Hot Ice (30 page)

She selected “Call Jason Mobile” on her BlackBerry. “Go!”

On the roof, Jason had already used his electrical lock pick, waiting for Judith’s signal that the house had been evacuated. There was no way to know for sure that no one was left inside, but fear of a fire was the best way to make that possibility as remote as it could be.

He pulled goggles over his eyes and tied a wet bandana over his nose and mouth. A small oxygen tank would have been far better, but there was a limit as to how much he could carry given the swiftness the job required. Glock in his right hand, penlight in his left, he moved down the stairs to the door at the bottom. The beam of his light was diffused by the smoke, forcing him to hold the light in his mouth while he groped for the lock. It, too, yielded to his pick.

Inside, Jason swept the room with the Glock. The smoke bomb had done its job: total evacuation. A metal file cabinet sat against the far wall next to a generator. Puzzled for a moment, he wondered at its purpose. What he guessed was a shortwave radio was on a desk to his left. A table on which rested two computer monitors and a pair of keyboards was next to the door.

All the electronics, of course. That was what made the generator necessary. Dependable power supplies in the Caribbean were rare at best and nonexistent more often than not. The generator he had heard buzzing last night from the other side of the door made certain there was no interruption of communications.

Also on the table was a printer with a sheaf of paper hanging from its mechanical lips. Jason snatched up the papers.

Russian.

His command of the language had been limited to a few standard phrases (“Surrender! Hands High!” “What is your name?”), and even this had faded with disuse, but he recalled enough to know at a glance that these pages alone justified the risk he was taking. He rolled the papers and stuffed them into a back pocket.

One of the computers had been left on, deserted in a smoke-induced panic. An incredible bit of luck. Then his heart sank. The monitor showed a picture of a waterfall in a rain forest, a screen saver. There would be little time to try to penetrate what he was certain would be sophisticated firewalls.

Screen saver? There were no icons for program selection. Jason looked closer. Pretty picture, but hard to believe GrünWelt was using computers to exchange innocuous photographs. What was the word he had read recently?
Steganography
, that was it. The use of perfectly innocent images to hide messages. Prying eyes would see only a waterfall, mist, and a few orchids dripping from the trees that hosted the plants. Special software could coax text from the images.

Jason touched the Shift key and the screen filled with Cyrillic letters, five to a group. Double encryption, the image and now code. Some contemporary electronic version of the Enigma, the World War II machine where randomly selected wheels made deciphering possible only by a comparable device? No matter. Software was available that could accomplish in minutes what last century’s code breakers had been unable to do in months.

Leaning over the keyboard, Jason made a few clicks that sent the screen’s contents to Sybil. He’d call later with an explanation.

Right now, he wanted to steal as much information as he could in the time he had left.

In the bodega, Judith wondered how the hook and ladder had navigated the old city’s narrow streets. But it had, as evidenced by the firemen hopping down from it. In the first moment, all seemed confusion as every firefighter was shouting at another. Order quickly emerged as a hose was connected to a nearby hydrant, a ladder slowly rose toward the roof of the first house, and two men dashed inside.

Judith keyed her BlackBerry. “Two on the roof, two inside.”

“Which house?” came the reply.

“The one closest to the intersection.”

Jason shoved the BlackBerry back in his pocket. Shit! The roof! When the fireman found what had been put into the air-conditioning housing …

No time to worry now. Just keep calling up files and forwarding them to Sybil.

Perhaps a minute later Judith watched a fireman scamper down the ladder. Her heart sank when she saw what he was carrying: A large flowerpot from which thick, white smoke poured. A part of the crowd drawn by all the excitement was already jostling for space at the bottom of the ladder before the man reached the last rung.

She noted the big man with the shaved scalp push his way to the front. The one with the bandaged face was close behind. Were there others? None she saw. With growing consternation, she saw each take a look at the smoking clay pot. She could imagine the cartoon lightbulbs above their heads.

