Inside Outt

confirmed it was the white van he’d seen parked at the end of the street when he came in. He waited until it was forty feet away, then stepped out into the road, brought up the HK, and put a round through the windshield into the driver’s face. The van swerved wildly and slammed into a parked car ten feet from Larison’s position on the other side of the street. Larison crossed over, moved past the van, and approached it from behind on the passenger side, the HK up at chin level. A dazed-looking operator covered in his partner’s blood and brain matter was struggling with the door, which must have been jammed. He saw Larison and tried to bring up a gun, but the angle was all wrong and the timing useless. Larison shot him in the head.
    He walked quickly across the street, mounted the Kawasaki, fired it up, pulled on the helmet, and raced down the street toward where he knew the other sentries would be. Even if the first set hadn’t contacted them already, they would have heard the gunshots, would have known something had gone badly wrong. They’d be trying to raise their comrades on cell phones right now. He noted another van, a green one, on his right as he rode, but it was in the wrong position to have been of any use operationally and he judged it just a civilian coincidence.
    There it was, at the end of the street, another white van, parked on the right, facing away from him. He scanned the other parked cars and potential hot spots to ensure he wasn’t missing anything. He wasn’t. The van was the target.
    He gunned the engine so they would hear him coming, then swerved between two parked cars, jumped the curb, and raced up the sidewalk to the passenger side of the van. He saw the passenger’s reflection in the sideview. The man had heard the whine of the Kawasaki’s engine and naturally assumed Larison was coming up the street, not the sidewalk. So, sadly for him, he was now facing the wrong way.
    Larison pulled up to the window. The guy’s ears must have had just enough time to send an urgent corrective message to his brain
—threat on right, not on left—
because his head started to turn in the instant before Larison put an armor-piercing round into the back of it.
    The driver was amazingly quick. In the moment during which Larison was focused on his partner, he managed to open the door and jump out onto the street. Larison stepped back, judged the angle, and fired twice through the van. He heard a cry from the other side and circled carefully around the front. The guy was splayed out on his back in a growing pool of blood, a gun on the ground beside him, his legs kicking feebly as though to propel him from the scene of his own destruction. Larison checked his flanks
—clear—
stepped out from behind the cover of the van’s engine block, and approached him, the HK up.
    “Please,” the guy whispered. “Please.”
    Larison smiled and shot him in the face.
    He went back to the bike, reloaded, and roared off.
    Seven down,
he thought.
Five to go.
    He wished there were more.

CHAPTER 28
Shaken Up
    T he whole thing happened so fast that Ben didn’t have time to figure out what to do. In the space of a half minute, he watched Larison appear, drop five men, and disappear again. Ben could have gotten out of the van after the first three and engaged Larison from behind, but his orders were strictly to observe, and besides, the point, if anything, was to snatch Larison, not to kill him. Still, it was appalling to have to be a spectator to so much killing, to be helpless to do anything about it.
    Paula was stunned by the mayhem. She watched it all with one hand over her mouth, the other around the butt of the Glock in her lap, muttering, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God.”
    When Larison mounted up and roared off toward the other end of the street, Ben knew the two men waiting there were already dead. A moment later, the same .45 caliber gunshots he’d already heard confirmed it.
    Ben started to pull out his phone to call Hort. And then he realized.
    Larison wasn’t done. He was heading toward Nico’s office. Hoping to find more prey.
    Someone had to warn those guys. He could call Hort—
    Who would have to call the national security adviser, who would have to call the CIA, who would have to call the field director, who would have to call the snatch team in front of Nico’s office, whose bodies, by then, would already be cooling.
    Fuck it.
    He opened the back door. “Drive to Nico’s office,” he said.