Origin Page 6

  Within two seconds, he had spotted the sharpshooter on the roof, rifle aimed at the window, as well as the reflection in the shopfronts opposite of two men waiting by the Hostal Americano foyer below him.

  ‘Get by the side of the window!’ Adams whispered forcefully to Lynn. Then he pulled the nearest bed across the floor, using it to barricade the door. It wouldn’t stop the team for more than a few extra seconds, but it would be enough.

  Eldridge had met up with his men at the hotel at three in the morning. He had listened to their briefing, drawn his own equipment, and laid out the plans for the capture of the fugitives.

  At seven o’clock the same morning, he had led his team down the stairs and watched as his two lead men had raced at the door, small metal battering ram held between them. The strategy was pure ‘shock and awe’ on the small unit tactical level – smash through the door, disorientate the targets with stun grenades, and effect a quick arrest, subduing both people with force if necessary.

  But although the door had shattered, it had not caved forwards into the room as expected. Why the hell not?

  ‘Murphy!’ he called. ‘What’s the hold-up?’

  As the man on the right used the ram again, he called back, ‘There’s a bed behind the door! They knew we were coming!’

  Eldridge pressed the toggle on his tactical mic, speaking directly to the sharpshooter on the opposite roof. He would have liked to have more men outside, but their resources were necessarily limited in such a remote location.

  ‘Williams, what do you see?’

  ‘Nothing, movement at the window a moment ago – wait a second, they’ve broken through the window, the male target has something in his hand, he – arrgghh!’

  Eldridge’s blood went cold as the connection went dead.

  Sprinting once more towards the window, Adams had grabbed Lynn by the hand, dragging her with him. In his other hand, he had snatched up a large mirror from the dressing table. At the window he pulled the curtain back and slammed his booted foot straight through it; the glass shattered, falling to the ground two storeys below.

  An instant later, ignoring the cries of Lynn as he secured his grip on her wrist, Adams thrust the mirror up and out, angling its reflection straight at the sniper opposite. He saw the man recoil instinctively from the sudden, intense reflection of sunlight that hit him in the eye through the telescopic lens of his rifle, then heard the team behind him thumping against the door, breaking it down, and in that tiny window of opportunity, he pulled Lynn forward and jumped with her straight out of the window.

  Adams had seen the wide, canvas awning over the entrance to the hotel’s foyer when he had arrived, and then later confirmed that Lynn’s room was directly above it, two floors up.

  Jumping was a risk – they could easily hit a metal support strut – but the odds were more favourable than staying in the room and taking on six armed men.

  Adams was pleased that Lynn didn’t scream on the way down, although he didn’t know if it was bravery or shock. Either way, though, silence was a good thing – he hoped that the men below hadn’t already been alerted by the broken glass, as he would need every advantage he could get.

  They hit the fabric straight on and, using the bounce from the awning, Adams gripped the edge rail with one hand, his other arm going round Lynn’s waist, and swung round and down, letting go at the end of the swing and dropping lightly to the ground, right in front of the two men he had seen earlier.

  As he landed he let go of Lynn, who staggered disorientated to the side. The men’s eyes went wide as they saw him, hands on their earpieces, obviously receiving communication from the team above.

  Before they could react, Adams launched himself forward, his full body weight behind a heavy straight right to the first man’s jaw. Adams saw the eyes go, and as the man dropped unconscious to the ground, Adams was already twisting to the other side, throwing a left hook towards the second man. It connected but his timing was off, and the man just staggered back, hurt but still a threat.

  Adams saw him instinctively go for the pistol in his belt, and then saw his head twist round from another heavy impact. He turned, and saw Lynn standing there, backpack in her hands, having swung it at the man with all her might.

  Adams was impressed, but Lynn had always been a tough one. The man was still conscious but he was down. Adams suddenly remembered the sniper opposite. His vision might be impaired but he was still capable of getting off some shots.

  He pulled Lynn to one side, taking shelter behind one of the two huge terracotta plant pots stationed on either side of the main entrance even as his suspicions were confirmed and the rounds hit the sidewalk where they had just been standing. Adams noticed that the impacts left no mark, except for small black smears – rubber bullets. They could still be deadly if the target was unfortunate but it indicated that whoever was after them wanted them alive.

  That was the good news.

  The bad news was that they were now stuck between a sniper on one side and a team of men in the hotel behind them. The sniper might only have rubber bullets but they would still incapacitate them easily enough. If they ran into the street, they would be shot with these bullets; if they retreated back into the hotel, they would be greeted by the six men who would now doubtless be racing down the stairs to the foyer.

  Adams made a quick calculation in his head – from the time he had broken the window and they had jumped, he guessed no more than fifteen seconds had passed. During that time, the team upstairs was probably only just through the door, the team leader putting it all together, deciding what to do. An armed team descending two flights of stairs would take at least thirty seconds.

  Adams knew there would be a back entrance to the hotel, probably exiting into a service alley. He should have scoped out the exits as soon as he arrived. Sloppy. And sloppy could easily mean dead against these guys. He would have to raise his game if he and Lynn were going to survive.

