“Good.”

“However, once we have her back I’m going to need you folks to disappear for a while until we can roll up the people behind Pauline’s abduction. If you don’t have someplace, we can get you a hotel.”

Mare Lawless put up an arresting hand. “No need. An old friend of mine has a cottage down on the Gulf Coast that he lets us use anytime we want.”

Juan considered this option and decided it was safe enough. He nodded. “That sounds perfect. This might take us a couple of weeks.”

“Take as long as you need,” Kay said quickly, and with the resolve of a woman protecting her own. She turned when there was a knock on the sliding-glass door that led to the backyard patio. She shrieked with joy when she saw her son, standing next to the wicker table and chairs.

She unlatched the door and hugged MacD intensely, tears running unabashedly down her cheeks. Marion Senior joined them and threw his arms over his family. He too was crying with joy, and also the guilt of not being able to protect MacD’s only child.

If he was honest with himself, the scene made Juan choke up some as well.

They stayed for only an hour. Cabrillo wanted enough daylight to locate and study the house the kidnappers were using. MacD explained everything to his parents, only leaving out his treatment at the hands of the Insein Prison jailors, the fact that he’d had a rope bridge shot out from under him, and a few other details he felt it best they not know. It was still a harrowing story that left Kay Lawless a little pale under her tan.

They left amid smiles and more tears. MacD promised he’d come home as soon as they nailed the person behind Pauline’s abduction.

The neighborhood where the videoconference originated hadn’t been adopted by a celebrity or been the recipient of a generous grant. Many of the houses were still boarded up, though, at the very least, most of the trash had been removed. This was the section of New Orleans that was hardest hit when the levees failed and had been a virtual lake in the days following Katrina. Nearby were vacant lots with only crumbling concrete pads to mark the grave sites of families’ homes.

Linc dropped MacD and Cabrillo at a coffee shop not too far from their intended target. In this area, two white men and a black man in the same car would look suspiciously like cops no matter who was behind the wheel. He returned thirty minutes later, and helped himself to the chicory coffee from the pot Juan had ordered.

“Well?” Cabrillo asked after Linc had stopped making a sour face at the bitter taste of the coffee.

“Nasty,” he pronounced. “Okay, the satellite pics we have are a little out of date. The two houses behind the one we’re interested in have been demolished, and the lots are practically jungles. The ones on either side are still there and completely shuttered. There are families living across the street. I saw kids’ bikes chained in their yards, and toys and stuff on the lawn, so we need to be careful there.”

“What about the kidnappers?” MacD asked, his anxiety level spiking.

“Never showed themselves. The shades are drawn in all the windows, but I believe there are tiny gaps at the edges that they can see out of and only a professional Peeping Tom could see in. And Juan, you were right about the lawn. It looks like a goat’s buffet. Those guys are holed up tight and probably go out only at night, to get food from a store miles from here.”

“So was that an attached garage we saw on the pictures?”

“Yes.”

“Did you get a chance to run a thermal scan?”

“No. It would look too suspicious, and it’s still too warm outside. Not enough of a temperature difference to register properly.”

Cabrillo had suspected as much but felt he should ask anyway. “Okay. We lay low and then go in at one and assault at three.” Three a.m. is when the human body is at its lowest ebb. Even a guard on night duty succumbs to the body’s natural circadian rhythms and would be far from alert. “MacD, you cool?”

“Yeah,” he replied. “Ah won’t let my emotions interfere with the op.”

Even in such a tumbledown neighborhood, the men couldn’t go skulking around in full combat gear and armed to the teeth. As one o’clock approached, Linc parked the car several streets over from the target house and popped open the hood. Any passing police patrol would see that it was a disabled vehicle and that the driver had left it for the night. A curious cop might run the plates, see that it was a rental, and assume it was a relative displaced by Katrina to Houston, as so many were, back home for a visit.

They all wore dark jeans and long-sleeved T-shirts, and their equipment was stuffed in duffel bags. The air was markedly cooler, though the humidity remained high. They walked normally along the cracked sidewalk as if they didn’t have a care in the world. There was no traffic, and the only sound came from a barking dog several blocks over.

When they reached the jungled lot behind the target house, the men faded into it as if they’d never existed. From here on out, they were invisible. Bags whispered open, and equipment was triple-checked. They oozed their way through the foliage. If any of them noticed that most of the plants were studded with wicked sharp thorns, no one gave any indication. After five minutes of silently crawling through the underbrush, they came into the clear. A wooden fence, missing slats like a mouth missing teeth, encircled the backyard and blocked most of the view. Unperturbed, Cabrillo hefted the thermal imager from a bag strapped to his side and climbed atop a chunk of concrete left over from when this parcel had been a home.

The scanner worked by comparing heat signatures, and had uncanny sensitivity. It basically allowed him to see through walls as though he had X-ray vision. They were so effective that many civil liberties groups were fighting their use by law enforcement agencies because of right-to-privacy issues. The military had high hopes for the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, but oftentimes the mud huts’ walls were too thick to get accurate readings. But here, with a house so old it lacked even basic insulation, the scanner was in its element.

Cabrillo could see four distinct heat signatures, which glowed white in his vision, and a squat rectangle of absolute black, which would be the cold water stored in the only bathroom’s toilet cistern. There were three other spots showing heat. One was cylindrical and would be the hot-water tank. Another was much smaller and was the warm compressor motor for the refrigerator. There was no glowing pilot light, so the stove was electric. In this way not only did Juan see the occupants, he could decipher the house’s layout. Three of the people were in repose, their bodies seeming to float a few feet above the floor because the scanner couldn’t see the beds they were lying on. The fourth figure was sitting upright as if in a chair, a lightbulb glowing cheerily over him.

He concentrated on the seated person for fifteen minutes, and in all that time the figure didn’t move once. If Juan had to venture a guess, he’d say the guy was sound asleep.

Next he moved off to th

e right about twenty yards, through the grass, until he came up against the trunk of a tree. He was close enough now to peer over the fence. He scoped the house a second time. Because he’d shifted position he saw the same objects from a different angle and could confirm that his mental picture of its layout was accurate.

He rejoined his team, and they retreated back into the woods.

Tags: Clive Cussler Oregon Files Thriller
Source: readsnovelonline.net