Footsteps. Slow, deliberate, the crunch of grit under hard soles getting closer. He was on our street now. I could track his approach by sound alone, the footsteps growing louder, steadier, and then a pause. A long pause, right outside the van, close enough that I could hear the fabric of his jacket shifting as he turned.
A flashlight beam swept across the rear windows. It hit the tinted glass and scattered, throwing a weak amber glow across the ceiling that crawled from one side to the other like a slow searchlight. I held my breath. Beside me, Derby’s hand closed around his taser.
The footsteps moved again. Down the passenger side of the van now, slower, and I heard him try the door handle. Locked. A beat. He moved to the sliding side door and tried that. Locked. Another beat.
Then a sound that made my stomach drop, the scrape of metal on metal. He was working the rear door latch with some kind of tool. A knife, a pry bar, something thin enough to slide into the gap between the doors.
Derby rose from his seat in absolute silence, a movement so controlled it was almost mechanical, his body unfolding in the dark. He positioned himself two feet from the rear doors, taser up, feet spread, his free hand braced against the wall for balance.
The latch gave.
The right door swung open six inches, and the scout’s face appeared in the gap, round, stubbled, eyes already narrowing as they adjusted from the streetlight to the darkness inside the van. For one frozen second he saw nothing. Then his brain caught up to what his eyes were processing—the shape of Derby’s silhouette, the outline of the monitors, all of it registering in the same instant that Derby moved.
The taser crackled. Two probes hit the man center mass and his body seized. A full-body convulsion that locked every muscle at once, his jaw clamping shut on a sound that never made it out of his throat. He dropped straight down, his knees buckling, his shoulder hitting the bumper on the way to the asphalt. Derby was on him before he stopped twitching, one knee in his back, hands wrenched behind him, zip ties cinched tight around his wrists with the speed of someone who’d done it a thousand times. Doug was right behind him with a second set for the ankles, and between the two of them they had the man trussed and gagged and hauled into the van in under fifteen seconds.
Derby pulled the doors shut. The lock engaged with a click that sounded like a gunshot in the silence.
“Clear,” Derby said, barely winded.
The scout lay on the floor of the van, breathing hard through his nose, his eyes wide and darting. He was maybe forty, with a thick neck and gym-built arms that strained his jacket sleeves.
Doug powered the monitors back up. The screens bloomed to life, and the dock district reappeared—quiet, empty, unchanged. Nobody had heard. Nobody had seen.
I checked my watch. Ten thirty-three.
“Jack,” Derby said into the radio. “We had a visitor. Scout on the perimeter, checking vehicles. He found us. He’s been neutralized and secured in the van.”
“Anyone else?”
“Negative. He was alone.”
“Copy. Are we compromised?”
Derby looked at the scout on the floor, then at the monitors showing the still-quiet dock district. “Negative. Nobody saw.”
“Then we go now. Before they miss him.” Jack’s voice shifted, broadening to the full channel. “All units, this is Lawson. Execute, execute, execute.”
Three words. That was all it took.
On the center monitor, Danforth’s team moved. They came out of the darkness like they’d been manufactured from the night—black tactical gear, helmets, rifles up, moving in a column toward the loading dock with the fluid precision of men who trained for exactly this. The point man reached the loading dock door, and a second later the battering ram hit it with a sound I felt in my chest even from two blocks away. A deep, concussive boom that rolled through the dock district like thunder from underground.
Then they were inside, and the monitors erupted.
Doug’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “Margot, give me body cams. All of them.”
The three screens split into a grid. Twelve feeds from twelve helmet-mounted cameras, each one a lurching, strobing rectangle of chaos. Flashlight beams slashed across brick walls. Boots pounded down concrete stairs. The feeds shook with every step, every turn, the images so fractured and violent that watching them was like trying to read a book someone was tearing apart in front of you.
“Stairwell,” Doug said, pointing to the upper left feed. “They’re going down.”
The lead camera plunged into darkness, the flashlight beam catching the curve of old brick as the tunnel opened up at the bottom. Then the work lights hit, harsh, white, flooding the feed with sudden overexposure, and for one frozen frame I saw it. The ring. The crowd.
Hundreds of faces turning toward the stairwell entrance with the identical expression of animals caught in headlights.
Then everything happened at once.
“Breach! Breach! Stairs going down, moving to lower level?—”
“Contact right—two armed, east wall?—”