  As it was, they had thirty seconds to go back into the hotel and find their way out the other side.

  It would have to be enough.

  8

  ELDRIDGE LED HIS men back down the stairs, cursing all the way. How had they known his team was coming? And who would have guessed they would jump out of the window? What a mess!

  The latest update from Williams made him feel no better. Apparently his two men outside had been taken out, and the two fugitives had actually turned and run back inside the building!

  Eldridge didn’t know what their plan was but he knew it had been a mistake not putting people at the back door. But with such a limited amount of men, what could he do? He couldn’t cover everywhere, and the back entrance had seemed a very unlikely place to need covering when he had drawn up the plans for the arrest.

  Still, he considered as he neared the first landing, plans never survive contact with the enemy. The crusty old Master Chief who had led his SEAL training down at Virginia Beach had been right about that, at least.

  As they neared the bottom of the stairs and the foyer, he realized the impression they would make, six armed men running full tilt through a cheap city hotel. The op was supposed to go down quietly, and even though they had approval from the Chilean government and the Santiago metropolitan police, Eldridge was aware that the mission was about to overstep the agreed boundaries.

  The hotel foyer had been cleared of guests by the hotel staff for the duration of the op – the idea had been to bundle the arrested pair down the stairs and into the van waiting outside – but Eldridge understood what a spectacle was taking place, and how bad it might look for the US government if things continued to get worse. He stopped for a second on the last step – the van! Of course! How could he have forgotten?

  ‘Renfrew,’ he said into his mic as he took the last stair into the hotel foyer, ‘get the van round to the back! Now!’

  Adams and Lynn crashed together out of the metal service door into the narrow alleyway. They had found the exit through the kitchen, after sprinting at full speed through the foyer, reception and dining room.

  Adams was surprised that there were no other guests around, and then realized that they must have been confined to their rooms. There were no staff members around either, and he suddenly understood how well-connected the team must be to have secured the hotel so efficiently.

  As they ran down the service alley past overflowing refuse bins, towards the wider junction at the end, Adams was relieved that there had been no guard at the door. He began to believe that they might even be able to make their escape, when he saw the ominous black shape cruise across in front of them, its huge metal bulk cutting off the end of the alleyway.

  It was a large, black panel van, one Adams had glimpsed only for a brief instant as they had been penned in by the sniper in front of the hotel. The race for the rear exit had obviously been anticipated, and the van had moved to cut off their escape.

  The vehicle was fifteen feet away, and Adams saw the door pop open, a man leaning out towards them, submachine gun outstretched. Adams – not so sure that this gun’s bullets would be made of rubber – grabbed the huge wheeled bin next to him and pushed it down the alley with an almighty heave towards the armed man.

  The bin hit the van’s door, knocking the man back inside the vehicle, and Adams immediately gestured to Lynn, indicating the fire escape to their left. He heaved her up on top of another bin so she could reach the first rung and she pulled herself up. Then Adams was with her, climbing up towards the roof of the building behind the hotel.

  Adams looked down and saw the man below pushing the van door hard, shoving the bin back into the alleyway. The man looked up, enraged, raising his MP5 submachine gun towards them.

  But it was too late. They had made it to the roof.

  Eldridge was far from happy.

  He had not wanted to launch the operation until the rest of his team were there, but then Jacobs had been in contact, telling him to strike now, while they were sure where the pair were. Eldridge could see the logic – strike while the iron was hot, it would be calamitous if the pair escaped again. And yet he had been reluctant to launch the takedown with just nine men. They were all experts of course, but that wasn’t the point – nine men were just too few to control a building, and the area surrounding it. It was asking for trouble, and his operational experience should have caused him to tell Jacobs ‘no’.

  But, Eldridge reflected, you didn’t ever tell Jacobs ‘no’. Nobody did. And so he had followed his orders like a good soldier, and now this – a complete mission breakdown.

  The two targets had escaped from the hotel, and had managed to make their way past the buildings at the back of the Hostal Americano, emerging on to the Huérfanos, the main road that ran parallel to the Compañia de Jesús. Mercifully, Jacobs had managed to get a direct satellite feed from the NSA, and his own intelligence operators in Nevada were now able to direct the Alpha Brigade team on to the targets via aerial observation.

  But it was still a complete screw-up in Eldridge’s eyes. A chase spilling out across the streets of Santiago was just going to involve more and more people – people whom the Alpha Brigade would end up having to silence.

  It seemed that Matthew Adams and Evelyn Edwards had again been underestimated. Two teams of Eldridge’s men – men of the fabled Alpha Brigade, the best of the best – had so far failed, and Jacobs had made it more than plain that anything less than outright success would simply not be tolerated.

  Grimacing, Eldridge knew he would have to push on. The organization aside, he was not a man who accepted failure.

  Eldridge and his men tore out of the block of buildings, hot on the tail of their two targets. He was now being provided with real-time information on the pair’s movements, monitored from directly above. He knew it was from an observation satellite in low-earth orbit, and was not surprised that access to such a satellite had been granted so quickly – although relations between the various intelligence services were notoriously bad, Jacobs’ organization always had a way of expediting things.

