Blackout - By Tom Barber Page 0,23

have to ask - are these men friends of yours?’

He looked down at her. ‘No. Why?’

‘Well I’m very sorry sir, but one of them was found dead not an hour ago.’

The agent paused, right there in the corridor, people continuing to rush past, some of them bumping into him in their hurry to leave the building. Jean stopped too, looking at his face for some answers, people streaming past them on either side.

‘What?’ he asked her. ‘How?’

‘He was strangled in his car with a wire in a DC suburb parking lot. A Metro night patrolman found him.'

He looked down at her. 'The others?'

'Nothing yet, sir. I'll keep trying.'

Without a word, the man turned and moved through the door, headed for the exit.

He suddenly felt very cold and extremely worried.

Two of the men down in the same morning.

An anthrax threat in the building.

This wasn't a coincidence.

He glanced out of the front of the building at the mass of people being cordoned off by police, HAZMAT vehicles already arrived, their team climbing into white bio-suits. As he moved through the front door, letting Lynn out ahead of him, he stopped and scanned the crowd nervously, searching for anyone who was looking back at him. The cave echo of Charlie Adams’ name in his mind was gone, replaced by four other words instead.

They've come for us.

Outside the ARU headquarters, in a black car parked outside the lot on the other side of the street, two men watched in silence as the doors to the police unit suddenly burst open.

The pair in the car were dressed in black military fatigues, boots on their feet, gloves on their hands. Stowed beside them were two AK-47 Kalashnikov rifles, balaclavas resting on the butt of each weapon. They had duct-taped a second magazine to the underside of the one currently slapped into each weapon for ease of reloading, and each man also had three more stowed in pouches in their fatigues, close to Beretta 92F pistols that were tucked into holsters on their hips as backup firepower.

They watched in silence, side-by-side in the car, as the police officers ran to three black 4x4 Fords, all of them dressed in navy blue combat overalls, each man zipping up tactical vests and carrying MP5 sub-machine guns and black gas masks. The officers started pulling open the doors, climbing into the vehicles, and all three engines fired up. They watched in silence as the cars began to reverse out and then move forward to the parking lot exit. As the Fords started pulling out and speeding off, one of the two men in black pulled a mobile phone from his pocket and dialled a number.

The call connected to the man back at the command post.

‘It worked, sir. They’re leaving,’ he said, an Eastern European accent.

Pause.

‘Wait till they are gone. Then kill the man called Cobb. Like I told you, shoot him in the head. Give him the whole magazine.’

‘Yes sir.’

The man in the car ended the call as the last of the three Fords turned out of the lot.

And the two men watched as the entire counter-terrorist task force left the police station unprotected.

SEVEN

Behind the wheel of the lead Ford, Porter put his foot down and the car sped off down the street, heading towards Grosvenor Square and the US Embassy, moving fast. When his predecessor, Mac, had been sergeant of the squad, Porter had been allocated driving duties due to the quality and speed of his driving. Now, with Mac gone and as Sergeant of the task force, Porter could have offloaded driving responsibilities to someone else, but as he was the best guy behind the wheel in the squad, he insisted on continuing with the task.

Beside him, Fox was finishing adjusting a throat mic around his neck whilst Archer and Chalky did the same in the back seats, all of the officers now dressed in navy blue combat overalls, black tactical vests with mobile phones tucked in slots, plasti-cuffs, tools and spare ammunition zipped up over their torso. Once secured, the black Velcro-bound strips on each man’s neck allowed the team to communicate on the ground, up to a radius of seven miles. Each man had a pressel switch on the front of his uniform and an earpiece tucked into his ear. If he wanted to communicate with the other men on the squad all he had to do was push the button and start talking.

As he finished adjusting his mic, Archer frowned. He'd caught a glimpse of