Stolen Prey

you, and then walk down the same street.”
    He repeated it all, tracing the route on the aerial photo. When she was satisfied that he had it, she cut him loose.
    They watched as he walked back to Fremont, looked at the street sign, and took a right. In a moment he was out of sight.
    S HRAKE HAD gotten permission from a Margaret Street homeowner to sit behind the slats of his old-fashioned front porch, a block east of the decoy house. Jenkins was two blocks away, also on Margaret, west of the decoy, on his stomach behind a hedge. Lucas was in Del’s pickup with Del, parked a block over, north and west, toward East Seventh, where they expected she would come in. Shaffer was in a car with another agent, north and east.
    The second meeting with the other agents had gone well enough, with a couple of them annoyed that they hadn’t been let in on the secret about Martínez, but most agreeing that not knowing had given the meeting, with its flashes of anger, more authenticity. “Never would’ve guessed it,” one of the agents said.
    Shaffer found two members of the BCA SWAT team who weren’t on any immediate assignment, and grabbed them, and assigned them to hide inside the decoy house.
    In any case, it was Shrake who saw Uno coming. There’d been a half dozen false alarms, guys walking alone or in pairs along the street, but none of them looked right. Shrake checked Uno with a pair of compact, image-stabilized Canon binoculars, then called in on a handset that all the other teams would pick up.
    “Got a small guy coming in, he looks right, he looks Mexican,he’s small. Moving slow. He’s on Cypress, coming up to Margaret. He’s checking things out.”
    Lucas: “He’s alone?”
    “He’s the only one I see.”
    “I’m moving over a block, to Margaret,” Shaffer called. “Everybody else stay put.”
    A moment later Uno came up to the intersection and stopped on the corner, and with great, ostentatious nonchalance, stretched, yawned, took a good long look around, then turned toward the target. Shrake recognized that for what it was: “This is one of them,” he said, excitement riding in his voice. “He’s checking out the block. He’s got a phone in his hand, he just said something into it, so it’s turned on, or it’s a walkie-talkie. He’s turned toward the house.”
    “I see him,” Shaffer said. Shaffer was a full block behind Uno, sitting at an intersection.
    “She’s sent him out here to look for us,” Lucas said. “She’s not sure we’re here, but she’s worried. And she’s close. Not more than a few blocks away. I’m going to break off with Del and start turning blocks, see if we can spot her car.”
    “Go,” said Shaffer. “John, come in a block. Look for people in cars.”
    “The guy’s looking at the house,” Jenkins called.
    J ENKINS , S HRAKE , and Shaffer took turns recounting Uno’s progress down the block, and Lucas and Del started turning corners, looking for Martínez. They started north and west of the target house, while Martínez was south and east. As they wentfirst south, and then east, they turned a block too soon and passed a block north of Martínez’s position. They never saw her car, and she never saw their truck.
    M ARTÍNEZ ASKED U NO , on the phone, “How close are you?”
    “I’m crossing the street,” he said. “I see nobody here. There is a porch. It’s an old house. All the curtains are closed.”
    “All the curtains?” She tensed.
    “Yes, all the curtains. I am at the front. Should I go up?”
    “You see nobody?”
    “Nobody.”
    She thought about it for a few seconds, but it was only Uno. “Go up,” she said.
    U NO WALKED UP the porch to the door. The door had a glass panel in it, at head height. He peeked. He didn’t see anybody, but he saw a shadow, and the shadow moved.
    He stepped back and put the phone to his mouth. “There is somebody inside,” he said.
    Martínez closed her eyes. She said, “Is there a doorbell button?”
    Uno said,
“Sí.”
    “Push the button, then count to thirty. If they don’t answer, it is the police. Then, fast as you can, run down Margaret Street toward the big hole,” she said. “We will catch you on the other side.”
    “Push the button and count to thirty,” Uno repeated.
    “Like you were waiting for an answer. Then run like the wind.”
    A S SHE TALKED to him, she’d made a U-turn on Fremont and headed west, following the aerial photo on the iPad. She jogged onto Fourth Street, turned