  As Eldridge led his team on to Huérfanos, the electronic voice in his earpiece told him that the targets had just entered the Plaza de Brasil, less than five hundred feet directly east. Ignoring the startled look on the faces of the people in the streets as they stared at the heavily armed, masked men sprinting down the palm-lined boulevard, he quickly directed his teammates.

  Two would go down each side of the square, racing round to cut off the north and south exits, while the van would drive round to secure the far west exit. Eldridge and his partner would enter the Plaza directly, and make the arrest.

  He hoped.

  9

  THE SIGHT THAT greeted Adams and Lynn as they entered the plaza took their breath away, although they hardly paused, pressing on into the main square, and the centre of the Festival del Barrio Brasil.

  Everywhere they looked, something was going on. There was street theatre, mime artists, dance troupes, art exhibitions, acrobats, music bands, surrounded by hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of captivated spectators. The big plaza was also well covered by trees, offering shade and shelter, and it looked the perfect place to get lost in the crowd.

  Adams, all too aware that the armed team was probably right behind them, pulled Lynn forward further into the vast mass of people, slowing down to a fast walk so as not to draw attention.

  With everything that was going on in the plaza, it seemed an impossibility that they would be seen.

  Five hundred feet below the Nevada desert, the technicians monitored the live feeds coming in from the NSA satellites, as well as the Santiago metropolitan CCTV.

  They observed as the targets – Charlie One and Charlie Two – entered the crowded plaza. They lost them both momentarily, but then the program software highlighted them, indicating them with a blue light, and the lead technician cross-checked the given location and patched it through to the plaza’s CCTV cameras, which then turned and focused on the given targets.

  Images then came up of Charlie One and Two, drifting easily through the crowd, an American Indian man and Caucasian woman, late thirties, both carrying bags, looking carefully around them.

  As the technician reported the details to the field team, he felt almost guilty about how easy it all was.

  Eldridge gasped as he saw the crowds, wondering how in the hell he would ever find the targets in such an environment, but then his earpiece crackled, and the information came through with crystal clarity – they were forty yards south-east into the park, directly in the middle of a group of twenty-seven spectators just to the side of the acrobat display.

  He relayed the information to the rest of his team, clicked the safety off his weapon, and stalked forward, ignoring the screams of the people who saw him.

  Adams didn’t know which was first – the sight of the CCTV camera, all but hidden behind a large palm tree to the north of the square, turning slowly towards them, until it stopped directly facing them, or the sound of screams coming from behind them, the screams one might well imagine coming from people seeing men with guns.

  But in an instant he knew they were not hidden – they were trapped. Even now, the exits to the square might be being blocked off, creating a kill zone in the plaza. He knew that whoever was behind what was going on wanted them alive, but he also realized that this might well be preferential, not necessarily essential. He certainly wasn’t going to take any risks with the situation.

  Frantically, he scanned the plaza, the crowds, the bands, the dancers, the exhibits, the displays, the—

  He stopped dead and, despite himself, a smile broke out across his face.

  There was a commotion up ahead, that much Eldridge didn’t have to be told, he could see it with his own eyes, something happening in the crowd, a ripple of people, roaring, laughter, shouts.

  The voice coming through his earpiece told him that the two targets had left the crowd, heading further south-east, towards what appeared to be an animal display area. They were pushing past the crowds there, approaching the animals, and then – Eldridge shut himself off, not believing what he was hearing.

  Then he was there himself, pushing past people so that he could see, and he knew that the voice had been right.

  He pulled back, yelling into his microphone to his teammates. ‘Get to the van! Now! They’re on the back of a damn horse!’

  10

  ADAMS FELT LYNN’S grip tighten around his waist as he manoeuvred the horse through the rapidly parting crowd.

  He knew that the two of them on the back of a horse would only draw attention, their elevated position making them momentarily more of a target, but he hoped that the extra speed they would now have would more than compensate for it. He also didn’t expect shots to be fired wildly in such a packed public place, but there were no guarantees of that, and so he dug his heels into the horse’s flanks and drove onwards towards the west exit.

  From their higher position, they could both see more of what was going on. None of it was good. Lynn had twisted round to scope out what was going on behind, then turned and whispered in his ear, ‘Two armed men right behind us.’ He was amazed at the control of her voice, damping down any of the horrendous emotions that she must have been going through. At the same time, he had himself identified four policemen at work in the plaza, their attention shifting to the commotion around the animal enclosure.

  Adams and Lynn had raced in quickly, Adams jumping lithely on to the back of the unsaddled horse, arm down to pull Lynn up after him. The children who had been feeding the animal hay backed away quickly, and the keeper had tried to grab Adams’ leg to pull him off, but Adams had managed to kick him away, controlling the horse through the pressure of his thighs to steer her towards the far exit.

  Riding bareback was a difficult skill but it was one that Adams had mastered long ago, and one which he still often demonstrated during his tours. It was made more difficult by having Lynn behind him of course, but not impossible.