Wicked Prey

one.”
    Cruz looked at him for a long beat, then said, “It’s a her, not a him. Goddamnit, Brute . . .”

    LUCAS HAD sprung five agents, including himself: Jenkins, Shrake, Jim Benson, Dave Tompkins. “Better if we had two guys in each room,” he said, “but we just don’t have the people. So: everybody has armor, everybody has a shotgun, you don’t answer the door. After the knock, you wait: they can’t stand there long, because of the masks. They’ll walk away . . . that’s when you pop the door.”
    Tompkins grinned: “Now I see why you picked all single guys.”
    “Hey. It’s dangerous. No question about it. But we’ve got to do something.”
    They were all in place by eight o’clock.
    * * *
    ELEVEN O’CLOCK. Lucas got up and stretched, yawned, looked at Buddy Snider and Sally Craig, sitting at the breakfast table, playing gin rummy, then looked at his watch. From the hotel windows, he could see across the interstate all the way up to Capitol Hill. There’d been some semi-violent demonstrations during the afternoon, and a few more people had been taken off to jail, but nothing extreme. The downtown area was still loaded with cops, but everything below looked quiet.
    Craig, a thin, fiftyish blond woman from Washington, without looking up, said, “You’re pacing again.”
    “Yeah, well. You’re playing gin rummy,” Lucas said.
    “Cards exercise the mind,” she said.
    Snider said to Lucas, “Maybe you should check your gun again. That was interesting.”
    “Gun’s fine,” Lucas said.
    He’d been penned up for three hours; the first two hours in utter darkness, until Snider and Craig got back from the convention center, where, he suspected, they’d been passing out cash. Maybe lots of it. When they came through the door a few minutes before eleven o’clock, Craig had had a gorgeous soft deer-hide backpack slung over one shoulder, and it appeared to be empty. Lucas had carefully worked through the room while they were gone, and hadn’t found any money. There was a safe in the closet, though, that might have held anything up to a half-million dollars. Since Craig presumably had a safe in her own room, that could be another half-million.
    Lucas got on his cell phone and called Shrake: “Nothing here. Nothing at all,” Shrake said.
    Benson: “Nothing here.” Voice dropped. “Whitehead’s in the bathroom, she has some kind of a problem. The whole place stinks.”
    Jenkins: “Haven’t heard or seen a thing. Sitting here watching West Coast baseball.”
    Tompkins: “Schott’s gone to bed. Says he’s too tired to stay up anymore. I’m lying here watching Star Wars with the sound turned off.”
    “Which Star Wars ?” Lucas asked.
    “ A New Hope . Channel three-forty.”
    “That’s the first one,” Lucas said. “Where Princess Leia hints that she might go for a three-way with Han and Luke.”
    “Yup. That’s the one.”
    Off the phone, he searched through the TV channels until he found Star Wars . “You mind if I watch this?”
    “Better than this card game,” Craig said. She tossed her cards on the table and said, “Go gin yourself,” sprawled on the bed, and said, “Turn the sound up. They’re about to jump down the garbage chute.”
    * * *
    THE KNOCK on the door came at eleven-fifteen, three raps with a key, like a hotel maid would do it, and Jim Benson rolled to his feet, slipped the vest over his head, and pulled the Glock 9mm from its holster. The shotgun was in the corner, and he stepped over to it. Janet Whitehead, who was lying on the bed, sniffed and said, “Oh my God,” and then an envelope slipped under the door, and they could hear, faintly, somebody walking away. Benson, a short, square-shouldered blond with a dimpled chin and chiseled nose, did a quick peek at the peephole and saw nothing. Whitehead picked up the envelope, opened it, glanced at the paper inside and said, “Hey,” and before Benson could slow her down, she turned the knob on the door.
    The door latch-lock was engaged, as well as the safety chain; the chain allowed the door to open three or four inches. The doorjamb anchor was held in place by three Phillips screws. They were not sufficient. The instant Whitehead turned the knob, the door exploded, and Whitehead hurtled back into Benson, who staggered backward, off-balance, and then McCall was there in the doorway, Cohn behind him, a gun in his hand.
    McCall looked with surprise at Benson and opened his mouth to say something but