Brown said, “Fifty seconds out.”
More rounds were seated in chambers. A few soldiers coughed or blew their noses. The tension in the van was remarkably low, given the task ahead. Then again, the men and women following Brown were highly trained. This was neither a new drill nor an unfamiliar assignment.
They pulled onto a spur road that hooked around back to the west, where it met the Lincoln Memorial Cemetery. The van stopped where three streetlights had gone dark thanks to Crosman pellet guns two of his men used the night before. Brown’s driver killed the headlights. The rear of the van opened, and four men dressed head to toe in black spilled out.
Brown got out after them. Before clicking shut the passenger-side door, he said, “Oh three thirty.”
The driver nodded and drove away. The second van disgorged its passengers as well, and soon eight men and two women were climbing up and over the wall and into the cemetery. They turned on night-vision goggles. They wove through the green shadows and tombstones on a route that had been scoute
d repeatedly in the past three weeks. The intelligence was solid. So was this entry and exit route.
Now it was just a matter of executing the plan.
With his sore knee, Brown struggled to keep up, but he soon joined the others strung out along the tree line as they looked across a junky parking lot toward a dark and abandoned machine-tool factory. He listened, heard the purr of gas-fired electric generators, several of them, which was all the evidence you really needed to know that there was more to that relic of a factory than met the eye.
“See them, right there?” Cass whispered. “Two by the door, one on either end? Just like I told you.”
Cass was a big woman in her early thirties with short blond hair, and she was extraordinarily strong from years spent training in CrossFit. She was also one of the most competent and loyal people Brown had ever met. He’d had her scout the machine shop, knowing she’d do the job right.
He turned up the magnification on his night-vision, peered across the lot, and spotted the first two guards. They were lying on mattresses on either side of a double door. A third smoked a cigarette at the far corner. The fourth sat on his haunches at the opposite end of the building.
“Formation is the same,” Brown murmured into his microphone. “Cass and Hobbes, take the center. Price and Fender, the flanks.”
They padded softly toward their prey. The two guards sleeping at the doors didn’t have a chance to stir or make a peep before Cass and Hobbes snapped their necks. And the two watching the corners of the factory had no warning as Price and Fender came up behind them, flipped loops of piano wire over their heads, and crushed their throats.
Chapter
19
In the misty August dawn, six patrol cars with lights flashing formed a broad perimeter around an abandoned machine-tool factory in Anacostia. Despite the early hour, small groups of people were standing outside on stoops and sidewalks, peering at the old brick building as if it were some cursed place.
Bree, Sampson, and I had responded because we were closest, and we found the two patrolmen who’d made the discovery shaken.
They laid out the situation, which began with an anonymous call to 911 and ended with what they’d found in the old factory.
“We saw enough to fall back and call in the cavalry,” one said.
“You did right,” I said. “Show us.”
The officers led us around the rear of the building. We could hear generators rumbling inside when we turned the corner and saw the first strangled man sprawled ten feet away on gravel and weeds.
The piano wire that had killed him was embedded in his flesh. Early twenties, Hispanic, better than six feet tall and well over two hundred hard pounds, he wore a black wifebeater, baggy denim, expensive Nike basketball shoes, and lots of gold bling.
“Took somebody awful strong to do this,” Bree said.
“You know it,” Sampson said.
I dug through the victim’s front pockets and came up with cash and a vial of pinkish powder.
“Tastes like meth,” I said after dipping a gloved finger into it.
There was something odd about the angle of the dead man’s hips, so I pushed the body forward. Nothing on the ground. But when I lifted the tail of his shirt, there was a 9mm Ruger in a concealed-carry holster at the small of his back.
“He never got the chance to go for his gun,” I said.
“So somebody awful strong and awful sneaky quiet,” Bree said.
There were three other dead men outside the factory. The two by the doors were African American and had suffered broken necks. The one at the far corner was Caucasian and had also been strangled with piano wire. All of them were buff. All of them were armed. Not one of them carried an ID.