“For four rounds I’m good, then I guess I’ll just admire the artwork.”
“We’ll find you a weapon,” he said, and then, “On me.”
She put a hand on his right shoulder. Together they rose and began moving slowly up the dim and smoky hallway, their bodies close together.
* * *
• • •
Matt Hanley stood in silence, his hands raised alongside another seven men and women in cocktail attire. The two security men who had been in the room had both been killed at the doorway to the well-appointed office, but so far no one else had been harmed.
Hanley knew Sedgwick was behind the steel door inside the closet on his right, and he had two security men in there, as well. The ambo was safe, for now, but Hanley couldn’t say the same for himself and those with him.
Hanley was unarmed, and he wished he had his trusty old Colt 1911 with him right now.
But he did have one thing. He had communication with the three Poison Apple assets who were somewhere else in the building.
Gunfire continued downstairs, and in different parts of the second floor, as well. This remained a fluid scene, but the four terrorists who made it into the ambassador’s home office now had the door shut and blocked with a small but heavy wooden bookshelf, and they’d effectively cut off the ambassador from any hope of rescue.
At first two terrorists had entered the office; one he recognized as Mirza himself, and with him was an older man in black who appeared uninjured. Moments later, however, a man with an AK crawled into the room, a trail of blood behind him, and he rolled onto his side and pointed his gun back out onto the mezzanine he’d just left.
The ambulatory Iranian knelt down and patted the man on the shoulder to check on him, while Mirza held his gun on the group gathered here.
Within moments a fourth and then a fifth terrorist entered; it seemed clear to Hanley they’d all been ordered to come to this location, which meant Mirza had known the ambo would flee here to his panic room.
Hanley and all the others were searched for weapons and phones. No one had a gun, but all the phones were tossed into the corner. Still, Hanley’s tiny, skin-tone earpiece was in place in his left ear, so even though his phone was not on his person, he could hear the Poison Apple team as they moved around on the roof and downstairs, and he could communicate with them if he had to, simply by speaking.
Haz Mirza immediately stepped over to Ryan Sedgwick’s walnut desk and sat down behind it, and then he surprised Hanley by taking off his backpack and pulling out a laptop computer, as if he were at Starbucks doing his schoolwork, save for the polymer-and-metal Kalashnikov hanging on his chest.
He opened his computer and began typing, but soon he shouted in annoyance in Farsi to his men. Clearly he saw something on his laptop he didn’t like.
Quickly the DDO realized what had the terrorist so worked up. Hightower had shot down his reconnaissance drone, which had been giving Mirza the clearest picture of the situation outside.
The Iranian went to work on his laptop, no doubt tasking another craft of the swarm to be his main visual reference point.
* * *
• • •
On the roof Hightower had taken a grand total of one shot at a one-yard-square target in the dark hundreds of yards above his head, and he’d missed. He had no way to determine if his shot was high or low, left or right, and he recognized the folly of this task. He figured he shouldn’t do any more wild-ass-guess shooting up here unless he had to, because two dozen police cars were in view, approaching up Clayallee, and he didn’t want to get sprayed with lead by Berlin’s finest.
He did continue to scan the sky, and while doing this he saw one of the quadcopters leave its formation and descend straight down. It stopped over the park, roughly in the same spot as the drone he’d shot down, and now he realized he did have a chance to take down a second of what appeared to be about twenty of the unmanned aerial vehicles.
He lined up his shot as he’d done before, well aware that even though he was firing up, his round would still go somewhere if he missed, and he might end up shooting some poor hapless civilian in southern