The reaction was immediate. Shaved Head pointed to the roof of Number 23. Two men she had not noticed before broke from the spectators contained behind hastily erected barricades and shoved aside the fireman blocking the doorway of Number 23. The man with the shaved head and the one with the bandaged face also pushed firemen aside, this time to appropriate the ladder as they scrambled toward the roof, followed by Spanish invective from the firefighters. And orders in vain from the police.

Jason was somewhere between the two who had entered from the street and the pair on the ladder.

Judith threw a twenty onto the bodega’s table, slung the purse strap over a shoulder, and lurched into the street past the concerned owner, who tried to slow her down long enough to enquire about any problem with the food. She slid by him impatiently and was already running down Calle Luna as she speed-dialed Jason.

Jason returned the BlackBerry to his pocket with the hand that wasn’t on the computer’s keyboard. He’d never have time to copy and send all these files, let alone check out the filing cabinets. He hadn’t expected to have all night but he had hoped for a few more minutes before the origin of the “fire” was discovered.

He thought he heard footsteps pounding up the metal stairs. He picked up the Glock he had set beside the keyboard and stuck it in its holster in the small of his back. Sending the monitor crashing to the floor, he dragged the table to and through the door. It took effort to stand it on end, but he was gratified to note it neatly filled the landing outside the room he had occupied. He shoved harder, wedging it fast. Though the two men who, according to Judith, were on their way up, would not be impeded for long, he very well might need any delay he could get.

Now he was certain he heard feet clanging on the metal stairs. Pulling the Glock from its holster, he fired two shots into the generator. The crash of gunfire reverberated in the narrow stairwell as sparks flew and the smell of cordite mixed with the acrid odor of fried circuitry. The electrical hum became a whine and then was silent. The lights, already dim, flickered and died.

It took seconds to reach the top of the stairs. Behind him, Jason could hear the scrape of the blockading table being wrestled aside. On hands and knees, he crept out onto the roof. The rain had stopped but the moisture clung to the air like a living embrace. Keeping low so that the roofline was limned against the glow from the fire trucks and police cars below, he edged slowly toward the adjacent building, moving sideways like a crab so he could keep both the roofline and the staircase entry in view.

The rain had provided secrecy to get Jason in and now its remnants saved his life. He heard a splash, the sound of something striking the surface of one of the numerous puddles the earlier shower had created.

He flattened himself against the tiles of the roof just as there was a coughing sound and something nasty whined by where his head had been an instant before.

The muzzle flash had come from the adjacent building. His opponents had apparently discovered the breach in the razor wire he had cut. He was caught between the men trying to come up the stairs and the shooter.

On the street below, Judith was hurrying to the place where she and Jason had gotten up onto the old city’s defenses. She had no idea what she could do, only a sense of urgency to get there. Twice she nearly slipped on the sidewalk still wet from the evening’s rain.

Her concentration on keeping her balance was the most probable reason she didn’t see him: another man with a shaved head. Well over six feet, she guessed he weighed two hundred pounds or more as he materialized out of the darkness of a doorway to block her path.

“Excuse me,” she said, sidestepping in a fruitless hope the man meant her no harm.

That prospect disappeared with the whisper of a knife being drawn from its sheath. She cursed her carelessness in not spotting him sooner.

He moved forward, streetlights reflecting on what looked like an eight-inch blade. The space between them was not enough to give Judith any chance of slipping by him. She could only watch the blade move side to side. No stabbing or slicing movement, just the sure and certain advance of a man who knew what he was doing. At some point he would lunge with practiced precision, but at the moment he seemed to enjoy toying with her, feeding on the fear he sensed.

She knew she had two chances of survival. First, if she could delay his assault long enough, there was a good chance someone would see her plight and summon the police.

Secondly, her assailant was confident, perhaps overly so. She was unsure how this might help her; she could only hope.

