetic signs slapped onto the doors.

  The pickup stopped in front of a house near the end of the street, and two workers got out instead of the usual one. A man and a woman, wearing jeans and cable company polo shirts, laminated clip-on ID badges, and tool belts.

  The man crossed the street. The woman knocked on the door of the house. She had fine auburn hair, tied in the back. There was no answer.

  She passed by the next house, knocking at the one on the other side.

  This time, an old lady’s voice said from behind the door, “What do you want?”

  The redhead smiled into the peephole and said, “Adelphia Cable, ma’am. Are you having any trouble with your TV?”

  “No.”

  “Well, we’ve had some power fluctuations in the neighborhood, so we’re checking all the homes.”

  The door opened and revealed a silver-haired lady in her seventies, wearing a turquoise nylon jogging suit. “I don’t believe it! You’re from the cable company?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “The last time I had a problem with my Internet service, I called you up. And the recording said the customer service number changed, and to call another number. But by the time I got a pencil and paper, the recording was over and I had to call all over again. When I called that number do you know who I talked to? A man in Colorado. Colorado! You have to call Colorado for a service call in Los Angeles. I made an appointment, and you never showed up. Then I was out shopping, and a man called my cell phone saying he was waiting at my front door. On a day I didn’t even make an appointment! After that nonsense I went back to dial-up, and I don’t even want to tell you how long it took to get them to stop sending me bills for the service I cancelled. I’m thinking about satellite TV now ...”

  “I know just how you feel, ma’am,” the redhead replied, for a cable company employee strangely unperturbed about the amount of time she’d been standing there. In fact, she was all sympathy and warmth. “They mess up all our appointments, then send us out to try and put everything right. But you’re not having any trouble with your TV reception?”

  “No, honey. I was just watching Judge Judy. And aren’t you a sweet thing. Are you single?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m married.”

  “You’re not wearing a ring. Are you separated?”

  The redhead smiled. Her faint freckles nicely accompanied wide cheekbones and merry brown eyes. “No, ma’am. I just don’t wear my ring while I’m working. I don’t want to get it caught in anything.”

  “That’s too bad. I’ve got a wonderful nephew. But he can’t seem to meet any nice girls.”

  “Don’t worry, ma’am. I’m sure he will. I’m so sorry to have bothered you. Have a very nice afternoon.”

  As she turned down the walk, the homeowner called out, “Honey!”

  The redhead turned. “Yes, ma’am?”

  “I used to have a rear end like yours. Enjoy it while you’ve got it.”

  The redhead laughed heartily. “Thanks, I will.”

  She was already down to the sidewalk and out of range of any reply. Stopping in front of the house she’d originally passed by, she waited for her partner to return from knocking on all the doors in view on the other side of the street.

  “Nobody at home,” he said. “You?”

  “One little old lady next door.”

  “Should we have gotten her all interested?�
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  “She’d be watching us out her windows anyway. Now she’s satisfied, she knows what we’re doing.”

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s go around back.”

  They still didn’t knock on the door, but went around to the backyard through a gate in the wooden fence.

  “Nice,” the man said. “The fence does cover the windows.”

  “You never know,” she said. “Don’t take any chances. Sell the thing all the way.”

  “All right, all right.”

  They both paused to put on gloves. But not work gloves. Latex gloves.

  They appeared to trace the cable down the side of the house, stopping at the electric meter. The redhead produced a pair of cutters from her tool belt and clipped the wire seal on the meter and stuck it into her pocket. Grasping the glass barrel with both hands, she pulled the meter out of the socket, gave it a twirl so the plug wasn’t lined up, and left it resting there in the box. To all appearances still connected.

  While tracing the cable wire around the nearest window, the redhead took a thin-bladed palette knife from her belt and slid it in the crack between the upper and lower window frames. She yanked the knife sharply toward her, and the window lock popped open.

  After sliding the window open she paused for a moment. There wasn’t supposed to be any dog, but if there was it would show up shortly. No dog. And no power in the house meant no burglar alarm. The vast majority of alarm buyers failed to shell out that extra money for the backup unit that sent a radio signal if the power and phone were cut. The phone had already been cut.

  The redhead leaned through the window, as if looking for something. Then she was inside. Having learned from experience that she might need it, she checked again to make sure her walkie-talkie was on.

  She walked through the living room, checking the layout, making her decisions.

  Cops like to say that every burglar has a pattern. The redhead went directly to the light switches. Why? Because she wasn’t stealing anything. She had in her pocket a court order issued by a U.S. magistrate judge, authorizing Special Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to physically enter the target location in order to deploy, maintain, utilize, and remove the means to effect video and audio surveillance upon the interior of the target location. The document ordered further that Special Agents of the FBI were authorized to enter the target location surreptitiously, covertly, and by breaking and entering, if necessary, in order to deploy those means.