harness and gloves with him and had decided his best bet was to go down and cross the street out of sight of the guards in the lobby, and then make his way up the wall and move all the way up to either the rooftop to access the door there or, better still, find some breachable window along the way.
He was taking his time, though. There was always more tactical intelligence to pull off a target before acting, and many an operation had failed because someone had decided they knew enough to push ahead when they were, in fact, missing the one critical piece of information that spelled the difference between life and death.
He had his suppressed and subsonic short-barreled rifle up here with him, but it was zipped in its case. He had no plans to shoot anybody tonight, but he’d wanted the weapon on hand in case organized criminal elements who were clearly working with Cassidy were present and this whole thing went south.
He’d climb carrying only his Glock, which wasn’t much firepower, but slinging the .300 Blackout SBR up the side of a building on his back, using the thin aluminum and wet masonry as foot and handholds, would be no fun at all.
He’d left the Glock 43 back at the apartment, not wanting to be encumbered by anything strapped to his ankle while he climbed.
He took a break to eat a bag of raisins he’d brought with him, and to drink his last bottle of water. He bit into a protein bar, chewed a moment, then shoved the rest into his mouth.
He picked his binos up one last time before descending and gave one final slow scan to the building across the street when his night vision image stopped and froze on the northeast corner of the structure. There he saw a figure dressed in black, stepping over the third-floor balcony and then crouching down by the door latch there.
Where the hell did he come from?
It seemed to be some sort of a burglar, or someone with the exact same plans he had: to snoop on one of the offices inside.
This was opposite to the end of the building from where Cassidy’s office was, but there was no way he could penetrate the building now that there was some other jackass in there, potentially tripping off alarms or otherwise drawing attention to the place.
No, he’d have to sit tight and watch.
“Asshole,” he muttered as the figure opened the latch and disappeared inside the building.
* * *
• • •
Zoya Zakharova had performed a grand total of twelve minutes’ reconnaissance on the building before walking across a darkened portion of the street away from the lights of the front lobby, leaping up onto a thin iron pipe along the wall, and then pulling herself to a first-floor windowsill. From there she free-climbed up to the second story, which in Europe meant she was now three floors above the ground. It had taken her all of forty seconds, and after vaulting a balcony railing and dropping behind it, then picking a simple latch lock and slipping into what appeared to be an office break room, she squatted in the corner and listened for noises.
There was a patrol of two guards; she heard them talking as they passed, and then a stairwell door opened and she heard two pairs of feet descending. She stood and went for the door, then began skulking up the hall. She had two stories to climb, and to do it she moved towards the stairwell on the opposite side of the building from the one the guards used.
* * *
• • •
“Where are you, you stupid son of a bitch?” Court muttered to himself on the roof across the street. He continued to scan with his binos, looking through every window he could see, desperately trying to get some sort of a fix on the intruder.
While doing this he tapped his earpiece, placing a call to the one number in his phone.
Twenty seconds later he got an answer. “Brewer.”
“No chance you have someone else doing a sneak-and-peek on Cassidy’s building, is there?”
“No chance whatsoever. I assumed you could handle that by yourself. Was I overly optimistic?”
“Well, I could have, if some random dipshit didn’t just scale the side of the building and climb in through a balcony door.”
“You’re kidding. What if he’s going for the safe?”
“Then I guess I’ll smash him over the head when he gets out of there, and I’ll take whatever