Not far away, Jason lay belly-down, soaked by the roof’s wet tiles. He had crawled fifteen or so feet from where he had been when someone had taken the shot at him. He turned his head slowly, aware the corner of the eye was more likely to catch movement than a direct stare was. Nothing moved other than a breeze, swaying leaves of several potted marijuana plants on the adjacent roof. Even if he could see his enemies, taking a shot would betray his position as clearly as a beacon. Staying put was not an attractive option either. Sooner or later, someone would risk making themselves a target by using a flashlight.

He had no sooner considered the possibility than it happened.

Judith’s back was all too literally against a wall. Her antagonist had backed her up step by step until she was pressed against the side of a house, one of the few on the street that was dark and shuttered. She considered making a desperate effort to escape, maybe find a house with doors open to catch the rain-cooled breeze before her assailant could drive the knife into a fatal spot.

The old adage of watching your opponent’s eyes to predict a move is just that: an old adage. Any skilled street fighter feints with his eyes as well as any other part of his body. Judith’s attention was on the blade he held.

She faked a move to her left, instantly trying to come right. He easily anticipated her. It was an amateurish ploy, one he would expect of one untrained in close-combat tactics. But it gave her a reason to extend her arms from her sides as though trying to keep her balance.

She repeated the move to the other side, provoking a grin from the man with the knife; she was too dumb to know she had no chance. This time, though, she swung her purse at his head, a clumsy effort easily deflected.

But grabbing the purse strap required him to watch the intended blow, not her.

Only an instant, but enough.

Pushing off the wall, the top of her head struck his chin with an audible crunch while her spread arms kept the blade at a distance. He lost his grip on the purse strap and staggered back half a step. Trying to clear his head, he brought the knife up as though to fend off further attack by the purse.

Too late he realized his mistake.

Being a physician, Judith was aware of the more tender parts of the anatomy. As a woman she chose the obvious. With all the force she could muster, she delivered a fifty-yard field-goal kick to the groin. Her assailant turned to try to take the blow with his hip rather than his crotch but was only partially successful. She got enough of the testicles. He folded like a jackknife. Then he knelt slowly, his hands clutching his groin.

Judith had no idea what happened next other than the fact she was running as fast as she could.

Jason’s immediate problem was avoiding being targeted by the seemingly random sweep of flashlights. There were three of them now, painting the roof with erratic movement. There was also enough light both from the flashes and from the emergency vehicles on the street to see that the lights were held by firemen.

So far, the men in the fire-retardant suits and unique rear-billed fireman’s helmets hadn’t noticed they were not alone up there. Because each house’s roof was separated by razor wire, they had been forced to use the ladder to ascend to the top of each of the three smoking homes.

Jason had an idea as he watched the three firemen remove the still-smoking pot from the air-conditioning housing. Perhaps not the best idea, but the only one he had at the moment.

Still on his stomach, he crawled commando-style to a position that put him on the side of the air-conditioning unit opposite from the firefighters. He was close enough to hear a conversation in Spanish even if he could not understand it. The man holding the remnants of the smoke bomb carried it to the edge of the roof, holding it aloft so those on the street below could see. A second man gave the roof a cursory sweep with the beam of his flashlight before he, too, headed for his turn to descend the ladder. Somehow the men who had come up the stairs remained unseen, although Jason knew they were around somewhere.

Now came the tricky part.

As the third man turned to leave, Jason reached out and grabbed his foot, sending him sprawling. Before the guy had a clue what had happened, Jason was holding his head in one hand, the Glock pressed against it with the other.

Jason had always thought the old description of eyes big as saucers was an exaggeration. Even in the dim reflected light, he had living proof it wasn’t.

“Nobody’s gonna get hurt,” Jason told him with little effect. “I just want your hat there and maybe that jacket.”

He would have liked to have the big turn-down-top boots, too, but he hadn’t the time required to pull them off the fireman and put them on. Sooner or later, the men on this roof and the one next door were going to come looking for him. The fact there had not been another shot made him fairly certain they didn’t know exactly where he was and that they had no night-vision equipment.