The Black Echo

you do, my department and I will not hold back our criticism or the details of what was discussed at this meeting. Good night.”
    He turned and walked back to the patrol car. The two uniforms followed without being told to. Everybody else just watched. When the patrol car drove down the ramp, Rourke said, “Well, you heard the man. We can’t fuck this up. Anybody else want to suggest something?”
    “What about putting people in the vault now and waiting for them to come up?” Bosch said. He hadn’t really considered it but threw it out as it came to him.
    “No,” the SWAT man said. “You put people in the vault and they are in a corner. No options. No way out. I wouldn’t even ask my men for volunteers.”
    “They could be injured by the blast,” Rourke added. “No telling where or when the perps will come up.”
    Bosch nodded. They were right.
    “Can we open the vault and go in, once we know they have come up?” one of the agents said. Bosch couldn’t remember now whether he was Hanlon or Houck.
    “Yes, there’s a way to take the door off the time lock,” Wish said. “We’d need to get Avery, the owner, back out here.”
    “From what Avery said, it looks like that would take too long,” Bosch said. “Too slow. Avery can take it off time lock and open it, but it’s a two-ton door that swings open on its own weight. At best, it would take a half minute to get it open. Maybe less, but they’d still have the drop on us, the people inside. Same risk as coming at them through the tunnels.”
    “What about a flash bang?” one of the agents said. “We open the vault door just a bit and throw in a flash grenade. Then we go in and take them.”
    Rourke and the SWAT man shook their heads in unison.
    “For two reasons,” the SWAT man said. “If they wire the tunnel as we assume they will, the flash could detonate the charges. We could see Wilshire Boulevard out there drop thirty feet, and we don’t want that. Think of the paperwork.”
    When no one smiled, he continued. “Secondly, that’s a glass room we are talking about. Our position in there would be very vulnerable. If they have a lookout, we’re dead. We think they go with radio silence when they’ve got the explosives out. But what if they don’t and this lookout lets them know we’re out there. They might be ready to toss something out at
us
while we’re tossing something in.”
    Rourke added his own thoughts. “Never mind the lookout. We put a SWAT team in that glass room and they can watch it on TV. We’ll have every station in L.A. with a camera out on the sidewalk and traffic backed up to Santa Monica. It’d be a circus. So forget that. SWAT will get with Gearson, do the recon and get the exits down by the freeway covered. We wait for them underneath and we take ’em on
our
terms. That’s it.”
    The SWAT man nodded and Rourke continued. “Starting tonight we’ll have twenty-four-hour surveillance topside on the vault. I want Wish, Bosch, on the vault side of the building. Hanlon, Houck, on Rincon Street so you can see the door. If it looks or sounds like it is going down, I want to be alerted and I will alert SWAT to stand by. Use landlines if possible. We don’t know if they are monitoring our freeks. You people on the surveillance will have to work out a code to use on the radio. Everybody got that?”
    “What if there is an alarm?” Bosch asked. “There have been three so far this week.”
    Rourke thought a moment and said, “Handle it routinely. Meet the callout manager, Avery or whoever, at the door and reset the alarm and send him on his way. I’ll get back to Orozco and tell him to send his patrols on the alarms but we’ll handle things.”
    “Avery will get the callouts,” Wish said. “He already knows what we think is going to happen here. What if he wants to open the vault, take a look around?”
    “Don’t let him. It’s that simple. It’s his vault but his life would be endangered. We can prevent it.”
    Rourke looked around at the faces. There were no more questions.
    “Then that’s it. I want people in position in ninety minutes. That gives you all-nighters time to eat, piss and get coffee. Wish, give me status reports, landline, at midnight and oh six hundred. Got it?”
    “Got it.”
    Rourke and the SWAT man got in the car where Gearson was waiting and drove down the ramp. Bosch, Wish, Hanlon, and Houck then worked out a radio code to use. They decided to switch the streets in the